Financial Permaculture

Oct 08 .. "financial permaculture" has suddently got very sexy it seems.  About time...

Here is an attempt to map some of the current 'labs' to explore (by Stella, please do help to fill in gaps)

October 08 Financial Permaculture Conference

Well done to the Gaia University blogging team for making a commitment to experiment with live-blogging a course event... and making it a financial permaculture one.

Main start page ('hub') is here: http://www.financialpermaculture.org

a good place to start might be the definitions page

then an perhaps the article on Principles of Financial Permaculture

or Can Our Own Communities Serve as Financial Safe Havens in Troubled Times?

and zillions of other links, these are the (main?) bloggers:

- www.permaculturedesigns.blogspot.com

- www.solari.com/blog

- www.gaiaemerging.com

- www.thinkingjamz.blogspot.com

- www.gifthub.org

- www.peaksurfer.blogspot.com

Econophysics Lab

There is an Econophysics Lab which started sept 08, a small group of people (mostly already in the CC movement and with physics / maths background) interested in exploring the dynamics of currency systems and correlations with physics and other energy systems.   Principally in the application of the principles of physics to economics.

This takes inspiration directly from and Odum's and Gessell's work and was sparked off by some more recent (but unrelated) work.

(hope to make more detail available soon)

Currently we are chatting as a skype conference, for joining info please skype Stella

Complementary Currencies Network

This movement is vast has been organizing very well using latest information technology from 2001 or earlier

An ongoing skype conference "CC The Open Collective" is good for general news and questions.

(¿Miguel, can u put best links up in this section plse?)

In spanish this is a good 'hub' resource which was started by the Permaculture network's IPC8's Pre-conference

Local Resiliance

Complementary Currencies are an inportant part of Financial Permaculture but they're just (mainly) a joining-up device.   You also need to have good solid things to join up.

Difficult to categorize holistic things so here is an attempt at gathering some places where the other part of the dialogues are happening on the web:

http://transitionculture.org/2008/10/22/lse-dissertation-on-transition-initiatives-now-available/

http://www.relocalize.net/

others?

Some history

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  George Santayana (1863 – 1952, Madrid) Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense (1905)

(please do fill in gaps)

Not many people suspect that the actual 'mother and father of permaculture' might be Dana Meadows and Howard Odum - 

Meadows, a brilliant early system thinker and educator inspired Bill Mollison (as well as The Club of Rome and many others) with the "Limits to Growth" ground-braking report (which Bill mentions in his history of the founding of permaculture) ,and David Holmgren was greatly influenced by Odum's emergy accounting and his modelling of ecosystems in an entirely new and very ingenious way.   Both giants way ahead of their times, the genious of Mollison and Holmgren was to not only understand the significance of their work, but to forge it into such a practical and timely new systemics science as permaculture.

Margrit Kennedy was an early student of Mollison's in Europe, and her personal trajectory from architecture professor to permaculture farmer to perhaps our foremost permaculture pioneer in  complementary currencies is described in an interview downloadable from her profile, and is one of those gems in fractal history...

Bernard Lietaer is a brilliant designer of complementary currencies as well as one of the foremost educators and visionaries in the field.  His visionary book "The Future of Money" is perhaps the nearest thing we've got to a designer's manual for Financial Permaculture.    Article here with more links to his work.

The 8th International Permaculture Convergence in Brasil (IPC8) in 2007 was an important milestone in putting us up to date with Financial Permaculture.

Titled "Greening the Economy using permaculture principles", you can find a report here