Community Sufficiency Technologies

Description

As proposed and described by David Braden:

"There are two ways you can invest your time and money. You can invest in trying to make a profit, in which case, your investment is subject to all the market forces and the corresponding risks. And/or, you could invest in the capacity to provide for yourself, in which case, for those things, you don't care what happens in the market.

The second approach is generally undertaken by families, it is known as "self-sufficiency". But doing it as a community is much more efficient and not nearly as lonely. Owning a share of the capacity to provide for ourselves could be no different than owning a share of a corporation trying to make a profit, except that, if we are doing it as a neighborhood, there is no question about transparency.

In the market we have a feed back loop that rewards efficiency of scale . . . bigger is better . . . and simpler is better. We can balance that with local systems of production, owned by the consumers of what they produce, because that creates a feed back loop that rewards efficiencies of integration . . .

Imagine a system of gardens and greenhouses that produced enough food for the entire neighborhood (Neighborhoods already own much of what is required). Imagine that anyone in the neighborhood could get a share of that food by doing what they enjoy . . . fixing cars, reading to kids, cooking, sewing, carpentry, home repair, gardening, making cheese . . .

Once you start an integrated system of production, it gets better the more things you can integrate . . . and, instead of labor being a cost, in this system, the more people that contribute, the less each person has to do." (http://www.organiclandscapedesign.org/content/community-sufficiency-technologies)