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Just wrapping up another grant writing effort - USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Conservation Innovation Grant. Thankfully, I'm not the primary author on this one, which is a collaborative project involving a Cleveland African/American food sustainability nonprofit, a Detroit inner city gardening movement, a Navajo tribal farming and greenhouse operation, and a collaboration of five social, agricultural, and business operations in my community.
The focus area for the grant opportunity that we are basing the proposal on is energy conservation in agricultural operations, so our biochar+energy systems are the piece linking all four sites together - expanding greenhouse operations to year-round function in a revenue positive model that creates an cascade of ancillary biochar related benefits.
In this age of fighting, destruction, and generally miserable attitudes, we are working for solutions. As my one of my heroes once said, "“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete." -R. Buckminster Fuller
We got the grant - in the neighborhood of $880K.
It includes a $220K contract for The Trollworks LLC, my company that is developing Biochar+Energy Systems, for four biochar-making boilers to heat greenhouses at each site, and one 'liability biomass' processing system for the Cleveland partner.
It's what the Green New Deal oughta be about.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. R. Buckminster Fuller
What this woman says is viscerally counterintuitive to me, but nonetheless it is a subject that I have been wondering about for years. Could it be that our thinking about debt and money is just as culturally biased as any ideology?
Both money and debt exist only because of agreements, after all... what limits the agreements that are possible?
Boomers went for supply side economics hard. They literally think that the taxation and fiscal spending plumbing is directly connected. That government needs to run its budgets like a household, paying debts is moral responsibility, etc, etc...
Your ears bleed listening to this propoganda over the years.
Here’s a fun dive into the historical concept of debt and money:
A great deal of wealth gets accumulated thru the language of scarcity. It took me awhile to get this. Not new, as I understand it, but goes back to the European colonial period of extracting wealth from regions while offering nearly nothing in return. England was a master at this tactic and we have much to thank them for our own impoverishment as an inland colony for our rentiers.
Scarcity language has been used for decades as an impediment to any redistributive benefits for the vast majority of Americans. Embraced by our current Rentiers as ‘common sense’ and ‘logic’ when in reality it’s nothing more than self reenforcing justification of the current power and wealth arrangements. Socialism for rentiers and coupon clippers, the iron heel for wage earners. No health care for you. Too expensive. Big shiny military for us. Don’t ask how we pay for it, etc..
One of the more interesting contradictions for me is how the redistributive effects of the new deal, leading to the largest middle class in human history, create a population of voters who then Went on to reject those policies that they directly benefitted from (looking at you boomers).
As I understand it, the mind works out the benefit, usually in the form of exclusion (race, gender, sexual orientation, political, etc), does the act of exclusion that in some way benefits themself, then creates the self reenforcing logic to justify the act of exclusion. Language of scarcity is a fellow traveler to eugenics, racism, meritocracy and other rationals for ripping off people and not feeling bad about it.
What is wealth? The absence of scarcity and precarity, IMO.
It includes a $220K contract for The Trollworks LLC, my company that is developing Biochar+Energy Systems, for four biochar-making boilers to heat greenhouses at each site, and one 'liability biomass' processing system for the Cleveland partner.
It's what the Green New Deal oughta be about.
Years and years in the making. Finally! Congrats Loggy.
