Chapter 4

Every Dollar your neighborhood saves producing something for yourselves, is a Dollar that can be invested in more capacity to produce for yourselves. That is the feed back loop that will bring our systems back from the brink of disaster.

The problems we face are systemic and cannot be solved one at a time. To solve the big problems like peak oil, climate change, poverty and environmental degradation, we have to change the way the system functions. One big stumbling block to that kind of change is the belief that work must be converted to money before it can be converted into goods and services. The market is a great system to convert work to money so long as there is demand for your skills. If there is no demand for your skills, the system has no other way to use your potential contribution. The system will make you beg or starve or maintain you on some form of government assistance.

At the API we are developing Community Sufficiency Technologies. That is, we are figuring out how to organize ourselves to provide for ourselves in ways that supplement what we get participating in the market. When we take this other approach, and invest our time in developing the capacity to provide for ourselves, labor is not a cost. Labor becomes an investment in all that will be produced from the capacity we develop. In the case of building bee hives, we are investing in all the honey that can be produced in those hives. If we simply distribute the honey to ourselves, there need be no money involved after purchase of materials.

The way things lay out, 7 Warre' hives is an efficient way to use 4X8 sheets of plywood and a few pine boards. We are looking for 4 people with $100.00 each who want to help build those 7 hives and take one home with them. The $400.00 will buy the materials for all 7 hives. The a retail value of similar hives purchased in the market is about $2000. Our team will supply the facility, the tools and the expertise and we will keep 3 hives. The event will be a joint venture of all the participants to invest in capacity to produce for ourselves . . . and improve our habitat by increasing the number of honey bees.

The main objective is to figure out the relationships that get us over the stumbling block and closer to the kind of world in which we want to live. It is a step toward a neighborhood with gardens and greenhouses that provide all the food the neighborhood needs. And a neighborhood in which anyone can get a share of that food by contributing what they enjoy doing. As Geoff Lawton says in Greening the Desert; “You can fix all the world's problems in a garden”.