You Can Make the Change You Want
Author: Kevin Jones Issue: 2025-04-16
You Can Make the Change You Want
by Kevin Jones
We are building a currency that will be tied to the health of the river, and we are granting the Cherokee a trust agreement that will let them have permanent access to the river cane and other cultural products on our farm as we sell it to the local park system. Their rights will be guaranteed within the provisions of sale.
They heal the ecosystem around the river cane, and we will learn from them and get people to care because the river cane is across from the only place in Swannanoa where it's safe to walk, because we have no sidewalks.
So we will get people to give to restore and regenerate the Owen Park ecosystem, and we will be following indigenous land management practices. But the money given will go for healing in some other places, in food-insecure legacy and low-status neighborhoods sometimes.
When you let indigenous people design the method to heal the river from the hurricane, you get additional biodiversity and lower climate risk. Putting a price on those rights allows you to get paid for these benefits, as your collective risk goes down. There are people who have measured this sort of thing who we'll likely start with.
And we are very interested in community insurance. Post-disaster, the effort to extract a profit at enough volume from for-profit insurance in that community will over time give an edge to community-led efforts that will have a lower total cost of risk. So a currency is forming.
We are designing to be able to move to community-embedded property insurance and rethinking the definition of private and public property and community/commons property and their valuation. All within the frame of reducing total cost of risk, which is the metric you use for community insurance.
When the people own the capital stack, you can make the change you want.
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