Maia Maia Emissions Reduction Currency System

Everything happens at once!

2011-07-12T23:44:00.000-07:00

A lot of things have been happening behind the scenes and we haven't been able to tell anyone about them.

How frustrating is that?! Well now it is all happening, and man is it happening. Wow!

To begin with due to the magic contributions of one Mr. Kym Flannery we now have a beautiful and carefully crafted new Boya plus the connections to the printers and paper suppliers to make the next Boya issue a true currency. See the design above.

This came just in time as we have been requested by Men of the Trees to work with this years Activate! tree plantings on August 6-7 in critical biodiversity habitat in the Wheatbelt so that they can issue Boya to volunteers based on the carbon sequestered by the trees.

But wait, that's not all!

We are now helping Coolbinia Primary to issue a Boya based on a 10 Tonne sustainability plan that is integrated with the school cirriculum. This will kick off in August and we are very excited with this one as it takes it back to our beginning inspiration, to empower our kids to feel like they can do something about climate change!

Part of the Ten Tonne plan is assisting a Ugandan school purchase much needed solar lanterns to replace dangerous and greenhouse gas generating kerosene lanterns. This part of the project is being facilitated by Solar Sister, an NGO working in Africa to increase student literacy and community resilience by helping distribute dependable and low running cost solar lanterns. Solar Sister are winners of a prestigious Clinton Global Initiative award for their hands on word in reducing poverty. What an amazing opportunity to collaborate with an organisation that is making a real difference in peoples lives!

And if that wasn't enough, Linda Blagg of Sunday Arvo Pictures in Fremantle have agreed to help us video document these early days and create an on-line video that will help us get the word out on this fantastic opportunity for our communities to roll up our sleeves to tackle climate change and for these stories to circulate in the world rather than being invisible.

To make this video we need to cover our costs, so we have used a service called Pozible to give you the opportunty to contribute to making it. You will be thanked with Boya from the Activate! tree planting, so if you wanted to earn some Boya but can't make it to the planting this is a way to contribute.

Click on the Boya below to enter the Pozible site:

Whew! If anything else was happening I'd need a holiday.

Stay tuned...

A WORLD FIRST: MAIA MAIA ERCS LAUNCHES COMMUNITY RUN EMISSIONS CURRENCY

2011-05-22T21:39:00.000-07:00

We finally did it! Below is the press release for our Boya launch!

Most has been reprinted in April 2011 edition of Community Currency Magazine

http://ccmag.net/maia-maia-boya-emissions-nelson

Contact: MaiaMaiaProject@gmail.com

30 January, 2011 Fremantle, Western Australia

Maia Maia ERCS, a local Western Australian group, has created a new way for local communities to make their efforts to reduce carbon pollution, which are normally invisible, into a tangible form of ‘community money’. The approach is similar to simple loyalty programmes such as frequent flyer points.

Frustrated with the lack of government leadership in regulating dangerous carbon pollution, Maia Maia ERCS, launched the boya, a local currency issued on the basis of positive actions to prevent climate change. The launch took place on 30 January at a workshop on Empowered Fundraising in Fremantle, WA. There are currently over 200 local currency systems in operation around Australia, but Maia Maia ERCS is the first such system to be based on emissions reductions.

Boya are created as ‘rewards’ for group activities that result in the reduction in CO2 pollution through reducing power bills, planting trees, installing solar panels or other activities. Once reductions are made, groups are able to apply to create their own boyas underwritten by their actions. Maia Maia ERCS uses global standards to calculate the amount of carbon taken out of the atmosphere as a result of that action for the currency issue.

Each boya note contains the logo of the group issuing it, the amount of carbon pollution reduced, the activity undertaken to reduce it and who sponsored them in helping to cover their costs. The first issue of the boya was by the Gaia Foundation of Western Australia and the International Permaculture Service (IPS) which is working with farmers in Ghana, Africa to develop sustainable agriculture methods and who planted the trees used to back their boya. The sponsor of the issue, whose logo also appears on the boya, was Edge 5, an environmental consultancy which helped set up IPS.

Sam Nelson, a co-founder of Maia Maia ERCS, believes the story of the group is the most powerful element of the boya. He explains, “As our stories continue to circulate with the boya they remind us that people are out there doing good things, something that is easy to overlook. I believe it is this sharing of stories that will have the most impact in changing our society, rather than any economic value we may put on carbon.”

The boya is named after rock trading tokens used by local Nyungar people, which is one of the oldest systems of money on the planet. The name was suggested by local Elder Neville Collard.

There are currently four businesses signed up to accept the boya for various discount offers and a similar number of communities on the waiting list to issue their own boya. Some are offering a dollar discount per boya whereas some, like the Organic Collective, an organic fruit and veg retailer in Fremantle, is offering a 10% discount for 10 boya.

Trading the boya can be likened to the use of frequent flyer points or other loyalty programs. A boya can be redeemed at participating businesses or traded among individuals but can then also be used by businesses to trade with other vendors. The boya is issued in the form of a note so that it can be carried around in people’s wallets and handbags and shared. Through this boya enrich the community with a sense of pride that we all are playing our part in protecting our common future.

Maia Maia ERCS has been co-founded and developed by a diverse group of individuals namely; Sam Nelson, Elaine Lewis, Michael Starling, Bryce Martin, Nick Mortimer, Drew Phillips, Natasha Alphonse, and Kristina Newton. This group contains specialists in environmental accounting, climate change education, strategic business planning, peak oil and energy economics, community development ,home and business energy efficiency, and permaculture.

The committee is currently working to complete their business plan and are interested in speaking to volunteers and professionals who would like to get involved with the program.

For more information or to register as a business or community visit www.maiamaia.org or contact Sam Nelson at MaiaMaiaProject@gmail.com

What’s the Big Idea? Emissions reduction currency, climate change, and us

2011-02-06T05:41:00.000-08:00

“The way the Chinese express the concept of crisis. They use two symbols, the first of which by itself means ‘danger’. The second, in isolation, means ‘opportunity’.“

Al Gore had come to visit our remote corner of Western Australia in 2007, and his talk started with this promising line. We are all familiar with dramatic scenes of the dangers of climate change: shrinking ice caps and calving ice, the human suffering from floods and droughts and storms, swelling seas engulfing our cities and the upward lines on graphs catapulting us back into the Jurassic. Those scenarios were the ‘danger’. I was desperate to hear the plus side. What could be the ‘opportunity’ of global warming? What exciting vision of the future might this global challenge of catastrophic proportions provide?

I was disappointed. As the talk wound down to an anticlimax, the ‘opportunity’ turned out to be a graph showing a mix of dry policy shifts mostly involving power utilities, some rather mundane technologies, swapping out light bulbs, politics as a ‘renewable resource’, and the chance to meet ‘the moral challenge of our generation’. Don’t get me wrong. I am a long-time fan of Al Gore’s and continue to be, but I couldn’t get away from the sinking feeling that the disintegrating glaciers, etc. had much more ability to command the imagination than the solutions did.

Psychologists have found that most people can only envision one future at a time and whether that future is positive or negative, will generally act in a way that will make that future become a reality. This type of self-fulfilling prophecy arising in society as a whole is known as the Synergistic Accumulative Effect. Given the options presented that night by Vice President Gore, it was clear that the dangerous vision of the future was more compelling that the alternatives.

For many years I’ve worked as an environmental accountant for large resources companies. My motivation to get into this line of work was the old maxim, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” While there have been some important wins with this approach over the years, it had been a source of frustration for me that the pace of change is not what I felt the world needs to meet the climate crisis. From this feeling grew a sense that I wanted to do something tangible in my own community and I began to discuss options with the sustainability group at my kids’ school. Perhaps I could put my professional skills to work with some kind of community carbon crediting scheme?

“Instead of carbon credits, why don’t you back a community currency with your emissions reductions?” This suggestion came from my friend John Croft, Director of the Gaia Foundation in Western Australia - a network that facilitates sustainability projects worldwide, the first being the 1992 Earth Summit. The idea intrigued me. In the same way our money used to be backed by gold, and continues to be backed by greed, was it possible to have money backed by measurable reductions in greenhouse gases and good will in our community? This approach was also more practical. From my professional experience with emissions trading I was sure that the charged politics and sluggish bureaucracy surrounding carbon credits were going to be difficult for our local Montessori school to manage. At least with this approach we could make up the rules to suit ourselves as long as we used the globally established and easy to use accounting procedures, that I was well familiar with, to determine our schools reductions.
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"The real wealth of life aboard our planet is a forwardly-operative, metabolic and intellectually regenerative system." The Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1969.

Buckminster Fuller was a gadfly American intellectual in the post-World War II era who is best known for inventing the geodesic dome. He was also one of the first planetary systems thinkers who would fearlessly cross any disciplinary boundary he happened upon, inventing new words to describe novel combinations of ideas. Fuller was also the first to suggest the type of currency system that my friends and I had decided to set up and had invented a whole new economics with which to back it. True wealth on a finite planet, he posited, had to use human ingenuity to capture renewable energy from the sun and tides in a way that did not compromise the natural life support systems of a “spaceship” Earth.

Could prevention of human induced global warming and associated environmental degradation be an opportunity for developing a whole new vision of what wealth is? This question followed from the idea of backing money with greenhouse gas reductions. What kind of wealth would that be? My friends and I came up with the following:

* It would be tangible wealth with a physical basis and universally accepted procedures for accounting for it;
* It would be democratically accessible wealth that anyone reducing consumption, putting up solar panels, composting waste, or planting trees could create without needing to visit a bank;
* It would be wealth with a universal economic basis, since no one will avoid the consequences of a rapidly heating and increasingly crowded planet; and
* It would be wealth that builds good-will since the atmosphere connects us all and preventing global warming is an act of kindness towards every living being on the planet;

Changing our economy to be more life-friendly and democratic would certainly be an historic opportunity arising from the crisis of Global Warming, one that could fire the imagination and impact people in an immediate way. It was an exciting time as these implications began to sink in. I wrote letters to Nobel Peace Prize winners on our blog and waited for the world to come marching to our door. Predictably, that hasn’t happened...yet.
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Garry Davis, soul-sick from the experience of dropping bombs from his B-52 on the citizens of Europe, decided to announce himself a ‘Citizen of the World’ and renounce his ties to the national governments that had been the source of so much suffering. He self-declared a world government, travelled the world on his homemade world passport, and decided to put Buckminster Fuller’s idea of a solar energy-backed currency into circulation.

"We went out and finally printed our own money ‘kilowatt dollars’ and took them down to the [1992] Earth Summit and started to distribute them - it was very hot down there and we were accosted by the Brazillians who said, "Americans were rich and they were poor" - and the sun was broiling down and everybody was sweating and I said, ‘Look at that sun out there and that sun is pouring billions of 'kilowatt dollars' on your land every second’ and then I started distributing the 'kilowatt dollars'. I said I'm giving a 'kilowatt dollar' to every person ... and people just wanted them, they grabbed them, they said, ‘Oh world money - this is it.’ “

Our group, which we named Maia Maia after the local indigenous Nyungar people’s word for ‘home’, was having more trouble than Garry Davis did in inspiring enthusiasm, at least at our school. People just didn’t seem to get it, so we decided to take the idea ‘bush’ in order to flesh out the idea and think of better ways to ‘sell’ the concept. We dragged our families on a camping retreat to brainstorm our ideas. Our kids had a great time mucking about in water holes and designing their own ‘boyas’, the name for our currency taken from the Aboriginal name for rock trading tokens that may be the world’s oldest form of money. The kids seemed to accept the idea of a new way of making money, setting up trades between themselves for services rendered, but we adults were still struggling with the whole idea.

Our group was divided. One side was excited about the idea of creating a monetary reward that would motivate the community to reduce emissions. The other side felt that putting a monetary value on boyas was demeaning as they believed that boyas already had an innate value as a tangible symbol of “doing the right thing”. To them this ‘value’ was worth more than the economic value that might result from trading them. Interestingly this split occurred along gender lines.

To resolve these differences we decided to change the focus of our currency system towards extending good-will and educating the community, rather than it being an economic tool. The implications of this discussion were exciting to me as it seemed that a community currency based on emissions reduction could have an innate value even before it is traded. This would help us because we could encourage our school to issue boyas without having a system for trading them already set up.

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The Rev. Hidehito Okochi of the Jōdo Shinshū Jukou-in Temple in the suburb of Edogawa, Tokyo believes that the Pure Land of Buddhism is not a destination in the hereafter, but can manifest on Earth in the present by working to make our ‘impure world’ into a Pure Land. Over the years he has involved his followers in a range of forward-thinking initiatives, including establishing the Edogawatt, the world’s first active community-based emissions reduction currency system.

Purchasers of Green Power Certificates from solar panels put up by the community, sold as part of a fundraiser for the Temple, are given 30 Edogawatt bills per certificate. Reads the Temple website, "These are currently being used among people ... as a certificate of debt or obligation in exchange for baby-sitting, carrying loads, translating and other small jobs. They have provided an incentive for creation of a mutual aid society within the community and we would like to make them a tool for deepening interpersonal relationships and trust."

Another year had passed. We had received a boost of confidence from having Maia Maia showcased alongside another similar currency, the Kiwah, on Danish television during the Copenhagen Climate Change conference. But on the home-front we were still encountering resistance to our idea.

We had not foreseen the obstacles that would arise from the strong emotions attached to both climate change and the idea of money. Harking back to our campsite talks, a major objection was the concern around teaching children to be motivated by something as impure as “money” instead of preventing climate change simply because it was the correct thing to do. Our money idea was actually a disincentive for some people wanting to reduce emissions! With some reluctance we decided to try another community other than our school to launch our currency. It was a revelation to me that negative feelings about money had proven so strong. Perhaps that Buddhist philosophy of changing the impure into the pure is one reason the Edogawatt was successfully introduced.

We decided to be creative in looking for another place to get started.

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“Don't bother trying to teach people a new way to think, give them a tool the use of which will result in a new way of thinking”, Buckminster Fuller.

Solar Sister is an heroic organisation that helps provide solar lamps to African families. Their motivation arises from the need to educate women, long seen as a solution for poverty in developing nations. In more patriarchal societies, boys are allowed to study during precious free-time daylight hours while girls are committed to daily chores. Kerosene for night-time study is prohibitive for most families and so the girls face great challenges in developing literacy. Solar Sister literally provides light where there is none, through the provision of solar-powered lanterns. Their hope is that girls will then be able to participate in their education on a more equal basis. For their innovative approach Solar Sister were awarded a 2010 Clinton Global Initiative Award.

After reading about the organisation I ‘tweeted’ about them on the Maia Maia Twitter page and was delighted when Katherine Lucey, Solar Sister CEO, contacted me about using our currency system as a way to raise money for small-scale projects like hers. She presented a study showing that on average each lamp saved 550 litres of kerosene in its lifetime, which I calculated to be 13 boyas a year. Could we set up a sister school arrangement where an Australian school would raise money for solar lamps for a Ugandan school and the students from Uganda could return a gift of emissions reduction currency? If money issued by a Ugandan community could be spent in Australia that would demonstrate the exciting possibility that our local currency was also a world currency.

Neuroeconomics is the study of changes in the brain that occur during economic transactions. The results from these studies have shown that ordinary economic transactions based on money produce stress and anxiety whereas reciprocal gift giving releases endorphins and is correlated with happiness. When gift giving is one sided, as in the case of much charity, this effect does not occur. Could our currency be a tool for encouraging good feelings as we work together to solve the related threats of climate change and poverty?

This is where we are right now. We have found another school that seems excited by the prospect of entering into a Solar Sister school arrangement and introducing the boya on that basis. We are more open now to the opportunities that might come from unexpected quarters. If those opportunities result in connecting people on this small planet and widening our shared sense of humanity then our efforts have been well spent.

2010-12-26T17:03:00.000-08:00

Due to requests I have uploaded this conceptual draft of the elements of our currency.

On one side will be information identifying the currency as belonging to the Maia Maia scheme with bar code to make it work with exisiting coupon systems for businesses such as retailers. This side assures users that the actions to reduce greenhouse gas are being properly accounted for, and that notes in the Maia Maia scheme

On the other side is information regarding the issuing community (school, church, community group, local government, etc... that is actively reducing the greenhouse gases through conservation, efficiency, alternative energy, vegetation planting, or soil amendment). These reductions are the basis of value for the currency.
Opportunities to use these currencies for fund raising, promotions, and support for development projects in the developing world, are currently being investigated. Please feel free to contact us with your ideas at MaiaMaiaProject@gmail.com

Our intention is to further develop this design to better resemble Australian currency as research has shown that alternative currencies that resemble (in a general way) the national currency are more likely to be taken up in the local community. A design competition has been posted to here.

We are developing this as an open source methodology and posting this methodology on the P2P Foundation wiki.

ERCS: Feet on the Ground or Heads in the Sky?

2010-07-19T21:56:00.000-07:00

Another in my series of open letters to Nobel Peace Prize winners regarding Emissions Reduction Currency Systems, this time to Dr. Joseph Stiglitz, a preminent and compassionate economist for our age who may be the first person to win both the Nobel Prize in Economics and the Nobel Peace Prize.

Dear Professor Stiglitz,

It was a pleasure attending your talk tonight here at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. I have long been a fan since reading Globalisation and Its Discontents where you awakened me to the frightening impact of self-serving economic ideologies being perpetuated by the global financial sector. Your talk tonight extended these insights through a sober post mortem of the global financial crisis, but all the while maintained your hallmark sensitivity to the real and pressing economic demands of our time such as poverty relief and climate change.

In your introduction I was surprised to learn that in addition to being awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics that, as a lead author for the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), you are also a joint recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. As it turns out, for our blog I have been writing a series of open letters to Nobel Peace Prize laureates regarding efforts by our NGO to establish an community issued Emissions Reduction Currency which uses the universal greenhouse gas accounting standards and framework drafted by the IPCC to create localised economic and social capital based on practical actions to prevent global warming. I am doing this to frame our vision in a universal context. Possessing an illustrious background in both economics and climate change you were an obvious choice to become a recipient of one of these letters.

What is an Emissions Reduction Currency? In essence it is a tool in the form of a local currency whereby a community can reward itself directly for day to day actions its members undertake, individually or collectively, to prevent global warming. Local currencies are a formalisation of barter which are variously used to increase social cohesion, to reduce the cost of working capital and to promote small businesses, and historically, particularly during the Great Depression, to temporarily increase liquidity for exchanges and transactions during times when credit is hard to come by. There are currently several thousand local currencies in circulation worldwide, with Australia for some reason having the largest number documented despite our relatively small population. The limitation of local currencies is that they depend on social capital and trust that exists in a community and this prevents them from operating at a large scale, particularly in modern times where people are highly mobile and social institutions are in decline.

In 1969 Buckminster Fuller, in his classic Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, proposed the creation of a world currency based on kilowatt hours of alternative energy produced. His thinking was that such a currency would promote sustainable energy resources and technology in a democratically accessible fashion, and would also ground economic transactions within an environmentally sustainable context. More recently, governments such as the EU have been attempting to create a similar currency based on the commodification of greenhouse gas emission through emissions trading systems. In part to facilitate this, the IPCC and other global institutions have created a universal accounting structure for documenting reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Our group, the Maia Maia Emissions Reduction Currency Scheme, and other small scale initiatives worldwide have been attempting to bring these two ideas together to create local currencies that are based on alternative energy usage and greenhouse gas reductions and sequestration. In our scheme, local organisations such as schools, churches, local government or civil society groups who are engaged in efforts to prevent global warming can issue a local currency based on the quantification of greenhouse gases reduced. The hope is that this currency will serve to make these reductions tangible, will further promote those efforts and ultimately will create an economic return from them. As this currency is used as a coupon in trade for goods and services (in combination with ordinary fiat currency) it communicates an ethos of environmental awareness which will hopefully influence purchasing decisions by consumers.

Conceptually, emission reduction currencies will not be limited by the social capital available in the issuing group as the basis of the currency connects goodwill fostered locally with the goodwill generated globally through our collective actions to protect humanities common future and the ecosystems in which we are embedded. In effect we are trying to invent a global local currency that can be freely convertible everywhere.

I am curious what an eminent economist such as yourself might think about our little experiment. Could this be a viable tool for easing the global economic malaise through generating new resources for local economies that have been abandoned by the banks and global economic institutions. Do you think this is a realistic idea? Can ordinary people create their own economic values for greenhouse gas reductions without waiting for a world-wide political consensus. Can this approach avoid market speculation that has plagued government sponsored emissions trading systems? What do you think? Are we crazy or can this idea actually make a positive contribution?

As a final bit of trivia, the term Emissions Reduction Currency was coined for us by a Professor at Murdoch University. I've used this term to categorise similar schemes being developed internationally and to publish my research in that most scholarly of publications, Wikipedia. Myself being a businessman and not an academic this was the best I could do on short notice. I've included a hyperlink to this information at the bottom of this letter in the off chance that you might know anyone in the Establishment that might be interested.

In any case, I hope this letter has been of interest to you. Thank you for your amazing efforts at keeping faith with reality in a field such as economic policy where feet so rarely touch the ground.

Best wishes,
Sam Nelson

Co-founder The Maia Maia Emissions Reduction Currency System

http://www.maiamaia.org
http://www.themaiamaiaproject.blogspot.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_Reduction_Currency_System

Growing Green 'Money' in the Green Belt

2009-12-16T17:26:00.000-08:00

In keeping with my project to write to Nobel Peace Prize winners, below is a letter to Wangari Maathai, founder of the Greenbelt movement in Kenya that is simultaneously protecting and regenerating life nuturing forests while promoting the dignity and self determination of rural African women. I am using this project to frame the opportunity of Emissions Reduction Currency Systems in the most ambitious terms. For more down to Earth presentation and explanation see our website .

Dear Professor Maathai,

I have just finished your inspiring autobiography, Unbowed, and was many times brought to tears at the numerous great challenges you and your colleagues in the Greenbelt Movement have faced and surmounted. Your story is full of wonderful lessons in humility and determination that I will carry with me from now on in life. Thank you.

Besides thanking you, I would also like to share an idea that I feel may be of use to the Green Belt Movement in extending the role of tree planting as a cornerstone of the rural economy in Kenya. Our group in Western Australia, Maia Maia, has been developing a concept known as an Emissions Reduction Currency System (ERCS) in which a local currency system is backed by a reduction of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Local currency systems are common in the world and are usually implemented to increase a sense of community, to keep money circulating within the local economy, and to make up for a lack of cash during economic downturns. They are typically based on hours of labour or a fixed exchange rate with the national currency. However, since they depend on local social capital their scope tends to be limited and they have historically played a minor role in the overall economy.

However, when the value of local currencies is based on activities that reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere we believe something very powerful can happen. This is because such activities have amazing and unprecedented qualities:

1. They universally benefit all other living beings on the planet without discrimination;
2. They are democratically accessible – anyone can plant a tree or conserve energy, many can share in developing alternative energy sources;
3. They have a real economic value since climate change will have a huge predicted negative impact on both global and local economies;
4. They are measurable in a standardised way. The United Nations and other bodies have developed generic formulas to estimate greenhouse gas emissions or sequestration of carbon dioxide by trees based on data that is easy to collect (in most cases). I believe your ‘foresters without diplomas’ already capture some of this data.

These qualities allow the value of a local currency to have an value outside of the immediate community in which it is traded. As more and more of these systems come into being this value should increase in an organic manner over time. More information on how we envision an ERCS could be implemented can be found on our website www.maiamaia.org, although I imagine many details would be different in rural Kenya than in suburban Australia.

In Unbowed I was struck by the role the introduction of a cash economy played in cementing colonial control of the economy during your father’s generation. At that time money was based on the gold standard and the British controlled the supply of gold since only a large Empire could afford a reliable supply - the mining of gold being the most energy intensive of all the metals. Similar dynamics exist in the global financial system which continues to disadvantage developing nations such as those in sub-Saharan Africa. Could a gradual introduction of a new kind of money create a future where restoring the forests of Africa as the ‘Lungs of the Earth’ becomes a dominant source of sustainable wealth for the people who live there?

In my backyard, one the first things I did upon emigrating to Australia from Alaska, and moving into a new home with my wife Nadia, was to plant the back of our quarter acre with many Native trees. Thirteen years later these shade the house and are home to many singing birds. Whenever I am unsure whether I have made any concrete impact on the world I often take solace in those trees and the peace they emanate. On finishing Unbowed I have made a vow to plant more trees.

If you or any of your colleagues in the Green Belt Movement would like to follow up regarding emissions reduction currency systems, or if there is any other way you feel we may be able to assist in your inspiring mission, we would be honoured to discuss this with you.

Warm regards,

Sam Nelson

Co-founder of The Maia Maia Project

A Social Currency?

2009-10-01T19:17:00.001-07:00

This is an open letter to Grameen Bank and Dr. Muhammad Yunus inspired by reading his visionary book 'Creating a World Without Poverty' Having previously written a letter to another Nobel Peace Prize winner, His Holiness the Dalai Lama (see earlier post) I felt less inhibited writing this one.

Dear Dr. Yunas and the Grameen Board,

I am writing to you to share a very powerful idea our group in Australia has stumbled upon that may be of some use to the Grameen mission of helping those in poverty to liberate themselves from it.

The idea is that greenhouse gas emissions reductions and abatement have some unprecedented and amazing properties (they are measurable, have a universally recognised value, are democratically accessible, and are an indicator of good will) that make them an excellent medium to back a community run 'social currency'.

Many local currencies are in existence around the world most of which are a formalisation of a barter economy. These currencies are backed by local community social capital and historically proliferate during economic downturns when the official money supply is constricted. They tend to operate on a limited scale as the value of their currencies is dependent on relationships within tight knit communities.

The opportunity in basing a local currency on emissions reductions is that such currencies become controvertible to one another on the basis of universally shared interests and thus have a real economic value that is potentially more substantial than the national currency.

We are further proposing that the inherent value of greenhouse gas reductions can only become converted to a local currency when they are ‘donated’ to socially useful ‘projects’ and earned by project participants.

Such a social currency can be exchanged for goods and services between individuals, for discounts from social businesses, or indeed from any businesses. More details on how this might be structured are found on our website: www.maiamaia.org .

Implementing such a social currency may prove useful to Grameen Bank borrowers and stakeholders in the following ways:

1. A social currency can help to pay for underfunded and vital services for impoverished communities such as education, health care, social services, water and waste treatment, etc...

2. A social currency circulating in a community will create economic efficiencies from division of labor and services that will optimise the value of national currency in that community.

3. Social currency discounts granted by social businesses such as Grameen Danone are an easy way to introduce differential pricing structures that target benefits from the businesses to the population most needing assistance.

4. The additional financial resources and efficiencies added to a community through introduction of the social currency will make it easier for microcredit lenders to pay back their loans in national currency.

5. 'Donation' of social currency collected by social business back to local community projects creates an additional avenue for social businesses to advertise their services to their target customers in a way that also directly supports those customers.

6. Social currency tends to remain in local communities rather than being pulled out of the local economy and is not subject to international currency value fluctuations.

7. Introducing an emissions reduction social currency creates a market wherein educated children of borrowers can learn environmental accounting skills to liberate the economic value of Clean Development Mechanism projects (while simultaneously creating additional incentives for those projects). This is a huge and expanding secondary services market and skills are exportable throughout Asia and to the rest of the world.

Grameen Bank is ideally constituted to introduce an emissions reduction backed social currency.

1. It has credibility and contacts with all three groups needed for a social currency to be successful - communities, families, and businesses.

2. It has the administrative structure already in place. Local Grameen branches can provide both micro-credit and social currency management services.

3. It has a large number of branches with a history of creative problem solving within which good ideas can thrive and others that aren't practical can be quietly dropped.

4. It has an immediate and local source of emission abatement in Grameen Shakti's alternative energy provision services. Grameen Shakti also has the technical capabilities to provide emissions accounting services for other local sources of emissions abatement or reduction.

5. It has the international credibility to attract 'donations' of emissions reductions from auditable corporate sources such as from Corporate Sustainability Reporting (CSR) and regulatory reporting by Danone and its subsidiaries.

Demonstrating a powerful new approach to countering greenhouse gas emissions could be a wonderful source of pride for Bangladeshis whose country is one of the most vulnerable to climate change.

It is likely that an emissions reduction ‘social currency’ could be more successfully implemented in a poor country like Bangladesh where necessity can be the mother of invention, rather than in a more economically comfortable country such as Australia. Our hope is that in some years time we can be inspired by and learn from your efforts.

Please contact us if you would like to discuss this idea further or any other way in which we as a group can assist you in making poverty history.

All the best.

Triangles

2009-08-19T07:19:00.000-07:00

Triangles are the most stable geometry in the physical world. Force on any corner is redistributed over the widest possible area and all sides reinforce one another. This is why triangles are essential elements in construction going back to the Pyramids, the longest lasting human architecture still standing.

Triangles have a less favourable reputation for stability when it comes to human relationships, particularly those of the romantic variety. But in the case of The Maia Maia Project, triangles provide an extremely sturdy and durable social foundation that can provide new sources of livelihood and a sustainable economy.

The Maia Maia Project logo consists of a triangle of hands floating above the spiral of a sea shell in cross section. The sea shell represents our ideal, to build our lives and homes by removing carbon from our air and thus avoiding the sufferings of global warming. The hands are the three institutions that work together to achieve this - our schools, our families, and our businesses.

Schools are the starting place because they are our institutions with the longest view on the future, focused as they are on the education and success of the next generation. By bringing families and concerned members of the community together they provide the social glue that encourages us to stick to our pledges to reduce our emissions and thereby reward ourselves with booyas.

Our familes, by reducing emissions and receiving booyas for our efforts, naturally feel pride in our collective accomplishment and this reaffirms our commitment to our children and to their schools. This relationship, as such, does not require overt policing even though monetary value is created in the issuing of booyas. Who would want to jeopardise those good feelings, not to mention the good will extended towards our children?

When Businesses accept booyas as part of their sales, they reflect this good will back to their customers. By doing so they are developing a relationship of trust that will pay back in the form of customer loyalty. There is little incentive for them try to game the system since that would invalidate the object of the exercise.

By donating booyas back to the school and completing the cycle, the businesses are establishing long term relationships with enduring institutions in their community. By accepting the donations to use in various sustainability projects the schools are tapping into broader resources in their community, resources that are critical to expanding their educational mission in a time of constrained budgets.

The key point is that these transactions build up a triangle of social and economic relationships that are mutually beneficial, self-sustaining and thereby require minimal administrative oversight.

Compare this to the massive inefficiencies, and complex, expensive, and intrusive institutions required to prevent corruption in our national economy.

The magic of using emissions reductions as the medium of exchange is that, as measurable and universal indicators of good will and kind actions, they allow value created by these local triangles to be spent in other communities.

Linking up all these triangles through the use of Emissions Reduction Currency Systems has the potential to create an extremely durable social framework upon which to build up our communities to meet the challenges of this brave new millennium.

Looking Back Through the Bottlenecks

2009-07-28T03:52:00.000-07:00

Assume we are in the not too distant future when our Emission Reduction Currency System is operational and growing.

In this imagined future we have had our first Annual General Meeting, adopted our Constitution, elected our officers (anyone up for the challenge of building a genuinely NEW kind of community from the ground up! WE NEED YOU!), have signed up members and distributed Booyas and they are actually being accepted as currency by other members.

HOORAY! Doesn't that feel good! We've done it!

Imagining we are already where we are headed is a part of the challenge. Otherwise all the mundane and difficult steps, each one taking time and energy and attention, that we need to take, one after the other, can make achieving a dream seem impossible.

So celebrate the vision. We have succeeded in finding a way of moving forwards. We are no longer cynical, despondent, waiting for politicians and impersonal powers to dig us out of the global environmental and energy crisis that we all have been complicit in. We are beyond all that now. We are having fun, making friends, doing meaningful work and literally "making money out of thin air" and a bit of care.

And what do we do when we are through all these inevitable bottlenecks?

WHATEVER COMES NEXT.

Which happens to be precisely the same thing that we need to do right now.

This is a thought that one of our members, Nick, shared with me. Nick was a bit more to the point actually.

Nick has recently been successful in getting our Local Council to go along with his stalwart group of volunteers in granting land and resources for creating a community garden. We went to a council planning meeting this week and everything is going better than expected. Now they are doing whatever comes next.

On a more abstract level, Nick dropped by over the weekend and we had a lively conversation about a potential bottleneck in the Maia Maia Project currency system, one of these things on the far side of next. If we award Maia Maia groups annually for dropping below their original baselines and if businesses also contribute their emissions reductions to the system, won't the value of a Booya inevitably go down as the numbers of Booyas in the system goes up? In other words, won't we have inflation?

This is a question that has bothered me for sometime and I think Nick and I came up with a potential answer for you all to consider. Suppose the Maia Maia Project levies a surcharge, say 5%, on each Booya transaction. Some of this surcharge could 'pay' volunteers and retire the initial loans of Booyas to new members. However, after 20 transactions (for a 5% surcharge) a Booya would be removed from circulation and be stored in a Reserve account. Eventually a portion of the Reserve would be 'retired' and would be considered then as a 'permanent' reduction in emissions by the scheme. Alternatively, if there were more opportunities to spend Booyas that there were Booyas to spend, some of the Reserve could be donated back to the grants scheme to increase opportunities for folks to earn Booyas. By managing the Reserve and surcharge rates the Maia Maia Project can manage inflation and deflation in the scheme in much the same way as a Reserve Bank does in the national economy.

Hopefully this last paragraph hasn't become a bottleneck in itself for anyone.

The good news is, you are already on the other side of it :)

ERCS and Other Mythical Beasts

2009-07-12T19:30:00.000-07:00

I have taken the liberty of posting a document summarising all of our group's ideas which we have generated over the last two years (What is the Maia Maia Project).

The document is structured as a how-to guide for anyone else with perhaps more organisational accumen to take over. The ideas are important and revolutionary and should take on a life of their own in the right hands. Hopefully someone out there on the web can beat us to the punch and take all the credit as this could save us alot of hard work :)

Some developments that have occured by our own hands in the last 6 months are:

1. We established a coherent general concept as to the underlying value of booyas and how they fit into the community from our Camp Runamuck retreat.

2. Our ideas have consolidated into an operational system, as opposed to remaining as general concepts. Much of this is due to input from Cam Jakocevich who was previously involved in bringing alternative currency systems to Western Australia.

3. UnleashedDesign have been so kind as to volunteer their expertise in setting up our website (Soon to be released at www.maiamaia.org).

4. We were included in a successful grant application to local government for a community garden project. In theory the community garden will become a Maia Maia group and attempt to use booyas to attract resources.

5. We have been included in a grant application for building funds for the new library at a local Montessori school. A successful outcome of this grant would give the Maia Maia project an operational base. They have included the Maia Maia Project in their curriculum planning for next term.

6. We had a greatly fun annual dinner (albiet with a small number of attendees) at the Wild Fig last week with a rousing serenade of 'What a wonderful world' by the house jazz band accompanied by various group members on the tambourine.

7. Have made some terrific contacts with pledges of support from interesting quarters.

So slowly slowly slowly we are becoming real. The best indication of this is that we have been given a four letter academic acronym - we are now officially an ERCS (Emissions Reduction Currency System). Credit goes to Sally Paulin at the Murdoch University Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy. This was used rather casually by Sally in an email to me and I have tried to use it liberally where I can to good effect.

This idea is so much bigger than we are it is truly deserving of a bland moniker that can be used universally in studies and polices. Hopefully this only ERCS the right people :)

All for now folks - let's see where this all takes us.

Letter to His Holiness the Dalai Lama

2009-05-06T20:16:00.000-07:00

Hi all - this week my little sister Katie Nelson had a rare opportunity to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama because her father-in-law is a noted scholar of Tibetan history. When I heard about this I had this impulsive idea to tell His Holiness about our project. I had been reading His Holiness's amazing book 'The Universe in a Single Atom' regarding his explorations of modern science, and it struck me that our little project might be of interest to him. I asked Katie if she could deliver it for me. She agreed and the letter was given to His Holiness's minder following their brief meeting this week!

I have included the text below as it is the most concise and evocative statement of what we are trying to accomplish that I have come up with yet.

Your Holiness,

I am writing to tell you of the efforts of my friends and I to develop an operating economic system based on care for the environment and the development of altruistic good feelings in society.

While our achievements to date have been marginal, we believe we have stumbled upon some simple concepts which have profound potential to transform basic economic behaviour from the base of society on up. Most importantly, we have formulated a way to implement these changes, starting from local schools, in a straight forward and easy to understand manner that does not depend on governments or other intervening organisations. We hope to contribute to change so urgently needed to reduce the already calamitous impact of climate change and other associated impacts of our collective modern lifestyle.

Our initiative is called ‘The Maia Maia Project’ (a Maia Maia is the local Western Australian Nyungar people’s word for ‘house’). Our diverse and dynamic core group includes a retired head of an oil company, an environmental accountant, a sustainability educator, an architect/building biologist, an upper atmosphere physicist, an ex-government official for greenhouse gas reporting, an events coordinator, a green technology enthusiast, a marketer and business analyst, a statistician, a permaculturist, a nurse, and a community organiser. Alas no economist! Working together over the past two years we have developed the following approach.

It all starts with schools. As you opined during your last visit to our city Perth, leadership on the environment begins with educating children, then educating the media, and then finally our leaders will lead! Currently there is an established effort underway in Australia and other countries to educate children regarding ecological sustainability; our work extends this learning into the local community and the businesses that service them.

To begin the process, we first attract a group of concerned students, parents, and teachers. Together we make a promise to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by a certain amount. We then issue a local currency, designed by the children, the value of which is based on how many kilograms of greenhouse gases we reduced. In Western Australia we call these local notes “Booyas” (using a name suggested by a local Nyungar Elder for rock trading tokens previously used by his people).

When people and businesses exchange these “Booyas” they are recognising the kindness of each other in trying to reduce dangerous levels of greenhouse gas pollution that threaten us all equally. To allow a gradual start, businesses may accept only 1 Booya for every 9 Australian dollars and accept more as they get used to the idea. Businesses then have the option of donating the Booyas they accept (or any greenhouse gas reductions they or their suppliers achieve) to pay for various community and environmental projects. In return the businesses improve their public image which they can advertise. This virtuous circle allows a single action of reducing emissions to leverage many additional positive actions.

The economics of this process are based on three values.

Firstly, there is an immediate positive feeling that comes from performing an act of kindness for everyone in the world without discrimination through reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Especially for children there is a sense of empowerment from dealing directly with one of the biggest challenges their generation will face. The parents in our group identified this as the most important value.

The second value is an increase in community as the notes are exchanged and different parties recognise each other for their efforts. This shares the good feeling around and reinforces fragile and fragmented social bonds.

Lastly there is a very real economic value that can help people directly during these cash-strapped times. This value is actually more substantive than the values of existing national currencies. After all, "Booyas" in Western Australia can be directly and predictably exchanged with say, "Mani" from Tibet (perhaps based on non-polluting development) since they share an equivalent basis while this is not the case for other currencies. Also these currencies represent a measurable physical quantity associated with the well studied benefits arising from greenhouse gas reductions.

As your fellow Nobel Laureate Al Gore said in a public talk during his recent visit to Perth, the Chinese character for crisis is the combination of danger and opportunity, and this was his metaphor for dealing with the climate crisis. The well documented dangers of global warming (and other environmental disruptions) are immense and universal. It stands to reason that the opportunity arising must share these properties.

From this perspective, reducing the pollution in our atmosphere becomes the first and only globally recognised and identically valued economic commodity. Using a simple approach there appears to us to be the possibility for communities to access this wealth directly without the intercession of governments, corporations, and other intermediaries. But more importantly there is an opportunity for spiritual development. Those good feeling from helping others without discrimination, the result of altruism, are actually what determines the value and appeal of these currencies.

The Maia Maia Project is in its early stages, and while we have attracted a group of dedicated and accomplished people and had wide ranging discussions, we are yet to issue a single Booya. On behalf of the group I am therefore seeking your encouragement and insight to assist us in turning this dream into a reality.

My apologies for writing such a long letter given your busy schedule; I hope you have found it of interest.

Sincerely,

Sam Nelson (Executive committee – The Maia Maia Project)

Camp Runamuck: It's all about the kids

2009-01-31T17:12:00.000-08:00

Over two weeks have passed since our small group soaked up the cool pools of Icy Creek while the thermometer soared to 38C during our Camp Runamuck retreat at Nanga Mill camp site in the hills near Dwellingup.

Our kids, true to tradition, ran amuck, scouring the area for hidden trails and secret treasures. A big dusty hill in the center of the camp became a racing track for Tonka trucks imparting a thick film of healthy dirt over our little 'Pigpens'.

The rest of us, intermittently repressing our suburban anxieties over hidden snakes and skinned knees, had several useful conversations about the Maia Maia Project.

There was a range of understandings about what we wanted to accomplish, what booyas (our alternative currency based on achieving community targets in environmental footprint reduction) actually were, and whether they were important or not. Perhaps the single biggest insight from these discussions was that for many the possible financial benefits of a local community currency were entirely secondary to feeling that as a group we could do something about climate change. In other words, if generating and exchanging booyas helped this process that would be great, but it would be just fine if booyas only existed as an indicator of successful action.

Bryce summarised this insight for us by stating that booyas actually had three layers of value.
1. An intrinsic value without any exchange required as an indicator of community pride in doing something.
2. A social value in that any exchange of booyas would further provide social recognition of our efforts.
3. A possible economic value to be realised sometime in the future depending upon how things evolved.

People are free to engage with the Maia Maia Project on any of these three levels, and to me these three layers of value mean that booyas can be a flexible and creative tool that have the potential to evolve into something greater that what we as a group can currently conceive.

Another great idea that came up was the concept of a booya auction where families could bring unwanted possessions destined for eBay, yard sales, or the tip and hold to an auction where only booyas could be spent. This event would encourage recycling rather than consumption and would highlight the social and economic value of booyas.

But the real stars of Camp Runamuck were the kids.

They started by designing and decorating our very first batch of booyas with denominations ranging from 5 to 5000000000000. Some of the designs were superb and the older kids, 'Those Martin Girls', came up with interesting and aesthetic approaches to preventing counterfeiting.

Then, on the basis of pledges to take specific actions on global warming, the booyas were disbursed to the parents. The kids then ran tours for adults, in exchange for booyas, of all the interesting places they had found in their explorations.

Then, hunkered down in the art tent, they designed their own commemorative Camp Runamuck 2009 T-Shirts that are still worn with pride.

Finally they retired down to Icy Creek painting their faces and bodies with ocher ground up from creek bed material.

Their enthusiasm and intuitive grasp of concepts were a counter to the cynicism and sadness the subject of global warming can invoke in adult minds. The kids created an opening for optimism and, as they are the center of their parents hopes for the future, motivation to act.

What emerged from the weekend is that the Maia Maia Project is at it's heart an educational initiative, focused on empowering our kids and engendering an understanding that can heal the historical rift between economy and the environment. It is this fourth value that is at the heart of what we are attempting, and that fourth value is called 'Hope'.

Taking Our Own Sweet Time

2008-12-27T04:38:00.000-08:00

The Maia Maia project has had a slow motion start - like all good ideas it is taking it's sweet time to germinate.

We now have some time - twelve years or so.

That is the time that the Kevin Rudd government has given for Australia to achieve a paltry 5% reduction in Greenhouse Gas emissions - far short of the major turn around needed to lead the way to a remotely sustainable tomorrow.

The political interference has been intense - all of the Daily Rags in Oz have been railing against the very idea of taking any sort of ethical stance. And that was before the Crash put any companies in any real danger from emissions trading.

Which brings us back to the why of Maia Maia.

The problem of global warming actually comes from all of us. In trillions of individually trivial actions we daily push the climate and environment past the tipping points.

So it follows that responsibility for a solution must start with us as well.

We wouldn't be the first to do this - seemingly inconsequential carbonate shelled sea life have been cooling the planet for eons.

Why can't we?

Imagine a world where much of our "money" comes from creatively managing the environmental impact of our household activities and through how we choose to spend our money.

Imagine a world where businesses compete for customers not by the products and services they offer but by how sustainably these were produced.

Imagine a world where wealth is generated through empowering communities and not through remote and capricious financial institutions and markets.

Imagine a world where we have fun building our future while educating our kids and our selves in the true value of things.

These are some of the objectives of the Maia Maia Project.

To turn promises into action today.

We hope you can join us...