After writing about “paying the fish,” it kept on nagging me. [1] Because it remains a search for the true essence of money, or in other words, the essence of compensating each other for labor and services without ruining everything. I’d like to share this here and am open to new insights on the matter. It seems clear that the current financial and monetary system is pushing us in the wrong direction. The essence may lie in the phrase ‘compensating each other.’ Essentially that is what we do—compensating each other, as humans, and therefore without ‘compensating’ the plants and animals, and the land on which they/we depend. Yet, they are all part of a whole in terms of value and physical qualities. This is something that Quenet and George already advocated hundreds of years ago. We need to return to basics, with land and the sun as the primary capital, and the spontaneous or cultivated output of these, especially if we want to do without fossil fuels. I also explored this extensively in my book. In fact, this piece and some other recent ones can be seen as an extension of the book, a further pondering and exploration of the necessary changes. A search for the essentials on this island in the universe.
So, once again, let’s delve into that article about “paying the fish,” with the following reasoning. Paying the fish? Yes, within our current economic and monetary system, that’s the only way to achieve some balance in the system, consistently reasoning through the chain. Then, payment must also be made for the end product, or rather the starting product. But, of course, the money system is flawed—money has no physical, scientific, or ecological basis—so it remains an artificial construct. For example: is a fish worth 5 or 10 euros? At a more fundamental level, it seems to be a different story. Lets assume a blank slate. And suppose we burn that money at the end of the (money) chain, on behalf of the fish, how did I then acquire money to pay the fishmonger, and the fishmonger the fisherman, and the fisherman the fish, at the beginning of the (raw material) chain? One could argue that I could also compensate the fish stall in kind if I had no money: trade the fish for a box of cherries, which I also picked for free from a tree. But if we have to pay for the fish, then I should also pay the tree for the services rendered in the form of cherries. But with what? With fish? That’s an option. I once saw in Canada that they caught salmon, well, picked them up along the streams after they had laid eggs and were about to die (and were no longer edible), to fertilize their garden, and thus “pay” the tree to get more cherries.
The situation then becomes one where no money is in circulation—a clean situation without free money, with only barter, obtained from the eco/bio/geo sphere, based on labor (and the sun). I had to invest labor in picking cherries, and they in catching the fish, along with all the intermediate steps. And, of course, money can’t play a role in this interaction because trees and fish don’t accept money. They grow naturally. The variables here are essentially only the yield of land and sea, and only that part which maintains the chain. Eating fish isn’t the problem; all nature is based on living off each other. The big fish eats the smaller fish (‘fishivores’…?), but there’s a maximum level where the land and sea continue to provide resources without sacrificing quality or quantity. That’s the essence.
Picking and fishing aren’t the problem, but guarding for the maximum is. For example, fishermen already have to deal with a fish quota, which is a form of maximizing. But within our current financial system, it’s still about appropriating a disproportionately large part of what is actually common property for free. Setting limits is an approach that many old cultures discovered long before us as the only one that works in the long run (like the ‘seven generations’ criterion, for example, used by the Native Americans). And that’s possible, but you then have to ensure/guarantee that there is no over-harvesting or overfishing. How much is harvestable or cultivable from land or sea without disrupting the chain (and without shifting the disadvantages to other sectors)? In other words, there’s a limit to the amount of exploitable land, and therefore also to the labor to be invested: once that annual maximum share is harvested, it’s done. Then you are free to go lie on the beach. This is something that old cultures realized based on common sense. Think of hunter-gatherers, although I don’t see us doing that directly. (For hunting and gathering, there’s not enough land available per person based on what nature spontaneously provides in edible form, which required about 2 km² per person. Now the world average is only 0.2 km² per person.)
Active agriculture is therefore necessary, with maximized yields (and thus also maximized impact and input).[2] Moreover, all of this must be done without the use of fossil fuels. And then we are entirely dependent on land(-agriculture) yields (from land, with the air or water above it) and with the sun fueling the system. With humans as engines, converting solar grown food into labor energy. The human body being the most effective conversion machine, although we’d rather not like to hear that…. Nevertheless, that’s the only basis for prosperity in terms of resources: food, materials, and energy—all three as yields of land, plus labor (including metals, for example, see*). In which everyone has an equal share—a cooperative share. This is exactly how some early settled cultures worked, as is becoming increasingly clear from anthropological research, as described in the book “The Dawn of Everything”: for example, among the Ayllu in Peru (Incas), the living groups came together every year to settle mutual debts and redistribute the land equally among everyone (and thus hand-worked land; fossil fuels played no role yet).[3]
So it could (and can) be done without an extensive legal and juridical framework, and without money, but based on agreements and trust. Incidentally, a century and a half ago, a native (Indian) negotiator (Kandiaronk) in North America also noted this after visiting France, as the same book cites him: “the entire apparatus that tries to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France didn’t also maintain a counter-apparatus that encourages people to behave badly.” That apparatus consisted of money, property rights, and the resulting pursuit of material gain. He considered it mainly to be due to “the distinction between mine and thine.”
Now, returning to the fish, it should (for sustainable purposes) be seen as collective property. Which can be divided based on trust, with an annual redistribution. A form of money can still play a role in that redistribution, but the monetary value must then be based on what can be harvested at an annually maximum. To distribute in a fair manner, in a form of basic income , ensuring that everyone has their fair share, which can be used for own purposes (varying—one person might prefer more fish, another more cherries, for example). (In modern terms: We are all shareholders of the biological production company, the Earth. (And we are dependent on it!) Therefore, also responsible for ensuring that the company is preserved and doesn’t exhaust its reserves or production capacity.) That money can simply be printed, with a maximum to distribute each year, so I can pay that fishmonger, but ultimately, the last one in the chain, the fisherman, must indeed pay for the fish by burning the money (and I ‘pay’ the tree), so there’s no accumulation of money, or in other words, no overfishing or over-harvesting occurs. Otherwise, it accumulates with the fisherman or the farmer, who supposedly has free access to land (the stock). Burning it isn’t literally necessary; the money can just go back into the pot for a new round of basic incomes. The amount of money depends on what the land can sustainably reproduce annually. And yes, the fish must indeed be paid for…
Again, I’m thinking out loud here, as it were, searching for the essence. What remains, for example, is the question: who ensures that work is done on the land and that fish are caught at sea? And how about land ownership? What is a sustainable /maintainable stock? (For fish, see part 1, but what about metals, for example?*). To be continued, comments are welcome…
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*Metals and minerals: they also have an autonomous annual yield, an amount at which the chain remains intact. This yield is very low, as the geological processes that concentrate substances take a very long time, see this paper [4] or my book (soon in English) .
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[1] fish 1 https://www.ronaldrovers.com/pay-the-fish-no-not-the-fishmonger-the-fish/
[2] potatoes : https://www.ronaldrovers.com/eroi-and-land-use-of-potato-crop-a-pilot-12/
[3] The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Greaber 2022
[4] paper: circularity of resources: a non discrimination evaluation methodology. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/1078/1/012125
