Our economy, whether we like it or not, cannot be saved. It is beginning to runravel. Where we land though is up to us—where we need to aim for is a steady-state economy soft landing.  The drop will be discontinuous; we will see plateaus punctuated by abrupt drops. Unlike the great depression, which over half of the population lived on family farms, today only two percent of people have a connection to their food production.

Question: What do we do now?

Answer: Powerdown from industrial capitalism to a steady-state economy. Our goal is to keep as much of the best of what we have today as we can—the Internet, rail systems, education, libraries, and seed banks. Here is a list of changes we should consider implementing now. Some ideas may sound radical, but remember, we have lot to reverse and restore, and if we don’t do it, nature and peak oil will do it for us.

1. 1.Adopt the Oil Depletion Protocol. This will give governments, communities, and individuals a way to equitably share dwindling energy resources. Peak oil is actually going to be as Richard Heinberg says peak everything. Unless we find a way to cooperatively share these resources as they decline, we are going to have more resource wars and skyrocketing prices. All of this can be avoided if governments adopt the Oil Depletion Protocol.
   

2. 2.Return ownership of local natural resources to common ownership by the local community. Ownership of local resources can be neither transferred or concentrated. Decisions as to use and preservation of local resources should only be made by consensus and not by elected representatives. No hierarchy and no tyranny of the majority. Income from resource extraction is distributed equally by family—note, by individual family. A family of one child and six children would receive the same amount. We can no longer pay people to have larger families that further exacerbate overpopulation.
   

3. 3.Natural resources that are taken also have to be paid for at their true value and natural benefits, not just their cost of extraction. The value of a forest in carbon sequestering, precipitation creation, and top soil retention is in the trillions of dollars. A tree is not just worth what is can be cut down for, but much more.
   

4. 4.End private property. This has never made sense to me. Owning the land is like owning the sky. Maybe start by putting your land in a land trust for the benefit of your community and children. Link like-minded people who want to join your community by contributing all or some of their land or housing to the land trust as well. Provide land in usufruct to farmers cost and tax free.
   

5. 5.Redistribute land equitably. We won’t have cheap gas to run tractors on 10,000 acre farms for much longer anyway. See the International Society for Ecology and Culture to learn more about locally-based agricultural alternatives. Agricultural land should be returned to individual families and local communities. Monocultures should be replaced with soil building polycultures. Animal factories (CAFOs) should go away and bring animals back to the farm.
   

6. 6.End externalized costs. For example, if a city needs a new power plant, the new coal or nuclear plant should to be located right in the middle of the city. If you want the power plant, you breath the air and soak up the radiation for 2,000 generations, otherwise cut your power use, have smaller families, and invest in cleaner alternatives. Place animal stock yards next to grocery stores. In fact, if you want to eat meat, maybe people should actually live in a stock yard for a few weeks. Chemical plants should move to cities as well. No more blissfully rolling your shopping cart down the isle of a big box store not knowing what you are supporting.
   

7. 7.Factories, networks, freight carriers, and businesses should be owned by their employees. Decisions are made locally through consensus. Large shopping, restaurant, and service chain stores would return to local owners to adapt to local community lifestyles—no more sick monocultures of the mind, in diversity their is resilience. We do not need a transnational corporation to flip hamburgers.
   
   Take away central hierarchical decision making that was the downfall of soviet style central economies. If a small business wants to be innovative, it should become a corporation and give up the physical assets. Physical assets such as offices, buildings, and networks that a corporation would need, would be rented or leased from local employee owned non-corporate businesses. Local businesses would not have limited liability—if you want to be irresponsible to make a buck, you pay the consequences.
   

8. 8.Scaled down banks to serve local or regional communities. Size banks to bioregions to allow economies of scale. Community banks must also offer micro credit to reduce local poverty.
   

9. 9.Life and biological property may not be owned. Seeds may not be patented and may be saved by farmers at no cost. Each local community should own their own seed bank. If you want to start farming, the government should give you a plot of land as usufruct, water, knowhow, and tools—just like the Cuban government does. Organic food should cost less than pesticide, herbicide, GMO laden food—a lot less.
   

10. 10.Break the country into several smaller watershed or bioregional countries. Also reshape counties by smaller watersheds and geographic regions, not squares. These counties will eventually dissolve into tribal communities and tribal confederacies like the Iroquois. We should also follow the actual Iroquois form of government that our founding fathers sought to imitate: eliminate the chief executive, only women can vote for elected representatives, and the entire nation has to vote on national decision of changing boarders or going to war. If women were in charge, we would not have war anyway.
    

11. 11.Close all financial markets except foreign exchange, commodities, and maybe bond markets—no derivatives, options, etc. If your assets are under $500,000 single, $1 million married, I can see the corporations or government reimbursing you for your current stock market value like FDIC insurance. The stock market is nothing more than a speculative global casino. A Business only benefits once from a stock sale at the initial public offering. Every subsequent sale of stock is like the sale of a used car—the business does not benefit from each stock resale.
    
    If a business needs to raise capital, they can get a loan like everybody else—the government should ensure that loans are being made at reasonable rates to businesses and individuals and that banks don’t just sit on the cash. If a bank is going to offer a mortgage, they can hold onto the loan locally and not package it to be sold with a bundle of other loans. No stock market, no need for selling short or long—no derivatives. A lot of multi-millionaires and billionaires are going to lose a ton of dough, but they will survive, and you can’t take it with you anyway.
    
    We could have saved a fortune by not bailing out insolvent banks. Bad banks should be allowed to fail and deposit insured. The money would be better spent on helping the lower and  middle class, rebuilding our infrastructure, and balancing the budget.
    

12. 12.Close the Federal Reserve. Lincoln made sure he did not borrow money from bankers to fund the Civil War. Why borrow money and pay interest on it from the private Fed when we the government could just make the money? This would eliminate the federal debt overnight and return control of creating money to the people and not the bankers. End the fractional banking system, listen to Ellen Hodgson Brown’s interview by KMO’s C-Realm podcast, No 102: A Vocabulary of Control. Lastly, reinstate the gold standard to stabilize financial markets.
    

13. 13.Reform what a corporation is and owns. Before the robber barons changed the laws, they actually cheated, and created corporate personhood, a corporate charter was only for a limited public purpose for a finite period of time—for example, building the Erie Canal. We do need to motivate brilliant people to innovate, but we do not need exaggerated concentration of wealth. Today about 20 percent of the world’s population controls almost 90 percent of the wealth. In the United Kingdom .28 percent of the population owns almost 65 percent of the land. Further, why should the natural resources of a local community be owned by an absentee land owner or government? Nature also needs to be given the same or even greater rights than humans.
    

14. Here are the new corporate rules:
    

14. 14.Corporations can own no assets, only cash. We need innovators, so the nature of a corporation becomes that of a design firm licensor who invents smart phones, airplanes, and toasters or specializes in intellectual property. Corporations would have limited liability so enable them to invent, but no personhood—overturn Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. Decisions may still be made hierarchically to enable innovation.
    

15. 15.Amend corporate charters by adding 26 words to create “Code of Corporate Citizenship”. Today corporations are only responsible to their shareholders. You can change every corporate officer into a walking Buddha, but nothing will change until corporate directors and officers are also responsible to local communities, their workers, and customers. Corporations would still have a duty to make money for shareholders, but “... but not at the expense of the environment, human rights, the public safety, the communities in which the corporation operates or the dignity of its employees.”
    

16. 16.Product designers must require that producers take back their products to be recycled at no charge. When you’re done with your iPhone, you can send it back to Apple to be recycled. The products would go to locally owned recycling businesses—cradle to cradle, waste equals food.
    

17. 17.If you want to play, you pay. Pay taxes to your local bioregion based on family size. The bigger your family the more you pay; larger families use more government resources. Each family pays its fare share. Small families no longer subsidize larger familes. Overpopulation is probably our biggest problem. Our “being fruitful and multiplying” and “dominion over the earth” is over.
    

18. 18.Citizens decide where their taxes are spent by choosing what percent to put towards each governmental department. If a person does not want to support the military, then none of their money goes to the war department. As long as we are at it, we should replace the war department with Dennis Kucinich’s idea of a Department of Peace. The tax system we have needs to be dumped because it is neither fair nor balanced and is too susceptible to manipulation by special interests.
    

So, how do you make an iPhone under this scenario? This may or may not work. Apple would stay a limited liability corporation that continues to specialize in developing innovative electronic consumer and business products. It would lease its offices and equipment from local businesses. The network(s) that the iPhone runs over would be owned by regional consensus managed non-limited liability businesses. Apple would innovate and would tell the local employee owned production facilities and networks what they need.

That being said, technologies such as the Internet that depend on abundant cheap energy are going to be increasing are going to be increasingly difficult to maintain as we enter the down slope of peak oil.

I do not believe for a minute that any of these reforms are going to happen anytime soon because I do not see the majority of people changing the way they live. However, those of us who are becoming the change we want to see can start living differently ourselves. We can start seeking new ways to make a living closer to our homes, our families, and our communities.

These ideas are only ideas or guide posts to show what’s wrong today. They are not the solutions—they are only transitional programs. Programs run contrary to vision. A program is something like recycling. Vision is the story that the world belongs to man and we can consume as much of it as we want. Programs do more of the same thing, vision changes the underlining lifestyle that makes programs unnecessary. For example, we need to take back the story that humanity belongs to the earth, and forget the failed story of the earth belongs to man.

The financial crisis is only part of a growing perfect storm—read Culturequake. We are at a 20 percent overshoot of the earth’s carrying capacity and the annual decline rate global oil production is now 6.4 to 9.1 percent. For most of the world peoples and species, a storm has been raging for years.

It is going to be a new world out there and change takes time. Our economies and hopefully our populations, are going begin to shrink. The current financial crisis should be seen as an opportunity for people to start talking and looking outside of our culture for like-minded people to form community and to live the lifestyle you want. We need to rediscover the wealth of Leaver or native peoples such as cradle to grave security. Small businesses should become tribal. Tribal business take better care of their employees, families, and communities.

It’s time to use your smart phone to tell a friend about Culturequake. Think bioregionally, act tribally.

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Visit www.culturequake.org to read the most updated version of this essay and to read the blog as a whole work, visit the Culturequake amazon.com book store, and learn more about the book Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture. Visit www.restorationfarm.org to learn what we are doing to grow new stories and cultures. ©2008 Chuck Burr LLC.