The purpose of this post is to introduce some basic principles that will be vital to our consideration of our relationship to the Earth, a topic that has become increasingly important to me the more that I have learned. This relationship has become regulated and controlled by the economy, and thus money and its connection to the planet is the first key idea to understand.
In our country and in the global marketplace we use a peculiar type of currency known as fiat currency. For those who do not remember from their high school civics class, fiat currencies are odd because they have no physical standard of value. Other currencies of the past have been tied to some kind of physical commodity, like gold, silver, or even grain. Thus, if the demand for gold increases, the value of a gold-standard currency increases. However, if gold becomes more available, the value of gold-standard currency decreases. The amount of value in a commodity based economy is dictated by the amount of value in the particular commodity. In other words, commodity economies are regulated by our communal relationship to the commodity. The two major players in this type of system are the Earth, who provides the commodities, and the decentralized will of the people.
Thus, before we switched to a fiat currency system, the dollar had real value because it represented a certain amount of the gold held by the United States government. This gold was essentially owned by the people in the form of the dollar, anybody could own it, and the amount of gold which your particular dollar could be exchanged for was controlled by the amount of bills in the economy and the amount of gold in the U.S. Treasury. In terms of alienation from actual value, commodities themselves are the least alienated because they are identical with the value they represent. Representative currencies are more alienated because their value is artificially controlled by the amount of bills in circulation, and fiat money is the most alienated. Fiat money only has value because the government says that it has value and we all agree to abide by what the government says regarding its value.
This presents the first breakdown in our relationship with Earth. The economy’s job is to distribute commodities among the people. We do not produce commodities by our own work, but in partnership with the Earth. In the end the Earth provides, we simply cultivate and reap according to our needs. In a commodity economy, even if you were not a farmer or miner, your work was directly connected to the Earth. This relationship is reality, even today, we have simply covered over this truth by insulating ourselves from nature. Even programmers are shaping the way physical products behave, much like potters shape clay to perform certain tasks. Teachers of old, who produced nothing and shaped nothing, were still tethered to Earth by the system in which they were paid. No matter how far technology can progress, we will always rely on nature. Fiat currencies hide this reality by untethering our work from Earth in terms of its monetary value. The dollar has no ecological value until it is spent on products derived from the ecosystem.
The point of considering our currency is to find a better, more accurate way of thinking about us and the Earth. It is to start thinking of the goods and services we buy and sell as deductions from the natural environment so that we realize that our wealth is limited by the availability of natural resources.