January 1, 2050
Report by Paddy Le Flufy on how initiating the Cosmolocal Capital Fund helped us transform society:
In early 2024, just like the world, I had an uncertain future. I had published my first book, Building Tomorrow: Averting Environmental Crisis With a New Economic System, 9 months before. While it had got some good endorsements, it wasn’t selling many copies and, most importantly of all, it hadn’t had any tangible impact.
At the same time, the Earth was heating up – the 12 months to 1 February 2024 were the first 12 months in history to be over 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial average – and there was no indication we would transform society in time to stave off catastrophe.
I decided writing wasn’t enough – I had to put some of my ideas into action myself. I went for the most transformative of all: the Cosmolocal Capital Fund. At the time, the ideas of cosmolocalism already existed, and so did some cosmolocal networks. But the ideas were little-known, even among ecological economists, and the network structure had not been applied at commercial scale.
I found this strange, because to me the potential of cosmolocalism was clear: it’s an economic system, equivalent to the then-dominant capitalist system, because its structure creates a dynamic that drives forward development. But rather than the competitive dynamic of capitalism that drove us into economic growth, cosmolocalism has a collaborative dynamic that we now use to genuinely improve the world.
To begin seeding the new system, we began by setting up some cosmolocal networks: global networks that connect local nodes. The networks were independent, but joined through the hub organisation of the Cosmolocal Capital Fund (CCF). The CCF did much more than provide capital – in fact, at the beginning we did very little of that. Instead, we concentrated on setting up the networks as well as possible, to ensure they could seed a new system rather than get co-opted into the old. For example, including the Doughnut goal of aiming to ‘meet the needs of all within the means of the living planet’ in the Charters of the cosmolocal networks helped steer society into the Doughnut.
The whole structure was designed to be as collaborative as possible, and it enabled people around the world to cooperate and in doing so improve their local areas. For example, people throughout the clothing network shared their clothing designs, from t-shirt prints to dress shapes, and because the network included nodes all around the world, from Mali to Bolivia to the States, people everywhere could suddenly access a huge pool of styles and designs. As the network grew, there was a burst of sartorial creativity that was visible on streets around the world.
There was an upswelling of cooperation and creativity in many other areas. The information commons itself was developed as an open source collaboration. Collaboration was also essential to creating regional circularity. It’s hard to imagine, now that almost all our materials circulate regionally, but in the early 2020’s, most goods were shipped across the world, and incredible amounts of waste were created every year – plastic waste, e-waste, you name it – without ever being reused (until we started using vast quantities of it as a raw material in the 2030’s).
Getting from that immensely wasteful system to the current one, in which materials cycle so effectively there is almost no waste at all, necessitated a degree of cultural change. There was a huge amount of collaboration within networks, with nodes sharing their experiences of what did and didn’t work to encourage circularity. But the real breakthrough was the collaboration that happened between different networks, such as the way the community hubs network and the complementary currencies network combined to encourage and incentivise truly circular local recycling.
Another area in which collaboration had a massive positive impact was through the research & development network. Labs were set up around the world, all focused on building products that could be made in local-scale factories, with circular materials and minimal environmental impact. They shared their innovations and experiences, and then the lab network connected with the makerspace network, so that anyone who enjoyed tinkering could easily help design new commercial products, from furniture to computers. This made our material development a truly society-wide collaboration, and eventually resulted in the make-anything factories that are the basis for today’s create-on-demand material economy.
Of course, there have been many other important developments in recent decades – the newly responsible attitude to wealth and capital stewardship is one, and the One Planet Living Tokens monetary system is another – but I’m very happy to have had a role in moving society from the 20th century’s capitalist economic system, to today’s cosmolocalist system.