INHABIT STORY

The Migratory Gardens

We see a green corridor that crosses the planet, composed of edible forests producing diverse foods and patterns. Visible from space, this corridor appears to be the largest infrastructure ever created by humans….

The long-stretched garden starts in South Africa, stretches up to Europe, extends to the eastern tip of Asia, crosses into Canada, and finally descends to the southernmost tip of Patagonia.

Planted by millions of people of all ages and cultures, this edible corridor weaves through towns and deserts, each person contributing their own small garden and forest to create a continuous — biodiverse garden

A South African girl sends a message to a friend in Turkey. She prepares the letter, writing her friend’s name and corridor location. The letter travels along the corridor, passed hand to hand, from inhabitant to inhabitant, until it reaches her friend’s hands.

Increasingly, more people are eager to connect to the corridor, benefiting from the intelligence, cultures, wisdom, biodiversity, seeds, and ideas that flow through its veins. Gradually, a robust and branched living network emerges, spreading up to the roofs of cities…

The movement of species and wisdoms becomes so thriving across the corridor, that the gardens themselves start moving. This phenomenon will later be known as Migratory Gardens.

HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT

The word ‘economics’ comes from two Greek words ‘eco’ meaning home and ‘nomos’ meaning accounts; in its original meaning economics is the practice of “household management”. This necessary practice of design for day-to-day management can be applied at different spheres of life: to our body, our community, our territory, our planet.

At the planetary level we know today that earth self-regulates to maintain an equilibrium that sustains and enhance life; we could say that earth performs its own “house management” as a unitary system.

Everything in life exists only in relation to something else and humanity has been able to exist and prosper because climate and environment had optimal conditions for humans to thrive; the relationship with a stable climate has been the key to our prosperity. For 10.000 years prior to 1950, earth temperature remained highly stable with a variation of only +-1° for the entire period, stability being the one fundamental condition to enable the development of humanity and civilizations as we know it. However, the impact of industrialization and excessive burning of fossil fuels have altered climate stability and other stable earth regulatory systems. The Stockholm Resilience Centre have highlighted 9 planetary boundaries or ecological ceilings that need not to be crossed to enable earth to maintain stable ecological conditions for human to thrive. As we speak, 5 out of 9 boundaries have already been crossed.[1]

Given these premises, how could we participate in the “household management” of the territory that supports our life? How could we co-design the places we inhabit in a way that supports stable and life enhancing habitats and cultures?

As individuals and communities, we are part of a specific territory within a wider bioregion that includes lands, soils, water, plants and all living beings, each performing its essential role in the ecosystem.

Humans are embedded in nature and are interdependent on the many ecosystems that provide essential services to society, from pollination to filtering of pollution, water regulation, food, and raw materials.

Today there are countless projects, initiatives and groups that live within the planetary boundaries by making use of knowledge, technology and new economic models in a way that proves that our human civilisation cannot only thrive within its ecosystem’s life supporting capacity but can have a role of life-sustaining and life-enhancing member of the web of life.

Regenerative agriculture has emerged as a concept to describe that way of being in the ecosystem by establishing food systems that enhance natural capital and create “conditions conducive to life”[2].

Regenerative agriculture includes a set of design practices, meta-approaches, and agricultural techniques to generate food and farming systems that preserve and regenerate the territory’s ecosystem services (topsoil, biodiversity, water quality, etc.). Amongst the many approaches, we found Japanese natural farming, permaculture, agro-ecology, agroforestry systems for ecological restoration (e.g. syntropic farming) and holistic grazing.

However, it became clear that this agriculture paradigm shift implies a mind/cultural shift in the way we perceive ourselves and our environment and in the way we collaborate. At its deepest level regenerative agriculture implies the design of our human communities or regenerative cultures to construct conditions conducive to life and where reciprocity can thrive.

“Deeply regenerative agriculture can exist only if it is completely interwoven into a thriving regenerative culture. This includes the songs, stories, myths, rituals, foods, ceremonies and music that transform agriculture from a functional economic activity to a spiritually rich and emotionally fulfilling central heart of an agricultural community.”[3]

THE COMMONS

Inspired by Nobel Prize economist Elinor Ostrom, the prosocial approach explains how “Common-pool resources such as lands, bodies of water, the atmosphere, space, and even the Internet only become the commons when they are actively governed by communities that care for their sustainability”.[4]

Many foresee a future where projects, companies, natural resources, and villages are co-owned and co-governed by a community of users that have a say in the way they are managed. However, whether co-ownership and co-governance will evolve into healthy patterns that promote diversity, equality and individuals’ self-affirmation remains to be seen.

Ostrom’s groundbreaking insight was to perceive the common not only as resource but as a self-organized social system — the commons: resource + a community + a set of social norms. [5]

Could farmland be managed as a common household and represent the regenerative foundation from which a community can thrive from?

What is INHABIT?

The word Inhabit comes from “habitare” from Latin “to dwell, to live in”, and “ghabh” meaning “to give or receive” or “to hold,” which can be either in offering or in taking.

INHABIT started in Colombia in 2020 with the vision to empower groups of people to participate in the economy of their bioregion and to take part to the regenerative household-management of the places they inhabit.

The INHABIT dream is to see a plurality of farms and community projects to emerge and align in a physical corridor, where each place hosts a unique pool of bio-cultural diversity, art and wisdom to safeguard and share.

To achieve this dream, INHABIT establishes Bio-Cultural Hubs, and develops Rural social Innovation tools for people to design, transform and sustain the places they inhabit, and to facilitate healthy connections and exchanges to take place within and between farms.

One of such tool is the INHABIT Stewardship NFT, which allow for legal and ecological “stability” of ecosystems, and for specific lands to be managed as a common households.

Read the INHABIT Land Tenure Framework and become a Steward

To know more about Inhabit visit the link www.inhabit.one or write to [email protected] / [email protected]

Whitepaper

One-pager

References

[1] https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries/the-nine-planetary-boundaries.html

[2] ‘Biomimicry — Innovations Inspired by Nature’ (Benyus, 2002)

[3] Levels of Regenerative Agriculture (Soloviev and Gregory Landua)

[4] Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups (by Paul W.B. Atkins PhD (Author), David Sloan Wilson PhD (Author), Steven C. Hayes PhD (Author), Richard M Ryan Phd (Foreword)

[5] http://www.bollier.org/commons-short-and-sweet

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