Compared to the worldwide value of commodities, stocks are nothing. Consider the underutilized “Earth Market,” the trading of values which in aggregate are as vast as the earth itself. Consider tradeable rights to emit pollution, to mine ore, to take stocks of fisheries; financial futures pegged to the value of specific forests, forest index futures, forest derivatives. The Earth Market is an unstoppable force. Growing the Earth Market could become a very bright interpretation of capitalism. Enlightened financial killings are to be made, as technology makes production more and more pollution free, and permits to pollute are bought up by conservation groups. Within 20 years there would be no pollution, no overfishing, no overharvesting. Is this just a dream of some right-wing environmentalist?

The danger in the dream is that its implementation could be just as totalitarian as the leftist alternative. Imagine what it might take to make global emissions trading work in the real world. A supra-national government agency would be necessary to verify trades, set parameters, police against abuse. The Earth Market is real, but best allowed to grow by simply evolving. Otherwise the extremes meet. Right is Left.

In WorldWatch Magazine’s November 1998 issue, there is an article entitled “Last Tango In Buenos Aires,” which describes slow progress made (or is it evolution?) at the last world conference on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The conference veered into more general topics such as reducing all greenhouse emissions, as well as discussions of possible global emissions trading schemes. In true evolutionary fashion, we dance around the edges of the idea. The Earth Market awakens.

Commodities such as forests generate real value simply by growing. Owners of forests can earn dividends simply by selling select trees from sections of their forests at a sustainable rate. Access to information and instantaneous low-cost fund transfers via the internet allow ownership in ecologically correct “EC” projects to disperse, allowing much more capital (in smaller increments!) to identify and focus on the investments that work. According to the green-consumer advocacy group Co-op America, already over 25% of American consumers are earth conscious consumers, looking for the “EC” deal.

While electric cars aren’t economical yet (if even ecologically correct, when one assesses the impact of dead batteries and new generating plants), hybrid vehicles are another story. They get incredible gas mileage, up to 100 mpg, and hybrid vehicles, which use a small internal combustion engine along with a electric motor / electric generator system, don’t pollute, and they don’t cost much anymore. They’re already a hit in Japan. Buses using hybrid propulsion systems ought to be getting built and sent to Tegucigalpa, and elsewhere in the rebuilding after Hurricane Mitch.

In Honduras and elsewhere in Central America, the recent hurricane was so fierce that in vast areas even the topsoil was blown away. Not many millions, but many billions of trees are necessary to stabilize an area as vast as an entire country, even if it is only 30,000 square miles or so. Huge percentages of trees don’t survive their first year, and in the harsh landscape of storm-scoured ground, the first generation of replacement trees will be stunted, requiring higher than normal densities of mature trees.

Why shouldn’t an Earth Market exist for tradeable futures in Honduran forests? This approach can open a whole new area of environmentally conscious investing, and a whole new way of financing new forests. Charitable environmental groups might actually purchase covenants on the forest holdings, allowing them to limit the density of harvests and the areas harvested, pushing up the value of the remaining lumber.

The Earth Market can emerge without necessarily requiring a whole new layer of global eco-cop world government power. Around the world, the Earth Market can emerge in the wake of technology’s direct effects; increased education, increased integration, increased liberation, increased communication. The Earth Market can evolve harmoniously into prominent existence, unpredictable and unstoppable, sidestepping tyranny. The sooner it arrives, the more we will save, and the richer our world will be.

Compared to the worldwide value of commodities, stocks are nothing. Consider the underutilized “Earth Market,” the trading of values which in aggregate are as vast as the earth itself. Consider tradeable rights to emit pollution, to mine ore, to take stocks of fisheries; financial futures pegged to the value of specific forests, forest index futures, forest derivatives. The Earth Market is an unstoppable force. Growing the Earth Market could become a very a bright interpretation of capitalism. Enlightened financial killings are to be made, as technology makes production more and more pollution free, and permits to pollute are bought up by conservation groups. Within 20 years there would be no pollution, no overfishing, no overharvesting. Is this just a dream of some right-wing environmentalist?

The danger in the dream is that its implementation could be just as totalitarian as the leftist alternative. Imagine what it might take to make global emissions trading work in the real world. A supra-national government agency would be necessary to verify trades, set parameters, police against abuse. The Earth Market is real, but it will best allowed to grow by simply evolving. Otherwise the extremes meet. Right is Left.

In WorldWatch Magazine´s November 1998 issue, there is an article entitled “Last Tango In Buenos Aires,” which describes slow progress made (or is it evolution?) at the last world conference on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The conference veered into more general topics such as reducing all greenhouse emissions, as well as discussions of possible global emissions trading schemes. In true evolutionary fashion, we dance around the edges of the idea. The Earth Market awakens.

Here, let´s get started. I will purchase 100 redwood trees (that´s sequoia sempervirons) for up to $.40 per tree by March 31st, 1999. There! We´ve just started the roaring bull market in commodities. The Earth Market grows.

Grandiose? No. Commodities such as forests generate real value simply by growing. Owners of forests can earn dividends simply by selling select trees from sections of their forests at a sustainable rate. Access to information and instantaneous low-cost fund transfers via the internet allows ownership in ecologically correct “EC” projects to disperse, allowing much more capital (in smaller increments!) to identify and focus on the investments that work. According to the green-consumer advocacy group Co-op America, already over 25% of American consumers are earth conscious consumers, looking for the “EC” deal.

Electric cars really aren´t economical yet (if even ecologically correct, when one assesses the impact of dead batteries and new generating plants), but hybrid vehicles are another story. They get incredible gas mileage, up to 100 mpg already, and hybrid vehicles, which use a small internal combustion engine along with a electric motor / electric generator system, don´t pollute, and they don´t cost much anymore. They´re already a hit in Japan. Buses using hybrid propulsion systems ought to be getting built and sent to Tegucigalpa, and elsewhere in the restocking and rebuilding after Hurricane Mitch.

In Honduras and elsewhere in Central America, the recent hurricane was so fierce that in vast areas even the topsoil was blown away. Not many millions, but many billions of trees are necessary to stabilize an area as vast as an entire country, even if it is only 30,000 square miles or so. Huge percentages of trees don´t survive their first year, and in the harsh landscape of storm-scoured ground, the first generation of replacement trees will be stunted, requiring higher than normal densities of mature trees.

Why shouldn´t an Earth Market exist for tradeable futures in Honduran forests? This approach can open a whole new area of environmentally conscious investing, and a whole new way of financing new forests. Charitable environmental groups might actually purchase covenants on the forest holdings, allowing them to limit the density of harvests and the areas harvested, pushing up the value of the remaining lumber. Agro-forestry farms would thrive in such a region. Trees, Water & People would benefit.

The Earth Market can emerge without necessarily requiring a whole new layer of global eco-cop world government power. Around the world, the Earth Market can emerge in the wake of technology´s direct effects; increased education, increased integration, increased liberation, increased communication. The Earth Market can evolve harmoniously into prominent existence, unpredictable and unstoppable, sidestepping tyranny. The sooner it arrives, the more we will save, and the richer our world will be.

Paleontology. A sense of cyclicity, a hyperopic perspective. A perspective from which to speculate about mass extinctions. Side by side with the long boom, the mass extinction? There have been plenty of mass extinctions before, at least half a dozen big ones in the last 600 million years, where anywhere from one-third to nearly all of the earth’s then existing species were lost.

What makes species become extinct? Five key factors: (1) habitat destruction, (2) habitat fragmentation, (3) overkill, i.e., over-hunting and over-harvesting, (4) invasive species, and (5) cascading effects. Of these, invasive species appears poised to be the biggest contributor to the imminent a die-out of somewhere between 35% and 95% of the earth’s current biological diversity.

Why are invasive species, weedy species, taking over the ecosystems of the planet, and killing everything in their path? It´s not a result of the information age, but rather because of an earlier revolution, the transportation revolution. With inter-ocean trade via ship, and now via air, species are deliberately and unintentionally being deposited from every corner to every corner of the planet.

Weedy species share the following characteristics (1) they reproduce quickly, (2) disperse widely, (3) tolerate a broad range of habitats, (4) resist eradication. Where these species become established, they kill off native species, monopolizing the ecosystem. They thrive in human dominated terrains. Wherever they go, they tend to survive and then they crowd out native species.

The October 1998 issue of Harper´s Magazine has an excellent, though dark toned, article entitled “Planet of Weeds, Tallying the Losses of Earth´s Animals and Plants,” by David Quammen. Much of the above information came from that article. But of what use was the dark tone? Why not hedge every dark assessment of our global environmental prospect with constructive ideas? What can we do?

Though to say so is to risk being branded a luddite, a malthusian, a gloom & doomer, and worse, the weediest species the earth has ever seen is homosapiens. We reproduce quickly, disperse widely, are extremely adaptable, and tend to survive the exigencies of nature quite well, wherever we settle.

All the primary causes of species extinction, destruction of habitat, fragmentation of habitat, over-hunting and over-harvesting, are due to an expanding human population. Even though in the developed nations populations are now stable, because of barely checked growth rates in the rest of the world the total human population is going to nearly double in the next fifty years, to around 11 billion, before leveling off.

Barring a true catastrophe, such as being hit by an asteroid ten kilometers in diameter, or a real live version of the Andromeda Strain, most of the human race will survive.

What quality of life will the human race experience, and what quality of global ecosystem will the human race inhabit? Those are the questions we must ask ourselves about the period one or two centuries from now - a mere heartbeat in the history of our species, but easily the most profound and abrupt shift ever in our collective circumstances.

Constructive ideas should include new ideas. New ideas should allow new freedoms. Human technology has conquered nature at last. The set of traits most important for human survival and prosperity has been suddenly rearranged. With the strength needed for the hunt less important now than the ability to manipulate symbolic logic, it is only logical that the human female will ascend to a position of equity in human society. To put it mildly, our society doesn’t require physical strength in the measure it once did. The more developed a society is technologically, the more this becomes the case.

Consequently, nothing will advance the wealth of developing nations, and slow their population growth, nearly as effectively as helping to speed the emancipation of women. Their education, their equal access to opportunity; the empowerment of women. Needless to say, this phenomenon, though not as speedy as some would like, is inescapable and ineluctable, and is encountering some vehement resistance.

Imagine our planet one century from now, full of organic farms, new forests with billions of trees, clean, fresh water, and fewer people. Perhaps the New Age Californians are right, a “shift” is occuring, as the feminine principal ascends. Solar homes, hydrogen buses, sustainable societies. The feminine principal can help bring our technology back into harmony with nature.

Maybe one can conclude, Spocklike, that we are simply experiencing a predictable transition period, one that would affect any species like ours, living on an M-class planet. Barring star travel (which has its own pitfalls, such as Borg, the weediest species imaginable), here and now, this epic, these next fifty years, is where we define our biological endowment for the next thousand millenia.

Is this all overwrought gobbledegoop? Paleo-babble? Arcane trekkie aphorisms? Of course, but the question remains: Are we to be the weediest species of all? Living on a planet of weeds? Or will we celebrate ecological diversity, instead, in the year twenty-five twenty-five.

There is a lot of talk of the Y2K problem, that is, “The Year 2000 Bug,” which, as we approach January 1st, 2000, will render a significant portion of the computers and computer networks of the planet paralysed. A recent issue of the prestigious international magazine “The Economist” featured on the cover a cartoon of planet earth melting like a ball of wax. The message was clear, at the dawn of a millenium, the editors of the Economist fear not only a computer bug, but a broader economic meltdown that The Year 2000 Bug will only exacerbate.

At a moment perhaps not as precise as 11:59 PM, December 31st, 1999, our real Y2K problem will be not on the microchip but on the entire planet: Global economic meltdown, global economic restructuring; something not malthusian, but something as inevitable as the seasons. Let´s figure out how to hedge. When sustainability becomes not an ideology but an imperative, in the face of a global economic slowdown, two thousand new forests will be a good investment.

In mid-September one of the biggest and best investment banks in the world had their annual technology conference in San Francisco. EcoWorld was there, on one of the four magnificant nights they staged. Nights where they hosted thousands of guests with $100 bottles of wine littering the tables, the finest liquor, world-class live entertainment, world-class finger foods; there were gigantic gems on countless rings that were blinding in all directions. The attendees were the elite of the elite, some of the richest and most sophisticated investors since the renaissance.

But how many of these technology investors see the operating system of an ecosystem, and the compelling investment represented by sustainability?

How many of them will hedge their volatile and intangible financial holdings with ownership of real, perpetually profitable forests? How many of them think not just of the Y2K problem on the chip, but think also of the Y2K solution on the earth, two-thousand new forests around the world?

Around the year 2000, let the technology barons pool their resources, hedge their bets, and reach out to their global audience with the credo of Nature and Technology in Harmony. Let them plant new forests on 2,000 new sites, sites that were desertified, urbanized, or are just generally forestable, anywhere and everywhere on earth. In the name of product diversification, they´ll need to make sure to plant at least 2,000 different species of trees, and at each site plant a forest with anywhere from 2,000 to 2,000 million new trees.

With Nature and Technology in Harmony as the operating credo, and perpetual profit as the financial goal, plant the new forests and let them grow.

Across Eurasia from Norway to Indochina, in the islands of Polinesia and Indonesia, from the Americas to Africa, the forests are being overcut NOW. Every time cutting exceeds regeneration the future value of the wood goes up.

Where is the futures market for precious and slow-growing hardwoods? Wood has a tangible value and a non-manipulable rate of regeneration. Pricing for wood is at least as rational as the pricing of the stock of corporations; not ideology but pure Newtonian market physics can predict that the market should NOW be starting to invest in and save the rarest and most sought after woods. Because of technology and the internet, a bigger and broader market for trees is imminent, bringing the effortless focus and copious cash from saavy investors everywhere. “Ecology Markets” are just around the corner, and they will revitalize global ecosystems, and hedge global portfolios.

The Y2K Solution would be a giant step towards reforesting the planet, and can succeed if included among those inspired to help plant the new forests are the very people who think now primarily of the other Y2K concept, the Y2K problem on the chip. If a tenth of the effort to solve that problem on the chip is put into implementing this solution on the earth, we´ll be well on our way towards a better world, a new millenium with more people, but also more trees, more water, and eventually, a new boom.

In the hills of central Honduras, about 20 miles west of Tegucigalpa, there lies an abandoned city.
It sits along the eastern bank of the Guacerique river, mile after mile of concrete row houses and narrow dirt lanes. They stretch along the flat lands from the river bank up to the bluffs that run out from the surrounding mountains. The river runs along the length of the city, the surrounding lands are fertile, but the city is without life.

Even in broad daylight, the city is so still that the birds alight for hours to sun themselves on the rooftops, and wild animals take shelter in the shells of the empty homes. This city that could house 50,000 people, lies empty because nobody thought of what to do with the sewage that the city dwellers would produce. Nobody could come up with a good way to treat the sewage before it polluted the river water and groundwater, the same water that 800,000 Tegucigalpans downriver depend on for drinking and cooking and bathing.

There is a way to treat sewage that renders the final water product completely clean, drinkable, safe to cook with, safe to bathe with. This method uses algae and other water plants growing in a system of ponds to extract all poisons from the sewage.

An algae pond system that would clean the sewage from a city of 50,000 people would require at most about one-half a square mile of relatively flat land, downstream from the city and with canal access to the river upstream and downstream from the ponds. There are several such areas downstream from Ciudad Mateo, at least according to the topographic maps ecoworld.com has obtained from the Honduran Instituto Geographica Nacional.

This means that instead of an empty city, one where the miles of concrete hollows are being considered by the municipal authorities for sale to use as mausoleums, Ciudad Mateo could be filled with life. The Honduran authorities are trying to decide what to do with this empty city right now. What they should do is build an algae pond system to treat the sewage from Ciudad Mateo; for design expertise, hire William Oswald, the Algae King from the University of California at Berkeley. Algae treatment costs only about one-tenth what mechanized sewage treatment plants cost, and they clean the water better than mechanized plants. They also require less energy input and less maintenance. The only reason they haven’t caught on in the developed world is they require a relatively large amount of land, which is not a problem in Honduras, or most of the developing world.

While they’re at it, the Hondurans should hire an architect or city planner from Curitiba, that Brazilian showcase of urban planning, to selectively blast wide boulevards through the rows of concrete structures. A solid grid of streets might be cost-efficient to build, but the efficiency of a more thoughtful system of roads and open spaces would more than pay for itself in the long run. Imagine Ciudad Mateo transforming itself from an empty city destined to become a mausoleum into a model city, filled with life. Children playing in the parks, young people chasing a soccer ball in the open places, farmer’s markets and music in the squares, and everywhere, big trees, clean water, and happy people.

The verdant countryside of Central America

Whatever else, at its best religion can be the savior of humankind, providing the motive, the means, and through adherence to a faith, a united mass of humanity to solve the problems of humankind. Surprisingly, in Latin America, it seems to be the Catholic Church, bolstered with the conviction of thousands of Central American martyrs, that has become the torch-bearer for environmentally enlightened religion. But just as the reformist priests gathered an irresistible momentum, civil war decimated their ranks, and into the gaps stepped fanatical right-wing evangelical missionaries from the U.S. The race is on, between the ineluctable reforming of Catholic doctrine, and the more seductive lure of the fanatics, the nihilistic evangelicals.

Central America in 6-98 was people standing crowded in the back of pickup trucks, flatbed trucks, dump trucks, racing along bumpy dirt roads or swerving through crowded intersections in cities like San Salvador. We rode in the back of the truck a lot since the alternative was three in the cab. We went to the lowlands of Guatamala, to the road junction town of Tiquasate, where there are endless fields of sugar cane, and it stays between 90 and 100 degrees sometimes all night with 100% humidity. Malaria carrying mosquitoes come out in force around 5PM and don’t go away till around 9AM. The sun seemed to be straight overhead all day.

The hillsides in El Salvador were being stripped bare, the last crucial watersheds being cut for fuel, the wells and springs were drying up. In a few cases, there were springs that restarted after trees were replanted. The equation that finds more trees equals more water which sustains more people is simple, but nihilistic evangelicals don’t care. Only their doctrine matters to them, not an evolutionary, ecumenical interpretation of religion. The equation’s converse yields stark realities: a 4% natural increase per year in the population of a country like El Salvador, where there are already over 500 people per square mile, is not sustainable.

In the highlands of Guatemala we visited nurseries in the hills above Lake Atitlan, where at lakeside the elevation was 6,000 feet, and the temperature was moderate. The steep peaks of volcanoes rose to 12,000 feet and higher all around the lake, and Mayan Indian girls sold us their jewelry and fabrics. Everywhere there were old Spanish churches and cathedrals. In Antigua, which from 1520 till 1773 was the capital city of the Viceroyalty of La Plata, the wealthy built cathedrals to receive absolution. When the earthquake in 1773 destroyed most of them, there were already around 30 massive cathedrals; all of them are now magnificent ruins.

Central America’s biggest urban centers are Guatemala City, with three million people, and San Salvador, with two million people. The civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador were brutal, both lasting over a decade and both ending only a few years ago. There are abandoned military checkpoints on all the roads, and many of the former soldiers and former rebels are employed as security guards. The banks and major office buildings all have at least a half-dozen guards, usually armed with assault shotguns, otherwise with automatic rifles. Large grocery stores and other stores invariably have two or three armed private security guards, always in uniform.

Honduras is the most undeveloped of the three countries we visited (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras). In the virgin forest that runs throughout the eastern third of the country it is believed many significant Mayan ruins await discovery. The capital, Tegucigalpa, has only 800,000 people living there, and does not experience the traffic gridlock that grips Guatemala City and San Salvador. The central square in Tegucigalpa at dusk is beautiful, with a huge equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar to one end, and a luminous Spanish cathedral on the other. In the middle of the square is an area of raised dirt where several giant native trees grow, and even in the middle of the day the sounds of the birds that sit there is by far the loudest thing you hear.

Tree plantings are well underway in these countries. The role of women is evolving. Slash and burn farming is slowly dying out. Watersheds are being protected. There are lots of reasons to be hopeful. One of the tree planting foundations that we visited early one evening in El Salvador had their offices in a studio apartment in a concrete building of 32 units stacked two stories high, eight in a row. The building was full of families with fathers and mothers and children, bikes and BBQs overflowing onto the walkways. Dinner smells and TV and fans and all the doors and windows open in the San Salvador heat.

The catholic church, massive, slow moving, and with a tradition of being subtly ecumenical, had incorporated Indian paganism, and in 1980´s Latin America, was beginning to embrace the total emancipation and equality of women. Nothing else can possibly accelerate the lowering of birth rates as fast as the emancipation of women. But the civil wars cost the lives of the boldest of the priests and nuns. Into the gap rode the American right wing evangelicals. Their well funded and seductively reactionary missionary efforts have now made evangelical adherents the fastest growing religious segment throughout Central America.

All the units in the immense apartment complex we visited in central San Salvador were single room cubicles, a door, a window, a sink and stove, a toilet and shower. A random few of the units were offices, in the one we visited they had a small round conference table, a few overturned doors on top of 2 drawer file cabinets, the walls fully occupied with shelves or maps full of pins. Still poor, but their country at peace at last, the people worked with a strange combination of resignation and joy. Only truth can unmask the fanatics. A rational and experientially derived truth that says to encourage everyone to have great big families is nihilistic.

We visited and ate lunch at a women’s coop where they manufactured solar stoves. In the eyes of a 40 year old Mayan women I saw wisdom coming not only from her ancient culture, but from the tribulations of her own time. Returning to the USA and watching U.S. television after not seeing any for nearly a month was amazing, scary, addictive, sensory-overloaded, hallucinogenic. Modern TV, after weeks without it, was an overwhelming bombardment of high opticality and captivating audio. Better than ever. But for a time the stealth was taken away from its subjugating impact, and the raw power of American media was naked to see.

Which is to say this: our mere TV preachers in America are Central America’s US donor funded pied pipers, hotter than the Beetles were at Shea. Pied pipers who tell their acolytes to write the earth’s environment off to the unstoppable and imminent apocalypse, and to concentrate instead on multiplying their numbers.

We hear a lot about the notion of sustainable forestry, a fine idea, though often misconstrued. Any good capitalist should love sustainable forestry, since such a practice guarantees perpetual profits. But the word “sustainable,” at least among our right-wing brethren, seems be regarded as a code word for government intervention, socialism, central planning; a real nightmare. These connotations are false. The real meaning of the word sustainable is perpetual profit.

One of the reasons that reforestation is taking so long is because it is a process largely driven by charity funds instead of investment funds. If deforested lands aren’t immediately viable candidates for monocultural plantations, the traditional capitalist investors stay out, and the lands remain empty of trees. What if capitalism were harnessed (instead of feared) by people who believe in reforesting the earth? What if they took all that money and became atypical investors, instead of donors?

Large investors would help estate owners establish plantations with diverse species of flora, harvested sustainably, yielding a perpetual cash-flow that would be hedged by virtue of its diversity against economic turbulence.

Small investors and micro-investors would help small farmers establish stands of trees on their properties for fuel wood, fruit, nuts and timber. Again, harvested sustainably, these stands of trees would yield a perpetual abundance of products for the farmers to consume and to sell.

Which brings us to sustainable nurseries. Why do the nurseries dry up when the aid money stops? Why aren’t billions of trees per year being grown and profitably sold to landowners large and small? Why aren’t hundreds of thousands of profit-making nurseries operating throughout our deforested world, growing and selling these trees?

There are long term trends of ineluctable force that will make sustainable tree nurseries, i.e., profitable tree nurseries, more and more common. The algebra is compelling: (1) The world’s population is increasing, requiring vastly more consumption of tree products each year. (2) The number of trees in the world is falling. This phenomenon, while not in aggregate as dire as some would have us believe, is acutely felt in many regions, and in the regions where reforestation does outstrip deforestation, the quality of the reforestation is questionable. (3) Here’s the clincher. For a variety of reasons, aid money for tree nurseries and reforesting is slowing down. All three of these trends point to one fact, the cost of trees for basic needs, fuel and food, is going up, but the need for trees will not abate; tree growing is getting more profitable.

Small farmers will not only plant more trees on their land to grow their own fuel and food instead of paying higher and higher prices to buy it, but they will also grow trees for other small farmers to buy, in micro-nurseries financed by micro-loans. A part-time enterprise growing and selling a few thousand trees per year can yield an income that could make the difference between subsistence and prosperity for many small
farmers in the developing world.

Financial sustainability as well as ecological sustainability are keys to reforesting the earth. Profit and environmentalism can be aligned.

There was lots of heat here recently for asking not if, but when and how the downward adjustment in stock multiples will occur. No, they laughed, though they laughed a bit too loud. Of course the bulls will roar this way forever!

Lots of those taken aback were professional investors who ought to know better. But anyone who manages forest inventory does know better. When you live in the forest, you feel many seasons when you behold the various trees. Looking at rings in the stumps, you see abundance and drought in cycles that mock the human span. When you live in the forest, you know with absolute certainty that out there in the economy, the bears always come back.

Regardless of whether or not we live in a season of Bulls or Bears, micro-enterprises such as profitable agro-forestry plantations will not replace global integration and massive economies of scale, they will coexist, in both low-tech and high-tech forms. Moreover, they will not be intrinsically isolated from the world economy, that will just be an option. Other autarkies besides these enlightened plantations will be, for example, guilds of programmers, whose virtual workplace and proprietary community effortlessly walks the continents.

When, then, will the Bears come? This depends on whether this current run of unprecedented technological advances has caused our global economy to experience something new, something Wired Magazine once called “The Long Boom,” where stratospheric stock multiples stay high for 50 years or more, or whether this is just another plain-wrap boom we’re having, just one a bit bigger and longer than average. Either way, the boom will end.

How will the Bears come? The second question is more stark. When the boom ends, how will the global economy adjust? Will our transition back to earth be smooth? Or will we humans have by then stripped the earth bare of its biosphere, consuming it in such a frenzy that we didn’t even know when the line was crossed from exhuberance to desperation, from civility to total war, from Finches to Lemmings. In nature, species do it all the time.

Perhaps the benefits of technology are just beginning, but the social dislocation engendered by technology; massive population growth, precarious economic interdependences, biological and ecological disruption, is also just beginning. There is no guarantee that world civilization will not descend into yet another chaotic, catastrophic maelstrom. To think we are now beyond famine, plague and war is the conventional wisdom, reminiscent of popular sentiments in Europe sometime around 1912. It is convenient and common to think that at worst such apocalyptic visions only loom slowly in the deep distance, horrible, but probably just a malthusian fantasy, at worst something easily turned away. In a culture as saturated with advertising fantasy and entertainment fantasy as America today, geopolitics are boring, and Winston Churchill would have been dismissed as a raving drunk.

So how will the Bears come? It won’t require an antarctic meltdown, an ozone layer burn-off, a burning season that suffocates half the planet. There are a lot of countries with populations of several hundred million people who could spin into disaster with nothing more than a sharp jolt, a global hiccough, an extra bad El Nino, an oil production cutback, a cholera outbreak. If rallied by demogogic politicians or fanatical clergy, they will not be predictable and will not be easily contained. Are we ready? Can’t the boom end with a whimper instead of a bang?

We at ecoworld.com think that a smoother slowdown can still be had, and so we are trying to promote an unabashedly capitalist, yet sustainable model of capitalism that believes nature and technology can exist in harmony with each other. New technology, at least this time, breeds autarky along with booms, because twentyfirst century technology is allowing competitive decentralization of information and manufacturing systems. Ecoworld.com just wants to remind the reader to see the operating systems in the forests, the fisheries, the farms, the waters, as we ponder the next operating system on the chip. Many of our new insights into information ecosystems are transferable to natural ecosystems. We can now make these smaller, better, cleaner, faster, too.

Profitable, sustainable agro-forestry not only will make a developing country prosperous and self-sufficient, its implementation will foster great leaps in public education and literacy, as well as a deep and practical understanding of ecological stewardship. Profitability is central to this plan and guarantees its proliferation. It’s just too bad that it will take a bust to make sustainable growth in real value ala the enlightened plantation a more attractive economic option.

Someday, unless we boom ourselves straight into a higher life form, this long boom will end. The price/earnings and price/sales ratios of the S&P 500 are higher now than they were back in 1929, and for good reason. The boom in the twenties was fueled by new technology, better manufacturing, new levels of global integration, and rampant speculation. The boom in the 1990s is fueled by all these, plus far more profound technological shifts, plus the stability lent by US military supremacy, something not seen since Rome was in its prime. But the days of price/sales ratios anywhere from 100 to 1000 will end, maybe in fifty years, maybe next week.

When this progress plateaus, when we finally digest all the implications and benefits of information technology, growth will slow, expectations of growth will slow, and stock multiples will return to earth. If we’re very, very lucky, underlying stock values will have grown into their multiples, instead of having to also fall. Don’t count on it.

One way to make the inevitable economic correction slower and more civil would be to have by then a critical mass of souls in this world who understand not just the autarky of electronic freedom, but also the autarky of agro-forestry, and who already understand and embrace a sustainable model of capitalism.

After the roar of the bull, how would an economic collapse affect planting trees?

When underlying values of investments are fragile, built on unprecedented and self-generating demand and on expectations of never-slowing growth, even a small shock will topple the house of cards. Experts don´t even know whether to fear inflation or deflation, and just like with global warming precipitating an ice age, we could have both, someday.

The global economy is relying on plummeting costs of manufactured goods to fuel a rise in stock values. Costs are in free fall, in turn, because of amazing new technologies. But when the biggest global economic locomotive of all, the USA, has 30% of its driving population using money they borrowed to command the highways inside absurdly expensive steel behemoths that get gas mileage scarcely better than… a locomotive, an economic hiccough is as nearby and easy as another assasination in Sarajevo and some empty pipelines. Price/earnings ratios in the hundreds and thousands don´t hold when oil costs USD $50 per barrel. Nothing can hold up a house of cards forever, not even high-tech.

Even if a crash never comes, shouldn’t we be ready? It’s nice to hope that some multi-billionaire will underwrite the successful planting of 80 billion trees in the next 20 years. But can´t this great reforesting endeavor acquire its own momentum, and pull its own economic weight?

The earth will be reforested no matter what happens to the global economy, and here’s how and why:

Combining forest operations with farming, water supply and treatment, power generation, waste disposal, fishing, education; this kind of integration can yield an enterprise that sustains itself. If there is a global economic collapse, it is these types of operations that would be most likely to achieve autarky, causing them to grow, since autarky would suddenly look pretty good. Producing their own timber, food, water and energy, they would be far less vulnerable to economic disasters. In a prosperous economy, such an operation would only need to sell a small surplus in order to guarantee itself financial independence and sustainable growth.

A locally controlled, polycultural agro-forestry plantation, once established, could prosper on its own, not affected by global economic catastrophe. Such a business could incorporate the best that high-tech has to offer, but without sacrificing ecological good sense. The alternative, and current trend, are massive, monocultural cash crop operations which not only ravage ecosystems, but are themselves wiped out routinely by even minor fluctuations in global commodity prices.

Creating a business plan for self-sufficient agro-forestry enterprises is relatively easy, if you´re willing to trade capricious but stupendous, cigar-chomping P/E ratios for slow, real growth in value that won’t stop. As long as we still have an internet, transmitting blueprints and operational guides to potential practitioners around the world is also dirt cheap.

No matter what happens to the global economy, and with or without charity, this planet can be reforested. Profit and enlightenment aren´t intrinsically at odds. We can plant 80 billion trees in the next 20 years, and make money, for all we know.

Who says you have to buy big expensive trees? Hardly anyone can afford a forest that way. At the George Zappettini Tree Farm in Tuolumne, California, for just $56.00 give or take a quarter, you can be the proud owner of 100 Cottonwood Trees. Not just any Cottonwood Trees, either. These 12″ sprouts will grow to 8´ in one year, and to 60 feet tall with a 60 foot diameter crown in twenty short years. It´s a cross between a California Black Cottonwood and an Eastern Cottonwood, two truly fine species, both tall, broad, and fast growing. For windbreaks and for firewood (in a reburner low emission fireplace, of course), this Populus Americanus is an excellent tree.

But what about the streams that empty into the cleaner than ever San Francisco Bay, flush with rainwater and Salmon? What about those choke points where the water temperature is too hot for too long a course? Don´t they cry for such trees? When the river cries for trees, can you hear?

In California´s Santa Clara (Silicon) Valley, you cannot plant trees below the 100 year flood mark, unless a special dispensation is granted by the Water District Officials, who own and administer most of the waterways in that area. We at ecoworld.com are looking into said dispensation. In real life, creek trees must be below the 100 year flood mark, so they don´t die of thirst in the summer.

In the capriciously dry streams and creeks of Silicon Valley, and elsewhere I´d reckon, year-round moisture about one foot down is essential for trees, and that condition is usually reached either in a moist mountain canyon or on a floodplain.

There are stretches of San Jose´s Guadalupe river where in twenty years 100 of these magnificant Cottonwood trees would be visible from Airliners, as they bathed the Salmon rich waters with shade and all the beneficence that restored ecosystems would bestow.

It is astonishing that such a small amount of well-placed investment can yield such an aesthetic and ecological reward. Simply poking 100 sprouts of Cottonwood in the right holes along a river will turn in half a generation a sun-parched precarious ribbon of life into a great greenbelt of moisture, cool waters and fragrant trees.

Nobody on earth reading this should doubt for a moment the immense return on such a small but thoughtful commitment. Made one at a time but with logarithmic acceleration to transform the planet. Who in Bangalore will go to Rishi, and bring their educational cards and anchor trees to Varanasi, to the Mahant? Who will grow the seeds in tree farms fed with the dung from algae ponds that will clean the mother river?