Saving Earth: Regenerated Land, Clean Water, Food for All

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Worker Cooperative People Skills: Cooperation Skills for Startup, Operations, Growth and More

Carol A. Manetta

Worker Cooperative Technical Skills: Joining Forces for the Good of All

Carol A. Manetta

Copyright © 2021 by Carol A. Manetta

ISBN 978-1-7324668-2-1 EBK

First Edition December 2021

Published by Earth Goodness Publishing

PO Box 6541, Scottsdale, Arizona 85261

Distributed by Books2Read

All rights reserved.

Cover photo credit: Sasin Tipchai

Acknowledgements

It has been a privilege and an enjoyment to work with highly qualified people on this continuing journey into the unknown on restoring Earth. The best is yet to come from these people who are the best. The good work we're doing resembles that of a well-practiced team of athletes. When difficulties arise, there is no rising of hackles. Instead, calm intelligence prevails. That's what's needed to tackle climate change.

In this instance the steady journey is such because of the embodied leadership capabilities of Timm Esque of East Valley Leadership Lab in Arizona.  He is the author of two leadership books, No Surprises Project Management: A Proven Early Warning System for Staying on Track, and Making an Impact: Building a Top-Performing Organization from the Bottom Up. Timm became a mentor to our program through the International Society for Performance Improvement when that organization granted Reap Goodness its Community Service Program Award in 2019. He has remained an exuberant leadership supporter since.

The steady intelligence and vigor of Olivia Murray came to us via Arizona State University’s Engineering Projects in Community Service, or EPICS Program. It was an earlier ASU EPICS project with Reap Goodness for an American Indigenous tribe that led to four awards. Olivia’s leadership of the EPICS Pro team of graduate students and her continuing indefatigable research and reporting remain an invaluable gift in support of this book’s content and our program in general.

It is right and just to highlight the importance of Joshua Loughman as the underpinning force and good nature of our work and its upcoming test, the Heartland Trial. His generosity in lending us his land on which to conduct this all-important trial cannot be measured. His background in systems engineering and overall high intelligence and vision quadrupled the scope of the EPICS Program as its Director at ASU and now serves him as Senior Strategic Planning Analyst at Salt River Project, which delivers water and power to the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. His support of our current work has been unwavering.

It's more than a mere mention to include the ongoing support and feedback from Thomas McCoy and Kathy Watson McCoy on each step of this journey. Both are highly supportive of Veterans and Reap Goodness’ work. Without them, this book would not exist.

While there are others along the way, these standouts are just the beginning. We treasure them and always will.

To our multiplicity of advisors in the background, we hail your astounding loyalty to this cause of nurturing nature and its comeback for the good of all!

Contents

Chapter 1  How Trios of Cooperatives Can Work in Your Community

Chapter 2  Robustness of Living

Chapter 3  Charging Ahead in Fine Time

Chapter 4  What This Means for Your Community

Chapter 5  Responses from Around the World

Chapter 6  Economics and the New Times

Chapter 7  Supply Chain Implications

Chapter 8  Mandates from Government

Chapter 9  Uplifting Others and Yourself

Chapter 10  What This Means for Future Generations

Chapter 11  Earth Tendencies with Care

Chapter 12  Conclusions

Saving Earth

Chapter 1  How Trios of Cooperatives Can Work in Your Community

Starting in a jurisdiction

From the moment a group of people decide to join together for a common purpose, creativity begins. We envision a group of people coming together for the first time to talk about prosperity in their community. These are good souls, whose work together brings about happiness starting from within the group and extending out to all others in the community. This is the crux of the cooperative effort worldwide. It’s here we start this journey with this feeling of wishing to increase the prosperity of an entire community. Each one joins with the same intention. Never does it occur to them that they wish to outdo one another, but instead focus on uplifting each other and being uplifted themselves in turn.

The joy this brings each person each day cannot be overemphasized. It’s what makes worth living and working toward with every single breath they take. It’s from this stance they can begin to organize all their activities to support this notion.

Now imagine there are three groups of people who wish to do the same thing, uplift one another and the community at large. They come together, these three groups, and talk about how they can share the responsibility of increasing water resources, blending into the landscape by rectifying the land that’s been degraded by monoculture and animal agriculture, and cleansing tainted waters anywhere they occur, including roadside ditches that eventually feed the oceans. How will they do that, they asked amongst themselves?

Secondly, they asked themselves how this work will, done together, then affect the rest of the community in a positive way. Here we gather the evidence of systems that already work in communities around the world to help people improve their prosperity by cooperatives and their natural form of working together.

In the Philippines there are cooperatives that use natural resources ongoing to promote small businesses as well as supply them inside their nearby communities. In Africa there are cooperatives that restore landscapes in order to hold animal sanctuaries in good stead to support their community of precious wildlife nearby. In Sri Lanka there are agricultural cooperatives of individuals who band together to improve their lot by restructuring water resources to benefit all, including wildlife.

In just such instances the minimal effect of invasion into other people’s privacy is superseded by the overwhelming good that is done in support of all people in those communities as well as the natural systems that support all life. So this work of our trio of cooperatives to undertake this notion of restoring Earth for the benefit of all is really a simple variation of what is already going on around the Earth.

No more is there an emphasis on individualism and individual net worth.

Instead, the cooperative venture is where the true heart of the people resides. No, this is not imposed by any form of authority; local, regional, national or corporate. Instead, the joint effort strengthens the resolve of the community to bring prosperity in both simple and complex forms to all who live there. When we speak of community, we mean all those within geographic reach that is comfortable. This could be a neighborhood or set of neighborhoods inside a large city perhaps. Or it could be a rural community in whole or in divided sections as it pleases the people.

Now to the subject at hand. We choose this model of our trio of worker cooperatives to speed things up. By things we mean reclamation of the Earth, food and water security for all, and common good surrounding cleansing of waters ongoing. In this case much good can be done when many hands make light work, as the saying goes.

As any group of people chooses to enhance prosperity where they live and work, their community, they will wish to know how to do this in a hurry. They can look to existing resources in libraries, bookstores, online in print and in videos and regional sources through universities that delve into these topics. There’s more available from people who have already set their minds to reclaiming Earth for the continuing use of all. These gardens and food forests and water management systems are available for all to see worldwide.

Knowing that people need a guidance factor in a hurry, we choose to develop training for how a trio of cooperatives will form, make quality decisions together for in-house and outside resource support, and how the outcomes of their work will positively impact the community surrounding them. For these interested people we can point to the examples previously mentioned and all the many more that can be found on the Internet.

However, the existence of a trio of cooperatives to do this comprehensive work is not known. So we wish to fill in that gap with qualified training on the decision-making processes from formation to the prosperity gathering and distribution at the far end of this good work together.

Objectives

The main objective is to clarify the intentions of the original three groups to come together, or divide a single group into a meaningful trio of groups, each with their known abilities to do the work of a trio of cooperatives. With coordination this trio of cooperatives can understand what each one is supposed to do, where there might be slight overlaps of work that are agreed upon, how resources are going to be shared, and what they are going to do with the outcomes of their work for the community. These agreements are many. Therefore, the initial discussions and ongoing discussions are the most important aspect of this training that they need. The physical aspects of what they’re going to do can be found out from myriad other resources.

Process

Joining together requires a series of meetings to ask and answer a number of questions. From the beginning these meetings are the first thing that people have to agree upon in order for the trio of cooperatives to work. When and how often they meet is a considerable factor, given their variable schedules.

When a schedule of meetings is solidified in preparation to form a trio of cooperatives, there remains an agreement as to what topics will be discussed in the order that they will be discussed. If in doing so, certain group members cannot agree, it is best that they not join the trio of cooperatives who must work things out together in solidarity and in group decision-making that is pleasant and that all can abide by. If these factors are not there, there will be too much brutish behavior and the threat of scuttling the entire process. This cannot be done. There is no time to waste for Earth.

From there all decisions will run smoothly once the process of decision-making is developed. Since this is a new business model based on successful ones that already exist, our treatment here is to emphasize the objectives of coming together in the first place, completing this good system of work, and sharing the outcomes with the community in order to support it. The good work that is accomplished will have been envisioned ahead of time, discussed and agreed upon, and shared with the community in ways that make the community more comfortable in its way of living. It’s the comfortable way of living that is the intended outcome of all work, including these trios of cooperatives. This prosperity cannot be overstated.

How to join

Generosity of spirit from the start and concluding at the end result of betterment for all requires a joint effort in this scenario. In joining the good work that benefits the whole community, it takes a spirit of healthy personality and fair mindedness that will make it work in the long run. Short run enthusiasm is synonymous with a good start. However, the tenacity required to see this through to its glorious conclusion requires amiable people to come together with the ability to resolve differences quickly and equitably. Without these traits the good work of many people may be scuttled down the road and this would be a tragedy. Instead, self-assessment of one’s ability to get along with others under a variety of circumstances will prompt each individual to join or to wait for other opportunities that may come their way. No more will the concept of devil’s advocate be seen as a plus in any group situation.

For starters, here is a diagram of the basic concept of why trios of cooperatives are beneficial to form.

Instances of propriety aside, the new joy potential for all communities is to envelop their future around a trio of cooperatives that will support them and in return are supported by the community. This gesture of harmony back and forth between the community and the cooperatives made up of members of their community will prosper all. The basics of life and harmony hang in the balance with climate change as being the cause.

In this book we will explain just how these interactions will occur, as well as each of the basic tasks that will be embraced by each of the members of the trios of cooperatives in harmony with each other.

The starting point

It’s joyous to think that people today can harmonize while saving the Earth from degradation any further. It also makes economic sense for people to support each other locally, since localization is well documented for being economically superior to long chain supply chain systems. It’s in this harmonizing and economically superior state of functioning that we start to think about how this exactly can work.

The number one thought behind starting this system is saving Earth. Without the balanced ecosystems in place, it doesn’t matter what kind of economic systems exist or fail, there is no life to have exchanges economically. So in setting up this system of trios of cooperatives, the components of saving Earth had to be the main focus.

From there, the individual components of ecosystems saving had to be the primary consideration. Looking at the Earth as if from afar, we see transitory weather systems that are completely out of balance. This affects all of the surface geographic areas and their individual propensities for existence. Let’s look at one space in particular as an example: the brown desert of Australia. In its glory days, that which is intended to be a desert there supported plants not known anywhere else on Earth. The desert was full of them. We know that ecosystem variance has cause these plans to go into near extinction. Now it stands to reason that those plants supported other