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The LocalScale Blog

"He that plants trees loves others besides himself." Thomas Fuller

Using a Mutual Credit System to support the development of regenerative local economies

A mutual credit system, when used in conjunction with a local digital currency, serves as a means of facilitating transactions within a community or a localized economy. The primary purpose is to enable participants within that community to exchange goods and services without necessarily relying on traditional forms of currency like national currencies (e.g., dollars, euros) or centralized banking systems.

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How Local Crypto-Currencies Can Fuel Bioregional Economic Development

In recent years, the emergence of cryptocurrencies has revolutionized the global financial landscape. While Bitcoin and other mainstream cryptocurrencies have gained significant attention, a new trend is emerging - the rise of local crypto-currencies. These digital currencies, specific to a particular region or community, offer unique opportunities for local economic development. In this blog post, we will explore the benefits of local crypto-currencies and how they can contribute to the growth and prosperity of communities, and highlight how LocalScale can facilitate their management and utilization.

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LocalScale Partners with Hypha to Improve Bioregional Organization

In comparison to its complementary force - Entropy - that describes the diffusion of energy - Syntropy concentrates energy. It organizes itself in higher and higher complexity thereby reducing energy diffusion. Syntropy is - one could say - the driving motive and engine behind biodiversity. Ensuring thrivability and abundance while creating living systems that are robust and adaptable to disturbances and change.

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A Quick Guide to Syntropic Farming

In comparison to its complementary force - Entropy - that describes the diffusion of energy - Syntropy concentrates energy. It organizes itself in higher and higher complexity thereby reducing energy diffusion. Syntropy is - one could say - the driving motive and engine behind biodiversity. Ensuring thrivability and abundance while creating living systems that are robust and adaptable to disturbances and change.

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How does seagrass help fight climate change

Seagrasses are located along the shore of every continent except Antarctica. They are submerged flowering plants with deep roots. Seagrass ecosystems can sequester significant amounts of carbon and store it as organic carbon in sediment for long periods, making them one of the most significant natural carbon sinks globally. "Blue carbon" refers to the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the world’s ocean ecosystems. As carbon accumulates over time in seagrasses, it is stored primarily in soils, with 50-99% of coastal blue carbon stored in the soils below ground. These accumulates have been measured up to four meters deep and remain for extensive periods (up to millennia).

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The Critical To-Do List for Organic Agriculture

Before LocalScale had a name or a team or a Twitter account, it was just an idea driven by a few theories and beliefs. Five core driving forces laid the foundation for an organization now focused on connecting people to places and developing resilient sustainable economies. As our vision, network, and technology has grown, these initial forces continue to serve as the foundational principles that guide us forward.

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LocalScale's 5 Guiding Principles

Before LocalScale had a name or a team or a Twitter account, it was just an idea driven by a few theories and beliefs. Five core driving forces laid the foundation for an organization now focused on connecting people to places and developing resilient sustainable economies. As our vision, network, and technology has grown, these initial forces continue to serve as the foundational principles that guide us forward.

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12 strategies for developing local food system resilience

In February 2020, the collective Les Greniers d’Abondance published a report on local resiliency. Based in France, the team of researchers, activists and consultants released a 175 pages report focused on food resiliency issues, and what local governments can do to address them. In particular, the report focuses on global threats to the ways we currently produce, distribute and consume food: climate change, biodiversity collapse, soil erosion and degradation, development of built environments over arable lands, disparition of wild landscapes, depletion of energy and mining resources, and - last but not least - increased political and economic instability.

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Using doughnut economics as a pathway to thriving local ecosystems

The "Doughnut Theory" of pro-social economics, founded by Oxford Economist Kate Raworth, is the conceptual framework we need to build a world in which people and planet Earth can thrive in balance. It offers a compass for guiding 21st century Prosperity. Both Seeds and LocalScale use the Doughnut framework as a conceptual foundation for their respective platforms.

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What is a bioregion?

As LocalScale uses bioregions as a fundamental layer of organisational structure in the way it represents human communities and natural ecosystems, it is important to clearly define the concept of bioregion and how it will be used in the platform. According to the ecologists who founded the notion of "bioregion", the term is used to refer to the geographical context as much as to the cognitive context - that is to say, both to a place and to the ideas that have been developed about the ways of life in this particular place. (Berg and Dasmann 1977). As a neologism sometimes used to serve an eco-anarchist political ideology, bioregionalism can also be perceived as an animalist movement defending, in the face of the industrial capitalistic exploitation of environments, an "ecological holism" (a global and inclusive approach to the state of health of ecosystems) according to which the sustainability of any human settlement must go through a fully ecocentric consideration of environments.

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