Alternative Currency

Reader Contribution by Bethann Weick
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Just the other evening an intern – who is also a student – was posing his homework questions to the rest of us over dinner. I ambled into the room at a critical moment:

“Beth, what do you think are the root causes of the world’s problems?” 

Money and men were my off-the-cuff response. We all laughed for the joke, or perhaps for the truth it suggested. “Men” being alliterative; my meaning being “humanity” lest anyone feel unfairly slighted. The answer, of course, is not nearly that simplistic. Setting aside the topic of humanity, let’s briefly consider that of money.

Money, a statement of value. Yet money so effectively affects our judgment of value. Twists it, undermines it, and counters a traditional value system rooted in place, landscape, resources, and community. 

Rather than judging worth -value – by the time it took to make an object, or the neighbor’s par excellence skill with a particular tool; or the resources you had to pull from your own land for the creation of a good; or the necessity that an object can claim in our daily life…rather than any of these reasonable, tangible, based-in-reality systems of value, we have chosen to use paper currency as a value-determining middle-man. Not only that, but paper currency is now an international value, resulting in total detachment from a community-based scale of value. We have evolved into a system that determines value largely devoid of the people, places, and resource-base from which objects and services originate. 

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