The Future of Wealth
Evolving from Silicon Valley to California Goldfields and a wealth of the mind and soul
For a long time I viewed having wealth as antithetical to being a good person—especially being a good person for the climate. However, my bias overlooked the fact that wealth, like all human behaviors, is modeled from nature.
Nature creates and accompanies our behaviors at every step of the way: from firing our synapses to falling in love, external stimuli influence and change us. Rather than being inherently harmful and dichotomous to Mother Nature’s processes, exchanging money is something we observe in ecosystems that accumulate and exchange currency to promote life. In response to and accordance with these ecosystems, we constructed our own economies and concepts of wealth. Our role in the global ecosystem is our biological truth, and currency is a powerful tool within this story to exchange energy for the better.
Oatmail
Welcome to Oatmail, the Environ-Mental Health blog about nature's design to help you un-learn and re-learn how to be human from the species we share space with. I hope that my words will help you develop coping mechanisms to be well in today’s climate-changed world and the sustenance to grow a better tomorrow.
Today’s lesson: wealth. Lasthenia californica, more colloquially known as goldfields, exude abundance. By using the goldfields’ role in their ecosystem as a model for human behavior, I suggest shifting our narrative of wealth to one that shares wellness and minimizes harm.
A Portrait of Wealth and Value Systems
A landscape stippled by goldfields is a portrait of wealth. The blossoms’ beauty is enunciated through their magnitude and reminds me that humans originally learned the concepts of wealth and poverty from similar natural scenes. Thousands of years ago, humans observed good and bad fortunes in ecosystems as they shifted through their seasons. A habitat’s well-being dictated our own.
People mimicked these ecosystems at work when we became farmers. For the first time, we became responsible for our personal wealths by coaxing useful products out of the earth. We learned who we were with wealth when the harvest was abundant and we had enough food to feed our families and more to sell, share, and save. Alternatively, we learned who we were in times of famine when everyone suffered.
Over time, civilizations employed money as the signifier for value and utility, and money became our main tool through which we exchanged these energies, but it is not the only tool. Famously, when asked about gold, indigenous people offered up stalks of corn to European settlers on North American soil as their valuable currency. This starch not only reflected the color of the metal that the Europeans sampled, but was also instrumental within the indigenous people’s economy as a food, construction material, and cultural staple.
As the indigenous people demonstrated, making and spending money is comparable to any other natural resource. In the context of a typical ecosystem’s economy, the sun donates rays that plants save and spend to develop into towering maturation to behold.
Lathenis Californica
Our featured flower today, the California goldfield or lathenis californica, turns resources into exponential wealth. This golden flower blooms from March to May in swaths throughout the entire Golden State. Truly “pennies from heaven,” the goldfields’ coin-sized buds are made up of smaller star-shaped flowers clustered together. These coins shower entire fields and hillsides in a wealth of gold: Lathenis californica requires little water and spreads easily, far outnumbering needier plants. Massive numbers of flies pollinate the goldfield’s buds, and it casts seeds all throughout its native valleys and coastlines. The result is a deliciously lush landscape polished in gold pollen paint.
An ecosystem even wider than the flowers’ breadth benefits from their profits. Goldfields are related to sunflowers and contain a comparably dense nutrition profile of vitamins and minerals, so everything from goldfinches to critters to humans gain their seeds. Indigenous populations traditionally ground the goldfields’ seeds into pinole for flour recipes passed down from generation to generation.
A few times, I have had the opportunity to work cornmeal at a grindstone into tortilla rounds cooked over an adobe fire. An authentic tortilla introduces a rich taste profile that I could not buy in a grocery store, plus the value of a known skill and appreciation of the source. When I labor the ingredient through its stages to produce a food, my payment has a higher return on investment through enhancing my skill and, I think, a fun time (although not specifically after forty minutes of grinding maize). Since home-ground corn tortillas taste so hearty, I can only imagine the buttery, nutty essence of a goldfield seed tortilla.
Dreams of the Sacramento Splash
Superlative reveries like this one built the Golden State. Depictions of ever-abounding vistas such as the “Sacramento Splash” of goldfields whetted dreams of fortune and opportunity that drove settlers west to strike it rich in the goldrush.
Both the goldmines and the goldfields paid directly from the land’s bank of wealth and offered parallel visions of an economy. In the gold mines and rivers, prosperity-hungry prospectors pick-axed and panned after their chance of uncovering a nugget of wealth. Meanwhile, bees visited each flower in the vast goldfields and gathered nectar and pollen. The workers benefited similarly from these exchanges: bees built up their honeycombs, fed themselves and their community, and indulged in sugary nectar. Gold prospectors, if successful, could establish homes and businesses that contributed to the overall community’s well-being and started the cities we have today.
When I look at the reflexive service done to the employer in either situation, the comparison breaks. Goldfield flowers yielded nectar to entice pollinators because the flowers benefit from the labor; it is the main source of their regeneration. The exchange is a mutually beneficial one that sustains itself in perpetuity and proliferates boons to recipients far beyond the initial source, including humans—bees’ pollination yields between $235 and $577 billion of benefits to global food production annually.
Meanwhile, goldmines received no reflexive benefit from miners but were instead looted and emptied. This is the difference between finite and renewable resources, linear and circular economies.
What if human value had been placed in plants over minerals? I imagine settlers coming to California for the goldfields instead of the goldmines and working alongside bees in the fields. The states may have received a more evenly distributed reputation based upon biodiverse habitats and floral wonders to behold. Instead of Silicon Valley, which borrows valleys’ appeals of plentitude and robust opportunity for all but appropriates these connotations onto a metal inhumanely and unsustainably sourced from continents away, we might spread states’ fame for their habitat equivalents of the “Sacramento Splash.”
Wealth for Wellness
Since money is a tool, and tools are conduits that amplify the will of the user, my reservations about wealth would be more effectively placed on how people use money rather than the money itself. Even the wealth accrued in the goldmines then and in Silicon Valley now contain more nuance than I have given them credence. Wealth created by economic booms have secured healthy families and brilliant innovations that have evolved the course of humanity. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these capitalistic success stories are unbalanced because they succeed at the cost of others’ well-being.
Our capitalistic wealth would benefit from renovation according to natural design. An organic model of wealth such as the one seen in goldfields characterizes the economy of the future that I desire.
Goldfields model an economy that ironically sustains its wealth through giving wealth. Sharing wealth by supporting the species of their ecosystem optimizes the goldfields’ reproductive potential without generating harm as a byproduct. This is the wealth I want to accumulate, one that spreads as evenly as butter on toast to enhance the overall flavor.
Having lived for so long in a hypercapitalistic economy that champions individual ownership, are we able to view shared wealth as wealth?
I believe that we can evolve into an economy that more closely represents an ecosystem’s balanced exchanges. The word wealth comes from the Indo-European root “wel-” for wellness to describe a holistic state of being. If we reclaim wealth as a kind of health, currency is recontextualized as a resource to promote wellness. Just as physical or mental health have their peaks, one’s material wealth reaches a limit of utility beyond which it yields diminishing returns to the wealth maker while taking away from others’ well-being. Rather than strictly seeing wealth as material, how would our culture evolve if we considered the wealth of our minds and hearts?
Our cultural environment is shifting as our climate changes, and in this rotation of human history, our survival warrants us to be influenced by the environment’s signals rather than ignore them.
A better abundance begins with observance. A field of goldfields is prosperity, and studying the behaviors that they use to live and let live gives way to understanding that we may then replicate within our economies. Watching goldfields convinces me that wealth, well-being, grows from shared beneficence. What else but this merger of natural resources could give rise to a hundred tiny blossoms assembled atop a stem and polished yellow petals? Wealth is a field of pennies from heaven, and when the wind raises their petals, lathenis californica ripples as a sea of gold.
CALLS TO ACTION
Shop local: Redistribute wealth back into your ecosystem’s economy by identifying alternatives to global and national brands and endorsing these small businesses. Ask a local business how it gives back to the community
Budget charity for climate: Take time to budget out a percentage of your income for a climate-related cause and schedule a monthly or annually recurring donation
Plant native seeds: Visit this National Wildlife Federation page to discover which plants are native to your local area. Grow native plants in your garden, balcony, or nearby public land.
Eat from Scratch: Challenge yourself to make one meal this week entirely from scratch. My personal favorite is quiche because I love to make homemade crust! Bonus points if you make the meal using local ingredients
Donate to a microgrid or microeconomy
LINKS
Calscape.org; Lasthenia californica
NPS.gov; California goldfields
Ethnobotany; Goldfields
Smmtc.org; California goldfields
Indybay.org; Conservation of symbiotic bees pollinators and vernal pools
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Pollinators
National Wildlife Federation; Native plant finder