Greenspace is founded in the ethics identified in permaculture: earth care, people care, fair shares. They are great foundations for a way of being – if we take care of the soil & each other, then everything is fundamentally ok. We seem to have travelled quite far from these ethics in many ways. We count food and shelter in dollars, and forests in carbon credits. Can we come around again to connection with a beautiful new consciousness and intention?

An organic shop is a community centre, it’s a place that puts a stake in the ground and says We care about the earth. We are prepared to pay more today, acknowledging it’s a big job to grow good food for our communities. We support organic, biodynamic and regenerative agriculture – ways of working with the land that nourish and renew.

In an age where many of us feel a concern to attend more closely to our local ecologies, we have to be so careful not to allow nature to be sold back to us in the form of userpays initiatives capitalising on our collective sense of responsibility. If we don’t change the structures that have created the problems, we will never find lasting solutions that heal ourselves and our relationships with the whole.

We can’t do holistic on a spreadsheet, we can’t balance our relationship with the rest of natural world by balancing carbon credits. Human beings are primed for action. We want to make measurable changes, but a deeper change needs to happen. It’s the change the starts with the sacred pause. The breath. The moment of dissolution, into the mush of imaginal cells that the caterpillar surrenders into before re-forming completely into the next phase of its life, the wondrous creature of butterfly. This isn’t the easy path, it isn’t easy to watch the destruction and simply breathe, dissolve, reimagine.

If more of us recommit every day to the basic ethics of earth care, people care and fair shares in any way we can, we can shift this world situation for the better really fast. The expertise is out there – we just need to ask our indigenous/regenerative/biodynamic/permaculture elders.

Do you feel good about the ethical choices you are making in your consumption? I don’t feel good about all of mine, but I am picking them off one by one. At Greenspace I want to offer you the best I have found. Next year or next month there may be a better solution, and then I will bring it here for you. Through Greenspace I want to offer a model for enterprise, for a trading post that is thoughtful, creative and in balance. I think we really can change the world, and it won’t take long once we figure it out.