Open-source proposal, Draft v3.2
What if the soil under your feet was worth more alive than dead?
A proposal for a money that rewards the people who build soil, and charges for the damage. Open source. No one owns it.
The Problem
The ledger counts dead things.
Picture an old redwood on a hillside you own. It pulls water out of the fog, holds the hill together and shelters owls. Our economic scoreboard gives it no credit for any of that. Cut it down and the numbers go up. Try it.
Bars show what the ledger counts. Shapes only, not real amounts.
Nobody decided the tree should die. The ledger did.
The Foundation
Why soil?
If we want to pay for nature, we need something real to measure. Soil is where it all comes together.
Carbon is an output. Soil is the asset.
Carbon is one of many things healthy soil produces. Reward the soil itself, and the carbon, the water and the food come with it.
Built in years, not centuries.
A redwood takes centuries to grow. Soil, with good care, can start to recover within years. That is a reward people can see in their own lifetime.
It holds everything up.
Soil holds water, grows our food and stores carbon. Most of what we eat starts there. When it is healthy, nearly everything above it does better.
The Idea
The idea in five steps.
A simple loop that runs every season. Tap or hover a step.
Step 1 of 5
Measure
Satellites, drones, ground sensors, lab samples and the people who work the land all read the same ground.
Concept level only. The details are still being worked out in the open.
Try It
Reward the care, pay for the damage.
Here is one parcel of land. Move the slider to play the steward for a season, and watch what the ledger would do.
Soil is getting better.
Deeper roots, more rain soaking in, more life in every handful. The steward is credited for the measured gain.
Illustration only. No real amounts, prices or scoring rules are shown here.
The Money Question
Sound money, honestly.
Good money is hard to fake and hard to inflate away, but it still needs room to grow with real wealth. Every option so far has given something up.
Tangible, but too stiff.
Hard to fake and hard to print. But its supply has little to do with how much real wealth an economy produces.
Flexible, but loose.
It can grow when it needs to. It can also grow when it should not. Historically, that has ended in collapse or a steady loss of value.
Grows only as the soil grows.
A supply that can only expand with verified soil gain. That is the promising half. The demand side, who buys and why, is still an open question.
Honest Status
Where this stands
The measuring and valuing half already works. As a way to pay for verified regeneration, the rest is buildable. As money, two big questions are still open.
Working today
- SoilScope's click-anywhere map of what land does
- A full worked study of real conservation land
- A versioned, sourced valuation method
Designed, not built
- Verification from several independent layers
- Soil credits issued for measured gains
- Public rules for who sets the score, with a change log
- Charges for measured loss, paid to stewards
Open for anyone to build
- A field pilot with lab-calibrated baselines
- Independent review of the scoring
- An open public ledger of soil
- The first verified soil credits
Still Unsolved
The hardest open problems
No idea is worth much if it hides its weak spots. Here are the ones we know about.
- Who sets the scorePeople build the index. Public weights, slow and visible changes and outside review make capture harder to hide, not impossible.
- Who joinsThose doing the most damage are the least likely to volunteer. This starts as a club, not a universal ledger.
- Who must buyEarly demand is mostly about reputation. Whether a credit can hold a steady value is for a pilot to test.
- Baseline gamingRun land down, then get paid to fix it. Past records and a lookback reduce this. They do not end it.
- Goodhart's lawPeople chase what they are paid for. Scoring each site against itself and revising in public help.
- The cost of checkingOn a small parcel, measuring could cost more than the credits. Pooling with neighbors helps.
Build It With Us
Looking for the first pilots.
This is a starting point, not a finished product. The fastest way to find out if it works is to measure real land, in public.
A data center with buffer land
Or any large site with open land it wants to prove is getting healthier, measured where everyone can see.
A working ranch in Marin or Sonoma
Ready to set a lab-calibrated baseline and be measured season by season, out in the open.
If you are a land trust, a soil scientist, a builder, a funder or a public agency: test this, criticize it, improve it, build it.
Feed the soil, and it feeds everything.