We know that everything we experience today is often the result of accumulated choices that have been made by people over time. Our society's choice to use fossil fuels and clear-cut forests happened long before many of us were even born, but it is choices like these that we now live with the consequences of.
It is our time to make the choices that will be inherited by future generations. If we want to see a world that is more just, resilient, equitable, and fecund, we are going to have to build it ourselves, we are going to need to create more possibilities.
The systems that are supposed to take care of us have not sufficiently and can no longer. None of these systems are designed for a world where infinite extraction is no longer possible. We know this instinctively because we can feel the crisis deeply. If we want to exist in an abundant future that nourishes all, we must adapt the economy to be in line with the earth’s capacity. We must create resilient systems that are no longer reliant on long chains of extraction. We need systems that by their very nature regrow, restore, and regenerate.
The people, cultures, and biomes that have inhabited this planet for thousands of years fundamentally understand that without practices of reciprocity, collaboration, and mutual aid, everything eventually falls apart. It is these cosmologies and cultural practices that we need to center as we create new systems of value and relationship.
We must listen and learn from the many people who have a different notion of what this world is so that we might remember what it's like not to subsist on extraction. It is only very recently in the history of the industrial economy that we have had the ability to assess even a fraction of the impact of its extraction. This “fog of consumption” is the lack of daily awareness of what it takes to make everything we consume. But a lack of awareness doesn’t mean a lack of happening, and the stories of how we got here are woven into communities across our world.
This is why we must pay attention to what’s happening at the margins, to what people are creating in spite of, rather than just because of. It is important to realize that we might not at first understand what is being brought forth, because we are the ones that implicitly hold up these systems. We must mistake our own understanding of it as an indicator of its value. We must get comfortable with being uncomfortable. To build resilient systems, we must become resilient ourselves.
Luckily, we don’t have to start from scratch. For there is a world that is vibrant, dynamic, courageous, creative, restorative and loving. This world is nascent and fragile, and it is not what a world most of us experience every day, but we can get glimpses of it. It’s out there in pockets of people that have a passion for leaving this planet a better place than they’ve found it. A committment to being good ancestors.
The work we need now more than ever is to make this world the lived reality for the majority of beings on this planet.
Our lives are influenced by networks that operate at a global scale, and yet the life we inhabit is often local. The “fog of consumption” obscures the outcomes, from the relationships that lead to those outcomes. For example, we see the advertisement for the new iPhone, but don’t see the factory floor where it is made or the mines where the metals are extracted. The hiding of these relationships makes it hard for us to act in line with our values. We want to build a system where the relationships are not only visible but centered, where we are able to make choices across value chains about how things are made, how the environment is affected by their production, and how the beings that make them are treated.
We are committed to supporting the commons, systems that are nourishing and beneficial for all beings, both human and non-human. To realize our collective desires, we need restorative connections between humans themselves and other earthkin. This requires more support for humans and organizations that sustain and nurture these types of connections. Extraction and domination can no longer be the operating system for our most basic needs. At every step of the modern system that feeds, clothes, houses and powers us, is a process that is a net negative for the planet after we factor in all the “externalities”. This however doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, there is an emerging network decomposing what is no longer serving us and creating new solutions for shared abundance.
We call ourselves hypha because a hypha is the building block of the underground networks of mycelium that sustain life in many living systems. Our goal is to aggregate our network's resources, knowledge, expertise, and awareness to scale the regenerative systems that are foundational to building a world based on thriving rather than just survival. We think in systems because we know that there isn’t going to be one thing that solves everything; the sum of solutions is going to be as diverse as the worlds we inhabit. Many different threads will be woven together to build bridges to what’s possible, making the adaptation economy, the “yes and” economy.
We know that most people don’t have the capacity to decide who and what needs support constantly. hypha is a social impact community designed to simplify this process; our mission is to find the best examples of social changing work and contribute to them automatically with our collective resources. You contribute monthly, and we direct the money to where it needs to go, highlighting the relationships that are being built along the way. In order to simplify the inherent complexity in building the commons, we are first focusing on 3 systems: food, energy, and housing. We seek to rebuild these systems from source to sink, from the resources these systems rely on to the impact these systems have on communities and the environment. We prioritize distributed and diverse networks that are building foundational systems and changing relationships of ownership, access, stewardship, and value across places everywhere.
Join our community at hypha.network and together we can compost society.