A dream to grow a globally distributed seed and story library is taking root in the heart of the world. With our recent journeys in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Colombia, we hope to grow spaces for yOur (yours and ours) stories and answer the questions surrounding the origins of the produce we consume while looking at the subsequent spaces our influential energy flows. From the sacredness of water that connects all life, to the multitude of plants that have and continue to help humanity thrive, we invite you to help explore and attribute a collective value to the origins of life on earth.
This Face the Current Health Feature is published in Issue 23 / May-June 2019 Edition. Order PRINT here, SUBSCRIBE to digital membership for unlimited access, or continue reading this article below.
What is a Pod?
A S33D Pod is a sustainably built community structure; a focus point or “hub” for localizing trade, learning, and investment. Each Pod provides the infrastructure necessary to collect, cast, curate, and verify the seed-stories we share around the vast supply chains of our consumables. The germination of Pods in communities around the world will form S33D’s Distributed Library (SDL), an open-source educational network focused around the restoration of biodiversity and its circulating knowledge. The Pods will act as hubs to verify organic trade and the local stories around native plants. The S33D will germinate a web of ledgers to incentivize transaction trails back to the origin of the plants we consume. Through their own conscious consumption, communities preserve the stories around the world’s plant species and feed the conservation of wilderness and biodiversity.
Sowing
On March third of this year, S33D reached a remarkable milestone in its journey thus far, launching our Alpha build, which began with the sowing of the Genesis S33D Pod on the soil of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We began with an eleven-day workshop at Aloha Ke Akua, a conscious garden community located in the mountains above Minca, Colombia. The Aloha workshop focused our energies around sustainable building, and dream and story sharing, with an imagination-stimulating introduction to permaculture and the future of food forests. We all felt the Genesis Pod was born exactly where it was meant to be as we looked onto the snow-capped twin peaks of one of the world’s highest coastal mountain ranges. Whilst sitting in meditation on the foundations of the Genesis Pod, it didn’t take long to understand why these types of ecosystems are worth preserving. Naturally home to a wealth of biodiversity including rare birdlife, plant species, and an extensive range of ancient knowledge, the Sierra Nevada is the perfect platform to begin showcasing the values we wish to amplify, preserve, and protect. Integrating clean water, preserved wilderness, and sustainable food systems on both local and global scales is essential.
Flowering Tool Boxes for Preservation and Evolution
We believe that by providing tools to allow individuals to establish clearer connections with the origins of their food and medicines, we will collectively begin to value the bio-diversity of the planet as the abundant resource it truly is. As we were building the Pod in Colombia, the sense that our earth requires a diverse makeup of ecosystems for survival was constantly apparent. By providing tools and trust networks to accelerate purchasing and restoring large portions of the earth’s land to its natural state, we are aiding in stabilizing the earth’s systems, increasing crop security, and preserving languages and stories that might otherwise be lost. We see S33D developing as a toolbox to assist us in collectively bringing our consumption and creation into balance.
Origin Trails and yOur Future
Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”
Despite these reassuring words from Dr. Seuss, the question of “Who is the you?” still remains. There are two main threads to this: Many of you will have experienced or heard about someone else experiencing a sense of oneness or an intuition that everything you can see, imagine, or feel is one with it all—its whole self. The other thread is that of individuality and when these two threads knit together, we come to the knowing that every individual is a unique expression of the one being. If you are then inevitably what you eat, growing the connection to the produce we chose to consume increases our own self-awareness, enabling us to deepen and sweeten the way we live. Origin trails can help us efficiently direct our energy to tidying up areas of the planet. For example, we hope to make it easy for you to support producers who fairly contribute to their surrounding environment in ways that resonate with you. This might take the form of supporting education initiatives, preserving wilderness, or growing diverse seed stock. We seek to give you the tools to feed a world you hope to live in.
NowTees
We aim to launch and fundraise S33D Alpha by distributing 999 limited edition hemp t-shirts—the Aloha NowTees. This sale will help fund the establishment of The Papaya Foundation, an organization to help guide S33D’s early growth, including the development of our first mobile application, as well as the continuation of building S33D’s Pod network. The NowTees will be both a collective and collaborative work of art, interweaving facets of both blockchain and organics to create a new medium on which to experiment and fundraise. Each NowTee will be assigned a set of unique private keys (a non-fungible digital token), allowing buyers to prove rarity and ownership of the item. These supporters will also be rewarded with the opportunity to gain early access to our mobile application and aid in the curation of the Genesis Pod’s inventory.
Furthermore, the NowTees also act as an experiment in developing S33D’s smART canvas trade template—a contract template that allows merchants to curate a product’s story and origin trail for the education of the end consumer. Our aim is to open-source and grow the protocol for curating these educational trade templates for all we collectively consume and produce, unifying a web of plant and knowledge-backed capital pools in the process of gathering together physical seed libraries.
Co-Founder of S33D, Ed Thurlow
Golden-Age Dawning
The Aloha Alpha build cemented the knowing that a story corroborated by a trusted community can add enormous value to strengthening our human connection. The modern world now offers the worldwide connectivity to reimagine the way this is achieved, and the ancient world retains the heart-connection to guide us through this transformative stage of humanity’s conscious evolution. S33D’s Alpha app features center around social governance tools for communities and their Pods. Demonstrating the possibility of co-curating a shared space shows we now not only have the connectivity but also the will to shift the trade and educational paradigms in harmony with the ecological restoration we must now undertake. Following in the footsteps of the evolutionary proof of work protocol pioneered by bitcoin, our vision for an open web of organic trade transactions consists of separately validated transaction strings and guardian councils for each plant species. We hope the gamification of this planet’s restoration through the mapping of ancient trees, trade flows, and our shared story patterns can increase the efficiency and number of hands committed to the important task.
More Info:
www.s33d.life / Instagram: @s33dgram
Ed Thurlow – S33D Co-Founding Gardener / Instagram @ejthurlow
Ed’s dream to build a distributed seed and story library has had many twists and turns. Having been attracted to the local stories and wild animals of lands he was lucky to visit at a young age. The importance of organic and transparent supply chains, paired with conscious use of them, later came into his fields as the most promising solution to preserve the wilderness that has always inspired him. S33D was born to assist the calibration of our collective value systems to re-align with preserving, protecting and learning from the earths body.
Co-Founder of S33D, Ed Pratt
Ed Pratt – S33D Co-Founding Gardener / Instagram @ed_barefoot
Ed Pratt, S33D’s other Founder, is a young product designer who is passionate about both blockchain and organics. Following his online studies in sustainable agriculture, environmental science, and distributed ledger technologies, Ed realized the potential S33D could have in restoring and preserving biodiversity through organic trade and education.