If you eat, you’re in. And you don’t need a farm to begin.
Project Lichen uses regenerative capability to describe the capacity of living systems, people and communities to continue producing, reproducing, adapting and sharing the things needed for life.
Much of conventional economics measures value by asking:
What is this worth?
Regenerative capability asks an additional question:
What can this produce, reproduce or enable?
A seed is a simple example.
It may have very little monetary value, yet contain the capability to produce food, biomass, flowers for pollinators and many successor seeds.
The value is not only in what we possess today.
It is also in what today’s resources make possible tomorrow.
Some of the most interesting examples are things that are simultaneously food and reproductive material.
We call these Edible Reproductive Materials (ERM).
Examples include:
A viable Fava bean, for example, presents several possibilities:
Eat it. Plant it. Store it. Share it. Exchange it.
If eaten, it provides nutrition now.
If planted, it may produce food and many successor seeds.
If stored correctly, those choices can remain available into the future.
This makes Edible Reproductive Material something more than stored food and something more than seed.
It is stored optionality.
Project Lichen is exploring a simple framework called the Reproductive Resilience Index (RRI).
The purpose of RRI is not to determine the financial value of a seed or crop.
Instead, it asks:
How effectively can this living material contribute to continuing local productive capability?
Possible characteristics include:
The methodology is still evolving.
Rather than beginning with a complicated formula, Project Lichen favors direct observation.
For example:
Plant 100 seeds. Record what they require. Measure what they produce. Reserve enough viable seed to reproduce the planting. Record what remains available for food, storage and sharing.
Over multiple seasons, these observations may tell us considerably more than the monetary price of the original seed.
One useful measurement is simply the relationship between reproductive material planted and reproductive material harvested.
For example:
100 seeds planted
↓
plants grow and reproduce
↓
2,500 viable seeds harvested
↓
100 seeds reserved for the next planting
↓
2,400 seeds remain available for food, storage, exchange or sharing
The exact numbers will vary enormously between crops, seasons, soils and locations.
That variation is important.
Project Lichen is interested not merely in theoretical yield, but in what actually happens in place.
Financial systems often speak about stores of value.
Regenerative systems suggest another useful idea:
Stores of capability.
A store of value attempts to preserve the ability to acquire something in the future.
A store of capability preserves some of the means of producing or enabling it.
Examples might include:
These should not be considered replacements for money or markets.
They provide additional pathways through which needs can be met.
One of the questions emerging from Project Lichen is:
Which future purchases can I make unnecessary?
Saving seed provides a simple example.
A gardener who purchases seed every year depends upon:
money → supplier → transportation → seed
A gardener who successfully saves viable seed may shorten that path:
previous harvest → saved seed → next planting
The financial value of the seed may be small.
The reduction in dependency may be much larger.
The same principle can apply to compost, propagation, perennial plants, food preservation, repair skills and many other capabilities.
The objective is not complete self-sufficiency.
It is to preserve multiple ways of meeting important needs.
Modern systems can be extraordinarily efficient, but they often involve long chains of dependency.
Food might travel through:
money → payment system → retailer → distributor → processor → producer → food
Local productive capability can sometimes create a shorter path:
need → local capability → provision
Neither pathway needs to replace the other.
Resilience may come from retaining more than one pathway.
There is unlikely to be a single “best” resilience crop.
Different plants provide different capabilities.
A Fava bean may provide protein, seed, biomass, pollinator forage and nitrogen fixation.
A potato may provide substantial carbohydrate production.
A sunflower may provide edible seed, oil, biomass and pollinator resources.
A squash may provide food and large quantities of easily saved seed.
A grain may provide calories, seed and long-term dry storage.
The important question may therefore not be:
Which crop has the highest RRI?
but:
What combination of locally appropriate reproductive materials provides the greatest diversity of useful capabilities?
Project Lichen refers to this emerging idea as a Reproductive Resilience Portfolio.
Unlike a financial portfolio, its purpose is not primarily to maximize monetary return.
Its purpose is to preserve diverse pathways to future biological production.
Reproductive resilience cannot be completely determined from a catalogue or laboratory.
A seed that performs exceptionally well in one climate may fail somewhere else.
Local soils, rainfall, temperature, pollinators, pests, growing practices and genetics all matter.
For this reason, Project Lichen treats local variation as useful information rather than experimental noise.
Observe carefully. Learn continually. Share generously.
The aim is not to create a universal ranking of plants.
It is to develop simple ways for people to observe and document what reproduces resilience where they are.
Regenerative capability does not require a farm.
It can begin in a garden bed, community garden, school, balcony, container or windowsill.
Plant something.
Observe what happens.
Save some seed.
Plant it again.
Share what you learn.
And where possible, share the reproductive material itself.
Food can fulfill today’s need. Seed can preserve the possibility of fulfilling tomorrow’s.
This is an evolving Project Lichen framework. Definitions, measurements and methods will change as observations accumulate and others contribute their own experience.
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