Community Covenant
Welcome.Thisis a plain-language description of how a sustainablegreen off-gridcommunity operates. Our incorporated democratic community structure (federally incorporated as Shelterlife Inc.) addresses the problem of creatinga fair and sustainable future by focusing on life, liberty and security of the person.We make it easy for members to pool resources to buy land and equipment,to build small debt-free homes and green businesses, and to work together for cost savings due to group purchasing power, all while maximizing personal freedom.
The simplest structure of a for-profit corporation was used to start up, but our Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws will be re-filed as the group shapes its operations and adds expert members as community care directors.Prospective members are required to do their own due diligence and fix or report any definite conflicts with law to the directors who will act expediently to remedy the conflict.
Member Intention Agreement
Sustainable Shelterlife communities aim to create a healthy protected space for peaceful people interested in self-determination, democracy and freedom from oppressive financial forces currently infringing our Canadian Section 7 Charter Rights to life, liberty and security of the person. The best life security you can have is a debt-free home on land you have permanent rights to be on, with fresh air, clean water, healthy soil, plants, animals and natural resources. No one should endure permanent lifetime debt for basic human needs due to extreme wealth polarization that causes direct or statistical indentured wage slavery and life insecurity.
At present, undemocratic market forces aiming for domination and short-term profit by monopolizing basic human needs are severely undermining personal life security and degrading our life-sustaining ecosystems. A logical and caring response is to change how we do business by using our market freedom to defend personal rights, create debt-free sustainable green homes and businesses, and ensure a sustainable Nature-first future. This is accomplished by working together as a democratic co-owned for-profit social enterprise, using group purchasing power to slash life expenses, provide basic life security and create new green businesses.
With our economy entirelybased on the life-sustaining ecosystems of Nature, we defend our obvious and inherent rights to a fair and sustainable future. As caring democratic co-owners aiming to act according to the best intentions of our Constitution Act (1982) and The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, our members aim to achieve sustainable personal life security of basic human needs while not engaging in uncaring activities known to degrade lives, drive planetary degradation and create social unrest.
To this end, our members have grouped together to form a life company, a social enterprise that is necessarily democratic and for-profit, to buy land and tools for common use to practically meet the intent of our Canadian Charter Rights. Our members aim to maximize their personal freedoms and self-determination while maintainingoptions to work together or use group purchasing power and financing to build scalable debt-free homes or start businesses that generate green-collar jobs for a sustainable economy.A better Canada starts here.
Our Section 7 Charter Rights to life, liberty and security of the person are easily understood and caringly applied usingfundamental logic, science and living tree doctrine to include all necessities of life. Because our bodies are formed by ingesting plants grown directly in soil, we have obvious, inherent and provable food and environmental rights. All species have the right to exist. The Canadian dollar belongs to Canadian citizens and must be used to free people rather than indebt and enslave. The natural resources of a country belong to the people of the country and must be used for their benefit.
We maintain rights to fair-trade work and tofreely enjoy life by exploring our human potential for good, with our actions necessarily limited by respectful and healthyrelations with each other and Nature. Recognizing that our human economy is based entirely on the provisions of Nature, all members of a sustainable community have a Nature-first land use policy considering humans in equal partnership with Nature.
In addition, our members assertself-determination as apioneer right, that one must be sufficiently free from financial impositions on basic human needs as to allow a person to use their own talents and labour to build a life for themselves.As sustainability requires fair trade relations between people and Nature, our members agree to limit their profit from the use of human labour and basic living needs, and also limit their actions to preserve a healthy future environment for our children.
Our pioneer rights manifest as member access to land and its resources, camping, cabins, small homes and business opportunities. The structure of a co-owned company allows debt-free construction in grow-as-needed stages using low-cost wholesale materials. Withinternal non-competition between members, you get fair-trade access to the diverse skills of friends and neighbors plus great deals on construction materials and services. Our corporate structure lets you make trade deals including labour loans aimed at debt-free financial stability, backed by community bonds.
Interest clusters attract like-minded neighbors and the key people needed to start businesses, making the community a natural innovation incubator for green-collar job creation.The aim is to make life easy for one another, and this is accomplished by offering irresistibly great deals using group purchasing power and a financial structure that creates start-up funds.
Investing in each othercreates a low-cost Innovation Incubator, special conditions of personal freedom suited to solving societal problems and growing green businesses from seeds of ideas. This is necessarily a protected environment, but the specific type of social protection is from individuals seeking extreme personal gain by violating a fundamental tenet by which all laws are applied. Each person has a great excess of rights and freedoms to richly explore their positive human potential, but their actions must not diminish or degrade the rights and freedoms of others. To this end, each adult member has an equal vote in all matters of common interest. We aim to produce long-lasting quality goods and services at reasonable cost, putting human health and well-being ahead of profits.
Asacaringengaged democracy respecting personal freedoms and Nature, our members agree to equal partnership with Nature with approximately half the land being ecologically reserved. In a park-like community setting, the land available for human use includesresidential, agricultural andcommercial areas, parks, roads, parking andreserves for future use. Homes and gardens are personal space buffered from neighbors by unfenced connected commons land. The human network of roads and trails is crafted to integrate with the network of trees, fields and water required for animal movement and a diversity of plants. Members have minimal-impact access to unique landscape features including creeks and lakes, but human development must not disturb or block animal access to their essentials of life.The land use plan is community-driven, complex and varied according to needs and response to the landscape, ecologically organic rather than diced into rectangles that isolate people to extract maximum profit.
Concerning collective intelligence, our members agree to gather, use and develop the best ideas, practices and green technologies known, and to use group purchasing power to build debt-free off-grid sustainable homes and businesses with grow as needed designs.The human impact on Nature is to be estimated by observation, calculation and measurement with actions taken to counteract negative impact.
To respect individual self-determination and enhance strength in diversity, members may freely form and participate in interest clusters. Here, you propose an idea which is then strengthened by knowledge input and enacted by cluster members. Examples include land use, choice of neighbors, shared-use barn building, agricultural field use, food sales, computer programming, metal and wood workshops, lumber yards and hardware outlets with sales to generate capital reserves for projects.
In the example of a water use interest cluster, the best ideas for gathering, treating and using water and waste are recorded,discussed and enhanced on a community Wiki website with voting capability. Next, our group purchasing power is used to build a water system that provides low-cost or free water for decades to come. Each local expert naturally has the opportunity to build a business offering goods and services outside the community, thus creating income for members of the interest cluster with a negotiated cut to the company and community.The social structure creates a community culture encouraging our best human behaviour.
A group of people working together economically can easily meet basic human needs including debt-free shelter. The ideas and economic benefits of worker-owned companies and community land trusts are within the bylaws of the articles of incorporation. In general, few rules are emplaced here because the community uses the top laws of Canada as a template, with certain restrictions on economic and interpersonal activities known to degrade and enslave people and ruin our life-sustaining ecosystems. With basic life security, members can freely explore their great human potential to solve our most pressing issues.
This member intention agreement is considered a ConstitutionalCommunity Covenant and is unalterable except for wise debate using principles of natural law; if you do not agree then do not join. Members can sell their share in the Company and also recover theirtestable real value of homes, businesses and land improvements or leave these as an inheritance; however, the land is co-owned and used as a perpetual commons. This is no place for speculators who add no real value to goods or services or investors seeking income without labour. To this end, restricted by fundamental human rights concerning fair trade and sustainability, all labour and financial transactions are calculated using only straight-line methods across time with returns oninvestment restricted to a single one-time interest calculation.
Because our Canadian Charter considers only relations of government to people, it lacks numerous rights and freedoms concerning how individuals relate to each other, government, businesses and Nature. At present, isolated citizens have little say in matters that directly impact their lives. Therefore, our members incorporate to utilize work and trade rights in the Corporations Act, even though trade rights are fundamental human interactions that historically existed prior to the idea of common money as a way to make trade simple and easy.Our members assert fundamental human rights to work, trade and communication including effective discussions essential to negotiating fair trade.
Discussion
All community members are bound to uphold the best intentions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms of the Constitution Act (1982), improving our Charter if necessary by usingprovable, logical and caring principles of natural law in response to our most urgent and pressing issues. Our human economy is based entirely on Nature. Therefore, we have a Nature-first policy as a reasonable and provable application of our Section 7 Charter Rights to life, liberty and security of the person. Freedom, personal security and ecosystem healthare top priorities locally and nationally. Our lives and values are protected by the Charter and by incorporation as a for-profit social enterprise. This structure is designed to make it easy to work together to attain life security and start sustainable green businesses.
A simple exercise, imagining scenarios of survival, realistically reveals our connections to Nature and our basic human needs. Each need ties to a human right and a law. Fundamental law considers what we know about ourselves and the world we live in, to decide how people can best relate to one another and to Nature. At present, by urgent necessity, we need to reconsider ideas of top-down exertion of power, unlimited growth, conquest and plunder.
Human population growth and consumption of natural habitat is decimating wildlife populations, driving species to extinction and ruining our life-sustaining ecosystems. Not only are humans are one of many species with fundamental rights to exist, but our children have future rights to enjoy the wonders of Nature. In typical land use, people like some feature of Nature, then move in and ruin it by overdevelopment. By definition, a sustainable community is required to offset its negative impact on Nature andcan limit its population, growth and development. We aim to live, preserve and protect. We have fundamental rights to a fair and sustainable future.
Sustainable communities are vibrant ecosystems that continuously generate sufficient food, shelter and profit for a healthy life. Like an apple orchard, the productivity varies but is on average steady. By fair trade, everyone has the right to use their inherent skills and capabilities to work to build their own lives; however, your activities must not degrade the rights of others or ruin our life-sustaining ecosystems. Inequitable financial schemes of wealth extraction including forced growth by compounding interest are banned. Pyramid schemes undermining peaceful democracy, extracting excessive wealth from labour, basic human needs or common natural resources, or causing conditions of statistical slavery or indentured servitude are banned. This is no place for market speculators seeking income independent of work. Our lives are not your next get-rich scheme. We recognize that one economic force, a fantasy of unlimited exponential growth with profits funnelled to the few, is unsustainably escalating the cost of living, bringing the nation to dangerous debt levels, ruining personal lives and destroying our life-sustaining ecosystems. Whereas we must be free to express our better values with evidence-based decision making.
Charter Rights Interpretation
By definition, our community Covenantis unalterable except for wise and judicial purposes of clarification and improvement. It is a legally debatable declaration of intent to tackle two problems of most pressing concern to individuals, personal life security and planetary sustainability. Recognition of our fundamental rights to a fair and sustainable future is not a revolutionary statement but is a caring, logical and scientifically provable statement of our most urgent priorities based on natural law. It is obvious and provable that our economy is based on the provisions of Nature and thathuman activity is causing planetary degradation. Humans are but one of many species in the web of life with fundamental rights to exist. Our intelligence being limited, we have only just begun to understand Nature. What we do know, however, are laws of thermodynamics describing irreversible degradation of systems. Since we don’t know how to restore ecosystems, we must err on the side of care, caution and preservation. For example, we reject food tampering that places profit before human health and we instead aim for healthy food production.
Our rights to a fair and sustainable future are considered fundamental, intuitive, undeniable, inalienable, provable, logical,morally and ethically good. The word fair at first describes an inherent sense of good and equitable human interactions, then a symbiotic ecology involving rights to access life-sustaining resources necessary for survival.The word sustainable ultimately refers to species propagation through time. Scientifically, much of what we understand about life relates to our understanding of DNA. It is known, however, that our bodies are composed not only of the elements of stars but of elements specifically concentrated in the crust of the evolved Earth, in soil and then in plants that we eat and digest to release elements and form molecules for our bodies. Food rights and environmental rights are thus obvious, inherent and provable rights that in our Constitution Act (1982) are arguably naturally contained in our Section 7 Charter Rights to life, liberty and security of the person.
Recognizing our rights to a fair and sustainable future may bea restatement of existing fundamental rights but is necessary to prioritize our most urgent problems. Note that the Constitution Act (1982) aimed only to consider how government relates to people and was weakened and marred by political power struggles. Our modern problem, in Canada and worldwide, is that individual Citizens are essentially powerless and lacking in effective communication with government, banks and big business, particularly with regards to personal life security and planetary degradation. Canadians also lack Charter Rights to robust communication essential to negotiation between individuals and groups. In many cases we are acted on by corporate monopolies with unreasonable policies that effectively damage personal lives and remove freedom of choice. What is the nature ofa democracy in which you have no say over matters that directly impact your life and threaten the future of your children?