About

cultures of transitions

The impulse for Tierra Valiente stems from an awareness of our civilizational trajectory within the dominant culture with its source code of extraction, domination, commodification, colonization and separation from the living world. We are both informed by this critical lens and inspired to create outside of the old values and incentive landscape to build a culture based on reciprocity, regeneration and resiliency.

Land as Sovereign 

We grapple with the complexity of living within the neoliberal paradigm while trying to create new/ancient/emerging pathways for post capitalist possibilities. In practice, this means that we are land stewards rather than land “owners”. We are entrusted with the care of land rather than entitled to it as property. We have put our land in a Trust structure with a governance board. Stewardship also does not imply imposing our will on land, but rather, being in reciprocal relationship as kin - asking for direction, honoring the seen/unseen beings, providing offerings, and asking for consent.

Co-operative economic models to build resiliency

Although we operate within the dominant culture of capitalist modernity, we use capital (in the short period of time it is still useful) to build “post-capitalist infrastructure”. We operate as a not-for-profit worker cooperative. We call our economic model 5/50/25/25.

This means that five percent of topline revenue is put into a bio-regional mutual aid network to build resilience in our local ecosystem.

Fifty percent of our net profit is put back into community infrastructure within the Tierra Valiente footprint.

Twenty five percent is redistributed to our co-workers (with no distinction between labour and capital).

Twenty five percent is put into a fund to make small grants to other communities who operate with similar models (e.g. non-commodification of land, bio-regional self-sufficiency, co-operative decision making, wealth as collective redistribution rather than private accumulation, and re-granting to “horizontally scale” post capitalist experiments.