 love my bikes. Well, I say bikes. I only have two, which isn't many by many people's standards, but this one was one I couldn't resist. It was down the village, just about 400 yards away, and a prop up against the wall with a sign on it saying, spares or a pair, £5. And this was only a few months ago and I looked at it and it was a much tattier state than this, quite rusty and I I picked it up and various things were seized and but I came home and I was thinking about it and having got home I thought, okay, I'm going to go and get it. So I went down the road and I gave one of these to the chap and in exchange I got to have this. And what has occurred of course is something we do on a regular basis and that is the trading of one form of wealth for another, in this case, financial wealth for what I would call techno-industrial wealth, things that we make, we manufacture, things like metals and plastics and tires, even though the rubber is a natural material, it's mixed with a whole bunch of things, turned into this molded tire. So let's think about those different forms of wealth and there are several different models for this. There's one by Wealth Works, another by Apple Seed Permaculture and they're all very good and very interesting and what I've done is just reflecting on some of the words that he used and some questions in my head I've come up with my own slightly adapted version which I'll describe now. So the first two I've got here are financial and techno-industrial so let's put those on the wheel. And what's marvellous about this wheel is it has 36 spokes, 18 on each side, that's nine pairs, which allows me to put nine segments on it so it even works mathematically, but even more fun for me is this idea of the word wheel because wheel we associate with things that go round of course, but there's also another word wheel which comes from Anglo-Saxon and it's the root of the word wealth. So wealth and wheel come from the same place and the spelling of that word was W-E-A-L and we'll come to its meaning a bit later, but at these days we tend to think of wealth as money or material possessions in our society anyway and so these are the two forms of wealth we tend to focus on the most and in this session I'm going to reflect on some of the other forms of wealth and why they're important. So I traded some of this, some of this, but look where it led me why did I decide to do that in the first place? Well it's because I have a few other forms of wealth which I felt would have made this a better deal than perhaps it was for the people that went by and didn't choose to take it up and that includes my intellectual wealth, the knowledge I have about bicycles and the things I've read about bikes in the past and ultimately the experience I have of fixing up bicycles and actually taking that knowledge and applying it. So because I knew about bikes and I knew I could fix bikes because I've done it before I thought that this looked like a really good deal. So I took the bike with me to the next permacotch design course I was teaching up in the Midlands and the idea was that I was going to spend the evenings or some of the evenings doing it up, fixing it up, doing a bit with the frame, sorting out the headset which was completely seized, the bottom bracket which was also pretty short and what I didn't expect was to get some help. I thought it was just something I would end up doing myself but as it turned out I had an opportunity to work with somebody who was assisting on the course and he'd been somebody who'd been in the background for me, he lives in London I didn't really get much chance to mix with him but we had two weeks together and he was really interested in the renovation of the bike and so we spent a lot of time fixing it up together and he really helped me particularly in those moments where I was starting to think I don't think I can fix this, it's too seized and it was just that kind of extra momentum to help me get through and so this is very much about the people we know, the network we have around us, the different experience, knowledge, skills and so on that we have within that network and so for me getting into permaculture I really built my social network like-minded people around me it's been one of the key things for me about learning permaculture, the people that I got to associate with. Now fixing up the bike we had solved some problems and there's another form of wealth here which is our cultural wealth the songs, stories and so on from our ancestors were very much about problem solving what happens if you know this happens in the future how do we solve this problem in the past and in addition to the knowledge that's passed on to our culture there's also really key things well somebody in the past invented bicycles and I get to enjoy like the cultural heritage the techno industrial cultural heritage if you like of having a bicycle but also as a gardener the varieties the different types of apples and pears and so on which we have available to us now were bred by our ancestors and they've been gifted to us and it's part of our cultural inheritance so for me there's a huge cultural wealth that I've inherited coming into this world and one that I feel that we have a responsibility to look after and that ties us very nicely into the natural world of course which talking about trees and plants and so on that all these things are only possible because of what nature has managed to achieve on earth to take the energy of the sun and to transform that energy into life using such amazing technologies and the natural world is one that we desperately need to care for in permaculture we give a great deal of attention to and so what are the natural what's the natural wealth that we've inherited well it's the water and the air and the soils and and so it's our responsibility again to look after those things and if we don't because we are made of those things then we ultimately will be poisoned by them which leads us nicely to our physical health which is the reason we do all of this stuff you could say our physical health is another form of natural wealth because we are nature but ultimately the landscape that we shape out here the way we shape it is all about meeting our needs how do we find the food we need and the water and the energy and so on to survive and thrive here and so our physical health really is a key aspect of our wealth and if we don't have physical health then much of the rest of it really is irrelevant so what about this other segment well we'll come back to that in a moment but what gets interesting is when you start to look at these different forms of wealth and when I talked about other models before that was they described as different forms of capital now capital is a stock it's it's a fixed thing it's something you hold it's the food in your fridge or the food in your garden or the logs in your log store but it doesn't take account of the flows the things that are coming in and those that are leaving and so wealth has to accommodate these things if the sun went out tomorrow then we might have a whole load of carbon stored on the earth and we could eat for a while but essentially without the sun's energy coming into power the system we would be doomed and of course stocks empty because they're there to basically buffer the times when the flows aren't coming in so we have to have food in our larder for the winter for instance or we collect rain in our water butts for the summer when it's not raining so much so wealth has to accommodate or take into account the flows in and the flows out and when we start looking at the rate of inflow and outflow of these different forms of wealth then we notice they're actually quite different so if we come back to physical health now I know that if I go out and exercise then I can slowly build up some improvement in my fitness for instance or if I'm not feeling very well and I want to eat more healthily then that's something that takes time for the effects to change and similarly my physical health deteriorates at a reasonably slow rate if I stop exercising then after a while I start to notice the difference and it might make me think I need to do start doing more of that again we could look at techno industrial things in a similar way this bicycle by the time I acquired it was in quite a state and they were quite a bit of work but you know I can park it in the corner of the room and it'll take a while for it to degrade so it's not something it disappears or degrades very rapidly how about some of these other things well my intellectual and experiential capital they're things that essentially until I really start to forget things when I'm really old then they just build and build over time I get more experience from doing different things the more I read or the people I talk to and so on the more you learn these are things that build and perhaps from time to time you know I will forget things because they're no longer that important but even things like experience I do ride a bike a lot but if I hadn't ridden the bike for a few years then I could still get back on one and within a few minutes pick up where I left off same for things like swimming because it's an experiential thing it's in the body we know how to do it cultural capital as well that's something that is very much we all inherit it and we hopefully add to it in some way but it builds and builds over time and things that become less important disappear and what we have to be careful of though is because our world is changing so rapidly and we are in a world where we've got essentially free energy to do all kinds of things that some of those things that our ancestors knew how to do which were vital for surviving and thriving can be starting we might start to consider those things as not being very important anymore and they can be lost and there are vital skills we live in a thatched house and thatching is a particular skill and the people that lived here in the past they thatched their house because that's the material they had you've got walked down the valley and there's a stream streaming the valley and lots of reeds and you go and you cut reeds and you basically roof your house with it because that's what you have and those skills can be lost so in permaculture we're really thinking about how do we preserve those skills because we may well need them in the future it's very important and of course our social capital people we know and network also again that's fairly stable we might be able to upset people quite quickly by just saying something offensive but on the whole our social network stays pretty much stable it doesn't change very rapidly the natural world is also very interesting because nature essentially just builds and builds over time life has used the energy of the sun and the expertise of different species and kingdoms in nature to build more and more of itself and so when we work with nature and natural resources then that's something that we can't use it up rapidly although of course there are non-renewable things in the context of you can use them more quickly than they're made like oil and gas and coal for instance so which of these stocks empties the most quickly well I think if most of us really think about it we'd look and say it's probably financial if I looked at my bank accounts it can be dramatically different within a matter of weeks perhaps even days depending on what bill's coming and so if we fixate on our financial stocks as being key to our feelings of safety because stocks are all about safety you know having food in the larder having rain in the water bath is all about feeling safe and so if we have full stocks and we see them and appreciate them then we feel safe if I look at my bank account too often I might start to think ah looks like that's empty I need to go out and find some more money and because that's something that happens a lot it has the potential to make us feel really anxious and it's no surprise to me that the culture I live in that values money so highly in material possessions is such an anxious culture for me the remedy to that is to remember and appreciate all of these other forms of wealth the intellectual the experiential wealth I have the people I know the cult my cultural inheritance the varieties of plants and fruits and vegetables and so on that I've inherited so coming back to this last segment what is that segment well I like to put in well-being I've talked about physical health so this is all about our mental emotional and spiritual well-being and this for me ties very much to the levels of all these other stocks because our well-being can go up and down very quickly in a day and it's a stock that you know we can feel fantastic maybe something great happened and then something terrible happens and we can go downhill very rapidly so to keep a good stock of well-being I think the key for me is to remember to appreciate all of these health forms and certainly if we worry too much about where our financial stocks are doing then that very much affects our well-being coming back to the bicycle and the word wheel and wheel means or the original meaning of wheel the Anglo-Saxon word was wholeness well-being so the circle encompasses that wholeness if you like so wellness wholeness well-being so when I traded one of these for one of these I didn't just exchange some financial wealth for some techno industrial wealth I also acquired the opportunity to build my intellectual capital my intellectual wealth because I had to learn a bit about a bike that was had a few things that were less familiar to me I hadn't done before and that ties into my experiential wealth because I've taken on a bike that I'd not worked with before and I fixed it up I know now that I can do it again it gives me confidence to know that I can do it it helped me build my social wealth by giving me an opportunity to really connect with somebody who I've been wanting to speak to learn from befriend for quite a long time it gave me a chance to appreciate my culture and what I'd inherited including the invention of the bicycle and the people that had made them even more fun by making them look like this and the natural world of course benefits by me using a bicycle rather than a vehicle that uses fossil fuels and a bike helps get me out into nature much more easily as well and of course while buying the bike was not me buying more physical health because I could just park it in the corner of the room and ignore it but by using a bike then inevitably my physical health benefits and so for me when I bought the bike I bought all of these things and ultimately a great deal of well-being so my question to you is what was the best £5 that you ever spent and I mean that from the perspective of all of these different kinds of wealth that you acquired by doing so