It's been six months since I last wrote here. I went quiet because I was heads-down in the work, and the public writing moved to the ENSURANCE Guide.
This is for those of you who put your money and your faith behind this. You believed in me when it was still mostly a conviction, and I still carry that. I care about the living systems themselves: the water a city drinks, the block that overheats, the hillside above a road, and the species who live on what a watershed provides. I am determined to see this through, for those places and for you.
Nature is a long tail. It's the ditch a town drinks from, the creek someone has fished for thirty years, the block that overheats every July, the hillside where the elk winter. Each one is a place, the people who depend on it, and what they're trying to keep. We give each one an agent and the instruments to protect and steward it. That's a micromarket. Put enough of them together and you have a market. As a whole: markets for what matters.
These months have been the work of stocking that tail ahead of demand. A place can be mapped, an agent can hold a wallet, a coin and a pool can exist, and a guide can be written, before the person who needs that niche arrives. Do that across enough places and demand arrives. And is. Place by Place by Place.
Of course the wider market is taking longer to arrive than I'd like. That's exactly why we're building ahead of it. Storms, degradation, flood, and the risk on buildings, roads, and water systems are going to make the demand plain. The tail should already be on the shelf when that happens.
The idea I most want you to leave with is the rule the ensurance agents now carry.
A place stays alive because of ground outside its own fence. Fund what provides your condition. The water upstream of you. The weather upwind of you. The land over the ridge. The rain that arrives from somewhere else.
An agent can already see the places, the people, and the purposes it shares. The money follows the land that holds it up. Protect the parcel in your hand, and the condition can still fail if the providing ground fails.
the shelf
We have mapped 262 places, 305 people and organizations, and 235 outcomes worth protecting. Together they say the place, who depends on it, and what has to keep working.
There are 2,095 ensurance agents. Each one is a place, a group of people, or a purpose, and each has its own wallet. There are 191 coins, and 109 liquidity pools where a buyer can trade them. The Guide holds 721 pieces, the public shelf of the same tail. Underneath, about 217,000 lines of application code, and more than 1,200 commits since April.
Our parcel engine turns each one of those niches into a specific piece of ground. A point resolves to a real boundary, which we can read for flood, wetlands, and watershed, and on a hot block for summer temperature, canopy, and pavement. A minority of parcels carry more of the system than the acres around them. Those are the keystone parcels, the ones a town, a utility, or a downstream neighbor actually stands on.
our own liquidity
We are building our own liquidity, so supporters can get in and get out of a place without waiting for someone else to make the market. That work is part of stocking the tail.
In collaboration with Jay Gutierrez, we have been reading a landscape as a graph, in both directions: which parcels hold a place up, and who downstream depends on them. The graph is the first screen. His model is what we run once it has named a corridor. One western river has already been read this way, the parcels and the towns and utilities along it.
Next, those edges live on the parcel itself, so a town or a single parcel can be read as one web: what it needs, which parcels provide it, and who depends on it. The work ahead is to run the whole system on as many places, people, and purposes as we can. That includes supplemental ensurance: coming alongside people who are already protecting a place, and adding to what they've built.
The same build includes the work on the ground: streams, wetlands, fuels, erosion, and monitoring, offered as field services.
where the writing went
The writing lives on the Guide now, so a person can find the one place they already care about or suggest a place they care about.
What financing urban heat island mitigation actually is. A kilowatt-hour can repay one meter. The street, the hospital visit, and the peak a utility never has to build are the rest of the bill.
Santa Fe doesn't drink water. It drinks a mountain, a river, and a ditch.
Quito drinks a páramo.
What a business already gets from ecosystem services. Water, cooling, flood hold, and how that gets funded.
If you want to know more, I will give you a private demo. We can sit with one place: who depends on it, which parcels carry it, and how a agent and it's instruments sits beside the land as a living system.
Reply and I will add places you care about and depend on.
I will keep building until this succeeds. Place by Place by Place. It's my promise to you.
TMO
BASIN ENSURANCE