About Shares

Why this type of investment?

We need to move all our resources as quickly as possible towards the most effective solutions if we are to halt & reverse the current destructive trends, and create the new economy.  This article from an expert in green investing explains why the type of investment we are offering with this initiative is of the most important, but also least used.

Why Shares?

• One of the most important jobs we need to do to change paradigms is to ‘liberate’ land. The idea of humans ‘owning’ land is incomprehensible to native peoples and one of the roots of our collective psychosis in the west. With this shares structure (shares correspond to living rights / stewardship duties but not ‘ownership’ of land) what we are doing is putting the land in trust with a Foundation (or other legal structure to be determined) which ensures it will be safeguarded by permaculture ethics, principles & objectives in perpetuity. We think this change of mindset regarding ownership is essential to having a saner relationships in the future.
• This is also a way of enjoying a whole farm for a fraction of the price it would cost you to buy one on your own, while multiplying many times its quality & fertility. You can cash-in your investment if you wish to move on, always provided you have contributed positively to the project. Your investment would increase simply with time under industrial conditions, and should increase (in real value if not cash value) as an increasingly productive rural land with our work on it, and particularly as a unit of a wider synergistic whole (the Eco-village).  The return of your investment may, especially during the early stage of the project, be contingent upon there being another applicant who is ready to invest — all of this will be clearly defined in the initial agreements (statutes and by-laws) by the founding members.

Investing (our money, time, attention, energy) in the solutions to the world’s environmental, social & economic problems is now the most important job we have as humans, and this project can be thought as a kind of bank for ethical investors.  Whether you reap the benefits by sharing this space or just by having a monetary return on your investment in the future, it’s probably one of the most secure ways to invest right now, and certainly one of the most ethical & strategically important, for all of us.

Read more about how shares work and investing in 8th Life Panama.