Can we save native plants by harvesting them? The Watershed Wealth Cooperative says yes. It may seem counterintuitive, say cooperative founders Larry Bailey and Michelle Boshard, but they point out that many of the most prolific, diverse and ubiquitous plants on the planet are so precisely because humans have placed great value on them. Corn, potatoes, the cabbage family, olives, date palms, grapes are some of the plants that have thrived through their association with humans. Native plants, on the other hand, usually are seen as weeds or scenery with little economic value.

Okanagan Nation Alliance, Pacific Streamkeepers Federation and Rural Resource Associates have combined forces in a unique approach to environmental restoration. The three partners have incorporated the Watershed Wealth Cooperative to support franchisees who make a business of supporting local environmental restoration. The enterprise will be supported by products made from native plant materials carefully collected from restoration sites or grown by independent growers. In addition to large scale applications, they are developing a program for homeowners who want to grow native plants and either sell them or make products from them.

Many of the products we use every day contain compounds derived from plants. All those plants are native somewhere, sometimes in your backyard or along the highway. But industrial production removes them from the places where they developed to places that are more convenient, but where they are alien life forms. They require vast amounts of water, chemicals and other "inputs" to keep them alive. Meanwhile the habitat where they once grew is degraded and destroyed, often by the production of plants or animals that are native somewhere else. Local benefits including jobs, products and ecosystem services are lost. Larry and Michelle counter the argument that it is inefficient and less productive to grow plants in their native habitat by studies showing that natural growing using a "Forest Garden" concept actually can be twice as productive as the most "modern" agricultural system without compromising ecosystem services.

What if we looked at economic enterprises as parts of the natural world, they ask. No natural system could survive if it was organized the way we try to organize human institutions, especially economic institutions. Our unbalanced, top-down direction, bottom-up production, model constantly malfunctions and government must constantly intervene to keep the wealth flowing up and the decisions flowing down. Much like plants out of their habitat, these institutions are vulnerable, inefficient and out of balance. The only way to counter the inefficiencies and inequalities is endless growth.

A truly free market will organize itself more locally because that is more sustainable, and, in the end, more efficient in community and individual human terms. It is less efficient at concentrating wealth at the disposal of those who contribute least to the actual work accomplished. The elite mostly work at enhancing the concentration of wealth, not in producing more and better products. The best products of all in their eyes are those that have no physical reality at all but are imaginary "derivatives" with little connection to the real world. The Watershed Wealth Cooperative founders believe our economics should be reality based.

The Watershed Wealth Cooperative concept grew out of community based environmental work in British Columbia and Washington State by Michelle and Larry of Rural Resource Associates. An account of that work by the two became a chapter called "Follow the Money" in Salmon 2100: The Future of Wild Pacific Salmon, an award winning text book published by the American Fisheries Society in 2006 and developed from an Environmental Protection Agency project called Salmon 2100 headed by (Lackey). They have since coordinated an agricultural project demonstrating the concept near Abbotsford, BC. They also have completed several feasibility studies for elements of the program. Details of the business plan come from discussions with many different kinds of organizations and people.

"A lot of people have to understand the concept, and agree, for it to work," Larry says. "Environmentalists and environmental regulators seem to have a moment of panic when we use words like 'harvest' or 'product.' But when you look at how much is being harvested from all kinds of areas now, often illegally, often damaging the environment, our process is much more accountable and is based on thorough monitoring. In the end, with our approach, there are more native plants growing where they should be and new, innovative products demonstrating just how valuable those plants are. We proved with our Abbotsford project that all the different agencies and other stakeholders can agree when faced with a real-life example."

Watershed Wealth Cooperative brings economies of scale in their support for the independent franchise businesses they call "Delivery Agents," but allows local focus and control to guide most decisions. "Our job is to network a lot of things that are already going on but are not coordinated or efficient," Larry says. "You might have a wildcrafter or small grower in the same community as product makers who use the same raw material but are buying it from a wholesaler who gets it from an importer and it's grown in Asia. Meanwhile, the local grower and wildcrafter are selling at the bottom of the market into the same industrial distribution system. There should be room for someone to make better sense of it and spread the opportunities around a little."

The networking of opportunities is the theme of the cooperative. "If we have a producer who has a large amount of a botanical that needs to be turned into an oil or an extract, we look for someone who has or who would like to have a small business making oils and extracts and connect the two, help with upgrades or marketing or planning as needed. We don't want to duplicate and compete with and eliminate the few people who currently are involved with native plants as a conventional corporation would. The same is true for restoration projects. One of our services is to get local plant material planted or cloned so that projects can be done with plants from the same micro-environment, not whatever happens to be on the market. We can trade maintenance and monitoring of projects for permission to collect a small amount of plant material for propagation or for products. We can broker carbon credits for projects too small to do it themselves. And as revenue accumulates, Watershed Wealth Cooperative will fund restoration projects as part of our mission."

The Watershed Wealth Cooperative is not a non-profit organization. It is a business designed to generate profits from several revenue streams, none of them grant-based or non-taxable. The funding Watershed Wealth Cooperative has received has been economic development funding intended to create jobs and develop entrepreneurial opportunities. Ecological distribution of resources enhances triple bottom line profits. There is no need to feed the greed of venture capitalists or shareholders by making short-term-profit oriented decisions.

Watershed Wealth Cooperative was partly organized as an alternative to the erratic and inadequate grant funding of environmental efforts and the short-sighted regulatory regimes that attempt to create sustainable habitat by eliminating economic activity. It became clear to us from our participation in the Salmon 2100 Project (link) that the powerful societal drivers energizing habitat destruction were not going to be countered with charity and volunteers or by eliminating human access to large areas. One of the economic drivers that leads to major habitat loss is the production and harvest for industrial use of the very native plants (and animals) that are present in intact habitat. The Watershed Wealth Cooperative concept and business plan puts (or leaves) the plants where they belong to provide ecosystem services including carbon sequestration and also provide a wide range of products in high and growing demand locally and on a worldwide commodity market. The Watershed Wealth Cooperative support system for value-added small businesses keeps more of the revenue in circulation in the local economy, multiplying the economic return.

While this approach may seem primitive there is good evidence that it enhances sustainable production above levels achieved by industrial agriculture (forest garden paper). When combined with 21st century technology including wireless monitoring, social networking and online marketing and brokerage, the Watershed Wealth Cooperative model becomes a template for sustainable environment/economy interaction that is adaptable to any habitat.