It's another busy work week for us at r+. While I waited to cross the road at the side of a junction in Kampot, I observed some farmers cutting tall grass. Curious, I asked them why they needed the grass. They answered that they were cutting the grass for cattle feed for their neighbouring farmer, and in exchange, the cattle farmer would give them manure as fertiliser for their own crops.
Nowadays, our urban societies proclaim, "We need to create an ecosystem!" Yet, rural communities have already achieved their own sustainable ecosystems, not by complex plans over Powerpoint, but through intuition. It got me thinking: we already have a default ecosystem of bartering, but urban living may have detached us. Perhaps our new ecosystems should take inspiration from rurality, and be derived by intuition, instead of us crafting needlessly complex systems.
