Do-It-Yourself Money And The New Alchemists - growing movement in France known as SEL and a recent history of local currencies

Ecologist, The, March, 2001 by David Boyle

Like Italian professor Giacinto Auriti, who recently went on trial for printing his own currency, known as 'the money of the poor'. Or Isle of Wight County Council, which was convicted in 1997 for printing its own tokens, that they had made the mistake of calling 'euros'.

SEL has gone beyond that. But the other myth its success debunks is that local currencies are purely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon.

They certainly re-emerged in Anglo-Saxon countries. Like the hours notes in Ithaca in upstate New York - started in 1992 as a way of fighting off a new Wal-mart store, and now backed by the local chamber of commerce and accepted at a third of the town's businesses.

Or the similar Womanshare system in New York City, run by local carpenter Diana McCourt, whose husband Malachy is one of the celebrated McCourts of Angela's Ashes fame.

But SEL has also led the way for the rest of the world. There are similar schemes, using printed notes, in Senegal and other parts of French-speaking Africa. There are ambitious local currencies in Holland, Germany, Italy and the first time bank in Slovakia. There are widely used printed currencies across Latin America, like the tlaloc in Mexico.

Like SEL, the most exciting local currencies are linking up with a range of other organisations. In Chicago, pupils are earning 'time dollars' by tutoring other pupils, and spending them on recycled computers.

If you have one of the Minneapolis dual-track HeroCards, you can buy products at the Mall of America - the biggest shopping mall in the USA - partly in dollars and partly in a local time-based currency, earned by helping out in the local community, tutoring in schools or giving lifts to the elderly.

It isn't exactly green, but it does mean that anyone can have some spending power as long as they've got time and they're prepared to help someone.

SEL and the other 2,000 or so local currencies remain small, but they may be able to help communities fight off the worst symptoms of globalisation, by using local resources more efficiently. What the global currencies can only see as rubbish or useless people can be wealth to a local measuring system. After all, four million perfectly good computers are put into landfill every year in the UK.

It also means that people can issue their own currency -- not by themselves, but with each other. It's like rediscovering alchemy.

'Below the radar beams of many official monetary experts, fundamental change in our money systems is in fact already well under way, irresistibly driven by the social and technological forces of the Information Age,' says one of the designers of the euro, former Belgian central banker Bernard Lietaer, in his forthcoming book The Future of Money.

REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT

And when the world depends on the by-products of the $2 trillion a day that is speculated across global computer screens every day, we do need something else to rely on.

Five centuries ago, alchemists like the mysterious Paracelsus -- wandering round Europe in a coloured coat which he never washed -- were the inspiration behind a revolution against the old order of authority and control.