omniharmonicCompost Capital
Compost capital is the strategic practice of transforming extractive capital into regenerative community wealth. Just as composting takes dead organic matter and transforms it into soil that nourishes new life, compost capital takes accumulated wealth — often generated through extractive, colonial, or exploitative systems — and redirects it into community-governed institutions, regenerative enterprises, and ecological restoration.
The concept addresses a practical dilemma facing movements for systemic change: the existing system has concentrated enormous resources in extractive institutions, and building alternatives requires capital. Rather than rejecting all engagement with existing wealth or naively accepting it without transformation, compost capital proposes a deliberate alchemical process. Wealth passes through community-governed structures — community-land-trusts, cooperative investment funds, bioregional development institutions — that strip away extractive return expectations and redirect resources toward regenerative outcomes.
Compost capital connects to regenerative-finance as a transitional strategy: it describes how to move money from the extractive economy into regenerative circuits. It relates to dual-power as the financial dimension of building parallel institutions — you cannot build alternatives without resources, and those resources must come from somewhere. Within regenerative-economics, compost capital names the metabolic process by which an extractive economy is gradually digested and transformed into a living one. The concept insists that this transformation must be intentional and structured, not simply a matter of “good intentions” applied to conventional investment.