Ethan Roland published an article in the Summer 2011 issue of Permaculture Magazine.
http://appleseedpermaculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/8_Forms_of_Capital_PM68.pdf
This tool has been enormously useful to me. I wholeheartedly recommend reading the article.
Briefly, the eight forms are:
- Social capital, such as influence and connections.
- Material capital, non-living physical objects, both raw and processed
- Financial capital, currencies and other tools of the global financial system
- Living capital, living beings including plants, animals, and soil
- Intellectual capital, knowledge learned from a book or school
- Experiential capital, knowledge gained by doing
- Cultural capital, shared knowledge of a community
- Spiritual capital, religion, spirituality, or other means of connection
Considering these different forms has changed the way I think about my interactions with the world. Previously I only thought about financial capital in my life, working a job to make money. Now, while I realise the importance of finance in our society today, I no longer exclusively pursue financial capital. A whole suite of things becomes viable that weren’t before.
For example I am keeping sheep (living capital), in an innovative way that spreads the load of caring for them helping my co-shepherd (social capital), builds experience in animal husbandry (intellectual & experiential capital), meat for my freezer (material capital), and a flock of sheep to graze in my coops food forest (more living capital), which gives me the ability to monitor that food forest (experiential capital).
One concept I’ve found that expands the usefulness of this tool is the concept of pollution in relation to these different forms of capital. Any time that there is an excess of a capital, it stagnates and creates problems in the world.
Some examples of how they might manifest: celebrity as social pollution, superfund sites material pollution, trying to substitute relationship with money as financial pollution, monocropping as living pollution, knowledge without experience as intellectual pollution, action without forethought as experiential pollution, cultural appropriation as cultural pollution, and hollow spirituality as spiritual pollution.
Certainly there’s a lot of threads to follow here but I present this here as context for some future conversations…