how to spend $1,000,000,000.00

This is in response to Mr Wheaton's Q&A with Mr. Lawton.

I didn't feel the two answers given where maybe the best use of the fictional money.
So to the people of permaculture at large how would you spend the money?

I haven't heard the podcast, but savory style 'planned holistic grazing' implemented over as much of the grasslands of the world as possible would be my first port of call.

Low cost to implement but impacts a massive geographical area - restore water cycles, soil structure and fertility over the fraction of the earth struggling with desertification issues and you go a long way to solving very many problems. Not least of which is that improving soils by increasing soil carbon locks up lots of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, potentially mitigating global warming.

I think I saw in one video that 15 million hectares are currently under this form of management. THat is an area 150km by 1000km. Seems like a good bang for your buck ratio.

I listed the things that would require use of the money

Take PDC
Buy Land - of varying sizes to show what can be done on any size of property (1/4, 1-5, 10+ acres) in each of the zones then expand from there.
Use equipment to tweak land
Hire a bunch of people to help get it done (internet shill's to post about permaculture every where linking to online vids, people to plant, design, PM, etc.)
Plant
Video everything and make it available for free - probably hire Geoff to do the talking in front of the camera.
Make Recipe Cards for the USDA zones and other climates
Provide $ for PDC scholarships - essentially this would pay the PDC teachers yet lower the entry level for students
Create a ROKU channel for Permaculture
Fund permaculture research
Run site examples as businesses to continue to fund world domination
Figure out how to get market penetration where the example sites are to increase infection rate.

Just what I could come up with off the top of my head

I'd rather have hundreds of thousands of people around the world doing experiments than just my ideas, so I'd want to leverage the talent pool.
>99% into a low-interest revolving loan fund for permies to buy and improve land, small-scale yeoman farmers only. No experience required, but PDCs and a business plan. If you are successful, you can buy more acreage on your own later if you want.
Maybe a sliding scale on interest that reduces as your soil organic material goes up or some other metric on land health.
Put the rest (and the interest) into helping people qualify for the loans, like more access to PDCs, and the occasional follow-up to make sure you are actually meeting the permie commitment of the loan. I'd expect previous loan recipients to help improve and qualify the plans for new borrowers. Maybe some regional get-togethers for the landholders to share ideas.

If you look at what Tony Rinaudo did with a pocketknife (reforested 12 million acres on the edge of the Sahara), that is enough to save the world in the right hands.

I think I would follow the Wheaton model (you don't know which ideas will stick so try them all, paraphrased) and spread the money around to a lot of people. Give 100K to 10K people (or vice versa) and see what happens. Most will burn out, but those 3% that make it will make it BIG.

If I had that money I would found a trust that buys large-scale land holdings and resells the land to local people after splitting it to parcels of a size affordable for them.
In my opinion the concentration of more and more land in the Hands of less and less people is one of the biggest problems on earth. And if such a large-scale thing is sold, it is in most cases sold in one piece and to someone already owning even more land.

Ok heres my 2 cents.
I feel like a block of the money would be best spend on creating self replicating entities.
Think Applebee’s they started in 1980 and have over 2000 locations in the US alone.
Heck Subway has 40k plus locations and was started in 1970 .
If you create a business that has an livable risk and a 5% return people will be lined up around the block to buy in.
As a franchise you have a very large control over all the separate locations.
So lets say you want to do verma compost business well you could do everything ground up or you could spend the same money to Perms Verma Inc.
Who will do all your market research, supply you with your equipment, and all the other proven winning formulas.
You pay a % back to Perms Verma for the bulk advertising, R&D, etc.
Perms Verma can be setup in a way to reduce the the tendency to the dark side so a non-profit franchise thats sole goal is to self replicate and improve itself and the world in a sustainable way. 10 to 30 million to crack the code and your on your way cost of propagating new businesses $0 cost of operation positive 5%.
Remember its the love of money that is the root of evil not the need of it.
When dealing with humans if its not profitable its not sustainable. I know no one or organization who doesn’t “need” money at sometime and thats just the fact of our world.

The same way we would take a distressed landscape and sew pioneer healing plant seeds to bring the landscape back into balance. So we must do the same with the business landscape. Sew profitable permaculture inline businesses that can self-replicate and over take the deep furrows that are the current models.

i would buy a bunch of tons and tons of cheap land in different places and give it away to people who wanted to grow food.

without a lot of restrictions....but maybe a few very specific restrictions regarding land use... even though not all the people would do something awesome with it, some of them would. i suppose if, in this theoretical scenario, it came to it, i would try to think of a good way to get the right kinds of folks on it, but i wouldnt want to micromanage it at all....and would want to really give away the land without too many restrictions and no head trip.