The Idea: Over the past two years I've been sharing my, and
others', ideas on a better way to live, and what needs to be done to
get there. This article is an attempt to recap many of those articles,
and draw them together into a cohesive and practical model for a
post-civilization culture.
For three million years human
society was built on a gatherer-hunter culture, based on community, a
culture we shared with the rest of life on Earth. When a series of
natural and man-made events created a sudden and severe food shortage
30,000 years ago, a new acquirer-settler culture evolved, based on
agriculture and more recently on energy-driven industrialization and
urbanization, and maintained by the establishment of political
hierarchy and unequal ownership which artificially created scarcity,
slavery and dependence, which were necessary to command obedience and
maintain law and order in such an 'unnatural' culture. Now we are again
at a turning point, as we realize that this culture, which we call
'civilization', is not sustainable, and is running into a wall as it
attempts with greater and greater difficulty to defy the laws of
thermodynamics, the laws of finite capacity, and nature's balancing
mechanisms: pandemic disease and adrenaline-provoked lethal
aggressiveness, psychological breakdown and incapacity, as triggered
responses to overcrowding and scarcity.
I have argued that the root causes of this overcrowding and scarcity, and hence of all the problems
we face today, are overpopulation and overconsumption, though some
think I am giving the ruling elites of our world too much benefit of
the doubt by not listing their psychopathic violence and greediness as
root causes. I have therefore maintained that to build a
post-civilization culture we need to do four things:
- We need to tell everyone a new
story of our planet's destiny, a new vision, and show them a new model,
a better way to live that will realize that vision.
- We need to achieve broad consensus that
overpopulation and overconsumption are the root causes of our current
culture's unsustainability, and that they must be actively addressed
and solved.
- We
need to tap into the collective wisdom of Earth's people to find the
best solutions to these two root problems, and help them test and
implement the solutions in their communities.
- We need to help each other clear away obstacles to success, through humanitarian and peacemaking assistance, helping to
build new infrastructure that will work in the new community-based
world, redistributing resources from the rich to the poor, and
disarming those that will try to establish new wealth and power
hierarchies.
I thought it might be useful to set out a 'straw man' model of how to
go about the first three of these steps, something that people can
shoot at and refine and test out. My model is illustrated above and has
four components: Principles (a basic set of standards to guide how the
new culture would operate), Learnings (what each of us must learn and
teach to make the new culture successful), Enablers (the tools and
systems we need to have at our disposal to make the new culture work),
and Infrastructure (what we need to build to show that the new culture
works, and to make it sustainable). Here's a quick walk-through of what
I'm proposing be in each component:
Principles:
Because it's so difficult to get consensus on principles, and because
principles cannot be imposed, I think it's important that the new
culture have as few principles, and as inclusive and intuitive
principles as possible. The smallest set I can come up with that will
do the job is these five, and they're all about responsibility:
- Legacy Principle: We must leave the world at least as healthy, abundant and well-off for future generations as we found it.
- Gaia Principle: We recognize that Earth is a single,
self-balancing, self-managing organism of which we are an inseparable
part, and we have a sacred responsibility to respect and live in
harmony with all other life on Earth, not treat it as our 'property',
and to waste nothing.
- Stop at One Principle: Until we can restore a healthy
balance to life on our planet, and live up to the Legacy and Gaia
Principles, we must procreate no more than one child for each two human
inhabitants until our population is reduced to one billion.
- No Debts No Deficits Principle: We must always live within
our means, be beholden to no others, and never encumber our descendants.
- Trade Only Surpluses Principle: We will buy from other
communities only those things which we cannot reasonably produce
ourselves, and sell to other communities only those things which we do
not need ourselves.
Learnings:
We cannot expect to be able to live successfully in a new culture
without learning (or re-learning) how to make a living together and how
to live together. Each one of us must learn critical skills to that
end, such as those depicted in the map above. Just as importantly, we
need to learn to reconnect with nature, with our instincts, and with
all other life in our communities. This will take time, patience,
practice, and immersion in wilderness -- not to 'conquer' our fear of
it, but to accept it as sacred and as our home, to understand after
millennia of forgetting that we
are animals, and that we are an integral part of the whole ecosystem.
Without this reconnection and re-learning we will simply revert to the
bad habits of the acquirer-settler culture.
Enablers:
The basic building blocks of the new culture are community, knowledge,
self-sufficiency, connection, collaboration and innovation. The
Internet will allow us
to acquire and share these building blocks. We can use it to find
like-minds for our new communities, to teach and learn how to make
these communities successful and sustainable, and to collaborate with
others to share ideas and successes, and to find innovative solutions
to the problems we encounter in community-building. This will allow us
to realize the three pillars of Freeman Dyson's Dream that will be essential to successful and sustainable communities:
- The free exchange of information (and of everything else that can be reduced to bytes);
- The development of community-based renewable energy co-ops that will make each community energy self-sufficient; and
- The development of open-source innovations in sustainable
agriculture and biotech, which will allow communities to also become
self-sufficient in producing their own food, fabrics and other
more-with-less materials that encourage and enable sustainable, humane
low-footprint methods of meeting all the communities' essential needs.
Infrastructure:
With the right principles that can guide our decisions, the learnings
to build the new culture properly, and the enabling building blocks, we
can create the infrastructure that embodies the new culture. I think
this infrastructure needs three key components:
- Model Intentional Communities: These are the new political, social and
economic units of the new culture. They embody our choices on who we
want to live with and how we want to live, and manage ourselves, as
autonomous communities or 'tribes' of like-minded individuals. Much has
been written about how to construct these once we have the principles, learnings and enablers to do so effectively.
- Natural Enterprises: The community of people with whom one chooses to live, and the people with whom one may choose to make a living (work), will not necessarily be the same people, and with modern communications and 'virtual presence' technology it need not be. The formation and principles behind Natural Enterprises are different from, but entirely consistent with, those that underlie Model Intentional Communities.
- Collaborative Solution Centres: There will be problems,
especially in the early going of the new culture, that cannot be
effectively solved by the members of a single community. There is some
doubt in my mind whether the Internet, even with much improved social
networking and 'shared space', communication and connectivity tools,
will have adequate resources to solve these problems effectively. I see
a role, therefore, for Solution Centres that will aggregate the people,
knowledge, skills and practices
that will allow large and diverse groups of people with a shared
problem to answer it effectively. These Centres could also do
double-duty as sites (physical and/or virtual) for the teaching of
critical skills that cannot be more effectively taught in the field.
They could in fact become the 'community centres' of the new culture.
That's the model. It's a straw-man, so kick away.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
