Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Building and operating a bathhouse for 1,000 people requires much less energy than building and operating 1,000 individual bathrooms. A public bathhouse is also more efficient concerning materials, money, and space.
If you believe, like I do, that capitalism as a system is harmful, that food and agriculture should be commons and that humanity should leave more space to other species while at the same time be a responsible keystone species, then the short and medium term actions and political demands should contribute to the reality you desire.
Rumors and lies about government responses to natural disasters are not new. Politics, misinformation and blame-shifting have long surrounded government response efforts.
The Enlightenment, modernity, technology, fossil fuels and capitalism were mutually reinforcing and permeated daily practices, which in turn galvanized the system; earlier greed was bad, then it became ok and then good and now, finally, it is an essential virtue. This insight has implications for how we instill change.
In my 2012 essay in The Futurist, I concluded that we might no longer be able to get out of the mess we were creating for ourselves, but we could get through it. There was still plenty to dream of, and to strive for. Today, hope remains, unreasonable, hanging by a thread.
What if we could bring the natural world to our own yards? What if we could connect our yards in such a way that we create a kind of continuation of our national parks, where nature is restored and we can be right in the middle of it all?
A while back, I came across a fascinating paper from 2007 by Gurven and Kaplan on longevity among hunter-gatherers that helped me understand aspects of what life was (and is) like outside of modernity. My interest is both a matter of pure curiosity, and to gain perspective on how desperate life feels—or doesn’t—to members of pre-agricultural (ecological) cultures.
Resilience is not measured by wealth and access to power alone. It is often, perhaps even more so, calculated by the culture, strength, and community of a people.
What if we presented possible options for future human developments—let’s say human population as a solid example—and pretend it’s a menu from which we get to choose.
Modernity (even if defining starting 10,000 years ago) is a short-lived phase that will self-terminate—likely starting this century.
Memory is how we orient ourselves in time and space. In the age of the internet the repositories of memory are exceedingly vulnerable.
To inspire hope that ordinary people such as ourselves can bring about meaningful change, I’ve included brief snapshots below of some of the largest and most successful systems-changing strategies I know. Because these kinds of stories are not often reported on in the mainstream media, we need to do everything in our power to get them out as far and wide as possible.
