Intentional Living
Communities, not nation-states nor city-states, are the foundation of a functional global Federation. We live in an increasingly dysfunctional global society—interconnected and codependent, so thereby 'global'—which is vastly more than a collection of separate and 'permanent' nations whose representatives sometimes meet in embassies or at the UN. Nation-states are based on a shared delusion created by a historical collective identity and apprehension of other nations—we seek safety (and conquest) in numbers.
Denying a fact does not make it go away. What we live on is a planet, a spaceship. Fear makes us act as if we didn't. We live in a world where corporations have been enthroned, where there is thus corruption in high places. The moneyed powers of the world will continue to work upon the prejudices and weaknesses of the people until wealth is aggregated and civilization is destroyed.
The new world disorder, secondary to a presumption of human exceptionalism, is all about us and is becoming ever more humanocentric. The present global growth-culture is pervasive and increasingly westernized by advertising jingles as it becomes increasingly subject to corporate-state control. The Great Corrupter, power/money, knows that nothing is better for business than growth and consumption as nation-state bureaucrats and their people are readily persuaded to believe.
Yet anyone with a tongue-tipped taste of scientific literacy knows that exponential growth in a finite system, such as Earth, cannot continue without limit as overshoot follows as dark follows day. Overshoot the capacity of the system to support a more or less steady-state biophysical economy of enough, and collapse (to extinction or at best oscillation) will follow. Regional collapses have occurred (though few or none were left to write the history of them), but never before has collapse been global. The possibility is there. Denial does not make the possibility or probability go away. The twenty-first century may well see global overshoot and collapse of the current global growth-culture.
Collapse, however, does not imply extinction. Some will likely survive. The question is whether they will rebuild sanely in such a way as to avoid repeating the past. Those who merely survive because they have more bullets than others will not do so.
It need not come to that.
We must find out now how to live rightly—to create sustainable, planned communities that can function through and beyond any foreseeable hard times to come to create islands of sustainability. Such rebuilding or restoration as will then have to be done, can be done, but done in accordance to a new model of functionality. It is not enough that ideologues survive. Better for all if the thoughtful and mindful survive because they have learned to live sustainably in harmonious accord with the reality that is Earth because they share values and insights, not beliefs. If collapse occurs, let us think now of who (other than those with the most bullets) will rebuild, how, and according to what plan.
A top-down response may not occur to overshoot and collapse until the fact is undeniable, at which time action will be too little too late. This leaves the bottom-up option. What can individuals or small numbers of cooperating individuals do? They cannot create nations or even cities unless they vote with their feet. They cannot take over the globe through the barrel of a gun. What they can create are households and communities by intent. Science can help (neurology, psychology, human ecology, biology, anthropology, sociology, economy and political science, perhaps a new multi-disciplinary 'community science' will be needed). Going it alone is unlikely to be enough, for what is the community but the people? People live as they are, moment to moment, at best alive to the present, to one another, to Nature, and while assisted by science, they must live as the highly verbal animals they are. Wisdom, mindfulness, humanity, compassion, insight, intelligence, understanding and love need fill them or be selected for. Beliefs need not. As a species we, as we have since the Pleistocene, are unlikely to survive or thrive apart from functional communities of tribal size that cooporate with other such communities to form complex societies able to sustain and protect their non-empire-building way of life.
Rural communities would approach self-sufficiency in that, if needed, they could produce food and basic necessities for themselves. Each community might produce specialties leading to trade with other communities. In stable times, cities would depend upon nearby functional rural communities for food, arts, and crafts. Many from rural communities might choose to spend part of their lives living in the city. Cities would supply goods and services not otherwise available to the rural communities. The mutual dependency, mutually recognized, would define the relationship. In a less energy rich world with declining resources, such clusters of communities/city would be more likely to survive. Cities and rural areas both are now supplied through great expenditure of mostly fossil-fuels by the business of business, including vast transportation infrastructure and agribusiness concerns. What would happen if the trucks stopped resupplying your stores? How many days would you have?
Cites themselves could be composed of communities, but children are best raised in the country surrounded by Nature, so those wishing to raise children would move back to a rural community. In the city they would be clustered and provide needed labor and services to the city, but still operate efficiently as communities providing shared resources and support to members, which would be far more functional than the system of fragmented nuclear families and isolated individuals ('needed' to maximize consumption) we are now experimenting with. No one intended the experiment, no one is monitoring it closely or learning from it other than to describe its dysfunctionality. If aliens were to abduct a few thousand humans for their zoo, they would not treat them, if they knew anything of our biology, so atomistically as humans are treated today in urban/suburban environments. That which is commonplace is not thereby natural or normal, much less sustainable.