Redeveloping a Sense of Community in the Modern
Many progressives desire a socially transformed world where a new economic system and way of thinking will have to emerge into to ensure the continued viability of humanity. Many seek to figure out ways to create this social change. One idea forwarded is that a socially consciousness marketplace will eventually function as an alternative to existing business giving people an opportunity to make more environmentally and socially thoughtful choices.
My concept of redevelopment of the built environment involves the visualization of marketplace viable models of ecological and socially conscious living. Regardless of our opinions about capitalism and the prevailing socioeconomic system, we have to accept the reality that drives human society at this time and take advantage of it and channel it cleverly into these sustainable models of development. The greatest way to change the dominant economic system is to figure out how to put one’s ideals into effective practical practices that support the global movement for change—Practical Idealism.
Accepting the Reality that we Live in an Imperfect World
During my stay at Arcosanti my ideas have evolved, and so my vision has changed as well. I have learned much of value while I have been there, and met many wonderful people but what has been most obvious is the greatest challenge is not money or technology, but learning how to work in a open and highly creative social and cultural environment creating new versions of community that are suitable and desirable for post-industrial human society. What is pivotal is not architecture or economics or technology or politics, but in developing human scale, community oriented type social systems that do not dehumanize the very people they are supposed to be serving.
Economics and Decentralization
A sustainable, steady state economy based on the assumption that economics should function as if people and the natural environment mattered, must exist on the most fundamentally human scale, where people can relate to each other on a personal level. A population of 500-2000 people in an intense and tightly knit urban space. Activities within this small-scale economy should take advantage of emerging appropriate technologies such as bio-remediation, composting, recycling, renewable energies, organic/health foods and healing/therapy. The emerging vision of the eco-community is the practical agent of social, economic political change within the society.
Sustainable, renewable or appropriate technologies will not in themselves reverse the negative social and economic trends of the industrial society. Evolution towards a enlightened state of being--as defined by the evolving personal transformation of individuals, who seek truth and a state of personal balance and harmony within life itself-is the necessary core, for a massive social transformation in which people begin to affect others by creating systems that are consistent with their genuine striving for higher moral and ethical values in life.
Voluntary Simplicity
Ted Trainer believes we have to abandon affluence in order to become a sustainable society. He says that the rates of consumption must be lower than they are now in developed countries. Yet rather than seek out large-scale solutions in the form of big government solutions it is wiser to come up with a model that offers people substantive alternatives to the absurdities of modern life.
Communities would be much more self sufficient with increased dependence on the land for survival. Trainer says the few machines needed would be made to last and easily repairable for many years. (Ted Trainer 1991 The Green Reader Andrew Dobson editor P84-90)
EF Schumacher, a British economist who specialized in the coal industry, wrote a book called Small is Beautiful. The basis theme was: economics as if people and nature matter. Our rallying cry must be: economics as if people and nature matter. It is up to us to organize and work together to form sustainable, ecologically and socially centered communities and networks that will provide an alternative to the mainstream consumer based way of life. The only way that people will ever truly have meaning in their lives, is if the small, micro scale of their everyday, ordinary lives is made beautiful and valuable within the context of their own lives. Those who are the most extraordinary are those who are truly humble, and are not consumed by the need to dominate the world with their hungry ego.