EdenSpace Concept
We are in a time of great change. People are losing faith in the present system and this is giving rise to a power vacuum. This is a tremendous opportunity to communicate a pragmatic but idealist message first to the counterculture and then to the mainstream society. Public apathy is an opportunity to create a broad based movement for change. Most people are driven by fear and they usually watch their neighbors and the opinion leaders to make sure they fit in to what the society defines as normal behavior. Few will take chances on new ideas and approaches until they are convinced that green businesspeople, designers and political activists have come up with real alternatives to the status quo.
A successful political or social movement is one that integrates the many into one, going beyond purely political and ideologically-based criticisms of the present status quo. Instead, the focus revolves around the development of a proactive strategy for comprehensive, grassroots change in the way our civilization works. This means taking the initiative and working towards workable prototypes that encourage and inspire us towards a new global dream model, as compared to this presently limiting concept of American dream.
The notion of what is right and appropriate will vary between groups of people. One of the greatest mistakes is arbitrarily defined limits to human behavior that are based on artificial and even unrealistic expectations of what is actually in our nature. Some people actually hope for the worst outcome because they can then take advantage of it and what results is a human reality driven by the lowest common denominator.
The local component of this global strategy for sustainable development is to design not just a human scale, locally based architecture but a social architecture that links all the various aspects of human reality together. We need places to built new relationships, businesses and ideas to propel the larger sustainable systems that are going to remake our society. These emergent systems of understanding reality in order to work have to give us the confidence to move towards a more environmentally sustainable and community orientated living environment--a new vision of what constitutes growth and progress.
Core themes of the EdenSpace Concept:
The Re-Creation of Community and the Development of an Alternative Global Society – This is not so much so much about a specific and concrete set of plans about the construction of an ecovillage, as it is about starting a larger social discussion about the creation of new living spaces that involve the resurrection and reintegration of community and consideration of what role information and communications technologies have to play in this process.
EdenSpace: Creating Spa-Like Healing Environments and a Sacred Sense of Place - The goal is to make a home for the human soul: through plants, gardens water fountains, and pools to create beautiful aesthetic spaces to bring out the soul within us. This serves to facilitate a revelatory framework that allows us to proceed at a maximal rate up the learning curve of life, to overcome our tendencies towards self-destruction and self-deception. From a Platonic perspective we are moving towards realm of form and moving away from the realm of illusion. Yet life is not about simplistic categorization of black and white but a process of experiencing phenomena, learning from one's mistakes and then expanding one's perception of things within the phenomenology of life. When the soul is at rest, we can act from a deeper place. Sacred spaces are sanctuaries from the realm of the mundane, which has proliferated in the modern world. Pools, waterfalls, exercise rooms, saunas Jacuzzis combined with a soothing architectural landscape help us to be more mindful and give us time to relax, enjoy life and contemplate the larger meaning of life. Part of this healing process and exploration may involve looking at how our everyday life activities fit with our ideals and aspirations. The goal is to do more with less. More time and energy devoted towards maximizing the quality of the experience and less on simply consuming to keep up with the Joneses.
Integrated Approach to Sustainable Development and the Promotion of Whole Systems Thinking - Ecological design is about the careful selection of technologies and materials based on the desire to minimize resource use while maximizing the utilization of materials and labor towards an elegant frugality. Multi-use in ecological design means that by doing several things at once with an optimized design, we reduce materials and resources needed. Every sustainable system should incorporate these multi-use principles when possible. Although much of this site is based on an evolving interpretation of Arcology theory, it departs from the mega-scale, monolithic architecture that is so evident in Paolo Soleri's Arcology models), and instead seeks to create human scale, synergistic and symbiotic relational patterns within buildings as well as with the people and organizations that occupy those spaces. Industrial ecology is the process by which we create industrial systems that make use of each other’s byproducts. The goal is for zero emissions and this means creating a closed system where everything going out of a production process is recycled back into that or another production process. Synergy means that by combining a sustainable technology research center, Business Park, eco-tourism, centering all these attributes on a functioning evolving community, we gain the advantages of each aspect of the project and offer a powerful alternative to existing development models. This type of sustainable economic development will mean bringing people with innovative solutions together with the financial resources to bring these ideas to life. Appropriate Technology: Means environmentally responsible, human scale, decentralized approaches to technology that lead to empowerment. The goal is to enable people to make the decisions they need to make to govern their futures rather than having it done for them by someone at the top of society.
Practical Idealism - Ideals and ideas in order to be relevant in our world have to put into practical practice of creating workable solutions to address the problems of the contemporary world. People today not only long to be involved in a project where their ideals are put into context through the development of workable solutions to create livable urban spaces, they want to live there as well. If we want local autonomy, we must base this on economic realities. The more productive we are as a community, the more we become empowered to determine our own destiny rather than depending on corporations to decide what is best for us. Ecovillage projects can become centers for the study of innovative, sustainable technologies encouraging the redefinition of what we see as waste into valuable resources.
Replication of Sustainable Systems - The ultimate goal of this project is to create critical mass on a larger social level, by focusing on the local level through training, consulting and eventually the development of financial resources to assist in the creation of other similarly themed environmentally and socially conscious projects throughout the world.
Technology is only a part of this EdenSpace equation for social change. The ultimate goal is to improve the quality of human experience in this life right here, right now. Promoting technologies and practices that are in tune with the core aspects of the project sustainability and social justice are an important component of improving the quality of human experiences. When we feel good about ourselves, and what we are doing, we can then come from a higher place within ourselves and start to be model for others. People that inspire are those that are living in the moment so an important ingredient toward achieving our goals is to live in the moment and not outside of it.