Review of overall approach
I am hoping this review feels logical and attractive under the circumstances. I am appealing in the spirit of common sense (what all would see if they looked? ) in contrast to the Chinese kan bu dong. “Look, but not see”
The steps go
Collapse
Lifeboats
Gardenworld culture
New civilization blending humans with nature
Increasingly people are convinced that we are in climate change and many recognize that we are empty-handed about solutions. In particular, the idea that a green economy can save us by building it. A new energy regime is seen increasingly as a false hope because of the paradox that building such a regime requires a tremendous amount of energy and would produce an immense amount of CO2.
The number of people who are moving from one part of the world to another is shocking. For example, a family that migrated from Paris to Sicily is now leaving because farming on Sicily has become impossible due to the heat. This pattern is being reproduced all over the world. But not uniformly. Some places have already become unlivable and at the same time many places remain livable.
Those places are going to have strange histories because they are going to attract people who do not own the land but want to use it. Responding to this context I have proposed What I have been calling a lifeboat strategy, which basically comes down to doing what we can to enhance the livability of such livable places. This means complicated things like dealing with newcomers, which foods to plant, and how to organize the lifeboat communities. It will mean scavenging among what has been abandoned and repurposing it with recurrent resourcefulness.
We will see much variability and surprising new efforts to make those lifeboats, livable. Some of them, and my hope is for many of them, will emerge as interesting and actually fairly healthy places to live. The odds are against them, but humans are amazing. The collapse across a number of indicators will have the effect of grip drastically cutting CO2 production. The great Unknown however is how to remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere to limit increasing global warming. We just do not know how to do it if you noticed my calculation, the amount of CO2 that must be removed is on the order of trillions of tons. The quantity is staggering, especially trying to do it with far less industrial capacity to make new equipment and explore new inventions.
Those lifeboats which emerge in a fairly positive direction will find their efforts approaching the aesthetics and livability of Gardenworlds.
And thinking about how to live and work in Gardenworld, we can start with simple memory: many of us in childhood used clotheslines, closepins and blankets to make comfortable and exciting playhouses. The activity around small houses, even tiny houses shows us new ways of coping that while radically different from what we are used to use images of how to live that are already attractive to us. We do not know quite how to live in such simplified spaces, but they remain attractive to our exploratory instincts towards playfulness and how to live.
The Arts and crafts movement was a reaction against the over-mechanization of industry and had wide-scale support in the late 1800s. Its defeat by wars and commercialism is unfortunate because it almost became the dominant culture – now almost forgotten.
I lived in Mexico City in the late 1960’s. Some people I got to know who were refugees from the Spanish Civil War introduced me to a local artist, Feliciano Bejar, who made new small houses out of the ruins of old mansions. This produced spaces that blended inside and outside feelings and made living in the gardens and small houses much easier.
Successful lifeboats will morph into Gardenworlds. The problems will be intense. Increasing temperature and variations in weather, the arrival of refugees from less viable parts of the world with an interface of violence. Will the attempts at organization be feudalism, democratic socialism, or rehashing open markets with let’s hope not monopoly capitalism?
The amazing book Homo Ludens ), Man the playful, and Jean Piagets’To Understand is to Invent. should help resolve conflicts and point out the value in Gardenworlds of serious reading and discussion because Gardenworlds can be, should be, stepping stones (Xi, "crossing the river on stones) to a new civilization."
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one of many helpful uoutubes
[Mexico City, the late '60s, I, too, was there as a short-term student at the University of the Americas, located at 16 km of the Toluca Hwy. What had you there, Douglass? BB in VA]