"Solar Village":
What is missing in this picture?
The
following has been written as a reaction to an article by Gussie
Fauntleroy - "Pushing against the tide - Hanne & Maurice Strong
at Earth Summit 2012" Crestone Eagle June 2012, p20-21 -
http://crestoneeagle.com/digisub/CrestoneEagle_Vol23_No6.pdf ,
which, among other things, says:
... Among
the Manitou Foundation's current projects is the design and
planning of a "solar village" aimed at providing self-sustaining
housing, food production and energy for 50 to 60 families (with the
number to be determined by a land-capacity feasibility study), as
well as training and employment for local young people. The first
proposal/design concept for the village, to be built near Willow
Creek west of Atalanta in the Grants, will be completed by
mid-June, Hanne relates. The next step will be to choose the best
and most appropriate design, and to plan fundraising for the
project. ...
If the
"solar village" (mentioned in the article) is meant to present a
picture of how people should live in the, presumably, sustainable
future, then the "picture" is incomplete. It would then imply that
in the sustainable future we all live in solar villages, in
"self-sustaining housing", grow our own food. But it wouldn't say
how the solar panels and all the things that those solar panels are
supposed to power (what would those things, indeed, be?) are to be
manufactured and maintained. It is obvious that all these could not
be made in the village smithy! For all this a huge industrial
complex would be needed, run by many people (unless sustainably
made and sustainably maintained robots would be used) that by its
hugeness and complexity would very unlikely be sustainable
ecologically, nor socially, if run by people. If this industrial
complex would be run by people--would all those be also living in
solar villages? Would they also grow their own food? What would a
sustainable health care look like? Would the economy, governance
also be provably sustainable? Could those, indeed, be proven to be
sustainable ever? By what means? How would all other, non-human
species be accommodated? ... All of this would have to be plainly,
credibly shown in the "picture".
It is important to present the whole picture of how things should
be, because having such a "picture" available would prevent loss of
time caused by sorting out our differences in real time/space,
instead of sorting them out ahead in a "picture" of how things
ideally should be; There is little time left, as the destruction of
the planet is much faster than any meaningful improvements. Having
such a "picture" would expedite things, because we often strive for
different objectives, believing all the time that we want the same
thing. We all want "sustainability", but it means a thousand
different things to a thousand people! In a "picture" it could be
seen what definitions are supposed to mean.
The whole picture should show what it would look like when
everybody lives sustainably, into as small a detail as possible.
The picture would then show that it is truly viable and realistic
for humanity to want to live in sync with itself and the whole
world. The picture should also show how all others, who would want
to live simpler sustainable life-styles, would fit in, how all the
possible (but truly so) sustainable sustainable life-styles would
fit on one Earth successfully side-by-side, along with all other
life.
More on this in Universal
Platform for Developing Sustainable Earth Vision/Model
Cooperatively
N. B.
The "picture" in this writing could exist in many forms--verbal, as
gedankenexperiments, computer models, discussions around the
hearth, ... ...
Thank you, Mr. Jan Hearthstone - ModelEarth.Org
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