A positive vision of the future

Climate change, global warming, peak oil, economic meltdown?...

They are threats to our current unsustainable culture and dysfunctional economy, but also open the possibility of radical change: humankind moving to a new level!

Imagine a new global culture, growing from more collaborative and sustainable ways of living at the local level – ‘connected communities’.

1. •Using modern communications technology to join together regionally and globally.
   

2. •People acting as planetary citizens to form a human society that looks after itself and the Earth: Earth Connected.
   

But what about...

1. •Lobbying governments? Expecting your government to take the lead in providing real solutions to our deep problems is a mistake. They are too trapped in conventional views to provide radical leadership. The best that we can hope is that governments will be supportive of useful initiatives.
   

2. •Protest movements? They may be useful in slowing down some of the worst offenders and possibly stopping the odd development, but they will not create radical change.
   

Be on the cutting edge of our culture!

Help create a collaborative, sustainable future!

Many partial solutions are coming from the grassroots, from thousands of small projects, that could eventually link up.

I see my role as contributing to these solutions by creating clear visions of a desirable future and practical starting points through my community work. Creating a vision of a desirable and practical future is a crucial step that is much harder than merely criticising the present.

We cannot know whether these initiatives will succeed, and if they will ever become the mainstream. But for now, nothing else seems as important or as exciting to me.

The Vision: Key points

1. Re-inventing community

Re-connecting to each other and to the natural world is the basis of that desirable future. We need new community-based social structures, in which people are aware of themselves as part of a supportive social network that provides much of their basic needs, plus social and emotional support on a personal basis. (i.e. rather than expecting this from a centralised welfare state)

New and improved skills of personal communication and conflict resolution are needed for this to succeed. Combine those with a revived local economy based upon trust, and driven by quality and environmental awareness, and we have the embryonic form of a new culture.

2.  Trust-based exchange based upon social and environmental needs and wants, not maximising money flows.

Our environmental and social problems are to a large extent a side effect of our out-of-control economy, driven not by what we and the environment needs, but by money flows. That has turned humankind into a global cancer.

Our money-based economy is at the heart of our problems for three main reasons: Doing things for the wrong reasons, hiding real costs, and unfairness.

1. • When economic activities are done for money rather than directly to improve wellbeing for people and planet, many absurd activities result: cutting down rainforests for short term economic gain, the illegal drugs trade and the arms trade as two the the world's largest industries, trafficking in people, most crime and corruption… The list is endless.
   

2. •The cost of an activity is a crucial concept, but if that is understood as cost in money, we miss the point. It hides most of the real social and environmental costs and doesn't provide consumers with the information they need.
   

3. •Monetary exchange is largely unfair, with the powerful setting the terms at the expense of the weak.
   

Only in re-invented communities can we put this right, re-creating trust-based exchange on a co-operative basis, using information systems to inform people about quality and real costs. (See below for more detailed models.)

3. Sustainability as a major social goal.

We are now hugely wasteful, with much production sucked into conflicts of all sorts–political, economic, social–and much more totally useless because it is optimised to make money, not maximise wellbeing.

However, if the above two points become the mainstream, we will have a co-operative economy instead of a competitive economy, driven by improving wellbeing. With it, all of humankind can live in modest material comfort, with much greater social and emotional wellbeing than at present, while maintaining a healthy natural environment.

We will be able to provide good lives for all with vastly less use of energy and resources, and vastly less conflict between people. 

My book, eGaia, Growing a peaceful, sustainable Earth through communication describes the kind of future I would like to see in much greater detail, and also gives an in-depth analysis of current problems.

As some reviewers have said:

    "The main strength of eGaia is that it concentrates on the positive: what kind of society do we really want, and how might we get it?"

    "Alexander paints an unashamedly-Utopian picture of what life could be like in a future eGaian society. He describes the lives of various young, middle-aged and old members of the “Pinecone Network”, a co-operative economic and social grouping of several hundred people in and around a provincial town. There are many such networks, all loosely linked, at local, national and international levels. Together, they constitute a sustainable, co-operative economy made possible by computer-based networks and software specifically designed to facilitate co-operation, sustainability and conflict resolution. "

    (Godfrey Boyle)

    The third part of the book presents an eGaian alternative, setting out principles of successful relationships and conflict resolution embedded within nourishing social structures, a co-operative economy, and practical methods to reduce consumption and energy use to build an environmentally sustainable society.

    (Gill Seyfang)

(Counselling cartoon from eGaia, p. 64)

The Open Co-op

Several of us started the Open Co-op a few years ago, whose purpose is:

    to build a world-wide community of individuals and organisations committed to the creation of a collaborative, sustainable economy

We created a specification for PlaNet, “our dream communication system” and Planet 2010, a fictional story, based in 2010 that “describes how various users benefit from using PlaNet.”