A local produce shop sells some of my #cards and they wanted more #vegetable-themed ones. Recently I’ve got an idea for #futuristic #giant #vegetables. Not sure this will be welcomed! 😉 #carrot #carrots #drawing #sketch #sketching #linandaras_art #future #hitech (at Linandara art & craft)
A small #sketch of local #hills with a few scattered #futuristic #buildings #Newtownpowys #wales #scifi #fantasy #white #green #future #architecture #canvas #watermedia #fields #hedges #towers #linandaras_art (at Linandara art & craft)
Sometimes I feel like I have to hold the world by hand, just as I did when my kids were little. I am an overprotective parent. But the world doesn’t need me dragging it. I wanted to build a unique place, an intentional community working to make human life better. But it is already getting better by means of us experimenting, living, evolving anyway. Even if I found 100 like minded people to help me, we only could do a drop in the ocean of human endeavour. Maybe it is the time to let the world go?…
Building the Good New Town as a non-dogmatic community – Good New Town
If the word eco-village is too loaded with images of low tech and countryside to be used for a nature- and future- friendly intentional community also in towns and cities, what could it be called? There is a therm for a nuclear family. Maybe there should be one for a Nuclear Community, as an alternative building block of any society? To put everything on the shoulders of a small present day family is being too harsh on people. Wait… Then if you say “I plan to build a Nuclear Community here” the residents will suspect you are planning to install a small nuclear power plant in their neighborhood…
Maybe it just has to be a “Good New Town“. I live in Newtown, Powys. Newtown is small yet it is the biggest town in Mid Wales. It is old. We all heard about “Good Old Days”, “Brave New World” and “The Good Life”… Some may also know about “Good Life Project” and “Good Sense Foundation”. – those are my influences for the name.
Whatever the name, I think for true happiness and healthy development this community should not be dogmatic. In his “What’s Left”
Another interesting therm I came across is “Sacred Naturalism“: “a special respect and care for the scientific approach to understanding the natural world, and to the natural world generally”. “Sacred Naturalism honors and serves that part of human nature that seeks transcendence and longs for sacred community and ritual. It answers the real human need to feel a part of something greater than the self and the longing some feel for a connection (oneness) with community/nature/the cosmos. Reverence and awe of the natural world is enough for sacred naturalists who do not believe in a traditional, anthropomorphic god, but nonetheless view science and mystery as both valuable and compatible”. And there also is Sacred Ecology: “Contemplative practices, rituals, ceremonies, and other activities in the world that bring people into a closer relationship with the natural environment and other beings engenders deep caring. Indeed, many sacred naturalists share a desire to protect and nurture ecological wisdom, the rights of nature, a sustainable future, as well as human flourishing and well being”.
I think it is very important to have the feeling of sacred, mystery and communion among people, and there is no additional need for any supernatural beliefs to cultivate those feelings. The world and its people are beautiful and mysterious enough already. That said, you can not and should not force this point of view to anybody.
We are humans. All our friends, mentors and family are. And we are here, dominating this planet. If we never developed, would other intelligent species took over the planet one day? Could dolphins, elephants, crows, chimps, dogs or perhaps rats give rise to a new civilization? Would they be “gentler” with the Nature and each other than we have been? We can not know at the moment.
For all our sins, we are the only force so far which could potentially save life from a global disaster like an asteroid strike.
Wishing for our civilization to disappear, I think, is an immature way of thinking happening sometime withing environmentally aware community. I too might have been like this – when I was ten.
In the book “Ecovillage at Ithaca” (a useful record of an ecovillage development and a part of my ever growinglist of potentially useful books for creating new ways of living)
Liz Walker starts with describing her young son’s attitude, his wish for humans to “just die of” because of species disappearing at an incredible rate. She herself, although shocked, could see his point, as “at the beginning of the 21st century, we face a world that is falling apart at the seams“…
Is it? Or we humans just intrinsically like tragedy, our media picks up on this and paint us a, alas, desirable picture of “our world … drenched in the blood of seemingly endless warfare” and “miserable living conditions for much of the world’s population“.
If we wont to build a real better future, we have to deal with facts, not the ever-changing media theater. Violence, disease and poverty are the enemies of our future. What has been happening to them?
First, I would recommend the well known Steven Pinker’s book
where he meticulously proves the diminishing of violence through the history and talks about the reasons for this.
Here you can find the data on the global decrease of poverty.
“Historical data shows that global life expectancy has increased drastically over the last couple of centuries, with substantial long-run improvements in all countries around the world” – according to Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser. Is this data good? Let me know if you find otherwise.
Life is wonderful. One of its miracles is the ability to recover. There have been a series of devastating mass extinctions throughout the geologic history of our planet. In some cases up to 60 percent of species were gone. Of course, it took Nature from 20 to 100 million years to recover the biodiversity (see
for more information). We may argue, that the life would never evolve to be so inventive and resilient if not for those extinction events, but we don’t need another one. According to WWF at the moment we might be loosing between 0.01 and 0.1 percent of all species per year which is 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. We took over the planet, this changed all the ecosystems… Bit since we realised what is happening we ought to change. It could be that the knowledge itself makes it impossible for humanity to avoid the coming change.
Living this change, this is the purpose of the Good New Town project. It has to have solid foundation: verifiable data. Doom and gloom might induce some people to act – for a while. Only complete honesty can sustain the movement.
So let’s question every piece of information coming to us, examine the evidence and try to accept the world as it is.
Originally posted at http://goodnewtown.uk/wishing-humans-dead/
Here’s my contribution to the debate
Many small scale experiments for a more resilient future
Now that we have an opportunity to rethink the future of agriculture, land management and the life of rural communities in Wales, let people to experiment and to find out what will work. There is no need to play havoc with all of the rural economy at once but please allow innovation and initiative on a small scale, as long as there is no clear and obvious risk to people, animals and the environment. There must be people willing to experiment, creating all sorts of new businesses, eco-villages, homesteads and seasteads, various intentional communities. Give them a good fighting chance then take evidence-based decisions, not affected by fads or overrated opinions of the most vocal of lobbies. Even then, no government should ever place all eggs in the same basket (be this sheep farming or timber). Diversity in business models and lifestyles improves the resilience of any economy just like biodiversity helps ecosystems to survive changes and hard times.
Why the contribution is important
Presently there are lots of things going wrong with our lives. Our towns are surrounded by countryside but people may feel very distant from it. The farmland creates backdrop to their lives but is inaccessible due to lack of footpaths, public transport and human connection to the farming community, lack of internet – and lack of interest too. This is not a healthy relationship. The people are suffering, stuck to cities and towns with ridiculously small gardens and manicured parks. People need real nature and countryside for mental and physical health. People need fresh quality food, need connection to the land and to the community. So, we need our intelligence to develop a way of living in harmony with nature, surrounded by nature everywhere where we are. I am thinking in the direction of sustainable small scale farming, food forests, “garden cities”, decentralisation, edible landscapes, living roofs and walls, passive houses, forest farming, green burial sites, silvopasture, permaculture, aquaponics, real community gardens serving real communities, etc. – whatever works. I believe human activity and flourishing could be conducted within a healthy ecosystem made of us, our stuff, wide variety of plants and animals.
I am an artist and a geographer interested in creating a prototype semi-rural intentional community (an eco-village, an eco-block or an eco-neighborhood), an ongoing experiment for a better way of living, more sufficient and efficient, closer to Nature, working with the help from newest technology. An open lab of an honest, creative and compassionate life, strong friendly community, better health and well-being. Doing research into reintroducing wildlife, into more efficient food production and waste recycling systems, into automation, working on the new ways to get energy, new building methods, new educational systems, restoring useful agricultural and building practices from the past, and so on. People of various interests and abilities creating better lives for themselves, their friends, neighbours and families, ultimately, for the whole Earth. In the world obsessed with divisions this should be a place of honest enquiry, free of prejudices and any party rhetoric.
What we need is relaxing of planing permissions and other regulations for experimental / alternative communities, eco-villages, or self-built houses; we need land and we need grants. It is vitally important that public money won’t go to some smoke screen / green wash projects for clever bureaucrats but to real people building real future. There also should not be any exploitation of vulnerable and gullible “volunteers”, like in some modern social enterprises. People who will be living and working in those future communities are also the best candidates for building them.
The wast green spaces of Wales are treasures. We have a chance to make them also different to all other rural parts of the world in being a magnet for innovation and future-friendly experiment, brain-and skill- gain rather than drain, place for openness and cooperation, honest work for common good.
If you are interested in participating, please join the New Good Town project athttp://goodnewtown.uk/ and our Facebook page athttps://www.facebook.com/groups/goodnewtown/
by AlexandraCook on October 04, 2016 at 11:27AM
Could our cities be as full of non human life as our forests? Living walls, green roofs, reintroduced wildlife, food forests and orchards along the roads, pastures and meadows for the squares… I can imagine that.
Worry does not empty tomorrow of sorrow – it empties today of strength.
I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don’t feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.
Foragers delight. .. Imagine if all green spaces between houses were filled with edibles: fruits, nuts, berries, greens, roots. I don’t think that easy growing plants would be more difficult to maintain than present nonsense shrubs and trees and lawns. Local residents would care more for their surrounding if it fed them.
I do get upset and angry. But then I think the best way would be to do something positive, however small. I am trying to start an “ecovillage” or intentional community where I live – as an evolving template for future better living founded on intellectual and emotional honesty and compassion. If the whole world is mostly built with globally-minded, happy, busy, freedom- and neighbor-loving interconnected communities, hatred-driven people will have no places to recruit.
I do get upset and angry. But then I think the best way would be to do something positive, however small. I am trying to start an “ecovillage” or intentional community where I live – as an evolving template for future better living founded on intellectual and emotional honesty and compassion. If the whole world is mostly built with globally-minded, happy, busy, freedom- and neighbor-loving interconnected communities, hatred-driven people will have no places to recruit.
My reply to a question posted by the New Humanist magazine: “
What three things should the city of the future contain?”
1. It should be made of many intentional communities/“tribes” as building blocks.
2. It should have as much nature/wildlife incorporated as possible.
3. It should have education, recreation facilities and meaningful jobs for all the spectrum of people living in it.
My reply to a question posted by the New Humanist magazine: “
What three things should the city of the future contain?”
1. It should be made of many intentional communities/“tribes” as building blocks.
2. It should have as much nature/wildlife incorporated as possible.
3. It should have education, recreation facilities and meaningful jobs for all the spectrum of people living in it.
Think to yourself that every day is your last; the hour to which you do not look forward will come as a welcome surprise.