Let's start a village

I'm going to do that mashup thing again where I look at a bunch of dots and posit whether they're connected. Here's the first dot. In the 1970's James Lovelock, a chemist and inventor, then working for NASA, published a radical theory: The earth is not a magically self-regulating planet that has always been and will always be, it is a living organism of which we are all a part. It was the first time people were asked to think about our role on this planet as something other than just beneficiaries of all it has to offer. In his latest book, "Revenge of Gaia," Lovelock declares that humans are doomed, global warming is irreversible and by the end of the century, over 6 billion people will die of droughts, floods, disease and hunger.

In an article in Rolling Stone, Lovelock talks about the ones who will survive by recalling a story about a fire on a plane. Everyone stayed in their seats as they were told, frozen, while the few that survived did so by crawling over their fellow passengers and climbing out the windows. The majority of people are going to stay seated during this crisis and die in their seats. It made me think of The Terminator and how Sarah Connor, knowing what was coming, started preparing herself for the fight ahead. According to Lovelock, there are only two ways to survive this - either by going primitive or by going super high-tech. I think it may be a combination of both but the people who can live in a more primitive way, by growing their own food and creating their own energy, will be at a great advantage.

Which brings me to the second dot. An article in National Geographic was talking about the shanty towns near Bombay and then a friend recalled the same story, something he'd witnessed in Mexico City. Enormous populations of people, hundreds of thousands, have built cities from the ground up, by themselves with no developers, no infrastructure, no government support. While poor, these communities are thriving. They have power, they have water, they've built industries and services, their places are clean and nicely kept and they are carbon neutral. These are the greenest cities in the world; everything is recycled or reused and there is no excess. If there is any kind of collapse in our energy supply or our economies, these communities will be impacted the least. Apparently one in six people lives in a squatter town and that number is expected to triple by 2050.

Then I heard one of the most exciting ideas yet in a PopTech lecture by Adrian Bowyer, a challenge to the concept of money. If every home had a small robot that could manufacture any item - a comb, a bowl, a fork - from a resin made of starch grown in the backyard (i.e. corn or potatoes) and those items went right back into the earth when we were done with them, would we have the same need for factories and therefore, money? He quotes science fiction writer Iain Banks who said that "money is a sign of poverty" to illustrate that we would be richer if we didn't need money at all.

Finally, I keep having a certain conversation with my friends about how disillusioned we are with work and its role in our life. These are people scattered all over the country who don’t know each other. They’re all about 30-45, some married, some with children, some homeowners but what we all have in common is that we grew up middle-class, we went to college and we have to work for a living. A rough illustration of who these people are:

- A single guy in D.C. who likes photography, traveling and Jazz. Works in film restoration, which he likes, but there's not much work and it pays very little.
- A recently married woman in North Carolina, about to have a baby, who works as a graphic designer. Loves designing but hates working all the time.
- A new mother and writer in Santa Monica who has to hire two nannies so that she can work when she'd rather spend the time with her baby but can't afford to.
- A single guy in Los Angeles who works a web producer. He loves computers so spends his time in front of one any way but continually has jobs that require 60-hour work weeks.
- A woman in New York working as a teacher whose job is so stressful, she couldn't do it without her live-in boyfriend helping with house work and daily chores.
- A single woman in San Francisco who has spent the last ten years pursuing a career but finds herself unfulfilled by the work.
- A bi-coastal young man, recently out of college, who's already frustrated with the fact that work takes him away from the projects he feels passionate about.
- A woman with a teenage daughter in the Bay Area who finds herself more motivated than everyone she works for and can't figure out how to dumb herself down.
- A single woman in Los Angeles who wants to help people in her native Cambodia but makes ends meet by working at an interactive agency.

We don’t have enough time to do what we enjoy because we spend our lives working and yet don’t make enough money to buy more time. In the jobs, we’re frustrated with others’ lack of commitment or in the company itself and feel that we deserve better. But in the pursuit of a better job in a better company we finally come to realize that work does not fulfill us enough to justify the time spent doing it. Most of us work to create or promote the sale of goods, goods that we use the money we earn to buy. By any measure, it’s not an efficient use of our time.

My friends are ready to quit this rat race of working and buying and are ready to move somewhere quieter, live a simpler life and grow our own food. The problem, I suppose, is that we’re all cultural people who need other people and art to stimulate us and aren’t really the kind of folk you find in rural towns. Back in April of 2007, I wrote that servitude sucks and that we've been duped because more "primitive" societies enjoy abundant free time. Now, it seems, I'm hearing the same thing from everyone: How do we get to a place where LIVING is what we spend most of our time doing instead of WORKING?

And connecting all these dots, I had an idea. A communal village of like-minded people. We want to grow our own food and learn to make our own energy and live without cars. We want to raise each other's children and imagine a society of the future and sometimes watch 30 Rock. Do you think it's possible? It would have to be in Canada, somewhere north that will be less impacted by global warming. I saw a fantastic photo in National Geographic (a similar one I found on the web is here) that shows a village in Israel, built to be egalitarian in that everyone has equal access to school, church, and other community buildings, in the center of town, but everyone also owns a piece of land, on the outside of town. It's limited as to how many people can live there, about 750, and everyone is independent and yet totally connected to each other.


It looks good. It looks real good. What do you think y'all? Ready to buy some property in Alberta?