Electricity and heat are produced by small local stations the size of garages, each one serving its own community of 12 to 20 homes. The fuel sources vary, depending on the climate, from solar to wind to biomass to trash. The community stations supplement home power stations—rooftop photovoltaic collectors and basement fuel cells—which supply most of the power that families need. Each central station also purifies water for the community and processes its liquid and solid wastes.
Even though resources are primarily produced and used locally, there is considerable trade among neighborhoods. Some communities specialize in growing particular types of food or in making unique clothing. One may have a healer with special talents. Others might have brilliant technical specialists who help maintain the power plants or who mentor youngsters in the upkeep of homes and gardens. Trade is almost always done by means of barter; goods may be exchanged for labor and vice versa. Food, however, is considered sacred and is never traded for anything except other food. The free giving of food is one of the highest social obligations and one of the fastest ways to achieve status in the community.
Laws and cultural norms are mostly determined locally. Neighborhoods have names and can seem a bit tribal: Residents of a particular neighborhood are often related by blood and usually share lifestyles and religious values. Although most are racially homogenous, some communities have chosen to go the full tribal route, particularly those who still have historic tribal roots.
Tribalism is no longer considered racist—as it was before the Crash—because “other” no longer means “inferior,” “competitor,” or “to be conquered.” Physical and cultural differences are respected and even celebrated. People living in a community understand that their neighborhood is theirs, that they are who they were born to be, and that every other neighborhood has an equal right to be itself.
Each community administers its own justice. The concepts of sin and punishment, which grew out of the king-based religions of ancient Samaria, with their idea that human nature is evil, have been rejected. People have returned to the concepts of harmony and disharmony, balance and imbalance, reflecting how humans had lived for millions of years before the Younger-Culture Eruption from 6000 bce to 2012 ce. The assumption is that people are essentially good and their misbehavior is an aberration, not the converse.
When a person’s behavior steps outside the standards of the community, everybody feels it as a ripple of imbalance within the neighborhood. People gather in the community center to discuss with the out-of-balance person and those he may have harmed ideas about how to come back into harmony and restore balance. When Americans figured out that having the world’s fastest-growing prison population was a sign of cultural failure and noticed that tribal people had never had police or prisons, we relearned the ancient ways of valuing every member of the community and working as a group to restore harmony. Only rarely is a person so far out of balance that he must travel to a refuge or an outside community of healers.
Teaching is done by groups of families, who take turns hosting schools of 5 to 10 children. The goal is to make sure that all children grow up with strong self-esteem, a sense of personal power, and certainty about their options and passions. Each teenager chooses a career based on his own passions; then an appropriate mentor in that trade or profession teaches the teenager during an apprenticeship, whether in power-plant maintenance, sewing, or surgery.
Negative labels such as attention deficit disordered and learning disabled are recognized as vestiges of the Bad Old Days, also known as the Era of the Corporate Kings, when schools were run like factories, with children as standardized products on a conveyor belt. These negative labels simply described children whose gifts weren’t useful to corporations, children who wouldn’t work well in factories or cubicles. (People woke up when they noticed that there were no diagnostic categories, therapies, or medications being developed or sold by the big drug companies for “art disabled” or “creativity disordered” or “music deficient” children because these were disorders of talents that the corporations did not care about.) Instead of trying to determine what’s wrong with children, the goal of education now is to determine their individual gifts and help them develop these into both vocations and avocations.
There are still universities, but they’re no longer beholden to corporate interests to fund their research or determine their curricula. Americans awakened to realize that “government of, by, and for the people” meant that the government wasn’t the enemy and its function was, first and foremost, to make sure that basic human needs were met and human rights respected. When multinational corporations tried to usurp this function, attempting to control human needs such as those for health care and food and to limit human rights by placing themselves above living, breathing people in the legal hierarchy, the laws that Thomas Jefferson first put into place to restrain corporations were restored. Corporate charters now must be renewed annually, and the first obligation of a corporation is to its community; the profit it makes for its shareholders comes second, as was the case for the first 100 years of American history.
Even if this image of a future America sounds unrealistic or idealistic, it’s not. It’s simply a practical way to live. Americans have used all aspects of it at various times over the past 300 years. Even if it sounds nostalgic, it’s not. It’s based on the way most stable human cultures have functioned for 200,000 years or more, the way most Native American cultures have functioned for 10,000 years, and the way a dwindling number of tribal, intentional, and remote small-town communities function in America today.
It’s quite different, however, from the way typical Americans experience daily life at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Instead of a life filled with family and friends, in the past 30 years we’ve entered a time of hyper-competition, fear of HMOs and insurance companies, and the frenetic struggle to earn more, more, more and buy more, more, more. We wake up to nightmares of downsizing and stock market crashes, and we try not to wonder what will happen when the world’s oil runs dry sometime in the twenty-first century. We pretend that it’s normal that suicide is the second-leading cause of death among schoolchildren and that it is merely unfortunate that the majority of America’s lakes, streams, and coastal areas are measurably polluted with toxic waste and human pathogens.
The same industry that brought us DDT now brings us bio-engineered foods that may well usher in the silent spring that Rachel Carson warned us about, but we consider it impolite to discuss in the media the millions of dollars that chemical companies and agribusiness give our politicians, the employment revolving door between these corporations and the governmental agencies that regulate them, and the growing stranglehold that corporations have on the funding and the publication of university research.
What happened?
Somewhere along the way—many would say between the development of the advertising industry in the 1920s and the time in the 1960s when, for the first time, more than half of all American households owned televisions—we lost our bearings. We became confused and disoriented, shifting our attention from our communities, neighbors, and families to an electronic neurological drug delivered hourly by multinational corporations.
In our collective mythic identity, we moved from the truly middle-class life of Ralph Kramden’s and Lucy Ricardo’s 1950s apartments to Frasier’s multimillion-dollar penthouse, complete with a beautiful maid and expensive furniture. The Joneses with whom we tried to keep up shifted from the neighbors we actually knew to those we watched on television, where the average home cost more than $1 million.
A national explosion of upscaling brought us a country studded with child-care facilities for our preschoolers and TV sets in every bedroom of our school-age children. Fully half of all American children at the beginning of the twenty-first century come home to a house silent but for the television.
Within two generations we have become the most voracious consumers on earth, using 30 times the planetary resources per ca
pita consumed by a typical resident of India. As we slid from an American culture based on community into one based on consumerism, we turned this nation from a rich garden into a giant mall.
Although feel-good evangelists for a consumer culture preach that there’s enough for everybody, the fact is that if every human on earth adopted the lifestyle of a poverty-level American, we would need the natural resources of at least four earths to sustain that level of consumption. We turned the poor of the world into our slaves: Peasants in China work for $1 a day so that we can buy cheap jeans, faux Tiffany lamps, and inexpensive area rugs. We didn’t end slavery; we simply exported it.
This wasn’t lost on the rest of the world. Planetwide, people watching American television began to demand the standard of living they saw on Beverly Hills 90210 and Baywatch, a standard of living their governments could never deliver because the planet simply doesn’t have the resources for 6 billion people to live that way.
Some of the world’s poor believed in the American Dream that if they worked hard and long enough in sweatshops, they could lift themselves out of poverty. A few did reach a local version of the middle-class life in countries such as Korea and Thailand. But when labor became expensive in those places because of this upward mobility, post-GATT multinational corporations simply moved their factories from one nation to another, leaving economic and environmental disasters in their wakes.*
As a result, the developing world began to revolt. From Chiapas, Mexico, to Nicaragua to Indonesia to the Congo, people rebelled against governments aligned with multinational corporate interests that used the people of these countries as cheap labor to supply America’s stores. From the outback of Australia to the tribal lands of North America, indigenous people protested the strip-mining and the destruction of their environments to provide cheap metals for a throwaway American culture. From the rain forests of Borneo to the jungles of Colombia to the forests of California, local residents protested with increasing noise and violence the theft of their trees to feed the junk mail avalanche and the furniture fads of Americans, Japanese, and western Europeans.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the more loudly people protested, the more repressive governments became. Intelligence agencies were omnipresent, and America trained the armies of the developing world’s governments in the subtle and coarse arts of brainwashing and torture, the tools for which were provided by multinational weapons companies. By the year 2000, the world’s food supplies were so poisoned that Inuit people were told not to eat seal blubber, their traditional delicacy, because of dioxins; fishermen from California to Michigan to Georgia were warned about mercury contamination of seafood; and red-tide algal, bacterial, and viral contamination was wiping out shellfish and coral around the planet.
Then things got really bad in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
We Americans first realized that change was necessary when poor countries began to withhold their oil from us. Some, such as Myanmar (Burma), were down to just two- or three-year oil reserves. They couldn’t pump cheap oil to sell to us any longer even if they wanted to. We could no longer just send in the Marines to protect our “vital national interest” in $1-per-gallon gasoline; we had to change the way we lived.
But we were facing this problem in the twenty-first century—the age of the automobile and the airplane. The shock of skyrocketing gasoline prices came first, and it toppled our stock markets, collapsing a worldwide economic house of cards. But we had to recover: there were simply too many humans on the planet to ignore.
It took from the time of the earliest fossils of fully modern humans, 200,000 years ago, until the year 1800 for us to produce the first 1 billion members of the species Homo sapiens. That 200,000-year-long feat was then repeated in only 130 years, as we hit a population of 2 billion in 1930. Our population grew to 3 billion in only 30 years (1960). We added the fourth billion in 14 years (1974), the fifth billion in 13 years (1987), and the sixth billion in 12 years (1999).
By the year 2000, humans outnumbered rats as the most numerous mammalian species on earth and had gone from consuming about 3 percent of the planet’s total resources and 5 percent of its fresh water in 1800 (when there were 1 billion of us) to more than 50 percent of each. This left all other plants and animals to fight among themselves for the remaining half of the planet’s resources, and they didn’t do it particularly well: in the year 2000, species were becoming extinct at a rate of more than 120 a day.
We entered what Richard Leaky called the Sixth Extinction about the same time that the climate became violently unstable and butterflies nearly vanished from North America. Droughts and floods swept the land; tornadoes, frosts, and killer heatwaves occurred in places that had never seen them before; insect and rodent populations exploded in some areas, and wildlife and forests died off on a massive scale in others. We realized that not only was plant and animal life on the planet in crisis but, for the first time in history, so was human life.
At first we told ourselves that this was a predictable result of human nature. We believed that we were created defective, accursed sinners and that it was human nature to murder, ignore the environment, and stockpile personal wealth while ignoring other people’s poverty. We thought that this was how it had always been, and we even guessed that it was because of a stupid mistake a woman had made millennia ago—a deal with a snake that justified 6,000 years of the oppression of women worldwide.
And then we noticed that there were other peoples who were not this way. We’d always called them “primitive” and “stupid” because we found it easy to kill them, to steal their lands, and to take their people as slaves. Our technological superiority was, in our minds, the proof of our cultural superiority. Some of us had even organized groups to evangelize them and convert them to our way of living because we were so certain that we represented the pinnacle of human evolution.
But they lived sustainably. Their populations were stable. Many didn’t even have words for war in their vocabularies, and genocide was a totally alien concept to them. They didn’t build prisons, and withholding health care or food from people was unthinkable. Their children didn’t commit suicide.
What we found when we boiled it down was that our ways of acting and living were not as destructive to the world’s ecosystems and our own future as our way of thinking was. Our behavior over the long term always derives from our beliefs, and the toxic beliefs we held in our culture—that people are inherently evil, that humans are meant to live hierarchically, that women are responsible for the “fall” of humankind, that happiness comes from having more toys, that nature is something different and separate from us, and that God or divinity or spirit is distant and is to be put in a box or a building and visited only once a week—are what brought us to the brink of destruction. Even our initial attempted solutions were grounded in the belief that the world is a machine and that we need only find the right levers: salvation through action.
So, the difficult reality of the end of the era of cheap oil and fabulous American wealth in the midst of a poverty-struck world caused us, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, to begin systematically reinventing our culture by changing our core assumptions about what is real and true and meaningful.
At first it seemed impossible; the bad news was that it is exceedingly difficult for a culture to change its foundational beliefs. But we made it happen. The good news was that we’d already made several very radical belief-shifts in just the previous few generations (resulting in the enfranchisement of women, the abolition of slavery, and the outlawing of segregation) and that we didn’t need to invent new stories from scratch—we only needed to borrow them from the older cultures that still inhabited our planet.
The voluntary simplicity movement had already gained a number of adherents by 2000, but by 2020, eight years after the Crash, it was a national way of life. Americans awakened from their drugged stupor and disconnected their cable TVs, preferring only local news and programming. It
became fashionable to wear clothes until they were threadbare, to live in smaller and simpler houses, and to use things until they were totally worn out. New meant “to replace something that is no longer useable” instead of “to make you happy just because of the novelty”; it ceased to be a useful word for advertising. People recycled not because it was fashionable or even because it was mandated; there just weren’t very many disposable things around anymore. Folks saved jars and string and wire, and they handed down or passed around clothes their children had outgrown. A way of life that had once seemed quite normal but then was derided by the corporate-driven consumerism religion of the late twentieth century, returned. It fit Americans comfortably, like an old shoe.
As we reconnected with family, community, nature, and spirit, we discovered the deepest meanings of life in ways that were often startling to those who had been raised on a diet of shock television, dysfunctional schools, and violent movies. Those who believed that the fastest route to happiness was to go shopping discovered the shallowness of their previous lives and the richness of family, friends, and personal communication. In the late twentieth century, only those who worked with the dying and heard their final regrets knew that at the ends of their lives people never wished they had bought more things or worked more hours. By the mid-twenty-first century, it was common knowledge that true happiness and a meaningful day-to-day life come through creative work, gentle play, and connection with others.
Out of this new way of life, we naturally began to take better care of our environment, to live more lightly on the earth, and to reverse the toxic slide that seemed so irreversible during the Era of the Corporate Kings.
Can you imagine this new America? Will you help us build it?
I know you can.
From Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century,
ed. Marianne Williamson, © 2001, published by NAL Trade.
The Thom Hartmann Reader Page 27
