I was chatting about this this afternoon with Tree (a very successful sole proprietor, doing work as an independent professional facilitator), who has challenged me before on whether “the work we’re meant to do” really should preferably be in partnership with others. I had lamented that most of the people who had written to me to tell me that thanks to my book they had found their sweet spot (the work they’re mean to do), also told me that this work involves writing or personal coaching or some other individual enterprise. Tree is (like me) a believer that our economy and society would be more sustainable and healthier if it substantially evolved bottom-up, and if it was community-based. I argued that many of the key enterprises of such self-sustaining communities (like renewable energy co-ops, local food co-ops, community theatre, community health clinics etc.) would have to be partnerships — collaborative ventures involving several if not dozens of committed people.

However, I’m also a fan of the idea of a World of Ends as the future of business — the idea that, thanks to Open Source and the Internet, one day every new venture might be created spontaneously as an online collaboration between potential producers and consumers identifying and then filling unmet needs. Is it possible, I wondered, for cooperative enterprises to self-organize around unmet community needs in such a way that no one needs to commit or accept responsibility for anything beyond completion of the next project? Could a whole economy operate without major institutions, without funding for capital projects and infrastructure and ongoing working capital, without commitments for continuity of supply? Is it possible to create a society so resilient that it has no commitments, so that it can therefore “turn on a dime”?

This got me thinking about writing a second edition of (or sequel to) my book, this time not about how to find a sustainable niche in the unsustainable industrial growth economy, but rather presenting a blueprint for creating a whole new, connected, resilient, sustainable, community-based, bottom-up steady-state economy.

If we were to take the World of Ends approach of spontaneous self-organized collaborative enterprise formation, then the 7-step approach to creating a Natural Enterprise within the current economy, outlined in my book, might morph into a 7-step approach to creating Natural Enterprises that are part of a fully Natural Economy, as follows:

The World of Ends gang are essentially globalists, and their vision of customer/supplier self-organized Peer Production depends on the ability to ship products made of atoms (not just those made of bits) worldwide, inexpensively. As we realize that shipping atoms all around the planet is unsustainable, can we scale down the World of Ends model to work at a self-sufficient community level? In other words, could we create a “100-mile economy” for goods and services made of atoms (where nothing and no one is transported more than 100 miles) while still accommodating a “global economy” for goods and services made of bits (that cost essentially nothing to send anywhere)?

To try to envision this, let’s start with a list of the essential goods and services in a sustainable, sufficient, community-based economy (a Natural Economy), delineating those made of atoms (subject to the 100-mile rule) and those made of bits:

A. Essential Goods and Services Made of Atoms:

• food and water (this assumes permaculture principles are used, so there is no importing of chemicals or water to grow food)
• clothing products and related personal services
• building products, furnishings and supplies and related personal services
• energy
• transportation products and related personal services
• health products and related personal services
• live art, entertainment and recreation
• personal education services (to the extent these are needed in a de-schooled society, i.e. personal mentoring to self-directed learners, rather than teaching)

B. Essential Goods and Services Made of Bits:

• designs (of clothing, building, energy, transportation and health products)
• information, ideas, perspectives (Internet) and communication/connectivity/collaboration services
• recordings and broadcasts of art, entertainment and recreation

So how might  this Natural Economy work, where items from list A had to be provided within 100 miles of sources of supply (and ideally within the community itself), but items from list B could be provided from and to anywhere on the planet?

Here’s a Future State Story that imagines how such an economy might work:

So the idea is as follows:

1. Finding the Sweet Spot, my book, was about creating Natural Enterprises within niches of the existing Industrial Growth Economy, in the hope that, if there were enough of them, they would rended that unsustainable economy obsolete. 
2. What I’m talking about above is more radical: It’s about creating Natural Communities, that would be able and motivated to withdraw almost immediately from that Industrial Growth Economy, and that could, by networking together, transition us directly to a new, sustainable Natural Economy. 
3. And by operating on World of Ends principles, these Natural Communities don’t need anyone to take personal responsibility for creating anything – no one needs to advocate, or oppose, any capitalist, socialist, libertarian or any other political or economic ideology. All we need to do is, personally, identify the work we’re meant to do, and then, working individually in networks within and between communities and doing that “work we’re meant to do”, spontaneously self-organize to surface, innovate and deliver solutions to communities’ unmet needs, and then keep those communities sustainable by maintaining those networks, by being resilient, and by operating ‘on principle’.

In such an economy we would all be sole proprietors, ‘free’ agents, Natural Entrepreneurs, working in teams that were continuously self-forming, reorganizing and re-forming, to solve one problem, meet one need, at a time. No responsibility for others, no personal commitments, just doing what we know we’re meant to do, sustainably, responsively, joyfully, in community.

* Not having the skills, self-confidence, ideas, money or time; not being able to handle the stress, the failure or the loneliness; not knowing the “process”; and the fear that “the deck’s stacked against entrepreneurs in favour of big business”.

Y

The part of our discussion that blew me away stemmed from Amy’s description of a session at a retreat Andrew and Amy co-facilitated with a group of young people. I’m going to get her to write up the story and I’ll republish this when she does, but in essence what emerged from this retreat was a sense of disconnection between what we know and what we do. I’ve referred to this before in the narrow context of procrastination (we know what we should do, but something keeps us doing other, more urgent, less important things). Otto Scharmer of Presencing fame, who Andrew and Amy have worked with, refers to this as a temporal disconnect: “the heart feels the future, while the head reflects the past”.

But what Amy was talking about was something even deeper, more present, and more visceral.

My first direct sense of this came from a couple of recent face-to-face conversations with climate scientists and conservationists. They were attempting to talk rationally about what needed to be done in light of the constant barrage of new and startling information about the pace of events precipitating climate change and what would be required to mitigate it and adapt to it. But what was clear from the undertone of their discussions, their expressions, and the anxiety present in their answers to questions, was that they are absolutely terrified. They know it’s too late, that we have almost certainly passed the tipping point and they have a terrible sense of guilt and sadness and dread about what we may have unleashed on the world. But if they lose their composure and outward hopefulness, they know they will lose credibility and their chance to at least get people to do something.

They (and perhaps all of us) are afflicted with a new kind of endemic dissociative mental illness. The dissonance between what we ‘know’, in some primeval way (like the wild animals who sense an impending storm or earthquake or ‘hear’ noises outside conscious perception), and what we ‘think’ based on the day’s news and on the conversations we have about the needs and events of the moment, is utterly inconsolable, irreconcilable. So we try to ignore that dissonance. We pretend it isn’t real.

But when we start to study and learn how the world really works, and what is really going on, that passive, anxious, visceral persona inside us starts to come out. When we spend time in nature, away from the noise and distraction, that profound dis-ease resurfaces, because we resonate then with all-life-on-Earth, and the rest of the species know what is happening, just as we do. And when we try to quiet our minds to learn to be present, to resonate with each other in a direct and visceral way, unmuted by the cultural veil between ourselves and what is real, here, now, the same thing happens. The young people who connected at Andrew and Amy’s retreat felt it, and like the climate scientists, they were overwhelmed by their realizations, by their recognition of what conservationist Terry Glavin calls “the dark and gathering sameness of the world.” They were compelled, as they explored this, to cry out, as one, we were here! as if this message had to be expressed before it was lost – back, perhaps, into the quiet desperate dissonance, or forward to the world where the actions and words of humanity will, once again, no longer be seen or heard.

This is what I have sensed, recognized in the works that have most affected me since I began researching how the world really works and how we might make the world a better place, eight years ago. And I suspect that most of the readers of this blog recognize it, too, sense it, know it in your bones, in your heart of hearts. I have described it, thanks to an article by Richard Bruce Anderson that my friend Dave Smith drew to my attention, as feeling unbearable grief for gaia.

Most of the world, I suspect, does not want to listen to, or recognize, that dissonant other inside them. There is enough suffering, for most, in the immediate moment, and a lack of imagination, curiosity and capacity to really know, anyway.

For those who do have the courage to face that dissonant grief-filled other, perhaps Nancy White’s urging of us all to “build bridges” is what is needed. We can recognize that terrified voice inside us, and see it in some others, young and old, especially the artists and the scientists, those who don’t suffer from our society’s endemic imaginative poverty and who I’ve (probably arrogantly) described as “too far ahead“, and we can sense it in all-life-on-Earth. Perhaps it’s time, in building bridges between our disconnected selves and between ourselves and others, to put the grief into words and pictures, to inform it, to recognize it out loud, to realize it in what we say and in what we do.

This blog has been, mostly, my way of saying, “I am here”, in an attempt to recognize my grief and look for resonance with others’, and ways of coping with it, realizing it.

If enough of us say it, and begin to act on it, then at least our collective realizations might move forward from exclamations of “we were here” to proclamations of “we are here”.

Andrew and Amy’s collaborative website is here.

(image: the anthropik network logo from jason godesky; photos taken yesterday by andrew and amy)

My friend Joe Bageant (who credits his son with the quote) says that “community is born of necessity”. Hopkins village in Belize (photo above) where Joe now lives was founded of necessity three hundred years ago when a group of slave ships was shipwrecked and the escapees needed to find a place to live together. They’ve made their community work, for three centuries, because they had to.

Peel County, in Ontario, was “settled” in 1807 by a group of 13 families (with an average of 15 children each!), mostly United Empire Loyalists who came to Canada with everything they owned, including their farm animals, on foot and by wagon, and squatted in a temporary camp at what is now Yonge and Front Streets, Toronto, for two years, and then made their way up a new rough-hewn road through ancient forest to their 200-acre allotments, which had to be “proved” (two acres cleared for farming, and a log house of a certain minimum size built) within two years or they forfeited the land. One of those families were my great-great-great-great grandparents. They made their community work, for almost a century, because they had to. They worked with their “accidental community” of 200, with vital help from the Mississagua First Nation people (who’d sold the land to the occupying government but retained the river and adjacent lands), to do what had to be done.

For the last couple of years I’ve been studying and meeting people in intentional communities and in the transitions movement. Most ICs are not born of necessity. They are a conscious, often idealistic lifestyle choice. Often members will leave when they feel the community no longer offers them what they really want. The pioneers of Hopkins and Peel had no such option. They stayed, and did their best. They were probably happy, because there was no other choice. Their accidental communities quickly became the only life they could imagine.

My friend Janene has pondered the challenges involved in finding members and location for an intentional community, and concluded that perhaps an “organic community” might be more, er, fitting. My brother (I think) coined the term “gravitational community” — one that has evolved as a result of our propensity to gravitate, over time, towards people with whom we feel affinity. While these constructs seem more sturdy, and adaptive, than an intentional community that is planned out in detail ahead of time, they are still much more inherently fragile and volatile than accidental communities. If we’re not happy, we can and will leave intentional, organic and gravitational communities. We don’t have to settle.

Perhaps that’s why ICs often fail, usually stay small and frequently have to be ‘reformed’ after a major turnover of membership.

It is in our nature, especially those of us who are reasonably self-knowledgeable and informed, not to want to be tied down. Having to lock your life savings into a collaborative venture with a bunch of other people is understandably frightening. At this stage in my life, I’d really rather rent, thank you. I want to be free to change my mind. I want to be free, period. I think that’s why I have gravitated to polyamory so strongly and effortlessly, and found that it really works for me. So while I ponder what group of people I might want to live in community with, and where we might “settle”, I realize that I will always want to be free of long-term commitment, free of the necessity of living with any group of people. So if Joe is right, perhaps I (and most of the other idealists who are constantly thinking about, and forming, and re-forming, and abandoning, intentional communities) am just not meant to live in community. Or at least not in any one community — maybe we idealists are meant to flit, like butterflies (though much less fuel-efficient), full of imagined possibilities, between communities.

This is quite a breakthrough in thinking for me, because it brings home the struggle I have had creating my own (our own, since it would be a collaborative partnership) sustainable, natural enterprise. Which is rather embarrassing since I wrote a book on the subject. My sweet spot (what I do well, that I love doing and that is needed in the world — the intersection of the three circles above) is imagining possibilities, flitting around, seeding ideas that probably would never occur to most others. I don’t want to do that in one natural enterprise (even one whose business is flitting around seeding ideas). Almost all successful, sustainable enterprises (and I’ve looked at a lot over the past 30 years) are partnerships; they’re communities of passion. They are not sole proprietorships. No one person has all the capacities (or time) needed to sustain an enterprise.

Yet a lot of the people I know and love (and a lot of the people who write kind messages to me about my book, saying they’ve now found their sweet spot) don’t want to be in business with others, in partnership. Like me, they want to flit. And, often, they want to do that not only in the work they’re meant to do, but in the life they’re meant (they believe) to live.

I’m not sure if this is a disease of modern affluent-nation civilization, with its cult of the individual. Are we inherently selfish and irresponsible, to want to love and work with others, lots of others, but not be tied down or committed long-term to any one particular group of others? Is there something the matter with us?

Here is why that question is so important:

• I believe we need to create working models of communities and enterprises that are sustainable, to show the world that there is a better way to live and make a living.
• Intentional Communities offer enormous potential to be such models, but because they’re not “born of necessity”, people flit in and out, so they’re often fragile and unstable, which makes them realistic models but not terribly practicable ones.
• Transition Movement Communities offer enormous potential to be such models, but such communities tend to be small towns and cohesive neighbourhoods in certain cities. Most people, unfortunately, live in “accidental communities” in big amorphous cities with no local cohesion; residents often don’t particularly like where they live (they’re only there because it’s handy to their wage-slave workplace) and often don’t know or don’t like their neighbours, and without shared values the Transition Movement is unlikely to take hold in them. 

So the ideal, of combining the best qualities of Intentional Communities (experience with, and desire for, working together,  and shared values) with the best qualities of Transition Movement Communities (shared objectives and shared processes to achieve them), appears to be just that, an ideal. Our desire to flit limits our capacity to create Intentional Community, and our lack of sense of place or affinity with others in modern subdivision neighbourhoods limits our capacity to create Transition Movement Communities in most big cities.

If we were to choose to leave our subdivision neighbourhoods to live in such an ideal place (let’s call it an Intentional Transition Community, or ITC for short), many of us would want the freedom to flit, which would likely doom such communities to failure.
And likewise, if we were to choose to leave our wage slave jobs, rather than moving to work in idealistic Natural Enterprises (built on the strengths of self-sufficiency, partnership, passion, responsibility and sustainability) within Intentional Transition Communities, many of us would prefer to be our own bosses, flitting from assignment to assignment, not tied down to business partners no matter how strong our affinity with them.

This is a serious problem, folks. If our software programming is to be free, to flit, to be in total control over what we do and who we do it with, and where, then we’re never going to be able to create sustainable models of how to live (ITCs) and make a living (NEs). And the Transition Movement will never be able to catch on in the big cities.

Eventually, thanks to climate change and the End of Oil and a host of other simmering crises, our civilization is going to collapse, and so then will our cities. Then, we will have no choice but to either flee the cities and suburbs to live in working Transition Communities in smaller centres, or set aside our dislike of our urban neighbours, declare our neighbourhoods as Transition Communities, and learn fast how to live collaboratively, sustainably, and self-sufficiently. Either is likely to be a mighty ugly transition.

But maybe there’s another way. There are several hundred million affluent-nation baby boomers poised to retire over the next decade. And there are several hundred million affluent-nation Gen Y’ers poised to enter the workforce over the next decade. These are the two most populous generations in the history of the planet.

This idea has all sorts of things going for it:

• The boomers know a lot about business, so they can mentor the Gen Y’ers (who really need work) to get the NEs up and running, and provide largely-volunteer labour (in return for the right to flit, and the satisfaction, at last, of doing meaningful work)
• The ITCs would have a good demographic mix (and hence essential diversity) because of representation from these two very different generations 
• We catch both generations in transition, when they’re changing lifestyles anyway

The big question, as for all pioneers, is where will these ITCs be located? There are, after all, no new frontiers to stake out any more. But land and buildings, these days, are a lot cheaper than they’ve been in years. There are whole neighbourhoods begging for buyers, and a lot of small towns and farm communities that were deep-sixed by globalization and corporatism, and have never recovered, with high vacancy rates. It will take some care, and research, to stake out areas that are suitable — warm, relatively unpolluted, with good soils and solar energy potential — and to put together enough adjacent parcels to comprise a true community without bullying the remaining neighbours, but this should be manageable.

The biggest challange, perhaps, will be the scarcity of knowledge and capacities (such as those in the chart above, plus new skills like permaculture and transition infrastructure design) and the imaginative poverty that our ghastly dumbed-down consumer society, mainstream media and education systems have bequeathed us. The answer to that, I think, is unschooling. We’re never too old to learn, and we have tools and knowledge available to us now, online, that we couldn’t have dreamed of even a decade ago. We can learn from and teach each other.

And the Transition Movement, which has been brilliant at capturing public and media attention with a simple, practicable methodology at the right place and the right time, could help us to organize and publicize the whole ITC movement.

I know, it’s still awfully idealistic. And I’m still nagged by a real doubt that many of us are ready, at this stage, to make a commitment to ITCs and NEs that doesn’t allow us the freedom to flit when we feel like it.

But imagining possibilities is what I do. And this seems to me to be a real one. So what do you think, and how might we make it happen, on the same scale as the Transition Movement?