If we want to grow a plant, we give it water and food, and it needs sunlight.
We try to make it happy,
It’s the same with human life. For our human life to flourish and thrive in the future, we have to create a world that supports people and supports children to grow up happy and secure.
There is no choice but to have a positive future. It’s our only option for survival. life-supporting is entirely practical. Either the future will be positive or we all die.
We need positive visions of what we can build to take us into the future.
we need a positive vision to inspire to lift the heart so people feel there’s hope, to make something good for the future. a vision which inspires and delights makes us feel it’s worth it.
How do we want to live? We have the creative adventure to set up ways to sustain life for our future. what say we use our creative imagination to make a positive vision we can create together, even if we didn’t have an extreme life and death crisis, we’d still want to do this.
We need to not only survive, but bring out the glorious things about it.
books and films create dystopias to warn us what not to do. We are presented with all kinds of terrible visions, hardly any positive ones. We can’t support life with negative visions. who wants to live like those horrible dystopias?
Without a positive life supporting .vision, we won’t be motivated enough to do it, why bother? we’ll give up, like many people on this planet at the moment I know think there’s no future.
Throughtopia
In New Zealand, most of us will need to relocate sooner or later, from coastal regions with sea level rise, or from flood plains, or steep hillsides, which are prone to landslides, the most deadly thing at the moment.
There are two scenarios for our future, to make the way we live more life-supporting, when less food and fuel is coming in from other countries.
We relocate, and rebuild for a way of life that will support us into the future.
Or we stay where we are, and organise ourselves in new more life-supporting ways.
If everyone tries to do it individually, that would be very hard. In the long term, we can’t do this on our own. We need to build a new way of living, together, in our local communities.
Let’s imagine the scenario which will become more and more common, where an entire local community needs to relocate, and set up something new, together.
How will we develop the new place, to make it life-supporting for our future? It’s likely to look pretty different to what we’ve got now.
How do we design our layout?
What are we going to build?
What materials do we use to build with? Hempcrete?
Roads? for what kind of transport?
Do we need a community hall?
Do we lay out the houses in a different way?
How and where do we grow our food?
Do we grow food as a communal project?
How do we organise to share it around?
What social structure are we going to build it for?
How do you see that influencing the rebuild?
Working together as a community
Most of us have little experience of how to work together as a community.
How do we nurture our community of people, so we can work together in a constructive, healthy, happy way?
What does community look like to you?
What new skills do we need to learn, to function together as a community?
What arrangements /institutions do we need to establish?
What kind of family systems do we set up?
How do we look after children, elders and sick?
How do we raise and educate the children for this?
In the following pages we will explore these questions in more detail.
in Transition Towns. Cultural transformation is a name for this,