How to Save the World

Dave Pollard believes we’re in deep shit [and so do I] but he’s also offering positive solutions:

A period of great change is always turbulent and unsettling, and the transformation to a Relater-Sharer culture won’t be achieved in our lifetime. So we will need to be, like all pioneers, patient, indefatiguable, and aware that the beneficiaries of what we do starting now will be our descendents, future generations who will only know us from stories. As human beings, and as the species that created this mess in the first place, we owe them no less. We know, instinctively, that that is why we’re here.

Highly recommended: read The Truth About Nature, a three-part essay and then follow as many of Dave’s suggestions as you can:

The idea that six billion of us are needlessly and voluntarily living profoundly destructive, counter-intuitive, unhappy, unhealthy, unnatural, hard, self-limiting, self-sacrificing, deprived lives, and that all we need to do is learn the lessons of nature, change our minds, walk away from civilization and create an stunningly better, joyful life, and save the world in the process, is just too radical, too insane an idea for most people to accept.

I can accept that. Whether I can do it is another story. But Dave is starting to make me believe that I can:

The truth about nature is that she is inside us, all around us, just waiting for us to ask her what to do. The truth about civilization is that it was an honest mistake, an invention that was necessary at the time, a mere 30,000 years ago, when nature appeared to be letting us down and we thought we could do better. But now it has outlived its usefulness, and is out of control, and threatens the survival of all life on our planet, so it’s time to let it go. It’s time to move forward and imagine and invent a new culture, a sustainable one that works for all creatures on Earth, drawing on the best learnings from nature and the best innovations from civilization.