SELF-RELIANT AND ORGANIC COMMUNITIES, VILLAGES AND NATIONS

 

SELF-RELIANCE, SELF-SUSTAINANCE AND BEING ORGANIC ARE  THE MAGIC SOLUTION FOR COMMUNITIES, VILLAGES AND NATIONS IN THE HIGHLY POLLUTION-PRONE, MARKET-RIDDEN, DEGENERATED WORLD TODAY.

 

“They think the empire will eventually disintegrate…In anticipation of that collapse, islands of refuge must be prepared.” ~ SCHWARZ AND SCHWARZ, 1998, p. 3.

“A quiet and quite unexpected revolution in simple living is steadily transforming our society. Slowly but surely an ever growing number of people are consciously rejecting the traditional trappings of affluence…. The change is as significant as that from agriculture to industrial society. Maybe 10% of US people have made the change.” ~ D. ELGIN, Garden of simplicity, YES, Winter 2001.

 “Thousands are forming a new generation of ‘tribes’ — small ‘intentional’ communities where people care for each other and live sustainably….millions of people, unsung heroes of a new era, are already at work constructing the building blocks of a post-corporate, post-capitalist civilisation. They are demonstrating alternatives far more attractive and viable than socialism or the failed economic models of the former Soviet Union.”            ~ D. KORTEN, “The post corporate world”, The Ecologist, 29. 3. March/April, 1999, 219.

“It is a contest between the competing goals of economic growth to maximise profits for absentee owners versus creating healthy communities that are good places for people to live…..All over the world people are indeed waking up to the truth about economic globalisation and are taking steps to reclaim and rebuild their local communities.” ~ T. SCHROYER, ED., Towards a ‘World That Works, 1997.

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself….Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for. .. Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.”                 ~ RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“Every child, by the time he leaves elementary school, should know firsthand—not from bloody video!—how to grow his own food, raise chickens, and cook them, so that when this crack-a joke, house-of-gadgets of a society crumbles, and the last investment banker lies dead of starvation in front of an empty deli, he can be happily whistling in the fields with his little hoe.”                               ~ F. MATTE, A Reasonable Life, 1993.

 

 

 

A “survivalist” does not wish to depend on other people, or the government to take care of him/her. We are in the midst of a fundamentally new phenomenon in the modern human experience, the creation of a new civilization from the bottom up. Ordinary people are doing these things. Most are driven more by a simple desire to create viable living spaces in the midst of a troubled world than by any grand visions of planetary change.

Maybe, if enough people learn to be self-reliant, it will send a loud and clear message in that it provides a proven method for restoring a sense of self-reliance and community to people who have lost their faith in their ability to provide for themselves. “Worldwide there are between 5000 and 25000 communal projects in which hundreds of thousands of people work together co-operatively. Today Australia has some 100 — 200 intentional communities. Most of them have between ten and thirty members…”, Hagmaier Etal writes in Eurotopia, Directory of Intentional Communities and Ecovillaghes in Europe (Okodorf, Germany, 2000).

However, today’s mainstream world still lies deep in a system that breeds dependence and stifles self-reliance! Self-reliance is something that seems lost on most of us these days. If one has not awakened to self-reliance, chances are his life is not his own. Today we live in a highly globalized hi-tech world where almost 99% of its 7 billion people are living as ‘other people’ tell them how ‘ It indeed is a Herculean task to be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else. The person has been living in an image of what the people around them have created. In other words, in order to be a part of something (society), man has lost his.

You came into this life with the only real possessions that ever matter — your body, the time that you have to live, your energy, the thoughts and ideas unique to you, and your autonomy. But over the years you tend to give all of this away. You spend years working for others — they own you during that period. You get needlessly caught up in people’s games and battles, wasting energy and time that you will never get back. You come to respect your own ideas less and less, listening to experts, conforming to conventional and readymade opinions. Without realizing it you squander your independence, everything that makes you a creative individual. No wonder, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote: “The most ‘dangerous’ man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.”

Thus most modern humans are led by the collective ‘intelligence’ en-mass. The realities reveal that collective ‘intelligence’ (or its shadow, collective stupidity) has been at work for quite some time now. And tragically, the development is not without its grave consequence: this long onslaught of collective ‘intelligence’ (stupidity) has rendered individual intelligence and intellect as DEGENERATED and SHRINKING. Thus human individual creativity and other problem-solving capacity have taken a severe beating in our day. No wonder, we are now inundated in all kinds of crises, many of them reaching their catastrophic tipping points (This rationale has already been discussed in chapters 1, 2 and 11).

The best writers on Self-reliance, like H L Mencken and Ralph Maldo Emerson, are all Americans. But when we look around at American society today, what do we see? We see a nation of people that have lost their self-reliance. The state of affairs in the rest part of the post-modern society the world over, is no different, if not worse. Today the mechanically mass-educated, mass-communicated, mass-medicated, mass-marketed, mass-fed, mass-led and mass-entertained modern mankind have all easily stripped and depleted its humanity in ways that promptly leave him/her incapable of responding to anything as an organic human being, other than anything as an inorganic system being.

Food and agriculture around the world are being threatened as never before by corporate agribusiness and international ‘free’ trade. Small, sustainable, diverse farms producing food for local communities are being wiped out; replaced by vast chemical-intensive agribusinesses producing single crops that are eventually sold via supermarket chains on the other side of the world. Year by year the farms grow larger, the transportation distances grow longer, the waste and pollution grow exponentially and the retailers grow ever more powerful.

The sort of Green Revolution marked a turning point in agriculture in the world, particularly in the West during the 20th century.  It is a term used to describe the point at which technology became a driving force in our agricultural practices.  From mechanization to chemical use, advanced varieties of seeds and plants were farmed with the aid of technology – the goal being to make food more readily available, cheaper, and abundant at all times of the year.

As with many agricultural ‘experiments’, this seemed a great course of action at that time.  But what were the repercussions of such systems?  It would take nearly 50 years for us to start to see the results of the Green Revolution.  Depleted soils that will never again be productive, large amounts of chemical residues from dangerous pesticides and fertilizers, and the depletion of our atmosphere due to the use of fossil fuels both on the farm, and from shipping bountiful harvest all over the nation and the world.  Small family farms disappeared at an alarming rate, as people struggled to produce food that can be sold at profit and compete with the large agribusiness corporations. “The problem we’re facing is not one in which nobody wants to farm, but rather the fact that the U.S. economy is structured in such a way that makes it really hard to start a farm in this country.” wrote Severine von Tscharner Fleming, of Agrarian Trust, on access to farmland in a recent article on IPS news.

Every 5 seconds a child dies from hunger. We once were promised that GMOs will feed all the mankind. However, the introduction of GMOs has not only failed to address this issue, but led to a global increase in infertility, farmers’ bankruptcy, as well as the death of insects involved in pollination, which can lead to disastrous consequences.

Here’s an up-to-date statistics which is not widely publicized, and is kept behind the scenes. But what matters is not even what the numbers of diseases are, but the fact that all of these diseases are degenerative. This means that the body is literally falling apart and degrading under the pressure of unnatural and aggressive environmental conditions.

Further, what is produced and harvested in abundance turned out to be not only far less in nourishment and devoid of the necessary vitamins, minerals and life sustaining enzymes but also their growing glut causing further pollutions and toxification of environment. Today, the world struggles hard to reverse the effects of the Green Revolution and the later GMO cataclysms which are still being sponsored and spearhead by agribusiness corporations.

However today, there is renewed interest in locally grown and produced food, desire to know more about how organic food was grown, and a realization that a small farm produces much more per acre than the giant mechanized farm ever will. The only way the planet can be saved is when the entire world adopts a new economic order. The social fabric of society will need to be rebuilt around largely self-sufficient village communities — an alternative economic system based on sustainability. Here, Nature must become a community of relatives, worthy of our respect and a teacher to whom we look for inspiration and insight. In contrast to the present day, sustainable societies will likely be founded on local foods, local materials, and local energy. They will be run by people who have a strong passion for place and a deep understanding of the needs of those places. And this passion and understanding will be grounded in direct, firsthand experiences with those places.

A brief outline on some aspects of this new economic order is as follows:

• Agricultural production to be based on permaculture, rather than mono-culture. Experts advocate a return to more labour-intensive, family-owned production units. Elimination of inorganic fertilizer and chemical weed and pest control are made mandatory. Resort to maximum land use by including fruit and nut trees, vines, and vegetable gardens in landscaping of residential areas.
• Large scale transportation of goods and services curtailed, producing savings in resources consumed on the production and maintenance of motor vehicles, producing savings in capital and labour consumed in transportation.
• Production of food to be produced naturally and consumed locally where possible. Unhealthy foodstuff, particularly those containing high levels of fats, sugars, preservatives and salts, such as modern fast food must be banned. This would result in improvement in population’s health.
• Reduction of the role of the service sectors – literally the middlemen – which have become the fastest growing sectors in the economy, yet do little to improve the quality of life for the average person. Rather, they all too often squander away vital resources. In particular, much of the activities of the finance, government and legal sectors could largely be eliminated, freeing up the resources for improving the quality of life of many.
• Ownership of agricultural land to be allocated to individual families, which would be leased in perpetuity. Land will not be able to be sold or repossessed, providing security to families, and allowing for long-term investment to improve soil fertility and productivity.
• Activity in finance and banking sectors to be largely curtailed.
• Oceans and waterways to be protected from pollutants and other disposable untreated waste. Large-scale fishing operations stopped and fishing limited to sustainable coastal operations.
• Non-renewable energy resources only used sparely, so there will be reserves available for the future generations. This may be done by approaching self-sufficiency in energy through conservation and through maximum use of solar energy, wind power, and renewable sources such as woodlots and agricultural waste.
• Replace the large wasteful welfare agencies with local community-based volunteer networks to provide help and assistance for those in need. Responsibility of care for the elderly and those in need once again become that of the family, not the State.

Regaining the most important wealth that is lost and forgotten: the COMMUNITY

Another truth about Nature is the importance of community and of place. Civilization has supplanted our sense of community – the essential unit of wealth of social life for all other creatures and cultures on Earth – with constructs that allow greater command and control over all civilized humans and all human endeavors: the family, the market, the religious order and the state. The family is a small, nuclear social unit that is helpless (it can’t survive without interacting with larger social groups). The corporation, the religious order and the state are large, hierarchical social units that are undemocratic (the power is unequally distributed) and omnipotent.

By giving the adult the power in the family unit, corporations, religious orders and states are now able to lower social resistance to keeping the real power to themselves. This is essential for maintaining order in a world of six billion people who intuitively want to self-govern. The community competes for allegiance and authority with the family on one side, and with the corporation, the religious order, and the state on the other, so it has been systematically attacked and subverted from both sides.

When we say we live in a ‘community’ today, it doesn’t mean a group of people with whom we have special kinship (unless we are exceptionally lucky), it means the homogeneous yet non-integrated collection of nuclear family homes that is part of a larger, powerful state. This community has no real power, no real authority, and no real organization, and commands no allegiance from those who live in it, who cannot even really be called ‘members’. We are, however, members of a family, and members as well of a state (citizens), religious order and corporation (employees). The place in which we live usually bears no signs of its natural heritage (trees are cut down and non-native trees and flowers planted in their place, and all houses look much like houses everywhere else in the civilized world, and block the view of everything except the neighbouring houses). And many of us live transient lives – we move often to other, identical-looking places far away, and during the day we commute from our ‘homes’ on identical-looking highways to identical-looking office buildings and plants. So we have no sense of community, no sense of place, and no loyalty to either.

In the natural world, community and place are paramount. The community is democratic, self-managing and self-selecting: Even if you are born into it, either you have to pass a rite of passage to stay (with the approval of other community members) or you are expected to leave and find another community (or form your own). You belong to a community – a much stronger bond than mere membership. The community (like the amnesiac tribe) teaches you what you need to live, defines you and gives you purpose. It anchors and connects you. And though we are all part of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, ultimately we have our own place, our ‘home’. If you’re not totally connected with everything and every creature that is part of your place, then it isn’t your place. If you don’t have a place, then you don’t yet really exist. It is your community, your ecosystem, all of it, that is your place – not the isolated, nuclear-family, locked house on ‘private’ property. A house is not a home. And even though most humans live largely inside their own minds, a mind is not a home either it is not a real place.

Very few of us in the civilized world really belong to a community, or have found our true place, a natural home. In Nature, by contrast, every creature either belongs to a community and to a place, or is in a lifelong quest for them. It is instinctive to belong to a community and to a place because in Darwinian terms that is what works best. Even we humans, newcomers to Earth, have three million years of programming in our DNA driving us to seek community and find our place. And because it works so well it is not surprising that most creatures, human and otherwise, who have found where they belong and found their place are quite passionate about it – they will defend it from all outsiders of their species, even to the death if necessary (which it rarely is, because except for civilized man, most creatures profoundly respect the communities and places of others, and unless welcomed in will go back or move on). And they will share their space with communities of all other species that also call that place home, because they instinctively understand the reverence of place and community, appreciate the value of diversity, and that all life on Earth is sacred.

The love that you have for your place and your community, and the other and diverse lives with which you share it, is what gives your life meaning. There is no ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ in Nature, because of the profound understanding that every place is somebody’s home, a part of somebody’s community, and must be respected. Land is not merely property to be owned or fenced off by one individual of one species. It is sacred, holy, part of life itself. It ‘belongs’ to no one. We belong to the land, to the web of life of which it, and we, are all a part of this.

It is no longer enough to assume that ecological sustainability will come naturally after ‘the social revolution’. We must assume that sustainability has already existed. The struggle is to return to our wild roots. The truth about Nature is that she is inside us, all around us, just waiting for us to ask her what to do.

I think the darkest moment in one’s life is the development of a situation when he feels himself to be in a totally helpless situation in life, particularly when he realizes the fact that he cannot do anything to help even his own children from the imminent disaster, which exactly is the situation today. For millions of years, Mother Nature was man’s teacher, his ultimate refuge under whose care and protection man and other species are entrusting their children in peace and in total confidence. Nature only teaches its children lessons. Instances of Nature deceiving her children are rarer than the instances of a mother deceiving her own children. Electricity failure is a common feature in the highly mechanized modern society. But the sun has not failed to light human society even for once in its billions year long history.

The solution to the global environmental crisis we face today depends far less on the dissemination of new information than it does on the re-emergence into consciousness of old ideas. Primitive ideas, kinship, solidarity, community, direct democracy, diversity, harmony with Nature etc. provide the framework or foundation of any human society. Today, these primal ideas have been blocked from entering consciousness. The vast majority of modern people cannot see the basic truths that our ancient ancestors knew and that we must know again, about living within the natural balance. We are lost in endless political debates, scientific research, and compromises because what is self-evident to the primitive mind has been forgotten.

Beneath the false self, there still lives the original identity of the person. This original self is older than, and different from the foreign personality that has been imposed upon it. This original self is closely connected to the oldest layer of the psyche.

Anthropologists like Stanley Diamond and Marshall Sahlins have argued that ‘primitive’ humans enjoy greater health, happiness, political power, and ease of existence than all but the luckiest of civilized humans. Even in historic times, some things have been getting worse.

In ancient Greece, even slaves had a deep social role as part of a household, unlike even higher class modern workers, who are valued as things, interchangeable parts in engines of profit. Medieval serfs worked fewer hours than modern people, at a slower pace, and passed less of their money up the hierarchy. We declare our lives better than theirs in terms of our own cultural values. If medieval people could visit us, I think they would be impressed by our advances in alcohol, pornography, and sweet foods, and appalled at our biophobia, our fences, the lifelessness of our physical spaces, the meaninglessness and stress of our existence, our lack of practical skills, and the extent to which we let our lords (leaders of religion, government and market) regulate our every activity. They are sure to consider us as pitiful creatures.

Whether or not an individual awakens to the message of a tribal self depends on the mental condition of one’s personal life. Crisis can open a person to ideas that would otherwise be shunned or rejected. A desperate or confused person seeking help may accept the notion of a tribal self intellectually. Intellectual awareness of one’s tribal self, via the message, is the first prerequisite of a sane person, but it is not enough, not the same thing as hearing one’s own primal voice. Each individual must validate or prove, for itself, the message or theory of a tribal self.

Imagine that you, and a small group of other people, were to wake up tomorrow with absolutely no memories of your past or even of the language you spoke, in the middle of a forest in a tropical wilderness. Even if none of you had ever spent a moment away from the shelter of civilization in your life, you would not awake and be filled with dread and fear. You think you might because in the ‘real’ world you have been conditioned to fear Nature, to see it as savage, violent, a struggle to survive. You have been taught and brainwashed to distrust and ignore your instincts. But now you would awaken with no such prejudgments. You would become, in many ways, as children, and your whole group would awake full of wonder, and greet each other awkwardly, and then, probably, until hunger and thirst and sexual desire started to command your attention, you would probably play with your new ‘friends’, exploring and discovering, as children do, and as the newborn of all species in Nature do.

Your group becomes, in fact, a hunter-gatherer tribe, completely unaware of any of the precepts of civilization – language, science, reason, morality. Your initial state is one of astonishing joy, wonder, health, well-being, self-sufficiency, peace, security, community, learning, alertness, awareness, cooperation, imagination, love and respect for Nature, and, to the extent needed, creativity – all the elements of natural systems. You will instinctively hunt together and gather and share food, and you will recognize in each other specialized talents for doing one thing or another, and learn from your expert peers. There will be a ‘pecking order’ of sorts, based on consensus of, and respect for, those whose talents are most valuable – keen senses, physical strength, creativity – but the tribe will be egalitarian. There will be no hoarding or inequitable distribution of food or other resources. Since there is no scarcity, sharing will be according to need. Sex will be consensual and non-exclusive. You will respect and flee from predators, and be alert for them and protect your young from them, but you will not fear them.

That is how Nature works. Each creature strives to live and to bring more of their kind into the world not because they fear death, but because life is wonderful. When you see tiny birds scrounging at your bird-feeder or shivering in a tree in winter, don’t feel sorry for them. They are not helpless and struggling and cowed. They shiver because instinctively they know it keeps their body temperature up. They have amazing (at least to us, who lack them) instinctive survival talents – they need a lot of food in winter to keep warm, and they find it easily, enjoyably, and if they can’t, they simply hibernate. Although lots of birds are eaten by predators, few freeze or starve to death – famine is a modern human invention, due to our huge numbers and loss of natural adaptability. If you see a dead bird, it almost certainly might have succumbed to one of three human-caused injuries: Collision with a window, or an automobile, or a domestic cat that no longer needed or wanted to eat what it killed.

The people in our amnesiac tribe, and all the creatures in the wild, know what David Abram calls the Spell of the Sensuous. Many animals have senses that are much more acute than ours, and we have lost much of our openness, largely because we live most of our lives in cities and indoors. We no longer have either rich sensory environments to experience, or practice exercising our senses, opportunities to open ourselves up to the richness of sounds, sights, smells, tastes and feelings in Nature, so that even in those rare times when we are in natural environments we are unaware, insensitive, closed, disinterested in their magic, their meaning, their knowledge.

Our ignorance of Nature, combined with our collective arrogance (because of our unquestioned ‘evolutionary’ success), leads us to believe that we are the only emotional and intelligent creatures on the planet. But just as economists and historians are tearing apart our myths about prehistoric man, scientists are systematically deconstructing the anthropocentric myths of our emotional and intellectual uniqueness and superiority. Although our incompetence at deciphering animal language and communication has so far made it conveniently impossible to prove conclusively, there is very compelling evidence that many animals exhibit extraordinary intelligence.

In fact given some new evidence that emotion is principally a response to sensory stimulus, and knowledge that some animals have greater sensitivity to many sensory stimuli than humans, it’s quite possible that many animals lead much richer emotional lives than we do, that they are more ‘sensitive’ in every sense of the word than we are, that they ‘feel’ more, and more deeply, than we could ever hope to. Why then don’t they articulate this, so that we understand? Perhaps they do – maybe we are just so numb to all language other than our limited and clumsy human ones that we don’t ‘hear’ them. Or perhaps it’s just that they don’t have to – maybe we developed ‘sophisticated’ abstract language not because we were uniquely able to, but because it was necessary to convey precise instructions about man-made processes (like computers) in our strange new unnatural hierarchical culture, whereas other animals always survived just fine without such artificial constructs. How sophisticated a language do you need to say ‘danger’, ‘food’, ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘I love you’, and ultimately what else is really important to say?

Modern humans now need Nature’s language and Nature’s technology to live comfortable lives. But most other animals know a better way to live, and don’t need sophisticated language or technology to do so.

EVOLUTION OF SELF-RELIANT ECO-COMMUNITIES

Today, overwhelmed by growing unemployment, homelessness, massively spreading of diseases and the like that are leading people to even mass suicides, many concerned and independent citizens and groups around the world, in an attempt to empower people to solve their own crises by themselves, are building self-reliant communities. For example, in Africa, South Asia and Latin America, many such groups seek to end hunger and poverty by empowering people to lead lives of self-reliance, meet their own basic needs and build better futures for their children.

Success and self-reliance are achieved solely by those who rely on their own capability. A self-reliant community is one that aims to provide for its own needs, under its own management, using as far as possible local resources. Self-reliance is the practice of active lifestyles: growing food, building, making music. In such a community people enjoy the familiar interaction with neighbors, the mutual help, the contact with Nature and Earth. For example, they prefer the activity of walking or cycling to the possession of the power and speed of the car. For the poor who live at the margins of the system and who do not share in its affluence, self-reliance   offers the only hope of relief.

In a self-reliant community people value their freedom to create their own lifestyle higher than the affluence of the present system. The movement to create eco-villages is perhaps the most complete antidote to dependence on the global economy. Around the world, people are building communities that attempt to get away from the waste, pollution, competition, and violence of contemporary life. Many communities rely on renewable energy and are seeking to develop more cooperative local economies. The Global Eco-village Network links several of these communities worldwide.

In a world of hundreds of small nations, each of which numbers no more than six or seven million, and which in turn is subdivided into numerous small, localised and empowered village or urban communities running their own local affairs without interference from national governments, it is apparent that the common sense and humanity of ordinary people will be far more fully able to reject war, resource waste, ecological despoliation and other evils than monster mega-nations dominated by mass political military and commercial interests. Like the examples of the city states of renaissance Europe, the sort of localized, human scale of government is the only means by which humankind has achieved every such social fulfillment and aesthetic splendor as it has ever known.

There are a number of historical examples of societies that demonstrate the viability of direct democratic governance, even though they limited suffrage to adult males. These include the Greek city-state of Athens during the reign of Pericles, colonial New England town meetings, and the medieval Italian communes in cities like Florence, Venice, Bologna, Genoa and Milan. Especially noteworthy is the Republic of Raetia, now the Swiss canton of Graubunden. From1524 until Napoleon forced its unification with Switzerland in 1799, the mountain peasants of Raetia governed themselves in village communes employing techniques of face-to-face democracy, having fought off attempts by kings, nobles, and churchmen to impose the kind of feudal or ecclesiastic controls common elsewhere in Europe. In Raetia, power was so firmly vested in the communes that office-seekers openly tried to buy elections and nobody cared, because everyone knew the offices did nothing important. The Raetians probably invented the referendum and used it often to aggregate the will of the communes and make policy at the national level (thereby demonstrating that local, self-governing communities can work together in larger bodies, even when the fastest means of communication is a horse and rider).

Direct democratic practices thrive in the modern world too, often in forms that are directly relevant to sustainability issues. For example, in America, annual open town meetings are still the preferred form of government in most New England towns, with turnout ranging from a low of 68 percent of Rhode Island towns to 97 percent of Maine towns. Attendance varies, depending on town size and the urgency of the issues, from 1 percent to 90 percent. Citizen committees, which study issues and present reports to the townspeople, help keep the quality of debate and decision high.

How can we reverse the devastating effects of corporate industrialization on the Third World, and indeed on the industrialized countries themselves? The answer, according to E. Goldsmith of “Biospheric ethics” (The Future of Progress, London, Green Books, 1995) is that we need to return to low energy, low resource, low pollution societies – and very quickly. Such societies must necessarily conduct their economic and indeed their political affairs on a very much smaller scale than is today the trend, which means catering to very much smaller markets. The correct unit for economic activity is clearly the family and to a lesser extent the community. It is only in this way that economic activities can satisfy social, religious and ecological needs – not merely narrow economic ones as is necessarily the case when they are fulfilled by corporations. Since humans, during 99.9% of the period of their tenancy on this planet, have lived in tribal societies that conducted their economic activities in precisely this way, it seems clear that we must derive our inspiration from that experience.

Note: Due to the limit of space in this print edition, some parts of this chapter under the following subtitles may please be read in the e-book edition of this book (soon to be published):

• The Fourth World
• Evolution of Gandhian “Village Republics”
• A New We: A Novel Grouping of Eco-Villages and Eco Communities in Europe
• Young Greeks Create Self-Reliant Island Society
• America, The Global Leader, May Show The Way
• Return Of The Organarian: From Organism to Organization to Organism
• 6000 Steps to Paradise: A Unique Chinese Epic — Man of Nature will inherit Earth