THE CANDIDATE'S ARGUMENTS ON BEHALF ON THE BUILDING OF A NEW SPIRITUAL AND HOLISTIC ECO-CIVILIZATION BASED ON THE RESPECT OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND DUTIES AND ON THE PROMOTION OF NON IDEOLOGICAL SCIENCE, HOLISTIC MEDICINE AND SUSTAINABLE ECO-VILLAGES
" What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task" President Barack Obama, inauguration speech, Jan 20, 2009
In my Washington State 2008 gubernatorial campaign, I stressed the importance of “fundamental freedoms and responsabilities" erga omnes (legal latin = for all), both of which are necessary is we are to fertilize Humanity's promise and shift paradigms to usher in a new civilization, from today’s mercantile-militarist dualistic civilization to tomorrow’s holistic and spiritual civilization grounded in Unity and legally based on a public authority with universal competence on matters of cross-frontier significance (diseases, security, development, environment etc).
“Because I feel Washington State should be leading the Nation in promoting a Spiritual Civilization based on holistic medicine, alternative energy, affordable housing, relevant education, a dynamic economy, bio-diversity, world development and meaningful access to justice, I respectfully propose my “FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOMS” PLAN OF ACTION.” (Christian Pierre Joubert, Washington State’s Voters Pamphlet, primary election, August 19th 2008, see below for the link).
In effect, from an analysis of the date, it would appear that this starting point is the only way to durably solve any political or economic crisis. (See www.christianforgovernor2008.com and click on the left menu on “vision” and “political philosophy” and “history”).
THE BASIS OF THE NEXT CIVILIZATION IS PARTIALLY PREDICTABLE. THEREFORE SCIENTIFICALLY BASED.
Contributing in the resurrection of a spiritual and holistic civilization was the very “raison d’etre” (purpose) of my gubernatorial efforts. And far from being the "wishy-washy" dogmas of the ivory tower theologians, a Holistic Civilization is much more than just being "holy" or the "omnipresence of God in His universe", a holistic Civilization is all of what "Is" in the hic and the nunc. From the strictly theologian viewpoint, it is the cross-fertilization of "immanence" and transcendance", the "coming of the Kingdom". From an astrophysical viewpoint, it is subsumed in the concept "totality". totality of all energies, of Life. From the quantum physics standpoint, it is based on the theory for a unified description of the fundamental particles and forces in nature including but not limited to gravity, the underlying symmetries of nature, the quantum behaviour of black holes, the existence and breaking of supersymmetry, and the quantum treatment of singularities, the quantum mechanics and space and time. Today, our scientists are qualifying this "theory of everything", which is suppose to unify all of the known forces and energies of the Universe as the "superstring theory. In string theory all the forces and particles emerge in an elegant geometrical way, realizing Einstein's dream of building everything from the geometry of space-time. Although this theory has little do do with Science (no way to experimenting via the refutation mechanism this metaphysical asbstraction), it remains a good imaginative scheme partially based on reason, on what we know and on institutional expectations.
Before delving in a deeper analysis of the physics of reality, it is necessary to review the "shift" patterns of human civilizations during the last ten thousands of years.
THREE TYPES OF CIVILIZATIONS
According to the best historians, from Michelet to Sun Tzu, Clausewitz,Toynbee and the others, in the last ten thousands years, there have been only three types of civilizations: Tens of thousands of Societies. But only three regional civilizations. 1. The military one. 2. The mercantile or commercial one. 3. And the spiritual or holistic one
In his many huge volumes of History, the historian Arnold Toynbee had spent over 50 years of his life studying these hydraulic (river) civilizations and their many societies, their regulations, their evolutionary patterns and their demise. At the end of his vast inquiry, the historian determined that the People’s basic needs were the most fulfilled in the Spiritual civilizations, such as during the Neolithic eco-village era before social differentiation set in or during the 5th century B.C. when the Lao Tseu's, the Boudha's, the Isaia's, the Zarathustra's, the Hippocrates, the Socrates' were burgeoning on the five major continents enlightening the People with their pearls of wisdom, seedling exquisite happenings with their quantic energy over-flow.
THE LIMITATIONS OF MERCANTILE AND MILITARY CIVILIZATIONS
In this context, the political philosopher Socrates, (5 B.C.), in one of his most brilliant dialogues, had actually pinpointed two human activities that would push people to the military and mercantile civilization modalities. These were the health and the legal systems.
" When dissoluteness and disease abound in a city, are not law courts and surgeries opened in abundance, and do not Lawyers and Physicians begin to hold their heads high…”
In this dialogue, Socrates was chatting with Glaucon on the consequences of the replacement of a plant-based diet by a meat-based diet preferred by Glaucon. Socrates was explaining that a diet of barley, wheat, olives, figs, beans, myrtle berries, beech nuts and wine in moderation were all conducive to health and contentment while an animal diet would lead to diseases, to a sickness industry, legal strife and tension, corruption.
On the other hand, Glaucon preferred to argue that the sacrifice of animals for tasty food was the way to go. (cf Plato’s Dialogue).
With the erosion or uni-directional passage of time, Greek mainstreamers based their diet on the shedding of innocent animal blood and processed foods, many of which were contaminated with heavy metals like lead. Little by little, they lost their center and their society crumbled. To humility, compassion and sensitivity, were substituted callousness, greed and arrogance. Like with Imperial Rome a little later, inner city conflicts and graft weakened the Nation, until foreign invasions finished off these legalistic and sickness-industry laden Societies.
Since these times tens of thousands of other Societies emerged on the five continents, from the depth of Africa and Asia to the Ottoman powers, where the Ottoman people themselves also came face to face with decadence when over half of their population became chronically ill and obese. Curiously, chronic diseases went hand in hand with the well-recorded Ottoman tentacular bureaucracy (e.g. red tape) and that government's imperialistic instinct. The Ottoman Empire definitely died when the British, the Americans, the French and allies vanquished the Austra-German powers (and their allies). But the deep causes of its demise were internal.
THE DEMISE OF THE AMERICAN IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
Over two thousands years after Socrates' plant-based diet dialogue, Academic studies have undisputedly proven that Socrates and not Glaucon was right, insofar as the health superiority of a plant-based diet is concerned, that Béchamp, not Pasteur was right in that "le terrain est tout", not the microbe, that Yashua the Christ was right, Boudha, Dr Schweitzer and the Dalai Lama were right, "compassion for all living entitities" is a superior attitude than our present ideologically-based mainstream Science paradigm.
"Americans will not reduce their rate of cancers, cardiovascular disease and other chronic, degenerative diseases until they shift their diets away from animal-based foods to plant-based foods, according to research findings emerging from the most comprehensive project on diet and disease ever done. Findings from the study suggest that even eating just small amounts of animal-based foods is linked to significantly higher rates of cancers and cardiovascular diseases typically found in the United States, said Cornell nutritional biochemist T. Colin Campbell, director of the Cornell-China-Oxford Project on Nutrition, Health and Environment (...) To get really significant changes in disease rates, it will be necessary to shift the American diet from its heavy reliance on animal-based foods to one that relies far more on plant-based foods," said Campbell, who along with his colleagues has been analyzing the data from the the China project, a collaborative effort of Cornell, the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine and University of Oxford. The project, which just received $200,000 from the American Institute for Cancer Research to continue analyzing data, is a massive survey designed to study diet, lifestyle and disease across the far reaches of China; it includes almost 7,000 Chinese families. By investigating simultaneously more diseases and more dietary characteristics than any other study to date, the project has generated the most comprehensive database in the world on the multiple causes of disease. " [Cornell Chronicle (12/01/94)] .
Today, close the three out of four Americans are either obese (34 percent) or overweight (32 percent). The chronic diseases, stress and suffering that result from the “sad” (standard American diet) and bad lifestyles are immeasurable. Each year, this epidemic is worsening as is worsening America’s economic crisis, whose central causes precisely gravitates around health issues, if only because health bills are the leading factor to bankruptcies.
"Hundreds of thousands of Americans file for personal bankruptcy each year because of medical bills - even though they have health insurance, according to a new study by Harvard University legal and medical researchers". NEW YORK TIMES (Feb 2 2005).
PLEADING ON BEHALF OF A NEW CIVILIZATION
To maintain Progress in the Edification of the Human Adventure, and especially to align our human activities in the direction of the cosmic flow of energy, to build the Peace among Nations, we do need new Institutions, powerful messages and symbols, Art. Good food. And new ways of thinking, of being. Fresh attitudes.
"Peace is not a passive nor definitive state, a kind of Dead Sea where the river of History goes to die. On the contrary, peace is a state of high human activity which mobilizes the highest functions of the human spirit. Peace requires a continuous creation of new values, new emotions, new ways of thinking. It is only at this price that our new institutions that peace requires can live. In a word, Peace is the highest and most arduous form of the Universal Revolution." (Madariaga, President of the "Thirteen" group, League of Nation).
How is all of this relevant to the U.S. Ambassador to France job ?
Powerfully.
If the next U.S Ambassador to France can create “great debates” with the French (who have a passion for “great debates”, History and Meaning) on public health, food and innovative science, Civilizations and their shifts, (a French inclination), this will necessarily and instantly (via the web) ricochet back to the U.S mainstream media and then, Americans will be better motivated to engage in similar debates and in investing in new attitudes, in innovative institutions, in holistic health, one effect of which is “mental clarity”, a “commodity” which is getting rare.
By bestowing upon Americans such debates and key information, great events will happen. One in seven of American dollars is spent on diseases. One is seven and this figure is rising. We must invest in health as a priority. We need to start with detox, a good liver cleanse for all citizens (see the measures from the gubernatorial site on this question). The only way to durably build the Peace.
THESE THEMES HAVE LED TO GUBERNATORIAL SUCCESS: JOUBERT BECAME THE IPSO FACTO THIRD POLITICAL EXECUTIVE FORCE OF WASHINGTON STATE. SEEDS CAN THUS GERMINATE IN THE NATION AND ON FOREIGN LAND
I have campaigned and debated on the above themes as well as on the 176 other pertinent themes during the last gubernatorial elections as a “complementary” and European-educated American Democratic party candidate, thanks to which I scored enough votes to become the third political force of Washington State (See footnote and EXHIBIT C for the governor’s results). (And see EXHIBIT D for my public gubernatorial mission statement published on the Secretary of State’s website).
The gist of my gubernatorial campaign and efforts can be summed up as follows, an extract of which was taken from the back-cover of the book I drafted on this effort.
“ During the gubernatorial (governor's) primary elections of August 19, 2008, the most important election of Washington State, Christian Pierre Joubert and his "Fundamental Freedom's Action Plan" harvested nearly twice as many votes as the Greens and more than twice in relation to other minority and third parties. If we are to count the Republican Party and the G.O.P. as one movement, his Fundamental Freedom's Action Plan, as a platform, emerged as the third political force. This success is based on the People's thirst for the expansion of additional fundamental freedoms and their desire to believe in a political philosophy whose Plan of Action proposes a credible method by which to satisfy the five basic needs all Civilizations have struggled with: (a) good vibrant and unpolluted food and water catering to life and reproduction (b), a decent and re-energizing shelter structure, (c) affordable health care and conditions under which lifestyle medicine is prevalent (d), meaningful access to education, culture, art and spiritual practice,(e) and equal access to an efficient Justice system, including, but not limited to civil justice, thanks to which security and all of the other freedoms mentioned above can be vindicated when necessary. In this book, Christian Pierre Joubert explains what this credible method that satisfies people's basic needs is and reviews the 178 measures he proposed to Washingtonians during the primary elections, all of which would meaningfully contribute in the restoration of our broken Republic. Since many of these measures are inspired from Europe’s fundamental freedoms traditions and remain, in essence, trans-frontier, they are also relevant for the other fifty States. And for the Nation.”
ECO VILLAGES AND SUSTAINABLE SETTLEMENTS AT THE DAWN OF THE THIRD MILLENIUM: THE VERY FOUNDATION UPON WHICH THE NEXT SPIRITUAL AND HOLISTIC CIVILIZATION IS BASED.
After Einstein's theories, Roosevelt's " New Deal ", Kennedy's "New Frontier", Obama's "Yes we can", the concept of ‘sustainability’ is ever so strong and rampant, as if this notion was trying to hold us by the hand to lead us toward Light. The forces of Nature are reflecting back human beings' overstepping tendencies, their lack of respect to Earth's evolutionary processes, their ignorance. All these indicators are well-documented and, by now, familiar : diseases, global warming, Earth's magnetic dwindling, weather extremes, ozone depletion, rapid extinctions, loss of topsoil and forests, depleted fisheries, exhausted aquifers, rising cancer rates and other debilitating pathologies due to our polluted environment, military conflict over control of dwindling resources.The list reads like a virtual science fiction horror story, like a compendium for disaster. Similarly to the metastasis action mechanism of cancer malignancies, the current ‘system’ is out of control.
As a reaction to these above mentioned abuses, the People, from all of our 16,000 Nations (defined via culture and not legally) have been lumped together into the " sustainability movement ". In this perspective, sustainability is seen as the connective tissue, the corrective measure to bring the current system and humanity as a whole back into alignment and resonance with the processes and balance of Nature, Gaian evolution and the present continuum of the forces of the Cosmos, whose proponents are ready to move beyond anthropocentric species consciousness and manifest holistic, biospheric self-awareness.
SUSTAINABILITY IS MORE THAN SELF RELIANCE BUT LESS THAN HOLISTIC SPIRITUALITY
“Sustainability,” as a concept, is the announcement that one long cycle is coming to a close and a new cycle is about to begin. It is the transition zone between these cycles but it is not an end in itself. The American Heritage dictionary defines to sustain as “to keep in existence, to maintain, prolong”. This sounds like the condition of a comatose patient hooked up to life-support equipment. As participating human beings, successfully meeting the challenges posed by this era of Responsiblity requires us to set our sights beyond sustainability, beyond merely prolonging, to an attitude of holistic renewal.
The age of our Sun is in its infancy. However, in the next several million years the Sun will grow so large and so hot that Earth will not be able to manage her comfortable, homeostatic conditions that have spawned and nurtured biological life for so long. No culture or life-form or planet can actually be continued indefinitely, so sustainability is a matter of temporal degree. But we can learn to thrive and flourish and shine while we are still here, and become conscious players in the direction of Gaian evolution, supporting, nurturing, and enriching fundamental life patterns, processes, and structures.
THE NEW HERO: FROM THE FOREST BONOBO TO ECO-VILLAGERS.
Bonobos are closer to us genetically than to their cousins the Champanzees. And a peaceful and playful plant based forest group. (See the governor's website www.christianforgovernor2008.com for more info). In a similar way, the genus Homo has its origins at the forest edge, the ecotone where savannah meets jungle. Gathering together in small bands, these early ancestors would alternate their movements between hunting out on the open grasslands, and then returning to the forest edge to gather fruits, nuts, seeds, berries, and tubers. This was a viable lifestyle and anthropologists estimate that it took less than 20 hours per week per each adult to meet the essential needs of the group, compared to 40+ hours for a modern post-industrialist (van Andruss, et al., 1990). Its viability is confirmed by noting that many North American tribes, at the time of European contact, were preferring to live a hunting-gathering lifestyle, millions of years after these early ancestors, and it is still the preference of a few groups surviving today. Many more would if they could, because there is such innate freedom in this way of life. The settlement pattern associated with this lifestyle is the temporary, seasonal camp, perhaps revisited yearly, but easily abandoned and returned back into bush, without a trace.
Then came evolution, the Ice age, the development of the neo-cortex. The situation was especially acute in Europe, where the ice moved furthest south, assisted by the positioning of the Alps. There, for a long while, two species of advanced Homo existed in close proximity: Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. Both species embodied the essential human qualities: tool-making, symbolic languaging, and the passing down of culture. Neanderthal actually achieved a larger brain volume, called the cephalic index (Brace, 1967), and must have enjoyed vivid symbolic imagery and enlivening, intuitive symbiotic attunement with biogeographical realities (scientists have deduced that the pineal, seat of the intuition, was much larger in austrolopiticus than in today's humans), ; but it was the conspicuous growth of the neo-cortex that set Homo sapiens apart. This organ, a bulging of the frontal lobe of the brain, provided the capacity for rational, objective thinking and forethought. It allowed Homo sapiens to abstractly project situations into the future, to plan and to predict, and to discriminate and choose between contingencies. This capacity proved to be an advantage at the onset of an Ice Age, when rapidly changing conditions required flexible adaptability, visualization of new techniques or possibilities, and a sense of preparation and hoarding for an unknown future. It certainly provided these, but also an unfortunate disconnection from the immediacy of the Now. During inevitable competition encounters, Neanderthal was stigmatized, prejudiced, hunted down and beaten into extinction, like many of today's vegan animals.
But what was left? Here was Homo sapiens, an animal whose environmental circumstances had influenced the selection for the growth of an abstracting, rationalizing portion of the brain, an animal that could relate to others of its kind through symbolic languaging the dreadful experience of environmental conditions suddenly turning harsh and inhospitable, an animal that could use its brain and its free hands to control and reshape its environment to suit its needs, and an animal increasingly relying on a culture of technology for its very survival. These initial conditions provided the substratum that ‘programmed’ Homo sapiens to institute the compensatory technological mindset they have been refining, perfecting, and relying on for the past 40-50,000 years, setting them on the irreversible path that would culminate in material, dualistic and entropic non resilient civilizations. The continual growth of the neo-cortex, as it was responding to the exercising of these skills, eventually led to the capacity in the brain (and all-inclusive ‘mind’) for self-consciousness – the ability for the mind to reflect upon itself, to analyze its environment by separating ‘things’ and events into parts, to think about itself thinking, and inevitably, to consider itself as separated from others, from its environment, and even from Nature herself.
This feeling of existential separation would become the preternatural condition of Homo sapiens, and would grow into their biggest alienating dilemma. We see this in people with "mongolian" disease ("Down's syndrome"). In a race, one fell. Then all of the racers stopped short and helped the fallen racer. Likewise with the French movie made by De Broca. A mental hospital frees the psychotic during Hitler's war. As the opposing armies march toward the hospital, they shot themselves. The psychotics hide. Then continue playing. While none of the disciplined uniformed soldiers are left alive. Neo-cortex "oblige". Even some animals prove this point. A fisherman spears a dophin. A storm rips the fisherman's boat. The fisherman is sinking. The same dolphine brings him to shore by pulling the boat via the anchor chain. Then dies from hemorage.
FROM NOMADISM TO TRADITIONAL VILLAGES AND ECO-SETTLEMENTS CIVILIZATIONS
Driven by necessity, Homo sapiens grew ever more clever at shaping and controlling the environment to suit its needs. The tremendous adaptability afforded by a self-reflective, abstracting brain, and the hands to physically implement proposed concepts, meant this species could invent a culture to inhabit and exploit any ecological niche. Soon, Homo sapiens was spreading over the entire globe. Their prolific enduring propagation success meant ever-increasing numbers, and the excessive concentration of humans in any particular area precluded the possibility of continuing a hunting-gathering lifestyle. A certain point was reached where excessive populations needed to settle down, self-organize and become sedentary, fixed to one spot, producing all their essential needs in one delimited locale. This was the onset of agriculture and the beginning of permanent human settlement, identified as occurring some 10,000 years ago. In this perspective, it was formerly commonly believed that this stage was a learned process, that humans gradually developed the ‘understanding’ that food-plants grow from seeds, and that by collecting and propagating the seeds a group could ensure a guaranteed continual food supply, and so settle down as an obvious matter of choice. But evidence from pre-contact cultures in North America shows that hunter-gatherers from time immemorial were well aware that plants grow from seeds; in fact, these traveling bands would plant food-stuffs all along their migrational routes, to be harvested on circumambulating return trips (Kotke, 1993). The same kind of evidence is available in the South American jungles of today, where paths are lined with useful plants that have been intentionally placed and propagated by semi-nomadic travelers.
The human animal is genetically predisposed to a hunting-gathering lifestyle; that lifestyle provides an abundance of leisure and health, a cohesive ‘band’ level of social organization, and a far more nutritious and diverse diet than a sedentary, agricultural existence. It was completely out of the necessity imposed by population pressure that the genus Homo became sedentary, and so eventually ‘civilized.’
The first permanent settlements sprang up along waterways, (what Toynbee called hydraulic civilizations) particularly in fertile alluvial deltas, where the majority of population was concentrated.
There, it was fairly easy to begin the processes of mass plant cultivation and animal husbandry that is coincident with a sedentary lifestyle because the life-force is so vibrant in such areas. More marginal areas required a great deal of work in establishing and maintaining soil fertility, and then irrigation, so they were chosen only as a last resort. Although this transition to the toil of permanent settlement (inescapably a coincidence of the emergence of a self-conscious, abstracting, discriminating neo-cortex) was the proverbial banishment from ‘edenic’ paradise, the new living situation provided the opportunity, and necessity, for progressive advances of culture. Ever newer technologies were required, as well as new structures, new processes, and new patterns of relationship, accompanied and assisted by the advances in social organization needed to keep the emerging life-support systems operable and productive.
At the beginning of this stage, human beings were still an integral part of Nature; that is, their actions unconsciously contributed to the ongoing complexification and diversification of the Gaian evolutionary process. They were agents of Gaia, Mother Earth, acting reverently and religiously in her behalf. Continually harvesting a living from one specific location required a numinous identification with that particular place. These were people of the land. As the land provided their subsistence, it was honored, and Nature-based/ Goddess religions arose to complement and sacralize this attitude, and to introduce the necessary social taboos to prevent destabilization of the mutually-reinforcing, mutually-beneficial people-people and people-land associations.
Because the people were so embedded within the natural flux, so much a part of Nature, acting as one kind of organism “structurally coupled” to a living ecosystem, cognitively interfacing with other organisms (as articulated in Maturana and Varela,1980), the settlements that grew up around them were very organic. These settlements were living systems, integrally nestled within larger, living bioregional systems and composed of smaller, living organismic sub-systems. Structurally, these settlements could be considered ‘self-created;’ that is, they germinated from a seed inception event and grew up organically, constructed entirely by the people living there. Originally, an established camp would birth or absorb new members, increasingly self-organizing till it reached a more complex level of higher order. New structures, patterns, and processes were added as they were needed, most crucially to, 1) maintain this self-organization, and 2) continually allow for the successful reproduction of the organisms contained within (Maturana and Varela, 1980). Eventually the camp would grow so large as to fundamentally alter its relationship with its surrounding environment. A new level of organization and configuration was then needed to maintain balance and mutual reciprocity with all the living systems concerned. Eventually, the ‘camp’ would grow through ‘hamlet’ size and on to ‘village’ scale (Hudson, 1970). At each stage, the spontaneously self-organizing, organic living systems would acquire novel “emergent properties” and a new quality of relationship with the encompassing ecosystem. All along this progression of growth, internal social relationships were also evolving to ensure continued harmony and balance between component members, once again with the self-organizing imperative for the collectivity to sustain its existence as an autonomous, coherent, self-reliant living whole. These internal social arrangements were also self-created; no one was in charge, but patterns of relationship would evolve based on the criteria of producing the maximum benefit for all. Each component member had a role to fill that was a positive contribution to the maintenance of the health and vitality of the whole. The collective social whole had as its intention the maintenance and enhancement of the greater ecosystem whole, because when the surrounding ecosystem was thriving, their own lives were much enriched and filled with abundance. The village scale was the level of order where the optimum balance of internal social cohesion and social complexification could be achieved, before reaching the level of impinging deleteriously on the functions of the surrounding living systems. In fact, the traditional village would contribute to the diversity and long-term viability of the surrounding systems by introducing novel patterns, concentrations, and relationships that otherwise would have never occurred. The village could intensively, knowledgably, hereditarily cultivate its immediate circumambient environment to maximize diversity, productivity, and long-term sustainability for all its embodied members -- and this would naturally benefit all the other associated, interwoven life-forms – this is what it means to be “an agent of Gaian evolution.” (As opposed to a parasite). The village scale was large enough so that a specialized, complex economy as a collective unity could be fulfilled - with enough time left over for leisure, play, contemplation, conversation, and the pursuit of artistic-spiritual endeavors - but not so large as to begin to exhaust the encompassing and inherent biological nutrients that fueled the metabolism to keep it alive, to keep it sustainable. When the village grew to a population-size that could be observed to be contributing to the depletion of the surrounding resource-base upon which it sustained itself, it would spontaneously divide, as in the biological act of mitosis, reproducing a sub-group that would splinter off to seed a new settlement.
THE ECO VILLAGE AS A LIVING SYSTEM
This magic size that is village-scale varies from region to region. In rich, fertile areas like alluvial deltas, the population can be larger and the villages can be clustered closer together. In more marginal regions, the villages will be smaller in size and more spread apart. What they all have in common, however, is that they are all self-organizing, self-maintaining, self-regenerating organic living systems, maintaining energized conditions of balanced reciprocity and co-evolution with the surrounding living eco-systems of which they are a part. They are all completely ‘self-created,’ ‘self-organizing’ by their internal constituents in an organic way that introduces new structures, patterns, and processes as needed, built upon pre-existing forms, their combined effects always contributing to the intention of maintaining the harmonious systemic equilibrium that ensures continued self-organization and reproductive capability for all concerned. And since self-organizing living systems are primordial, not requiring filtering justification through the analyzing, objectifying, rationalizing neo-cortex for their existence, they are a natural process of organic growth, so they are always integrated complementarily with the larger Gaian ecological evolution.
The neo-cortex of the brain (the last frontier) was still used for developing technological advances in culture and abstractly philosophizing about the meaning of Life, but the abstract models it conceived were voluntarily limited in application, and were wisely selected according to the overarching criteria of maintaining conditions of homeostasis internally, within the village, and externally, within the surrounding environment. The large frontal lobe of the brain that distinguished Homo sapiens became in many ways a decorative function, primarily used for envisioning and creating stimulating language and stories, ritual ceremonies and costuming, art, architecture, an elaborately conceived spiritual culture. It was a very useful organ for increasing the complexity and diversity of life, but it was purposely tempered in its calculations to those innovations that were practically useful for sustaining the group and the culture as a whole.
This is pretty much the situation in those traditional villages that have survived up to this day. The majority of the world’s population still lives (or would prefer to live) in village-scale settlements that have learned to adapt to their particular location and circumstances over the course of millennia, and wherein the supply lines are short. To be sustainable for so long, these villages have created cultures that are capable of maintaining long-term, mutually-beneficial, co-evolving relationships with their encompassing ecosystems. All village culture is pretty much the same; that is, there are many universal, identifiable elements found in all cultures that operate within a village scale (Critchfield, 1983).
Any discussion about sustainability at the dawn of the third millennium must necessarily incorporate the timeless precedent set by traditional village culture. The village settlement size is the optimal scale for embodying an enduring, sustainable, perma-culture, as has been demonstrated by countless examples all over the world. There is something very special about this village size – it is inherently human scale (cf the works of Schumacher and the "appropriate technology movement"). It is large enough to accommodate sophisticated culture, i.e., science, philosophy, art, astronomy, architecture, writing, religion, etc., but not so large that people are unable to identify and intimately co-habitate with one another as an integrated social unity. A village will never grow so large that this sense of social unity among its inhabitants is ever compromised, or at least if it does, it ceases to be a village, and is heading down that degenerative, unsustainable path leading to ‘civilization,’ the culture of cities.
A traditional village is an organism, a highly refined and adaptable living system, embodying the essential pattern of all organisms. This observation can be confirmed by studying aerial pictures of villages, they look like biological structures: neurons, amoebas, protozoans, etc., It is characteristic of organisms that they all have a well-defined center and a well-defined boundary and good resilency and exchange capacity with their natural habitat, the environment, like healthy cells (versus cancer cells). Villages also share these characteristics. Organisms grow to a predetermined form according to nature-encoded information. Their size is determined by their function within and their relationship to their environment. Villages have these characteristics as well. Besides being nature-encoded (hereditary), their growth depends upon the availability of nutrients and their ability to form cooperative, symbiotic, interdependent relationships with their environment. If they fail to meet these criteria, they stop growing, period. Organisms also tend to grow radially out from their center, increasing their ‘edge’ and thus their productive interaction with their environment. Organisms also grow through time by processing information, increasing their adaptability, and qualitatively expanding their evolutionary potential – thus they are cognitive (Maturana and Varela, 1987).
Tradition Villages are cognitive living systems as well, and that is what makes them sustainable.Organisms all share a cyclic process of birth, growth, maturity, decay, and rebirth. All organisms are fundamentally cellular, and reproduce themselves, the most ‘successful’ bringing forth the most evolutionarily advanced and adaptive offspring. Finally, organisms incarnate vitalistic or soul-like properties (von Bertalanffy, 1968). These organismic characteristics become design criteria when envisioning a sustainable ecovillage settlement.
It is precisely because traditional villages are organisms: cohesive, cognitive, autonomous biological unities energetically immersed within a progressive holarchy of other cohesive, cognitive, self-organizing unities, they are able to endure and sustain themselves for so long -- conceivably indefinitely! If we want to create a sustainable culture in the 21st century, we must begin by designing our settlements to be organism-like living systems, modeled after the perennial example of the traditional village.
The village scale of human settlement provides the optimal conditions for all concerned, including the living potential “Gaia.” The people can thrive in such a village setting, and can comfortably strive to actualize their full potential as gifted, indigenous children of the Earth. The group dynamics in a village allow for multiple levels of identification and a sense of belonging, something so important for children especially. The village itself is harmoniously, organically integrated into the circumambient ecosystem as a constituent living system with a life of its own. Optimal satisfaction and satiation can be realized in those areas most vitally important: clean air, pure water, invigorating food, meaningful work, strong family and community ties, an enlivening spiritual connection to the great mystery, continuity, health, peace, love and happiness, etc. Sure this is an idealization, but, given the choice, people who grow up in villages prefer to stay with their villages; these villages are metaphoric wombs. These people may travel far and wide to experience the world, but they will always return back to their source, their roots. These people identify more strongly with their village than with their so-called nation. This attitude can be witnessed today as millions of indigenous people fight to maintain sovereignty of their land so as to perpetuate their village lifestyle against the rising tide of globalization. Tragically, more and more people are getting plucked from their home-grown, organic ways and are getting sucked into the corrupting, depraving, life-draining vortex of the city; this process has been accelerating for thousands of years, since the advent of civilization, and is now culminating and becoming a serious life-threatening issue at the dawn of the 21st century. Fortunately, there is a counter-movement, returning motion to come back Home! at this dawn.
FROM TRADITIONAL VILLAGES TO "CITY" (MERCANTILE AND MILITARY) CIVILIZATIONS
Traditional, village-scale settlements were quite sustainable; they could be continued into the indefinite future (the definition forwarded by Gilman, 1991). Unfortunately, Homo sapiens was so successful at reproducing, lacking any natural deterrents, that their numbers just kept on accumulating. In the rich, fertile alluvial plains that were the preferred site for settlement, the populations grew so large that people could no longer disperse to establish new villages. Existing settlements began to grow past that organic ‘village’ stage, and reached the size of ‘towns’. A town has a far different relationship to its inhabited, co-evolving ecosystem than does a village. A town begins to exceed the carrying capacity of the local living ecology that sustains it, so resources must begin to be gathered from outside the immediate area. Internally, social dynamics change as conflicts of interest over the appropriation of resources divides the town into competing factions, and the organic sense of unity is lost. A town-scale settlement starts to become unsustainable because it begins to lose touch with human-scale relationships.
Back on the alluvial plains, the population eventually surpassed the town stage, and city-scale settlements were needed to contain all the population, heralding the birth of civilization. Civilization, deriving from the Latin root civitas, or city, is essentially the culture of cities – city life. It is not necessarily the pinnacle of creation, the full realized potential of human beings; it is more like the inevitable and unavoidable consequences of people living on top of one another, as in zoos, and striving their best to make it work.
The ‘city’ marks a whole new level of development in the relationship between a human settlement and its encompassing, underlying ecosystem. A city is so large that it must reach way out into the hinterland to acquire the materials and resources necessary to maintain its level of consumption. The immediate area surrounding the city is soon depleted of its life-force: timber is cut down and forests are cleared; sterile housing developments begin to displace once living systems; diverse natural ecosystems are traded for human-built abstractions; animal life is exterminated or converted into domesticated commodities; waterways and their flowing dendritic patterns are forced underground into channels and ducts; topsoil is quickly squandered, etc. And, ultimately, beneath the city, a once living landscape is completely covered up, leveled, paved, submerged, and made to conform to an abstract, general standard.
Mercantile and military Civilizations have an atrocious record of relationship with natural ecosystems. Numerous civilizations have appeared, risen, and expanded, only to collapse as the supporting ecosystems they depended on for sustenance were ravaged and finally destroyed. This has happened repeatedly (see Carter and Dale, 1974). And if the presence of the pattern ‘city’ has such a deleterious effect on the life-force of the region it occupies, how could it possibly invigorate the life-force of its inhabitants?
The social organization of a city is very different from the social organization of a village. The feeling of unity found in a village is completely displaced in the crowded, hectic mass of competing interests that make up a city. There are so many strangers with questionable motives that a general mood of distrust prevails; it could be dangerous to interact with a person on the street. It is better to close oneself off, to create an armored bubble, to not become vulnerable to being taken advantage of. A small group of regular associates will develop, but there is no sort of enclosure to define this group as a unity, so the associations are often transitory. Neighbors may never come to know one another. City-life imposes a setting where the primary, fundamental needs of human nature, those primordial needs extending deep back into time, are superceded by superficial contingencies; eventually, the nature of city-dwellers is created and defined by their setting. Such a thick throng of humanity massed on top of one another would immediately turn to complete chaos were it not for the necessary stack of laws and accompanying police force that comes with city-life. In the village there is one law: “The choice you make now must contribute to the ongoing welfare, stability, and sustainability of the collective whole,” so control comes from within. In the city, external controls are needed to coerce people into compulsory obeyance of an authority they would not otherwise comply with. The city is so complicated and contrived, with so many fabricated human-made problems and miseries, that someone needs to be in charge to organize and direct all the confusion, and to make the unwanted life-threatening decisions. Because the village is organismic, and self-organizing and self-directing, it is an inherently natural, equanimous social arrangement where codes of relationship are genetically passed down from generation to generation, grounded in the wisdom of the ancestors, and egoistic, self-appointed, manipulating ‘leaders’ are not normally needed.
In contrast, there is such a diverse specialization of tasks required to keep a city running that an inevitable hierarchy develops. The social hierarchy in a city is a completely arbitrary, incongruous, paradoxical structure, in that, those who are contributing most to the welfare of the ‘whole’ will not be on top. Instead, the situation is reversed, and those who are hoarding or extracting or exploiting the most, at the expense of the collective whole, will be elevated to the top. Compared to a living landscape, such as hunter-gatherers drew subsistence from, the city landscape is barren and a place of scarcity. Crowds of people must vie with one another in a competitive game of resource procurement to ensure their survival. Those who are able to grab the most arbitrary power, in the sense of gaining compulsory influence over others, will have the most control over the production and distribution of resources. And this situation compounds upon itself over the generations, so that those who are willing or inclined to grab and wield arbitrary power are consistently selected for positions of authority and control, and lineages with this characteristic develop. With this ‘willingness to dominate’ being the selective factor in the creation of hierarchies, other qualities such as competence, compassion, humility and service to the whole are discounted or selected out.
Realistically, this willingness for domination and arbitrary power-wielding is absolutely necessary to keep materialistic civilization running. Imagine that first city, Ur, in Mesopotamia circa 5000 B.P. To keep its gears turning, it needed to extend itself out beyond its immediate environs and appropriate resources from its neighbors. Some may have resisted this pilfering. What the city could not take by negotiation it would take by force, for its continued existence depended upon extracting resources from the surrounding areas. A standing army was eventually needed to maintain compliance, and ensure tribute from down-pressed, outlying subjects. Most of the booty went toward satiating the excessive extravagance of the self-imposed, self-aggrandized elite, whose redeeming, authorizing characteristics were the penchants for playing the game of arbitrary power-grabbing, and the readiness to sound the death-bell, either for an external expedition or as internal enforcement; power, not Life, was the selecting factor. Soon, other settlements would grow to city size and begin the phase of civilization. As they expanded and projected their spheres of influence, drawing in resources from the hinterland, they would eventually come into rivalry with the spheres of influence of other expanding, projecting cities. Both would have standing armies, and a continuous battle of contesting the other for control of resources would eventually careen into a state of perpetual warfare, especially after other regional cities grew large enough to enter the fray. Any city-scale social entity that was not willing to exercise aggressive posturing and force in the competition for resources would soon be swallowed up, disintegrated, or vanquished. So, right from its inception, the crowded milieu of ‘civilization’ has precluded any other avenue of discourse except that of war, and this has impoverished the people greatly, for they never really had a choice.
All of the activities associated with dualistic civilization, i.e., with the unnatural arrangement of excessive populations in a limited area competing with one another for a scarcity of resources, were facilitated by and a production of the conceptualizing, objectifying, analyzing neo-cortex of Homo sapiens. As civilization, an abstract human construction, was distancing itself ever further from natural structures, patterns, and processes, so too was the neo-cortex distancing itself from its biological proto-substructure, and beginning to consider itself elevated above and superior to Nature. Successfully competing in the arbitrary power struggle of civilization was greatly assisted by a self-aggrandizing, self-separating ego, a self-image able to objectify people and situations so as to include them in rational calculations of comparative worth. Immersion in this contrived, fabricated, temporal, unnatural environment, living in a self-constructed limitation, produced the unwholesome side-effect of propagating shallow, mechanistic relationships.
Power struggles between competing civilizations required the rapid development of new science and technologies to gain the killing advantage, and the neo-cortex, developed in concurrence with the survival crisis of the ice ages, was pre-adapted to conceptualizing, engineering, and ultimately mechanizing, and manufacturing these technologies. As civilization continued to displace the natural order, the models, concepts, philosophies, and ideologies produced from a self-reflective, intellectualizing, ever more disconnected neo-cortex began to be mistaken for reality itself. Homo sapiens was creating an abstract world super-imposed upon the natural world that had been its roots, and through civilization, was setting the course for an alternative evolution diverging from Gaian evolution. This new world, existing almost entirely in a linguistic domain, was technologized and fabricated with the over-riding goal of securing short-term, competitive advantage in the anarchic, inter-societal power struggle in consistecy with military and mercantile civilizations.
With this sort of edict directing decision-making, from highly speculative mathematical models of Knightian decision making to common sense, it was expedient that the society itself behave like a well-oiled, highly productive machine. Command signals from above needed to be transmitted through an efficient communication network to auxillary units. A mechanized system of transportation and supply lines were needed to efficaciously relay energy and materials to keep the engine running. Specific functions within the machine needed to be skillfully designed so that when component parts (people) wore out they could be easily replaced. Doctrines, declarations, commandments, and manifestos provided conceptual blueprints for social organization. People were treated by their position in the apparatus, rather than as fellow human beings. It was better that the people themselves behaved as efficient, productive automatons, and so wrathful, vengeful male gods were invoked to ensure control and compliance. The society that could best engineer its total structure to react automatically to a mobilization order secured a strategic advantage in the anarchic, inter-societal competition.
And of course, this imperative was reflected in the physical pattern and layout of the city, in its structural arrangement. Villages grew up organically as an outgrowth of the natural lay of the land. Their flow patterns curved and winded and spiraled and adjusted over time. This is a very ‘feminine’ pattern and corresponds with matriarchal influence and authority. The patriarchal leaders of civilized societies required strict control and mechanization of the population, so the settlement patterns they created were highly ordered, rigid, and geometrically exact. Witness an aerial view of San Francisco or New York, as examples; there, rigid grid patterns are super-imposed upon the once living landscape. In the case of San Francisco, seven large hills were completely disregarded so that the two-dimensional city plan could achieve a level of square exactness. This same square grid pattern is used everywhere a civilized settlement is planned; it was first used by the Romans to militarily influence control over their colonies. In astrology, the square is a stressful aspect. The people living in these city-squares are subjected to an unnatural stress because natural flows and patterns are circumvented, and these people are drawn increasingly away from their natural roots and into an abstracted world designed for them with the intention of mechanizing their lives. The city is completely an engineered, mechanical system, and thus prone to entropy.
Back in the inter-societal competition, as tamer, less engineered societies were defeated or conquered, ever fewer power centers consolidated ever larger territories, and civilization marched into its pre-destined empire phase. Once this civilizing process is begun, i.e., the violent power-grabbing consolidating into ever fewer centers, it cannot be reversed; it develops an inertia that must play itself out to its inevitable cyclic completion. The people involved in the arbitrary power manipulations cannot just simply resign (and go back to the farm); they have been genetically selected for generations to possess the qualities that enable them to effectively play the power game. Eventually, inevitably, the consolidation of power into ever fewer centers will result in the creation of one totalitarian power center attempting to control access to all resources. The appearance of the WTO in the current climate of globalization is a welcome sign that the 5000-year cycle of civilization is nearing completion, and Homo sapiens ’ work is almost finished.
THE ECO VILLAGE HOLISTICALLY BASED SPIRITUAL CIVILIZATION
The 21st century will prove to be an age full of excitement, growth, and new discovery, creativity. A convergence of prophecies from many different traditions point to these days as a time of great transformation. (See link "prophecies and the end of Civilizations"). Some of these prophecies portend doom, and certainly, for those still intent on pressing forward at all costs with the outworn, abstract, unsustainable pattern of ‘civilization’, the world will prove to be increasingly difficult and hard to understand. Those in charge will need to impose ever greater tyranny and control to maintain the status quo until their highly entropic, mechanized global system collapses in upon itself, as has been the fate of all prior civilizations, and many people will suffer needlessly.
Most of the prophecies, however, presage a coming Golden Age of peace and enlightenment, what can be called a holistically based spiritual civilization. These conditions will appear for those able to initiate new cycles, mated with traditional cycles, disassociated from the patterns and motivations of civilization. Homo sapiens has courageously brought us to the point where we can perceive ourselves as a planetary collective unity, where we can communicate as a cognitive global system, and this corresponds with, and is the result of, the larger being Gaia achieving self-awareness. The 21st century will begin the age when this self-reflective, global intelligence begins making decisions on its own behalf, for its own regeneration, as Gaia grows into maturity. Those human beings delighting in cooperating and participating with the evolution of this inclusive, planetary intelligence will represent a new species of the genus Homo. These graduated human beings will be somatically and genetically predisposed toward contributing to the health and vitality of the greater whole, to all of Nature, and to returning Earth to a lush paradise. They will voluntarily initiate patterns intended to assist and enhance fundamental Gaian evolutionary processes, so that Earth may become a luxuriant wonderland of Life, naturally maximizing diversity and complexity as is its proclivity, proliferating life-forms in a bloom of abundance that can become a seed bank for the galaxy. What time will there be for calculating the GNP? We will some calculate in GWB. It is the will of the people.
" A recent survey (Easton, 2006) found that 81% of the UK population agreed that the Government’s primary objective should be the creation of happiness not wealth. Earlier this year David Cameron, House Member Leader of the Opposition, put happiness firmly on the political agenda by arguing that “It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not just on GDP (gross domestic product), but on GWB – general well-being" (BBC, 2006).
According to some research, the new species of human will be distinguished by a conspicuous growth in the back of the brain with more "right brain" function, offsetting and balancing the recent growth in the forward neo-cortex. This new profusion will be much closer to the spinal column and thus will be an extension of more primal brain structures. The new species will have access to the analyzing, abstracting, objectifying, rationalizing functions of the neo-cortex, but will identify itself wholistically with the entire brain, so that this new species may come to identify with the entire 3.5 billion year evolution of biological life on Earth. The new brain growth will thus permit the species to access the wisdom and intelligence of a self-aware Gaia, so they may become the acting cells of a Gaian brain. There are today children and adults who have the gifts resulting from evolved brains.
The Gaian brain will wisely attempt a synthesis. The culminating effects of the history of civilization cannot be denied, discounted, or erased; they were, after all, the product of an inclusive Gaian organism, and their combined consummation has brought the planetary intelligence to the point of self-awareness.
The separating, isolating, ego self-consciousness of the neo-cortex has its role, but in the long run, is not meant to be primary; the synthesized whole of the brain is far more effective and enlivening. And yes, diet and lifestye have an impact thereon.
Tribal, organic, village life could be considered the thesis; there, people identified primarily with the group and had very little individual identity. Civilized, city life could be considered the antithesis; there, maximum individual identity was asserted at the expense of the group. In the synthesis, highly individuated, highly creative members will consciously come together in groups for the benefit of, and the opportunity provided by, the collective whole (Rudhyar, 1970).
This is already beginning to happen as people are voluntarily coming together to form communities with like-minded people. These communities are being embodied in a variety of settlement patterns, with varying degrees of dependence on the continuation of civilized, city-based culture. It is being asserted here that ‘village’ scale is the ultimate fecund context that provides the most fruitful opportunities for successfully initiating the new cultural patterns that can sustain themselves into the 21st century and beyond.
The village is large enough so that all essential life-maintenance tasks can be achieved, as a group, with enough free time left over for leisure and the pursuit of culture, but not so large that there are strangers – in a village everybody is known. The village is large enough so that a diversity of specialization tasks provides interesting work for all, but not so large that the diversity of tasks requires a hierarchy and a self-appointed leader to provide direction. If a village was part of a cooperative assembly of other villages in close proximity (for example, clustering the population of a city into self-contained, organic, village-sized assemblies), the meta-village could professionalize its work to the point of concentrating on light industry and manufacturing, thus furthering the synthesis of organic and technical culture. The population of this idealized, self-contained, meta-synthesis is theorized to be roughly 5000 (Sale, 1980), 5000 (Mumford, 1961), 7000 (Alexander, 1977) -- and Mollison (1988) reminds us that these amalgamations need to be further subdivided into village-scale social groups of 500. These, then, can become organic, reproducible unities of eco sustainble settlement. Smaller unites are also possible.
It may be possible to design settlements so that they achieve an organic, self-maintaining, self-organizing living status, and this is perhaps the greatest potential of the concept of the ‘ecovillage’. Traditional villages are organisms primarily because they biologically grow into their mature forms, by themselves, over the course of millennia; organisms are foremost self-creating (Maturana and Varela, 1980), they are not created by an external authority. When we consciously ‘design’ an ecovillage, then, we can never create an organism. But we can create a living system; organisms are but one class of living system (von Bertalanffy, 1968).
All living systems are characterized by three essential qualities:
1) a pattern of autopoiesis, or self-organization,
2) a process of cognition, or maintaining self-organization by exchanging information with a dynamically changing environment, to keep continually abreast of any needed, corresponding internal changes, and
3) the form of a dissipative structure, or an autonomous unity operating at highly energized conditions far from equilibrium. This is the scientific definition of living systems forwarded by Capra (1991).
When we apply these principles to our own design considerations, it becomes apparent that the real task of a village designer is to gradually introduce the patterns, processes, and structures so that the (eco)village is capable of growing itself, and so becoming a genuine living system, harmoniously integrated into its environment.
This means that, for example, to come in as a professional, external design team, and make all the calculations and considerations and plans and drawings necessary to construct a proto-ecovillage model of 5000, no matter how beautifully orchestrated and ecologically integrated, will be, in effect, the creation of another mechanical system. It will be prone to entropy and will not be sustainable because it will not be built by the people who will be living there; residents will need to be imported and may never actually come to identify with the place. A living system is primarily, fundamentally, self-organized, and grows through time with a history of structural coupling to its environment. A design team, no matter how brilliant, cannot anticipate all the necessary contingencies to ensure mutually reciprocating, interdependent, long-term viable relationships between a settlement and its dynamically changing, encompassing ecosystem, and still less anticipate the relationships between the people who will be residing in the settlement. It is far more ‘timeless’ to teach the people how to build the village themselves (Alexander, 1979).
THE OBAMA "FATHER'S VILLAGE", THE PROTO-ECO VILLAGE OF THE NEW ERA
Creating a proto-ecovillage model of 5000 under the Obama Presidency would be a tremendous achievement. It would serve as a demonstration that the long-term viability of tribal, village culture could be synthesized with selected components of technical, civilized culture, to create a workable, post-industrial, pre-organic model, with all the comforts of the 20th century, during this transition stage of emphasis on sustainability. But we would be fooling ourselves to consider such a consciously planned development to be a “living system”. Go to a traditional village, and see that the people there created their living system all by themselves, over generations. And their health is buyant, often surpassing 100 years old with no chronic diseases..
Their culture is sustainable. The best thing a village designer could do would be to educate people who have forgotten that they are an integral component of Gaian evolution, and are perfectly capable of creating their living situations by themselves, once they have relearned the techniques. And once the State frees the People from oppression. And promote a plant based diet Society. The starting point to any renewal in public health. (CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT WHY).
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION PENDING MORE TIME TO REFINE THIS ANALYSIS
" It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs" . Albert Einstein, (1879 - 1955), in Treasury for the Free World", 1946)
OUR FATHERS' DREAM: the Sustainable Village
" As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more." President Obama (Inauguration, Jan 20th, 2009).
Why would a French-cultured holistic U.S ambassador to France to helpful to the evolution of Franco-American Unity ?
LIKE PRESIDENT OBAMA'S FATHER, MOST FRENCH PEOPLE NOT ONLY APPRECIATE LIVE AND MEANINGFUL DEBATES, BUT LIVE IN SMALL VILLAGES WITHIN 36,000 "CANTONS". This would be a fertile terrain to promote sustainable communities, from which similar movements would ensue in America.
HOLISTIC HEALTH ECO-VILLAGES BASED ON ENLIGHTENED SELF-SOVEREIGNTY, MEANING MOST OF THE TOOLS OF PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION ARE CREATED LOCALLY (FOOD, SHELTER, TEXTILES ETC) AS NEEDED, THE "SHORT SUPPLY" KEY, BECAUSE THE GOAL OF AN ENLIGHTENED ECO COMMUNITY IS LESS THE SLAVERY OF GDP (GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCTION),THAN THE IN VIVO INVESTMENT OF GWB (GENERAL WELL BEING).
PLEADING FOR AN EXPERIMENTAL ECO SUSTAINABLE HOLISTIC HEALTH VILLAGE TO BE BUILT IN FRANCE AND THE US.
The building of an experimental holistic health eco village based on detox and immuno boosting retreats, sustainability, appropriate technology and congenial values, in the low to mid mountain area, close to hot springs and a river could be a bilateral project in conjunction with the Statue of Civic Responsibility.
This project could start the shift in the civilization process. Because then, we would have the living evidence that lifestyle medicine and holistic health are decisive when it comes to the rejuvenation and restoration of chronically ill patients and the Nation.
Once shown to be decisive, this model could be implanted in all welcoming communities, provided our Constitutions can get more "perfected" with key amendment provisions (See the Committee's Constitutional clean-up Declaration for the details).
IS THIS PROJECT UTOPIA, AUTARCY, SOCIALISM, TOTALITARIANISM, RECKLESSNESS ?
ECO-TOPIA MAYBE. A NEW UNIFYING CIVILIZATION MECHANISM POSSIBLY, AN IMPROVEMENT ON WHAT THERE IS, YES.
IS THERE EVIDENCE THAT OUR MILITARO-CONSUMERIST MERCANTILE, POST INDUSTRIAL, FINANCE SPECULATION CIVILIZATION IS NOT CAPABLE OF SATISFYING THE BASIC NEEDS OF THE MAJORITY ?
THERE ARE MANY INDICATORS: AMONG OTHERS:
TWO THIRDS ?
PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR THE EVIDENCE.
IS THIS "SUSTAINABILITY" AND "SELF RELIANCE" PROJECT IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE SPIRIT AND THE LETTER OF THE LAWS ?
The core, the nucleus of the issue rests on the engine of "enlightened self sovereignty" and on the way both Nature and the Universe work. Less from a competitive, divisive, "long supply lines" structure than via a cooperative, unifying localized village structure.
IS THERE EVIDENCE OF THOUSANDS OF EXAMPLES OF THE EMERGENCE OF THIS NEW HOLISTIC & SPIRITUAL CIVILIZATION MODALITY VIA SUSTAINABLE ECO-COMMUNITIES ?
Yes, tens of thousands, PLEASE MOUSE CLICK HERE
“The continued existence of a free and democratic society depends upon recognition of the concept that justice is based upon the rule of law grounded in respect for the dignity of the individual and the capacity through reason for enlightened self-government". (On attorney ethic rules, Washington State's Supreme Court)
IS A HOLISTIC AND SPIRITUAL CIVILIZATION BASED ON "ENLIGHTENED SELF-SOVEREIGNTY, SELF-DETERMINATION AND SELF-RELIANCE SUSTAINABLITY TECHNIQUES STRONGER THAN ALL OF THE ARMIES IN THE WORLD ?
"There is only on thing more powerful than all the armies of the world, that is an idea whose time has come” Victor HUGO
FOR A PIECE ON POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY RELATED TO OUR CONCERNS, PLEASE CLICK THIS PARAGRAPH. THANK YOU.
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