An Invitation to Participate in Creating a Regenerative Society
by The Center for Planetary Culture
The visionary design scientist Buckminster Fuller believed humanity faced a choice between ‘utopia or oblivion.’ According to Fuller, we will either establish a world where everyone on Earth receives a research grant for life in whatever subject interests them or we will fall by the wayside, like the vast majority of species before us. With the acceleration of our technological capacities and the deepening of our ecological destruction, we seem to be approaching the critical threshold where we choose our path.
With our position paper and Wiki, we invite the global community to work with us to envision our current situation as an opportunity for an evolutionary leap, and document what lies beyond it. We can move beyond the limits of outmoded ideologies and cultural obstructions to build a new human society based on symbiosis, resilience, cooperation, and the rational application of our technical powers. This Wiki will critically explore and analyze the current system and highlight the many amazing alternatives and experimental projects that show us the trajectory toward a world that works for all.
From the Regenerative Society Wiki:
We invite you to collaborate with scholars, technologists, independent researchers, visionaries, and activists to facilitate rapid social transformation, in light of our planetary crisis, particularly accelerating climate change and loss of biodiversity, as well as ever-growing economic inequality.
The content on this Wiki will be the foundational material for the Center for Planetary Culture’s position paper, A Transition to a Regenerative Society, which will be re-published regularly based on new information and developments. Our goal is to create a living document that defines strategic initiatives and the best practices to address our society’s current inertia – despite scientific predictions of a 4 – 6 Celsius temperature rise within this century, which would have drastic consequences for human civilization. We seek to help inspire a worldwide movement of civil society by providing clear and tangible steps for both individuals, social groups, and organizations to get involved.
The three main areas addressed by this Wiki are technical infrastructure, social (political and economic) structure, and consciousness and culture, or superstructure. If human society is going to evolve to take on the immense challenges we face as a species, these three areas must be addressed, comprehensively, in a systemic way. The last section, Rapid Transition Strategy, takes the recommendations developing in each area and turns them into a plan of action, proposing a strategy for quickly communicating the message.
Over the last several decades, governments and corporations have shown they are incapable of reacting to the ecological crisis with the necessary urgency. Recent reports from scientific bodies like the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) make it evident that we have now reached a critical threshold. A global movement of civil society must arise as a third force. We have only a short window of time—perhaps a few years—before the crisis becomes overwhelming. For a civil society movement to succeed, leaders and civilians must organize around a cohesive vision and shared strategy.
Technically, nothing prevents us from reconstructing human society rapidly, using the communications infrastructure and social tools that evolved in the last decades. Sustainable technologies for permaculture, bioremediation, holistic health, rainwater harvesting, alternative energies, and so on can be mass distributed or manufactured locally. We can use mass media and social media to re-train the global population and disseminate a new set of values and principles that support a holistic and sustainable way of life. Facing rising seas, we can construct eco-cities that act as scaffoldings for living systems, supporting local communities, with food and energy produced on site.
Through a coordinated movement of civil society based on Gandhi-esque principles and organized through social technologies, we can dismantle the military industrial complex and institute a peaceful world.
If you buy a massive area of land the size of a small country with ample natural resources and want skilled people to come and fully participate in a social experiment to transcended Capatilism using Socioracy / similar structures to evolve governance, while still trading with the outside world so the country itself can become financially rich and in a position to change the bigger picture…
Let me know, I’ll come and help build it
I believe we should no longer grow feed for animals her in the Midwest. Instead we should grow food for human consumption and only eat native animals sparingly.We currently grow too many crops to feed to livestock that are not native to this area which causes dirty water and polluted land from pesticides and chemicals . We should take down the fences, put the land in the public domian and have government harvesters cull whitetail deer , bison etc. in responsible numbers and harvest the worst in a given population (mimicking natural predators) instead of trophy hunting and hurting the gene pool. Also public transportation should be instituted on a big scale , this would help alleviate air pollution and decrease the number of animals wasted on roadways. Everything we currently do here concerning agriculture is destructive to the environment and cruel to animals.
I would love to be a part of something like this. It would be a dream come true!