Leonard Cohen once wrote, “A scheme is not a vision.” What you have presented here is an elaborate, complex, detailed scheme—which is comprehensible only to highly educated technocrats like yourself—who compose about .01 percent of our global population at best. And your scheme—elaborate and sophisticated as it is—is predicated on the assumption that our modern, techno-industrial and economic infrastructures are fully compatible with an intact and functioning biological support system. Sorry. A money-based global market economy is completely dependent on readily available net energy and on endless growth of production and consumption of commodities, which in turn depends on expanding extraction of finite resources to feed and enrich an endlessly growing population. But this model of infinite growth is fundamentally incompatible with a finite planet! The global market economy is, in fact, a terminal cancer on our biosphere.
So what’s the alternative—what vision can guide future generations in a collapsing industrial civilization on an overstressed planet? Rule one: keep it simple, so the ordinary Joe knows what you’re talking about. Here is my own vision—which can be summed up in three simple injunctions that even a fifth grader can understand: Grow Gardens, Grow Community, Grow Awareness—by learning, teaching, healing, and creating. Just imagine what might happen if that simple injunction went viral!
People would spend less money and grow healthier food.
They would get to know their neighbors.
They would develop three key forms of positive-sum capital: experiential, intellectual, and social.
They would conserve water, build topsoil, attract pollinators, diversify their diets, and freely share their knowledge and skills with friends and neighbors, for the good of all.
They would become politically engaged at the community level to solve larger, collective problems…
Now THAT’s a vision, for it is rooted in a simple triadic slogan: Grow Gardens, Grow Community, Grow Awareness.