Designing Sustainable Sebastopol.
• The need for designing a sustainable community.
Why should there be any need for designing a sustainable community?
The point of designing the future is to replicate, as closely as possible, in models that that would happen in reality anyhow, but with a very distinct, very important difference--resolving differences and controversies that there are among us in real life causes real waste of resources and time, and causes real (sometimes irreparable) harm to ourselves and other beings in the world; resolving the very same differences and controversies in models would prevent real waste and harm from occurring in real life.
It would be much easier to achieve sustainability if we knew, into as minute detail as possible, what the ideal that we are trying to achieve actually is, what the ideal should look like--it is always easier to get something when we know what that something is. When we are unsure, or--as in the case of a commonly desired goal--we are not all wanting the same thing, reaching the goal is much harder, if not impossible.
As it is now, do we know what we mean when we utter "sustainable"? Do we really all mean the same thing, do we all imagine "sustainable" anything into the same extent of detail? Might there even exist ideas that would be mutually incompatible/contrary to other ideas of what "sustainable" anything should be like?
We all know what we do not want in our ideal world, but do we know what we do want there?
Unless we know, unless we collectively design what a sustainable anything--from a local community to the entire world--should look like into the least possible detail, we will have a hard time achieving sustainability.
• How to do the designing?
People would be able to pool all their ideas they have about what their community should look like if it were really sustainable, and then it would be decided what ideas are more "sustainable" than others, and those selected ideas would be used in portraying what the community would look like when it would be sustainable.
It would not matter at this moment how exactly this would be done--a discussion list at the start would probably suffice; for anything more involved, especially at global level, there already are computer programs and technology (to mind come all the various games and "distributed computing") that would make it possible.
The ideas should contain:
• What would be the sustainable way of obtaining the basic necessities for life in Sebastopol--food, materials for shelter, clothing, utensils, tools, etc,. etc. ... ?
• What would be a sustainable Sebastopol's social structure?
• What would a sustainable Sebastopol's government look like?
• What all else should there be in a sustainable Sebastopol? (Please note that it would be useless to submit ideas about what there should not be in a sustainable Sebastopol, because an absence of anything would not make the picture of the ideal any clearer.)
Discussing the subject at:
Sustainable Sebastopol Forum at Yahoo Groups
Thank you, Mr. Jan Hearthstone - ModelEarth.Org .
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