Dreaming Deep Green, Imagining the Ecozoic: Imagine It then Build It

Imagine homes, factories, schools and other kinds of buildings that breathe, heat and cool themselves, collect and store sunlight, produce food and recycle nearly all of their waste and water. Imagine city sidewalks lined with nut and fruit trees under which grow raised beds of vegetables and berries; the front walls and windows of row houses are turned into hanging gardens and greenhouses. Empty shop spaces have turned into community canning and food drying operations, tool and equipment cooperatives. Imagine the basements of apartment buildings, offices and restaurants given over to vermiculture (worm-based) composting systems. Parking lots have become solar collectors and roofs water collectors.

Imagine vacant lots and even dumps turned into urban farmsteads or parks that recycle greywater, nurture chickens, geese, pigs and fish and produce gardens. Imagine living machines or bio-shelters like greenhouses that use aquatic plants to produce organic soil amendments, fish farms, irrigation water and electricity out of sewage. Imagine that temperate zone suburbs can produce 75% of the food, water and energy they consume.

First We Imagine, Then We Create!*

Imagine shanty-towns and slums and schools and colleges establishing community gardens on local landfills, using methane from the fills to heat greenhouses and class and community rooms. Imagine buried non-toxic dumps becoming master gardener teaching centers.

Imagine residents of urban ghettoes transforming hundreds of blocks of hazardous waste sites, condemned buildings, vermin-infested, dilapidated housing, crack houses and closed businesses and vacant lots into urban eco-restorative villages: racially and ethnically diverse, neighborly communities that combine affordable housing, shops and community centers with pocket parks, urban organic farms and markets, environmental reclamation projects and community houses. Imagine city parks that feature wind generators, fruit orchards, fish ponds and community garden plots as well as concerts in summer and ice skating in winter.

Imagine that, because trial and error can be made virtual and time can be speeded up digitally, a community can make relatively appropriate and cautious decisions about and for itself in real time, and by that means over time avoid some of Life's more brutal paybacks.


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From Thinking and Hoping, to Transformation

Imagine that churches, town halls, libraries, empty retail spaces and schools become open spaces for community big-screen local cable and movie viewing and for teleconferencing and discussion of local and cultural issues. Imagine that local programming enjoys an 80% audience share because it is genuine reality TV.

Imagine, as democracy guru Lloyd Wells has, that members of a community can signify in advance of receiving a tax bill their approval or disapproval of, interest or disinterest in local initiatives and expenditures by symbolically allotting their portion of local taxes to their preferred programs and projects on a mock-up of their tax bill that they receive in the mail or online.

Imagine schools and universities in which students raise their own food, process their own trash and waste, and are trained to compete in resource-watch and restoration and eco-design teams. Imagine empty big-box stores turned into community-owned libraries, community-built public housing and workshops; imagine small manufactories that produce fabrics from locally grown fibers like hemp, cotton, wool, cattail and flax; local businesses build furniture from recycled materials and sustainably harvested bamboo and timber.

Imagine that long buried watercourses are uncovered and allowed to flow through cities again. Depaved highways are turned into greenways that flow through and around them. Imagine that in places where there is no more nature, we invite nature back in.

All of these things are already being done somewhere. Hundreds of cities and suburbs around the world are bringing just such Earthological imaginings to life.

But why stop here with our imaginings? Let's push beyond what's already being done. Let's imagine what isn't yet but could be.

A New Reality: Imagining the Ecozoic**

Dreaming Deep Green, Imagining the Ecozoic: Imagine It, then Build ItImagine that the only thing we do on a global scale is share art, culture and information — about the status of our communities and environments, about survival strategies, inventions and innovations and about what worked for us and what didn't. Imagine that tribal desert dwellers in Africa, Mongolia and the Arabian Peninsula can teach us things we do not and cannot know if they don't teach us. That remnant populations of native peoples can teach us survival and subsistence techniques that make us competent and our communities sustainable in every kind of environment. That each generation of the world's children is more place-competent and Life-wise.

Imagine that everything doesn't always cost more and that nothing really important is scarce. That small is beautiful. That animals and plants and ecosystems become extinct only in the natural course of things. That salmon run thick in the world's rivers again, shrimp and lobsters crawl the continental shelves, polar bears aren't drowning or whales beaching or bees and bats dying. And color is coming back into the cheeks of paled coral.

Imagine that there are no world wars because there isn't enough funny-money or fossil fuels — or even the will or desire — to fight them. Imagine that human health improves because we're no longer poisoning ourselves, the air, water, soils and our food with derivatives of those fossil fuels. Imagine that the weather doesn't get any worse.

Rather Than Collapsing, We Rise to the Challenge

Imagine that what comes after Critical Mass is not collapse, a long emergency or the end of civilization, but something more like what Thomas Berry foresaw: a deeply green, Ecozoic Age. In this time ahead we do not live beyond Earth's means or behave as if we were larger than Life, but live within Earth's means with every other kind of living thing as if we were children of and partners with Life. We live in an age in which we have helped to restore health to Earth's immune system and learned how not to compromise it again.

Imagine that we simply need an occasion worth rising to. And that Critical Mass is such an occasion.

All this is possible.

*Sub-titles by InnerSelf

©2012 by Ellen LaConte. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
New Society Publishers. www.newsociety.com

**Definition of Ecozoic: "...when humans live in a mutually enhancing
relationship with Earth and the Earth community."


This article was adapted with permission from Chapter 16 of the book:

Life Rules: Nature's Blueprint for Surviving Economic and Environmental Collapse
by Ellen LaConte.

Life Rules: Nature's Blueprint for Surviving Economic and Environmental Collapse by Ellen LaConteThis sobering yet essentially optimistic manifesto is required reading for anyone concerned about our ability to live within Earth's means. A powerful tool for community transition and cultural transformation, Life Rules offers a solution to our global challenges that is at once authentically hopeful, deeply inspiring, and profoundly liberating.

Click here for more info and/or to order this book.


About the Author

Ellen LaConte, author of: Life Rules -- Nature's Blueprint for Surviving Economic and Environmental CollapseEllen LaConte is acting director of the EarthWalk Alliance, a contributing editor to Green Horizon Magazine and The Ecozoic, a frequent talk show guest, and publisher of the Starting Point online newsletter. She has written two books about Helen and Scott Nearing, homesteaders and best-selling authors of Living the Good Life, and she is the author of the upcoming environmental novel Afton. After twenty three years homesteading in Mid-Coast Maine, she resides now in the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina. Visit her website at www.ellenlaconte.com.