Learning Methods

1. We need to quickly reduce human population on Earth to a sustainable level of no more than one billion. Attempting to make any solution work in a world so horrendously overpopulated is futile and insane. If technology improvements, education and peer pressure can achieve this quickly and voluntarily, that would be the best answer. Political pressure to do so has repeatedly failed, and won't work. If the voluntary methods won't work quickly, we need to find another way, painless and non-discriminatory and non-political.
2. The next culture, everyone seems to agree, needs to be built around communities. We need to create some Model Intentional Communities, a lot of them, to re-learn how communities work, and how to create them, and to show our young people a better way to live (preaching to them won't work). Quinn's idea of just 'walking away' from our civilization culture is a good one, but we need something to walk away to, and MICs might be the answer, the building block of the next, sustainable culture.
3. Saving the world is going to require some self-sacrifice and some risk-taking. We need to bring together a lot of bright minds in a lot of different ways to start focusing on this one big problem, instead of the immediate little problems civilization keeps throwing in front of us. We need to diagnose and cure the disease, and that means some of us need to stop being preoccupied with treating the symptoms. I believe that process needs to be voluntary, and the problem-solving groups need to be self-selecting and self-managed. And we need to solve the problem holistically -- a vicious cycle can't be changed merely by tinkering with its isolated parts. That means we need a combination of big-picture thinkers and innovators, and specialists who can expose the big-thinkers' ideas to real-world reality tests. Think-tanks, conferences, ad hoc organizations -- we need them all, and lots of them. If we're going to fix this, many people will have to decide to make this their calling, their purpose for living, at considerable personal sacrifice, and they'll have to find, and work with, like minds.
   
4. My sense is that the answers, if there are any, are innovations and technologies that can change our culture as broadly and abruptly as the invention of the arrowheads, agriculture, science and automation did. They won't be the result of linear thinking, and will probably be far more revolutionary than any of the technologies I call for in point 2 above. As Einstein said, We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
   
5. We don't have much time. We are already starting to see the early signs of total ecological and social collapse, and although this collapse is unlikely to reach a head in our lifetimes (it could take as long as another century), we may already be too late to begin to prevent it. I believe the signal for the beginning of the end will be more conventional than natural disasters caused by global warming -- it is more likely to be a nuclear or biological holocaust caused by two warring, suffering, nothing-left-to-lose nations, or by a stateless group of desperate malcontents who have the motive, and probably the method, and are only now waiting for the opportunity to say fuck you all. There is no time to lose, or to debate whether anything needs to be done. Something needs to be done, now.
6. We can't go back. Returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is neither possible nor desirable. We need to go forward to build a new culture that understands and learns from the truth about nature, and is sustainable, but which also uses the best innovations and technologies that human ingenuity has and will come up with, so that a billion of us can live lightly on the Earth, comfortably, easily, connected, in balance with and as part of nature. Innovation can allow us to do more with less, to eat well without farming animals or catastrophic agriculture, to specialize in what we do best and love doing most, with people we love to live and work with. But that innovation and those technologies must also respect the truth about nature, which means we'll need to reinvent them to work without non-renewable resources, and so that they can be produced with no pollution and no waste. Just because many current technologies use non-sustainable processes and non-renewable materials, exploit slave labour, are produced by a demeaning hierarchical and irresponsible corporatist economy and produce mountains of toxic garbage doesn't mean all technologies must do so. Just as civilization isn't the only viable human culture, today's wasteful and destructive economy isn't the only viable economy. They're the only life we know, but not the only life possible. We need only imagine something better, and strive to make it so.