So what are we to do? Some of the writers cited above offer no solutions -- they are merely diagnosticians, they say, it is not their place to tell us what to do. Some writers do proffer answers, that range from the modest to the radical to the resigned. Here are some of them:
The late Freeman Dyson, in his famous Wired interview, suggests we need to rediscover community and focus our attention on it, since that's the political level at which we can have a personal impact. Along with that, he says, we need to quickly advance new technologies that (like solar energy co-ops) increase community self-sufficiency and (like biotech innovations) improve quality of life. Economist Herman Daly, in Developing Ideas, proposes an economic and tax program that would help communities flourish and encourage conservation and the protection of the commons, and proposes a global contract in which developed nations would agree to reduce their levels of consumption while in return the developing nations would agree to reduce their levels of population.
Just in the last year, Jon Schell in The Unconquerable World has proposed a new political system built around non-violence and consensus-building, while Shoshana Zuboff in The Support Economy has proposed a new post-capitalist economic system based on small enterprises collaborating to meet human needs holistically. Thom Hartmann in Unequal Protection, David Korten in When Corporations Rule the World and Joel Bakan in The Corporation present prescriptions for stripping corporations of their power and perhaps returning that power to local communities. Jim Merkel in Radical Simplicity prescribes a way that each of us can strive to reduce our personal footprint to sustainable levels.
Thomas King in The Truth About Stories and Thomas Berry in Dream of the Earth both say we need to write a new story about a new human culture, that the rest of us can embrace, and which will show us the way forward. Meanwhile, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point teaches us how change occurs and can be brought about quickly, and Peter Singer in Ten Ways to Make a Difference and the late Dana Meadows in Places to Intervene in a System offer pragmatic advice about how to bring change about. Stuart Koffman in At Home in the Universe explains how we can exploit the attributes of self-managing systems to help humans evolve at the community level.
While Margaret Mead tells us that most of the major changes in human society and culture have been wrought by a few, caring people, James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds persuades us of the importance and value of tapping into the collective wisdom of large numbers of people who, together, probably have the answer to every problem, even one as intractable as the crisis that faces us today. And Bill McDonough in Cradle to Cradle and Avery Lovins in Natural Capitalism show proven ways that could be used to redesign the world by learning from nature.
Bucky Fuller reminds us that it is much easier to create a new system that renders the old one obsolete than to try to reform an existing system. There is even a school of thought that proposes a human cultural metamorphosis, explained by Elisabet Sahtouris in EarthDance and Gary Alexander in eGaia, by which transformation to a new human culture might be achieved quickly. Glenn Parton in Humans in the Wilderness suggests a grand experiment of spaced-out Intentional Communities, to reintroduce humans to community and wilderness, and provide a model for building a new natural culture.
So there are many suggested solutions, none of which has achieved any great groundswell of support. They are of four main types:
- innovative (brought about through invention of new technologies),
- social/educational (brought about by virally changing a lot of people's minds),
- commercial/entrepreneurial (brought about by changing the rules by which the economy operates) and
- political (brought about by changing laws and regulations).
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