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From: wce@hogbbs.scol.pa.us (Bill Eichman)
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Date: 	Thu, 15 Apr 1993 00:09:00 -0400
To: angst+@CMU.EDU
Subject: Seed Crystal Book-- part 1 of chapter 5
Reply-To: wce@hogbbs.scol.pa.us

SEED CRYSTAL PROTOTEXT -- Version 5.1 -- ANALYSIS -- (5-A)
(c) 1993 Cary G. Robyn / 1440 East 14th St. / Brooklyn NY 11230


     Why do a "VILLAGE"?  Why not focus our primary efforts on
state or national elections, or organizing bioregionally, or
creating a global network, or designing cities, or setting up a
small commune first?  What unique properties does a village have?

     The intentional village is the largest scale upon which we
can presently take control over all institutional and cultural
parameters and effect holistic change.  It is the largest social
unit we can be confident we know how to restructure well.  It is
also the largest that no one will stop us from restructuring.  

     We may not be able to get one of our favorite visionaries
elected President of the United States in the next election, 
or even for several elections after that.  We may never persuade 
the general public of the merits of an Anarchical revolution.  
We may not be certain what government legislation would encourage
investment while simultaneously keeping inflation, unemployment,
taxes and interest rates low throughout the nation.  But we do
know how to build a village that will embody our highest ideals
and provide us with an excellent quality of life.  This is
something that we already have a robust theoretical basis for.  

     We also have the power to set our own part of the world
aright.  In the United States -- and even in most other nations
of the globe where private property rights are respected -- 
a group of people can readily form a corporation and purchase
exclusive title to a parcel of rural land of sufficient size to
build themselves a new community.  If the group sincerely defines
itself as having a spiritual focus, it can be incorporated as 
a church and thereby enjoy additional legal protections and 
tax-exempt status under the special freedoms accorded to
religious institutions.  In most significant respects, such a
settlement can function as a self-styled independent enclave, 
no less so than any company town or conventional religious
monastery.  Technically, of course, the laws of the state will
still remain enforceable there, but in a de-facto sense, it can
function largely as a world unto itself and a sanctuary from 
the sort of oppression that is actually felt by individuals. 

     The acreage and quantity of resources needed to construct 
a self-reliant ecotopian village are moderate enough to place
them within the reach of a relatively small group of dedicated,
like-minded people.  A great deal of prime agricultural land 
in the northeast has been idled by the economic decline of the
family farm.  New England has hundreds of abandoned mill sites
where 19th century Yankees constructed dams that could be used
for small-scale hydropower.  The ongoing economic recession 
has caused land prices to plummet throughout this region.  
     The ECO project is attractively bold and ambitious but 
fully practical to complete at the level of financial, technical
and creative resources our subculture could command.  This goal
is attainable at the present time if enough of us choose to 
work together.  

     Intentional village formation during the mid Nineties is 
a plausible scenario for us, not a far-future science fiction
possibility or a fanciful pipe-dream.  Electronic Virtual Reality
is a fascinating topic that has captured the imagination of many,
ourselves included, but we know it will not deliver on most of
its promise for decades.  In contrast, an Eco-Futuristic Village 
is something we can actually inhabit ourselves within the next
few years.  It is practical to construct in the contemporary 
real world.  Indeed, it could have and should have been brought
into being more than a decade ago.  We view it as an obvious and
logical step that should have been taken by our predecessors
before the end of the Seventies, one that is now long overdue.

     There is an impressive degree of consensus about the 
community format among brilliant minds from many different epochs
and many different persuasions.  Each has invoked the concept
under different circumstances and used it as a setting for 
their personal utopian vision; from holding all wealth in 
common to radical extremes of capitalism; from technocrats to
luddite wildmen; from scientific materialists to enthusiasts 
of speculative New Age visions of telepathic transformation.  
They may disagree about the specifics, but they agree on this
much:  Whatever the solution to the human condition, this is 
the setting where it can arise.


     Earth Colony One merits top priority as a focus for our
efforts in the years ahead.  ECO is the only project that can
simultaneously address all of our most pressing personal needs
while maximizing our influence upon the problems facing the 
world at large.  It is the only project that will satisfactorily
relieve the socio-economic pressures and distractions that
undermine our ability to devote ourselves to creative
productivity and political activism.  Moreover, ECO is the 
only project that will deliver an optimal habitat in time for
raising our children.  No other project can compete with its
prospectus in this regard. 

     A protest rally will rarely earn us more than five minutes
of coverage by the media, no matter how large the attendance. 
The newsstands are already filled with magazines on every
conceivable topic.  Even a great book will ultimately sit
passively on the shelf.  Most letters to politicians are 
no longer read for content, merely categorized and counted.  
A music recording or a video will provide but occasional
entertainment.
     In contrast, Earth Colony One represents a chance to 
create a complete evolving micro-society.  It will have a greater
effect upon the lives of its participants than any other project. 
By applying straightforward intelligence to the comprehensive
anticipatory design of a community habitat, we can easily 
enable a way of life that will be vastly more joyful, fulfilling,
rewarding, attainable and sustainable than what the mainstream
culture offers us.  Through Eco-Futuristic Village formation, 
we can change the rules of the sociological game and play with
this world in a constructive fashion.  

     There is a large personal preference factor that makes a
rural village something worth doing for us, simply because it
feels right as where we want to live.  We want to make our homes
in the countryside.  We enjoy raising our own crops, making our
own things, designing our own dwellings.  We want to live in a
place that is attuned to the rhythms of the Earth and celebrates
meaningful holidays instead of overcommercialized farces.  
ECO will let us do this.

     Collective living arrangements make good economic and
ecological sense.  By increasing the scale of procurement and
organizing the process of acquisition, they encourage the use of
optimally efficient procedures that reduce the amount of energy
and resource consumption required to provide the necessities 
of life.  They cut out all middlemen and bureaucracies.  They
minimize the redundancy of little-used facilities.  They make it
easy for members to pool their finances and share ownership in
order to gain access to top-of-the-line, professional quality,
long-lasting equipment instead of bearing a greater expense for
individual ownership of lesser-quality goods that often break
down.  They enable the group purchase of luxury items that
individuals in the group could never afford on their own.  
They can provide more leisure time under normal circumstances 
and a readily available collective workforce on occasions 
when there is a difficult task that needs to be accomplished. 
The larger scale of collective needs and the averaging of
irregular individual usage maximizes the utility of investing 
in alternative energy systems, such as co-generation and 
electric cars, and facilitates higher levels of self-sufficiency. 
Intelligent planning for a modern tribal lifestyle can make ECO 
a notably comfortable, efficient, pleasant place to live.

     The tribal unit has an economy of scale and available labor
that make collective self-reliance more practical than going it
alone on a homestead.  For instance, an article on the American
farmer in the May 4, 1992 issue of Newsweek magazine noted that
"a recent study showed that production cost doesn't vary much
from 300 to 3000 acres."  The agricultural facilities of a
cooperative village can be large enough to approach or pass 
that lower threshold. 

     One family cannot make efficient use of the products 
of a cow.  A village kitchen can easily utilize the output of
several at once, and thus always have some in milk production. 
Being there to shepherd, feed, water and perform milking would
keep a family tied to its homestead every day of the year. 
Livestock become more practical for a collective village because
there will always be someone available on site who can look 
after them.  Raising our own livestock under wholesome conditions
means that non-vegetarians as well as vegetarians can boycott the
cruelty of the factory farm system and eat much healthier food
than what the industry sells to supermarkets and restaurants.

     The village setting subsumes most of our individual economic
interactions with the world.  It will change the products we buy,
the type of work that we do, the way we dispose of our wastes,
the vehicles we travel in and how often we need to use them. 
By providing for our material needs as a collective committed to 
ethical values, it can let us live our lives within a carriage 
of assured ecological compatibility and social responsibility.

     Eco-Futuristic Village formation will have a greater
satisfaction return per unit of applied effort than any other
venture.  We are proposing a project that will utterly transform
every aspect of its participants' lives.  It will enable a
restructuring of our living environment that will be profound,
complete and entire.  It will change our physical surroundings,
the caliber of people we routinely interact with, the tasks we
spend most of our time with, how our children will be educated,
the amount of time we can spend with them, the creative resources
we have access to, the issues we spend most of our days thinking
about, the choices we can make, the pleasures we can share.  
It engages all levels of the personality.  

     Our daily environment shapes most of our reality tunnel.  
We cannot change the whole country or the whole world just yet,
but how much of our direct sensory input comes from all that
territory?  Very little.  Subjectively, engineering big changes
on a small scale will deliver much more for us than small changes
on a large scale.  Objectively, it will yield a qualitative
rather than merely a quantitative advance.

     A social net is inherently an ant farm tunnel through the
sand of the population as a whole.  You can never touch all the
grains.  You can never touch most of the grains.  You can never
even hope to touch more than the tiniest fraction of a percent 
of them as anything more than a media image or the designer of 
a manufactured product. 

     Each individual person's experience of the world is much
like the view through a fisheye lens.  Unless one looks up the
actual figures in a statistical abstract, one's perception of
"everyone's" values, interests, capabilities and other important
characteristics is inevitably skewed to the statistically
insignificant by the temporal limitations of in-depth
interpersonal interaction.  We each get to know, at most, 
a few dozen people fairly well and perhaps a few hundred
peripherally.  Beyond that, our impressions are little more 
than of faces in a crowd and mass media characterizations.  
It is but meager threads that bind us to social reality.

     This has some interesting consequences:  A relatively 
small population can constitute an "everyone" to those that
comprise it.  For social experimentation, it means that a 
group of people can live the lifestyle of a world that does 
not currently exist and experience it as if it were the norm.  
The effects observed on an individual level within the group 
will be almost indistinguishable from those that would be
attained under conditions of total societal transformation.  
The only difference is the missing information content that 
would be entering their purview from a world of similarly
structured communities, whose creative works could not be
simulated in the absence of genuine large-scale transformation. 
The format of the missing information is mostly of an impersonal
nature: the news reports, films, books, images and inventions
that would originate from the rest of the transformed society.

     Through intentional convergence, it is possible to assemble
enough people to fill the center of our "fisheye lenses" and
relegate the mundane majority to the rim without becoming hermits
and still maintaining a very busy and emotionally fulfilling
social life.  If utilized deliberately, to all intents and
purposes, we can live in a holistically transformed world that
will not exist for hundreds of years, differing only in the
subjectively small area of the rim from the genuine article,
because our concept of "everyone" is, in truth, shaped by 
a statistically insignificant number of people anyway.

     Earth Colony One will be like a time machine with its
controls set for the far future, letting us glimpse the dynamics
of a culture that will not exist among mainstream society for
generations -- and may only have a chance to take root and grow
if we embark upon this course, for ECO's facilities will let us
touch that larger population with media and inventions that would
otherwise never see the light of day.

     A New Age future is not the only fantasy that can be 
brought to life.  In a world approaching six billion people, 
there are enough individuals who will be attracted to almost any
conceivable theme, any historical epoch -- Renaissance Europe,
Ancient Greece, Imperial Japan, the Roman Empire, whatever 
you fancy -- to develop realistic Fourth Wave communities
actualizing worlds that have ceased to exist or exist only 
in the imagination.  (Atlantis, Hyperborea, Road Warrior and
Middle Earth can get the exact same treatment.)  The Fourth Wave
technologies of self-sufficiency, shamanism and cyberspace can
reverse the trend towards a global industrial monoculture by
making it possible for people to actualize the fantastic with
less hassle than entailed in an ordinary "9-to-5" existence 
in mundania.  This is a mind-blowing aspect to alternative
technologies that has been little discussed and one which
Terracon has a special interest in.

     Choosing to focus our efforts on building intentional
villages will enable us to reify unconventional visions in
fullness, even if only the tiniest percentage of the population
presently agrees with us.  We do not need to convince a majority
of the electorate that we are correct before accomplishing
anything substantial, or resign ourselves to exerting only a
tenuous influence upon our surroundings.  Whatever the specifics
of a shared vision, we can gather up the most aligned people 
from around the world and assemble a sufficient number to 
set off to live our lives in our own way.  

     The intentional village format will maximize our power 
to craft a complete lifestyle for ourselves, extending it
throughout the spheres of employment and sociology that
predominate in flavoring our lives with satisfaction or
frustration.  Experientially, apart from media originating 
from off-site, we can know that alternate cultural reality as
intimately and vividly as if it had been fully externalized
throughout the world.  

     Yet a village is large enough to be historically meaningful. 
It will attain a sustainability of culture that no backyard
project, isolated collective household or transient event could
hope to accomplish.  If our vision of a better way of life proves
to be a valid one, it will attain a transpersonal immortality
through attracting our successors in subsequent generations,
replicating itself and propagating its memes throughout the
civilization as a whole.  

     Will ECO be a "perfect" society or a "perfect" place?  No,
not likely.  But, at minimum, there is every reason to believe
that it will be "a very good place to live," indeed, a much
better one than we are likely to see anywhere else.  There will
still be problems to contend with, but the kinds of problems 
that do remain will be more manageable, less dangerous, less
chronically debilitating.  They will be human-scale flaws that 
a culture, an ecosystem and a planet can live with; ones that
will not undermine the basis for sustainability or pervasively
block us from attainment, accomplishment and pursuit of
happiness.  We will vigorously thrive in a place like this.  
Of this we can be confident, for most of the miseries that 
we endure in mainstream society are sustained by stubborn,
ignorant, neo-phobic people and the ossified customs of a
pathological culture.
     To be worth doing, the question is not whether our prototype
will be perfect -- a literal "utopia," in the more fanciful sense
of that word -- but whether it has a reasonable chance of being
significantly better than what we would face here otherwise.
The answer to that question seems to be, unambiguously, yes.

     The ECO project is of more than personal hedonic relevance
because the formation of such an enclave will enable a group of
allied people to maximize their effectiveness in shaping the
world at large.  Through Eco-Futuristic Village formation, 
we can position ourselves to be as influential as possible in
propagating our ideals.  Nothing will persuade more people to
adopt an ecologically compatible lifestyle like watching us
thrive, prosper and enjoy ourselves while doing it.  Building 
ECO is a capital investment in planetary metamorphosis.  If we
seek ambitious, idealistic, world-historical goals, we should
attempt this project first so as to improve our leverage and
place them within our collective reach.

     Like a computer, the Eco-Futuristic Village is a 
"general purpose tool" that can make us more efficient at doing
whatever we think is worthwhile doing.  There is a geometric,
sometimes even an exponential advantage conveyed by the synergy
of joining forces with our counterparts instead of working alone. 
By enabling a large group of people sharing unusual interests 
to live in proximity, ECO will create a place where long-term
collaboration on elaborate projects will be possible.  There 
will be helping hands and sophisticated perspectives when it
comes time to get a job done.  The quality of our lives will be
enhanced through the power of comprehensive integrated innovation
and an abundance of convivial technologies.  We will thereby 
free ourselves from dozens of pernicious sources of distraction
and tension that decrease our fitness and reduce our creative
productivity while living in mainstream society.  

     Building Eco-Futuristic Villages is the best way to create 
an environment conducive to enabling the second generation of
noetic talent to actualize its full potential.  We have a
responsibility to do this for their sakes.  It is also the only
way to shield the first generation of noetic talent from being
reduced to Circuit Four neurological predominance in the course
of struggling to raise our kids amidst the social and economic
pressures of mundania.  We need this project for our sakes too.

     Raising children merits high status in the value system 
of noetic mutants.  We carry a sacred legacy and should allow it
to fully unfold, both in us and through us.  The trouble is, 
the social dynamics of starting a family amidst mainstream
culture are fraught with dangers for everything that makes us
special.  There are few things that degrade the creative /
adventurous / visionary instincts like having little mouths 
to feed and worry about.  It is appalling what parenting does 
to the personalities of most people.  Basically, all the world's
cultural progress happens in-between "omnidirectional teenage
rebellion" and "becoming like your parents were."  Only community
formation can provide a satisfactory solution to our dilemma by
deflecting most of these socio-economic forces.  

     Time is the great equalizer and the aging process the
sorcerer's worst enemy.  Biological neoteny has a lot to do 
with what we are.  To a large extent, what the noetic mutation
has done is to extend the duration of an exploratory, innovative,
adventurous, idealistic phase that few Normals have much of 
to begin with and most leave behind with their teens.  Alas, 
this condition is not necessarily permanent for us either.  
The majority of noetic mutants eventually hit an expiration date
of their own sometime after their mid-twenties.  It is the same
"Circuit Four" social domestication process, only delayed a bit,
and just as damaging.  Some do keep going.  A few retain that
magickal and tantric vitality for all of their lives, but most 
do not.  Twenty years later, the majority of those who attended
Woodstock were indistinguishable from those who stayed away. 

     What makes us special is a recent overlay on top of a much
older hominid base.  The older neural circuitry is programmed 
to cut down on much of our adventurousness and innovativeness
when it notices that it is time to settle down and care for
babies.  This is why you see lots of teenage skateboarders 
and teenage rebels, very few thirty-year-old ones and almost 
no forty-year-old ones, even if they exercise enough to stay 
in good physical shape.
  
     From the utilitarian vantage point of what Richard Dawkins
described as the "selfish gene," teenagers are comparatively
expendable in natural selection.  This life phase provides a
chance for the gene pool to place some of its bets on risky-but-
potentially-high-yield strategies for the species as a whole: 
Most of those rebels will be wrong, but a few will hit upon
something that works better than the traditional ways, or find
more fertile lands and abundant game over the distant mountains
when they run away from the parental village.

     Once the individual reaches the age of reproduction, it
makes sense for genes to place their bets on a conservative,
domestic approach to life in order to maximize the chances of the
children's survival.  Few people lived much beyond their thirties
back then anyway.  Today, different factors mediate the prospects
of survival, but these sociobiological cognitive phase genes 
are still playing by the rules of 10,000 BC.  Most people are
unconscious of the psychobiological mechanisms involved here and
just go by what they feel without thinking about it.  We need to
anticipate and deliberately circumvent these debilitating forces
to sustain our vitality.  We ignore them at our own peril.
We must create a place where it will be easy to do a good job 
of raising children without having our nervous systems switched
into "typical parents" mode.

     To some extent, the aging process will damage us 
no matter what we know or what we do (short of a breakthrough 
in biotechnology or, possibly, some of the emergent properties 
of advanced Circuit Five tantric Body Wisdom and Circuit Seven
Neurogenetic adepthood) but any inevitable losses will be
compounded by the artificially imposed stresses of raising
children in the midst of this high-stress, fear-ridden society. 
We need to aim at removing most of the socio-economic pressures 
that mainstream people have to worry about in these years.  
To accomplish this, we must assemble a social matrix of
intentional extended families that will make it easy to share
childrearing tasks, a culture that will prioritize the family
over the corporation, and a super-efficient economy that can 
make this culture practical and sustainable.

     Enabling our children to reach their full potential is 
also going to take a special environment carefully designed for
this purpose, one that is very different from that offered by
mainstream society.  A lot of the work I am doing with the ECO
project is motivated by a desire to build that environment. 
Sometimes I even have the feeling that the beings that want 
to be born through me are compelling me to work on this project
so that they will have a suitable habitat when they arrive.   

     If we do not start building these noetic sanctuaries very
soon, we are going to lose what little remains intact of the
Eighties Generation crop and consign the Nineties Generation crop
to the same well-worn path to fading out, giving up and becoming
absorbed by the mainstream culture.  We are looking at a moving
wavefront that swells in the teens and expires in the late
twenties unless it is very carefully cultivated.  Why has no one
on our side learned from watching this happen in every decade
since the Sixties?!

     It is crucial to recognize that, while the phenomenon we are
part of exhibits tremendous innate potential to move this world
towards a challenging and hopeful future, it is diffuse enough
that if no conscious, active attempt is made to organize our
efforts, it could easily fail to achieve anything of lasting
consequence at all.  Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of
choice, and in this society, it is extremely difficult for young
people to choose to follow their vision even if that vision is
strong.  It also becomes apparent that the primary reason more
people in this society are not engaged in interesting or creative
activities is that the schedule of a regular job and running a
household leaves them with too little time and feeling too
drained of energy to apply to such endeavors.  Either we will
make it possible to support ourselves in some other manner, or 
we will lose that creative productivity and magickal vitality.
     In reflecting on the modern American commune movement,
sociologist Hugh Gardner comments that the Sixties Generation 
was "the first in history to have all the world, past and
present, from which to choose how to live."  The creative rebels
and innovators of the Nineties have an additional advantage, 
for we look not only upon distant civilizations, but also 
upon recent periods of social upheaval and their yield.  
We have a better understanding of which strategies for change 
are likely to lead to a free society and which are likely to
replace one oppressor with another.  In foreign lands, we see 
the repeated failure of attempts at imposing "dictatorships of
the proletariat" instead of evolutionary change on the community
level.  Perhaps most relevant to this report is the inescapable
conclusion that protest is a tool -- but not an end goal -- 
if we wish to create a meaningful alternative in our own lives.  

     The extent to which "selling out" became almost inevitable
for our predecessors demonstrates an underlying systemic problem
that has remained unaddressed.  It is not mediated by personal
values or sincerity alone, for there is little reason to doubt
that multitudes were deeply and passionately committed to 
their causes.  The situation is pervasive.  Our ranks have 
been decimated with the passing years, not just gnawed at or
pockmarked by a few turncoats.  The problem here is less a matter
of idealism vs. corruption, but rather one of ineffective praxis
undermining our subculture's psychobiological and cultural
viability in a very pragmatic context.  The prevaling strategies
of Leftist activism have failed to provide for basic needs of the
tuned-in population as it is carried along the conveyor belt of
the stages of human life.  Correcting this failure is where we
must focus our efforts in order to sustain our contemporaries 
as agents of transformation as they mature. 

     Protest rallies are not enough to support the lifestyle of 
a sustainable culture.  Neither is protest an intelligent choice
for a culture's core theme, lest we be perpetually led about by
gainsaying the moves of our opposition instead of tracking the
leading edge of the ingression of novelty.  To drive lasting
forward motion in the world at large, we must do more than 
react to what the opposition does.  We must take the initiative, 
set an exciting and hopeful agenda, and use it to capture the
imagination of influential segments of the population.

     Our phenomenon will not be able to accomplish much of
lasting significance until after we have attained the colony
formation stage.  In the absence of a home base for our Tribe,
our efforts will be circumscribed by the demands of conventional
employment and the overall hassle of living in society-at-large. 
Shamanic research will be hampered by the lack of continuity
between distant individuals scattered across the country.  
Many of our closest counterparts will only be able to interact 
for a few hours amidst the full schedules of annual festivals 
and hectic protest marches, or never even be seen again after a
serendipitous encounter.  Like this, activism will be limited to
playing a role in part-time protest ventures, ameliorating some
peripheral aspects of industrial culture through institutions
like food co-ops and urban gardens, or possibly, involvement 
with a political candidacy.  We may see some minor or transient
improvements as the result of years of struggle but, by and
large, we will be regarded by the popular culture as little more
than "holdovers from the Sixties," the handful of eccentrics who
always have a cause to push, rather than credibly laying claim 
to the title of pioneers of an exciting and hopeful future.  

     We cannot capture the imagination of the mainstream
intelligencia or mainstream youth this way.  We will remain
economically disadvantaged and never reach our own potential as
individuals or attain the life-affirming culture that is within
our grasp.  Our children will grow up here and most will be
absorbed by the system.  It is a dismal scenario that threatens
to swallow us.

     Until we develop and pioneer the solution to this dilemma
ourselves, I do not believe that we can justifiable criticize
those who take the Establishment route to professional success.
We must provide a viable alternative for people with high levels
of ability who desire to work on the frontiers of human
knowledge, enabling them to meet their personal needs and find
rewarding applications of their talents in the institutions of 
a Gaian culture.  If we don't -- and we have not done this yet,
not even for ourselves -- it is only rational for them to choose
to meet at least some of their needs well by taking the easy path
that is provided and laid out for them by mainstream society.

     Protest politics has its greatest failing in that it does
not provide anywhere for its own people to go.  In victory, 
it dissolves the basis for organizational linkages that were
developed to fight a now-vanquished evil.  Those who devoted
themselves to the struggle find themselves isolated in an
otherwise unchanged culture.  In ongoing struggle, it becomes 
an extracurricular activity for a few years while one is in the
state of partial freedom that campus life affords.  As graduation
looms, the pragmatic demands of economic subsistance (especially 
when one contemplates raising a family) usurp idealistic and
humanitarian motivations.  

     There, in a nutshell, is the key limitation to elevating the
functioning of society to the level of awareness that is already
approached by a significant fraction of the general public in 
its youth.  Each generation has its creative rebels, most of whom
end up getting absorbed back into the system because they find
there is nowhere else to go -- even though we possess exactly the
skills, aptitudes and interests needed to create a practical
alternative for ourselves and those like us who follow in the
generations ahead.  In the Nineties, we also have advanced
technologies for communication and organization that did not
exist when the Sixties crop became involved with political
causes, along with largely perfected habitat technologies that
could enable us to achieve a high degree of self-sufficiency 
in providing for our material needs.  Near total independence
from the Establishment is possible if we do it on a scale 
large enough to attain a critical mass of skills and resources.

     The evidence suggests this can be accomplished by a 
network of self-reliant bases within, at most, one order 
of magnitude beyond what has already been demonstrated at
independent alternative communities like Arcosanti and The Farm. 
It may be practical at the same scale if we utilize more
effective strategies than our predecessors, which had serious
known flaws and are hardly the best we can conceive of today.  
How many people do you need to assemble enough skills, expertise
and resources to cut the cord entirely and assume a complete
post-industrial culture and economy?  How many "pet rocks" or
"videogames" or "Top 40 records" or "computer peripherals" do you
need to throw into the marketplace before you have a base of
capital large enough to manufacture whatever goods are necessary
(with all of your members gaining that much more free time 
and quality of life improvement from the energy efficiency,
automation and decentralized ownership)?  

     Eco-Futuristic Villages will help sustain idealism past
young adulthood.  They will also be a worthy and rewarding
application of that idealism.  Most contemporary problems are
embedded in a matrix of unbalancing forces that doom attempts 
at deep, lasting or truly meaningful change in society-at-large
to be frustrating failures.  If you stop feeding energy into a
project, it swiftly becomes overwhelmed by the forces of decay
that surround it.  Push them back in one place and they pop out
elsewhere.  Every news broadcast confirms that we are living in 
a fundamentally pathological culture.  It cannot be salvaged
intact, and it benefits no one to perpetuate the illusion that 
it can be, least of all ourselves.

     Mainstream culture suffers from a cancerous overburden of
social institutions that have grown into perverse monstrosities
and systematically misconditioned the population.  Everyone
reading this essay already knows this.  Need I devote pages to
enumerating the failings of the public schools?  Television?
The criminal justice system?  Welfare?  Health care?  Public
transportation?  Even the handful of institutions, like NASA,
that could once have been pointed to with pride, have grown 
stale and flabby.  The Establishment is rotten to the core.  
It is as if an entire civilization is crying, en masse, 
"Help, I've fallen and I can't get up."  Once, it was only
radicals and utopians who decried this situation, and most were
derided as malcontents and crazy doomsayers.  In the Nineties, 
it has become common knowledge that this civilization is going 
to hell in a handbasket.

     Although the formation of an Eco-Futuristic Village requires
a greater "activation energy" to embark upon a comprehensive
departure from the status quo, a host of otherwise intractible
contemporary problems become much easier to solve in this setting
because an intelligently planned community would never become
ensnared by them in the first place.  Here, one can eliminate
entire complexes of misery that vex the mainstream social order
by altering the conditions at their roots.  At places like ECO,
we would never get ourselves into most of these messes to begin
with.  As Fritz Schumacher put it: "The smart man solves a
problem.  The genius avoids it."  The intentional village setting
provides an opportunity for people to choose between whole
systems, rather than awkwardly attempting to steer destructive
juggernauts via piecemeal approaches of taxation and legislation. 
Here, we are starting from scratch with holistic planning, the
most advanced knowledge and the best creative talents available.

     With an abundance of workable solutions to real-life
problems and the added strength of combined innovations in 
so many areas, ECO will enjoy a unique synergy.  Just as 
problems reinforce one another in a web of hopelessness, so can
intelligent procedures reinforce a safety net.  ECO's success
will not depend upon any single innovation.  It will not be
jeopardized by any single failure.  Whatever we try that doesn't
work well will be isolated against a super-efficient background
and soon be revised in favor of something better.

     An intentional village is capable of experimenting with
innovations that are too radical to be politically feasible to
implement in society-at-large through a democratic government, 
or functionally impractical because of widespread societal
dependence upon deeply entrenched institutions.  Here, the only
limitations are the preferences of the experimenters themselves
and the constraints of physical reality.  For example, we could
not create an all-vegetarian community if there were not enough
otherwise aligned prospective members who desired this to be a
feature of their lifestyle.  We could not plow our fields with 
a tractor fueled by the amount of alcohol that can be distilled
from the plants grown in a windowbox.  Apart from this kind 
of thing, the only limits are those of our own imagination.  
The intentional nature of an Eco-Futuristic Village frees us 
from the limitations of the "lowest common denominator" in
society-at-large and the resulting pragmatic constraints on
holistic change there.  
     
     The character of the Eco-Futuristic Village's membership
will make it more open to new ideas, more flexible and more
adaptable than mainstream society.  It will thereby remain 
state of the art in years to come as well as well as when it
forms.  Almost by definition, it will attract a population that
is inclined to be adventurous and curious.  The prototype will
feature a biomorphic architectural style with timeless aesthetic
beauty.  Its facilities within will be continually upgraded as
photovoltaic technology, computer technology and biotechnology
advance.  Our community will function as a moving platform 
for conceiving and realizing the leading edge, not a museum 
of 1990s futurism like a static World's Fair exhibit.  

     ECO's inhabitants will have an enthusiasm for cultural
innovation that is rare to non-existent among the Circuit Four
predominant population that comprises the electoral majority
elsewhere.  Our society will be neo-philic instead of neo-phobic. 
It will operate from a context of imaginative play that is
intrigued by change instead of the prevailing context of fear 
and insecurity that resists change.

     For structural reasons as well, village institutions 
will be much easier to change than those of mainstream society.  
Our village will be a self-reliant autonomous habitat of 
compact scale where bold innovations can readily be implemented
with the consent of a town meeting.  If, for example, a labor
credit system that once looked good on paper was becoming too
unwieldy in practice, we would readily be inclined to try one 
of the other approaches for a trial period of a few seasons or 
a year and see if it satisfies our residents better.  A policy 
of empirical evaluation that mainstream society would reject
offhand as politically impractical would here be recognized as
the common sense approach.  If there is general agreement that
something doesn't work well, we will, very simply, try something
else.  (Note how often the mainstream culture flounders because
it refuses to do even this!)  Our adaptability will give us a
significant edge over the sluggish institutions of the corporate
state in a future that will not only be characterized by profound
changes but by acceleration in the rate of change itself.

     There are a lot of compelling personal incentives for
getting out of the death trap of industrial culture, if we make
it an attractive, workable option for pragmatic people to choose
directly.  If the politicians won't listen to us, then let's 
set out to do it our own way, prove our case to the electorate 
in a vivid fashion, and use the free time, connections and
resources we will amass by living a better lifestyle to launch 
an Ecological Futurist political party that will run them 
out of office.

     I, for one, am tired of putting energy into "lesser evil"
causes and stopgap measures, manipulative foreign interests 
and stale rhetoric.  We need to establish something that is 
"all ours," with nothing we have to be apologetic for; something
that is truly viable, that can build a way of life for us and 
not end up as just another discontented crowd carrying placards
or another stack of paper.  This need is so obvious and pressing
that it astounds me that it did not become the primary focus of
Countercultural efforts in the past decade.  

     As long as we remain in small scattered groups or alone,
we will never see the realization of our vision.  We will have
counterparts in every generation who will struggle against 
the system for a few years and then end up absorbed by it when
they decide further protest is futile, or end up stuck living 
a marginal existence on its fringes without significant 
influence over anything.  This process can continue indefinitely
until the violent, destructive and ultimately suicidal
Establishment culture leads us all to extinction.  Fortunately,
there is an alternative to entropic decline:  We can build these
syntropic loci and interconnect them into a new matrix for a
post-industrial Gaian civilization.  It will strengthen as the 
old order crumbles.  Our example will lead those who are willing
to listen to our message away from the path of destruction and
enable them to thrive.  Our presence will focus attention on
worthy solutions and, as Terence McKenna has urged in his recent
lectures, "raise the level of political discourse."  

                              ***

     There are two ways to respond to those with primarily 
political concerns.  One is within the traditional Marxist
paradigm, in which salvation comes from the masses.  The other 
is outside that paradigm, in which the masses are, at best,
peripheral, or as much of an obstacle as the ruling power elite,
and whatever salvation is possible comes from the collaboration
of extraordinary individuals.

     First, we have to ask ourselves what constitutes effective
activism in a society where the media culture has become
synonymous with the popular culture.

     In contrast with the Sixties, when rural communes and
political activism were often seen as inherently incompatible
poles of Countercultural effort, the Nineties are a time 
when these interests can readily converge.  The predominance 
of electronic media as the main driver of political opinion 
and human culture, the availability of affordable tools for
creating professional quality video productions on a desktop
workstation, and the unprecedented time-pressure that permeates
the urban lifestyle make intentional community formation the 
most intelligent strategy for would-be activists to adopt 
in order to enable a lifetime of service to their causes.  

     In the Information Age, basing ourselves in a physically
isolated location need not compromise our participation in the
political process at all.  Rather, it will let us become a nerve
center for ideas and information.  Our largely self-sufficient
economy will give us the freedom to devote ourselves to
coordinating idealistic projects and building Alternative
institutions.  Eco-Futuristic Villages will also create a
lifestyle appealing enough to attract and motivate talent that
would not otherwise participate deeply in activism but would be
inclined to assist their friends and neighbors in team endeavors.

     The Eco-Futuristic Village's superior efficiency will 
let its members save money that would ordinarily be consumed by
living expenses, and that means they will have more discretionary
income to contribute to worthy charities and activist causes.  
By idealizing prosperity applied to Great Works instead of the
purported virtues of poverty, our members will ultimately be able
to fund many substantial projects on their own.

     Winning tangible, meaningful victories in our personal 
lives will keep morale high and provide the encouragement needed
to approach the task of transformation with eagerness and
sustained determination instead of burning out after a few years. 
Projects that would otherwise have to be squeezed awkwardly 
into weekends and holidays will be able to proceed without
mundane distractions.  Money that would otherwise go to a
landlord and a supermarket will buy us printing presses and
editing gear.  Time that would otherwise be spent commuting to 
a corporate job will now be spent doing art or composing music or
computer networking or editing documentaries -- or simply playing
with each other and making love, and that is no small asset.  
We will be invigorated and inspired by our lifestyle instead of
worn down and discouraged.  Acting as agents of transformation
can become a lifelong role instead of merely a youthful escapade.

     And, of course, there is no reason that community members
cannot still attend major protest rallies, visit urban areas to
give public lectures or participate in conferences.  One does 
not need to live in a city to distribute a newspaper there.  
A community with a flexible work week that owns vans and
reconditioned buses can make it considerably more easy for 
large numbers of its residents to attend special events -- not
merely in one location but in many!  So, even by this measure,
Eco-Futuristic Village formation will actually increase our
ability to participate in traditional Leftist activism.

     Those who would criticize the Eco-Futuristic Village concept
as being, in some sense, "too escapist" would do well to consider
how much talent activism loses in its absence.  800,000 people
made for a spectacular peace rally in 1982, but how many of those
people were forced to return to the same resource-intensive,
corporate culture, "anthill society" lives the very next day
because there was no other available choice?  What percentage 
of the college students who attended that rally are still as
politically active in 1993?  Can anyone seriously doubt that
worthy causes would have received more of their attention if 
the creative lifestyle they knew in their collegiate days had
been sustained and enhanced instead of being snuffed out by
entering the debilitating world of nine-to-five employment,
commuting, rent, bills and taxes?  They have been lost from 
the Real Work of self-development and planetary metamorphosis
because they were not encouraged to engineer a sucessful escape
from the system, and most lacked the insight, the clarity or the
determination to choose to pioneer such a complex and demanding
enterprise on their own.  

     At some point, we have to ask ourselves: How many people 
has the prevailing approach gotten out of the system in a
sustainable fashion?  How far has it taken those people towards
actualizing their innate potential, both as individuals and as a
collective unit?  The answer, sadly, is very few break free of it
and fewer thrive while doing so.  Most of us ultimately end up
absorbed into the mass culture or living precariously on its
fringes and spending the rest of our lives being worn out by it. 
Chances to escape this trap and transcend this condition are 
the rare exception, not the rule.  This has been going on for
decades.  Many are inspired, but once the rally is over, once 
the gathering is over, once the conference is over, it is back 
to the daily grind in mundania.  This approach is no solution.

     The result is pitiful.  Nowhere in the world can we 
point to a single example of a state, or a county, or a 
city, or even a village where the desired changes have been 
implemented comprehensively.  We have no adequate example 
to show open-minded potential allies what the world would 
look like if our culture were victorious that can stand the
scrutiny of skeptical observers.  

     Those in the "protest lobby" who ignored or disparaged the
intentional community theme all these years bear the burden of
guilt in this debacle -- and we will not let them forget it.  
We do not have to account to them; they have to account to us 
for what they have done with all the talent, enthusiasm and
burgeoning promise this phenomenon has sent their way and how
little they have delivered for us in all this time.  It is time
to demand an accounting.  Where is the Eighties crop today?  
We have lost a generation of noetic talent, we have lost a
decade, and we have lost priceless historical opportunities for
engineering large-scale transformation that will never recur.
"Escape" is EXACTLY what we must do as a precondition of further
endeavors.  Seeking freedom from that which will debilitate us 
is both our natural right and our duty as agents of Gaia.  
No one should make themselves martyrs to incompetent praxis.

     Community formation is hardly a cop-out from the affairs 
of the world.  Indeed, it may be the only practical way for 
most of us to avoid being forced to sell out.  Protest rallies
and summer campouts cannot possibly support us.  With some
difficulty, an entrepreneurial collective might pay the rent, 
but where will our children be schooled?  Even if we built them
an alternative school, where can our children play in relaxed
safety in this degenerate society?   All other ventures are
piecemeal solutions that leave the whole undone.  Eco-Futuristic
Village formation is the only truly adequate comprehensive
solution to being stranded in this civilization.  It offers us
our best shot at being able to devote ourselves to the kind of
idealistic endeavors that we really want to be involved with,
ones that will do something significant to benefit the world.

     Also take into consideration all the resources we put into
the system just by choosing to continue living here; the money
that goes to landlords and taxes and utilities, the profits
enabled by the labor that we contribute to the corporate economy
and the products we buy.  Is having our face appear in an 
urban protest crowd or our name on a urban petition worth the
ten-thousand-dollars-plus per year (usually more than this) 
that we implicitly contributed to the Establishment in order to
support ourselves here?  Does it help the urban housing shortage
to have competent creative people taking up apartments that could
go to the Homeless?  Does the absence of a functioning model of 
a sustainable way of life help anyone?  

     In the 1990s, the traditional "starving artist" types 
should be encouraged to apply their talents to designing and
building finely-crafted, aesthetic, sustainable homes in rural
Eco-Futuristic Villages, not to waste their most vigorous years
battling the municipal bureaucracy for dilapidated "squats" in
unsafe urban neighborhoods.  We can do better for ourselves 
in our own enclaves.  We can do better for the world there too.
The Eco-Futuristic Village project is unique because it will 
let us do the most we can to serve the causes we believe in 
while significantly fostering our own interests. 

     Moreover, there is a need for the Counterculture to reassess
its strategies for social change.  Traditional protest techniques
have declined markedly in effectiveness.  Skimpy coverage by the
media and a jaded audience have reduced rallies to little more
than parades.  It is pathetic to consider the amount of time and
effort that have been put into protest in the past -- everything
from letter-writing campaigns to peaceful demonstrations to acts
of political violence -- and still there is no viable alternative
for those who seek to avoid becoming trapped in the present
destructive system.  The general public learned nothing from all
we have done; its views circa 1991 were shaped more by "Rambo"
and "Top Gun" than all our efforts put together.  

     The evidence is clear:  If we wish to transform the mass
culture, we must become media adepts.  To hold onto victories,
people who share our values must continuously generate a large
portion of the popular culture.  To do that we need facilities,
free time and a concentration of creative talent.  This is
exactly what ECO and its successors will give us.  The answer,
within the prevailing Leftist paradigm, is to point out that 
Eco-Futuristic Village formation will make us into the most
effective agents of political transformation that we could
possibly be.

     On a more fundamental philosophical level, we must also
question the underlying premise that it is from the mass culture
or the masses that deep or meaningful change can ever arise.  
It is necessary to recognize this as a flawed conception that 
has consistantly wasted effort and distracted us from genuine
attainments within our reach.  I posit here that our true heralds
were the Promethean Individualist philosophers who championed the
Outsider characters of history, the Dadaists, the Surrealists,
the science fiction authors and the visionary rock stars; that 
it is among members of the Counterculture itself that we will
find the hope of the Earth.

     As the Lifespirit Congregational Church observed about 
the main theme of world events that coincided with the Harmonic
Convergence: "There has been a vast movement of consciousness
towards spiritually and ecologically aware individualism 
from the totalitarian collectivisms of patriarchal culture." 
This is the nature of the most vibrant spiritual forces 
at work in our time.  

     I know these questions are uncomfortable for many of those
who have grown up attending Leftist protest rallies and adopted
Marxist memes almost by osmosis, but they must be asked here 
in talking about the future directions of the Counterculture:  
In what sense does the behavior of the masses suggest that they
are allied with the wilderness or with creative, free-spirited
intellectuals like ourselves?  "The enemy of my enemy is my
friend"?  Or is our situation closer to that of cetaceans 
caught between a harpoon bearer and a shark frenzy?  

     How has the economic underclass reciprocated decades 
of unswavering support from the Counterculture?  "America, 
love it or leave it" from the majority of blue collar workers. 
Overwhelming popular support for the Gulf War and the Drug War.
Minimal participation in environmental activism despite our
bending over backwards to give them every encouragement.
What did Marxism do to the environment of Eastern Europe?  
How many creative dissidents like ourselves did it ship off 
to gulags while apologists here defended it?  

     What role has its enthusiasts played among us?  Have 
they contributed cleverness and delivered success -- or stale
rhetoric, neurotic in-fighting and inept strategies?  Again 
and again and again and again.  How many conferences have been
soured from this specific direction?  
     Who taught us all to shy away from entrepreneurship while
other cultural minorities prospered in America during these 
same decades?  Where might we be today if Junior Achievement had
been given the noetic mutants' economic contract instead of the
prosperity-phobic Eastern gurus and the anti-capitalist Left?  
Would we no longer see visions?  Would we no longer enjoy 
our music, and our art, and romping skyclad in the forests?  
Of course we would still do all that, and more, for we would 
have the resources to shape this world in accord with our 
idyllic visions.  If this population had merely an ordinary
middle class income per capita at its disposal, I dare say 
it could have and would have built a paradise here.  

     A numinous phenomenon filled, not only with promise, but
with extraordinary promise, has been hobbled, and has remained
hobbled for three decades.  We must ask why that happened and 
which factions did it.  This maladaptive material is clearly a
memetic accretion; not the legacy of the source that gifted us. 
It is merely something else that was around when we arrived 
on the scene and tried to use us.  Most of our efforts should
have been and should be applied elsewhere.

     A cynical observer of the 1992 Presidential conventions
noted that "whichever party gets elected, it's the politicians
that always win."  The Eco-Futuristic Village is a tool for
empowering a different set of neurotypes: those of the artist,
scientist and spiritual visionary.

                              ***

     What about the Anarchist radicals, who are savvy to many of
the failings of the Marxists and have the most dynamic following
among Nineties youth?  I too have Anarchist leanings, but 
I see it as "one more luxury we can enjoy among ourselves as 
a perk of living an ecological lifestyle at places like ECO"
rather than a pragmatic option for implementation in contemporary
society as a whole.  I would much rather see people BUILDING
Anarchical VILLAGES than wasting their time shouting for
revolution in the streets.  I want to see that beautiful defiant
vigor frolicking free amidst an Arcadian sanctuary filled with
life and hope instead of succumbing to nihilism amidst the
necrotic decay of the urban blight.  I don't believe we can
attain the Anarchical ideal, for ourselves or for society as a
whole, through anything we say or do at an urban protest rally. 
If it comes, it won't come that way.  I see a lot of effort 
being wasted here too.  

     There is good reason to believe that Anarchy would be 
even less practical for us to implement in contemporary America
than selling the public on a Marxist regime.  A Neuropolitical
analysis clarifies what we are up against:  Circuit One
predominants don't care who is in charge as long as someone 
takes care of them; Anarchy sounds less safe than government
paternalism.  Circuit Two predominants feel most comfortable 
when they know they are in charge of someone else and they know
who is their boss; even participation in representative democracy
holds little meaning for them and little rational utility for
society.  Anarchy would take away their institutionalized
hierarchical satisfaction and basis for strong territorial
identification, leaving them lost.  Circuit Four predominants
care most about having a steady job and secure, well-policed
neighborhoods.  Anarchy sounds threatening to the economic 
and cultural stability that they crave most; the very foundations
of the Circuit Four identity.  These three categories comprise
the vast majority of the human population.

     Our vulnerability before them is appalling.  Once you are 
in the hands of their institutions, there is nothing a reasonable
person can do.  Once you are free of them, there is little one
can do to strike back against them.  Even an unreasonable person
can accomplish little more than making a mess for the janitors or
raising the social misery index and insurance rates for everyone,
with but minor consequences for the targeted institutions.  It is
all one vast mire of hostility and intrusion and pointless tedium
sapping our vitality whether approached with obedience or rage.

     We must face the fact that, neurologically, we are as 
"cats" stranded in a world of "sheep" and "dogs," many of them
rabid.  We are very different from the majority, we cannot rely
upon the masses ever rising up, even less upon an uprising of 
the masses leading to a favorable outcome for ourselves or for
anyone.  Life may simply get grimmer and nastier while the state
stays in control, often finding political justification for
greater restrictions upon individual freedom as a result of
terrorism and urban chaos.  We should seek something better 
for ourselves, our children and our allies.  Only the formation
of a rural intentional village could reliably deliver that.

     Eco-Futuristic Village formation offers a way to bring
rebellion to a productive and decisive culmination, for it is
a way of crafting the ultimate revenge against "The System"
itself; that amorphous thing that always proves so hard to 
fight.  The only route to a satisfying, meaningful victory is 
to crystallize our will into a carefully planned enterprise 
that will minimize our vulnerability to their depredations, 
free ourselves from the need to deal with their institutions, 
and let us attain a high quality of life while simultaneously
undermining that system's very foundations.  We must craft a
wedge that the system can neither spit out nor swallow, and
insert it in a weak spot that will ultimately crack it open.

     If the Eco-Futuristic Village prototype is implemented 
in fullness, it will, indeed, be a seed crystal whose growth 
will ultimately shatter the established order.  I was
deliberately being melodramatic and poetic in an earlier section
to highlight the flavor, but in no sense was I exaggerating.  

     For a peaceful, legal project, the Eco-Futuristic Village 
is remarkably subversive.  As a contemporary once said about
Frida Kahlo's surrealistic art, it is "a ribbon wrapped around 
a bomb."  The Eco-Futuristic Village will bring about the end 
of the five-day work week and move towards what Bob Black called 
"The Abolition of Work."  It will make telecommuting standard
business practice.  It will make conventional schooling obsolete
and end their monopoly on higher education.  It will ennoble and
popularize Neo-Paganism as the Nature Religion of the future.  
It will cut the ties to centralized energy and centralized
agriculture.  It will offer alternatives to the medical
establishment and the insurance industry.  It will demonstrate
the practicality of electronic democracy.  If it steers for it,
it has a good shot at making significant breakthroughs in
everything from the political arena to advanced technological
inventions to parapsychology to how the popular culture
interprets the arrival of its millenium.  The Eco-Futuristic
Village can be the engine that finally gets the Counterculture
out of its rut of marginality and ineffectiveness.

     But if we continue to drift along aimlessly, allowing our
opponents to set the agenda of our lives, the natural course of
events is for the system to swallow us.  It is only through
unusual levels of cleverness and dedication that we can hope to
escape its grasp and one day emerge triumphant.  We cannot do it
the way the majority of our counterparts approached our situation
in the Eighties.  Protest rallies will not get us there.  Selling
t-shirts and macrame will not get us there.  We have to try
something new.

     Championing radical themes in an ineffective manner against
overwhelming forces helps neither ourselves nor these causes.
Our words have been ignored -- resoundingly -- so, now it is 
time to try a new approach and play a different game.  Instead 
of holding up signs to the blind and preaching to the converted,
we must figure out how to save the converted from being swallowed
by the system we all detest, consolidate the most viable elements
of Alternative culture and attempt a highly focused program
building upon that viability.  Instead of shunning the high-tech
media, we must master the high-tech media and use it to carry 
our message to the electorate.  We must learn to play Illuminati
instead of picketers.  Most of the work that we need to
accomplish for the remainder of this decade is centered on
furthering our own development as skilled shamans and effective
communicators, salvaging as many of our counterparts as we can,
and arranging a suitable environment for cultivating subsequent
generations.  This is where we can make significant and
substantial progress.

     The Neuropolitical analysis suggests that Anarchy will
remain a perennial theme but only be appealing to small, 
atypical populations.  Eco-Futuristic Village formation will
assemble such an atypical population.  Even if you assess a
higher degree of mainstream marketability to the Anarchism theme
than I have done here, Eco-Futuristic Village formation remains
an excellent first step towards bringing it about.  Demonstrating
that a close approximation of the Anarchical ideal can work on 
a village scale and deliver a better overall quality of life is 
the most plausible way we might ever convince a large segment 
of the populace to take this concept seriously.

     We cannot spend our lives waiting for a revolution 
that will never come or assume that the sudden collapse of
civilization-as-we-know-it will automatically deliver us 
to salvation.  It will not.  Instead of merely enduring the
dreary nuisances of the workaday routine and overpriced
apartments, urban Hippies would have to contend with a 
city of empty supermarket shelves ruled by the gun barrels 
of Crack dealers, Skinheads, Mafiosos and National Guardsman. 
That is no improvement.  

     The security of life in the modern state is an illusion
sustained by remarkably fragile access to finite resources that
are nearly exhausted.  Without electrical power, the skyscrapers
would swiftly become wholly unliveable.  Water would not flow
from the faucets, toilets would not flush, elevators would not
run, air would not circulate, garbage would not be collected.  
If the pipes ever froze, the plumbing would be ruined throughout
and flood when water pressure was restored.

     In winter, ordinary homes and apartment buildings would 
be almost as crippled if anything disrupted energy supplies.  
If you tried to burn something to keep warm, the smoke could not
be properly vented, and what would you and your seven million
neighbors use for fuel?  The stores and warehouses would be
ransacked and soon there would be nothing to eat either.  There
are few places nearby to grow crops in quantity and virtually no
seed, let alone adequate know-how and machinery or stockpiles to
tide the population over until harvest.  If anything happens to
disrupt nationwide energy distribution or transportation, you've
got a situation with no food, no potential for agriculture, and 
a couple million people clamboring over corpses for whatever 
scraps remain.  Rest assured, no one holding the guns will be 
on our side.

     The American empire is currently teetering on the edge of 
a precipitous decline.  Terrorism, a major California earthquake,
a meltdown at a nuke plant, multiple natural disasters or banking
failures could lead to socio-economic collapse and make the whole
system unravel.  Our homes here would be indefensible, for even
if you had enough weaponry to hold off a mob, they are built 
upon inherently unsustainable foundations of petroleum and
agribusiness dependence.  You would freeze and you would starve. 
It is clear that we must gather together those who share the
ecotopian vision and get out of the death trap of industrial
civilization before it falls and takes us down along with it.

     We must maneuver into positions of greater invulnerability,
greater freedom to choose possible destinations and greater
influence upon the popular culture -- no matter what possible
future we find ourselves operating within.  Eco-Futuristic
Village formation is an optimal strategy under any probable
scenario because it can meet those decisive criteria.

     The idealization of poverty has been a tragic mistake 
for our subculture.  Owning large parcels of land ourselves 
is an excellent way to keep it out of the hands of people who
would despoil it.  Gaia gave us talents with which we can 
prosper here and the inspiration needed to employ wealth for
noble purposes.  That is exactly what we should set out to do. 
Each Eco-Futuristic Village can define and safeguard a private
wildlife sanctuary perpetually free from commercial exploitation
and managed according to the most idealistic standards.  If it
accomplishes nothing else, just by holding the land, a new
utopian movement would play a significant positive role in
preserving the environment.

     The only way we are going to achieve meaningful change 
is on the community scale -- not through more impersonal
bureaucratic programs or giving obsolete institutions more
technologies they cannot handle.  We need to recover utopian
experimentation from its connotations of impracticality and
recognize it as a legitimate, significant and appropriate
application of our intellectual skills.  Indeed, to recognize 
it as the optimum field for the most vigorous minds of our age
to explore.  

     As Matt Taylor once described the role of such villages: 
"We approach social change through innovation, rather than
advocacy of large social programs, legislation or government
intervention.  We identify technological, social and economic
innovation as the source of social change.  Innovation comes from
individual and voluntary group effort.  However 'progressively'
minded, governments cannot legislate, plan or coerce innovation. 
Creative innovation will flourish best when bureaucratic
planning, taxation and regulation are kept to a minimum, and 
when a variety of social, economic and lifestyle alternatives 
are allowed to develop."  This is exactly what an Eco-Futuristic
society will do.

     Competence applied to furthering the status quo is
counterproductive and pernicious.  Most of the time, their
institutions use us as finely-machined cogs that help support
a destructive apparatus.  Even at best, we are emptying the ocean
with a sieve.  Until comprehensive change can be instituted on
our terms, we should stop putting our talents into the system, 
we should stop putting our dollars into the system, we should
stop putting our taxes into the system.  We should get out of 
the dying cities, locate ourselves in the remaining unspoiled,
thinly populated areas of the world, defend the wilderness that
remains, and work together to establish a sustainable culture of
high and free beings with the power to choose its own destiny.   
Except for contending with economic necessity that would
otherwise decrease our own fitness during the interim period, 
we should avoid propping up any institution that is not run by
creative, inspired, competent people.  Our talents should be
devoted to building the New Matrix for a Gaian civilization, 
not bolstering moribund institutions.  When forced to confront 
an economy consisting of irresponsible corporations and bloated
bureaucracies, we should not even give them the satisfaction of 
a menial job well done.  It is time to pull out entirely.

     Eco-Futuristic Villages will make it practical to drop out
of mainstream society and still live comfortably.  They will
transform lifestyle and culture into a buyer's market and break
the back of the entire "wage slavery & inflated rent" system.
They will pioneer a path of viability that will carry the
noetically gifted population out of the death trap of the
mainstream culture and past the dead-end of the protest culture. 

     At a time when we are told by the media masters to resign
ourselves to living in an age of diminished expectations,
conditioned to passivity by fear for our jobs and our safety and
the very roof over our heads, Eco-Futuristic Village formation
will let us break away from the crowd of lemmings and raise our
standards instead by giving us the power to insist upon a more
leisurely, low-impact, non-corporate lifestyle.

     Until they have made their society hospitable to the
Creative Minority, we should pull out and neither patronize nor
labor for them.  If a city wants an "arty" district to attract
tourism and entertain the populace, then let them ensure that 
the housing is kept affordable, the subways are kept clean, the
streets are kept safe and the police are kept friendly.  Until
they employ us at meaningful work that fosters self-development
instead of draining our vigor, until their institutions have
earned our respect and they have learned to be tolerant of our
diversity and our pleasures, we should apply our talents to
building our own enclaves where ecotopian values will prevail.  

     We should team up with our counterparts and use our 
talents to empower an Eco-Futuristic culture than will respect
our freedom and honor our adventurous spirit.  If we work
together, it will be possible for us to attain a beachhead 
for noetic mutants in a sustainable extra-societal matrix and
expand it to pump talent out of the mainstream system and into
the institutions of a Gaian civilization.

     For, in addition to this visionary core, there are hundreds
of thousands -- quite possibly millions -- already on the
periphery, who have been touched by the phenomenon and/or its
informational legacy to a significant extent in shaping their
ideals and aspirations; if not yet enough to cause them to
pioneer such an endeavor themselves, more than enough to mesh
with this lifestyle successfully and feel happiest while living
among a peaceful culture in tune with the Earth.  There are 
tens of millions more who can readily be convinced to adopt our
innovations when they see Eco-Futuristic alternatives work better
as measured by shared criteria of pragmatic economic efficiency,
ecological sustainability and abundant opportunities for
enjoyment.  The majority will want to emulate this lifestyle 
when it becomes trendy among the culturally influential and 
the successful.  If these seeds of hope are cultivated, the
prevailing culture of ignorance, apathy and conformity that
sustains business as usual in mundania will dissolve in the 
light of the growing New Matrix.  This is our best hope for
large-scale social transformation.  ECO will provide us with 
a chance to demonstrate that we can do it better.

     The Nineties are a time for a new kind of libertarian 
direct action based upon removing legitimacy from mainstream
institutions by setting off to live our own lives in a way that
works, rather than merely protesting against faulty policies.  
Terran colony formation represents an added dimension for
political activism, in which we take charge of our own destiny
and adopt the form of societal structure we believe is most
appropriate.  We are not trying to take over the coercive
structures of the government to impose our system on others
through force, get our candidate elected President as a purported
solution to all ills, or merely make a nuisance of ourselves 
for the Establishment through perpetual protest.  We are coming
together of our own volition and setting out to do it in our 
own way.  If we are correct, our New Matrix will grow while the
Establishment system crumbles.  Eco-Futuristic Village formation
will make us ready to compete in the free marketplace of ideas
where evolution can take its course.

     Intermediate or lesser ventures should not sidetrack us from
fulfilling our potential in this regard.  We really do not need
another experiment station or conference center, another magazine
or lecture series or protest rally.  It has all been done before. 
From New Alchemy to Goddard College to The Mother Earth News to
Ramapo College to the Farralones Institute to the Windstar
Foundation, we already know that the components of an ecotopian
habitat can be made to work.  One could fill several bookcases
with reputable texts already published on these subjects, if
there are any skeptics in the audience who seek documentation of
this fact.  It is time for the next step.  We need to team up and
start LIVING the way we know is possible.  

     That Elven village of solar dwellings nestled among the
trees of the Eastern Forest exists in potentia, no less than did
the three-phase motor when Nikola Tesla envisioned it whole in
his mind.  Such is the nature of the process.  This is the
generation that can go the full distance.  Let us not forsake
that challenge with victory so close at hand!

     Hippie culture will forever seem unviable and unrealistic 
to the majority unless and until it is paired with a paradigm
shift in material support.  When our communities are demonstrably
self-sufficient in food and energy production in complete 
harmony with the environment, when they make a name for
themselves as centers of entrepreneurship and creative activity,
no longer will critics be able to deride us as "irresponsible,"
"unproductive" or "dependent upon the institutions we protest." 
So long as we have no answer for this, we leave ourselves 
open to attacks by both the opposition and the cynic.

     The number one priority at this time is to figure out how 
we are going to get ourselves out of the system in a practical,
sustainable fashion, and help those few other reliable, tuned-in
people around today to do the same.  We welcome those who share
our vision to join us.  We will assist those who wish to adapt
our habitat technologies to their own divergent conception of the
ideal living environment.  We respect the right of others to live
as they please, so long as they do not endanger the biosphere or
infringe upon the freedom of others to enjoy the same.

     Through focusing our efforts on Eco-Futuristic Village
formation, we can escape the danger of stagnation that looms over
the Counterculture.  To truly honor the spirit of the Sixties, 
we must do more than celebrate the anniversaries of past events. 
For the Sixties were not about nostalgia and tradition but about
stretching the cultural envelope and defining new and better
reality tunnels.  The bud yearns for the flower and the fruit,
not the seedling it sprang from.  As George Henry Elias reminded
us in his book Breakout into Space, "We need a frontier to
continue to be what we are."  We need it even more to become 
what we could become. 

     Our subculture has spent several decades attending
demonstrations, touring with the Grateful Dead and camping 
at summer Gatherings.  By now, we know how to do this well.  
We know what these events are like and what their limitations
are.  Eco-Futuristic Village formation is a way to use them 
as a launching point for something more substantial and
sustainable yet just as inspired and exhilerating.


     The Eco-Futuristic Village concept offers today's 
youth an opportunity for risk, excitement and challenge in 
a world that has lost its traditional wilderness frontier.  
As President Kennedy once said about going to the Moon:  
We choose to do this, not because it is easy but because 
it is hard.  The Counterculture needs a project like this, 
now more than ever.

     ECO is a complex and demanding enough venture for it to
serve as a framework for many diverse people to plug their
talents into.  It is a challenging enough project to force us 
to develop in many new directions and spur continuing growth, 
yet it is also a practical enough goal to be attainable after a
few years of invigorating hard work.  It is ambitious enough to
provide a worthy vehicle for coordinating the efforts of many
people for many decades, yet focused enough to bear significant
fruit during the mid 1990s.  We will reap the rewards of our
labor while still comparatively young and vigorous.  Enabling
such a lifestyle will do much to enable us to retain our vigor
throughout the decades to come.  Equipped with the resources 
and the free time to devote ourselves to visionary projects, 
we will surely go on to bigger and better things from here.

     In summary, Earth Colony One will provide an opportunity 
for escape from helplessness into viability and empowerment. 
Eco-Futuristic Village formation constitutes an attainable path
for building a way out of futility, for focusing our efforts 
on a weak spot instead of banging our heads indefinitely against
the strongest part of the wall.  It represents a chance to
realize our highest vision for ourselves and our planet.  
An intentional village project has the greatest prospects for
creating a fulfilled life and escaping the frustrations attendant
to living in mainstream society.  We should set out on this
quest, both to maximize our own personal satisfaction and to
further the process that made us what we are in the hope that 
we would become beings capable of saving the planet.

     The prototype Eco-Futuristic Village is a foundation layer
to everything else we hope to accomplish.  Unless we create such
a sanctuary, we are not going to have the free time, the gear, 
or the assembled talent we need to embark upon substantial
ventures.  Most of us will be preoccupied with the hassle of
ordinary life.  Few mainstream people will pay attention to our
message until they see for themselves that we are living better
this way.  Without the support and direction that setting will
provide, few of our counterparts will find the clarity, the 
resolve or the means to follow through on their transformative
vision in a practical manner.  Most will lose the qualities 
that once made them special when they leave their twenties.   
The second generation will face even worse circumstances than 
we did.  Many will give up, through the abundance of frustration
or simply the lack of any economically viable options for
personal support, becoming absorbed by the system or lost in 
one way or another.  The remainder will keep to their ideals but
remain on the fringes of influence and have little or no impact
upon world events.  That is the scenario most of us have already
been shunted onto and the only question remaining is: will we
ever break free of this trap?

     The appropriate course of action is clear.  It is time 
to get out of living in tents, get out of living in "squats" 
and build this Tribe a permanent home base.  Rainbow Gatherings
and Pagan Festivals let us savor a morsel of what we hunger for
most.  Villages like Earth Colony One will give us a feast.


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