The United Nations Agenda 2030 focus on “15-minute” Smart cities for living and working leaves much to be desired for those who desire a life closer to nature working with their hands. While some people enjoy or don’t mind it, there are many of us who do not wish to be stuck in a city job being on incessant zoom meetings and cell phone calls. And while it sounds nice and convenient to have everything you need within 15 minutes of your home and to work from home, this is something similar to what indigenous people had for centuries in their villages, without the need for an overly technological so-called “Smart” city that requires the consumption of vast amounts of mineral and energy resources to keep it going. The materials that make a “15-minute” city possible do not take 15 minutes to get there, as it takes a lot of energy and time to mine the metals (e.g. lithium, copper, coltan, etc.), process them, manufacture them into an item that is then shipped by ship and/or truck to the store (a journey that may be thousands of miles long) that is actually within 15 minutes of a persons home.
Also, many of the “Smart” cities are places with the most sophisticated surveillance technologies and hence, had the most stringent pandemic restrictions from 2020 to 2022. These do not seem to be places that allow for much personal freedom or exercising your personal sovereignty. What happens when your small business is again determined to be “non-essential” during the next perceived crisis and response (e.g. climate lockdowns)? Many alternative thinkers even go as far as to say these cities will become more like open-air prisons than actual cities (this already happened to an extent in many cities during the pandemic).
What about going back to the grassroots focus on designing ecovillages or towns where people work together on their own terms without bowing down to a large governmental entity? A village or town where people can work with their hands farming, fixing/maintaining equipment, cooking, repairing shoes/clothes, weaving, etc. Also, what about a focus on repopulating small towns in rust belts across the world? These places have been decimated by WTO free-trade agreements, lack of investment, and propaganda that paints cities as “the places to be.”
Living in a small town, closer to nature, one can imagine that it would be easier there to become less reliant on the global economic control structure, to reestablish connections to natural ecosystems, and to live a slower-paced life. Now, it may seem that you have to drive more living out in the rural small town areas but that is only because many of these towns have been economically and socially devastated over the decades. By rebuilding the socioeconomic fabric of these small towns people would then be able to drive a lot less as the things they need would be made in the town and many of their friends and family would be there too.
I was thinking back to the late 2000s and early 2010s when the Transition Towns, Permaculture, and De-growth movements were really taking shape and there was a fast growing public interest in these grassroots movements. We were going to solve most of our environmental, energy, and social problems on our own terms in our own towns. This local-living environmental zeitgeist has now been largely co-opted by the globalized governments that will now dictate what the “15-minute” cities will look like (these are also just culminations of trends that have been building up over the last few decades):
Large Amazon warehouses, Walmart stores, and Home Depots instead of mom & pop retail shops along main streets
4-5 story expensive condo buildings that all look very similar (see photo below) instead of dense affordable eco-villages or towns each with their own unique architecture surrounded by small regenerative farms
Expensive schools and colleges that train students to become cogs in the techno-industrial complex instead of affordable education “pods” where students learn self-reliance skills, nature connection and have more fun
Total surveillance network consisting of large 4G cell towers and 5G small cells that can pinpoint any person’s location within a few meters 24/7
Digital passports, IDs, Carbon Credits, and/or Social Credit Scores dividing people into “Acceptable” and “Unacceptable” (dissidents to the established government, look what happened to the unvaccinated from 2021 to 2023)
Large incomes required, since the people are largely removed from nature and tight-knit communities they must rely on money and long work hours to meet their needs instead
New condo buildings in Attleboro, MA, image courtesy of Google Earth.
Conclusion
While some of the urban developments around transportation nodes (e.g. train stations, bus stops) make sense from a “weaning off fossil fuels” perspective, many people are not attracted to these expensive condos and apartments and desire a more nature-oriented life (further discussed in this post on voluntary simplicity). Also, many cities have recently been struggling to maintain their public transportation systems (e.g. the MBTA in Boston, MA), so it is difficult to see how these 15-minute Smart cities will really live up to the hype. Though, having lived in Boston (back when rent was moderately affordable) for several years with just a bicycle when I was younger, I can say it is an enticing lifestyle. However, now as I near mid-life I am taking steps to live a slower-paced life closer to nature.
Here is an example of a few people working on reconnecting with nature, simpler living and alternative education:
Jon Jandai’s Video Channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJRGqIuGVko). Jon is a self-reliant farmer from Thailand who lives in what he terms an “unintentional community.” One of his videos is titled “How to fight with dictators in a villager style,” which is quite pertinent to this post.
Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan’s Website (https://www.dredithubuntu.com/). Dr. Chan is a pioneer in alternative health and education.
In virtually every sphere of life including the physical, biological, and social, technological devices are displacing and replacing natural systems and the innate abilities of human beings. Why is that? Why don’t we focus on restoring our natural environmental systems and developing our innate physical, mental and social abilities to their fullest potential? For centuries humans have been embarking on a process of mechanization and utilization of increasing amounts of technology, culminating here in the early 21st century with the rollout of a worldwide 5G wireless network over the landscape and the launching of a literal “skynet” of satellites into low-earth orbit. Yet, mental illness is at an all-time high, pollution of our air, water, and food is still widespread, and the entire enterprise is obviously unsustainable on any number of environmental, ecological, and even psycho-spiritual fronts.
Many technologies have their uses and their places, as obviously this blog would not exist without the internet, but the extreme focus on mechanizing, controlling and manipulating every life and planetary process with complex technology leaves something else to be desired for many. A new renaissance is sorely needed at this time, right? The following is a short list of examples of where technology has usurped natural processes and following that is a list of ecological alternatives to those technologies.
Immune Systems and Pharmaceuticals
Regarding our overall health, our natural immune systems are being disrupted and degraded by different types of environmental pollution, as I have discussed at length in previous posts on environmental health. Consequently, our innate immune system capabilities are systematically being replaced with an ever increasing number of vaccines and other kinds of pharmaceuticals, many of which have significant side effects, including the over-stimulation of our immune systems and their contribution to the development of autoimmune disorders. In addition, think of the immensely complicated industrial supply chain that has to exist in order to mass produce a vaccine or other pharmaceutical that is delivered from a research lab all the way to being directly injected into your body. The different biochemical laboratory facilities, the large factories for constructing glass vials or plastic containers, all of the delivery trucks along the supply chain, the refrigeration systems and many more technological systems just to keep the vaccine/pharmaceutical supply chain going. This entire supply chain requires the consumption of vast amounts of natural resources and human labor in order to perform a natural function (immunity to pathogens) that our bodies could easily do well if we actually took good care of them (our “terrain”) and the environments we live in.
Human Breast Milk and Cow Milk/Formulated Milk
In the 20th century, some scientists and doctors decided that breast milk from a human mother could be replaced with cow’s milk or other formulated milks to improve a baby’s nutrition. The problem is that milk from the mother has just the precise balance of nutrients for satisfying the needs of a human baby. As Edward Goldsmith notes in The Way: An Ecological World View, human milk has a higher calcium to phosphorous ratio than other milks which is important for the growth of a baby’s musculoskeletal system. In addition, the level of sodium in cows milk is too high, leading to potential blood pressure issues in babies and toddlers. The level of copper in cows milk is also too low, leading to iron/hemoglobin transport issues and the development of anemia, which was common in North American infants a few decades ago.
Physical Tolerance Limits and Heating/Air Conditioning
After heating fuels and air conditioning became economical in the beginning of the 20th century many people have let their physical tolerance limits atrophy. They do not feel comfortable with temperatures below 65 degrees Fahrenheit inside of buildings in the winter, and temperatures above 72 degrees Fahrenheit inside of buildings in the summer. This is an extremely narrow range of comfortable temperatures and the consumption of vast amounts of fuels and electricity is required to maintain this narrow range inside of the built environment.
Innate Cognitive Capacity and IT Devices
Regarding memory and cognitive capacity, our innate memory skills are being degraded by increased reliance on information technology devices like GPS for navigating, for example. A study was done around a decade ago showing that old-school taxi drivers who had memorized the streets of London had a larger hippocampus compared to citizens who used GPS devices to get to their destinations. The citizens’ ability to create a mental map of London had atrophied, and a part of their brain literally became smaller after increased reliance on the new technology. Regarding cognitive capacity, calculators replace our ability to do simple arithmetic in our heads, emails cause our ability to compose hand-written letters with legible handwriting to atrophy… the list goes on, it is the the literal outsourcing of our cognition and memory to the technosphere.
Natural Waste Recycling Processes and Sewage/Wastewater Treatment Plants
Historically, human waste was delivered by wagon and wheelbarrow back to the agricultural fields surrounding the village for use as humanure commonly referred to as “night soil.” In modern societies, gigantic wastewater treatment facilities are built next to natural water bodies and dump large amounts of treated wastewater, which then still heavily pollutes natural water bodies with excess nutrients, trace pharmaceutical residues that are not filtered out by the treatment process, and some heavy metals. Other areas use cesspools and septic tanks, which when they fail, cause drinking water aquifers to be contaminated with excess nitrogen and traces of pharmaceuticals.
Traditional Social Networks and Social Media/Dating Websites
The vast majority of people desire to be accepted as part of a group and to find a loving partner, and historically this goal was accomplished by living in a small band of people with whom you were intimately familiar with. In modern anonymous mass societies people are now strewn across the country in urban sprawl conurbations with weak social connections to the people around them due to people continuously moving away for jobs and other reasons. The social connections, that often had a large physical component (e.g. handshakes, hugs, sex, etc.), between people in historic social networks have now been largely digitized by social media websites, dating websites, and email. For example, a few extroverted people in historic social networks used to be great matchmakers, introducing potential mates to each other and helping to form couples. This formerly organic process has now been largely relegated to social media, dating websites, and professional matchmaking services with mixed results, not to mention the large amount of resources including the electricity it takes to run the servers that host these websites.
A comparison of a formerly heavily forested area north of Houston, TX in 1944 on the left and the same area in 2021 on the right, an extreme example of urban sprawl.
The Eco-logic Renaissance
With the increasing creep of the technosphere into every aspect of life over the past decades and especially over the past two years, it is uplifting to see a growing interest among the public in ecological living topics including composting, organic gardening, composting toilets and humanure, small-scale renewable energy systems, simple water filtration, holistic health modalities, and other appropriate or “nature-like” technologies.
Natural Healing Modalities as Immune System Enhancers
Instead of relying solely on vaccines and other pharmaceutical agents for solving every health problem or curing an infection, many people are turning to alternative healing modalities for solutions to their health problems that have not been adequately addressed by mainstream medicine. The following table is a brief list of simple holistic health tips to improve immune system function naturally, as an example. Tomes of more information on alternative health can be found online or in an alternative book store.
Drink pure, unpolluted water
Improve sleeping conditions
Improve nutrient intake including Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Zinc, etc.
Decrease exposure to chemical pollutants and electrosmog (non-native EMFs)
Increase time in nature including grounding with the Earth
Natural breastfeeding for babies
Herbal remedies
Wetlands as Natural Wastewater Treatment Systems
A growing number of communities around the world are turning to restoring wetlands in order to process large amounts of wastewater. Healthy wetlands contain large amounts of peat with brown lignin compounds that can absorb large amounts of organic wastes and sequester heavy metals, thereby filtering the water as it flows downstream to other water bodies. At the scale of a home or small business, many are turning to composting toilet technologies or greener septic systems to reduce the amount of wastewater that is generated and discharged to the environment.
Developing Natural Human Abilities Instead of Overreliance on Technologies
When the power goes out, the GPS signal is lost, the water stops running, and the delivery trucks run out of fuel, people in modern societies are often left helpless as we have lost ancient skills that our ancestors used to survive in natural environments. We can learn or relearn old skills and even marry new ways of thinking to old skills and technologies (e.g. developing new passive solar water heater designs). We can develop mental maps of the towns and cities we live in instead of relying on GPS all of the time. We can practice hormesis (improve our physical tolerance limits) and maintain a comfortable body temperature throughout the year without resorting to excessive use of heating fuels in the winter or air conditioning in the summer. This seems to be a wiser choice than choosing to rely on the fossil-fueled technosphere that is showing increasing signs of incoherence, disruption and outright collapse (especially obvious in the last two years). Explore Arthur Haines’s website on rewilding and relearning ancient survival techniques for more information on this.
Ecovillages as Cohesive Social Networks
Many people are fed up with the social and mental illness that results from living in anonymous mass societies, and ecovillages are one antidote to the increasing social alienation and mental illness observed in modern societies. Ecovillages and ecocentric communities can allow people to form more permanent connections with those around them and possibly lighten the load of anxiety and stress so prevalent in modern mass societies. Regarding love, Tamara ecovillage in Portugal, for example, has a radical take on love and sexual relationships and creates a space for people to freely explore alternative ways to express their romantic desires and form partnerships that are difficult to implement in anonymous and alienating mass societies.
Conclusion
All in all, the wholesale replacement of the basic functions of the biosphere (Gaia) has been going on for centuries, but we still have time to change course if we want to. It is becoming increasingly apparent to a growing number of people that attempting to solve the problems created by technology with ever more complex technologies is maybe not the best way to go about the issue.
Instead of relying on and looking to “tech-no-logic” solutions for all of our problems, maybe a shift to focusing on “eco-logic” techniques and solutions would help? Why develop a Rube-Goldberg type of device to suck carbon out of the atmosphere but breaks down every few months, for example, when you can simply plant and maintain an edible forest garden, instead?
Currently, it appears that the entire physiology of Gaia is being systematically disrupted, degraded and replaced by a technologic mechanical system for whatever host of reasons (there are different theories floating around). However, whatever the reason is, a growing minority of people are fed up with this enterprise of attempting to conquer and control nature and are seeking ways to work with and make peace with her instead.
Further Reading:
The Ascent of Humanity Charles Eisenstein (free to read on his website)
Many people, young and old, are becoming involved in the regenerative farming movement, which is a great sign that our society is slowly turning toward an ecological age. Though one major hurdle these people face is the fact that in our society farming does not pay very well, financially speaking. I work at an organic farm myself and it is definitely not financially lucrative which makes it difficult to start a family or to get out of debt. Even many who start a farm and own the business struggle to obtain an average middle class income for themselves as explained in this issue of the Natural Farmer magazine, “Farming for a Living Wage”: http://www.nofa.org/tnf/2017_SpringSectionB.pdf. Though, some farmers become quite successful after 5 years or so. Also, socially and spiritually speaking, organic farming it is a very rewarding vocation, so there are other reasons to do it.
Given that many of us live in extremely financial societies, a potential way out of this predicament is to embrace voluntary simplicity and live on much less than what is the average per-capita income in developed nations. Obviously, this is easier said than done and I am still trying to find a way to make it work (and I may have to find another environmental job if it doesn’t work out). Fortunately, there are many books are out there detailing how to live on a half to a quarter of the average middle class income without becoming destitute, here is a partial list:
Simple Prosperity by David Wann
How to Survive Without a Salary by Charles Long
Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
Eisenstein’s book is more philosophical than the other books but brings up important questions such as: why do we necessarily need rising incomes? With ever rising incomes and economic growth, goods and services that people used to give each other for free in a gift society or for low prices in a local economy are now captured by the global marketplace and sold back to us at prices most of us struggle to afford. Also, increasing incomes tend to decrease community and the feelings of being closely connected to a group of people and relying on them for assistance.
The social and economic pressure to make a lot of money in order to maintain social status, create a long-term relationship, start a family and support ageing parents is very high, especially in developed nations. Unfortunately, many opportunities to make a lot of money involve stressful soul-crushing jobs, deterioration of friendships and substantial ecological destruction. But as more people gravitate to the voluntary simplicity lifestyle and other movements (degrowth, transition towns) because of intensifying life crises (e.g. leave the job they hate, laid off, relationship falls apart, etc.) this socioeconomic pressure to maintain appearances will ease. That, in turn, may help lessen the anxiety and depression epidemic which affects every income bracket. The key would be to view the crisis as a blessing in disguise, and not as a descent into poverty, although the transition may be quite rocky both physically and mentally. Afterwards, another key would be to start thinking of wealth in your life in terms of social capital, natural capital, and health capital instead of in terms of financial capital.
Here is an excerpt from Rob O’Grady’s book 150-Strong: A Pathway To A Different Future on this topic of socioeconomic pressures or as he calls it, the ‘burden of material expectation’:
“Each person will have a different level of resources to maintaining their [social] networks, but, interestingly, it is usually those who have the fewest possessions who are most likely to be able to authentically say that they are in touch with their 150. Perhaps, this is the reason why levels of depression are lower in societies where there is less [material] wealth. From my time in the Philippines, where there is much material want, I was able to compare the psychological state of people there with those in developed Western countries. Despite the lack of material resources in the poorer communities, there was almost always a network of support surrounding each person, and a much lower burden of material expectation. These networks are much more resilient than one might suppose of a network of mere friends living independent lives [i.e. a group of friends spread out across a big city or a rural county in a developed nation].”
Anything we do to lower the burden of material expectation in developed societies will likely help lower the levels of anxiety and depression. This could involve doing such things as changing zoning laws at the local level to allow for tiny houses or small cabins to be built on farmland or suburban/urban lots, converting vacant 2-3 story houses into affordable apartments and allowing for composting toilets instead of expensive septic systems. All in all, the voluntary simplicity lifestyle fits in very well with the tiny house, permaculture, intentional community and regenerative farming movements that are becoming more popular by the day.
In the social sphere, frugal people could get together and show others that people can form friendships, date, have loving relationships and potentially start families without a lot of financial capital (as long as they have sufficient social and health capital, of course, such as extended family and friends to help raise children). With the current crisis going on, we are actually seeing many young people move back to their hometowns, home states or nearby, potentially rebuilding the stock of social capital that had previously left these places.
By reclaiming social, natural and cultural capital from the financial system, the focus of society could then turn to regenerative farming, ecological healing and growing social relationships instead of accumulating and hoarding money and material things.
The Soeller Panel 