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Elisabet

Work Plan . . . A Plan to Work:

Utopian Vision for the Future

Group Project

• Business plan for a re-localization effort

Radio Project

• Kurt Friese
• New Pioneer Co-op?

Evaluation

Microenterprise Lab Certification

18 Jan. 2008 It is time to sit down and put some of my words towards this class. Several years ago I was visited by a vision - a vision of community. This community was global in its extant, yet centered on small regions and the people who lived there. At the time I had none of the definitions which I can apply today: re-localization, local economy, energy independence, food networks. All I knew is that I saw a civilization of communal self-reliance, a sharing community where individual needs were met and interests supportive and supported by the community. Individuality is incredibly important for civilization as it encourages free thought and is a type of diversity which is vital for survival. Intellectual individuality is a higher expression of the necessary diversity representative of a healthy, blooming ecosystem.

Studying the relationships and mechanics of local economy becomes an invaluable tool to understanding human relationships between each individual as well as the planet which sustains us. It it a study which I have desperately needed to undertake, for while I can grasp physics, math, biology, and literature, money and economics are the elusive twists on the path which ties all of it together for me.

Several years after my intoxicating vision, I read Thomas Moore's Utopia. Many of the ideas were the same, though I could not embrace the homogeniety of the people inhabiting Utopia. I still can't, nor would I ever want to. Scholars still cannot agree whether or not his work was a tongue-in-cheek production or underlined some serious vision and dream. Certainly I have a place reserved for utopia in my heart. In our stress-laden society, I think we are all beginning to look for the answers, answers which we can find with our neighbors as we share our cupboards and make our dinner a smorgasboard of prosperity and peace, with a durable future looming as the delicious dessert.

Speaking of homogeniety and durable futures, let's look at Wal-Mart. One of their corporate issues now being addressed regards "Greening Wal-Mart." What if Wal-Mart were to go "green"? What would their vision of green include? Fair-wage jobs in China? Bringing manufacturing jobs back to America? Local economies and living wages for their American employees? Or are they looking for a more money-colored green by buying a green reputation that will reduce resistance to their march across America's communities, allowing them to scale the walls that the American public are rightfully placing between their communities and the global not-so-jolly would-be Green Giant? Unless Wal-Mart starts buying from local infrastructures to support the local economies in the towns they plunder, these communities will be bearing the empty grins of the rolled-over, crushed under the weight of the giant green tsunami. Green is not just a technological improvement to the way energy is used or how produce is farmed. Green is the life-giving color of the fields bearing harvest for all of Earth's citizens, the tender response of our planet to the sun and winds and rain, and the color of the heart chakra. There are many shades of green, and I am curious which end of the spectrum tints the spectacles from which Wal-Mart is peering.

21 Jan. 2008 Waking in Utopia: The Future in a Child's Eyes

Aithne woke to the sound of ducks foraging outside of her window. When they did not come foraging in the mornings outside her window, she was usually teased from sleep by the smell of breakfast or the tickling sunlight angling through the window that would come to perch on her closed eyes. This past winter she had been given the responsibility of tending to the ducks as they were kept inside the greenhouse. She had come to recognize that the funny little birds actually had quite a range of quacking and other avian mutterings that spoke of their relative peace and comfort. She would have this responsibility again this next winter, along with helping her mother prepare the natural dyes with which they would color wool yarn. She really wanted to learn how to spin the yarn, having recently watched one of the ladies from the village patiently tending her loom, foot rocking back and forth on the pedal spinning the wheel, looking as though she were in the rhythm of some happy and peaceful song. In a few years she would be able to learn from someone in the village during the winter months, and if she still wanted to learn spinning, she could then.

Not every one worked in the village. Her brother had started journeying farther out with the other people from their village and traded food and other items with other communities nearby; soon he would be traveling to the large cities where the gardens did not offer the diversity so easily managed in the country towns. He wanted to be a village Voice like their mother, and so wanted to learn all that he could about people and relationships, observing how villages and cities worked together and all of the considerations a Voice must bear when listening to people. Aithne had heard tales of Voices being called together, gathering in villages where people were having really hard times, combining all of their Voices into a song of healing for the community. There were other types of Voices too, Voices of the Land who listened to all the Voices from the clusters of villages and then spoke with other Voices from Lands far off. Usually they talked via the internet, but sometimes they had to travel to meet in person. Aithne had asked her mother if she would become a Voice like that; her mother had said no, at least not until Aithne and her younger sister had chosen their following and gone to learn under the artists.

She did not know how her mom could like being the Voice. All the time people were coming up to her and talking for ages about this and that, sometimes calling her mother away from whatever she was doing in order to tend to some order of excitement in the village. Aithne preferred the quiet and wordless company of the gardens, the quaint ways of ducks and sheep, or when she could go, the deep quiet of the forest. There were forest gardeners who brought in strange and delicious forest foods from the woods surrounding the community; maybe she could go and learn with them this summer. It would be the first summer where she did not have to go to school because she would be learning with the villagers during the summer growing.

Summer was the busiest time of the year with the tending and continual harvesting of all the crops; she realized now that all her past summers learning in the classroom were meant to keep the smaller children out from underfoot. She liked school, though did not understand why they had to learn some of the subjects they studied. Balance with the earth and deep respect for the life it gave her, her family, and everyone seemed a silly thing to have to learn about or how eating fresh whole foods kept bodies happy and healthy, as well as simple meditation and time given to oneself each day. Aithne heard that next spring they would learn about being people! How ridiculous was that? Learning about what she already was! Sometimes these things seemed much too obvious to have to learn about! Her teachers explained that there was a time when people did not know these simple truths, and the Earth almost fell apart. She could not imagine that, either. It would be her last spring sitting in a class and talking with her friends and teachers. Then she would spend the next year traveling with her friends and teacher to areas around and outside their community, discovering how and where electricity was made, examining transportation in the large cities where much of the village's harvest traveled, and learning about the trades offered in the city. She would make friends in the large city, and one of these friends would come to live with her and her family the following year. Aithne would be like a teacher to this person, and it would be Aithne's responsibility to show this person around the woods and gardens, the barns and craft shops. The cities made their own clothes and crafts too, but less was done by traditional means. City people had a deep fascination for the traditional hand-crafts, and regarded them as having finer qualities. They purchased furniture, clothes, and other crafted items for special gifts from the artists who created them in the villages since the typical fare in the city was mostly machine-made.

Aithne's father worked for the Voices of their Land. He planned energy farms, and when communities grew, the Land would send him and others to plan and design the wind farms and other structures for energy capture. If a place had been stressed with strong weather, he would go with a team to determine how the farms had fared. Sometimes he was sent over the sea to learn about new ideas. He had been to many places, but said that their community was the best and his favorite place.

She herself had been to Brazil when she was eight, living with a family in the mountains while she learned Spanish. It had been beautiful there and the people kind. They were different in a way that Aithne could not quite understand – perhaps it was the leisure they engaged in. Her mother called this a cultural difference, flavored by language, climate, and tradition. Culture was what made people different, and with that difference, exciting. Aithne hoped to learn about other cultures, and her family was planning a travel to the Far East. They would stay with a family there for a month and become as part of their family for that time while traveling into the regions adjacent to visit the places there. Aithne's family too might host a family from far off as they came to travel in the land where Aithne lived.

Aithne thought about these things as she lay in bed for the final moments of early morning. Her world was much different from that of a child's in the year 2000. Aithne's life was not insular, but rather the sharing of a community. Her education was engaging, satisfying the curiosities harbored by children which further cultivated their good-nature, inquiry, and intelligence. Her education also looked beyond traditional disciplines and included common sense studies, such as the relationship between the Earth's health and the health of Earth's inhabitants, dietary wellness, and personal happiness. Her education let her be an individual that was completely functional and involved within the whole of society, an individual who recognized the joy of sharing life. Her life was a happy, utopian life.