There is an another way to make a living that enables you to do what you love and save the world at the same time. I call it the “middle way” of making a living between our modern industrial system and hunter gathering. This is a deep subject that deserves to have several books written about it.

Saving the World and Sustainability

What do we mean by saving the world? We mean humanity continuing in some fashion without taking tens of millions of species down with us. Today our culture is solely responsible for the greatest mass extinction since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. I say, “our culture,” because humanity has lived in harmony with the earth for three or four million years. The problem is not humanity. The problem is our culture, our growth, and how we make a living.

Some believe that sustainability involves living in a manner that does not diminish the prospects of future generations. That is an “all about humanity” definition that needs to be discarded.

True sustainability has our species, like all others, living in harmony with the ecosystem or Gaia. True sustainability is measured by the growth, not of human population, but of topsoil and biodiversity. These two are the only evolutionarily proven measures of sustainability, and have nothing to do with humanity’s success or failure. Permaculture, by allowing succession and by using natural structures such as a forest or an old field, is the best examples I know of that both builds top soil and allows for species biodiversity growth.

Why do we need the other species? In some respects we don’t. But in the long run we do. We need the full resilience of the earth’s ecosystems to adapt to an ever changing world. I also believe that the true measure of our intellect is not what we can take or build, but what we can nurture and leave alone.

Yes, we may be the first to reach this level of consciousness, but the question is are we going to be the last, or are we the mentors for those that will follow over the next few million years?

Honestly, for this to happen our modern monoculture and civilization most likely is going to have to be replaced by a wide diversity of earth friendly cultures. Humanity may be able to continue in a powered down version of what we have for the next 10-20 years. If our culture manages to survive in the long run, it will be in a monoculture desert of our own making. The sad thing is that future generations will not know or appreciate what it was like today just as we don’t know what it was like 200-300 years ago.

Tribal Way of Making A Living

A tribe is a group of people working together to make a living, sharing equally, and with no hierarchy. Generally, tribes are fewer than 150 people. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized this number of people to be the limit with whom we can maintain stable social relationships in which we know each person. He suggests that numbers larger than this require more restricted rules, laws, and enforcement.

All profits, losses, and finds are shared equally. Decisions are made by consensus. It appears that ownership, at least initially, is not so important when getting started. However, since private property leads to hoarding and is a disincentive to sharing, it should be eliminated. All non-household assets should also be communal or part of the commons.

A New Ethic and World View

Here is where it starts to get new. We need to embrace a new world view or honestly remember the original one. Chief Seattle in his 1854 speech and Daniel Quinn in his book Ishmael taught that the world is a sacred place and humanity has a place in it. Another way of saying this is that humanity belongs to the earth, our ecosystem, and Gaia.

This is the opposite of the world view that our ancestors created 2,000 years ago that humanity is flawed, we are sinners, and the earth is a proving ground to see whether we are worthy to go to a better place when we die. This belief gave us a “dominion” which we have to relinquish if we, or at least, most of the other species are going to survive.

Permaculture is also based on three central ethics:

1. “Care of the earth” means that our number one priority is taking care of the earth, making sure we don’t damage its natural systems.
2. “Care of the people” means meeting people’s needs so that people’s lives can be sustained and have a good quality of life as well but without damaging the earth.
3. “Accepting limits to population and consumption” is realizing that as a human species we cannot continue to increase and also sustain the planet. Sometimes you will hear this ethic phrased as “share the surplus, invest all of your means in the first two ethics.” This means limiting your consumption so that you can invest your resources in caring for the earth and caring for the people.

These ethics translate to making a living in a way that does not participate in destruction of the earth. This means more than not starting a toxic chemical or genetic engineering lab.

This may mean that will have to shift back to giving support to get support instead of making things to get things. A healthy self reliant local community focusing on each other and on giving support will provide greater cradle-to-grave security than our “all about me” culture.

If we are going to make products, they need to be made and consumed by the local community, bioregion, or watershed. If products are made for export and not just local use, the level of consumption will again lead to the depletion of local resources. I see this just driving around Oregon and Washington in the form of missing forests. In Peru 60 people just died in clashes between indigenous protestors and police over drilling for oil and gas in the rain forest. Defending your local resources and bioregion from outside interests is serious business.

Produce what you need now and some reserves, but not a large surplus that can be concentrated. If you concentrate resources or work within a hierarchy, you again will encourage hoarding, and take away the incentive to share.

Develop Community Self Reliance

One of the keys to the success of the Amish is that they do not operate in a way that creates entanglements with modern culture. Their aversion is more about the entanglement and not so much against technology. For example, the Amish use wood wheels which they can manufacture and repair themselves. They do not use rubber wheels because they don’t want to be dependent on modern culture. The Amish have nothing against rubber, but they do not want to be dependent upon us.

No individual or even a small group of people can be an island. It will take enough people working together as a community to bring one or both legs out of modern culture. Maybe one will have to work a day job while building skills and a tribal business with your friends. This will be a process not an overnight revolution. Remember though, petrocollapse will not conform to a gradual or delayed schedule for our convenience.

Set Aside Time for Yourself

Start by doing what you love to do. You will become good at it, enjoy your work, and will make the biggest impact with your life that way.

Don’t work more than maybe 30 hours per week. This not only allows for employment of more people, but it gives you time to work on yourself, to study, grow, explore, and self-actualize. This is part of the reason our culture is stuck where it is. People are worked so much and not given a holistic education to think for themselves. Develop your vocabulary, arts, music, mental constructs, travel, and just general self-actualize. So powerdown, give away a bunch of your stuff, and reduce your overhead.

How to Get Started

Based on my experience as an entrepreneur, I would say follow the path of least resistance and watch for serendipity. Try multiple things and see which one gets the most traction. Walk before you run. Try your ideas on a part-time or hobby basis before committing. You could start with your neighbors and each could plant a different fruit or nut tree and you could exchange harvests in the fall. Create a micro-neighborhood edible perennial nursery business. The possibilities are endless. Have fun with it.

One idea I am considering is to start by creating a virtual community. We cannot all move in next door to each other overnight, but like-minded people could put their properties into a land trust for the benefit of the community. It may also be easier to coalesce closer together over time as the opportunities arise.

At Restoration Farm we are trying to build a tribal permaculture farm. We hope to be mostly chemical and fossil fuel free. The fossil fuels we use are largely for infrastructure setup and not so much for planting and harvesting. We will be experimenting with U-pick blueberries and food forest, and compost for reduced food cost models.

In regards to finding like-minded people, try hosting a potluck to discuss neighborhood sustainability. See who shows up. Learn about permaculture, and consider taking a two week intensive permaculture design course (PDC). You will meet your tribe of like-minded people there.

Finding a benevolent way of making a living that allows you to do what you love and to not participate in the destruction of the world is a journey of a lifetime.

Visit www.culturequake.org to read the blog, visit the Culturequake amazon.com book store, and learn more about the book Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC

Notes:

Daniel Quinn
Ishmael

Wikipedia
Dunbar’s Number

Susan Blackmore
The Meme Machine

John Hostetler
Amish Society

Jan Lundberg
As surely as the red sun rises: Rebelling against extinction

Toby Hememway
Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

Geoff Lawton
The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia

Peter Bane
Permaculture Activist

Almost everyone misunderstands what culture is. Most think it is soda pop, pop stars, blue jeans, language, and TV. Some think it is capitalism, communism, or progressivism. Some see culture as Western culture or Eastern culture.

Look at the motorcycle picture. The motorcycles will fool you. All of the people above belong to the same culture, as does a soccer mom in a Chicago suburb. Keep guessing. This makes a huge difference in how we understand what is happening today and where we are going.

Our Culture

The answer is, that we are all Takers. We all belong to the same culture, tea tottaller or Taliban, one culture. The Dali Lama or Duncan Donuts cop, one culture. Our Taker culture began 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution when they locked up the food, began the population/food race, invented war, started privatizing land, and ended the formerly one universal religion of animism. It was forgotten in just a few generations that there used to be probably 10,000 unique Leaver cultures before our now universal Taker culture — The Great Forgetting.

Some suggest that modern progressive exuberance has replaced Christianity as the modern religion or culture. The belief is that “here and now” and a better life for each generation from technology has replaced Christianity’s faith in an “unseen unknown afterlife” and will culminate in a technological singularity that will save humanity.

They are right to identify exuberance, but today’s exuberance is the same that caused a tribe of agriculturalists between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to start overtaking their Leaver neighbors in an unending conquest that is now largely complete. The age of Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and Manifest Destiny are past examples of the same exuberance. The ultimate hubris was inventing one god in a human form. Today, all but one or two million Leavers, versus of 6.8 billion Takers, are left alive or are not yet assimilated.

It’s Pointless To Discuss Anything Else

Peak oil and financial collapse seem important because they immediately affect us and are within our lifetime scale. But, they are just noise along the way of our 10,000 year Taker cultural odyssey. Nothing will change for our children until our culture ends. It will be one rise and fall, migration and conquest, resource war after resource war on and on until our culture is replaced with a resilient diversity of many new cultures. Until then we are just building and operating the Taker prison for our children and ourselves. Only when our culture ends, will the earth be allowed to start healing itself. A change of leadership of the same culture is also a waste of time.

Here comes the important part of the essay: discussing anything else today except walking away from our culture is pointless. This has to do with the difference between programs and vision or story. When Columbus invaded Haiti, he brought with him the greatest virus of all, a new cultural story.

The story of Leaver cultures before the agricultural revolution was, “Humanity belongs to the earth.” The Taker cultural story is, “The earth belongs to man.” This has been the crux of the creation and perpetuation of our culture for the last 10,000 years. We have had technology since the digging stick; technology has nothing to do with culture. It is how you value humanity in relation to “our relations” or the earth and what you do with the technology that matters.

A program is doing more of the same. If the effort in Afghanistan is failing, send more troops. If test scores are falling, spend more on a failed educational system. If the banks are failing, send them more money.

A program is like a stick in the river of our culture. Programs run contrary to the cultural story. Recycling is a program to combat our consumer economy. Smart grids are a program to combat our excessive use of cheap fossil fuel energy. Green building is a program to combat urban sprawl. Food aid is a program to combat the population/food race. Organic farming is a program to combat industrial totalitarian agriculture.

Programs are fruitless efforts to combat the symptoms of our cultural story that the world belongs to man. Until the story is reversed, all programs are a complete waste of time. If new cultures do not replace our Taker culture, there will be no change in course – no Great Turning. If you truly want peace, social justice, and Ecotopia, you have to starting living under the remembered story that humanity belongs to the earth.

The Problem is Not Humanity

Humanity has lived on the earth for three or four million years. For millions of years we lived in harmony or symbiosis with the ecosystem. We had a stable population. A "give it to them as good as you get it" erratic retaliator strategy existed instead of war. Tribalism and animism were the universal human organizational structures and religion. Tribalism is the one and only evolutionarily proven human social organizational system. Tribalism is to humans what herds are for deer, pods are for whales, schools are for fish, and hives are for bees. The problem began 10,000 years ago when our culture was created.

You Cannot Invent a New Social Organizational System

Here is the rub. You just can’t invent a new social organizational system like a tribe. We have been trying to perfect a new social organizational system called civilization for 10,000 years. But, civilization continues to fail more each year for more people and species. If civilization was going to create world peace and plenty for all it would have done so already. It never can because a story based on one species taking everything it can get its hands on will never work. We even treat members of our own species as poorly as we do all other species we exploit.

The Great Remembering

The only solution worth discussion is developing new cultures that live by the original story that humanity belongs to the earth. Going green is not enough. Driving a hybrid and having a backyard vegetable garden is not going to get you there. It’s deeper than that. I am beginning to think we are going to have to start depaving, give up our iPods, and start making music for ourselves. I am not sure how far this is going to have to go. But I do know that it has to go back to a level in which our population and method of consumption allows the earth to start rebuilding biodiversity and topsoil.

We will have to remember our relationship with the cultivars, how to give support to get support, how to live on local sunlight, and we might even have to remember animism. We have a long way to go. I am starting the journey for my children and myself.

Hierarchies have strong defenses for attacks from below. However, they have no defense from abandonment. The point is we have to create new cultures that borrow what we can from the present that fits within the structure of the past. This is the only way we will make a difference. We have to become the change we want to see, find like-minded friends, and start our own local tribes. We must develop a high enough level of group self-reliance that will allow us to walk away. We need doers, not talkers, not surfers, and not bloggers. We need to be walking toward something better, not away from something we don’t like. Its time to start living your truth.

Visit www.culturequake.org to learn more about the book Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture and the blog. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC

Notes:

Daniel Quinn
Ishmael

Joanna Macy
The shift to a life-sustaining civilization, The Great Turning

Ernest Callenbach
Ecotopia

Marija Gimbutas
The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe

Dan Piraro
Bizarro

depave.org
About Depave

The mother of all long-term problems is that our culture has become an “anti-ecosystem.” Humans lived in symbiosis with all life for three million years before the agricultural revolution. Humanity fixed nitrogen, created carbon dioxide, and compost for plants in exchange for food, shelter, water, and air/oxygen.

10,000 years ago, one tribe in the fertile crescent changed history and started living a new story that “the world belongs to man” instead of “humanity belonging to the earth.” This new story lead to our lifestyle today that has ruptured our evolutionarily-developed mutually-beneficial relationship with our ecosystem.

Over the long run, how humanity lives with its ecosystem is infinitely more important than any other problem we face. Problems we face today such as the financial crisis and peak oil will affect us and the next couple generations, but then they are over. Social justice, poverty, overpopulation, and climate change are more symptoms of how we live within our ecosystem.

Because we are living the story that “the world belongs to man,” we can concentrate wealth, creating injustice and poverty. We can also populate at will regardless of the affect on all other species. Climate change is a reflection of our thirst for energy and an easy life. All of these and most other problems come from our world view. As long as “our life style is not negotiable” we will never change for the better.

I want to make it crystal clear that our biggest long-term problem is our relationship with our life supporting ecosystem. By long-term I don’t mean seven generations, I mean 500 generations—another 10,000 years. In seven generations, they will still be cleaning up our mess. If there is to be a 500th generation, we must admit our problem and find a new way or regain an old way of knowing. This is not a question of how future generations will live, but whether there will be future generations or not.

I will use two simple examples to open your mind: history and your body. Every ancient human civilization has failed. And, unless their people walked way before their ecosystem became too damaged, like the Mayan did, all ancient civilizations left deserts in their footsteps.

Recently I spent some time in Bosnia and Herzegovina with family. It reminded me of other parts of the Mediterranean that I have visited before. But once I remembered my history, what I was seeing really hit home. There was no topsoil left on the hills. Walking up them to the shrines for “Our Lady” in Medjigorie was difficult; it was almost completely rocky.

What was once old growth forest, was now a rocky savanna. The forests are long gone to smelt metals for the bronze and iron ages or just for heating and cooking. What is now left is a rocky over grazed scrub land that won’t even support olives. You can barely scratch any soil between the rocks with a knife there is so little left. Read Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture for detailed examples of civilization-caused ecosystem degradation.

Our culture reverses the growth of soil. Soil is reproduced from its parent material so slowly that once the topsoil is washed off the land it is, from a practical standpoint, permanently impoverished. It takes about 300 to 1,000 years to build one inch (2.5 centimeters) of topsoil under favorable conditions. When seven inches of topsoil is washed away, at least 2,000 to 7,000 years of nature’s work is gone. All of the world’s life depends on the fertility of this thin layer of topsoil covering only one-tenth of the earth’s total surface.

The laws of natural selection force practically all plants and animals to support the soil building process. No species of plant can survive long on sloping hillsides unless it helped check soil erosion. No species of animal developed enough intelligence or versatility to survive for long unless it tended to support the continued growth of plants and soil. Otherwise it destroyed itself by destroying its primary source of food.

For about 350 million years, the growth of land-based soil and life has increased. And the evolution of plants and animals to higher forms and greater biodiversity has continued until now. This is why I call our culture an “anti-ecosystem” – as it reverses what ecosystems build. The “agricultural revolution” should really be called the “symbiosis disruption.” In a blink of a eye, our culture has ripped an enormous hole in our ecosystem’s food web.

If the earth was your body, you may not know it yet, but you would have several severe or terminal illnesses. Your diagnosis would be congestive heart failure, AIDS, metastasized cancer, pulmonary fibrosis, plus a fever.

Your body has congestive heart failure because your rivers are polluted and blocked, AIDS because your natural resilience from biodiversity is crashing, cancer because the problem is spreading uncontrollably, the cancer has metastasized because it is now globalized everywhere, pulmonary fibrosis because your forest lung fibers are being clear cut and the air you breath is polluted, and you are running a fever called global warming. In short, if the earth was your body, you would be very sick.

The 2005 U.N. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported that, “Approximately 60% (15 out of 24) of the ecosystem services evaluated in this assessment are being degraded or used unsustainably,” and “10–30% of mammal, bird, and amphibian species are currently threatened with extinction.” If 60 percent of your body was beginning to fail and you were losing 10 to 30 percent of your immune system, you would be rushed to the hospital.

You may say, “I don’t think it’s that bad.” Three points: first, looking back people do not experience what the world was like for their grandparents and great great grandparents. If they did, they would be shocked. Peter Kahn called this “generational environmental amnesia.” We live too short a life time to know how the world has changed. We might remember when the field next door was turned into a subdivision. But we do not remember what the old growth forest was like next door before it was turned into a field.

Looking forward, I am not talking about the near future. Although, in a few years from now it will become difficult to walk out your door and go “happy motoring.” I am defining a long-term problem that affects many future generations. Connect the dots much further out than just your next paycheck.

Third, how can we be so selfish? We have been given the gift of not only life which we should cherish, but also of some semblance of intelligence. Yet we have this enormous lack of empathy for any other species other than our own. We sit back, drink beer, watch TV, and many could care less.

For ten millennia now one tribe’s cultural story has grown to dominate all others. The last remaining indigenous cultures are barely hanging on against our cultural onslaught. The onslaught of our technology, our languages, our media, our corporations, our bankers, and our loggers. A few dysfunctional wealthy stand atop the shoulders of the vast majority of people and all other species.

Theologian Leonardo Boff put it this way, “Not only do the poor scream, but also the water, the animals, the forests, the soils: that is, the Earth as a living super organism, called Gaia. They scream because they are continuously attacked. They scream because their autonomy and intrinsic value are not recognized. They scream because they are threatened with extinction. Every day around ten species of living beings disappear as a result of human aggressiveness in the contemporary industrial process.”

Many people are starting to recognize that “something just isn’t right,” and are searching for what to do. The answer is to restore the disruption in our relationship with the ecosystem. If we do this, everything else will eventually fall into place. There is a gray area between our ability to restore the earth and getting out of the way to let mother nature do her work. I myself am a permaculturist trying to restore 140 years of damage to our Ashland farm. With permaculture, we work with nature’s succession instead of against it.

Masanobu Fukuoka developed a system of rice farming and orcharding that involved no cultivation, no chemical fertilizer or prepared compost, no weeding by tillage or herbicides, and no pruning. Once he got “out of the way” of nature his rice and orchard yields matched industrial agricultures. He was doing another vastly important thing, he was building topsoil. Each year Fukuoka’s fields became more fertile.

We cannot expect everyone of us to start living like Masanobu Fukuoka today, but for those who are ready let’s start considering a new story—that “humanity belongs to the earth.” The story we live by is the rudder that steers our culture. Change the story and the culture will follow in time.

An ecosystem is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships and energy flows. Our planet, Gaia, is a self-regulating whole life system. Sunlight is the only input to this closed loop. A life form is what “it does.” The now extinct passenger pigeon was a huge nutrient distribution system. When one of the several mile long flocks of birds that darkened the sky stopped to roost, it left two to three inches of manure nutrients. One flock of millions of passenger pigeons did 300 to 1,000 years of soil building in a few just a few days.

Life is a process—a sacred spirit enlivened process. We know this when a loved one is still alive, yet has become simply a body that can no longer relate or respond to us. We know they are gone even before they are dead.

The earth, Gaia, our ecosystem is a sacred place. We are sacred in a sacred place. If we can remember the original story that air, water, soil, oak trees and even mushrooms are just as sacred as we are—that humanity belongs to the earth, then we will restore our symbiotic bond with our ecosystem. By reforming this bond of love, the earth will be able to heal herself and humanity as well.

Visit www.culturequake.org to learn more about Culturequake the book and the online Magazine. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC

Notes:

Oneida Kincaid: Another Way of Knowing

Chuck Burr: Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture

Tom Dale: Topsoil and Civilization

P.A. Yeomans: Water for Every Farm

Peter H., Jr. Kahn: The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture

The United Nations: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Leonardo Boff: Resurgence magazine, November/December 2002

Masanobu Fukuoka: The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming

The question is actually, not “what are we going to do?”, but is “how are we going to make a living?” First lets rule out the obvious, we can no longer make a living as Homo consumer. Peak oil will put an end to our happy motoring and consuming lifestyle before we get the chance to consume the world.

A new International Energy Agency (IEA) report shows the decline of global oil production has been recalculated at 9.1% per year, up from 5.8% earlier in 2008. The weakened global economy will buy us a couple more years, but after that the decline of world oil production will be far steeper than its rise. We started the last century slowly, but we are now running our fossil fuel economy full speed with the easily extracted oil gone and only the hard or impossible to extract left.

The end of plentiful cheap energy will mean a reduction in the complexity of our society so significant that few today comprehend it. I wonder if President-elect Obama has any idea what is in store for us. Watch to see if restoring “growth” is his mantra when inaugurated. This year we saw the end of investment banking and the beginning of the end of suburbia in the form of the mortgage crisis. Peak oil’s curtailment of happy motoring has not even kicked in yet.

Next, the experiment of the agricultural revolution is a failure as it has created overpopulation and overshoot of carrying capacity via a food race. The food race drives population growth with growth in food production; every increase in human population is met with an increase in food production.

The agricultural revolution made us powerful, but it has also meant the greatest mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Just when we need earth’s resilience in her biodiversity the most, Homo modern is destroying it by converting what is left into human biomass.

Combine agricultural revolution population growth with peak oil and you get a nightmare. At the start of the last century, there were only one billion on the planet, today there are almost 6.8 billion. That means that 5.8 billion people are here one way or another because of oil, and oil is about to run out.

The obvious being eliminated, that we are not going to make a living as fossil fuel consumers nor as hunter-gatherers. How are we going to make a living in the future?

What if I told you I had a way to make a living that has worked for 150,000 generations and it does not involve running into the forest to live by hunting, fishing, and harvesting wild food?

The answer is tribalism or as I describe in my book Culturequake: The End of Modern Culture and the Birth of a New World.

Tribalism is misunderstood by Homo modern as “living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.” Hunting and gathering is only one way of making a living; there are thousands of other ways to make a living. The important point is not “what” you do to make a living, but “how” you make a living. Make a living doing what ever you are best at, whether it is on a permaculture farm or fixing bicycles, it makes no difference.

Tribalism has been proven over three million years to be the evolutionarily proven form of human social organization. Bees make a living in hives, deer in herds, whales in pods, birds in flocks, and humans in tribes. There is no getting around it. If you think that civilization is the new answer, you are deeply mistaken. In the mere blink of an eye, 500 generations, civilization has brought the world to the point of mass extinction. It might be working for a wealthy westerner, but it is not working for the other 95 percent of the human population nor the 30 million other species on the planet.

Tribalism has two primary components that enable the average person to make a living from generation to generation without being stressed out or exploited. First, a tribe is simply a group of people making a living together. Everyone in the tribe does not even have to have the same beliefs, they just have to want to make a living together.

Second, tribe members have a strong incentive to share what they have made or found with other tribal members. This gives everyone else a strong incentive to share as well. There is no one leader or boss like our hierarchic agricultural revolution culture. Being the main scheduler for example is just another job. When food is scarce everyone goes hungry; no one keeps a surplus to themselves.

Generally, tribes are thought to be fewer than 150 people. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized this number of people to be the limit with whom we can maintain stable social relationships in which we know each person. He suggests that numbers larger than this require more restricted rules, laws, and enforcement. I suggest this number does not require a hierarchy; everyone can be an equal.

So what should you do? The universal advice I got from older people when I was growing up was to, “do what you love to do and you will be good at it.” You will make the biggest impact with your life that way. Seek like-minded people and find a way to make a living together that you all enjoy.

Based on my experience as an entrepreneur I would also say follow the path of least resistance and watch for serendipity. Try multiple things and see which one gets the most traction. Also, walk before you run. Try your ideas on a hobby, part-time, or club scale to get started. You could start with your neighbors and each could plant a different fruit or nut tree and you could exchange harvests in the fall. Create a micro-neighborhood edible perennial nursery business. The possibilities are endless. Have fun with it.

One idea I am considering is to start by creating a virtual tribal community. We cannot all move in next door to each other overnight, but like-minded people could put their properties into a land trust for the benefit of the community. This would create a patchwork to start with within the existing suburban culture. You could coalesce closer together over time as the opportunities arise.

In regards to finding like-minded people, try hosting a potluck to discuss how things are changing and neighborhood sustainability; see who shows up. Also I cannot emphasis enough about learning about permaculture and even taking a two week intensive permaculture design course (PDC). You will meet your tribe of like-minded people there. See the permaculture resources below.

Have no hierarchy; work from a group consensus. Produce no surplus that would be concentrated; make just what you need locally and your population will be stable and will not be in overshoot. If you concentrate resources or work within a hierarchy, you take away the incentive for tribal community members to share what ever they find with the rest of the community.

Do this and you give your children a bright future. The one great benefit of a tribal community is cradle-to-grave security. In our Homo modern culture, we “make things to get things.” In a tribal or Leaver culture, you “give support to get support.” It is a completely different story or cultural meme. Memes are to cultures what genes are to people.

Also, by living a better story, we create a new cultural meme that is more likely to be replicated than our current modern cultural story or meme that, “civilization must continue,” and “the world was made for man.” I mean really, how poor a story are these?

A far better story is that we and our children can make a living without destroying most of the other life on earth. The real exciting part is that not only can we survive, but we can thrive! We can thrive amid a riot of cultural diversity among different tribes all making a living differently. We will also be living within the natural carrying capacity of our surroundings; a far greater result than what we have today.

So this is our resolution for the new year. To find “our people” and to make a living together. Maybe being laid off from building pyramids for someone else could be a blessing in disguise as an opportunity to walk away from modern consumer culture.

—-

Postscript: Use this winter as a time to catch up on your reading. Besides reading Culturequake, I recommend Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway and the Permaculture for Beginners DVD which is coming soon from Geoff Lawton at Permaculture Research Institute of Australia.

Other excellent resources:

• Beyond Civilization, by Daniel Quinn
• Dunbar’s Number
• Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, by William Catton
• The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore
• Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Reside of Earth Culture, by Chuck Burr
• Geoff Lawton:
  The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia
• Peter Bane:
  Permaculture Activist
• "A Return to Tribes" by Jan Lundberg

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