WEDNESDAY, AUG 15, 2018: NOTE TO FILE
Intentional Watershed eMigrants
The who, what and why
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: ABANDONING INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY, FROM THE WIRES, SYSTEMS SCIENCE, ECOLACY
Abstract: That some concerned citizens who don't believe in political solutions could become intentional refugees from industrial society and emigrate to select watershed areas to become the majority within them is assumed to be possible. The who, what and why questions are considered.
TUCSON (A-P) — You will become an intentional watershed eMigrant (who thinks eMergy matters), as opposed to a voluntary refugee from industrial society, because the word 'refugee' became politized in the twentieth century to mean someone (a victim) who involuntarily crosses international borders for political reasons (to flee persecution, war or violence). So if forced to flee raising sea level by going to dryer ground without crossing a nation-state boarder, you cannot be a refugee because you remain in 'your' country and 'natural' disasters don't count. Apparently one who seeks refuge (17th century French meaning) voluntarily (as distinct from those who choose to remain to deal with an issue other than sea level raise) cannot be refugees as all refugees must be victims of political mistreatment/misadventure.
So those seeking refuge from techno-industrial society per se that is NOT REMOTELY CLOSE TO SUSTAINABLE, need to call themselves something else. You can think of yourself as a refugee, just don't say so in the presence of wordsmiths. Normal emigrants voluntarily move from 'their' country within global industrial society to become immigrants to another country to improve their lot in life (legally or not) or otherwise pursue self interest, and so are anything but refugees from industrial society.
So, you will become an intentional/voluntary watershed eMigrant (WeM) if:
1. You understand that the success and prosperity of the current global socio-politico-economic SYSTEM is analogous to the exuberant growth of a cancer that seems (to the cancer cells and people like me) to be the best imaginable life that one could hope for.
2. You develop foresight intelligence even though the current SYSTEM does not select for it, which allows for doubts about what seems self-evidently true to the more enthusiastic cancer cells.
3. You realize that there is no life sustainable without ecolate [systems science literate] thought.
4. You don't like anything said above, but realize that Nature doesn't care what you like or dislike, are for or against, or want or don't want to believe.
Those currently driven to want more, having been relentlessly marketed to from infancy, are voluntarily seeking to pursue personal self interests, as the SYSTEM encourages and selects for. If your consumer-driven life in one area, region, city, state, or nation-state is judged to allow for more consumption/acquisition if you move, then you are not an eMigrant from industrial consumer society, but merely an emigrant who seeks to obtain more of what you want in a different area of the now global techno-industrial consumer/producer society.
The term eMigrant, then, will be used to refer only to those seeking to abandon techno-industrial society secondary to their recognition that:
• Our global economic system is NOT REMOTELY CLOSE TO SUSTAINABLE.
• We are captured and being dragged along by a complex, powerful and remorseless dynamic that automatically thwarts all attempts to stop it, i.e. the global growth hegemon.
• If we don’t put time and energy into understanding it, we are doomed to go with it, right to the final curtain. [1]
• So don't go with it. Become a voluntary eMigrant before becoming a refugee is involuntary.
It is possible to view our global industrial growth system as pathological, as a cancer is in a body. A cancer cell possessing foresight intelligence could not enthusiastically metastasize or help others to. Growther culture is cancerous, growing at the expense of surrounding resources, including other people (who may get in the way) and other lifeforms. Those who understand the human predicament enough and possess foresight intelligence will not be able to enthusiastically serve the SYSTEM (e.g. go to university and spend most of their life working to serve 'their' business, corporation, government, NGO, nation, people, career...). They will, as they must, iterate away from the humancentric default culture they were born into to seek alternatives, most of which prove to be pretend alternatives that don't actually work. This is subjectively experienced as a choice, a voluntary decision to abandon the cruise ship of fools they are on, though no free-will is implied.
You cannot be an eMigrant if:
1. You believe in and hope to reform the current 'sustainable development' hegemon.
2. Lack foresight intelligence.
Therefore if you do not feel impelled to vote with your feet, then you lack information and/or foresight intelligence. To ensure a bright and prosperous future, go shopping.
Alternative to serving industrial society is to learn to live properly with the planet, aka Nature, which implies being naturcentric. An individual, like Ted Kaczynski, could serve the SYSTEM for a few years, buy a bit of land in a remote part of Montana, iterate towards living properly (via best guess which can be dead wrong) to see the most pristine area he could walk to in three days laid waste to, and end up in Florence supermax prison serving eight life terms. But foresight intelligence always asks: "And then what?"
Maybe you come to live the perfected life on a mountain top. Maybe you and your family do. Maybe our family and a few others form a model community. Other communities like yours form in the same area to cooperatively live within the environmental resources of your valley. If the Nimwits, who live one valley over, grow their economy by unsustainably exploiting all available environmental and human resources, are fruitful, multiply, and take your valley (watershed) to meet their "need" to grow, then what?
What if enough voluntary refugees/eMigrants from around the world pick an area, vote with their feet, self-organize, form watershed management units, and there are enough watershed management units in a region such that when an outlying empire-builder encroaches (or remnant of a failed empire), a mutual defense response is able to prevent conquest?
When outlying empire-builders fail, as all so far have in the past seven thousand years, then increasing numbers of humans (perhaps 1% - 5%) will voluntarily form watershed management units, agree to limit human exploitation of Nature and other humans, mutually agree to degrow their (and mutualist animal) population and per capita consumption (from excessive to enough) and when most humans live as members of a United Federation of Watersheds, mutually agreeing to limits, then no empire-builder complex societies would be selected for, hence they would fade away as the centuries pass.
Only a federation of sufficiently complex societies could cooperate to prevent member conquest which would select for continued conquest per business-as-usual. A Federation of Watersheds could preserve information packages, the flower and fruit of prior unsustainable complex societies. We are at risk of losing 100 percent of our memes even if a remnant population of humans, survivalist types, preserve human genes and when environmental restoration occurs, repeat the pattern of empire-building, overshoot and collapse secondary to having learned nothing from prior failures. Without a planetary larder of fossil fuels, the information gained, especially in the last 300 years, will never be regained, if, like golden grains of sand, they creep through our collective fingers to the deep. 'Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?'
Before there are enough eMigrants on the planet to form the first watershed management unit, perhaps 5,000 sq. kilometers in size, individuals or families can transition now to live their best guess as to how humans need to live to 'live properly' on the planet. One obvious transition involves living without direct or indirect use of fossil fuels, which implies a low-power life of enough (enough per capita consumption) for enough (determined by watershed carrying capacity) residents at the agreed upon level of nearly equitable aggregate consumption. Twenty to fifty people could form a community intended to be functional, and work to make it so. This could happen almost anywhere around the world. As the number of refugees increases, a point will be reached when enough could vote with their feet to form the first watershed management unit in a region of the globe that favors the formation of other units.
One or more pockets of sustainability could thus be formed globally as more and more ex-growthers come to abandon industrial society before it collapses. When the global collapse of industrial society occurs, there will be more refugees and not enough time or resources for them to transition (indicating insufficient foresight intelligence). But within established watershed management units, functioning complex societies would survive intact and in due time spread to replace the failed SYSTEM with another based on a foundationally different 'rules of the game' that selects for foresight intelligence and humans who are happy to live a life of enough while working to serve posterity by being Earth Agents.
During global collapse, the previously established watershed management units would have foreseen the problem of too many end-game refugees and stockpiled food and other resources to allow up to ten times more humans to be taken into their watershed than could be sustainably supported by local agricultural productivity provided the refugees understood and agreed that they could not reproduce at will and otherwise agree to limits. They could pass on their memes, however, and avoid dying a Malthusian death. Their numbers may be essential to help the watershed survive the chaotic collapse and involuntary depopulation of the region.
In a near future near you, humans could live in what today would be called RV Parks, but without the RVs. Or what is now considered a single family residence could become a shared home providing shelter for humans and their animal mutualists that is big enough for each. The per capita footprint for humans and animals would be big enough. Humans would transition to live in Bigenuff homes (20-32 sq. ft./person or 1.8-3 m2/person). Bigenuff communities take in refugees who self-organize into band-sized social units based on the life-driven purpose of making it work. Bands could form larger communities with the ongoing life-driven purpose of making them work. What works, as determined by Nature, could be transmitted as memes to others for consideration and testing.
Those who endeavor to learn to understand the planet and live with it properly may not be among those who will be able to vote with their feet to form the first watershed management unit, but what they have learned—knowledge gained about what works, may be transmitted to others memetically. One person who learns something of value, possibly of essential value, who passes on what they have learned, will have lived well. A would-be eMigrant, all alone, unable to find or form a micro-community who would have them as a member, could yet memetically contribute information of high, possibly even indispensable, value that enables humans to transition from living the cancerous life to living an ecolate life others come to live as the millennia past. Perhaps the individual writes The Tao of Walden, which goes viral, and the world changes when enough minds transition.
So what can one person or couple do? Turn off the TV, disconnect from misinformation and disinformation sources: listen to Nature as well as those who endeavor to listen to Nature (e.g. natural scientists, naturalists, and other non-human centrists whether artists, scholars, poets, or autodidacts from all societies who have passed on their memes over the prior millennia, which includes mythology as metaphor), but above all, leave room for and listen to Nature, to the nature of things. Don't be distracted by all the primate prattle, including that which echoes in your own head or the echo chamber of social media or tavern talk (or some academic conferences). Listen to the heart-mind instead, which is not a private possession that you created after your birth, nor will it cease to exist when "your" light goes out. Iterate towards waking up and pass on what works.
"The higher and faster you grow, the further and faster you fall, when you're building up capital stock in a nonrenewable resource. In the face of exponential growth of extraction or use, a doubling or quadrupling of the nonrenewable resource give little added time to develop alternatives.... The real choice in the management of a nonrenewable resource is whether to get rich very fast or to get less rich but stay that way longer." —Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer [Choice? The current SYSTEM always selects for short-termism, a remorseless dynamic we are all trapped in.]
