I would like to begin with the image above and my reason for posting this article. I firmly believe that a combination of technology such as Crypto currency, Blockchain, Permaculture, Green Renewable Energy, Sustainable Food, Abundant Water, Responsible Manufacture of Goods, Environmentally friendly Logistics, Travel and Community are the key to the healthy future of humanity on Earth. I aim to address a few of these issues here so please read on if you are interested.
I watch a lot of videos and read a lot of things as I constantly want to better my knowledge in order try to produce something fruitful with the rest of my life. Despite watching many permaculture, green energy and crypto related videos today many of which inspire and educate me such as the recently posted video on the #PermacultureMedia #youtube channel regarding #CulturalEmergence, the image above was taken from a particular video created and published by #HappenFilms a channel on YouTube I urge you to subscribe to and support. The man in the image is Robert Guyton an incredible man who has achieved great things that many can learn from. The title of the video is "Thriving 23 year old Permaculture Food Forest - An Invitation for Wildness" and a great watch (linked below). As things often tend to play out I stumbled upon Happen Films by pure chance a while ago from other videos. I again stumbled on this particular video again today after watching related content. It reminded me of how powerful I thought it was the first time of watching it not long after it was published way back in 2016. What inspired me to make this post mainly was the first comment from a viewer named #JustinRhodes he quoted the following "My Philosophy in life about what to do in the world isn't to go to a pristine area and live there and enjoy your life; it's to find a place that's degraded and fix it up" - Robert Guyton. He went on to say that he loves the philosophy and that we need more Robert Guyton's in the world. I for one echo this and firmly agree the world would be better if we had many more Robert Guyton's and other such like minded people.
I for one, am guilty of wasting a great deal of time when I was young. Despite having many opportunities to advance and make money I often fritted it all away carelessly in exchange for self indulgence and fun times. I feel that for the most part that was all for a reason and it has led me to my way of thinking about how we use time, how we treat the world and the things we do in adult life. My ideas for living the remainder of my life are always evolving but for the most part for many years now they have always been focused on the environment and making the world better. The ironic thing is that even though I can now I can look back on my younger days and realise what a waste of time, resources and other decisions I poorly made I am not yet in a position to move forward at any pace with plans to do the things I feel I need to do. The issue is that I now do not have much money, I also have young children and general commitments that make it a lot harder for me to raise the money or spend the time needed researching and learning enough to build my vision. That wont stop me trying though as I will explain below.
My long term life goal is to purchase a piece of land for several purposes. Firstly to allow a great permaculture system to be implemented. Secondly for people wishing to live in tiny homes it would provide a place to bring their tiny home and form a like minded community in which everyone contributes. Thirdly a place to trial new recycling and renewable energy production as technology emerges. A way of finding the perfect balance of nature, sustainability, community, resource production, allocation, technology, energy and future expansion as it evolves. I would hope this could be used as a platform to inspire a new way of thinking. Less orientated around money and individual growth but rather resource based thinking, living and an overriding goal of community growth benefitting all.
If we were all living, working, producing, consuming within the eco system then money becomes less important but rather the time we each spend contributing to the system achieves the goal. Rather than working in meaningless positions giving away our time in exchange for money to then pay someone else or an outside factor to come in and do our jobs or supply our resources we generate our own and benefit directly from our efforts. This is just the surface though, not only would we gain back our lives, get to quit our meaningless and soul destroying jobs but we would learn new skills, find our place and begin to enjoy certain aspects of this system that we can choose to spend more of our time participating in. Producing our own food, producing and consuming our own energy, capturing, processing and reusing water and more. Well pretty soon it will become apprarent that the way we view money and time begins to change. We would instead place equal if not more value on a fellow community members and appreciate each for their unique input that directly benefits us all. Put simply the further such a system progresses the less valuable internally money becomes to each person and to the eco system overall.
Delving deeper into the financial element it would be ignorant for me to say that money will not be required within the community at all. It will of course be needed for interaction outside of the community and by no means am I suggesting an isolated and totally self dependant community, indeed, quite the contrary. All aspects of what we do, learn, produce and achieve would be done in such a way as to supply revenue from said things. Therefore excess foods grown, excess energy produced and skill sets people develop can and would of course be sold externally for monetary value as and when required. This would, for the most part, become more optional as time goes by. As we place less value on money and more value on time choices would change. Doing additional tasks purely for money, I believe, would begin to become far less appealing to someone depending of course on their mindset and long term life goals at that time. I honestly think that people when their accommodation is secure, energy is supplied, food is not scarce and general basic life expenses are a much smaller factor will choose free time over working for extra money. There will always be people who want extra money for other things such as a car, furniture, overseas travel etc.. but many will choose to spend larger amounts of their time with family, friends, reading, travelling, exploring new things as opposed to giving it away to a corporation purely for money that previously would have been used largely to pay living expenses, bills, debt and accumulating possessions.
When limitations present themselves (as they always do in the world) new ways to overcome, remain green, supply jobs, resources and retain a better quality of life with fewer constraints than the current system under which most of us live would need to be implemented. There would always therefore be dynamic work to be done and new skill sets to be learned. Some ideas for evolving and growing such a community would be to implement indoor vertical farms for things that could not grow naturally in the region, this would provide jobs, produce excess food in abundance (and healthy), it would also be able to be powered by green energy (produced by us). Forming a Hemp farm for educational, medicinal and other purposes such as production of paper, clothing, hempcrete. This in turn would also enable training courses on site for those wishing to attend. For example encouraging local schools, colleges and universities to include the permaculture site or our green energy micro grid into their students learning experience with regular hands on visits. For students this would provide first hand experience and encourage more to adopt such practises into their post education lives. Also constantly implementing new green technology in solar, wind, water and batteries as well as trying to increase production to such an excess that we can sell unused energy via peer to peer platforms emerging in the crypto space. Projects such as #PowerLedger, #WePower and more are already laying the foundations for this. Anyone in energy knows that the future is going to consist of micro grids, green energy and smart control with peer to peer sales and utilisation rather than big, dangerous, inefficient and dirty power stations.
The eco system would have an overriding ethos of sustainability and being in balance with nature. It would also have to harness technological advances and changes such as those currently taking place in technology, energy and the financial world due to things like crypto currency and ever decreasing costs of solar (although traditional solar cells as we know them will not be used soon but I may speak about that in a later post), construction, insulation etc..
Due to this diversity, abundance of work, varied technology, manual labour, administrative tasks, maintenance and engineering tasks the idea of such a system would not form a barrier to people but rather an interest and mechanism for more adoption to such a way of living. What do I mean? Well when I speak about these things many people call me a hippy or refer to communes and alienated small societies who live off grid and largely alone and independent . This, however, would be a balance of all that is good and less of the things that historically have social stigma attached to them. Firstly and always most importantly would be the whole project being nature centric. The community needs would also always remain a top priority but heavily revolving around a community sustained infrastructure that produces many services, skills and products that in turn external communities would benefit from too. Not to mention the technology and embracement of better iterations of finance that are now emerging. If ever there were a time to do this, it is now. We can finally realise these ways of living that harness all that is good with technology but in perfect balance with nature too.
I am not crazy and I also don't want to just be a dreamer. I may not have the means or the money to do this yet but I do have many many more ideas on exactly how it can work and adapt as times passes. I believe the key to any such project does not rest just with one individual but rather should be a group effort from the ground up. As mentioned above I don’t have the money myself. As a (still fairly young) self employed disabled father, on a relatively low income and having time consumed with menial tasks that prevent me dedicating it to bigger and more pressing tasks such as this I am looking to form a group of likeminded people to discuss and maybe begin taking this whole idea into becoming a reality. I therefore am currently considering investments in crypto currencies which I am now making regularly in the hope any gains will fund the beginning of this. I am also forming a new small business but it will be fairly small turnover, although it will give me a new skill set and benefit the project in more ways than just financially. Also crowdfunding campaigns have crossed my mind but not something I have got too deep into exploring yet. Initially I would like to begin meeting likeminded people who would want to form a joint venture in such a project here in the UK with the goal becoming financial freedom, independence and the feeling of enjoying doing something great in the world rather than being caged in a job they do not like or do not feel is as beneficial as this has the potential to be.
It wouldn’t stop there either, this would only be phase one. This is of course just the tip of the iceberg for my thoughts on any such project and plans for evolution of it. The best thing is that if I can have a million ideas on how this can become reality, self sufficient and beneficial for all then imagine a combined group of people all with their own minds and ideas. The outcome would be incredible and far better than anything I alone could even begin to comprehend. If such a group can be formed and funds can be raised then all people would have direct input. Even if I had vast wealth and could implement such a thing alone by no means would I ever want full control or ownership of any such thing as to do do would corrupt it from its very roots. As #SatoshiNakamoto created Bitcoin anonymously then set it free into the world for its network members to manage and use as they deem best, I feel a similar concept should be tested here too. A community voting or similar system would be implemented as a way of always extracting and implementing the best ideas thereby preventing one person or a small group of people negatively affecting things or it moving in a way the largest percentage of the community are opposed to.
We are constantly reminded of the flaws in our current systems. We also see only too clearly where modern day politics and finance have got us. If we take one thing from all that we know, then a centralised system certainly isn't working very well nor the best way of doing things. In any such community the vote of the majority should always be the key to moving forward.
I will end this here and would like to say a huge thank you for reading this incredibly long post. If you are still here at the end then I genuinely hope to connect with you soon. If anyone is interested in speaking with me, humouring an old fool and his ideas, bouncing your own ideas around or more then please contact me. In the mean time feel free to watch the video linked below that inspired me to write this post. I hope we can all achieve great things with deep purpose. The world and society are in a dire situation at present, it needs to be changed from the ground up and new better ways of life adopted quickly. This is my vision to play a part in that positive change, I hope you share common ground with at least some of the things I have spoken about here.
Have a great day folks and if any of my followers such as @ecotrain @eco-alex @davidhay @dannyshine @crypt0 @magicalmoonlight @jerrybanfield or event the lovely and awesome @heiditravels can stop by and read this then I would love to ask a massive favour for you to all please upvote this post for me. I don't ever ask for posts to be upvoted but this one is a little different to the rest. Changing the world one upvote at a time ;)
My email is: littlecineman@gmail.com
Happen Films Video:
