Update 6: NOVEMBER 18, 2019
Friends, SEHIs, citizens: how far we have come. And yet, how much further we still have to go.
Six weeks ago there was an earthquake. The GEAS Report was in human terms a seismic event, in the aftershock of which some resorted to blame and anger, fingers pointed, accusing. Some among us panicked. Some despaired. Some fled. There were those who insisted that the figures were wrong, that the forecasts were lies; denied that anything had changed.
But many of us could feel it, deep down. We still do. The world had changed, as surely and as suddenly as if the ground had actually moved beneath our feet. And we recognised in that moment a need to change, respond, and rebuild atop the ruins of a broken civilisation.
In the Superstruct movement, something transformative has been created. In just six weeks, many of the urbanites among us have come to realise how profoundly disconnected we've become from the land. Accordingly, we have begun belatedly to take an intense interest in that which sustains us; the seeds, soils, weather patterns and steadfast, disciplined behaviours -- learned over millennia, passed down over generations, and very nearly forgotten in the flash of a few frenzied decades -- which make human lives possible.
At the same time, our apparently forgotten interdependence with a wonderfully complex web of life, whose well-being is a precondition of our survival, has at last come clearly into view. The value of so profoundly important, yet seemingly modest, an ecological contribution as that of pollinating insects is now much better appreciated. This week, for example, it's being addressed with a beekeepers' grant initiative in Nova Scotia.
In confronting the Ravenous Superthreat in our own lives, each of us has faced a personal choice between minimising, and carefully cultivating, our relationships of mutual aid with our neighbours. And in this sixth week of the crisis, many of us continued to find the need and, thankfully, the capacity, to rise to the occasion -- to connect and cooperate. Sometimes, as SEHI ProfRule reminds us, this means tearing down fences, and sometimes it means building bridges, as in this week's most hopeful new 'struct, Back2Basics, which is creating a coalition of 17 existing superstructures that address our food system.
Perhaps the most heartening lesson has been that our ability -- or instinct, if you prefer -- to band, learn and thrive together in the mouth of adversity has not been lost. People are getting organised, both formally through emerging nonprofit organisations such as Quality Rations and IAPEF (currently seeking funding), and informally through grassroots initiatives such as the Mobile Broadcast Unit. MBU founder todbrilliant this week shared exciting images of the group's first ever street-level intervention, an awareness-raising campaign for the Ravenous cause.
Understandably, in these uncertain times, there have been calls to look to the past to help find our way to the future. But one of the most successful of all 'structs, Bright Green, is a clear signal from the SEHI community that technological ingenuity will not be abandoned moving forward. In educating the next generation for survival, Superstructures such as Appleseed, Terra Perma, and Augmented University are all about the potential of tech, and especially gaming, to form an integral part of the process. One particularly impressive example this week came from SEHI Fleep, who stepped forward with an orientation video introducing her virtual farm, which is available for training purposes, notably for communities afflicted with ReDS.
Over the past six weeks, we've seen big debates -- for instance, between bottom up and top down solutions; and big ideas -- Vertical Gardens; terraforming and irrigating our deserts; feeding the world with insects; restructuring the whole economy around water. The usual astonishing variety of human responses swirls around Ravenous, as around everything else we touch. While some of us still have trouble sleeping, others waste no time in dreaming up ways to profit from our dire predicament -- a selfish tenacity that somehow testifies to both the best and the worst impulses within us.
There is so much yet to do, and so many hurdles to doing it. But we have begun. And today there is hope -- the real beginnings of something different and perhaps better: hope grounded in lessons learned and actions taken, not merely in wishful thinking.
Yes, just six weeks ago there was an earthquake.
The GEAS report, so long anticipated, so deeply dreaded, finally confirmed what many of us had known for a long time; perhaps all along. This grand experiment had gone awry. We have been choking ourselves: energy dissipating, disease spreading, order crumbling, food vanishing, and populations moving on, yet everywhere confronted by the same horror. A Whole Earth Catalog of Inexorable Self-Destruction. More than seven billion of us, five existential Superthreats, and a paltry 23 years remaining --- one generation of unrelenting despair in which to play out the sorry denouement of the human tragedy. This is the way the world was to end, not with a bang, but a whimper.
Then something happened.
People began to find in themselves a need, a willingness, and an ability to create something else. Individuals, families, communities began to hope, and to change, for an alternative vision, and the dark horizon of a future which had threatened to close in on us once and for all, began again to open up, and to brighten, in response to our newly rekindled imaginations.
Just as it always has.
~futuryst (Stuart Candy, Honolulu, Hawaii) & mrjudkins (Josh Judkins, Wellington, New Zealand), 18 November 2019
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