Planetary Villages and Planetary Cities for a Life-Sustaining Human Habitat

Planetary Villagers and Planetary Villages

[This article] is about living both in community and in the larger world; about what it means to have a well developed, rooted connection with a specific place and people, and yet at the same time have many connections and feel comfortably at home in the larger world – and how this fits into and contributes to a humane sustainable culture. We are describing this kind of local/global existence as “being a planetary villager”.

The term planetary village is very different from the more familiar term, “global village”. The idea of the global village is that because of jet travel and electronic communications, the whole globe becomes as interconnected as villages are. It uses the word, village, as a metaphor. It says that the globe is like a village, but not that it actually is a village. It is always used in the singular, and is in fact a description of the state of the world rather than a name for some thing. Planetary villages, on the other hand, are real villages. What makes them different from Indian villages or Nigerian villages is that they exist in the context of the whole planet. Planetary villages are expected to be richly diverse, yet different from traditional villages in their sense of living in a larger context. The “villages” in planetary villages is intended to refer to small towns and neighborhoods in cities as well as rural villages.

Villages are not so much physical places as a reuniting of the human spirit with the spirit of the Earth, a reidentification of communities of people with the places they inhabit. This idea of bringing together in villages the values of ecological integrity, global responsibility, community and spiritual sensitivity [woud result in] the consciousness of the villagers to include the planet as a whole in their identity – an identity that keeps in mind how everything that occurs in the village affects the whole earth. [In this way] villages would be a critically important part of future world culture.

The reemergence of villages will be critical to the next step in human evolution, [where] villages [serve] as the appropriate unit of ecological sustainability, and cultural integrity.

A village is an incarnation not only of human will, intent, and social structure, but of the character and quality of the land. Such villages could invoke and express the power of the land, but this power included elements that were not truly human. To become more aligned with and understanding of your human nature, you have had to move beyond the land, beyond the village. This is the gift of your industrial, technological culture. It can break some of the patterns of attachment to the village and the land in specific ways and provide room fore larger planetary context and attunement to emerge and develop. For example, you can now process and distribute information, images, experiences, foodstuffs, clothing, and styles of life and culture around the world, creating a planetary mosaic and exposing people in physical, mental and emotional, as well as spiritual ways, to planetary influences. This is very important in developing and incarnating within humanity a sense of planetary beingness, a sense of being part of a single, unified species and ecology. It attunes you to a planetary context rather than just to a local geographical one. The globe, the sphere, the image of wholeness, becomes your topographical influence and symbol, not just the physical boundaries of mountain and river, ocean and valley.

You must return to the mind and spirit of the land from the strength of a deeper human consciousness. This means that the movement back toward villages and communities will increase, but now these will be planetary villages that deal with the land in new ways and that draw not only on local environmental influences for self-definition, but on the planetary perspective as a whole. This would be true even if local conditions necessitated reliance on purely local resources. The present challenge to industrial culture is how to adapt itself and its technology to the village and to networks of villages (even to creating “villages” within your present cities). The form of these villages will vary, of course, but they will be embodiments of a common consciousness – one of integration with land, with self, with others, and with the planet. Such villages will then become true centers of training for the next step in human evolution.

Questions looms:

• How do we design and build communities which contributes to the health of our local ecosystems?
• What kind of life style can we adopt which does not depend on exploiting either the third world or future generations?
• What is the new technology that will bring villages around the world into intimate relationships?
• What will we want to say to and hear from people in China or Brazil?
• How do we nurture cooperation, care and wisdom in ourselves and our communities?
• And for those of us who grew up in cities and suburbs – what is a village, anyway?

The metaindustrial village is a turn on the spiral back toward the preindustrial village, but it is not the preindustrial village; for with electronics, complex informational flow on a global level, and higher states of consciousness from a contemplative education, it is not a return to the “idiocy of rural life.” Much of the necessary knowledge of ecology and appropriate technology is at hand, thanks to the work of such groups as the New Alchemists and the permaculture movement.

[Nevertheless] villages obviously don’t work without villagers – people with the imagination to adapt the new technologies and social patterns to their unique situations, the openness to learn new skills and habits, and the commitment to their place, their people, and their vision to stay and work on a new way of life for a lifetime. That’s where the planetary villagers come in.

Life in a Planetary Village

The agricultural economy of the metaindustrial village would focus on organic gardening and the replacing of fossil-fuel agribusiness with natural cycles in the food chain. Since the shift from gardening to field tillage with the plow originally displaced women from food production, the return to ecologically sophisticated gardening enables women to return to take up significant roles in the economy of the village, and thus to overcome the sexual alienation characteristic of industrial society.

The metaindustrial village is not anti-industrial and Luddite; there will be industry and technology, but they will be brought down to scale as workshops in converted barns. A village could produce artistically beautiful glass bottles which could be kept as art objects or reused as containers in place of plastics. Or the village could produce bicycles, clothing, rotary tillers, or other well-crafted and durable instruments. In a return to the mystery of the craft guild, particular communities could focus on the revival of particular crafts and industries. Whatever the industry chosen, the scale of the operation would be small, in harmony with the ecosystem of the region, and devoted more to a local market than an international one.

The characteristic feature of a postindustrial economy is the emphasis on research and development and education. Since the entire village would be a contemplative educational community, after the manner of Lindisfarne and Findhorn, the adventure of consciousness would be more basic to the way of life than patterns of consumption. Everyone living in the community would be involved in an experiential approach to education, from contemplative birth, after the thought of Dr. Frederick LeBoyer, to contemplative death, after the thought of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. And at the various stages of life in between, the entire community would function as a college, in which children and adults would work together in gardening, construction, ecological research, crafts, and classes in all fields of knowledge.

The Planetary City

Civilization (the word itself comes from the root civil/citizen/city) would not have been possible without the rise of universities, libraries theater districts, museums, archives, and market centers – those containers of cultivated life that only cities create. Urban influence is like the cultural ocean of air we breathe, out of which all planetary villages and communities will take their bearings.

But do we want such bearings to be taken from the present urban culture of Seattle, Chicago, New York . . . or a new one growing out of a new consciousness? Out of an ecological ignorance and destruction, or knowledge and sustenance? A stratified and power-oriented politics or a cooperative and service-oriented one? A competitive, exploitive, and entropic economics or a mutually supportive, contributory, and flourishing one?

The challenge requires a new city because no planetary village or community, no matter how successfully it deals with the ecology, is likely to convince our mainstream culture the solution is transferable. Cities [will] decentralize as global networks of electronic communications allows the remotest places on Earth to access and interact with the leading edge of human culture. The limitations of raw materials and increasing pollution [will] require humanity to redefine wealth in terms of inner experience rather than possessions and consumption. The values of community [will] form a basis for a new economics that allows for right livelihood and local self reliance.

A conscious city is the instrument, while villages and communities are the equally crucial aids.

A Scenario of Rural Renaissance – An Imagining on the Emergence of Planetary Villages

WHAT FOLLOWS is an excerpt from the book, Seven Tomorrows, which develops seven scenarios for the evolution of the U.S. during the eighties and nineties. While naturally fictional, they are based on extensive future studies by SRI International. They differ primarily along two dimensions, how difficult the economic and environmental situation becomes, and whether people react in primarily cooperative or competitive ways to these difficulties. This particular section is from “Mature Calm”, the mildly difficult, cooperative scenario. Reprinted with permission. Pages 76 – 81.

Many of the changes during these decades happened so slowly that they were not immediately noticeable, for example, the resurgence of the small town and the profound demographic shift accompanying it. College-educated youth from the cities continued their exodus to rural areas. Instead of heading for the woods, many of them set up shop in the village. Just when it seemed that many of the lost skills and arts of our forebears were to be forever lost between the pages of Eric Sloane’s books, tens of thousands of young craftpersons and artisans revived long forgotten skills. The hot tub revolution eventually spawned the revival of the cooperage. Blacksmiths became numerous enough for a national convention in 1988. Blacksmiths not only acted as ironmongers, but many began making tools to order complete with hand turned native wood handles.

The explosion of smalltown culture stimulated a similar increase in live music. With more and more people off in the country, unplugged from TV or just disinterested, there was a resurgence in smalltime country, jug, and bluegrass bands; folk singers, minstrels, and traveling road shows. Networks of smalltown entertainment circuits spread a festive and heel-kicking air that had been lost for decades. Just as the folk-rock music of the sixties had resulted in an explosion in the record industry, this new form of music had its correlative commercial wave. But instead of CBS and Warner, the new labels read Beanville, Red’s Neck, and many more – a profusion of smalltime record companies. Instead of acting as producers, the major record companies functioned as distributors of those labels they thought had national or regional appeal.

Another demonstration of smalltownism was demographic. While city schools continued to close one by one for lack of enrollments, country schools burst at the seams. At first the shift was not recognized by state and federal agencies as they acted on the continued assumption that cities should get the bulk of federal aid. The faltering cities received large infusions of capital and ended up buying off the poor. The pall of urban bureaucratic charity contrasted with the vitality of small towns where the poor were having a better time on less money.

The move toward small towns was not just a romantic fixation. During the eighties, it was still popularly assumed that living country-style was part of the post- industrial reaction to complexity and technology, and that those who left the urban areas were slightly nostalgic if not Luddite. When the 1990 Census showed how dramatic the shift had become, it became clearer that the migration was in fact a reversal of the economic considerations that had driven families off the land in the first place. The cities no longer offered the best jobs, the most security, or the richest lifestyle. They had become so burdened by scale and infrastructure costs that they could no longer support their populations with services and security. Police were beefed up, but streets were dirtier. Teachers were better paid, but the schools were dangerous. Housing was available, but rents were expensive. Food was costly, tension unbearable, and smog unabated.

As the migration to rural America proceeded, it took with it many small businesses – manufacturing, service, and communication. Many people left with their employers en masse to find a better environment. Electronics companies continued to be the growth industry they were in the eighties, and their technology allowed them the privilege of remoteness since they relied little upon steel, trucking, railroads, and freeways. When a small, high-tech company moved to a small town, a ripple effect typically produced a new food store, bookstore, and bakery, as well as a bicycle shop, graphics and design studio, printing press, community garden project, a babysitting co-op, a musical society, and a new surge of community activity in local schools. Each migration and settlement had its tensions, problems, and transitional crises, but there was no question that the hybridization of country folk with city folk in small towns and villages produced a vital environment that was very attractive. Instead of pouring money into the cities, many people hedged their urban bets by putting money into their own favorite town and looked forward to the time they would move to it.

Many who attempted the transition failed. Some could not adapt to lower wages or to the more modest lifestyle. Others missed the tension they had once dreaded. Others simply did not get along, refused to learn the lesson of smalltown diplomacy, and soon found themselves none too subtly ostracized for untoward remarks and actions. Long hair was never a problem in these resettlement activities, but big mouths were.

In the suburbs the change was not as dramatic. While the suburbs experienced some of the plight of the cities – higher transportation and food costs, rising crime and unemployment – they also had some of the advantages of the rural areas in that people had backyards, garages, and, in some cases, small workshops where they could produce for many of their own and their neighbor’s needs. The more affluent suburbs seemed to hang onto their image of how things ought to be. Their voters refused to allow small businesses to operate from homes, or food to be grown on school lawns. Otherwise suburbs made whatever adaptive measures were necessary and prudent. People did sewing, tailoring, and sharpening in their homes. Many front lawns became gardens, and food was prominent at flea markets.

By the mid-nineties, a three-tiered society was easily divisible by geography. While government concentrated on industry, production, and resource allocation, the cities saw their condition deteriorate with little taxpayer sympathy from either Washington or the states. Suburbs that had access to viable industries saw a modest decline in living standards and a tremendous increase in community participation in government, policing, services, and planning. The rural areas that offered good living conditions in terms of food, liberal building codes, friendly people, and ample resources, saw their stock soar. Rural America became the queen of the nineties.

This article is a summary and reconfiguration of the following articles taken from the 1st edition of “In Context – A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture, Winter 1983″:

1. “Introductions” by Robert Gilman
2. “What Is A Planetary Village? – How do you go about building one?” by Tim Clark
3. “The Metaindustrial Villag – A possible future encapsulates history .. and moves beyond” by William Irwin Thompson
4. “The Planetary City – The city also has a valuable role in the metaindustrial era” by Ronald Jorgensen
5. “Rural Renaissance – One scenario for America in the nineties” by Paul Hawken, James Ogilvy, and Peter Schwartz

Read more from the full 13 years archive of In Context

Keywords : ecosocial crisis, humane sustainable culture, sustainability, planetary village, planetary villager, planetary city, life-sustaining human habitat, life-sustaining civilization design, rural renaissance, planetary consciousness, community, appropriate scitech, unity in diversity, right livelihood, local self-reliance, relocalization, network of villages, post-industrial civilization, post-carbon civilization, culture of cooperation
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All contents copyright (c)1983, 1996 by Context Institute