Sspen Chapter 01 09 FB PDF

S YS TE MI C S Y MBIOTI C P LANETARY
ECOV ILLAG E NE TWORK
Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovillage Network

P O Box 1674
Middletown, CA
95461-1674
USA
silverj6@mchsi.com
Silver J. H. Jones
Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

1
TABLE OF CONTE NTS
Nonlinearity, complexity, and information

8
Problems in initiating microsocieties
12
The current status of existing microsocieties
15
A beginning point
18
General systems - systemics
20
Symbiotics
22
Sustainable living
23
Biorapture
23
Ascension
24
The motivation for ecovi!age implementation
25
The vital importance of networking
30
The power of bottom-up microsociety networking
33
Coevolutionary memetics
35
Ecovi!ages in the global warming era
37
The role of size and scaling in ecovi!ages
39
Growing social networks
41
An invitation to dig deeper
42

2
Network resources
43
References
44

3
CHAP TE R I
Introduction to Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network
Silver J. H. Jones
2008
Copyright © 2002 by Silver (J. H.) Jones. All rights, electronic, multimedia, and print, reserved. A publi-
cation of the Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovillage Network
Ecovillage or microsociety keyword progression chain:
alpha [link ~ sync ~ systemic ~ symbiotic ~ information assimilation ~ biorapture ~ ascension ~ cocrea-
tion ~ designer universes ~ metauniverses] omega
As inhabitants of our biosphere we need to do more than offer continual criticism of the existing govern-
ance, financial, and industrial systems, which control so much of our lives these day. It is easy to be a
critic, if you do not accept the larger challenge to provide a system to replace the systems you condemn.
We constantly hear in newspapers and on television, how disillusioned the public is with the established
government, yet few of these people are willing to face the greater challenge and provide the intellectual
effort needed to offer alternative, and hopefully superior, governance and financial paradigms to replace
the existing ‘established’ systems of governance, industry, and finance. Criticism serves a positive func-
tion when it is the first step towards initiating new structures and dynamics to replace poorly functioning
systems already operational. It is our purpose here to offer at least the beginning outlines of such a sys-
tem. However, we must provide more than just a new system, we must provide a realistic, workable, and
flowing bifurcation pathway that leads from the current structure and dynamics to the future structure and
dynamics we envision and desire. Nonlinear system theory teaches us that in order to move from one po-
sition and dynamic within a phase, configuration, or state space we must be able to find a new pathway or
flow that exists within the systems attractor basin, then we have a real possibility of reaching our new
goal. However, if we select a state or dynamic that is not available within the attractor basin, we have no
chance at all of achieving our goal. So the new paradigm we select, must first be reachable within the

4
laws pertaining to evolutionary biosphere ascension within our universe. Second, we must carefully study
and simulate just how we will initiate this bifurcation pathway - to the new state dynamic we wish to ar-
rive at. Furthermore, as we progress along this pathway we must master the laws of dynamical systems
and chaos control, if we wish to reach our new state by means of a new technique we shall refer to as non-
linear ascension tuning. Nonlinear ascension tuning differs from just any kind of nonlinear tuning, in
that its objective is much more than simply exploring the full spectrum of the dynamical system. Ascen-
sion tuning is a much more advanced form of tuning that can only take place once the spectrum of alter-
native pathways or flows have already been identified. Ascension tuning is teleological in nature, in that it
attempts to achieve the highest degree of capacity utilization, systemic synchronization, and symbiotic
win/win causality manifestation.
Our purpose here is to offer a realistic, practical, and hopefully inspiring alternative to the existing sys-
tem. So many of the replacements of existing systems throughout the history of our planet have involved
wide scale war, revolution, or terrorism. We shun these approaches at the outset. Our approach is nonvio-
lent and ascension oriented, as opposed to revolutionary and power oriented. Furthermore it is a bottom
up, emergent, and heterarchical approach - as opposed to a hierarchical approach, where the attempt is
made to eliminate or replace the existing power structure at the highest levels of governance. By no
means do we suggest that this is the only viable approach to change, it is but one of many possible ap-
proaches. What is unique about our approach is the application of concepts from the new sciences of gen-
eral system theory, alife, dynamic networks, emergence, evolutionary computation, and self-organization.
These are all very new sciences, taking their origin in the last quarter of the previous century. If you are
hungary for a government, an industrial infrastructure, and a financial system that serves the needs of this
biosphere’s inhabitants, rather than the mercenary objectives of vast multinational corporations that re-
spect no person, no country, and that defile the existing ecology and biosphere (the product of billions of
years of emergent ascension), then allow yourself to sample the ideas presented here. It is our sincere
hope, that once having assimilated these new concepts, you will be inspired to contribute to these efforts,
and to disseminate these ideas, and finally to personally act with others to release the enormous implicate
and explicate power of these concepts. We need a new fully realized explicate order, that will allow all the
citizens of this planet to proudly announce that - this is truly our planet once again!
The ascension pathway to systemic and symbiotic long term sustainable living is open to us all, but it will
require a very deep re-evaluation and commitment on the part of every human being on this earth. Even
long term sustainable living is not enough, we will settle for nothing less than full scale biorapture. The
only thing standing in our way is ourselves, and the power we have surrendered to others. It is time to
take back the power and the responsibility - it is time to get serious about the unlimited ascension possi-
bilities open to us is this astounding universe experiment we are a part of. Long term sustainable living
and biorapture are only the beginning of a very long process of ascension that leads to the solar system,
the stars, the galaxy, the superclusters, the universe, and beyond. It is time for us to take our place in this
universe and to accept the cocreation challenge that advanced universe design intelligence has afforded
us. If advanced universe design level intelligence had the confidence is us to provide us with free will,
and the ability to act as cocreators in this universe, should we expect anything less than this from our-
selves? In our multicausal universe, we are at least the cocreators and the navigators of our own reality. It

5
is time to take back the controls and the compass we surrendered to others - it is time once and for all to
step up to the challenge, and to realize the full implications of this marvelous gift that has been offered to
use, within the ascension pathways to the universal consciousness - which is continually pulling and guid-
ing us towards the universal attractor basin at the omega point of universe evolution.
In our discussion we will attempt to provide a general system theory perspective on the reasoning behind,
and the purpose for, establishing a network of eco-friendly microsocieties on a global scale.
We are attempting to find a way of establishing a systemic, symbiotic, planetary, ecovillage network
(SSPEN). Ecovillages are microsocieties, and as such they provide ideal testing zones for the larger civi-
lization to - test new methods of governance, culture, finance, education, sociology, technological evolu-
tion, and our general ability to navigate our way through the fitness landscape of universe evolution. Mi-
crosocieties when properly implemented, far from being a threat to the larger society, can serve as socio-
logical early warning systems. They can be centers for innovation focused around the common objectives
of attaining highly optimized and robust models of how to attain a long term sustainable civilization for
ourselves and our ecological planetary life support system.
We live in an era when a new and exciting science of networks is being developed. Networks have al-
ways been active in our lives, but we are just beginning to realize their ever increasing importance in our
lives as we penetrate further into the information age. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are partici-
pating in a civilization that is becoming more and more dependent upon the behavior of networks. Net-
works are no longer abstract realities far removed from our daily existence. Duncan Watts, an active par-
ticipant in the development of network science, has characterized this period of our history [1]:
“In the quiet corridors of academia, meanwhile, a new science has been emerging - one that speaks di-
rectly to the momentous events going on around it. For want of a better term, we call this new science the
science of networks.
And unlike the physics of subatomic particles or the large-scale structure of the universe, the science of
networks is the science of the real world - the world of people, friendships, rumors, disease, fads, firms,
and financial crises. If this particular period in the world’s history had to be characterized in any simple
way, it might be as one that is more highly, more globally, and more unexpectedly connected than at any
time before it. And if this age, the connected age, is to be understood, we must first understand how to
describe it scientifically; that is, we need a science of networks.”
Watts also warns us not to be put off from investigating this subject by textbooks which are often dry and
intimidating. He describes the textbook approach to science [2]:
“...Unfolding in a relentless march of logic from apparently impossible questions to seemingly indisput-
able conclusions, textbook science is hard enough to follow, let alone emulate. And even when science is
presented as an act of discovery, an achievement of humans, the process by which they actually figured it
out remains cloaked in mystery. My dominant memory from years of physics and math courses is the de-
pressing sense that no normal person could actually do this stuff.
But real science doesn’t work that way. As I eventually learned, real science occurs in the same messy
ambiguous world that scientists struggle to clarify, and is done by real people who suffer the same kind of

6
limitations and confusions as anybody else....Doing science is really a lot like doing anything else, but by
the time it gets out into the larger world and everyone reads about it in books, it has been so reworked and
refined that it takes on an aura of inevitability it never had in the making. This is the story about science
in the making.”
We only hope that we can play some small role in making this new science accessible and relevant to all
of those who wish to establish a long term sustainable civilization for themselves and the future inhabi-
tants of this planet. Without network expertise, no civilization has a change of obtaining this goal, and that
is why networks play such an essential role in our development of the new paradigm of networked micro-
societies.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
In the following pages you will find considerable critical comment on corporations, multinational corpo-
rations, and so called ‘free markets’ and their related equity trading systems. So we must also state that
we are not anti-corporate, anti-free markets, or anti-capitalism, because we do recognize the exten-
sive contributions these institutions have brought to our society. What we are critical of is the way
these corporations are structured, motivated, governed, and the unbalanced over extension of their politi-
cal and economic power over that of the general populous of our planet. Our purpose is to address this
imbalance, both by addressing how we as consumers and citizens can utilize our power to turn the direc-
tion of these corporations towards a more long term sustainable corporate paradigm, and how we, the
general populous of our planet, can organize ourselves within smaller, more adaptable, more innovative,
more systemic, more symbiotic, and more intimate communities. We simply wish to regain more control
over our destiny, and to counterbalance the current destructive track record of the strictly Darwinian cor-
porate paradigm. In the process of this evolution the small business sector, the corporate sector, the multi-
national sector, the governmental sector, and the general populous sector, should emerge into a new and
much more cooperative, synergistic, and systemic whole - which exhibits constructive symbiotic win/win
behavior which benefits all parties, as opposed to the destructive win/lose competitive behavior, that has
lead to the well documented wide scale destruction of our land, sea, fresh water resources, and our atmos-
phere. Whatever critical analysis we do offer is meant to be taken as a constructive effort to encourage
these institutions to reform many of their current practices, so as to provide a more sustainable civiliza-
tion. We encourage every aspect of internally motivated self initiated reform, but we also recognize that
we must be realistic about the previous track record of the pervasive corporate culture. As much as we
would like corporations to demonstrate what we might refer to as a corporate ‘soul,’ which provides ethi-
cal guidance and direction to their enterprises, the historical record has demonstrated that a large percent-
age of corporations operate on a strictly for profit motivation. When their conduct has been improper, they
seldom admit it and take corrective measures, unless they are forced to take such measures, either by the
passage of new legislation, the courts, or by economic pressures organized by the general population to
reduce their profits. Corporations have a very poor record of self invoked reform. Moral appeals seldom
carry any weight in corporate board rooms. On the other hand, organized action which effects their over-
all profit structure, seems to be very effective in getting their attention and promoting reform. Unfortu-
nately, the historical record has established a consistent pattern of conduct which we cannot afford to ig-

7
nore. If you want to alter the behavior of a corporation you absolutely must design your efforts to alter
their profit balance sheet if you want to be effective.
Nonlinearity, complexity, and information

The 21st Century is going to be an extremely important and challenging century for earth inhabitants. In
this century we will have to face many very serious problems:
• We will have to face the many consequences of severe overpopulation.
• We will encounter the problems of complex feedback in a highly nonlinear and technologically net-
worked society, with increasing degrees of interoperability and interconnectivity.
• The increased complexity of our society, is going to require much more advanced methods of complex-
ity management and control than we are currently exhibiting.
• We will have to contend with global warming, with all of its consequences, including rapid changes in
local climates, the rapid migration of plant and animal species, changes in local food crop viability,
changes in rainfall patterns, in underground water tables, and local ecological zones shifting from dry to
wet, and wet to dry conditions.
• We will come close to completely utilizing all of the reasonably accessible oil reserves.
• We will have to adjust to the much more rapid feedback and interaction of our economies and our fi-
nancial markets.
• We will face the rapid depletion of our non-renewable resources, and the severe stressing of our renew-
able resources.
• The pollution of our planet’s land, sea, surface fresh water, underground water, and atmosphere are on
the increase.
• We will be challenged by the new advantages and threats from bioengineering and genetic manipula-
tion.
• We will have to contend with the challenges of full biological cloning and partial therapeutic biological
cloning.
• We will be confronted with the numerous challenges of nanotechnology.
• We will continue to adjust to the ever increasing challenge of artificial intelligence and artificial life
(alife).
• We will continue to be challenged, at ever increasing levels, with managing enormous amounts of in-
formation in the information age.
Given the situation we are facing, we must ask ourselves if the current social, economic, trading markets,
corporate, and political institutions, by themselves, are adequate and sufficient to deal with the period of

8
rapid and massively parallel change we are facing. The recent inability of both government and the pri-
vate sector to properly manage the ‘tech, internet, and information age’ explosive growth, should leave us
with a real sense of concern. In this new century ‘the reactive management and governance style’ cur-
rently operating in our large institutions, will simply be too slow to keep up with the rapid pace of change.
We very much need more agile, negentropic, systemic, dynamical, and nonlinear savvy institutions, and if
such institutions do not exist, then we must simulate, grow, and explicate these systems, if we are to sur-
vive the rugged evolutionary fitness landscape we are facing in this century. These new experimental in-
stitutions must function like rapid response teams, continually simulating, forecasting, adapting, and de-
ploying new and innovative responses to the ever changing circumstances we will be facing. These new
institutions should be highly distributed around our ecoinfosphere, massively networked, and connected
by a sense of community that spans all existing borders, be they geophysical, geoeconomic, geosocial, or
geopolitical. These new and innovative communities will act as fully functional, but scaled down, socie-
ties, which we refer to as microsocieties or ecovillages. New approaches which have been proven effec-
tive at the local level of the global network, will then be adopted by larger zones within the network, pro-
viding multi-level complexity testing, with graduated introduction into the larger global network. They
will act as massively parallel testing zones for new and innovative approaches. After rugged testing, those
approaches which are found to be the most effective, can gradually be assimilated into larger areas of the
social, economic, and global governance networks.
Now we must ask, why are microsocieties so important to the future of our civilization’s evolution at
this particular juncture? In order to answer this question we must first utilize a tool similar to, but op-
posite to the microscope. We need to zoom out with a macroscope, rather than in with a microscope, to
get some perspective on where we are in the universe as an evolving civilization, before we take up our
main topic of microsocieties in the form of ecovillages.
As our earth civilization transitions from the end of one century and millennium into another, we should
pause and try to take an overview of where we are in the process of universe evolution. In the last few
centuries of the previous millennium, we moved from being an agricultural civilization to an industrial
civilization. In the last half of the previous century, our civilization transitioned from an essentially me-
chanical technological stage, to an electronic technological stage. In the last quarter of the previous cen-
tury, biotechnology and genetic technology began to surface as major technological trends, and with the
opening of the internet to the general public in the last decade, we entered the early stages of the informa-
tion age. These transitions were all important markers on the ascending scale of planetary complexity and
universe evolution. If we place this whole process in a macroscope and zoom out even further, to get an
even larger overview, what will we see?. The general trend that we will observe is one of ever increasing
complexity.
In the last few centuries we utilized linear reductionist thinking in our approach to science, to break up all
the objects in our world into their constituent parts. To a large extent we now know what the world is
made up of. However, having all the pieces of a puzzle identified, is very different from the process of
putting the puzzle together as a integrated whole. The reductionist approach is very successful at identify-
ing the pieces of the puzzle, but it provides little in the way of a map in terms of how all the pieces fit to-
gether and work together as a whole. In the real universe, the whole puzzle is not a static piece of card-

9
board, cut up into many small pieces. The universe is a dynamic multidimensional map, in which all the
individual components are systemically interactive and continually evolving. Instead of a two dimen-
sional puzzle, we have a multidimensional dynamic network. Comprehending such a network cannot be
accomplished by the linear reductionist approach, that worked so well when our concern was identifying
the constituent pieces. This method will not serve us well going forward, in our quest to understand the
complex interaction network, which ties all of these pieces together in a much larger functioning system.
In order to fulfill this new challenge, we need a general system theory, and a general system applied sci-
ence. General system theory is the approach one must take to understand dynamical systems, complexity,
self-organization, emergence, and chaos. The linear aspect of reductionism, consciously or unconsciously
proposes that pieces of systems can be isolated from the larger system, and studied in relative isolation,
and that this will allow us to understand the full nature of the system. The general idea is that by studying
all of the components in this manner, one will eventually be able to understand the entire system. The in-
herent assumption is, that what you learn about each of the separate components behavior in isolation,
will not be altered to any significant degree, when the separate pieces are placed back in the entire system.
Linearity assumes that there will be no complex interaction above and beyond the individual behavior of
that part when it is placed within the context of the much larger system. Unfortunately the vast majority
of systems in the universe are of such a level of complexity that they are incapable of displaying this kind
of simple behavior. What we see in the vast majority of the universe, are complex dynamical systems, that
display a large degree of systemic interoperability. These systems are nonlinear, rather than linear, and a
small change at some point in such a system, can initiate or block a whole cascading series of events in
the other components or stages of the system’s dynamics. In order to understand a system, we must un-
derstand its full dynamics, and the complex feedforward and feedback circuits that determine it’s overall
behavioral dynamics.
Because so much of the general population still remains on the periphery of the tremendous paradigm
shift that is taking place in how we view nature, a few words from one of the insiders in this transforma-
tion may prove useful. Steven Strogatz [3] summarized the transition in the epilogue of his book, SYNC
The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order:
“I hope i’ve given you a sense of how thrilling it is to be a scientist right now. It feels like the dawn of a
new era. After centuries of studying nature by teasing it into smaller and smaller pieces, we’re starting to
ask how to put the pieces back together again.
Old-timers will chuckle and say they’ve heard this line before. Every decade or so, a grandiose theory
comes along, bearing similar aspirations and often brandishing an ominous-sounding C-name. In the
1960s it was cybernetics. In the ‘70s it was catastrophe theory. Then came chaos theory in the ‘80s and
complexity theory in the ‘90s. In each case, the skeptics at the time grumbled that these theories were be-
ing oversold and that the results were either wrong or obvious. Then everyone had a good laugh and went
back to the lab bench for more grinding , reductionistic science, walled off from their colleagues in ad-
joining disciplines, who where themselves grinding away on their own tiny corner of the universe.
What’s different now is a feeling in the air. Even the most hard-boiled, mainstream scientists are begin-
ning to acknowledge that reductionism may not be powerful enough to solve all the great mysteries we’re
facing: cancer, consciousness, the origin of life, the resilience of the ecosystem, AIDS, global warming,

10
the functioning of a cell, the ebb and flow of the economy. It’s a sign of the times, for example, that at
every major research university, institutes are springing up with names such as functional genomics and
integrative biology, where biologists are teaming up with computer scientists and mathematicians to try to
make sense of the dance of life at the molecular level. Sequencing the human genome gave us an enor-
mous list of parts: 30,000 individual genes and the proteins they encode. But we still have almost no clue
how the interlocking activities of those genes and proteins are choreographed in the living cell.
What makes all these unsolved problems so vexing is their decentralized, dynamic character, in which
enormous numbers of components keep changing their state from moment to moment, looping back on
one another in ways that can’t be studied by examining any one part in isolation. In such cases, the whole
is surely not equal to the sum of the parts. These phenomena, like most others in the universe, are funda-
mentally nonlinear.
That’s why nonlinear dynamics is central to the future of science.”
Now to come back to the question of where we are on the curve and timeline of universe evolution. We
believe that while the next century will continue to be a century of technology, biotechnology, and infor-
mation theory, at the most fundamental level, it will be the century of ‘complexity’ understanding and
management. Either we will begin to understand, manage, and control complexity, or it will destabilize
our civilization from within, eventually leading to catastrophic cascading failures, which will either set us
back hundreds or thousands of years.
Some people may lead you to believe that we can avoid this confrontation, by simply going back to a
simpler society, something on the order of the agricultural society we have already emerged from. We do
not believe this approach is viable. Complexity is a fundamental quality of the universe, it exists for a
purpose, and that purpose is to challenge us to understand the entire universe as a whole. It is an inevi-
table part of our evolution, and we now stand on the threshold of this great adventure into the complexity
of the universe. We dare not step back from this challenge, if we have any hope of attaining the omega
state of universe evolution. What we do have a choice about is how we manage complexity, whether we
make it work for us, or allow it to destroy us. If we wish to be cocreators of the universe, we have no
choice but to master the real complexity inherent in the universe. However, it is extremely important that
we learn to identify essential complexity, which cannot be avoided, from frivolous complexity, which can
and must be controlled and avoided. Complexity created by poor and inaccurate conceptualization, de-
sign, engineering, production, and marketing is avoidable, and we must master this science and art of
‘complexity control,’ if we wish to survive as a viable technological civilization.
Unfortunately we are already showing many symptoms of the fact that we have not yet understood the
lessons of complexity, and our management skills seem to be falling further and further behind the grow-
ing exponential curve of complexity. We would like to suggest that microsocieties can play a very impor-
tant role in the coming century in helping us to understand, control, and eventually master complexity.
Microsocieties are ‘small worlds’ where we can explore complex networks. Many aspects of complexity
cannot simply be solved analytically, they must be simulated to be understood. As we gain increased
awareness of complexity, we can test our ideas in the smaller controlled environments of microvillages.
The smaller size of microsocieties allows us to simulate at a lower level of complexity, and at a reduced

11
costs, and the potential spread of poor simulations can be contained from proliferating into the larger
social organisms. When you are dealing with high degrees of complexity, many simulations are often
need to understand the full behavior of systems. In order to do this, one needs a large degree of parallel
processing. With the existence of large numbers of microsocieities, we can attain this needed degree of
parallel processing. Viable simulations can be tested across the larger microvillage network, to test their
robustness under different environmental, economic, and social circumstances.
Problems in initiating microsocieties

Research into the kinds of obstacles groups of people may encounter when attempting to establish ecovil-
lages, needs to be considered. We have listed some of the major obstacles that may stand in the way of
such efforts.
INFLEXIBLE ZONING CODES
When purchasing land, you will have to deal with the existing zoning commissions within the state,
county, and city in which you wish to purchase land. Most counties have zoning codes which attempt to
deal with the various types of land utilization they typically encounter. In a typical county where one can
still purchase large plots of land, you will usually find the following types of zoning statutes:
• residential (subdivision allowed)
• business
• agricultural (no subdivision)
• rural (no building allowed)
• rural (with homestead - allows for a single home)
• resort (only in some counties - perhaps the most flexible)
Intentional ecovillages or microsocieties present a unique challenge to county zoning commis-

sions. Why? Because intentional microsocieties, are by description ‘microsocieties,’ and this im-
plies that they will incorporate all, or a large percentage of, the above six zoning types within one
community. Intentional microsocieties really need a new zoning status which allows for all of the
above types of zoning within a single status.
The whole intention of a microsociety is to become a self supporting, self sustaining, inclusive
whole society on a micro-scale. In order to do this, the society must incorporate residences, agri-
culture, rural land, business, and resorts within its own boundaries in addition to maintaining an
active interface with the surrounding community (city, county, and state). Since cities or counties
already see themselves as providing the existing social structure, the microsociety (ranging from

12
10 - 50,000 people organized as an intentional community) presents a challenge that most cities
or counties have not anticipated, because they see themselves as providing this function. They
have already developed zones within their developmental projections for residences, businesses,
agricultural areas, rural areas, and resorts. Large microsocieties and small cities (~10,000-50,000
people) could very well find themselves competing to perform the same function. In cases where
the city or county is the larger unit, these institutions will look at microsocieties as something
that must be incorporated into their existing developmental planning, with little or no concern for
the needs of the microsociety. So it would seem that a new type of zoning may be required which
meets the needs of both types of social organization. A new type of zoning which would be
minimally acceptable and hopefully beneficial to both parties. We therefore suggest that coun-
ties and cities adopt an additional new zoning status which we shall refer to as a microsociety
zone. A microsociety zone would consist of a zone status that would allow a balanced percentage
(to be determined locally) of the land within a microsociety to be dedicated to each of the more
traditional zone types. Hopefully this new zoning status would allow an ecovillage community to
perform all of the following societal functions:
• grow its own food crops, and provide some extra food crops for sale
• conduct light non-polluting manufacturing and industry
• operate small businesses to serve both the internal community and the surrounding community
• operate its own coop banking and investment services
• operate its own energy (electrical, gas, geothermal, wind, solar, and alternative energy), water, and sew-
age utilities, including the capacity to sell energy back into the county, state, or national grid
• provide residential housing for its community members
• provide preschool and school facilities
• operate medical, hospice, dental, and veterinary facilities in the larger communities
• operate a shared transportation facility (car, truck, small plane, and helicopter facility) and transporta-
tion infrastructure (roads) where necessary or appropriate
• operate its own ground based and satellite based telecommunication and broadcast facilities, and pro-
vide its own internet POP node
Cities, counties, and states need to realize that positively oriented intentional ecological communities are
the trend of the future, and those states, counties, and cities that preemptively position themselves to
accommodate this paradigm shift in society will be in the best position to attract future investment

13
aimed at high quality sustainable living. As the ‘baby boomer’ generation nears retirement age, enormous
sums of money can potentially flow into such efforts, if the proper adjustments are made at the state,
county, and city levels of government. Enlightened states and counties will in no way see this as some sort
of sacrifice, for it should reduce the demands on the existing governmental structures and provide for a
new, highly entrepreneurial, bottom-up approach to governance, long overdue in a world plagued by bu-
reaucratic red tape and opposing party gridlock. Governments should welcome the assistance of innovate
communities with highly motivated responsible people willing to accept responsibility for their own in-
frastructure needs.
On the other hand, those states, counties, and cities that choose not to accommodate and facilitate inten-
tional ecological microsocieties, can continue to look forward to multinational corporate exploitation of
human resources, ecological resources, and infrastructure - as these corporations continue to force com-
munities to competitively bid against each other for their factories and facilities, forcing the cities to offer
tax payer funded incentives and reduced taxation if they want to be considered in the bidding process.
Additional problems may arise when the community submits its land proposal to the county. Develop-
mental projects like these often require city council public hearings, zoning commission hearings, and the
sharing of the proposal with the neighbors of the adjoining properties. The city council members, the zon-
ing commission members, and the surrounding property owners will, in most instances, be unfamiliar
with the concept of intentional ecological communities. A good deal of effective education and advocacy
may be required to convince these parties that such a community is a desirable alternative to the usual
zoning accommodations. It will be important that these communities present their projects in a very pro-
fessional and effective manner, if they wish to win over the sitting councilmen, commissioners, and prop-
erty owners. If and when their projects are approved, it will be very important to maintain good commu-
nications with these parties as the project develops. Efforts to welcome and incorporate the communities
input, may go a long way towards reducing any potential resistance. Once the project is approved, if any
needed deviations from the original proposal arise, it is important that these changes are reported and
dealt with through the proper channels. The community must be sure to comply with all codes and com-
plete all inspections in a timely and efficient manner, assuring the development of a good working rela-
tionship with the respective government institutions involved.
AN ATYPICAL PROFILE FOR BANK LOANS
Whenever possible groups who wish to start ecovillage projects should attempt to purchase land out-
right, and avoid beginning their projects by going into debt. In cases where this is not possible, bank
loans will be required, and the typical bank will not be familiar with the incentives, intentions, and goals
of an intentional ecological community. The banks may be somewhat more skeptical about making loans
for projects with which they are not familiar. This will probably require the potential owners to provide
considerable extra documentation, and to essentially educate and convince bankers that such projects are
very viable economic entities. Whenever possible, groups should seek out banks that may have already
had some experience with such projects, but in most cases this is unlikely, because ecovillages and micro-
societies are a new paradigm which has not yet been incorporated into the existing economic structure.
Banks must be educated and convinced that progressive sustainable ecological living is profitable, be-

14
cause natural resource exhausted societies are failing societies, which inevitably turn into long-term credit
risks. Long-term land conservatories can be both profitable and sustainable, and in many cases may actu-
ally improve renewable ecological resource utilization while improving the overall ecological environ-
ment, both locally and globally.
Intentional communities which do not have individuals within their founding members who have these
skills should seriously consider hiring professional representation to make sure these critical interfaces
are handled in an appropriate manner. These critical interfaces could very well be the ‘make or break’
steps in your attempts to establish your envisioned community. It is critical that you keep in mind that you
are competing with professional real estate development corporations that have enormous legal and
promotional departments. In many cases, county and city commissioners will be used to dealing with
these professional corporations, and any lack of professionalism on your part will most likely not be well
received.
The current status of existing microsocieties

If you go on the internet and do a search for communal living, ecovillages, and intentional communities,
and then proceed to do a survey of the hundreds of web sites you will find, you will come away with the
general impression that microsocieties are struggling in their development. The existing communities are
developed around many different themes:
• non-profit housing
• co-housing
• ecological life style
• farming (organic farming)
• increased community involvement
• back to nature
• small business
• traditional religion
• spiritual doctrine
• guru centered spiritual doctrine
• land preservation or trust
• resort
• health spa
• various kinds of cults

15
Since many of these microsocieties are not ‘for profit only motivated’ like the vast majority of land de-
velopment projects, funding is a real problem. Many of these communities are experimenting with how
ownership is handled, so some of the typical ingredients of typical home and land ownership like mort-
gages and individual property titles, are often not available. Incorporation is a flexible option, but there
are so many options with regard to how to set up the corporation, that this can often being challenging.
By no means should what we are about to discuss, be seen as an insensitive criticism of the existing
communities, that are working in a very dedicated fashion and under difficult circumstances to provide
new experiments in community. However, we do think their is value in looking at the mix of ingredients
that are involved in the particular approaches that are currently under development, in an effort to try to
understand why these approaches are struggling and experiencing funding, development, and expansion
problems. Some of the conspicuous points we noticed in our survey are:
• a conspicuous lack of the presence and utilization of many of the most cutting edge technologies
• unsophisticated internet networking capabilities
• unsophisticated multimedia capabilities
• a lack of universal broadband connections
• little or no e-commerce or B2B (business-to-business) capability
• a lack of even simple web sites (this is improving)
Since many aspects of the latest technologies can be eco-friendly (software development, e-commerce, e-
services) compared to many other forms of industry, why are such forms of commerce being shunned by
microsocieties? Furthermore with a good broadband connection, many of these types of businesses can be
conducted from relatively remote locations in the country with very minimal impact on the local envi-
ronment. One can easily come away with the impression that almost all technology is being shunned, not
just eco-unfriendly, polluting, and destructive technologies. Why is this so? Perhaps some people believe
that the best way to insure our future, is to once again return to our past. We take exception to this ap-
proach, because we do not think this is a viable approach. In order to ensure our future survival, we must
of necessity go forward. We certainly do agree that much of our current technological rollout has been
accomplished in a careless manner, which has been destructive to our environment, but this does not
mean that technology is inherently bad. Many of our new technological innovations are contributing to
cleaning up the previous destruction of the industrial age. Going forward, new technologies like genetic
engineering and nanotechnology. offer great promise to preserve and improve our existing ecology, if we
have the presence of mind and the patience to initiate them and mature them correctly. We believe that
when people ban together and make the choice to set up new and innovative microsocieties, their primary
objectives should be to:
• Renew their sense of intimacy with their local ecology and the preciousness of the earth’s biosphere,
leading them to living in a manner that ensures long-term sustainable living on our planet

16
• Reevaluate the manner in which they deal with what we refer to as economics - ownership of resources,
profit motive, management and distribution of renewable and non-renewable resources
• reevaluate methods of governance
• reevaluate methods of education
• We should leave behind poor industrial practices that are earth damaging and polluting, while incorpo-
rating new and improved earth preserving industry and technology.
• We should use our microsocieties as experimental zones to invent, develop, utilize, and distribute new
technologies which are beneficial to both human survival and our growth in the earth’s biosphere.
• Establish highly networked relationships with other microsocieties to take full advantage of the dy-
namical systems principle that the ‘whole is greater than the sum of the parts.’ True community is a
state of mind, it knows no physical boundaries. Microsocieties should not be set up with hard bounda-
ries to isolate people from the larger society, and any form of boundary should operate like a semi-
permeable cell membrane.
The semi-permeable membrane, which has worked so well in the evolution of cell biology, is an excellent
concept to utilize in microsocieties or ecovillages which are experimental societies. In the early days of
biology, cells were highly experimental molecular societies. Semi-permeable cell membranes allowed
cells to continually experiment and innovate with new materials/information that they could selectively
import and export through their cell membranes. Some materials would be accepted, evaluated, and re-
tained, other materials would be modified and adapted to the particular needs of the cell, and yet others
would be rejected because of their harmful or polluting effects on the cell interior. Constant experimenta-
tion, modification, refinement, and the sharing of manufactured materials and bioinformatics between
cells, has given us our current biosphere. Microsocieties should be hard pressed to find a better paradigm
to model their own experimental societies around.
To begin a microsociety with a backward looking perspective like the naive slogan ‘going back to the
land,’ is like taking a new journey by viewing it in the rear view mirror. By all means, our recent abuse of
our precious ecology must be addressed by a renewed respect and reverence for our natural resources, but
this does not imply that we must view negatively all of our technological efforts as cocreators in this uni-
verse. We must learn to use biology as our model for future technologies, and we must strive for 100%
non-destructive manufacturing and recycling. There is already the beginning of a trend within technology
which recognizes this necessity, and it is referred to as biomimicry. Biomimicry is the product of the
growing recognition by technologists, that biology has already accomplished much of what we wish to
accomplish in our future technology [4]. Biology is already computing and manufacturing at the small
molecular level, a task we are still striving to achieve.
We should not fear the process of cybernetics. The best argument we can present for this conclusion, is to
take a look at our own biological organisms. Much of the daily burden of keeping our bodies running and
finely tuned is handled by the autonomic nervous system. This marvelous autonomic nervous system
takes care of almost all the basic necessities of existence, and frees us up both physically and mentally to
think, analyze, modify, and generally manipulate our environment as cocreators of the universe. If it were

17
not for this autonomic nervous system, the vast majority of our time would be taken up adjusting our
blood pressure, directing every muscular activity, distributing nourishment and fluids, etc. Without the
advantage of this autonomic nervous system, we would be much less productive human beings. We be-
lieve that future societies will to a large extent function like our autonomic nervous system, and much of
the burden and labor that currently makes up the activity of our society, will be accomplished by cyber-
netic devices which operate in an autonomous, self-regulating, self-maintaining, and to a large extent self-
evolving fashion. Larger and larger portions of what we now refer to as human labor or work, will be
shifted into the autonomic nervous system of our future societies [5]. We feel this is not only inevitable,
but desirable, because it will free up human beings to do what they do best, think, learn, innovate, and
explore. Can this potentially labor-non-intensive society be abused? Of course it can. The potential is al-
ways there to turn our society into a shallow pleasure and leisure worshiping society, but if one just looks
at the innate curiosity of a child, we should have confidence that human curiosity will win in the end.
Cybersocieties, if implemented properly, with 100% biomimicry nanotechnology and very cautious bioen-
gineering, which features nondestructive and eco-friendly manufacturing and 100% recycling, offer us
enormous new opportunities which we are going to need in our ascension progression in this universe.
Evolution is a helical process, as opposed to a circular process, and if we want to be a part of the ascen-
sion of consciousness in this universe, our multivectors must of necessity be future oriented. As for the
simple ‘back to the land’ approach, we have been there, and done that, and we should not go back to what
would now be a retrograde evolution, in the form of a simple agricultural society. A temporary renewal of
our intimate relationship with our ecosystem is extremely valuable at this stage in our evolution. We must
relearn respect for our environment, and re-dedicate ourselves to preserving and improving it, but we
must not remain in this retrograde mode. We must go forward, with both a renewed respect for the envi-
ronment, and a focus on new non-polluting, non-destructive, and highly valuable technologies we are ca-
pable of introducing into our society.
A beginning point
Deep down inside of us, in the very core of our being, we know that we want more from life than the con-
tinual Darwinian struggle in our jobs, in our society, in our government institutions, in our economic sys-
tems, and in our global civilization. The law of the jungle has provided us with the biological precursors,
our biological organisms, necessary for the potential enactment of civilization. It has provides us with
marvelously adept bodies, and with a cognitive capacity that allows us to act intelligently and with rela-
tive free will. Now that we have these new capabilities, it would be a shame if we did not utilize them to
ascend beyond the processes that created them. The competitive Darwinian struggle for the ‘survival of
the fittest’ may be unavoidable in the early stages of biological evolution, but from a teleological perspec-
tive we must have the vision to see beyond these early stages of evolution. Biology as we currently under-
stand it, from our own limited universal perspective, is closer to the beginning alpha stage of universe
evolution than to the end omega stage of evolution. Once the biological prerequisites are in place, evolu-
tion continues it’s self-organizing emergence to new levels of society, culture, and civilization. In these
ascending levels of evolution, memes (units of cultural transmission) now serve as the new means of evo-
lutionary transmission. As a result of this process, a new awareness percolates up from within the mind of

18
intelligent life forms. As we look out deeper into the universe we instinctively sense that all this prepara-
tion seems to be indicating an experiment or a simulation of such enormous scale that more than simple
survival is inherent within the unfolding drama of the universe!
If we have the courage and the vision to accept the challenges of this universe, the potential is there for us
to do more than survive. We know we can do better, and it should not be necessary for us to get ahead in
life at the expense of our fellow man. Although competitive and exploitative strategies can provide short
term benefits to a small percentage of the population, at the expense of the remaining larger percentage, in
the medium and long term these practices are most often destructive to the individuals, groups, and the
environment we inhabit. Competitive and exploitative strategies, are short term win/lose strategies. They
generally produce very high consumption rates of both renewable and non-renewable resources, jeopard-
izing the long term sustainability of the ecosystem. If a planetary system is always divided into winners
and losers, there are always going to be lagging cores of poor intelligence and economic depravation,
resulting in failed societies which continue to provide a continual entropy drag within an otherwise ne-
gentropic evolutionary process.
Are there alternatives to the Darwinian scenario? Yes, of course, there are always alternatives, and our
purpose here is to explore these alternatives.
If one thinks of the universe as a vast educational experience, requiring graduated optimization in infor-
mation processing by the life forms that inhabit it, we can then ask what the next emergent level of evolu-
tion may be beyond Darwinian competition. We would like to hypothesize that the following progression
may be useful in attempting to understand the opportunities that lie ahead of us, in the next stages of uni-
verse evolution:
• Competitive phase - Darwinian evolution provides the basic biological organism capable of mobility,
action and reaction to the environment, comprehension, and creativity.
• Systemic phase - Intelligent life forms eventually come to an understanding of the systemic nature of
the universe, and they eventually develop a general system theory to properly model their ecosystem,
civilization, and universe.
• Symbiotic phase - The proper understanding and application of systemic principles leads to a new level
of cooperative convergence referred to as symbiosis.
• Long-term sustainable living phase - Once systemic principles and symbiotic principles become fully
integrated and applied within the civilization, the civilization ascends from a level 0 civilization to a
level 1 civilization. Level 0 civilizations are only potential civilizations, they have not yet harnessed the
entire resources of their planet in a long term sustainable fashion. Level 1 civilizations have harnessed
all of the resources available within their planetary ecowombs, and have learned to manage them in
fashion that ensures their long-term survival.
• Biorapture phase - Once a civilization has mastered the science and art of systemic and symbiotic liv-
ing, thereby assuring that every individual will have the opportunity to live up to their full genetic, in-
tellectual, and cultural potential, it can move on to an even higher level of evolution in the form of bio-

19
rapture. Biorapture is a state of finite biological perfection of living. Life is no longer a struggle, it has
finally reached the it’s relative planetary teleological objective. Brotherhood, love, joy, exquisite art,
advanced scientific understanding, and the excitement of being a cocreater in the universe become the
norm.
• Ascension phase - The systemic universe involves so much stored and distributed intelligence, that it is
impossible for a single level of existence to provide for all the learning experiences that will be neces-
sary for universe design level intelligence to lift it’s evolving intelligent life forms asymptotically to-
ward a level approaching design level intelligence. Ascension is the process by which we prepare and
move on to these higher levels of experience and learning in the larger universe beyond our beginning
planetary eco-wombs.
We must ask ourselves if it possible to accomplish the progression we have just explicated? We believe
that it is not only possible, but mandatory for all civilizations which wish to attain a position of permanent
residence in the universe. Of course free will allows inhabitants of planetary ecosystems to choose an-
other path, one that inevitably leads to becoming a part of the extinct fossil records. We have a choice
between the undistinguished misery of continual struggle and exploitation (a life style limited to look-
ing in the rear view mirror of primitive nature), or a distinguished life style fully focused on a glorious
future. As evolving open systems, life does not allow us the choice of no choice, nor will the universe
automatically make the choice for us. Do we just want to be a momentary footnote in the future galactic
archives of a species that had their brief ‘Disneyland’ moment in time, only to disappear from the arena,
or do we want to be a part of the vast wave of rising civilizations sweeping across the galaxy, that have
accepted the challenge, embraced the work, and are looking forward to the unimaginable opportunities
that await us in our assured future.
General systems - systemics

When we enter the universe it is already a systemic system that has experienced considerable evolution,
as is evidenced by the extensive hierarchical levels we witness in our planetary exploration, telescopes,
microscopes, and research satellites. The universe is a vast system, and if we are going to be successful in
understanding it, we must learn more about the nature of systems in general.
General System Theory is the growing knowledge base of the general understanding of systems. Applied
systemics is the application of the science and art of systems. The attempt to understand the structural
relationships and dynamics of systems, is a considerable challenge, and enormous potential rewards are
afforded those who succeed in overcoming this challenge. The universe we witness all around us is evi-
dence of the systemic challenge that lies before us.
If you live within a system (society, planetary ecosystem, solar system, galaxy, or universe) and you do
not understand it’s systemic nature, what are your chances of surviving and flourishing within it? The en-
vironment we are born into pre-exists us both individually and collectively. This environment is not going
to change to accommodate our lack of interest, or our lack of understanding of it’s functional dynamics.
This system can only parent and nurture you if you make the effort to become correlated and synergis-

20
tically resonant with it’s operating dynamics in a convergent manner. Both as individuals and as a soci-
ety we must make this effort. We can either work in a dissident manner against the systemic laws, or we
can learn to work in harmony with the system. If we choose the constructive path of systemic learning, we
eventually begin to see that we can generalize our knowledge from systems we already understand to sys-
tems we are not as familiar with. Eventually we learn to approach all aspects of the challenge of life from
this perspective. In a very real sense, life is the process of systemic living, where systems learn to con-
structively interface with other subsystems and macro-systems in such a manner that one achieves the
maximum of efficiency, optimization, pleasure, and evolution. When we work with systems, as opposed
to against them, systems are able to yield up their maximum potential to us. These systems have been put
in place to accomplish this very objective. Although we may not yet have sufficient information to prove
that all systems are teleological, it seems worthwhile to assume that they are until proven otherwise.
Many scientists today are uncomfortable with teleological objectives, and prefer to see our universe as an
extremely rare zone of negentropy in a much larger chaotic phase space in which randomness and sto-
chastic processes dominate. System theory leads us up another path that reveals self-organizing principles
of emergence, and that may reveal the existence of a teleological attractor within our universe.
If we look backwards through the previous history of the universe, we see a story of order building upon
previous order, in which the new levels of systemic dynamics are always greater than the sum of their
parts. We see a universe ‘bootstrapping’ itself into ever higher levels of emergent organization. The very
fact that we are having this discussion, is at least partial evidence of teleological progression and teleo-
logical success. We, as life forms produced within this universe, are able not only to question our purpose
in this universe, but also to create our own purpose in an emergent fashion. We are able to reconstruct the
advance of nature, to reverse engineer the universes progress, and to become not just spectators, but
cocreators. It would seem that no truly random process would provide for such a glorious inevitability.
As we move from the status of novice to apprentice in systemic understanding, we begin to see numerous
improvements in our quality of life. Life becomes more harmonious, productive, civilized, and joyful. We
begin to feel that we are no longer bucking a strong head wind, ant that we suddenly have the wind at our
backs, and that we are beginning to see all the advantages of systemic and symbiotic living springing up
all around us. Better food crops, more meaningful and humane working conditions, functional and effi-
cient government and economic institutions, and elevated culture lifting our lives to ever higher levels of
evolution. The superiority of systemic and symbiotic win/win strategies over Darwinian win/lose strate-
gies becomes ever more overwhelmingly convincing. Only one question remains. Why did we wait so
long to adopt this approach when so much suffering, strife, economic deprivation, and a general lack of
intelligent evolution could have been avoided even earlier in our evolution? If long term sustainable liv-
ing is assured for our civilization, our civilization can set its sights on more elevated pursuits. The civili-
zation can move on to the final pre-ascension phase of biorapture. Biorapture is the ultimate goal of
evolving planetary life, prior to ascension to a level of experience which is post-planetary. Biorapture is
the final refinement of planetary biological experimentation. It encompasses refined biology, universal
economic fulfillment, relative planetary perfection of society and culture, and the ultimate experience for
the individual life form in the attainment of enraptured organic living. Every minute, every hour, every
day, and every year is an exhilarating experience. Every individual is allowed to fulfill their full genetic,

21
cultural, and intellectual potential, and to make the ultimate contribution to their civilization. This is a
form of fulfillment hard for us to imagine in our current level 0 civilization. Life is no longer a burden-
some struggle, we are now able to see it for what it was always intended to be, a glorious gift of bound-
less learning, mastery, joy, and eventually universe cocreation.
Many of you may remain skeptical about this proposed pathway of evolution. We know that we shall only
have the final answers to our questions about evolution in the fullness of time. The process of universe
evolution, by its very nature, is inevitably a long and graduated process. The information differential be-
tween design level intelligence, and the evolving intelligent life forms that design level intelligence
evolves, is so enormous, that it can only be bridged by an ever ascending series of hierarchical levels of
learning. These planetary wombs, where life arises, are not the ultimate omega products of evolution, they
are very much closer to the alpha stage of preschools. It seems foolish to think that a single level of expe-
rience could ever hope to bridge such an vast difference in intelligence. Since our purpose here is to limit
our discussion to planetary ecovillages, we shall not go more deeply into these higher levels of experi-
ence. Entering into a discussion of the much vaster topics of the ultimate process and purpose of universe
evolution, from the combined perspectives of science, cognition, information theory, philosophy, and
spirituality would be a great adventure, but it would cause us to wander to far from our core topic.
Symbiotics
General system theory attempts to answer the question of how the universe is dynamically constructed
and computationally evolved (causes), and symbiotics deals more with the applied results of such under-
standing (effects). Nature at many hierarchical levels reveals not only competition, but also symbiotic
convergence. Unfortunately our current biological textbooks emphasize the competitive aspect of nature,
the survival of the fittest. Symbiotic study is an effort to rebalance this perspective, to provide examples
of emergent convergence towards some overall teleological objective. This objective is not necessarily
eventuated by pre-design alone, but more correctly, by emergent self organization by the evolving life
forms towards some overall universal attractor. In the much larger phase space in which a particular uni-
verse evolves, choice and free will play a role in the chosen pathways of approach to the final universal
attractor. Instead of a totally predetermined universe, we seem to be living in a universe, that not only
offers, but requires us to participate in the process of graduated cocreation towards a teleological ob-
jective that we are allowed to, at least partially, determine. Symbiotics is the realization of the reality that
we are all working towards a common objective, and that we are all interdependent in the process of
reaching this objective. When we properly apply systemic understanding in our lives, we move towards
this teleological objective in a manner that involves the principle of least action, or greatest efficiency.
The side effect of this choice, at the level of society, is to provide a life that involves a minimum of strug-
gle and suffering. When we work against natural systemic laws, we suffer the consequences of throwing
these systems out of balance. When we work cooperatively with natural laws, we flourish and advance in
evolution at the greatest possible pace. Evolution inherently involves effort, but it’s purpose is not to in-
flict suffering. Suffering is a feedback mechanism which alerts us to the fact that our understanding of the
workings of the universal causal network is insufficient and in error. Suffering is the result of going
against, rather than with, universal law. The only purpose of suffering is to inform us about our errors, so

22
that we can correct them, and return to a path that still involves the inevitable effort involved in evolution,
but without the suffering which results from gross neglect of natural systemic laws. When we contaminate
or otherwise imbalance our ecosystem, these mistakes come back to us as feedback, in the form of loss of
food supply, disease, social strife, unpredictable instability, economic deprivation, and social and psycho-
logical degradation. On the other hand, the successful practice and application of systemic knowledge
reduces these effects to the minimum. A minimum of suffering is always involved in any evolving experi-
ence, where one is always dealing with a finite and graduated process of perfection.
Symbiotic organization is the result of the realization that self-organizing systems emerge order out of
chaos through a process of order building upon previous order. This is accomplished in such a manner,
that at each new level of organization, the sum total of the degrees of freedom open to the higher level
system, always exceed the degrees of freedom available to the lower level system. This is why reduction-
ist thinking and approaches to science, although beneficial within their properly understood limits, can
never provide an overall unified theory of the universe. Systems at all hierarchical levels above the most
fundamental level, inevitably exhibit this ‘greater than the sum of it’s parts’ dynamical behavior, and al-
though these behaviors can not always be predicted in advance of their actual emergence, they seem to
show an inevitable convergence toward a common teleological attractor.
Sustainable living
Life without a sustainable focus is little more than a temporary flash in the pan, here and gone, with per-
haps a brief moment of purpose. As we have already stated, the process of universe evolution must of ne-
cessity be a long and graduated process of evolution, in which evolving intelligent life forms are only able
to approach the levels of universe design level intelligence asymptotically.
This makes sustainable long-term living an absolute necessity if one wants to attain the omega state of
evolution at the end of the process of universal evolution. Furthermore, the unparalleled challenge of
reaching the omega state of evolution can only be accomplished through the proper understanding of sys-
tems, and the proper application of this knowledge through symbiotic convergence. There is simply no
other way of approach. Linear reductionist approaches to evolution, which do not recognize the integrity
of the whole system, may get a civilization to some level of short term accomplishment before the natural
resources of the system as a whole have been squandered, depleted, damaged, and evolution is prema-
turely terminated. Only systemics and symbiotics build the foundation upon which a long-term sustain-
able civilization can be evolved. Civilization is built progressively like a pyramid, stone by stone from the
base up. It takes many pieces, each set in their proper relationship to every other piece, to build the as-
cending vertical cascade to the heavens.
Biorapture
Biorapture is the planetary capstone of the pyramid, the final focal point supported by all the structure
leading up to and supporting the focal point. Biorapture is the final convergence of billions of years of
self-organizing biology, finally focused on the planetary biology teleological objective. The entire process
operates much like a lens which collects all of the individual rays of light into a common focal point

23
where the distributed information can finally be integrated into a convergent epiphany. Now that we have
said this, we must be careful not to confuse an epiphany with the omega stage of universe evolution.
There will be epiphanies beyond our current imagination awaiting us upstream, but biorapture is defi-
nitely the culmination of the beginning planetary womb experience. Biorapture is the experience of the
relative ecstasy of highly refined organic planetary life, and the product of a process which began so long
ago in the struggle for survival in the oceans, the plains, and the jungles of our planetary ecosystem. It is
hard to believe, but we can now trace the origin of this process back to an even earlier era in the from of
our stardust origins in the stellar nurseries of the galaxies, which provided the basic chemical building
blocks for biology.
Lives in the future will be extended to hundreds of years, and the educations of such individuals may be
equivalent to a hundred or more doctorates. Individuals will have the time to become accomplished in
almost every aspect of the arts. Individuals will have the time to explore tens, if not hundreds, of profes-
sional carriers. One would have the ability to not just visit, but to live and explore every continent and
ecological zone on the planet. In the space colonization age, this would be extended to the ability to visit
every orbiting architectural space colony. Information access would be universal and instantaneous, so
that the one’s intellectual advancement would only by limited by one’s own intellectual efforts and the
sum total of all intellectual pursuits of the entire civilization.
Having experienced the fullness of the omega stage of planetary biological evolution, our spirits will be-
come restless again. The larger structures and levels of the universe will beckon us onward. We must and
will renew our sense of quest, the womb that served us so well will eventually seem overly confining. We
will break out with laser like focus, into the higher levels of universe experience.
Ascension
If biorapture is the focal point of planetary biology, then what exists beyond the focal point? This is the
true meaning and mystery of the pyramid formation. No system exists in isolation, because the universe
exhibits self-similar, fractal properties, revealing that all systems are supported below by previous levels
of organization, and above by continuing levels of organization. The next higher levels seems only virtual
to us now, but in the fullness of time we shall know them intimately. Why is this so? Because of the intel-
ligence differential between universe design intelligence and intelligent evolving life forms, the universe
must necessarily consist of an ascending series of levels of further revelation which can only be accessed
once the previous levels have been mastered. If this were not so, the evolving life forms would be over-
whelmed with the task of making sense of such an enormous experiment.
Just as our current schools have many levels of learning that we progressively pass though, we can be
quite sure that the universe has many levels of experience beyond the planetary biological experience.
Vast experiential levels are awaiting us at the proper time, and in the proper sequence. The general pro-
gression is pre-established, but how fast we achieve these levels may be to some extent within our own
control. With each new level of experience, the degrees of freedom available to us will increase in propor-
tion to our increasing intelligence, and our growing awareness of our responsibility in the cocreation of
the universe. More and more we shall become not just spectators and students, we shall be afforded the

24
gift of cocreation of the universe. With our increasing knowledge and power, we shall impregnate the
universal hyper-hologram with the essence of our experience and our being. When we finally reach the
true omega point of universe evolution, we will know with certainty that this is our universe.
Certainly universes could be created without intelligent evolving life forms, but think of what would be
lost. Design level intelligence would lose the most magnificent feedback mechanism ever devised. Our
awareness informs design intelligence of the value and nature of it’s design, in the process of evaluating
it’s creation. Furthermore without intelligent evolving life forms, the self-similar nature of the universe
would be terminated, and the multiverse would become a finite process. If you have been following the
trend of our thoughts here, you must be aware that we are leading up to a very profound hypothesis. If
universe design level intelligence has provided for us, then it seems quite conceivable the multiverse is
self-similar. This would seem to imply that we, some day in the far distant future, shall also become uni-
verse designers. What better training can you think of in preparation for universe design, that to grow
up in, and to experience every aspect and every level of universe evolution. We are as important to de-
sign level intelligence as it is to us, for once again the principles of systemic and symbiotic convergence
reveal themselves, even at these levels of existence that are almost inconceivable to us now.
The motivation for ecovillage implementation

We hope our brief introduction has convinced you of the need to establish SSPEN on our home planet. It
is unfortunate that we as the citizens of this planet cannot rely on our governments and multinational cor-
porations to initiate and support such efforts. Unfortunately our current governments and multinational
corporations have no long-term teleological objectives other than preserving their own wealth, and
power, and extending their authority over the planet and the people who inhabit it. They managed to get
this power because the inhabitants of this planet surrendered it to them. The intent was genuine, we
believed they would serve the people of this planet as stewards, guardians, and caretakers of our trust.
Unfortunately this has not been the case. Our trust has been abused! The governments no longer represent
the general population, and the democracies and republics no longer function in the manner of their origi-
nal intent. Elections have become very expensive, and this has allowed the power structure of multina-
tional corporations to present us with pre-selected candidates, who have already been compromised by
their indebtedness - in the form of campaign financing from these very same sources. The endless revolv-
ing door of government officials that continually rotate in and out of government and the corporate pri-
vate sector, ensures a loyalty not to the general public at larger, but rather to the corporate institutions
that support and fund these individuals in and out of office. Their loyalties have already been purchased
and assured, and the average citizen is left out in the cold, with no real representation, even after cast-
ing their vote. The intended power of the vote in democracies and republics has been neutered by the cor-
porate preselection of candidates in the major political parties, and new parties face enormous obstacles in
competing with the enormous funding available to the existing corporate sponsored parties. As individu-
als, we can no longer compete with the vast wealth of the multinational corporations in the governance
arena.

25
Before we proceed any further, let us state unequivocally that we are not promoting an anti-government,
anti-industry, anti-technology, or anti-progress approach to planetary existence. By no means are we sug-
gesting that we go back to a more primitive way of life. We believe that progress, industry, technology are
essential ingredients in the ascension of life.
What powers do we have left to us in our arsenal for defending our sovereignty as the rightful controllers
of this planet? We are faced with the question of how can we regain control of the planet, our lives on this
planet, and our future destiny.
We must find a new form of democracy that is once again organically integrated with the earth itself. We
must acquire land where ever possible, and set up ecovillage communities on every continent and ocean.
We must then link these communities together through internet networking and cyberspace so as to create
a critical mass that has the power to regain control of this planet. Once these communities are linked they
must carefully converge upon some shared teleological objectives.
The citizens of these communities must vote all over the world as a common block, to obtain these ob-
jectives. They must vote not only in political elections, but with their pocket books every day, and with
every purchase. One thing that amoral corporations understand is profits! If you threaten to remove
their profits you get their attention very quickly! When their objectives differ from those of a long-term
sustainable civilization, collectively the SSPEN can remove it’s support of their products and services.
Ecovillage citizens must also run for political offices, first at the local levels, and eventually working their
way up into higher levels of county, state, federal, and international governing bodies. They must accom-
plish this without compromising themselves with campaign contributions from large corporations. The
following process is a brief sketch of how we think this process can proceed, reach critical mass, and
change the course of our civilization:
• As individuals we must band together in groups and purchase land on every continent of the world. We
should attempt to purchase land with the greatest available resources.
• Next we must assess the resources on these plots of land.
• We then proceed to build organic, long-term sustainable living communities on these plots of land.
• We establish networks linking our efforts with those of similar communities all over the world, through
the internet. We must attempt to establish common objectives and goals.
• We must run candidates for office who accept no funding from multinational corporations, or lobbyists.
We provide our own lobbyists in the short term, before obtaining the critical mass to promote our col-
lective interests.
• We link our political representation, voting power, and our economic purchasing power together in
highly distributed but cohesive networks.
• Each community should have a non-resident aspect to its model, which encourages people and groups
from outside the community to visit the community and evaluate it as an alternative life style. Those
individuals who show a sustained interest, can either be invited into the community where continued

26
expansion is possible, or they can be encouraged and educated on how to set up new and expanding
communities with others of a like mind.
• By providing actual ongoing examples that such a process can not only succeed, but flourish, we entice
other to join the cause.
• Hopefully, at some point the combined efforts of the networking communities all over the world
reaches a critical mass, where we can use economic and political pressure to regain control of the planet
and assure the survival of ourselves and the planetary ecosystem that sustains us.
There is certainly no single stage in this process that is totally impractical. Granted, it will require vision,
creativity, and a great deal of perseverance.
Much of what the average citizen of the earth is currently enduring also requires great perseverance, but
it may not require much in the way of their own vision and creativity, more likely it is the ‘so called vi-
sion’ and the ‘so called creativity’ of others in the form of corporations that they are required to adhere to
and advance. The creation of yet another cloned unattractive shopping mall, suggests a good example of
such an empty creative experience.
The real question is what alternative is there? Corporations are loyal only to themselves, their power,
and their profits. They will yank a factory with the snap of a finger, and move it to any part of the world
that will allow them to increase their profits. They will force local communities to bid for new projects by
surrendering land, granting them tax incentives, and agreeing to pay for all the extended infrastructure
needed to interface with their new facilities with the existing public infrastructure. Every executive officer
has a ‘golden parachute’ contract where even if they perform poorly, stock holders will have to buy them
out with additional rewards to get them to terminate their contracts. America is the worst offender in this
category. The average compensation for a CEO in the rest of the world is about 20 times the average earn-
ings of the companies employees. In America the CEO compensations are on the order of 500 times the
compensation of the average employee, and their contracts are structured in such a manner that they re-
ceive these absurd salaries even if they run the company into bankruptcy. CEO’s are able to achieve these
salaries by stacking their boards with members of the ‘old boy network’ of fellow CEO’s who look out
for each other rather than their share holders. The recent ‘corporate scandal events’ in the U.S., involv-
ing large multinational corporations, are just the tip of the iceberg - revealing a systemic amorality
within the multinational corporate community. The accounting and corporate white collar crime wave was
soon followed by the mutual fund scandal. Corporations exist to move money to the highest levels of
management, and they care very little for their employees, their pension funds, their shareholders, or
the citizens of the countries and the world in which they exist. These institutions are driven by atheistic
Darwinian short term profit motives, and are essentially amoral, if not criminal, in their efforts to obtain
their objectives. Do you think these people are there to serve your interests? And when and if bankruptcy
occurs, they grant themselves huge bonuses prior to filling for bankruptcy. While we are told by our cor-
porate owned news media that street level crime is out of control, it is really corporate white collar crime
that is out of control, and we have allowed it to become perfectly legal. Corporate white collar crime
dwarfs the money made by drug traffickers and the Mafia by so many orders of magnitude that it is

27
ridiculous, yet we continue to allow it to happen as if it were somehow the natural order of things. We
have simply moved the law of the jungle into the financial realm. To allow this to continue is a sure path
to our own extinction.
We must choose to take back the planet, into the hands of all the people not by armed revolution, not by
terrorism, not by anger, but by being smart, and leveraging and expanding the power we do have, and
expanding the vision of self empowerment around the world through the power of information and net-
working. If we have the vision we already have the power, we have the media to spread the vision via the
internet. It is time to stop the further empowerment of multinational corporations, and to increase the
empowerment of multinational people. We do not wish to destroy multinational corporation, we wish to
bend their purpose to a higher purpose, and to get them to see that unless they adopt this higher approach
there will be not future for any of us. Our purpose is not to destroy, but to transform and assimilate, once
again, that which we gave away or allowed to slip away.
We gave away our power to these corporate entities, and we can take it back. The time to act is long
overdo. It is time to remind these corporations where their power originally came from. They must be re-
minded that they have been granted this power by the people, to serve the people’s interests, and not their
own. If they resist this reverse transformation back to it’s original intent, we must collectively withdraw
the purchase of their products and services. In the end, they have no power other than the power we
have granted them on a daily basis. If we sell their stock, and stop purchasing their products and serv-
ices - they vaporize. They and we must be reminded who holds the true rains of power. The same applies
to governments, if every citizens of every nation withheld their taxes the government employees would
soon join the homeless. It is time that they were reminded of this reality that we seem to have forgotten.
All that is required is that we all remember and act on this awareness as a cohesive and convergent net-
work which shares a common teleological objective. They preserve their power by dividing and separat-
ing, by a process of atomization, where each individual or family unit feels alone in the world strug-
gling for survival. This corporation fired me, will some other corporation please give me a job. This
works very effectively as long as we allow ourselves to be divided. The current state of the world is testi-
mony to this fact.
Corporations network all the time to promote and sustain their objectives, we as people must now do the
same. Even with their large numbers of employees, they have no chance to stand against an entire united
planetary population. We enormously outnumber them. If we get organized, they will have no choice but
to serve us, the people, if they wish to survive. The statistics are balanced heavily in our favor. The ques-
tion is will we choose to exercise our power? We do not mean to suggest that corporations have not pro-
vided us with many useful and beneficial advances. They have, but they must be reminded that we the
people are the ultimate board of directors! We have granted them the power they now have, and we have
forgotten this. It is time that we take back this power and remind them that they have no authority other
than the authority we grant them. This applies to governments, economic and financial systems, and cor-
porations. Just see how long banks last if you stop borrowing. If we save our money first, and then make
purchases banks are on their knees. Credit card companies have no power over you if you refuse to carry
a balance. The true power is in our hands. They only gain power when we are foolish enough to surrender
it, for they have no inherent power other than the power we give away. Yes you may want something im-

28
mediately, so you give away your power in order to have it immediately, by borrowing the money to pur-
chase it from a high interest rate credit card lender. Stop and think of the sense of power you can regain if
you save your money first, and then purchase the product. No interest rates, no indebtedness, no control
over your life, you are in the drivers seat now, not the corporation you would have been indebted to. Cor-
porations thrive on our debt. They want you as indebted to them as possible. From birth to death they
compete to be your primary debt provider! Think of the empowerment you will gain if you break this
cycle. Yes it requires returning to some ‘old values,’ the values that were in existence during the great
building and expansion periods in early America. You earn your money first, and then make your pur-
chases, thereby adding to your equity without incurring new debt. Your personal and family fortune
achieves real growth with these principles, in contrast to the illusion of ownership when you buy a house
with 10% down and enter into long term indebtedness. Instead of having equity escape into the hands of
others you acquire it, you take back the power you surrendered to banks and lending institutions.
Stop and think of how great it would feel to put off that purchase a few days, weeks, months, or years and
then purchase it with the knowledge that you now have the item but you have retained the full control and
power over your own destiny. Governments, banks, and corporations need us to surrender power in order
for them to gain it. This is the only way they can obtain it. For they have no inherent power, other than the
power we grant them. This should be a mantra you repeat and remind yourself of every day, and one that
you instill into your children over and over again.
Take back your power, for only you can give it away!
Although the current media would have you think that we exist within corporations and governments,
nothing could be further from the truth. The general population of this planet so out numbers all the dic-
tators, royal families, governments, and multinational corporations combined that it is not even a contest
if we choose to reassert our power. If you are tired of feeling powerless and continually in a state where
you do not feel that you are in control of your own life, take back the control you gave away. Talk to oth-
ers about doing the same, and in no time at all, you will have a forest fire of freedom on your hands.
The fuel capacity of this forest fire of social change is enormous and it consists of seven billion human
intelligence fuel sources. Once ignited through awareness and networking it could sweep around the earth
in no time at all. Nothing could stop it. It begins in the mind, spreads through the media, and is imple-
mented by local groups, from the ground up. It self-organizes into the most enormous social movement
ever imagined on this planet, and not a single life need be lost in the process. The people are the
power on this planet, occasionally they forget this, and in their delusion they actually believe they must
ask those in so called power (governments and corporations) to grant their wishes. But just like a bad
hangover, they eventually return to the reality and realize they are in control. The American revolution
was just such an event. Unfortunately this revolution involved violence. It became a battle of arms.
Since the handing over of power to corporations is not a core topic of our discussion here, for those who
wish to pursue this topic more deeply we highly recommend the book titled When Corporations Rule the
World by David C. Korten [6].

29
The vital importance of networking
In the information age, battles are fought in the arena of public opinion, and ‘spin’ is the cleaned up ver-
sion of disinformation and information manipulation. Multinational corporations may control the tradi-
tional media of television, radio, and print. But they do not yet control the internet and cyberspace, and do
not fool yourselves into thinking that the recent collapse of the internet explosion, the so called ‘internet
bubble,’ may not have been an accident. The potential power of this vast distributed network to re-
empower the people was not lost on those is power, once they awakened from their slumber. The old es-
tablished money was left in the dust by a bunch of very smart and also naive young entrepreneurs. Within
just a few years you saw stories of concern about whether it would be possible for any brick and mortar
business to survive the onslaught of the ‘new on-line economy.’ Did the bubble implode due to impracti-
cal business models, or was it crushed by the old money cartels who had been left behind in the dust with
nothing more to do than watch the dazzling speed with which the new economy exploded into their turf?
Something like seven trillion dollars was removed from the hottest economy in the world via the Nasdaq
so called ‘implosion.’ The American economy where the revolution began, was the envy of the world in
the late 1990’s. Now (2002) it is in recession and pulling down the economies around the world with it.
Only a few years ago the only question was whether the other economies of the world would be able to
attach their cabooses to this great engine, and ride the wave. Light optical fiber was spanning the conti-
nents and the oceans at a feverish pace, broadband was looming on the near horizon, and fiber to every
node on the planet was the ultimate objective, even down to the level of the average citizen. Strangely
once all the corporations got their fiber, we are now told that their is an excess of fiber capacity, and no
new build out should be expected for many years. Companies that produced and installed light optical fi-
ber and many of it’s related components, which traded in the 70 to 140 dollar range, are now worth only a
few dollars. It was only the average citizen who was denied the fiber revolution. Once the corporate in-
terests had secured their fiber channels, the story was reversed 180 degrees, and we were told that the fi-
ber buildout was an excess, ‘a bubble.’ This well ‘spun’ disinformation statement implies that we got ours,
but you are not going to get yours! The citizens who had funded the fiber revolution with their invest-
ments and internet fees, were left with collapsing stock portfolios, and the old and ever so slow and de-
crepit copper communications channels. Once again the ‘spin doctors’ feed the lap dog media the sug-
gested thought patterns to dummy down the American public even further, to think that they had made
bad investments. We paid for their fiber, and we were rewarded by having our portfolios crushed after
they got what they wanted!. The roll out stopped just short of suppling us with the same information revo-
lution that the corporations obtained at our expense.
What were the implicit promises at the beginning of the information age? All of the information archives
on the planet will be available is zero time, any where, and any place within only a few more decades.
Within five to ten years you will be abel to ordered a new watch, purchased a book, or uploaded a new
book or movie from the top of the Andes mountains, or from a hundred of meters under the ocean. Two
large corporations were already committed to providing low earth orbit satellites to cover all the earth and
ocean zones in which it would have been less than feasible financially to lay light optical fiber. Due to
remoteness and limited population density of some of the remotest areas of the planet, satellites were the
most feasible approach to filling in the missing zones in a total global information distribution system.

30
The vision of a world in which every square meter of the earth’s surface was able to receive and broadcast
text, voice, audio, video, and virtual reality was said to be on the near horizon. Bartenders, janitors, and
housewives were investing in stocks they could not even begin to understand, but the vision of the earth
as a highly distributed computational grid seemed to beckon to them, even if they could not begin to
comprehend the full consequences and implications of the information revolution. Now it looks like this
magnificent and courageous venture seems to have vanished in a puff of smoke, called the ‘bubble,’ as if
this were a real examination of what truly happened.
More people were drawn into the stock market than every before. In addition to making lots of money,
these ‘tech’ stocks which were about 8% of the total economy were providing for 35% of all economic
growth. The potential of the future growth pushed stock prices to unprecedented highs, far exceeding any-
thing seen in the industrial age. The information age was literally moving at the speed of light. The prom-
ise of terabytes of transmission and storage provided the impetus and fuel for the transformation.
The encumbrance of being tied to a fixed geographical node, was rapidly disappearing with the new
promise of wireless transmission of both voice and data. One could go anywhere, any time, and always be
in touch if one wanted to be. Technological companies could not acquire employees fast enough, or in
great enough quantities, and they found themselves searching the entire world in search of sufficient
numbers of skilled employees to fill their needs.
Two years later, many of these companies have seen their capitalization reduced by as much as 70% -
90%.
How did something that we were led to believe was so important, suddenly become something that was
inevitably destined to fail, only a bubble, an illusion, not something real? These questions require much
deeper investigation, than that which has been presented to us by our corporate owned and controlled me-
dia outlets.
Where did this unprecedented engine of wealth go?
We are now led to believe that it was all magic and smoking mirrors.
By no means are we suggesting that mistakes, exaggerations, and inflated projections were not also a part
of this enormous transformation. Greed, inexperience, recklessness, and considerable fraud were certainly
a substantial component of this information explosion. There were no guidelines for the pace and the
scope of this expansion. Legal mistakes, illegal mistakes, and intentional fraud were a part of the IPO
community, the investment bankers, the executive officers, the analysts, and the brokers activity. The
government, regulatory institutions, and the investing public at large were unprepared to deal with breadth
and scope of this revolution. Many of the pertinent institutions were caught in a perpetual game of catch-
up, because they were always behind the rapidly changing evolutionary curve of the information era.
When they finally realized the importance of e-mail and web surfing, the cutting edge had already
evolved beyond their reach into e-commerce, B2B business, videoconferencing, internet phone service,
and dynamic real time instant data acquisition, processing, and distribution.

31
But these mistakes were by no means at the core, or the essence of this revolution. An this is the essen-
tial point that has been lost in the so called ‘post bubble’ discussion of this phenomena.
The greed and corruption were merely the human frailty and folly that surrounded this revolution/
evolution on it’s circumference. The core of the revolution was the genuine thing, and an inevitable, if
explosive, stage in human and planetary evolution.
The great error was in blurring the distinction between some dot.coms with poor business models, and the
whole information revolution and the enormous hardware infrastructure that would be needed to accom-
plish it. The great mistake was in allowing the main infrastructure to come down with the highly specula-
tive fluff, which deserved to be purged. America will be paying an enormous and inestimable price for this
great confusion, for many years to come. When the technological and information revolution gets its sec-
ond wind, and it will, these previously highly prized jobs will be located permanently in China and Ma-
laysia, never to return again to the shores of America and Europe. The dismantling and shrinking of this
great undertaking was a huge mistake, many of the dot.coms in a few more years may have self-corrected
or merged with more grounded brick and mortar business practices which would have brought reliability
and foundational support, missing in so many of the early internet business models. The old and the new
economy would have merged and learned from each other, and the old economy would have been revital-
ized in the process. The new economy would have strengthened and adapted many of the tried and true
lessons of the old economy, which can be learned only from practical business experience. The sinking
state of the U.S and world economies from 2000 through 2002, is evidence of this profound mistake.
Did it collapse, or was it brought down with intention?
Any one could start a business on the internet with very little investment, and if the business offered peo-
ple services or products that were useful to them, it would thrive. Was this obvious explosion of entrepre-
neurial spirit just too much for the so called ‘free enterprise system,’ when the “old guard’ was put to the
challenge. Any one could start a internet newspaper, magazine, radio station, or television station for a
very minimal investment, and publish what ever they pleased. They did not have to go through the ap-
proval process within the corporate and multinational corporations, for the corporations did not yet own
the critical internet gatekeepers. The enormous funding required to start up brick and mortar businesses,
was not nearly as demanding when starting up an internet businesses. The balance on the business playing
field had shifted in favor of the new small entrepreneur.
Artists no longer needed to go through the gatekeeper censors of the established art galleries, record la-
bels, and print publishers. Artists, writers, scholars, and entrepreneurs now had the ability to promote and
market their own work, and more importantly, retain all the profits for themselves, rather than receive the
small percentages offered to them when working with the gatekeepers.
Did it collapse, or was it brought down with intention? We shall leave it up to you to decide.
Even with it’s scale, scope, and bandwidth diminished, the internet is still our most valuable tool. It is the
means by which we can connect our world wide ecovillage network and grow it to become a force to be
reckoned with. The internet provides other independent ecovillages with a means to share information,

32
inspiration, practical experience, commerce, governance ideas, ecological strategies, and legal informa-
tion. Finally, and most importantly, the power of all networks stems from the combined strengths of indi-
viduals and groups when they organize into information, economic, and a politically cohesive and con-
vergent forces.
We have yet to exercise even a fraction of a percent of this potential networking power!
Established governments, economies, and corporations have top-down power. They are basically authori-
tative models, and they have utilized their networks to maintain control over people. General populous
networks, especially highly distributed networks, when made available to diverse populations of people,
have power in the form of bottom-up self-organizing capability. We have only just begun to explore the
potential of this type of organization. But in order for this to work, people must become more than inter-
net surfers. We must become active players. We must become information, services, and product provid-
ers. When we reverse these roles, and combine our strengths, the corporations which are now so powerful
had better prepare for a level 5 hurricane.
Is there any thinking beings who would not like to turn the tables, after enduring the endless tape loops,
the poor products, and the inadequate support and service, we experience from so many of these corpora-
tions?
The corporations extended and strengthened the power we surrendered to them by controlling networks.
Turnabout is fair play. Furthermore, we outnumber them in terms of population, combined capital, land
ownership, and control of the direction of the economy via our individual and collective purchasing
power.
The only question left is, with all these facts skewed in our favor, what are we waiting for and what are
we going to do?
The power of bottom-up microsociety networking

Individually microsocieties are extremely vulnerable to larger local government institutions like the zon-
ing commissions, building and development offices, economic systems, local corporations, national cor-
porations, and transnational corporations.
It is fair to ask how these much smaller microsocieties have any chance of competing with the currently
much more powerful larger societies, governments, and corporations which surround them. Individually
they are easily ignored, overpowered, and kept vulnerable by inadequate funding. In contrast to the cur-
rent weakness of microsocieties we have just defined, we can foresee a vast network of microsocieties
united across time and space by the common theme of working toward a long-term sustainable future for
our ourselves and our planet. However, a common theme alone will not work. These microsocieties must
also systemically network to produce an effective flourishing economic web, that can easily challenge the
size and dimensions of the transnational corporations.
Linked up in a highly interactive and activist network, microsocieties become a true force in the world
economy. Lets take a single small example. A 1000 microsocieties with a population of between 30,000

33
and 50,000 people (the population of a major university) almost equals or exceeds the combined popula-
tion of the state of California in the United State of America. This is the 5th largest economy in the
world!
Imagine an WWW directory (THE ECONETWORK) similar to Yahoo, where you can go to shop
worldwide for products and services that are being supplied by eco-friendly businesses, located locally in
their respective ecovillages, but united as a network. If Starbucks and Walmart can do it, so can ecovil-
lages!
Shop at the ECONETWORK WEB, the earth preserving, eco-friendly, and symbiotic alternative.
Where you will find better products, better services, and at the same time you can cocreate a sustain-
able civilization for yourself, your family, and the future generations that will inhabit our planet.
Now 10,000 microsocieties with a population of 50,000 people each, equals a population of 500,000,000
people, almost twice the population of the United States, the largest economy in the world
($12,000,000,000,000), and almost equal to the population of the European Economic Union. Just let this
sink in for a few minutes!
The web site Intentional Communities ( http://www.ic.org) lists about 1550 communities in the USA,
with 204 listed in California alone. If you add to these 10,000 examples the thousands or tens of thou-
sands of naturally occurring microsocieties in the second and third world, you already have the levels of
population necessary to create the social ‘critical mass’ we are looking for.
Community is not where you are located in time and space!
• it is how you think
• how you vote
• how you purchase
• how you invest
• how you educate
• how you farm
• how you produce goods and services
• and most of all, how you envision the future of our planet
The internet contracts space and time, and makes any community possible via e-mail, web sites, video-
conferencing, and multimedia exchanges via CD-ROM, DVD, digital video, etc.
Think it! Invent it! Do it! Network it! Control your world and the future!

34
Coevolutionary memetics
The replicator mechanism that has launched life from it’s humble beginnings billions of years ago in the
oceans of our planet, to the the level of human beings, capable of reverse engineering the evolution of the
universe and life itself, is the gene. The gene is a molecular storage and transcription mechanism. The
gene’s role is to pass on molecular configuration information which configures atoms into complex three
dimensional topologies, which provide the building blocks for complex dynamical networks which we
refer to as living organisms. The overall progressive evolution of these organisms provides the ascension
mechanism by which the universe becomes aware of itself.
When evolution reaches the stage where symbolic communication or language can take place in living
organisms, a new replicator mechanism is born in the form of memes. A course-grain description of me-
mes might be mental motifs, gestalts, or ideas. Memes in many respects are more flexible than genes be-
cause they are not nearly as limited to a single physical substrate for their transmission. Genes exist, tran-
scribe, and transmit their bioinformatics by means of placing atoms into larger molecular configurations.
Genes reside closer to the act of creation, than they do to the coevolutionary act of cocreation. Although
self-organizing dynamics in the early stages of life, and free will choice, in the act of reproduction in the
more advanced stages of life, does blur this distinction. With the onset of human directed genetic engi-
neering the distinction becomes even less defendable. Even allowing for this blurring of the distinction
between genes and memes, we can still provide a strong case that genes are the replicator mechanism of
biological information, while memes are the replicator mechanism for social information. Genes provide
the mechanism that allow biological organisms to perform biocomputation. Once this biocomputation
reaches a critical threshold of complexity, organisms are able not only to perform biocomputation inter-
nally, they are able to develop and transmit information beyond their own individual bodies into a larger
pool of computation which we refer to as society or civilization. This new development in the progression
of life is a coevolutionary process, and a reciprocal process. Each individual not only conducts their own
personal biocomputation within themselves, they also share this information into a much larger pool of
information in the society in which they live. The society also shares it’s collective information process-
ing with the individual. The combination of these two directions of information flow creates a continu-
ously evolving and hopefully a continuously ascending reciprocal process. The new science that is devel-
oping around memes as the fundamental mechanism of sociological information transmission is referred
to a memetics.
In the general progression of evolution, memes can be seen to supersede genes. Memes are non-biological
and super-organic replicators that have many distinct advantages over their biological cousins in the form
of genes:
• Genes in the natural state are transmitted by cellular exchange, and take about 18 years to produce an
adult human being. Memes prior to the technological era were transmitted by sound, symbols, and
speech, and provided a much faster method of transmission than genes. In the technological era of civi-
lization memes can be transmitted by hard copy text, electronic text, electronic sound, electronic
speech, and electronic pictures. All of these methods of transmission or replication except hard copy

35
text can be transmitted at the speed of light. Memes, therefore, have a distinct advantage over genes
both in terms of their speed of replication and their speed of transmission.
• Memes are not limited to replicating and transmitting on a single physical substrate like genes are. Me-
mes can replicate and transmit on magnetic media, optical media, paper media, sound waves, and and
electromagnetic waves.
• The substantiation of psychic phenomena, such a telepathy, would establish that memes are even inde-
pendent of any particular symbolic language. Memes would be more like holomovement holographic
projections.
• In a highly networked civilization memes could spread throughout an entire planetary population in a
matter of days, hours, or seconds, truly providing for the first time, something we could call a planetary
consciousness.
One can also make an analogy between memes and viruses. Very active ideas, spread in very much the
same fashion as viruses. The drawing power of the idea or it’s popularity can be seen to be equivalent to
the contagiousness of a virus. Some viruses spread thought the population quickly, much as social fades
do, and then die off quickly. Other ideas spread much more slowly, like HIV, but linger in the population
over long periods of time. These retroviruses often linger in the body at a low level threshold until the
right set of conditions occur which allow the virus to break out into full contagion. Ideas often behave the
same way. The original idea is seeded by replication, but it lingers at a low level threshold in the collec-
tive mind, until the proper social circumstances allow the idea to burst forth into full explication. A good
example of this might be the collapse of communism in Western Europe near the end of the Twentieth
Century. The idea of democracy and individual liberty had been smoldering in the underground of the
USSR nations for decades, but it was only when the right set of circumstances occurred that the idea was
able to collectively burst forth in the actions of the people of these countries so that they were finally able
to overthrow Russian communism.
Now to bring all this discussion into focus with regard to microsocieties, we would like to suggest that
eco-freindly microsocieties which we refer to as ecovillages are a form of meme who’s time has come. An
ecovillage is an infectious idea which could be spread across a dynamic and rapidly expanding ecovillage
network. The ecovillage may be a retrovirus in hiding. The concept of community is almost instinctive in
all of us, like a retrovirus, it lingers at a low threshold level within all of us. Unfortunately transnational
corporations have managed to sublimate this instinct, by convincing people that their lives and their
communities are tied to corporate interest. Over the last century these corporations have managed to at-
omize or isolate individuals into believing that each of them is dependent upon ‘corporate community’ to
sustain their lives.
So if this is the case, why should we have any reason to believe that this condition could change in the
future. We would like to suggest that what is different going forward into the future is the internet. The
critical difference in the potential potency of this ecovillage meme going forward is that the meme now
has a new physical substrate to replicate in and transmit through. Just as the retrovirus memes of democ-
racy and personal freedom lingered for years before the correct conditions occurred for it to break out in

36
the former USSR, the recent opening of the internet to the general public has provided the contagion
mechanism for the ecovillage retrovirus to break out. Ecovillage meme communities, surrounded by a
much larger non-communal secular meme societies, are at a great disadvantage. However if these indi-
vidual ecovillages can reach out across the expanses that divide them, thereby linking themselves up into
a vast neural network configuration spanning all around the globe, they have the potential to grow into a
highly distributed massive social and economic force equaling or exceeding the size of the more mono-
lithic transnational society.
Ecovillages in the global warming era

We shall not enter into the debate as to how much of the current trend of global warming is being caused
by human development, and how much is being caused by some form of natural cycle, over which we
have no control. It could very well be a combination of both of these causes. One thing is certain, we only
have the ability to control our own development, so this is where we must focus our attention. The global
changes in weather patterns that are predicted to occur over the next century will have serious conse-
quences for our world civilization. We are entering a century in which we may have to deal with more
drastic changes in weather, seasonal temperatures, rainfall, water tables, crop viability, and species migra-
tion, than anything we have previously had to deal with for hundreds, if not thousands of years. These
potential problems are amplified even further by our insufficient efforts at controlling global population
growth.
If we are to successfully meet this enormous challenge, we must have social, financial market, economic,
and governance models in place that are able to deal with massively parallel and rapidly changing circum-
stances on a real time basis. Our existing institutions, because of their inherent size, complexity, linear
reductionist philosophy and practice, and historical perspective seem to display reactive as opposed to
proactive behavior. They simply respond too linearly and too slowly to deal with the rapid pace of change
that we are going to encounter in this new century. Our only hope of staying ahead of the curve is to as-
sume a proactive and nonlinear approach. We must move quickly from a reductionist perspective to a gen-
eral system theory perspective. If we do not, the quantity and the magnitude of the changes, in addition to
their interactive implications, will surely overwhelm us. Being proactive means that we will have to learn
to trust and react to changes based upon our simulations, rather than having the luxury of waiting to see if
these simulations are actually confirmed in the ‘real world.’ The science and art of computer simulation is
becoming an ever more important source of prediction in our society. We absolutely must push this com-
bined art and science of simulation to the absolute cutting edge if we are to have any hope of staying
ahead of the curve, as opposed to chasing it, and dealing with the devastating results of our tardy and in-
adequate reactions.
Now, having said this, having highly reliable forecasts is not enough. If you have social, economic, and
political institutions that are incapable of well thought out, rapid, and in depth response, the reliable pre-
dictions will be of little value to us, because our response mechanisms are antiquated and inadequate.
The vast majority of our current institutions are still asleep and lingering in the linear, reductionist,
and reactive operating mode of the previous century. If we are to successfully navigate the much more

37
rapid pace of change coming in the new 21st century, we must move into social, economic, and govern-
ance systems which are more dynamic, systemic, symbiotic, emergent, and self organizing. We believe
that microsocieties, in the form of ecovillages and their extended networks, provide an extremely viable
alternative model, designed to deal with this coming century of extremely active change. What advan-
tages do microsocieties offer:
• Fully structured microsocieties should include most of the same functional components of a larger scale
society, scaled down to a much smaller scale. This smaller scale allows the microsocieties to be more
experimental, more agile, and more able to quickly respond to changing weather and environmental
conditions. For those of you who are familiar with the ecological paradigm of Permaculture, these so-
cieties should be able to adapt to new weather and environmental changes by switching their existing
microsociety climate type to one of the other Permaculture climate types scenarios. Each Permaculture
climate type, provides an already optimized model for a small society to build it’s infrastructure around.
The book PERMACULTURE - A Designer’s Manual qualifies as a ‘must read,’ for anyone who wants to
improve and optimize an existing ecovillage community, or for anyone who is contemplating starting a
new ecovillage community [7].
• The smaller size of ecovillages also allows them to assimilate, evaluate, and respond to environmental
feedback much more rapidly than larger societies. Since all of the feedback is local and apparent to the
whole community, there is little need for the long extended studies, which are always required by larger
societies before legislation and funding to correct the problems can be eventuated.
• A third advantage of ecovillages in the plural, or in their highly distributed network structure, is their
ability to run massively parallel simulation or experimentation. Hundreds, thousands, and even millions
of parallel experiments can be ongoing simultaneously. The continuously updated data can be distrib-
uted on a time scale close to real time, similar to the manner in which multiple CPU processors update
in a massively parallel supercomputer or a distributed computational grid. The numerous advantages of
this near-real time dynamical evolution capability, should be very obvious in a rapidly changing world
environment. The ability to conduct experiments in a highly parallel fashion, as opposed to a serial
fashion, offers such a clear advantage, that one wonders why our current institutions seem so resistant
to adopting this new paradigm.
• The presence of local financing, local governance, and a highly motivated work force (due to their own
self interest) provides for a highly responsive society. One in which changes will not have to wait until
next years budget. In contrast to the ecovillage, we have the current reactionary, political infighting,
corporate and lobbyist manipulated, inertial political system which only moves for the benefit of the
general public when forced to by overwhelming public opinion and/or organized pressure. The vast ma-
jority of the time, the government functions to preserve the status quo. The government looks out for
the interests of the large corporations that fund their election campaigns. These same corporations pro-
vide government employees with very lucrative jobs, when they return to the private sector through the
revolving doors between government and the private sector. Previous government employees now work
for the very same companies who’s legislation they have just sponsored. Just the kind of behavior we
have come to expect from those who hold nothing more than a totally Darwinian view of life.
• In the most extreme circumstances, such as an ecovillage that exists on a shoreline that is being ab-
sorbed by the expanding oceans in the global warming era, a smaller society can more easily and more

38
rapidly migrate and rebuild in a more appropriate location, as many of the more primitive societies did
in the earlier years of our planets history.
• Another advantage or disadvantage of ecovillages, depending on how you view it, is the fact that pollu-
tion surfaces rather rapidly within the community, precisely because it is local, and it’s appearance, and
damaging effects are more easily isolated and corrected. Hopefully all ecovillages will adopt a ‘poison
free and pesticide free’ policy from the outset of their inception.
The role of size and scaling in ecovillages

The previous century seems to have been the era of transnational corporations. An era where corporations
lost all sense of loyalty to their native communities, and gained a new sense of loyalty to their profit and
loss balance sheets. Corporations learned to take advantage of cheap labor and low resource values in the
third world. The threat of moving plants to the third world was used to drag down wages in the industrial-
ized nations. The vast hierarchies of corporate management, in effect removed management from an inti-
mate relationship with their employees. The lifetime expectancy of a job has diminished considerably,
causing families to have to move and relocate on a much more frequent basis. Decreasing wages and fre-
quent job turnovers have had a very disruptive and destructive effect on communities and family life. In
much of the industrialized world both parents must now work to provide a decent living standard for their
families. The abuses in the second and third world countries, are even more abhorrent. Corporations often
force communities that need new jobs to competitively bid, in an auction style fashion, for the right to
have new plants built in their area. The corporations often force the local communities to give them tax
incentives and long term tax shelters, shifting more tax burden onto the general populous. The corpora-
tions also often dump the cost of their extended infrastructure needs, like trains routes, harbor facilities,
freeways, educational facilities, roads, and parking on the general public, with the threat that if these
communities do not give in to their demands for these concessions they will locate elsewhere. Such prac-
tices benefit the corporation’s profit bottom line at the expense of the community. This is by no means
good citizenship, and our communities continue to degrade under these practices.
The question we must ask going into this new century, is can this trend be reversed somehow? Can we
regain a greater degree of control over our own individual existence, our families, and our communities?
And if this is possible, how might we go about obtaining it?
We believe the way to counterbalance the power of the cold indifferent transnational corporations is to
develop new innovative, eco-friendly, high-tech societies on a much smaller scale, where people and
businesses have a chance to know their neighbors again. Just what size scale are we talking about? We are
not sure, because this is part of the experiment. At just what scale does a microsociety stop being a micro-
society? The following suggestions may serve as a starting point in this inquiry:
• In a microsociety of 25 to 50 people it is possible to think of everyone in your community as family.
• In a microsociety of 25 to 200 people it is probably possible to know almost everyone in your commu-
nity on a first name basis, and to maintain some degree of direct personal interaction with them.

39
• In a microsociety of 200 to 500 people, it is probably possible to maintain some degree of recognition
with most of the members of our community.
• A microsociety consisting of 500 to 5000 people is getting too large to maintain direct recognition of all
the members of your community, but you can still maintain a strong sense of community centered
around common themes of incorporation or mission purpose.
• A microsociety of 5000 to perhaps as high as 30,000, or even 50,000 people, is somewhat equivalent to
a very large and sophisticated research university. The capacity of intimacy with all of your fellow citi-
zens it considerably reduced at this level, yet many large universities are able to maintain a sense of
community enabling the direct participation of every member.
• Beyond 50,000 people we begin to approach the size of urban cities.
We believe that all of the above size communities would qualify as microsocieties, and perhaps with all
the new tools available to us with intranets (with which every citizen could have a personal profile), ex-
tranets, and the general internet, it may be possible to maintain a strong sense of community within an
even larger population. Is there a single optimal population level that fits all cases, or are there a number
of optimal population levels depending on the purpose, design, and style of microvillage implementation?
The ability of microsocieties to scale up effectively and efficiently is also an important question and con-
sideration which needs to be addressed and studied.
This is why it is so important that microsocieties network and share their accumulated expertise.
And finally, we must address the question of multiple levels of intimacy which would exist in a high dis-
tributed network, with many levels of heterarchical and hierarchical organization. This is extremely im-
portant if we want to achieve the greatest degree of effectiveness in counterbalancing the power of the big
transnational corporations. It is through networking that individual microsocieties or ecovillage attain
their greatest degree of power. It is extremely important that this be understood by existing, now form-
ing, and future forming microsocieties.
Unfortunately the existing microsocieties seem to be completely oblivious of this extremely important
paradigm!
The power of microsocieties stems, not from their isolation, but from their systemic and symbiotic inter-
relationships between much larger populations spread out across the entire biosphere. Community is a
state of mind, not a location. If you want more power and control over your lives and ecology, link up
now! Individually, each microsociety will be considered too small to be of any real significance to elected
officials on a state, national, or global scale. However the collective power of thousands, tens of thou-
sands, and even hundreds of thousands of microsocieties, voting, purchasing, traveling, manufacturing,
and offering products and services in collective blocks, presents a formidable force. It seems feasible that
such a force could gain political, economic, market, and ecological power, at least equal to, if not far in
excess of, the current power held by transnational corporations.

40
While virtual communities like facebook.com and mypace.com are a good start, we need to convert this
energy and enthusiasm to real physical communities!
Growing social networks

Those of you with a skeptical inclination undoubtedly want to know how hard it is going to be to grow
the type of social networks that would be required to establish the ecovillages and the related networks we
are proposing. The core of our current competitive social networks are structured around economic incen-
tives. While ecovillages are structured around the themes of utilizing systemic and symbiotic principles to
attain a long-term sustainable civilization. Computer simulations of social networks may be able to help
us understand just how social networks get established and grow over extended periods of time. Although
these types of simulations are still in a very early stage of development, they provide us with a means to
acquire considerable insight into the nature of social networks. The following statements by Jin, Girvan,
and Newman provide a brief summary of what these simulations are revealing [8]:
“What can we learn from results of the type presented here? The primary lesson is that complex and intui-
tively reasonable patterns of social network structure and evolution can emerge from very simple rules.
Furthermore, the general form of those patterns in not strongly influenced by the microscopic details of
the rules, so that most of the interesting behaviors can be reproduced in a much simplified model which is
clearly not a realistic representation of real-world social behaviors.
The crucial features which we find necessary to produce plausible networks are three in number: (1)
meetings between pairs of individuals, giving rise to friendships, at a rate which is high if a pair has one
or more mutual friends and low otherwise; (2) decay of friendships between pairs of individuals who no
longer meet or rarely do so; (3) an upper limit (either soft or hard) on the number of friendships an indi-
vidual can maintain.
These rules are quite different from the rules which have been used to model the evolution of graphs in
other arenas, such as the evolution of the World-Wide Web. While the evolution of the Web appears to be
dominated by preferential attachment - vertices with many edges accrue new ones at a higher rate than
those with few - we conjecture that social network growth is dominated by the introduction of future ac-
quaintances to one another by mutual friends. As a result, almost everything about the resulting graphs is
different between the two cases. Where preferential attachment yields a graph with a power-law degree
distribution, the limit we place on vertex in our social networks creates a sharply peaked distribution.
Where graphs grown with preferential attachment show clustering coefficients only slightly higher than
the corresponding random graph, our social network models show very high clustering coefficients, simi-
lar to those seen in real-world social networks. And where the structure of the Web and similar networks
is dominated by their rapid growth, the structure of our social networks is dominated by constant rewiring
of connections between existing vertices, with the addition of new vertices not playing a major role.
But perhaps the most intriguing feature of our models is that they show community structure in the net-
works they generate: there are groups of vertices with many connections between their members and few
connections to vertices outside the group. For some parameter values, these communities even separate
entirely and there are no connections between them at all. Community formation is certainly a feature of
real social networks also, and it is interesting to see that communities can arise from simple local growth

41
rules only. We are not aware of any study that has shown the existence of such communities in preferen-
tial attachment models. Interestingly, however, the real World-Wide Web does show community structure
[32]. Perhaps then a realistic model of the growth of the Web should include some additional elements
similar to those in our social network models in order to capture community formation fully.”
We believe that much of this research is promising from the point of view of the individuals and groups
who wish to organize new and experimental societies. The fact that these simulations show that simple
rules (rules (1)-(3) in these simulations) are capable of producing representative social networks, and that
these social networks are relatively insensitive to microscopic details is encouraging. If we attempt to ap-
ply these facts to people who wish to set up new ecovillage communities, what we see is:
• Social networks are initiated and grown as a result of individuals talking to other people of like mind,
who also have friends with similar interest. Communities potentially grow up around these shared con-
ceptual ideas (memes).
• Although individual members of these communities come and go, the communities as a whole maintain
stable populations. Newcomers replace members which withdraw from the community because the
community as a whole continues to establish new contacts.
• The total size of the social network is only limited by the total number of relationships that all of it’s
members are able to maintain collectively.
• The fact that growth is dominated by the introduction of future acquaintances to one another by mutual
friends - exactly what we would expect in intentional communities.
• The simulations also produced a high clustering coefficient in terms of the distribution of the social
network. This is what we might expect from people who are creating intentional communities. The
whole purpose of the experiment is to reestablish a stronger sense of community. The purpose of the
ecovillage network is to make sure that these peaks in the distribution are well spread out around the
globe.
We believe that this research supports a position in which there are no fundamental barriers to establish-
ing an extensive ecovillage network on a global scale. This can be done by starting such efforts at the lo-
cal level, and sharing the enthusiasm and results with other interested parties. With a potential pool of 50 -
150 trillion dollars (a rough estimate of the total capital assets of the individuals in the industrialized
world including property and investments?) to draw upon, the funds and resources are available. The real
question is - do people just want to keep complaining about the ‘established social system,’ or are they
ready to move beyond criticism?. Criticism is negative and easy. Cocreating the world you want to live in
is a much more positive, healthy, and constructive process.
An invitation to dig deeper

If this initial introduction has intrigued you, and our discussion has relevance to your life, then we invite
you to dig a little deeper into these ideas by visiting the other subject sections presented here.

42
The search engines on the internet will provide you with hundreds of actual or proposed ecovillage com-
munities. Most of these web sites deal with communities on a much more grounded, practical, and appli-
cation oriented approach. We have chosen to take a somewhat general, philosophical, and perhaps theo-
retical approach to investigating the true purpose and meaning of microsocieties or ecovillages. For some
of you, this approach may seem too removed from the everyday realities of trying to establish alternative
communities. For others we hope that this effort to stand back from the actual process of implementing
ecovillages, and instead, to examine the more philosophical implications of such an undertaking, may
prove valuable, and provide you with increased inspiration and purpose in your efforts.
We are searching for the core meaning and essence of the effort to establish planetary ecovillage net-
works - with the full realization that any actual effort at such an implementation will necessarily focus
these ideas towards a somewhat more specific set of objectives.
We can only hope that our efforts compliment, and hopefully assist, current and perhaps future efforts to
establish actual ecovillage communities.
Network resources
For those of you who feel inclined to investigate the nature of networks in more detail we suggest the fol-
lowing books:
• Linked - The New Science of Networks (2002) Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (ISBN 0-7382-0667-9)
• SYNC - The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order (2003) Steven Strogatz (ISBN 0-7868-6844-9)
• Six Degrees - The Science of a Connected Age (2003) Duncan J. Watts (ISBN 0-393-04142-5)
For those of you who wish to dig into networks at a more technical level we suggest the Santa Fe Institute
web site: http://www.santafe.edu

43
References
1. Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees - The Science of the Connected Age. W. W. Norton and Company, 2003.
pp. 13 - 14.
2. Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees - The Science of the Connected Age. W. W. Norton and Company, 2003.
pp. 14 - 15.
3. Steven, Strogatz. SYNC The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. Theia-Hyperion, 2003. pp. 285
- 286.
4. Benyus, Janine M. Biomimicry. William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997.
5. Rifkin, Jeremy. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-
market era. J. P. Tarcher, 1996.
6. Korten, David C. When Corporations Rule the World. Berrett-Koehler Publishers and Kumarian
Press, Inc., 1995.
7. Mollison, Bill. PERMACULTURE - A Designers’ Manual. Tagari Publication, 1988.
8. Jin, E. M., Girvan, M., and Newman, M. E. J. The structure of growing social networks. 2001, pp. 7-
8. (http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/ Working-Papers/01-06-032.pdf)

44

Sspen Chapter 01 09 FB PDF

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Descrizione originale:

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Sspen Chapter 01 09 FB PDF

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

S YS TE MI C S Y MBIOTI C P LANETARY

ECOV ILLAG E NE TWORK

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovillage Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Nonlinearity, complexity, and information

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Ecovillage or microsociety keyword progression chain:

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Nonlinearity, complexity, and information

• We will have to face the many consequences of severe overpopulation.

• We will be confronted with the numerous challenges of nanotechnology.

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

That’s why nonlinear dynamics is central to the future of science.”

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Problems in initiating microsocieties

INFLEXIBLE ZONING CODES

• residential (subdivision allowed)

• agricultural (no subdivision)

• rural (no building allowed)

• rural (with homestead - allows for a single home)

• resort (only in some counties - perhaps the most flexible)

Intentional ecovillages or microsocieties present a unique challenge to county zoning commis-

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

• conduct light non-polluting manufacturing and industry

• operate its own coop banking and investment services

• provide residential housing for its community members

• provide preschool and school facilities

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

AN ATYPICAL PROFILE FOR BANK LOANS

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

The current status of existing microsocieties

• ecological life style

• farming (organic farming)

• increased community involvement

• guru centered spiritual doctrine

• land preservation or trust

• various kinds of cults

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

• unsophisticated internet networking capabilities

• unsophisticated multimedia capabilities

• a lack of universal broadband connections

• little or no e-commerce or B2B (business-to-business) capability

• a lack of even simple web sites (this is improving)

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

• reevaluate methods of governance

• reevaluate methods of education

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

General systems - systemics

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

The motivation for ecovillage implementation