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Footprint redefined
Impressive truth
How come that such minute physical presence on Earth proves so destructive? Individually we may size up relatively small with a footprint of just 0.25 m2 if we stand up and do not move. But lifestyle wise we use 1000’s of m2 individually up to a point that we reach a point of singularity both in physical available space as our moral usage of it. We need to transform our lifestyles and usage of resources and space.
Usage of space:
When we look at a city and the behavior of a single human being you only have to consider your own daily usage of space to be surprised.
Summing up: We need a home to protect our intimicy and our integrity. We sleep horizontally, occupying already 10 x more space than standing up. We use tables, seats, space for different functions in our daily routine (relax, cook, eat, dress, bath, etc.). In family configuration we share functionality and space but in economic optimization of individualised lifestyles our space is just reserved for a single person.
We have created a culture to go to work nearly every day. We need a place to go where the work is executed. It is mostly a building where many gather for some kind of productivity with facilities, equipment, etc. While at work the space at home remains unused waiting for me to come back and vice versa. Between home and work there is variable distance that is covered with mobility. A diversity of options are at my disposal to choose from. When I choose one than the other options remain unused but occupy space while waiting.
I can only be at one place at Any time
Meanwhile a lot of space is reserved for usage
Whatever I choose to use needs storage at the place of arrival and an infrastructure in between. Our individualised consumer culture has stimulated me to have all the options in property including elements, such as a car, that proves extremely space and energy consuming.
In a city we are not consuming what we produce ourselves so our work generally is not related directly to the supply of my basic needs. These I acquire from a parallel infrastructure of logistics, shop surface and storage of my vehicles of access. Waste that I produce has yet another parallel infrastructure.
We want to see abundance even if we throw 50% away in the process
While this represents my daily routine as average adult citizen we also have children, elderly people, visitors, pets, etc that need their own modified facilities. My life is even more complex because in my spare time or holidays, when not at rest, I seek thrills through recreation, sport, travel, etc. All this needs still different facilities and infrastructures.
Holiday space
Summing up my own space and footprint I come to an astonishing figure that has nothing to do with my physical presence when standing still.
Transforming reality
When I realize this and consider the time spent in a traffic jam, wasted at some desk and doing different things in different places. Then I realize that we are doing it all wrong. Reducing my personal footprint requires attention to all the above. When I look at other species dealing with their reality of massive cohabitation I see:
Ants:
Ant heap
Bees:
Forrests:
The diversity is huge but the interaction is finetuned and usage of space optimized for self sufficiency. Everything is related to the rest in harmony even though growth, chaos and evolution takes place. The adaptive nature of everything is often breathtaking as well as the multifunctionality of infrastructures and relationships. There is a huge degree of reciprocity among interrelated species while competition is avoided. The footprint of any other species is relative to its size since every is always reusable and temporary in use.
Transforming my own life I become very much more active directly from home. I reduced my living space to a small sleeping area and working space for my laptop. I coordinate Sustainocracy programs with over 30.000 people now involved without hardly the need to travel. When I do I use a bike for local encounters and trains for stuff further away. Videoconference is ideal for metings in between. I have no office, nor does any of my multidisciplinairy ventures.
For food, energy and recreation I established FRE2SH, a co creative exercise to facilitate directly our direct consumption needs without hardly any logistics, loss or distribution system. Sharing our space and productivity with utmost application of innovative enhancements and scientific knowledge we use much more vertical space per m2 than before. We work in 5 levels for food: Under the ground, on the surface, bush and tree levels with animal life in between. We also want to do food exercises with insects and fish in the future. We do not work in mono food cultures but establish diversity of eatable species experimenting with harmony and abundance in productivity.
We hardly work with oil consuming machines. We do not sell products or services but invite people to participate and share in the results. Space previously used for mobility or parking is now used for real productivity. Our self sufficiency from self interest also develops a new biodiversity of species around us. Insects, birds, small animals etc start cohabitation with us demanding a new kind of knowledge development and awareness. We integrate our local rural options with the benefits of the city. A degree of self sufficiency uses up space in a much more efficiënt way reorganizing personal and collective economy too, with less financial dependence and more sense of stressless stability. It is even much less activity demanding while much more rewarding in direct productivity and multiple benefits.
We experiment with the objective of redefining our footprint. Of course we find multiple limitations in our surroundings caused by the fragmented multiplication of wasted space that is kept in place by all those old interests. Still plenty of opportunities arise to learn and do things that start small and start expanding as more effort and people get committed. It is a process that shows exponential growth but starts teasingly slow.
Having pioneered with it I am convinced that we can restructure cities and entire societies by committing to the reducing of our real footprint by letting go of our previous life while reconstructing a new one as we go. My current footprint is probably about 1/1000s of what it used to be and my quality of life has increased by various factors. And I have only started. When further along the line the change will be more and more visible as I get my entire city to transform with me.
FRE2SH (city self sufficiency) in action
City development is a complex ethical issue
Recently I was asked to participate in the Power to the City debat
Modern city development is a confrontation with ethics
City development is a human path along ethical breakthroughs and value driven leadership, based on wellness and harmony. Some cities in the world take the lead (eg New York, Eindhoven). Many others show horrible signs of decadence, speculation and chaos.
Leaps in Ethics guides our evolution
Using the complexity model (organization versus ethics, TO DO versus TO BE) in relation to the impressive explosive expansion of cities we can see that the city environment has become the utmost melting pot of speculative decadence and an ethical leadership challenge without precedence.
Just have a look at the evolution of London from 1800 till now:
The expansion leap of the city is especially spectacular from 1950 onwards. It is fully in line with the mathematical exponential function of doubling over a fixed time 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 etc) as explained so magnificently by Dr. Bartlett in 2002 and so neglected by the general people out of unawareness or complexity while manipulated by self interest of banks and governments. Where does ethics come in when a doubling time of just 30 years requires millions of homes to be built and financed? When all this spectacular affluence of people needs food to eat, energy in their homes, products, services and medical care to overcome their accidents and illnesses? Where is it when all the above has been economized in controlling hands of politicians, bureaucrats, banks and competitive business enterprises that only have growth on their mind of power and control? What happens when all this needs to be connected with infrastructures of roads, logistics and waste management? Where does one place priorities?
For decades the choice was obvious. Attending “Growth” had priority number 1 and was complicated enough to manage and interesting enough for greed and apathy to develop hand in hand.
Consequence driven governance
When you are a city government between 1950 and 2000 you tend to see this evolution as a big, growing pile of costs to be dealt with in 4 year democratic blocks. The city financing comes mainly from taxation (soil, real estate, consumption patterns) often with the burden of a national government in between as political and bureaucratic extra. The political focus easily becomes related to income through taxes, city services, lobbies and expense priorities, and in many cases even very personal interests of enrichment, power and manipulation. The evolution of the city tends to be chaotic and based on urgency to solve growth pains rather than moral planning. In this short video we see someconsequences of chaotic growth:
Big infrastructural needs and survival initiatives of ordinary people mingle. This short video is just as clear. Just wonder where the kids play…
The total lack of ethics results in unprecedented levels of pollution, sickness and ghetto forming, even in modern cities of the western world. The distance between rich and poor grows including decadence at both extreems. Secondary consequences, such as air and water pollution, criminality, sustainability issues in humanitarian and ecological ethics, etc. are unfortunate burdens that did not immediately fit into the expansion model of working with political or economic priorities of growth. All this is crazy if we realize that placing all 7 billion human beings sholder to sholder in rows “bud to belly”, the entire world population would fit into the smallest province of the Netherlands (Utrecht). And many know how small the Netherlands is already.
Impressive truth
If all people together occupy so little space why are we such a huge, destructive footprint on our planet Earth? That’s because we use our time, space, creativity and interaction wrongly.
Ready for change
The cities have grown so big, complex, problematic and vulnerable from management point of view that a new way of dealing with its household and community interaction is needed. The old bureaucratic model of tax versus expenses does not cover the needs anymore. Nor does the model of consumer economics that make people in cities extremely vulnerable for financial speculation, destruction of values, illnesses, etc. Cities tend to run into severe debt while responsibility piles up without apparent solutions in the old model.
The Sweed Hans Rosling made an interesting TED speech about the statistical growth of our global populations and the evolution of wellness versus poverty using his usual creative presentation techniques:
Rosling addresses the paradox of ethical need of child survival to stop the exponential expansion of the human population. He refers also to the moral need to bring together wellness by taking responsibility together. His logic makes sense even though the complexity of harmonic interaction with our environment with involvement of all structures of society was only briefly referred to.
As mentioned there are very powerful speculative forces at work that have always gone beyond governance control, facilitated by politics from the economic interest point view. Take for instance the tremendous food requirement for such large city populations (70% of all people in the world are consumers through money dependence in cities and they do not contribute to their food productivity) has stimulated the same speculants that corrupted the real estate market to do the same in the other commodities markets.
These people (real estate, food whole sale, politicians, banks) only care for the financial benefit and there are no laws against their malicious practice. Behind all these manipulative figures we find millions of real people suffering and dying, but this does not bother them. They often determine the rules of the game, the countries laws and public pressure out of self interest. The tension between such contrasting challenges and world views is a confrontation with our moral evolution. The ethical breakthrough tends to come through three means:
- When the masses stand up against their dictators. The Arabic spring was an example as a response to raising food prices. The Mexican youth movement in response to the student massacre by corrupt politicians and drug cartels, is yet another. 100’s of such hotspots can now be found in the world. And it spreads through social media and brave bottom up leadership.
- When crisis, catastrofes or depression give room for change. In many places fragmented power distribution makes executives aware that they cannot stop the public movement of change. The open up for dialoge and exchange their position of power to block for their authority facilitated change and gain admiration for that.
- When ethical leadership takes over from financial management. New value systems appear. They develop in parallel with old obsolete formal structures. They are not transactional but based on value creation and sharing. New organisational complexities arise that eventually take over from the old ones including the new level of ethics in their structure. Sustainocracy is a working example that invites executives from the old world to take responsibility also in the new one and bridge the transformation in a peaceful way.
Complex transformation
No matter what the outcome is per city the transformation processen are enormous because everything that evolved for centuries and especially the last few decades is being challenged to change. Many cities experience this as yet another cost but in Eindhoven we see it as a modern multidisciplinary value creation process, an emerging economy based on spirituality (the natural force of purpose driven living connectivity) and creativity (true 21st century entrepreneurship) that is more powerful than the old speculative one.
FRE2SH (city self sufficiency) in action
The biggest difficulty is to transform a working city of cement and cars into a biodiversity of health, safety and productive interaction. We do not start from scratch but transform our past into sustainable progress. This will always go accompanied with tearing down old structures and developing new ones. Precedent appear allover the world but decadence and greed still rules. When ethics reaches the levels of global governance the human world will enter its next evolutionary phase. The 3 level of ethics, the one of harmony with ourselves and our environment.
Visions start developping
The transformation of government is visualized in this summing up:
Transforming from one governance to the other needs others to become participatory too.
Jean-Paul Close (Founder of STIR’s City of Tomorrow)
The unappreciated 7th sense
The 7th sense
Communication is a rationalized skill that we tend to take for granted. Yet it is one of the most complex influential factors, in addition to our other 6 natural senses (smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing and spirituality, the latter being the equally underestimated inner or gut feeling, the 6th sense).
Communication has to do with expression, interpretation and influencing. We use ALL our senses to give communication a rationalized content but treat information in a processed way using existing formats stored in our minds. The 7th sense is a summing up of our regulated preception, expressed by putting it into words or some other means, influencing others with our points of view. The interaction between people and their expressions adds a unique dimension to our existence, one that is manipulated, subject to scientific research, learning processen and awareness breakthroughs . In “normal” situations our communication can be largely predictable, which is our biggest trap of blocked and distorted realities.
Liberation
In our current days, with radio, television, internet, etc this unique 7th sense is determining largely how humankind will develop, liberating itself from old dogmas, hierarchies of power and destructive social structures. This movement of liberation affects us all and has many expressions prior to arriving at a common consensus of value driven progress and harmony.
To understand our own senses and skills we first need to become rationally, rather than intuitively, fully aware of their existence, including the true value and threat of our own 7th sense and the effect of it upon us when influenced by others. Then we’ll also become aware of our entrapment, potential freedom and in the end maybe of more things, such as “responsibility” and “sustainable progress”.
Deaf and deprived of communication
To clarify my point just have a look at this African boy, Patrick, that seemed to be deprived from this 7th sense, unaware of his own potential, even though he has all the other underlying senses, except hearing. See what happens when he becomes aware of this 7th sense, available to him despite his hearing handicap:
The new Patrick has a world of difference ahead of him. Did you see him smile. What a change! From fearful, locked up misery to open brightness and interaction. He is a visualized example of someone who experiences a new level of awareness and breakthrough. He entered a new paradigm. It is easy to understand his breaking through and may fill us with joy as we identify and emphasise with the boy. Yet it is very difficult to see ourselves as Patricks, each with our own sensory handicap(s) or lack of open, transparant rationalization abilities using all our 7 senses. We tend to believe we use them all until something happens that shows that we don’t. Looking back we will see the same transformation but beforehand it seems impossible to anticipate.
It can however be learned.
We all tend to be like the old Patrick, deprived of our senses
In our daily lives communication tends to become a routine that does not reach our awareness anymore. We automatically react (for 99%) to impulses that we are used to, educated to interprete, and fear everything else. This is normal.
A new born baby opens the eyes and watches the faces of the parents while hearing their voices. We become familiarized with the sounds and images that belong to it. We observe the reaction of those images when we produce early sounds ourselves. A crying baby for instance will set off a whole series of natural responses. The baby learns to interact with sounds and gestures by interpreting the reactions. As we grow older there is a lot that we can predict in our action/reaction routines and we give it no second thought. It becomes automated.
When we grow up in a particular culture we get “educated” in perceiving our reality in a certain way. We apply our safely rationalized, automated 99% as if we are living inside a preprogrammed bubble of action and reactions that are all considered “normal”. Just look at YouTube films of traffic in places around the world. For those who live the daily reality it is normal. For other who observe from elsewhere it is a drama.
Our entire society is made up out of such communicative coloring of our “normative” reality. Internet is breaking through these bubbles as we can suddenly peak into new realities that are different from ours. We get into an emotional tension of determining what is right. Our world views or what we observe from elsewhere. Especially when we are questioning our own reality out of personal pain or need for inspiration we open up for paradigm shifts. We call this “the evolution of ethics”.
Transforming reality
My own bubble of perception burst the first time when I left my well payed executive job in Spain. Everything that had seemed normal was gone and nothing had taken its place. I had to become aware again of ALL my senses and when that happened my face illuminated just like that of Patrick. In my international career I had learned to cancel out my senses and tune in solely on the status and money driven reality. When my senses were activated again, breaking through into my rational world, a totally new perception of reality displayed itself to me. I became aware again of colors, smells, spiritual connectivity, etc. It had of course always been there but my senses had been blocked. I had been deaf, blind and mentally disturbed for a long time.
The second time it happened to me was when I moved back to Holland, my country of birth, and noticed that the original genetic energy that I carried as a Dutchman was not the same anymore as the reigning energy within the country. It opened up my mind to try to find out why. Slowly I discovered that my fellow Dutch had eliminated many of their senses, making them vulnerable and dependent at the same time. They had become old Patricks living in a bubble full of fear and deprived of a sense of full reality. Deaf, blind, speechless and insensitive to the 6th sense. It was often impossible for me to communicate with them. They all would react like the old Patrick, fearful and evasive.
I realized that it was not just the Dutch. Billions of people in the world live their robotized life in their 99% bubbles of fear and deprived freedom. My own liberation had come through intense changes in my personal situation that had opened up my original 6 senses changing my usage of the 7th sense (communication). Instead of trying to sell my views to people I started to invite them to my extrasensory world.
How to orchestrated our senses, even if we lack one?
The teacher of Patrick showed caringly that being deaf is not a handicap that stands communication in the way. We all need to accept that all 7 senses exist and are available to us. We can learn how to use them to the full for our joy, benefit and sustainable progress, without the depriving manipulations or handicapped fears.
All people have all these 7 senses but certain malicious human forces have tried to manipulate them for many thousands of years. When we gain access, through crises or voluntary exercise, we see reality in a new way and things start to happen in freedom of creativity and self regulatory forces. One of the biggest challenges is to give humankind her senses back and step up evolution.
A simple creative expression we share here. If you want to share one of your own please feel free to react to this post:
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 