Paradoxically the
holes in the net are the cities, towns, and villages.
Precisely where it looks like the net converges in
knots of intense communications activities, the
community/communication totality is malfunctioning
-- big time! Never has there been a crisis so grave
for life on Earth than the one that the
dysfunctioning built community is now square in the
middle of. Solution: repair the whole thing by
rebuilding the community with a sense of the whole:
ecological design, planning and building. There is
also a surprise awaiting us in a new network of
consciousness called the world holiday, yet to be
created, but ready and available with some care and
hard work.
I will present the
experience of a concerned citizen/activist, with an
artist's background and approaches, trying to solve
the problem of anti-ecological cities, working in a
particular community and learning about other
communities around the world. Through working for
energy conservation, creek restoration, biodiversity,
mixed-use community development, bicycle and transit
promotion, social equity in relation to ecological
justice, and against particular projects promoting
the car/sprawl/freeway/oil "landstructure" of which
we are a living, suffering part..., and much more, I
have come to believe that we need a whole new study,
science, art and discipline that I call "ecocitology."
I promote through this notion through writing,
activist work in my community and in helping to
organize international "ecocity" conferences. In
some detail I will describe and illustrate with
slides my efforts with others in two organizations I
founded, together with our successes and our
failures.
Then, from
especially the failures, I will draw conclusions
about where we need to go from here, which includes
a major emphasis on:
- ecological
reasoning of cities around walkable distances,
- a world-wide
effort in the form of an "International Ecological
Rebuilding Program", and
- the institution
of world holidays in the natural cycles as a key
element in the international communications
linkages. This hole, that gap that we could call
the failure to heretofore create a holiday for all
and everyone, can link us all as nothing before.
Finally -- because
we are talking about whole systems here -- I will
propose that all these elements can come together in
the observance of the beginning of the next
millennium -- on the right time, which is in the
natural cycles of the planet: December solstice,
1999, ten days before January 1, 2000. At that time
we need to create the super net by linking ecocity
conferences on seven continents in the first real
meta-media event, the event that comprises all other
media, including simple knowledge of sharing a time
and concern for the whole of life on Earth. The
first moment in our entire collective existence when
virtually all of humanity will be consciously
sharing a single time can then be turned to the task
of mending not just the holes in the net, but the
planet where it all exists and upon which it all
depends. |