Re: ecovillage and sustainability

"John Schinnerer" <john-/Gao9/[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.technology.sustainable.ecobalance
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Aloha,

> The moderator has touched a key point:

Gee, thanks Chris, but I'm not the moderator.  List is unmoderated - so y'all
behave, OK?  ;-)

> ...referring to 'traditional villages.' Yea, sure, they are (or were) the
> ultimate models for sustainability:...

Or perhaps they just had more than enough room to throw their trash without it
bumping into someone else's trash.  And of course they didn't have any
non-biodegradable trash, which probably made it easier, especially for the
semi-nomadics.
They would for example 'use up' the easily accessible resources of a
relatively small area, then move on...by the time they returned to that area
it would have naturally regenerated itself.
Low population density helps a *lot*.

There just weren't enough of them (us) or enough 'high' technology to do the
kind of damage we choose to do.

> ...they certainly could be "continued into the indefinite future"

Well, maybe.  We'll never know, since as you say most all have been
interrupted by other human systems (and some were perturbed beyond recovery by
non-human systems).

> but could we say they were "full-featured?"

Well, I reckon that depends on what one takes "full-featured" to mean.

Whattaya say, list members?  What's "full-featured" to you?

> Is it possible to integrate selected, appropriate,
> 21st century technologies...

My working definition of 'appropriate technologies' is 'technologies we can
appropriate for ourselves', where 'ourselves' means relatively small groups of
people working with locally available, regenerable/renewable resources.
Stuff other than that won't last past the end of the fossil-fuel era.

> ...into dispersed, tribal social and settlement
> patterns?

Well, we'll find out...but only if we do.



John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Design & Technology Services
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john-/Gao9/[email protected]
http://eco-living.net

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