"Evolving" the Ideal Earth Design:
Ensuring Transparency.
(for better navigability online: www.ModelEarth.Org/idedes.html )
by Mr. Jan Hearthstone - modelearth gmail

Before we can start living in an ideal world, we have to know what this ideal world should be like. We have to know what it is that we want to have, in order to ever be able to obtain it. We, all of us, have to agree on what kind of a world we want to have, and then, directly, all of us can strive for it. There is no time for "hit/miss" methods anymore.

While designing our ideal world collectively, with the exclusion of none, we can spot and deal with potential problems before those manifest in real space and time. This function of collectively designing our world and matching the reality with the ideal portrayed in the design would supplant, eventually, any form of any government from the global level down to local communities.

By starting the ideal Earth design from the simplest possible level of sustainability and then progressively evolve the design from that simplest level to more complex levels "in modelo", rather then trying to model into the design complex sustainable situations straightforwardly, the transparency of the design would be ensured at any level of complexity.

There is an urgent need for the existence of a model of an ideal Earth--a unified and a harmonized model accessible and amendable by anyone--whose existence would greatly expedite any attempts at making our peaceful co-existence in the world possible; it would serve the purpose better than any controversial summits and any such are doing now. It would be there allowing interactions among all interested in resolving any differences that there might be in the world now on a continuous basis. It would prevent the horrendous waste of time, energy, and lives that there occurs now while using methods for resolving of our differences in use currently.
It would not matter that only a small group would be maintaining the model at the start--the usefulness of the model would become more apparent with time.

Contents:

The Need for Designing the Ideal Earth Co-operatively 2

"Evolving" the Ideal Earth Design: Ensuring Transparency. 5

The State of the Co-operative Design Presently 6

Bibliography 8

Credit 9

Links 9

The Need for Designing the Ideal Earth Co-operatively.

It has to be understood very firmly that creating a vision of what one wants (I paraphrase Robert Fritz in his The Path of Least Resistance [Fritz 1984] frequently without always acknowledging this) is in no way forecasting the future!
This "vision" (a "choice" [Fritz 1984]) has to be based on what there, in the ideal reality, we would really like to have, without considering whether this would be "realistic", "possible" (Fritz 1984), or any such considerations for the nonce. It has to be ideal; as ideal as possible--one could not improve on the vision any further, as if. Only after this, once a vision is formulated into as minute detail as possible (Fritz 1984), would the effective finding of ways of how to achieve this vision start. It would not do to start looking for such ways without the vision not being fully defined, or at least as well defined that we would recognize this vision should we encounter it.

This approach is very different from the hit-or-miss, band-aid superficial approach that we, the humanity, have been using so far in trying to improve our conditions for life on Earth, with the results clearly observable--increasing environmental and societal crises that have no precedents in humankind's existence so far. So far we have mostly been responding to problems as they occur, with the result that we have been able to successfully deal with some of the problems, but, on the whole, although we have achieved a lot of "progress", we usually manage to create even more difficulties in this way due to our not dealing with the root causes of most of our problems.

Most of us know what kind of a world we would like to live in. And to make sure that we end up living in a world that we all would like to live in, we have to reconcile any possible differences that there might be among our individual ideas of what the world that we would like to live in should be like, before we start striving for it--just to make sure that we, each of us, are not striving for a different objective! As much as we share the same place, the same planet together, that much we have to share our planning for our common co-existence, our common future together.

We have to collectively create a model of the world that we would like to live in in order to have a "visible", a referable to portrayal of the commonly designed ideal, and while we all co-operate on constructing the model, we all work out all the differences that there might be among our ideas of what our ideal world should look like as we progress on construction of the design. Of course, constructing the model of an ideal world would never be finished--it would be continually improved upon--but we would start eventually getting the idea of what it is that we are all agreeing on, and we would start working towards the ideal world in real time and space as soon as the design would be clear enough to permit this.

This forever ongoing co-operation of us all on creating of an ideal Earth agreeable to all would be far better than the way of resolving of our differences on occasions, then going our separate ways, and then getting into difficulties with each other again--over and over again, as we are accustomed to doing "normally".
While continuously trying to improve the model of all of us existing together we would spot potential trouble spots long before those would develop in real life to cause real problems--an improvement over the cycles of violence we adhere to presently! It would be dealing with problems before those occur--not after problems occur!

It is very important that everybody has an access to the process of building the model, so that anybody's ideas of the ideal that might differ from the ideas of others would get sorted out in the model, rather than that those differences would be sorted out in real life, causing real damage!

With the free access of everybody to the modeling/designing of the ideal world everybody would be able to and forced to learn what they need to learn "on the job"--first by taking a part in designing of the ideal, then by co-operating on actually achieving the ideal in real life.

The ongoing designing of the world would be a permanent feature in everybody's life. It would be a feature that would be consciously encultured into the social/cultural fabric of the society from generation to generation seamlessly and thus (I hope) would prevent any future possible reversal to our current way of conducting politics. After all--resolving problems, differences, controversies, and complaints before those could engender real life damage would, at all times, be clearly superior to any other ways of living.

It would fundamentally differ from the way "politics" is being done in our world now-a-days in that, that it would not be personalities fighting for partisan and personal power; it would be ideas that would "compete" for inclusion into the ideal world design; only ideas that would best fit in with all other components of the design, and with all that we know about ourselves and about the world would be included in the design, to be replaced when better ideas would be submitted. It would never be necessary to know who is behind which idea!

This imagining of what the ideal Earth should be like should start on the global level and from there the design would be directing what each local community should look like, because were it otherwise, in the end, during the process of each community's becoming what the whichever community might consider "ideal" might interfere with what other communities might consider "ideal"--they would be wise to check on the global design just to prevent any future conflicts. In this case the "think globally, act locally" would have its rightful application. In practice this thinking and acting would occur simultaneously.



"Evolving" the Ideal Earth Design: Ensuring Transparency.

To ensure that any style of a sustainable living of any degree of complexity would really be, beyond any doubt, sustainable, the design of any of those should start from the simplest way of sustainable life possible--a hunter-gatherer community living side by side with all other forms of life, without there being any need for any special "wild-life preserves" since it would be in humans' conscious interest to live in balance with their environment.
From there the model would follow the "evolution" of hunter-gatherer way of life to more complex sustainable life-styles, step by step, always plainly displaying that the design remains sustainable ecologically and socially.

It has to be noted that this "evolution" in model would not follow the real evolution of human society in which violence has been the mover and initiator of "progress". On the contrary--the evolution of sustainable life-styles in model, from the simplest to more complex, would be driven by considerations for the wellbeing of all in the system. In this way "sustainability" of the system at any stage of "evolution" would be assured.

I hypothesize that in this way it would impossible to introduce into the design any non-sustainable societal and technological elements.

Evolved in this way, any way of sustainable living--from the simplest possible to the most conceivable complex ones--would demonstrably be transparently sustainable, i.e. truly sustainable, not only "sustainable" in name.
The younger a child to understand any process, the greater the transparency of that whichever process--in a way of testing processes for transparency.

A design evolved in this way would allow anyone wishing so to live at any level of complexity of a sustainable life-style, since many people have different ideas involving the complexity of a sustainable life-style. No too complicated computer programs would be necessary to model a sustainable Earth in this way! All different sustainable life-styles would fit in as long as the "sustainability" in each case would be clearly provable on the basis of all known and pertinent data.

The overall global population size should be determined by what population of hunter-gatherer the Earth could support, even though any sustainable style of living would be possible, the global population should aways remain at the level of hunter-gatherer society (the simplest and, at the same time, sustainable way of living on Earth), so that if the more complex forms of sustainable living (that might even be more "efficient" at using land area for food production, perhaps) should fail, or become not attractive anymore, there would never be any overpopulation problem should everybody have to start living at (ultimately) the hunter-gatherer level again. The idea of any "expansion", or "growth" (of population, of economy) would be foreign in a sustainable world. In a sustainable world there would be no need for growing population; a growing population would be antithetical to common sense--no one would introduce such ideas into the design!


The State of the Co-operative Design Presently
(as known to me, the author; please inform me of anything that I might have overlooked):

Currently there is no clearly defined, referable to, by anyone accessible, and by anyone amendable model of a sustainable Earth yet.

Listed bellow are some of the most prominent, promising, for modeling the ideal state of the Earth potentially important concepts:

*) Donella Meadows concept of "envisioning"/"visioning".

There are currently many groups and communities in the world that purport to be creating "visions" of how a group, or a community should live together; "visions" created by, if not all of the members of those groups and communities, then, at least, by more than one person, using methods that derive from Donella Meadows' "envisioning"/"visioning" (Meadows 1996) concept that ultimately owes its origin to Robert Fritz's TFC (Technologies For Creating) as originally introduced in his The Path of Least Resistance (Fritz 1984).
The Donella Meadows' "envisioning"/"visioning" cannot really be properly understood without understanding the very clear Robert Fritz's TFC concept (Fritz 1984) of creating results that we want.
Please see author's
Donella Meadows' "Visioning": Global Citizens Designing a Sustainable World Together. (Hearthstone 2009)

*) Robert Jungk's "future workshops" ("Zukunftwerkstätte") (Jungk 1987)

Any of the examples of consensual common reality vision creating based on Robert Jungk's "future workshops" that I found so far don't go beyond the scope of a local community, with no results that could really be called "sustainable".

*) ESDA (Future Search)

ESDA's (Envisioning a Sustainable and Desirable America) -
https://www.uvm.edu/giee/ESDA/am2100.html
This "Future Search" ( https://www.futuresearch.com ?, https://www.futuresearch.net/ ?) based consensus building system is really not a careful combined "... vision" of more participants, but rather a forecast 100 years into the future on the way to a not declared ideal, "... agreed [on] a set of 'realistic' assumptions both about people and the rest of the world that embodied the latest scientific research findings....". The impression I got was a depiction of a definitely non-sustainable future (this future is "stuffed" with hi-tech objects that would be impossible to manufacture by socially and ecologically sustainable methods, in my opinion) that still was evolving to some unspecified ideal--the time in this particular vision of a future in 100 years depicted by three "visitors" was very clearly linear, still evolving to something else; time in any vision of an ideal (even though the ideal itself might be evolving continuously) is cyclical--seasons, moon phases change in an ideal reality.
I would like to learn more about this "... Virtual Visit to a Sustainable and Desirable America, 2100...", but no links at the site work anymore--contacting the participants of this "Virtual Visit" has proven unfruitful, so far.



Bibliography:

Bodian, Stephan
1982 Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: an Interview with Arne Naess originally published by The Ten Directions, Los Angeles: Los Angeles Zen Center
included in 1995 Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, edited by George Session, Boston & London: Shambala
Pertinent to designing an ideal Earth

Fritz, Robert
1984 The Path of Least Resistance. Salem, MA: DMA Inc., ISBN: 0-930641-00-0.

Hearthstone, Jan
2009 "Donella Meadows' 'Visioning': Global Citizens Designing a Sustainable World Together."
https://www.modelearth.org/donella-vision.html

Jungk, Robert and Norbert Müllert
1987 Future Workshops: How to Create Desirable Futures. London, England: Institute for Social Inventions, ISBN: 0948826398

Meadows, Donella H.
1996 "Envisioning a Sustainable World." written for the Third Biennial Meeting of the International Society for Ecological Economics, October 24-28, 1994, San Jose, Costa Rica
In Getting Down to Earth, 1996 Practical Applications of Ecological Economics, editors Robert Costanza, Olman Segura and Juan Martinez-Alier Washington DC: Island Press

Meadows, Donella H. "Envisioning a Sustainable World." is online:
www.sustainer.org/pubs/Envisioning.DMeadows.pdf (accessed 10/06/2009)
It is a must read document; it explains best what Donella Meadows' "visioning" is.

Credit

This writing is based on and influenced by the numerous teachings that I had the fortune to receive from Tibetan Buddhist teachers for over the last more than thirty years, on what I had studied about Mahayana on my own, on my personal realizations, on my reading about and practicing ideas (for over the last twenty years) of Robert Fritz' as he wrote about them in The Path of Least Resistance (Fritz 1984), and what I learned at the University of Hawai'i where I graduated (May 2002, Anthropology).


Links

The need for designing a sustainable world co-operatively is explained at
The Need for Designing the Future Collaboratively
( https://www.modelearth.org/intro.html ).

Mahayana: Philosophy for Sustainability.
( https://www.modelearth.org/mahaecosoc.html )