Imagine Earthships
Imagine if every city-dweller was given the option to move to the countryside — anywhere in the world — and live in an Earthship (or any other sustainable, efficient eco-house) with a permaculture garden that would supply the basic fruit and vegetables for their daily needs.
Imagine if we could take all the brainpower currently used to figure out how to take people to Mars, or to help humans survive in space, and used it to figure out how to create sustainable eco-communities.
Imagine compost toilets that would never again dump a drop of sewage in oceans and rivers.
Imagine solar-powered everything and efficient energy storage capabilities.
Imagine people working with their hands, tending to their own land, their animals, their families, without the poverty and struggles of the past.
Imagine technology in service of humanity, instead of humanity in service of technology.
Imagine how many industries would go extinct; luxury goods, fast fashion, fast food.
Imagine how many industries would shrink down to a sustainable level; automobile, aviation, petrochemicals, industrial agriculture.
Imagine being able to live a rural life without having to compromise on healthcare, entertainment, culture, social connections, safety.
It’s hard to imagine a life you’ve never lived, a life no one you know has ever lived. All you know is 9–5 slavery in a boring job cause “we all need to make money”. Do we though? Do we “all” need to spend our lives in a meaningless job, in a depressing office, in a crowded, soulless city, just so we can pay for our very expensive, very small apartments, and live for one week a year where we can go on holiday at a place so majestic that makes our return back to normal unbearable?
This is not the only way to live. We don’t all have to study. We don’t all have to get a job in Marketing or IT. We don’t all have to join multinational organizations. We don’t. We don’t have to join the metaverse, we don’t have to buy NFTs, we don’t have to wear fancy sneakers, we don’t have to eat avocados with every meal. There is more to life than this.
Some people out there still dream of flying cars and Start Trek Enterprise-type of spaceships to take them where no one has gone before. I honestly hope these people get their dream, I hope they manage to live in Mars, just so that they can finally appreciate the Paradise that is Earth. Some of us already know this though.
Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Well, friend, maybe that’s exactly what some people need.
I don’t want to make a case for going backwards here, not at all. But I’d like to see the industrious, ambitious, space-hungry peeps allow the rest of us to co-exist on this planet. Don’t ruin the habitat of tribes that still live in the past. There’s nothing wrong with their way of life. Don’t poison their water. Don’t burn their trees. Don’t chase them away so you can mine their land and make more iPhones. Let them be.
Maybe, if we make space for each other, we won’t need so much stuff, maybe the prices won’t go up and down all the time, maybe we won’t have to kill each other as much. You know? Maybe the doughnut is possible after all, if we give it a fair, fighting chance.
