Author Archive for Ross Robertson

Go Big or Go Home

For all his overemphasis on “exterior” solutions–technology, design, and systems innovation–to the exclusion of the interior dimensions of consciousness and culture, I still love journalist and futurist Alex Steffen of Worldchanging. He’s got a way unlike anyone else of speaking to the meme shift that desperately needs to happen–and accelerate–for us to be able to meet the future with a bold and sensitive evolutionary intelligence. And when he publishes ruminations like these, I always feel compelled to share them:

The future demands new thinking.

We need to have the capacity to change quickly, to reinvent, to distribute innovation and explore new realities: and we’re going to have to do all that while the world gets weirder and many places crumble into chaos from time to time. We have to be built rugged enough to fight our way through the future’s troubles, strong enough to serve as bulwarks that can help and protect the more vulnerable.

I am pretty sure that to do that, we’ll need to be almost the opposite of what we’ve thought we need to be: we’ll need to get faster and more creative, not slower and more traditional; we’ll need to get bigger and more systemic, not smaller and more spread out; we’re need to get networked and more complex, not simpler and more isolated.

I think the way to live in this future is to move forward. Maybe we need less relinquishment and doomerism, and more radical vision and confidence. Maybe we need to start to take responsibility for all of it, and get big enough inside to handle that gracefully. To live in the future we’ve made, we need to make ourselves people of the future, not reflect imperfect idealized understandings of the past….

It would be an enormous service if people who really understand what’s good in the ideas behind permaculture, transition, voluntary simplicity and the like were able to reframe the insights they have to the scale and urban character of future we face.

Smart people can differ on these things, but if I were asked for advice, I’d say: Forget gardening suburban lawns — help us redesign urban foodsheds for millions. Forget cohousing — help us retrofit an entire districts with green buildings, clean energy and green infrastructure. Forget biodiesel — help us plan a whole new regional transportation systems. Forget ecocity ideas about making your neighborhood look like nature — help us densifying our existing cities, changing how they connect to ecosystems so they work like nature. Forget light green frugality, household tips and small steps — help reveal the backstory of the lives we lead and trigger a revolution in sustainable design, post-ownership and genuine prosperity. Forget countercultures. Make the real culture better. Get the new context, embrace the new tools, apply your hard-won insights to the new problems. Add to resilience a rugged urbanism; come help discover how to live in the future we have.