SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE END TIMES

 

WHILE most of the article repeated everything we know in a very long winded way,  I thought the conclusions were interesting.  The question is which type of non profit and co-operative projects are viable during these times.
http://ecowatch.com/2014/06/16/you-want-to-change-the-world/

"Here’s my last big take-away message for would-be social changers: only ideas, demonstration projects and policy proposals that fit our emerging infrastructure will have genuine usefulness or staying power. How can you know if your idea fits the emerging infrastructure?

There’s no hard and fast rule, but your idea stands a good chance if it assumes we are moving toward a societal regime with less energy and less transport (and that is therefore more localized); if it can work in a world where climate is changing and weather conditions are extreme and unpredictable; if it provides a way to sequester carbon rather than releasing more into the atmosphere; and if it helps people meet their basic needs during hard times.

It’s fairly easy to identify elements of our society’s existing structure and superstructure that won’t work with the infrastructure toward which we appear to be headed. Consumerism and corporatism are two big ones; these were twentieth century adaptations to cheap, abundant energy. They justifiably have been the objects of a great deal of activist opposition in recent decades.

There were reforms or alternatives to consumerism and corporatism that could have worked within our industrial infrastructure regime (or that did work in some places, not others): European-style industrial socialism is the primary example, though that might be thought of as a magnetic hub for a host of idealistic proposals championed by thousands, maybe even millions of would-be world-changers.

But industrial socialism is arguably just as thoroughly dependent on fossil-fueled infrastructure as corporatism and consumerism. To the extent that it is, activists who are married to an industrial-socialist vision of an ideal world may be wasting many of their efforts needlessly.

Historic examples offer useful ways of grounding social proposals. In the current context, it is important to remember that almost all of human history took place in a pre-industrial, “pre-progress” context, so it should be fairly easy to differentiate desirable from undesirable societal adaptations to analogous challenges in past eras.

For example, anarchist philosopher and evolutionary biologist Peter Kropotkin, in his book Mutual Aid, praised medieval European cities as sites of autonomy and creativity—though the period during which they flourished is often thought of as a “dark age.”

There are plenty of activist projects underway now that appear thoroughly aligned with the post-fossil fuel infrastructure toward which we are headed, including Permaculture cooperatives, ecovillages, local food campaigns, and Transition Initiatives.

Relevant new economic trends include the collaborative economy, the sharing economy, collaborative consumption, distributed production, P2P finance and the open source and open knowledge movements. While some of the latter merely constitute new business models that appear to spring from web-based technologies and social media, their attractiveness may partly derive from a broadly shared cultural sense that the centralized systems of production and consumption characteristic of the twentieth century are simply no longer viable, and must give way to more horizontal, distributed networks.

The list of existing ideas and projects that could help society adapt in a post-fossil fuel era is long. Plenty of people have sensed the direction of global change and come to their own sensible conclusions about what to do, without any awareness of Harris’s cultural materialism. But such awareness could help at the margins by reducing wasted effort.

Do you want to change the world? More power to you. Start by identifying your core values—fairness, peace, stability, beauty, resilience, whatever. That’s up to you.

Figure out what ideas, projects, proposals or policies further those values, but also fit with the infrastructure that’s almost certainly headed our way. Then get to work. There’s plenty to do, and lots at stake."