“If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it”
Lyndon B. Johnson.
A continuation of a fictional reflection by a hundred-year-old Espe from 2112 about the start and on-going movement of transformation to Sustainable Living. I add clarification links and quotes as needed.
Both sets of my grandparents were born between 1940 and 1953. Their grandparents were born in the time of Queen Victoria of England (the latter part of the 1800s). Steam engines had been around since the early 1700s, and the steam locomotive since the early 1800s. Wind and water power had been around for centuries (in a crude form as sail and water wheels), and the telegraph since the mid-1800s. But technology as we know it today was unknown. One of my great-great grandfathers, born in 1919, grew up on a farm with wagons and horses. While telephones and internal combustion automobiles were becoming more common, his farm had no electricity and no running water, and they still relied on the outhouse for sanitation.
We forget so quickly how technology came into our lives. So quickly in fact we plunged ahead with evermore complex technology without really questioning, as a global society, whether it was beneficial for us and the planet and not just for the bottom line of technocrats that saw it as a boom in financial development. Coupled with the insane economic paradigms that focused on profit that elevated businesses into controlling corporations over a period of perhaps less that 170 years, it is no wonder that global power quickly resided in just a few families before the Covid era. Appropriateness of developing technologies was based on profitable use and ability to increase comfort and luxuries of the more developed countries at the expense of the rest of humanity and the planetary ecosystems.
If residents of the developed countries had been more skeptical, they might have begun a sustainable mindset during the 1960s instead of the Gadarene rush to fancier technologies that with their Faustian bargains foisted upon us by people who saw money as the be-all and end-all for a global society. There were groups back then that sounded the alarm, such as the hippies and the growing environmental movement. The idea of technological appropriateness was laughed at and the consumer-materialism worldview dominated technological-economic thinking. Voices telling us about health problems for humanity and the environment were notable (e.g. see Health – Food 2 {January 2018}). A world leader in sustainable ecology, David Suzuki, was clear about the economic paradigms of the time that drove technological advancement, “If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.”
The wisdom that comes from technological skepticism kicked in around 2030 as we were almost forced in to changing how we lived in order to avert the global push of artificial intelligence and ever more controlling Cabal and technocratic elites. It was a time of Crisis and Opportunity; Notably, the two are related as seen in the Chinese word Wei ji. Our ability to say no and be free to do so became a point of change about how we considered freedom. We started to seriously ask, “Am I free?” – “What can authority take away from me?” After the Covid lockdowns of 2020, it was a more pertinent question by many around the world. At that time medical technology was being used to control and harm us in ways we could barely fathom that corrupt authorities would stoop.
We were bamboozled by cherry picked science from the elites, and voices that tried to show us a different science that elevated humanity, were suppressed (e.g. see link on Scientific Dogmas). In 2030, we began the psycho-spiritual transformation of how we considered our role in the vast web of life that is the planet Earth. In a word, we started caring – more about ourselves and also about the natural world. We enjoy technology now in our time but it has to foster life and not death and destruction as was typical of the industrial technology of the pre-Covid era. There are technologies we could employ, but we always ask, are they appropriate and in accordance with our ethics and concerns about harmony with each other and the natural world.
When we care for something, we give it more meaning and that leads to more caring and gratitude – it becomes contagious – it leads to trust and relationships. It leads to a desire to do something meaningful for oneself and others. Once we became more heartfelt, we started to follow our own passions and a new kinder society with better technologies was born from the chaos. We focused on how to help each other and not on disaster mongering to allow elites to control society.
I remember saying earlier how our technology today is as different from 2030 as 2030 was from the pre-industrial revolution before the 1700s (see Espe 5). Our global society is also completely different, but that can wait for another journal entry. The biggest test of our human ingenuity after 2030 was how to power a world while drastically reducing our fossil fuel usage. Despite the disaster narrative that was driving changes during the 2020s in an attempt to eliminate fossil fuel use, the reality was too simple. We had no real non-polluting alternatives, and pollution was our greatest problem. It was causing massive global ecological damage and species die-offs, and harming human health on an unprecedented scale that contributed to the human population drawdown.
Technologically, what we needed was a source of power and electricity that would permit a technological society within destroying it. This was the Faustian bargain of the industrial revolution that we had to live with. Prior to 2030 we were s a group of squabbling self-interested countries driven by a disastrous economic paradigm. Once we started to run things locally and bypass the corrupting influence of governments, we used the internet to have fruitful global discussions. Since energy renewables were the first step to independence, communities everywhere came up with many innovative ways to localize energy production to minimize the national and massive multinational electrical grids that had become dictatorial and prone to massive catastrophic outages. This was made all too obvious when the massive European grid went down after a concerted terrorist attack on key switching installations in 2028 after the Ukrainian conflict ceasefire negotiations failed yet again.
In the America’s high speed trains were becoming more normal and mass transit was established as an acceptable norm in North America following oil embargoes reminiscent of the 1970s. There was a push in 2025 by the global Cabal to create what the British called ’15 minute cities’ – communities that were local and sustainable and everything was within 15 minutes of where you lived. It was an innovative set of urban planning ideas and might have worked had legions of skeptics questioned how these cities would be managed. Fears of what was termed Hunger Game cities (after popular dystopian movies of the 2010s) caused much grass roots pushback. Had the Cabal not been so blatant in their controlling attempts after the Covid lockdowns of 2020, our global societal system might have been very different.
To Be Continued …………….
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