Now, if I Ruled the World

Note: this is the logical extension of a paper I read by Wallace Stegner. It's also the only work I've written after growing vegetables and melons at two farms this summer, and experiencing a speech by wilderness historian and futurist, Roderick Nash, this fall.

In your eyes:
How will the world (civilization and nature) have evolved after 1,000 more years of existence? What kinds of useful social, environmental and technological relationships will operate in this time? (Try and avoid visions of The Jetsons for a while and see what pops into your head...)

THE IDEAL
I believe the easiest way to influence environmental change, to pass it from one person to another, and impact society and the earth in a meaningful way is to enter the local food system.

Farming never really metamorphosed into a flashy occupation until the 1970s and the Back to the Land Movement. It’s not clean or techy, lucrative or monotonous. And what seems to make the act of farming so mouth-watering for educated, urban, and community-minded people may not be what’s fresh—eggs, milk or tomato—but rather a growing appetite for reclamation and renewal. People want their local food systems back (or extended past what their local food system has ever offered people) and the people in this small-scale ‘industry’ are willing to work in dirt, nay muck, to extract slivers of it. We are interested in Roderick Nash’s third scenario for our Fourth Millennium on Earth—“writing off technological civilization as a 10,000 year bad experiment.” As agrarian ruler, I would promote the activities (and lives!) of small-scale farmers, processors, distributors, etc., who work to feed their communities.

STRUCTURE
I think it’s interesting how Wallace Stegner approaches his ruling position, opting for the American-style democratic republic structure of governance (made evident by his appointments to Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture). The structure for his leadership is unrealistic and intellectually lazy coming from a supposed environmentalist thinker. Because his structure doesn’t address Peak Oil or Peak Water (and perhaps Peak Everything)--which will effectively dip our culture into a bath of the past when resources were less available--his appointments and his structure in general are futile attempts at solving these crises facing humans and the Earth. If I believed in the top-down style of leadership that Stegner advocates, a keynote in my administration would be to make building an educational system that addresses and mitigates (through low-tech and simple living).

No, if I ruled the world, it wouldn’t be through a nationally or internationally recognized government or entity. I wouldn’t need to be a representative in order to communicate and let my ideas thrive. An agrarian community model would do just fine as a bill in congress. Passed without a vote and transformed from community to community, the model would be administered in accordance with every locality’s resources.

That sounds broad and assumptive, yes, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Such a model doesn’t appear over night and neither do Japanese or Italian plums. Fruit comes to the tree that acts as a flag in soil and is dutifully pruned and watered year after year. Some years are better than others but still, it remains living. Meaning, part of the responsibility of a committed leader is to recognize that people and communities will rise and fall in their acceptance of a model. The point is that, like Nash’s theory on Island Civilization, humans will have to envision a future hundreds, even thousands of years in advance and stride towards it in their own lifestyles. Wallace Stegner is right—“Sooner or later, with or without an Environmental President, the United States will have to phase out chlorofluorocarbons and reduce automobile emissions and close down polluting smokestack industries”—these progressions will not be controlled by rulers and it will be a waste of energy to do so.

Under my rule, we would continue to have the fluorocarbon-inspired party that has created the majority of human culture today. Naively destroying foundations of our culture that were laid 10,000 years ago could have disastrous effects on the model. Instead of tearing down the walls, we would educate people with a curriculum that explains why the walls will soon fall on their own—why the system we set up was unnatural, and what we could do in different areas to support healthier and more sustainable ways of living. If solar panels and modern technology are beyond the capacity of the environment around us, we will have to think creatively (much like our ancestors) and discover solutions to our problems locally. I think our standards of living would improve in proportion to our self-satisfaction as our ability to live connected to our communities would flourish. In essence the structure follows this query—Why import beer from Holland? Why not get the recipe or create your own recipe and culture?

SPECIFICS, SPECIFICS
I would help bring about a few essential mandates that might help our species and undoubtedly the rest of the planet. We don’t need an Earth Czar to make this work—we need self-interest and self-sufficiency with a side of interspecies responsibility. We need to take a look at our past, our current path, and seriously consider an economics built on the idea that small is beautiful. Most of my direct energy would be spent educating people about peak oil, frugality, nature and culture interactions throughout history. I think this sort of education could spark some worthy thoughts and feelings about what we’d like to accomplish as a species in the future. More of the same? Probably not.

The internet is impersonal. The time and resources required to maintain and supplement information would not serve our future society. It would be more meaningful to dash the leader’s homepage altogether and form a speaking/workshop tour of the country and maybe even the globe to communicate the benefits of a model of community supported subsistence. This would be a campaign (more than a rulership) against the type of wage slavery that has existed and unsatisfied America for too long.

If we communicated the fruits of local food and labor well, we wouldn’t sell many books in the beginning. But neither did Thoreau or Leopold. My rule might be a little before it’s time. But hopefully 1,000 years down the line, such a way of living could be widely read about and again practiced.