HELEN’S TOWN
Floating in Intellectual Space, Looking for a Place to Land
Much of the thinking underlying this proposal was done in collaboration with my wife Helen, before she passed. As I wondered how to name the town, I came up with the name of the town as Helen.
The question that Helen’s Town sets out to answer is whether we can create a complex system, self-renewing in nature, that includes the whole life web community. We see this particular community as performing the regeneration of herding, farming and small village life of perhaps 20,000 people that all co-join to become a new niche in the web of life. By niche we mean the mutually supporting relational position of a species or population in an ecosystem. Often niches large and small have self-generated boundaries. We begin this work by imagining what, fifty to seventy-five years ahead, in a heat stressed planet, a small community could be like, beginning again.
This proposal creates an original synthesis using existing information. Enough historic and scientific knowledge is available, and the urgent need now is for the generation of solutions at scale where the original research is in the doing. This work reveals the elements that need to be developed in order to collectively express a whole systems synthesis as a working niche[1] in the web of life. The elements include forest (which can become ancient forest in a less than 200-year cycle) combined with ecologically knowledgeable herding, the newest forms of agriculture that are polycultural in nature, and an education system that is informed and involved in generating an eco-cultural, empathic community. By cultural empathy we refer to the feelings and diverse expressions of identification that peoples from prehistory to the present have developed when attempting to live non-destructively with millions of companion species over extended periods of time. In its simplest form, empathy is a metaphorical state where for instance a hunter who takes down a deer is in a metaphorical relationship; for that moment the hunter is the deer, although not completely. This is a form of empathy, with the life taken, expressed with gratitude
The ecologically based design of this 20,000-person town makes it forageable, carbon positive, and biodiverse. The town can be, and is, processed by the life web during the life of the town and after its use is over. In short, a low-entropy, small town is possible, and this document provides the key concepts for its initial design. We expect a certain number of these insights will be useful for much larger than village scale communities that may need also to form as a response to extreme warming. By entropy we mean the extraction of resources (energy) from all planetary life support systems with no equivalent energy restored. Helen’s Town by its very existence in its own small space reverses this process.
[1] I consciously refer to this as a niche in the lifeweb - it is most definitely not the only form of niche for humans in the future. I see the need for humans and their habitat to become a niche in the life web and this is likely the only way in which humans will survive the coming shocks to our planetary systems. These niches, as with all others in the life web, will take many forms, developed, defined and refined in relation to all other factors – place, participants, other biodiversity. I invite any and all creative suggestions for other ways of re-harmonizing our human lives with the life web, and I share Helen’s Town as one possible way.
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<span title="I consciously refer to this as a niche in the lifeweb - it is most definitely not the only form of niche for humans in the future. I see the need for humans and their habitat to become a niche in the life web and this is likely the only way in which humans will survive the coming shocks to our planetary systems. These niches, as with all others in the life web, will take many forms, developed, defined and refined in relation to all other factors – place, participants, other biodiversity. I invite any and all creative suggestions for other ways of re-harmonizing our human lives with the life web, and I share Helen’s Town as one possible way">a working niche in the web of life.</span>