"If humanity is to pass safely through it's present crisis on earth,it will be because a majority of individuals are now doing their own thinking"- Buckminster Fuller




The civilization model is weak and rusty. It sounds like fingers on a chalk board or a schreechy barn door.

We should create something new. It's morphing now. Shapeshifting itself into a new beast. What will this beast be? Will it trash the world around it?

>>> We need a new model. <<<

Or perhaps the eternal timeless one that we were all born with... ;)
It might take a little bit of dusting off, but I think most would be rather suprised to find that it's been there all along - just under the clothing of "civilized" mannerisms, that have simply failed because of the socio-political yokes that have been added atop that in order to harness the world's most valuable renewable (and as the corporations see it - expendable) resource; co-ordinated human action.

And now we know the only way to be free from it, is to allow our spirits to strip free from such constraints and go nude into our own creativity...

Need land. Outside the US or in. Land that has a water source, abundant in minerals, can support vegetation..etc. The only way to be free is to free ourselves from what binds us. The little bits of green paper we get from the FED. If the corperate world has nothing to offer us then we can be free from their indentured servant society. Freedom does not come free. It would cost us the security of modern convieniences. But, freedom means you or the community benefits from your labor, not those who exploit us so that they can live as kings. We are given the table scrapsof what we prepare with our own hands. The American dream was a lie. The Preamble was a lie. The only path to freedom is to give up everything and start over.

Well, you might as well. It looks like it is broken and there is not allot we can do to fix it. As a matter of fact the more we try the worse things seem to get. However, I don't think that this crash will be a piece of cake.

It's so hard to know what to do on an everyday individual and even tribal basis. So often I look around me and feel trapped and ask myself why anyone would want to bring children into this world though I myself have and sometimes feel a yearning for more.
Like someone else mentioned, we need land, fresh water, and would a guarantee that it won't be raped for another Wal Mart be too much to ask? And how do we learn from the tribal people when most of the tribes left have been forced from their land to live in such harsh conditions that they have chosen to no longer reproduce? After all these long years it is now in the last 40 years or so that many people native to their lands have said no more and are moving on from this existence. I don't intend to sound sour, at times I find myself with hope saying the same things you have but I find it hard to make connections that last. The kind of connection where you can look to your tribe for support and they come to you for what you can offer them as well. People even with the best of intentions can't seem to shake the every man for himself mentality.
This is probably the one subject that pains me the most. There is nothing I want more than for us to find workable, livable solutions to these great problems we face for the love of the planet and every species that has lived and is yet to come.

i think stop feeding the machine -- stop buying clothes, go to and/or house swaps instead. freegan your food as much as healthfully possible. live small. live with others. get your expenses down enough that you are working minimally for cash. use the extra time to walk or bike where you're going, if possible. work-trade, barter, gift, share. more practically than any other single thought system, it seems to me as though freeganism addresses our immediate evironmental and social issues.

Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.