The combination of crises facing us now and in the near future is being called the polycrisis. The intertwined issues include climate change, increasing natural catastrophes, biodiversity loss, crop failures, pandemics, a rise in warfare, a rise in authoritarianism, and disruptions in economies and populations resulting from all of the above.
This is a perilous time, and we stand at a crossroads. We are currently racing forward into the polycrisis. However we as individuals do have a way of not only reducing its severity but also building a bright future.
The Integration Center Model provides a way that individuals can take effective action in the face of the polycrisis. It starts moving people into regenerative food systems while simultaneously bringing new perspectives and strengthened capabilities to a larger network of people. This shift in people can give us the capacity to grow into a species that can thrive through the ages.
This article takes a look at our options in the face of the polycrisis, and gives a realistic vision of a thriving future beyond it.
Our Growth As a Civilization
To take a broad view of humanity’s future, it is helpful to explore our past and see what our trajectory has been.
The following (poorly-illustrated) graphic looks at the growth of human civilization as a maturation process. It begins in our long infancy (the Stone Age, when we became the first animals to use tools to craft other tools) to beyond the present, where we achieve maturity as a civilization that can persevere indefinitely.
The graphic roughly represents two things: one line indicating the health of nature as we impact on it, and the other representing the growth of our technology.
Starting about twelve thousand years ago, in the childhood of humanity, the impact of our technology began to outstrip nature’s ability to heal.
Less than three centuries ago, with the advent of industry, we entered a time of troubled adolescence. Our technologies have soared in their complexity and their capabilities; but nature is now approaching full-scale dysregulation.
Now we face the right of adulthood: the challenge of taking responsibility for our future. To succeed in the face of this challenge, we need to change our relationship with nature. If we fail the challenge, we destroy not only our civilization, but all the natural systems on the planet.
The Integration Center Model gives us a mechanism to change our relationship with nature. It is designed to be able to thrive indefinitely with or without advanced technology.
If we wish to also keep advanced technology in the future, we need to transition to a circular economy. As part of that transition, we will also need to turn some of that technology to the task of restoring some of the damage we have done to natural systems. Additionally, we will need to carefully redesign and repurpose much of our existing technology to operate within a closed-loop system.
If the Integration Center Model expands as it is designed to, it’s healing retreats have the ability to change the way many people view their relationship to nature. If enough people can be touched by these retreats, our civilization may develop the fortitude to do the hard work of closing the loop on our economy.
The Double Closed-Loop Economy
Since nature is in heavy decline, we will not continue along a system based on extraction from natural systems much longer. We have basically three paths in front of us:
- Abandon most technology and revert to a much more primitive existence.
- Abandon nature and try to subsist completely off of technology.
- Separate our food system from our technological system.
The first option is workable for some indigenous communities who still have untouched land, but there is little of that left; nor is there any way that all eight billion of us could do this. It also is seen as undesirable to most people who see value in some of the technologies we have invented.
There is a growing chance this low-technology fate might be forced upon us by major catastrophes; and if so, there will be far fewer of us remaining by that point. This is the fate we are aiming for in our unhealthy culture.
The second option is being promoted by tech idealists who envision a future where humans have no relationship to nature, living in space colonies or uploading their minds into virtual worlds or living in some other entirely tech-dependent culture. These people tend to look at food as something that can just be grown in vats, with perhaps select real foods being reserved for the wealthy.
These tech visions of the future used to be considered dystopian, but now are being looked at by some as utopian: a way that some individuals can not only survive the polycrisis but also achieve a sort of immortality. It is worth noting that these models (being promoted by extraction-minded thinkers) tend to rely on a hierarchy of people, where there are wealthy and/or noble people who get most of the benefits of the technology. The rest of us apparently are meant to live in service of their interests.
The Integration Center Model promotes the third option: separation of nature/food from technology. To have technology that is completely separate from nature, it will have to be maintained by a closed-loop economy. To keep humans fed and nature balanced indefinitely, individuals will need to participate in closed-loop food systems. So the end result is two mostly-independent loops.
The Integration Center Model provides the mechanism to set up the closed-loop of the food process. In conjunction with that, we will also need to put a great deal of work into building the closed-loop technology process.
How We Can Keep High Technology
Using our extractive approach to nature, we have developed a complex web of technologies. Many modern technologies can only exist if all of the other ones exist as well.
As an example, to manufacture aluminum, we need to be able to extract numerous minerals, process them into refined chemicals, transport them, and expend great amounts of energy to push the whole aluminum production process.
That web of interdependent technologies allows us to make an incredible variety of things, like drywall, surgical equipment, artificial intelligences, chicken nuggets, designer drugs, nuclear weapons, bowling balls… all the vast array of things that humans now create.
A lot of that is going to have to change. If we stop pulling resources out of the ground, we are not going to be able to continue manufacturing new products as we now do with abandon. We will have to work with the things that we already have extracted.
To some extent, we can keep using the products that we have already created; except that the majority of products now created are made to break down within a few years. So instead, we have to look at what resources we can salvage.
We have taken gigantic amounts of resources out of the ground already; and it is unlikely that we can restore most of them back to where they came from. So we will still have those resources available to us, looking at the products we now have more for their component materials than for their current function. Additionally, we can mine landfills for all of the resources we have abandoned there.
This transition will of course be a process, not an immediate shift. It will take time to figure out how to shift our economy (no easy task), how to redesign our products, and how to circularize our material use.
However, we may not have much time. Currently the majority of our civilization is still running full-speed toward self-destruction. If enough Integration Centers get established, we may be able to nudge society toward facing the hard choices of taking responsibility for our future. Alternatively, major global catastrophes might shock our cultural paradigm and make us more motivated to take on this responsibility as a species.
If and when we do make that commitment, we may have so little time left that our best hope will be to enlist the aid of artificial intelligence. Given enough collective will, we could pool our work on AIs (currently being heavily driven by profit motives, military motives, and authoritarian motives) into work on one AI that can help us to effect this transition.
We spent the past several million years advancing our technology to the point where it can think. Now we have a chance to leverage that work to undo the harms the work caused. A directed AI can help us redesign our systems and our products so that the materials can be continually preserved.
We will have to make choices about what technologies are actually useful to keep. AI can help us with that as well, but at some point it comes down to us deciding what is important.
Regenerative Computing
Most of the products and materials we currently use would have to go away; as would the factories that produce them; along with the mining operations, transport systems, distribution systems, and energy production systems that supply those factories.
We would take all the materials we have currently locked up in our disposable products and in our landfills, and reengineer them into select products that can be universally used and that can be easily maintained or recycled.
It is beyond our capability to imagine which products would be valuable to people who have all of their basic material needs already well taken care of by their regenerative food systems. Those people would be well fed and sheltered; they will live in supportive communities; and their days will flow with natural rhythms. They may have much less desire for modern inane consumer products.
But one thing we would certainly like to keep is the vast wealth of knowledge we have collected; and the ability to share with each other that knowledge plus all new things we learn. So we would be likely to want some form of computers and internet; perhaps even keeping a powerful AI to assist us as needed.
Currently, running the internet uses all the complexity of the global economy. It requires materials from all over the world, a vast web of supply chains, and all the capabilities of modern technology. But there are much more regenerative means this future society could use to have computers and internet.
Since most products, including computers, would be durable and repairable; there would be very few factories. These would be small, somewhat-redundant regional fabrication hubs. These fabs would mostly use existing materials; and any additional inputs would be sourced through regenerative mining practices such as biomining. The fabs would essentially be integrated into their local biome.
For computing, the fabs could produce all-carbon, re-printable electronics. For inter-networking, these computers could exchange data via a distributed internetwork; perhaps with the addition of regional data hubs (designed similarly to the regenerative fabrication hubs). Individuals might not carry multiple internet-linked devices on them at all times; but instead might go to the village library to interact with the computer.
Technology Is Limitless
The above model is all short-term imagining: setting up the ideas, but leaving open the infinitude of possibilities that humans can come up with (especially if assisted by AI). In the long-term, there is no upper-bound to our technology… if we base it in regenerative systems that can keep us sustained.
On our current path, technology is doomed to crumble, as it is based on a fragile and very complex network of extremely extractive practices. If we take a slower approach to technology, evolving it responsibly and in balance with the systems that support us: it can continue to develop forever.
What Does Your Future Look Like?
Being alive in the 2020s means that you have been tasked with confronting this global polycrisis. Regardless of your opinions on this fact, it still remains a fact: the polycrisis is gathering now, in the span of your lifetime.
It can seem daunting. These problems have been building momentum for at least five thousand years, if not much longer. And we, with our little one-century lifespans, are challenged with taking on humanity’s rite of adulthood.
While it may seem like our ancestors have left an awful mess for us to handle; we can also note that they gave us all the tools we need to clean it up and to thrive. They gave us a means to share ideas around the globe and to collect all human knowledge together. They also gave us a vast amount of material resources, as well as machines that can process enormous amounts of information. We can resolve this polycrisis if we try.
You are one individual among more than eight billion other humans, many of whom have much more economic and influential power than you have. It may seem that your actions are irrelevant within the global scheme of things. And yet, the way that each of those billions of individuals choose act is what will define how we face humanity’s right of adulthood.
As noted above, we basically have three choices for humanity’s future: abandon technology, abandon nature, or separate the two. While humanity as a species faces this choice, you personally face a version of it as well.
You can try to opt out of the economy, essentially abandoning most technology but also perhaps giving yourself the means to survive some potential catastrophes. Or you can continue participating in the current economy, which essentially means opting for technology over nature. Or you can start participating in an Integration Center project, choosing to start healing nature while keeping the foundation of a culture that can retain technology.
Choosing the first path, opting out, is extremely difficult in modern culture. Most people don’t have the resources or skills to do it successfully, and end up as homeless or displaced people.
Choosing the second path most likely means continuing on in your current life. You get to have all the benefits of the modern culture that you can pay for. You also get to have all the challenges of living in a deeply unhealthy culture (crime, pollution, greed, etc.). This will continue until it doesn’t. How it stops will depend on how the polycrisis plays out. The increasingly-likely outcomes are that at some point you will become unemployed, displaced, unable to get food, and/or harmed by a specific catastrophe; or before that happens, the entire global economy may collapse, leading to the same results for you.
Choosing the third path means changing your life before catastrophe forces change on you. You’ll be shifting the focus of your attention to building or participating in an Integration Center; and at some point you will move there.
When you’ve completed your move, you’ll be living in a small village that has the capacity to feed itself even in the event of many (not all) potential catastrophes. You’ll be living among a tight-knit group of people who are committed to their own personal development and to maintaining a healthy culture. And you will be directly healing the land you are on while removing most of your extractive footprint from the general economy. Plus you will be spreading the health of your community to others in an extended community reaching out into the general population.
Living in the village of an Integration Center may be less technologically luxurious than you are accustomed to if you live in a wealthier country. You won’t have a robot to vacuum your floor, nor a microwave to zap your food, nor a plasticized mousse for your hair.
You will need to spend a few hours each day on tasks such as gardening, maintenance, cooking, and cleaning. You may also need to spend a few hours a day as an instructor at the Center. Those two kinds of activities are your entire employment; and would likely be much less laborious than most regular jobs. (However during the startup phases, which can be several years, you will also be contributing to the development of the Center, which will involve a lot more physical and intellectual work-hours.)
The choice is yours. How do you want to respond to the challenge now facing humanity?
Further reading: Effective Action for the Polycrisis
Further reading: Healing Individuals, Society, and Nature