Following is the originators’ take on why Integration Centers are needed and effective. One can disagree with much of what is presented below and yet still see value in pursuing building an Integration Center.
The Break from Nature
The health of individuals, society, and the environment are intrinsically linked to each other. Sickness in any of those elements causes harm in the others. And in the prevailing modern culture, all three elements are deeply unwell.
At the root of this sickness is our long-standing break with nature.
Many animals use tools, but humans are the only animals to use technology: using tools to make other tools. This practice started even before hominids evolved into the genus Homo, over three million years ago, when early hominids used stones to sharpen and shape other stones, bones, and sticks. This use of technology allowed us to distinguish ourselves and other objects from the rest of the world, in a more sophisticated way than other animals were able to achieve.
Over the next few million years, technologies enabled the development of more technologies (including the control of fire), and the hominids using them evolved more dexterous hands and larger brains. Modern homo sapiens literally evolved as creatures that control nature.
Homo sapiens evolved from these earlier hominids within the context of an ice age. Under harsh conditions, they used their technologies (especially clothing and fire) to spread out through much of the globe, developing more sophisticated stone tools and eventually (somewhere between 40-150 thousand years ago) expressing in art and language.
But it was not until less than 12,000 years ago (a mere 120 centuries), when the ice age ended, that some humans started settling down onto specific pieces of land and learning how to cultivate crops. Some of those societies then started removing some individuals from the production of food while allowing those disconnected individuals to control the surplus of food.
There has always been conflict between humans in times of scarcity, but these cultures started to engage in conflict even when surrounded by abundance. For those disconnected individuals, the concept of scarcity turned from immediate material insecurity to an abstract sense of lacking: if wealth could be accumulated, then more wealth was possible. Scarcity became a relative thing, and the wealthy always felt scarcity in that they could always have more.
With this change in paradigm, battles were fought not just for control of limited resources, but for power: the ability to control more resources and other humans. Thus chiefdoms and states formed, with military leaders bent on seizing, maintaining, and growing their power. (It was only about seven thousand years ago that the earliest states began to form.)
Those militarized states have always bested other cultures, easily overpowering them with their tools of war (forged and wielded without regard to environmental impact) and their constantly-aggressive mindset. And so our history is one of states and empires waging war and extracting resources to accumulate “wealth” and “power” for a few individuals or for a minority class of people.
The states with the most resources and the best tools of war could overpower the others, and so every state was motivated to extract or seize more resources and to develop more destructive tools of war.
Starting in the 18th century, resource-extraction was being scaled to industrial levels. Starting in the 19th century, virtually all habitable land on Earth was claimed by states. Starting in the 20th century, the majority of humans no longer had anything to do with producing their own food, and warfare itself was mechanized and industrialized. Now in the 21st century, major climactic effects are becoming obvious and rampant, while natural resource extraction is becoming more difficult and costly.
That global-scale destruction is the result of not just massive carbon emissions, but rampant small-scale destruction everywhere. Almost all land on the planet has been disturbed by humans and almost all of it is now covered in artificial light. Most large animals have been replaced with livestock, and most of the old growth forests are gone. Most of the fish are gone from the warming, acidifying oceans. And there is micro-plastic almost everywhere. Our break from nature is destroying all nature around us; and that in turn is deeply damaging us as a society and as individuals.
The Bond of Individuals, Society, and Nature
We are at a point now where food from around the globe appears in front of us, neatly lined in a grocery aisle or delivered to our door. In wealthy countries, countless other “products” just appear at our doorstep as well, neatly packaged in layers of cardboard and plastic. We never touch or even see the land where that food originates, nor the land being churned and poisoned to extract and process the resources for those products.
When we are done with the products, we drop them in a bin and they disappear. When we have digested our food, we eliminate into fresh water and then it disappears. We never see the massive amounts of contamination that happens after these things “disappear,” nor the massive amounts of energy needed to try to mitigate that contamination. Hardly any of those disposed-of resources return to beneficial use.
In other words: each one of us is heavily disconnected from nature. That disconnection spreads out into our ways of behavior and the ways we think. After more than ten thousand years of developing systems that are alienated from nature, we have created extensive social structures that reenforce that disconnection.
Individuals are stuck in small dwellings full of artificial substances, often cut off from even seeing anything natural. They live isolated in small social units: all alone or at best in a nuclear family. In order to survive, they must sell half of their waking hours to the service of someone else’s profit. When they face troubles selling their labor, they are left to fend for themselves… or not, as many sink into poverty, destitution, and death. When living like this makes them sick, they are told that management of their health is up to experts and bureaucrats who feed them (highly profitable) drugs and send them home. When they face traumas, they are given no quarter to resolve them, but instead made to work hard at their job as always.
This is a sick culture that is making its members sick. And all around us, our natural environment is crumbling.
All three must be healed together. The culture is enforcing the sickness of the individuals while it is enforcing the extractive approach to nature. The sick individuals are maintaining the sick culture and continuing to practice behaviors that further harm the sick environment. The sick environment is making resources dry up, creating scarcity that pressures individuals and cultures to fight each other more. And natural disasters are increasing in intensity, exacerbating shortages and conflict.
After millennia of building a system based on taking from nature and giving nothing back, we are now hitting up against the limits that the system can bear. We can push those limits a bit farther and a bit farther still, but a model built on endless extraction of finite products is doomed to collapse eventually. In the meantime, our society pushes a different kind of limits: forcing more and more people out of the life of abundance and into poverty and sickness.
Looking at this history and these challenges, it is difficult to imagine getting out of this situation we have spent thousands of years creating. The problems are huge, complex, and deeply rooted.
One solution is to just continue, taking some steps to lengthen the time of collapse, suffering through disasters and wars, watching as more and more people get relegated to the sidelines of society. But there will be a collapse. Eventually, after much suffering, the few remaining survivors can perhaps put together a barely-agrarian economy and hope for the best, lacking much of any means to build out of that mess, as their ecosystems will be in shambles as well.
Another solution is to start healing the individuals in our society, healing the culture itself, and healing the natural environment and our relationship to it. Such a solution cannot and will not be imposed by the governments and corporations of the status quo, and so any practical solution must be a grass-roots one.
The Integration Center business plan is an approach that can be effected by a few small groups of people with some money and expertise. The more groups that implement versions of this plan, the more likely we are as a species to survive.
The Integration Center Model
Integration Centers are on land where the people work to heal and nurture that land and the surrounding biome. (Natural integration.)
Integration Centers support and are operated by villages where individuals can integrate into a healthy culture as that culture integrates into and nurtures its natural surroundings. (Cultural integration.)
Integration Centers are therapeutic retreat centers that help individuals heal from past traumas and integrate more nurturing practices and paradigms into their life. (Psychological integration.)
And at their core, Integration Centers connect individuals, culture, and nature together by directly connecting people with their food. All members on the premises produce, gather, prepare, and consume food together daily.
The retreat center creates growth in the population of the village: when individuals come from the current, sick culture to participate in healing within a healthy culture, some of them will want to stay.
The retreats also provide the financial resources for the village to get established and to grow, and for the members to continue to participate in the external society while the new one is being built.
When the village is well-functioning but gets larger than the natural limit for human groups (around 150), the money from the healing center goes to pay for the purchase of land for some members of the village to split off and form a new Integration Center. This feature also allows for a solution to unreconcilable differences that may arise within the village society.
In this way, the Centers will be an ever-growing network of healing for individuals, society, and nature. As the society around them continues to struggle to survive, more and more people are likely to be attracted to the Centers, and their propagation can further accelerate.
This grassroots approach to widespread healing may be our best or even only alternative to the inevitable destruction we now face. It also provides a genuinely better lifestyle than what is lived by the vast majority of people today: one with less work, more personal freedom, greater mental health, better physical health, and much stronger social connections.
Further reading: Effective Action for the Environment.
Further reading: What is Health?