In 1995 I wrote series of articles for a friend who edited an HR magazine. Her readers must have thought me mad - it was 1995 remember and the internet was just beginning to be felt. The last article was called Going Home. Here is the conclusion - It seems more and more likely that this could happen
A Vision of our Future (as of 1995)
The new institutions are emerging from the fire of the fiscal crisis.
Cottage industry based on working at home will race ahead facilitated by the Internet and by the new courier systems. Partnerships rather than traditional corporations will form enabling networks of cottage industries to compete globally. As cottage industry grows, the disconnection between family life and work is healed. As cottage industry grows, services come back to where we live and community begins to poke its tender shoots above the ground. As cottage industry grows, credentials lose their value. What counts is capability. Our children can learn again directly from those that have the skills. They themselves will have access to meaningful work. The extended adolescence of the industrial age will begin to contract as will the associated angst of youth with no purpose such as teen pregnancies and juvenile crime. Our current educational establishment will be severely challenged.
Existing governments will starve as E Money hides transactions and incomes drop. They will be forced to look at alternatives for revenue. I believe that they may be compelled to consider taxing the use of carbon which would set in motion a process of putting people back to work and reducing pollution.
I also believe that there is no shortage of economic resources. They are simply in the wrong place. The costs of our bureaucracies are not in the people but in the control systems and in their structures and processes. As the institutions of the old crumble these resources will be released back into the communities. As resources come back from the centre to the community, the demand to control community resources at the level of community will increase creating new locally based governance institutions. These new community based bodies will find the old decision making process not useful and will experiment with dialogue as an alternative. The old centralized governance institutions will become increasingly irrelevant.
As the communities become more connected, their health will improve and the social fabric will improve. In particular the elders of our communities will re-find their role in society as the holders of wisdom. This process of reconnection will reduce further the demands on our current service-delivery models of government. It will challenge the existing institutions of medicine and their supporting institutions such as the drug companies and retirement homes. As health care is half the budget of most Canadian provinces even more resources will be released to the communities. The costs of government and business will drop dramatically as a critical mass of communities develops. The need for taxation will drop. All our costs will drop. Our need for income will drop and we will be able to get off the treadmill.
As community becomes more important, so the quality of the environment will become more important. The city will become a less attractive magnet. The early movers of the community movement will seek places of natural beauty to relocate. Supported by the cyber network and by the courier systems, it will be possible to be in the world and in the country at the same time. The cities will begin to hull out even more than today. Artistic life will spring up in the smaller communities and will be more participative and useful. City life seems efficient, but it paradoxically consumes more resources than it produces. For cities over a certain size are linear systems that consume resources and produce unusable waste. They depend on intensive agriculture which drives the degradation of our environment and they depend on a massive physical transportation infrastructure which starves communities and feeds further urbanization.
The early movers in the community movement will begin at the periphery where the force of the old institutions is weakest. In Canada, I think that this will be in the Maritimes. The centre will do its best to hold on at every stage of this process. The centre will fight for survival. Much of the transition will be very painful. There is massive vested interest that will fight every step of the process. The vested interest will appear like Honnecker's border guards to have all the power. But the power behind the new paradigm is unstoppable. The Pope could threaten Gallileo with the stake but the idea was out and could not be stopped.
A more dispersed society will emerge. A dispersed society does not need intensive industrial agriculture. A community will find more and more time coming back to it as the need for income, to commute, to meet schedules and to have meetings about meetings goes away. We will have the time and the desire to grow much of our food again. The process of undoing 5 millennia of intensive agriculture will begin and we will have the opportunity of redeeming our abuse of our land.
A community needs to have a broader measurement system than one that focuses solely on money. Measures like GDP will appear increasingly irrelevant. We will seek broader more inclusive measures of wealth that will reconnect the economic with the social and the environment. Life in the new world will measure success differently. We will be measured by the contribution that we make to our community.
We will start to get back time. As the buzzing in our heads from all our business subsides, our spiritual life will re-emerge like a butterfly after a pupation of 5,000 years. We will seek ritual again. We will once again come home to our place as part of nature. We will be healed.
We will be home.
I do not wish to underestimate the struggle and the pain of making the transition. Many of us will see the foundation of our lives removed. But our choice is simple - we either go back to the future or we all perish.
I close with a quote from one of my favourite books. The Sun and the Serpent[18]. It describes a journey through the holy places of Old Europe in Arthur's country in the south west of England. The quote is from the end of the book where the authors describe the great ritual of renewal at Avebury.
The Golden Dawn
There will come a time when humanity will choose to go against nature, to exploit her bounteous gifts, causing a sickness across the planet. People will forget the ecstasies of communion, and life will become drab and colourless.
In these coming dark ages, though, a deep sense of loss will cause the beginnings of a Great Return. They will look at the landscape and the old temples, built to withstand the cataclysms of millennia and understand once again the sacred laws of Existence.
When this day comes, humanity will have come of age. It will consciously acknowledge its role in the creative impulse that comes from the Sun, fertilizes the Earth, and calls forth the flame in the hearts of men and women to worship Life and the miraculous forces behind Creation.
9:45:25 PM 
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