WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD? READ THIS FIRST - Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels - page 105

Historic examples offer useful ways of grounding social proposals. In the current context, it is
important to remember that almost all of human history took place in a preindustrial, “pre-progress”
context, so it should be fairly easy to differentiate desirable from undesirable societal adaptations
to analogous challenges in past eras. For example, anarchist philosopher and evolutionary biologist
Peter Kropotkin, in his topic Mutual Aid , praised medieval European cities as sites of autonomy and
creativity—though the period during which they flourished is often thought of as a “dark age.”
There are plenty of activist projects underway now that appear thoroughly aligned with the post-
fossil fuel infrastructure toward which we are headed, including permaculture cooperatives, eco-
villages, local food campaigns, and Transition Initiatives. Relevant new economic trends include
the collaborative economy, the sharing economy, collaborative consumption, distributed produc-
tion, P2P finance, and the open source and open knowledge movements. 18 While some of the latter
merely constitute new business models that appear to spring from Web-based technologies and so-
cial media, their attractiveness may partly derive from a broadly shared cultural sense that the cent-
ralized systems of production and consumption characteristic of the 20th century are simply no
longer viable, and must give way to more horizontal, distributed networks. The list of existing ideas
and projects that could help society adapt in a post-fossil fuel era is long. Plenty of people have
sensed the direction of global change and come to their own sensible conclusions about what to do,
without any awareness of Harris's cultural materialism. But such awareness could help at the mar-
gins by reducing wasted effort.
Do you want to change the world? More power to you. Start by identifying your core val-
ues—fairness, peace, stability, beauty, resilience, whatever. That's up to you. Figure out what ideas,
projects, proposals, or policies further those values, but also fit with the infrastructure that's almost
certainly headed our way. Then get to work. There's plenty to do, and lots at stake.
— JUNE 2014