Not just with life, LIKE life 

I’ve been working on a book called “Critical Mass: Why everything’s going wrong everywhere at once & how to fix it.” It’s premise is that our activities in a global economy under the influence of an imperial socio-political system, often called by its critics, the Domination System, have given Earth the equivalent of AIDS. The viral global economy targets, takes over and undermines Earth’s equivalent of an immune system—its network of natural and (some) human communities.It does that by breaking rules life has evolved over four billion years precisely to prevent living things and systems from exceeding Earth’s means of providing for them.

Paul Hawken has begun to explore this idea from the other end. In “Blessed Unrest” he proposes that the millions of organizations around the world that are dedicated to various of the 10 Green principles are functioning as antibodies do, spontaneously self-organizing and reacting the planetary infection that the global economy and Domination System represent. What’s needed is for each of these antibodies to become more aware of and connected with the others. Then they would function as a healthy immune system does to restore health to the body, only in this instance to the biosphere.

Immune systems are high-functioning, closely linked and tightly coordinated communities comprised of many different kinds of cells, proteins, etc in possession of complementary skills and roles. These communities of cells are disperced throughout the body so that every part of the body and the body as a whole is protected. There is no central authority, no top down from which orders come, no elite in receipt of most of the benefits of the system. There is only the totality of a community of communities working together toward the same ends. Immune systems are deeply, organically democratic.

Natural communities, ecosystems and bioregions and the biosphere, share these fundamentally, organically democratic characteristics. Life knows when it has a good thing.

Democracies as we know the, democracy as we know it hasn’t gotten nearly as far as these biochemical, natural systems have. But then it’s only had at best a couple thousand years to find its way in the world.

So what I want to propose here, and what I propose in my book, is that when we’re considering the ways in which we can radically overhaul democracy to “green” it we could do worse than reorganize ourselves so that we live, produce and consume the way living systems do those things, organically and democratically, in order to live within Earth’s means.

It seems to me that “green” in this regard means not only living, producing and consuming in ways that work with life but living, producing and consuming in ways that are life like. This would be to apply Janine Benyus’ et als “biomimicry” to every aspect of our personal and and public lives.

In my next several blogs I’d like to share some of my thinking and research along these lines and to hear responses that validate, support or criticize this line of thought. It was actually Lloyd Wells, Green Horizon supporter and democracy visionary, who got me started thinking about communities as the basic unit of democratic practice as well as economic activity. So far, his thinking has proven to be right—along life’s lines.

Ellen LaConte
07/13/08

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