Just when I fret over my decision to stay a week longer in Thailand -  instead of flying back to Shanghai to spend Lantern Festival with the family and then fly again south to Hong Kong - for reasons of avoiding two 1200 km flights, I watch No Impact Man and are relieved that I am not the only idiot who makes seemingly awkward decisions to reduce his environmental impact on the planet.

This is a film I really recommend everybody to watch. Colin Beavan aka No Impact Man put himself, his wife and his child in 2006 into a one-year zero waste, zero carbon footprint experiment. He was then 43, his wife 39 and their daughter 2. I am deeply impressed by this human portrait of trying to do something about climate change and the resulting struggle, both practical as well as emotional. The experiment really boils down to breaking out of this learned helplessness which industrial consumerism bestowed upon us. Its not about being a fundamentalist, its about wresting back control over one's life.

I was particularly touched by Colin's wife, a belligerent urbanite, recounting a dream after her first visit to the organic farm where the family starts to purchase their food from. She left in that dream her grandparent's farm and wakes up with the feeling that she has forgotten something important there. This symbolism could well be part of our collective unconscious, because most urban folks are severed from the planet and it is mainly through the connection to the soil that we can re-establish a balance in our lives and with the planet.

The future of work is not in the city despite all the innovations around urban farming. The future of work is out in the sticks.

Colin did also give a TEDx talk in 2010, which is recording in poor quality, but which nevertheless contains important ideas about what really matters in our lives. I would really like to know where the Beavans live now and how their search for a better life has unfolded.

… when advancing science and technology alter man’s long-established relationship with the planet on which he lives, revolutionize his societies, and at the same time equip his rulers with new and immensely more powerful instruments of domination, what ought we to do? What can we do? [Aldous Huxley]
 
Shenzhen, 18. January, 2018. As I enter the arrival hall in Baoan Airport my eyes search for Vasily in vain. He is not here. I give him a call and he picks up the phone. “I am on my way. You told me that you would arrive a quarter to eight.” I sit down in a Costa Coffee next to the arrival exit and wait for him. Vasily shows up ten minutes later and sits down opposite of me. I notice that he is taller than in my memory; probably 1.90, slim, dressed in black jeans and a black denim shirt, a grey scarf tied around his neck. If there weren’t teenager bracelets on his teeth, he would go through a Russian spy in a James Bond movie.
 
Vasily is actually from the Ukraine and I met him only two weeks earlier on a Shanghai event, where I spoke about the future of work and the impact of robotics and AI. He approached me after the event and explained that he owns a trading company, which buys mining rigs in Shenzhen and sells them to Eastern Europe, Russia and the US. As the conversation unfolds, he provides incredible numbers about the hardware industry behind the Bitcoin hype, and I am hooked. Mining rigs | 挖矿机. What in God’s name is he talking about? Aren’t rigs infrastructure to drill for oil?
 
I had a few years ago, when I first heard about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, opened a mental drawer and put the entire subject ad acta: pyramid scheme. Those who come first earn massive profits, those who come last bear the risk. Recently, the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin has attracted my interest after reading Heinz von Förster and Bernhard Pörksen’s conversation on Understanding Systems. Förster, who had the nickname Socrates of Cybernetics, explains therein the concept of circularity and I immediately understood that blockchain indeed is the technology to put in reality what the participants of the Macy Conferences have probably envisioned for humanity back in the 1950s: meritocracy.

Want to read more? Download below PDF.
First published Jan 24, 2018 on mycountryandmypeople.org

Automation, industry 4.0, smart factories, algorithms and artificial intelligence. We are being told with increasing frequency that human work is being made obsolete. We are being told that all this change happens exponentially, that is: fast beyond our comprehension. Yet, we continue to put our children in education system which prepare for traditional jobs. Yet, we continue ourselves to train for traditional jobs; either to stay in them or to get them back. Millions are out of them for good; labor market statistics are being distorted by young adults kept longer and longer in tertiary education; and adults either retiring early or put into re-education programs which make them disappear from the unemployment statistics.
 
Exponential technological change implies that the secondary and the tertiary sector will follow the trajectory of the primary sector. Advanced economies employ less than two percent of their work force in agriculture. Similar numbers are to be expected for industry and service by 2030 with landslide changes starting in the next few years. It really doesn’t matter how you look at labor markets. Jobs disappear. The human being is being made redundant by intelligent machines. After 200 years of almost full employment, automation will eliminate most jobs for good. 
 
That's absolutely great news and it's the best economic news on the planet these days; for two reasons: technological progress will provide abundance and that's exactly what we want an economic system to achieve; and humans will be set free from drudgery and toil, but there are two sets of challenges:

1. distribute income so that consumption keeps the economy going
2. let people stay engaged throughout life.

 
The solution to the economic challenge is a straight forward playbook which has already been read and understood by many contemporaries. We need a basic universal income which substitutes the social contract described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the outset of the industrial revolution. We need to close the gap between the thinning layer of the well to do and a broadening base of poor.  
 
The solution to the social challenge is a different subject and the playbook is not clear at all. Voltaire said that “work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice and need” and right he was; but he forgot in his negative perspective that work gives man above all meaning in life. How will we provide meaning to 7 or 9 billion people who have been put out of their traditional jobs? If all this change on our labor markets happens exponentially, then we are flying against a concrete wall at hypersonic speed. We need to prepare ourselves and our children now.

The American author Andy Couturier has looked deep into the future of the most advanced economy on this planet. Japan is the most urbanized nation with over 96% of its population perched into cities and a consumer saturation which can hardly be matched by any other market. He profiles in his book The Abundance of Less ten Japanese individuals who are in some sense models that we can follow. These people have left behind the clockwork of our industrial economies and the obsession with consumption, but most importantly: they have found meaning in what they do outside the mainstream economic system. They live in genuine satisfaction, care for a small patch of land, grow most of their food themselves and balance their intellectual interests with a long-forgotten trade.
 
Couturier gives them in his book a platform to teach an important lesson; one that humanity should collectively listen to, because they point at a single solution for the main social and environmental challenges which we face in the 21st century. Could it really be that these sages can show us a path which brings all at once balance to our lives and the global ecosystem?
 
The Shanghai based social enterprise Green Initiatives has invited Andy Couturier to Shanghai to share with us his insights. Join us in this public dialogue about the future of work throughout June 2018. Starting on the World Environment Day, June 5th, Andy will tour with Green Initiatives major Chinese cities, where we will host moderated book readings and podium discussions in cooperation with resident communities. Get in touch with us if you want to host an event. Follow our updates on wechat, facebook and our website if you want to participate in an event.

Certainly, there is something fundamentally modern in being able to choose different aspects of a way of life and put them together in a manner that makes sense to you. But what gets people in our society paralyzed sometimes is that there are so many options available, and we don’t have the internal fiber to make choices on a consistent and strongly held set of principles and values. We must learn how to meet more of our needs (which, after all, is the purpose of an economy) without relying on the inequalities and destructiveness of the current world order. Can we make the process of thinking and experimenting our way out of our dilemma an opportunity, a chance to build our values and characters? We could then use our minds to create a library of techniques that will make life better for ourselves, and for everyone. But whatever form it takes, it does require change. [Andy Couturier]
 
Couturier’s book is one of the top sustainability reads of this decade, en par with if not more important than E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. It does not remain to be postindustrial theory, but shows with real life examples how we can deal with the scarecrows of economic recession, unemployment and lack of intrinsic motivation.

Leading environmentalist Bill McKibben, who wrote the foreword to the new edition of Schumacher’s classic, says about The Abundance of Less: We are in an overheated world--physically and spiritually. It is extremely powerful to read of people who have managed to escape that world, not by traveling to outer space but by heading toward reality. This is subversive in the best possible way.

Couturier’s friends live in the Japanese countryside, grow their own food and pursue what they are really interested in, whether it may be writing, playing music or working as artisans. Their lives are simple and one would say deprived of material affluence. But, by the emerging consensus on truly sustainable living, they are pioneers, showing the rest of us how to be truly rich in social capital and abundant in creativity. Andy Couturier shows with ten case studies that an abundance in well-being and self-sufficiency opens up through a deliberate choice of less despite the omnipresent availability of material affluence.
 
Will we continue to concentrate on consumption driven urban agglomerations or will rural and decentralized self-sufficiency turn out to be a genuine alternative? Couturier suggests: We need to take a pause, a significant pause, to create a strategy and plan for the change to a slower, richer life. When we are maxed out, we slide into the way the system is already structured, the easiest way to do things.

China has turned within the last four decades into the single largest economy in terms of purchasing power, shaping the modern world like nothing ever before. It is not only the largest greenhouse gas emitter since 2007, but its growing class of affluent urban consumers exceeds already the total population of the US. The Chinese economy has been accelerating the exploitation of natural resources and the environmental degradation at an alarming rate.
 
Heavy air pollution with smog carpeting the vast area between Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan caused the former China State Television journalist Chai Jing to produce the documentary Under the Dome. China Water Risk reports that 57% of shallow ground water and 50% of deep ground water are severely polluted and not suitable for human contact let alone drinking. China’s soil pollution receives least attention, but is the most serious cause for concern.

Based on the conviction that an economic transformation towards sustainable models of growth must happen above all in China, which has in so many regards already taken over control of this spaceship, our earth, I believe that talking to Chinese in China about Couturier’s book will catalyze a critical understanding of the present-day consumption behavior, which is most dramatically reflected in the stellar rise of Chinese Single’s Day, the world’s largest offline and online shopping day. It is increased consumption by which we compensate for our discontent with modern civilization and urban alienation.
 
So much discussion about “becoming more green” seems to promise us that if we only make lifestyle tweaks, drive more efficient cars and install more and better solar panels, we can feel good about ourselves, keep our cushiness, and call it “sustainability.” But in the back of our minds, I think we know those tiny adaptations are not going to make the difference that we need. […] I think (the nuclear crisis in) Fukushima has given us an opportunity to deeply consider whether the changes we need to make are simply reorienting consumerism, or more fundamental, like asking “What kind of world do I want to be living in, and what kind of life do I want to have for my children?” [Andy Couturier]

Our economies, whether those many 19th and 20th century national economies we are part of, or this one global economy which has come into existence during the last few decades, are like giant ocean vessels: the larger they are the more difficult they are to manoeuver, the longer it takes to change their course.
 
Scientists tell us that this course is one of environmental and ultimately self-destruction, and many agree that we have about 20 years left to change direction before we reach a tipping point of no return; a point when climate change causes sea levels to rise, precipitation cycles to quicken, precipitation volumes and storm frequency to drastically increase.

Despite this overwhelming scientific evidence and despite a growing number of people being aware that we are heading in the wrong direction, the vast majority of humankind fears an economic recession, because it is associated with unemployment on a massive scale, explosive inflation, increasing poverty and ultimately war. Keeping inflation low has become the magic trick of conservative post WWII central bankers who know how to read their respective societies’ financial, but fail to understand or ignore the social indicators.[i] 
 
ALICE BOWS-LARKIN VIDEO
 
We have been brainwashed for generations by Keynes and his disciples that economic growth is the only formula to wealth and well-being. We have adapted all our institutions and corporations to the dogma that size matters, and we have overheard the gospel of post-industrial economists like E.F. Schumacher who said already in the early 1970s that small is beautiful and that we need to value the irreplaceable capital which man has not made, but simply found, i.e. the earth’s natural resources.[ii]
 
Postindustrial thinking has produced the ideas of a resource based or circular economy, i.e. an alternative to an industrial, linear and ultimately destructive system of production. Yet, this body of thought has not managed to resolve the recession stigma, which by sheer terminology implies less than before.[iii]
 
ELLEN MCARTHUR VIDEO
 
While most of the Western world is in the grip of fear of losing its material wealth, the industrial revolution and globalization have spread Western models of growth like an epidemic: breakneck urbanization, heavy capital investments, mass production, centralized development planning and advanced technology are elements of economic policy which all developing nations apply; in recent years camouflaged as a global rat race amongst knowledge economies.[iv]
 
It is above all India and China, the globe’s most populous nations, each of them inhabited by about three times more people than the EU and five times more than the US, which bring new urgency to a need for economic transformation. But it is exactly these two continent-like and relatively young nation states which are driven by the humiliation through the European scientific revolution to design their economic systems despite their avert dissatisfaction with Western hegemony in the same model.
 
In particular China has embarked on an unprecedented modernization trajectory. Urbanization rates have surpassed 50% in 2013 and all social structures including the labor markets are on a fast forward reorganization which is only comparable to what started in Europe during the second industrial revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, i.e. when electricity swept over businesses like a thunderstorm leaving no brick on another. 

Many problems in the world cannot be solved by personal choice alone. In this book, it was important to me to emphasize all the social action that people in Japan are taking, locally and nationally. The culture of individualism in the West encourages us to blame ourselves for problems that are created by our society and economic system. I wouldn’t want this book to reinforce that way of thinking. If you are rushed, hectic, disconnected, driving too much, is that all your personal fault? I don’t think so. [Andy Couturier]
 
If each national economic system were a giant clockwork and each one of us a tiny cogwheel in that machine, it would be impossible to reduce revolution let alone change direction. We are all part of larger social transformations, which demand to a certain degree being part of urbanized consumer societies. How can we regain our own momentum and build up torque?
 
A recession in national economies and the global industrial economy does not necessarily mean that humanity ends up in poverty. A recession in the industrial economy needs to be understood as a reduction of material wealth and profit to a minimum necessity. A reduction in material affluence must be embraced as the only possibility for a wealth in general well-being, that includes all of humanity and the Earth as a living ecosystem.
 
The German philosopher David Reinhard Precht tells us that the focus of modern societies on material wealth blocks spiritual well-being. It is in particular the exponential modernization of Chinese public transportation, which exemplifies how technocratic capitalism can accelerate a society's material progress. Many notice though that a progress in hardware must be balanced with an upgraded software. High tech infrastructure must be matched with a corresponding, moral (or if you prefer spiritual) value system. China gains rapidly ground in the first, but an increasing number of people feel emptiness in the latter.[i]
 
TECHINSIDER VIDEO
 
As this spiritual void opens up ever wider, president Xi Jinping has launched in 2013 the socialist core value campaign, which tries to revive traditional Chinese religions, in particular Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, as a counter measure. Ian Johnson writes in his book The Souls of China, that religion provides a morality and frames of reference for universal aspirations—like justice, fairness, and decency—that are higher than any government’s agenda. Out of this is coming a China that is more than the hyper-mercantilist, fragile superpower that we know. It is a country engaging in a global conversation that affects all of us: how to restore solidarity and values to societies that have made economics the basis of most decisions. Perhaps because Chinese traditions were so savagely attacked over the past decades, and then replaced with such a naked form of capitalism, China might actually be at the forefront of this worldwide search for values.[ii]
 
A campaign which focuses on the resurrection of an ancient value system without changing the overlying economic system makes it almost impossible to truly harvest the promised changes: individual lives continue to be subjected to socialist capitalism and thus consumerism; they remain tiny sprockets in a giant clockwork which drives the largest economic flywheel humanity has ever seen.
 
Alternative models of lifestyle are therefore fervently sought after and have generated in China during the last decade a self-help market in similar size to the US, but like the government ordained renewal of traditional Chinese values, all these teachings remain to be subject to a linear industrial economy.  Aeon Magazine recently published a beautiful video about a few Chinese millennials who have chosen a different path of seeking satisfaction beyond money in the simplicity of rural China. The Abundance of Less can help us understand their underlying motivations.

AEON VIDEO

Japan, the Asian country which for centuries copied China’s culture and commerce, was the most fervent disciple of Western modernization, emulating British industry, the German legal system and French bureaucratic centralization. Although it started during the Meiji Restoration more than a century after Western Europe with its own industrial revolution, it overtook the West latest in the 1990s, when its national financial crisis preceded the GFC by more than a decade.
 
It is against this backdrop of breakneck social transformation, the abandonment of its own culture and an urbanization rate exceeding 90% that Couturier found a few Japanese individuals who have decided to wrest authority over their lives away from a global market and a national government back into their own hands.

They live in the countryside, grow their own food and pursue what they are really interested in, whether it may be writing, playing music or working as artisans. Their lives are simple and one would say deprived of material affluence. But, by the emerging consensus on truly sustainable living, they are pioneers, showing the rest of us how to be truly rich in social capital and abundant in creativity.

They are in some sense models that we can follow, to leave behind the clockwork of our industrial economies, and Couturier’s profiles of them give us concrete steps on how we can do that. He gives these philosophers who put their thinking into action a platform to teach an important lecture humanity should collectively listen; and we will provide a platform to engage with and learn from him directly.

An increasing number of young Western people leave urban areas and move to the countryside for farming and Andy provides the blueprint for why they do it by translating the wisdom of his sage-like Japanese friends into an empathy for all human and non-human life:
 
What is the good life?  To many it’s a code word for high-end design, gourmet food, and a red convertible. And so on. To others it’s narrowly defined as total rural food self-sufficiency. For Cynthia and me, it’s an everyday negotiation with the world as it is, a negotiation that must include a continual returning to our values, and a reexamination of whether we are holding to them as strongly as we are able to. It’s also about how we relate to others, both in our daily life but also to others in faraway parts of the planet who suffer from the waste churned out by the affluence of the industrialized world.

Further Reading:
Book website: http://www.theabundanceofless.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheAbundanceOfLess/
Andy's writing school: http://theopening.org
Andy's second book: http://amzn.com/1569754764
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