In part five, we explored how we might have more productive communities.  We noted, in a previous essay, that our extreme idealism and the lack of land (said another way, the growing population around the world) would be obstacles to more productive communities.  We wondered whether technology could provide an answer. 

If technology enabled us to survive on little land, yes, we would have a solution.  A homogenous community could be created and maintained under environmentally-friendly conditions on otherwise inhospitable or unproductive land, like the vast stretches of the Mojave Desert.   

Generally, inhospitable or unproductive land is found where there are extremes in temperature.  The extremes in temperature could be harnessed for energy for a community.  The energy could be converted into hospitable living, e.g., air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter, and productivity, probably through closed agricultural environments, like hydroponic gardens and greenhouses. 

There is another direction in which we could go:  floating communities.  Building a floating city is within current technology.  Indeed, cruise ships are floating cities, although they are not designed for self-sufficiency, which could be addressed with current technology.  A community with strong, homogenous ideals could live in a floating city.  The initial large cost would be more than paid back by the greater productivity within that community and within the societies which they left, which no longer would have to spend large sums to accommodate the community.  Here is an example:  would it not cost less for “lifers” in prison to live in their own city, far from the rest of us, earning their bread by their own sweat and having the freedom to rehabilitate themselves or stew in their own misery? 

Unity around the world is an ideal which we like to embrace.  Seid umschlungen, millionen, dieser Kuss der ganzen Welt, from Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy.”  But homogeneity clashes with nature’s drive for diversity.  If we were willing to accommodate homogeneity in bite sizes, that is, on a community scale instead of a world scale, we could accommodate human ideals and nature’s diversity simultaneously. 

August 16, 2007