Land Contours: 'Consumption of Ideas,' "Always Coming Home," Agrarian Lifestyle to Reverse Global Climate Change

How to substitute the consumption of ideas for the consumption of pollution producing human action (such as driving fossil fuel burning cars that produce CO2) in the context of potentially a kind of decade-long orientation to move toward a more agrarian society, while not throwing away the material benefits of the industrial and information technology revolutions? And how might we do this as expressions of developments in ideals of the Enlightenment, the 1960s and 1970s, {as well as Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu's thinking}?

I'm thinking here of Ursula Le Guin's book "Always Coming Home," (1985) where people live basically a very comfortable and beautiful, agrarian lifestyle {as well as a rich, cultural~symbolic life}, in northern California, 400 years in the future (this is ethnographic, science fiction), while still accessing and sharing information via the internet. The most 'advanced' technology these people have, besides computing, is a lovely, wooden steam engine.

How will World University and School contribute to making consumption of ideas and an agrarian lifestyle much more desirable, enjoyable and fascinating than consumption of material, polluting processes?


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How can each of us reduce our carbon output by 80% (see climatologist Jim Hansen ~ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen), to slow and possibly reverse global climate change? He suggests that the tipping point will be 2016, if we don't change soon. Toyota Priuses reduce drivers' output of carbon 50%, from 1990s' levels. How to reduce carbon output by another 30%?

Here's the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's web site ~ ipcc.ch. They won the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007, and develop policy and make accessible the science about global climate change. (I rode a bicycle exclusively - no autos - for around 22 years out of a Quakerly-led concern about global climate change).

And here's a MIT Open Course Ware online class on global climate change: ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/15-023JSpring-2008/CourseHome.


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Sometimes Harbin Hot Springs reminds me of the life in the valley, without hot springs, which Ursula Le Guin describes so lyrically and luminously in "Always Coming Home" {California fiction}.

Into the Harbin pools soon ...