Ecotopian vision

Thought-provoking reading for a brand-new year
A friend of mine recently tipped me off to the existence of The Venus Project, an organization founded by a structural engineer/industrial designer named Jacque Fresco—whose lengthy résumé includes working as an aircraft designer for the Northrop Division of Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles, and as a designer in the Army Air Force Design and Development Unit at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio—and a former portrait artist, Roxanne Meadows.

The Venus Project—housed on a 25-acre research center in Venus, Fla.—“is an organization that proposes a feasible plan of action for social change, one that works toward a peaceful and sustainable global civilization,” according to its website.

“When one considers the enormity of the challenges facing society today, we can safely conclude that the time is long overdue for us to re-examine our values and to reflect upon and evaluate some of the underlying issues and assumptions we have as a society. This self-analysis calls into question the very nature of what it means to be human, what it means to be a member of a ‘civilization,’ and what choices we can make today to ensure a prosperous future for all the world’s people. …

“The Venus Project calls for a straightforward approach to the redesign of the culture, in which the age-old inadequacies of war, poverty, hunger, debt, environmental degradation and unnecessary human suffering are viewed not only as avoidable, but [also] totally unacceptable.”

The project proposes a shift from a money-based free-enterprise system to a “resource-based economy,” a “holistic socio-economic system in which all goods and services are available without the use of money, credits, barter or any other system of debt or servitude. All resources become the common heritage of all the inhabitants, not just a select few. The premise upon which this system is based is that the Earth is abundant with plentiful resources; our practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counterproductive to our survival. … In a resource-based economy, all of the world’s resources are held as the common heritage of all of Earth’s people, thus eventually outgrowing the need for the artificial boundaries that separate people. This is the unifying imperative.

“We must emphasize that this approach to global governance has nothing whatever in common with the present aims of an elite to form a world government with themselves and large corporations at the helm, and the vast majority of the world’s population subservient to them. Our vision of globalization empowers each and every person on the planet to be the best they can be, not to live in abject subjugation to a corporate governing body.”

Among the aims of resource-based economic system: “all-out efforts to develop new, clean and renewable sources of energy: geothermal; controlled fusion; solar; photovoltaic; wind, wave and tidal power; and even fuel from the oceans. … A resource-based economy must also be committed to the redesign of our cities, transportation systems and industrial plants, allowing them to be energy-efficient, clean and conveniently serve the needs of all people.”

Go to www.thevenusproject.com to learn more, and to watch the documentary, Paradise or Oblivion, a film that “details the need to outgrow the dated and inefficient methods of politics, law, business, or any other ‘establishment’ notions of human affairs, and use the methods of science, combined with high technology, to provide for the needs of all the world’s people. It is not based on the opinions of the political and financial elite or on illusionary so-called democracies, but on maintaining a dynamic equilibrium with the planet that could ultimately provide abundance for all people.”