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Project 2030 Overview

Leveraging the unfolding food shortages to jumpstart humanity’s transition

Central American migrants on the road in Escuintla, Mexico, April 20, 2019. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)

After many years of involvement in the sensemaking and systemic shift space, it’s become fairly obvious that no systemic change will occur without a meaningful incentive — it is simply too difficult to attempt it without a really compelling micro-reason. The macro-reason of systemic collapse is too difficult for most groups to get their head around.

Despite many research projects, theoretical models and grassroots initiatives working hard to find alternative ways of governing human activities, none were sufficiently able to scale up with workable alternatives when the COVID-19 lockdown occurred.

In the face of no compelling incentive for change, the global COVID-19-induced depression — expected by the World Bank, IMF, Federal Reserve, FAO, UN, WEF, Investec, a host of well-known economists around the world, and even Wikipedia to be worse than the Great Depression — could very well provide the required incentive.

How and why? The basic concept is inspired by how living organisms solve complex problems, specifically bacteria navigating complex mazes to find food. As you watch the 2min video below, hold an analogy in your mind where the navigating slime mould is the equivalent of climate-induced human migration.

The proposition is that locally produced food, using the latest food technologies, could very well provide the much needed power to transcend paradigms, the most effective systemic leverage point identified by Donella Meadows.

Project 2030 is the first open source and locally adaptable attempt to provide community leaders anywhere in the world comprehensive how-to information to feed their communities — without relying on the global food distribution system, government handouts or charitable mechanisms. For particularly motivated communities, it also provides a way to build a thriving local circular economy which attracts human capital away from the rapidly crumbling 1970 human experiment (capitalism, cities and competition).

Project 2030 sets out practical steps for community leaders to plan local food production and trade, attract funding, establish new forms of governance and run socially just circular societies. The intention is to also explore how projects can start small and scale from a tiny group of concerned individual households, to small local neighbourhoods to midsize villages, to whole new human settlements with the potential to replace cities.

Project 2030 is based on 2 extensive bodies of deep systemic transition research, which are in turn based on even further proven academic research. It also takes inspiration from a historical social precedent and an emerging new narrative.

1. P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival by Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation. This report explores how shared perma-circular supply chains, post-blockchain distributed ledgers, protocol cooperatives, and three new forms of post-capitalist accounting, could very well save the planet.
2. Founding Startup Societies: A Step-by-Step Guide by Mark Frazier and Joe McKinney. The authors of this guidebook wanted to radically lower barriers for creating new societies. This exhaustive manual — the first of its kind — explains twenty key steps for creating a Startup Society, covering everything from ideation to planning to running a full-scale city.
3. Victory Gardens were vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens planted at private residences and public parks in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany during World War I and World War II.
4. Bioregional Commons is an exceptionally broad and deep philosophy that aggregates a myriad of visions, projects and experiments that model potential future civilisational forms. The common theme in this evolving organism of thought and practice is an anti-rivalrous, anti-fragile civilisation. Much of the philosophy revolves around a shift from ownership to unenclosability (the commons) and a shift from globalism to bioregionalism.

These four concepts have been simplified and adapted to achieve 2 objectives:

1. Short-term (2–10 years): Quickly tackle the current menace to food access by establishing resilient local food systems. In meeting a short-term need, seed new forms of social engagement at the local level, which eventually become the new dominant norm.
2. Long-term (5–50 years): Develop the emerging social norms sufficiently to provide a compelling reason to divert the migrations currently occurring into established cities towards new socially just circular societies instead.

In other words, Project 2030 provides a suggested pathway for the evolution of the human species from competition (represented by cities) to collaboration (represented by new forms of commons-type settlements). The pathway is not prescriptive. Instead it encourages local variations, which are fed back into an easily accessed repository of global examples.

Section summary of Project 2030

This is a work in progress, but there is enough of a framework in place for community leaders to get building. This is what’s coming.

• Section 1: Background: A concise overview of the rationale underpinning this approach and a brief overview of P2P Accounting and Founding Startup Societies.
• Section 2: The Mind-Virus Induced Food Shortage: An exploration of the Native American cannibalistic spirit wetiko, who embodies greed and excess and has driven human development since the Agricultural Revolution. Explains why systemic change cannot be achieved within established structures like cities and federal governments and forms of governance like democracy and communism. Shows how entirely new ways of thinking are required.
• Section 3: Tools and Technologies: Explores currently available and tested methods of integrated, fair, local, and regenerative ecosystems of food production, even in areas where food cannot currently be produced.
• Section 4: Seeding the Idea and Building Momentum: How to set a bold vision for your community, create your documents from a set of templates, build a team, inspire the wider community, establish value flows and raise funding from external stakeholders.
• Section 5: Developing a Local Market to a World-Class Society: Explores the longer term possibility of developing a currently impoverished community into a highly desirable location for human settlement.