LEARNING FROM HISTORY
Why Project 2030?
How and why community gardens during the 1930s Depression could inspire humanity’s next great leap
Project 2030 is a world-war-scale grassroots mobilisation to feed the hungry, house the homeless, bring hope to the hopeless and shift the system.
The Problems Project 2030 Embraces
“Life has a dynamic way of oscillating between problems and solutions, which seems to keep evolution happening.” — paraphrased from Elisabet Sahtouris
Problem 1: Systemic Failure
The systems we put in place to make life better and richer for all of us are broken. While there may have been a time when they produced spectacular progress, they’re now producing the exact opposite of what everyone wants: widespread abundance.
The global depression triggered by COVID-19 shows that the 1970s experiment — architected by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek — has failed. We’re witnessing late stage civilisational collapse.
Far from being exceptional, collapses are a regular occurrence in class-based societies, where competitive behaviour drives over-use of resources to the point of collapse. Don’t protest collapse; build the new.
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” ― Napoleon Bonaparte
Problem 2: The Difficulty of System Change
The idea of a global reset isn’t new. There are many, many initiatives talking about a shift. Some, like the WEFs Great Reset, refer to “the new normal,” which is really just an attempt to breathe new life into the dying system.
Others are taking about a shift from a system which incentivises and rewards competitive behaviour, towards a system which can reward and incentivize collaborative, regenerative behaviour. This kind of shift is evolutionarily coherent, which means it follows the patterns of healthy living species.
As many of these system reset initiatives have discovered, systemic change is really, really difficult. The very simple reason is incentive: to date, no one has proposed a meaningful enough reason to change our entrenched behaviours.
The economic lockdown of 2020 was an attempt to force a change in behaviour (the stick approach). Project 2030 explores how an attractor can achieve the same behavioural change (the carrot approach).
Problem 3: Access to Solutions
The solution to every single one of the planet’s challenges already exist. However, those who need access to solutions the most (those who have been failed by the system — the hungry, homeless and hopeless) don’t know about the latest conversations happening, both in terms of research and teaching. The extent to which access has been denied became evident while investigating The Perversion of Science.
The Opportunity
The growing number of people protesting the broken system — as well as those excluded from the system through mass unemployment — represent significant human capital and potential, when provided a meaningful incentive to change entrenched behaviour.
The key issue addressed by Project 2030 is how to attract this vast base of human potential away from cities (which are maximised for competition), towards pockets of unused land or marginalised communities (which are maximised for collaboration), using food as the incentive.
In other words, Project 2030 feeds the hungry and houses the homeless as a short term objective, with a longer term objective of achieving a systemic shift (also known as showing a middle finger to oppressors).
The Solution
We do this by making available an easy-to-implement local food production and circular economy framework, which any community can adapt and use. The concept is based on Victory Gardens established during the Great Depression, but has been significantly updated to include emerging food production, complementary currency and other technologies.
Who is Project 2030 for?
- Grassroots activist movements who want to focus their efforts on longterm, systemic shift;
- Protest movements who want to invest their energy in building rather than breaking;
- Community leaders who want to move beyond problem solving to turning their community into a sought-after destination or settlement;
- Isolated settlements who want to build thriving, circular economies;
- Intentional communities who want to revive their initial vision, which may now be floundering;
- Corporate Social Responsibility leaders who want to do more than pay lip service with the corporate giving.
Next: Overview
