Colonizing

Colonizing Earth’s Grayish Brown Areas

By John Taylor; 2 January 2007

It has been puzzling me for a long time where to go with the Instauration Manifesto. Day after day I sit down at this writing station knowing deep down that this is my best chance to make a substantive contribution but at the same time I feel weak and utterly barren. I have no idea where to take it from here. I have collected over the past year or so more than enough material to fill a book, but every time I try to dig in and unify it in a final draft, it collapses like a delicate, overextended mine shaft. I must turn and run out choking, gasping for air. Then last night I had a dream.

I dreamed that I was regularly visiting Toronto where I stayed relatively cheaply as a paying guest of the Mississauga tribe, the inhabitants of the New Credit Reserve not far from here, near Caledonia. They had somehow settled their land claims to Canada's fourth largest city, Mississauga, and had built a large hotel complex on their land in that city. The place included not only your usual accommodation and entertainment amenities but also certain spiritual and other facilities related to and teaching about their traditional lifestyle. I had been going there regularly whenever I needed to be in Toronto and though in real life I dread going to the big city, this native place made me actually look forward to it.

When I awoke from this dream I knew that here was the answer to my desperate prayers for guidance. Eureka! Here is the end of my writer's block. To give you an idea how bad the block was, the following paragraph was all I could write after trying all day yesterday:

"Viewed from space, our planet looks blue, since most of its surface is covered in ocean. If we restrict our view to the land, though, fertile areas turn up green and deserts look grayish brown. A surprisingly large percentage of the Earth's land mass, especially near the equator in Africa and Asia, is grayish brown rather than green. These receive the most energy from the sun and by rights should support the most agriculture, provide the most energy from solar panel farms, and support the largest populations on earth. Yet they are deserted. What is worse, the brown areas are spreading. Previously certain desert ecosystems were capable of supporting a surprisingly broad diversity of life; some, in Australia and Mexico, even rival the rain forests for variety if not biomass. But as the planet heats up lakes are drying and the barren regions are as devoid of life as the moon. As what little water remained underneath these desert swathes is evaporated by unrelenting heat, the challenge of re-greening and colonizing these arid regions is almost as challenging as colonizing the moon."

What I was thinking about was a sequel something like this:

The mound housing complexes could be built simultaneously in the rich, developed world and in the desert colonies built in virgin, empty territory. This would offer advantages to both areas. Mounds in the desert would offer a living laboratory, a chance to build and live in mounds built under the most difficult-to-insulate conditions in the world. If a mound can be kept cool there, it can just as easily be kept warm in developed areas, which tend to be in colder, more northern places. At the same time, their construction in wealthy places would enable high-technology enhancements to their standardized living units. Economies of scale would allow these innovations to transfer to mounds in deserts and poor regions without delay.

The Sine Qua Non of it all is the formation of a world government. A global federalism would offer the awards and benefits of world citizenship to all those who live in mound complexes. An inhabitant of a mound development in Canada would be able to move his or her dwelling unit directly to a mound development in the Gobi desert without going through all the hassles of customs and immigration. It would be in everybody’s interest to see that as many people in as many people as possible live in mound developments, since they would be much easier on the environment than our present, wasteful buildings and streets.

The question immediately arises: What would prevent massive emigration from populous but poor areas into desert mound developments, followed in turn by mass migration from there into mound developments in rich countries, taking advantage of the privileges of world citizenship that mound living offers? The answer is that the entire lifestyle of mound dwellers will be scientifically designed from the ground up. Since the privileges, rights and freedoms of world citizens would already be highly regulated and records kept of everything -- much more so than what we are used to under a decrepit nationalist state -- it would not be possible to dwell where one cannot be self-supporting. Most important, areas deemed by computer calculations to need us most and jobs that best take advantage of our skills and talents would due to subtle wage and price adjustments also be the most economical places to live in. Besides, the lifestyle benefits and amenities in a mound development would be so superior to anywhere else, even what can be offered in the richest countries, that few will worry about whether their mound is in the Sahara or Gobi deserts, or in New York, Paris or Tokyo.

After my dream, I can now add this to it all: The perfect people to sponsor and host mound developments everywhere, in city and desert, are the world's aboriginal peoples. They already have many of the prime requisites for living in a mound development, they tend to have a deep reverence for the environment and a tradition of living in harmony with the land, plus they value communal living and shared property. All these are prime requisites for mound living. As soon as a world government forms, they could be given automatic rights as world citizens, get first dibs at living in and designing mound developments, receive IPO shares in the common property of these places (which would prove much more valuable than all their land claims, in the long run) and they would also share in the obligations of world citizenship, like paying a percentage of taxes directly to the world government. That is how it should be done.