Several months ago, he coined the term deep adaptation in a paper called ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy’, in which he draws consequences from current climate studies, offering a very grim perspective on our future reality.
Ever since, he has been advocating for actual adaptation to climate change, rather than hoping for miracles and mitigation. How will we deal with:
Mass migration
Massive food scarcity
Immensely more frequent and more extreme weather events
The sixth mass extinction event (the last killed the dinosaurs)
This presentation from November 5, 2018 was delivered to the ‘Foresight Group’ of the EU Commission in Brussels, Belgium. The assessment of our global prospects is extremely severe. The conclusions may be upsetting and perhaps life-changing for many. But the conclusions should not be taken in lightly.
How can 100 committed human beings, working as a network, positively transform a social system of 100 million, which is locked in self-destructive vicious circles?
With the use of technology, various industries have to change and adapt to the society of abundance. In this sense, Nathaniel presents several examples of cooperation initiatives that encourage participation and change, created by and for citizens, with the aim of improving the lives of the populations.
For the last several months, me and Diego Reimondez have been building up to a concrete implementation of the vision underlying the Decentralized Society Research Project: a broad vision for replicable, scalable, decentralised, autonomous and sustainable communities.
Concretely, we intend to found an intentional community based on sustainable co-housing, voluntary redistribution, economic viability, rural rehabilitation and forest ecology. For months, we have been building plans and forming a strong team to get our initiative off the ground.
It will be a challenging and complex project; although many of the components have been attempted separately, we will be pioneering the synergy amongst them. Nonetheless, the potential is immense.
We demonstrate and share the practical means to gain resilience against economic, climatic and social changes. Doing so, we offer people a narrative empowering them to both acknowledge and act upon climate change, directly. An antidote to the utter sense of powerlessness and political misrepresentation that they feel today.
Concretely, we are forming an international community of 3-8 households who will share the land and common spaces, who will each have their own house, their privacy and co-ownership of the project. We are looking to build natural, comfortable (warm, near-passive), affordable (partially self-build) wooden houses and to plant a commercial food forest around them. Besides that, we will have a co-working space, a shared kitchen, living room, quiet space/performance room, workshop/atelier and guest quarters.
Establishing principles and a vision for our community
Inviting and conversing potential community members
Co-creating an architectural plan and a forest design
Kickstarting a crowdfunding the for the forests implementation
Donate
In the meanwhile, we have already started a Dutch ‘foundation’, ready to receive donations. Stichting Sol Nascente has the statutory goal of transforming deteriorated landscapes into flourishing productive forest communities. Donations will be spend solely on forest management, education and related expenses - the funds will not be used to pay for people’s houses or communal facilities.
Any contributions, ahead of our crowdfunding later this year, will be immensely welcomed! You can donate using iDeal/SOFORT through https://bunq.me/solnascente or wire to IBAN NL16 BUNQ 2207 9045 04 to the name of ‘Stichting Sol Nascente’.
We intend to create a business ecosystem around the forest, so that we can process, market and distribute the raw products ourselves and, hopefully, get by doing it. However, we only expect to provide income for 2 of the households. Because of that, we are looking primarily for people with external income (e.g. remote or seasonal work), with particular skillsets required by our community.
Our core team consists of Diego, forest designer and writer, and Mathijs, mycelial connector and community architect. We are looking for a second forest designer, and a natural communicator (PT/EN, pref. identifies as feminine), who aids in community building and coordination, remediates conflict and gains happiness interacting with people all day long.
We are also looking for:
Advise on cooperative legal structures (specific to Portugal)
An experienced film maker to document our efforts and for our crowdfunding campaign
People with experience in natural construction, (bokashi) composting and payment for ecosystem services.
We have a limited budget available, we don’t expect people to work for free. However, enthusiasm and a deep understanding about our project is a must.
If you are interested, please read through the project description on our website, and: contact us! We’re happy to hear from you!