Nutshell Earth
In the comfort of our homes or apartments or our discomfort beneath a highway underpass or steam tunnel below a city street, each of us is surrounded by products and services that come to us from hundreds and thousands and, in many cases nowadays, as much ten thousand miles away. We possess these goods, but we don’t make these goods. In fact, nearly all the goods and services we consume we have never participated in producing, don’t know how to produce them, and, in most cases, would not care to know how to do so.
The fact that we have access to literally millions of products but produce none of them to sustain our daily lives is the primary driver of hyper-mass production, mass energy consumption, unsustainable resource extraction, farmland degradation on every continent, rampant pollution, low wage employment worldwide, the concentration of wealth in few hands, and a whole host of social pathologies.
The world has been our oyster, as the cliché goes, since humans have walked on this earth, but we are now consuming our oyster billions of tiny bites at a time. We’re doing this because we demand thousands of products useful or frivolous, we produce nothing for ourselves, and we depend on untold numbers of people somewhere else to produce those goods from increasingly scarce resources and get those goods to us by land, sea, or air from a world away. In so doing, we produce appalling mountains of waste and squander energy, forests, lands, and precious water.
The future will not be like this. It can’t be. This consumptive model, based on unending economic growth, is impossible, as most of us now understand instinctively.
But if we do wish to move away from a global capitalistic mono-culture based on endless and increasingly needless consumption, how do we get off that treadmill? What replaces that model that’s been with us at least since the dawn of the industrial revolution?
Our increasingly desperate situation can be mitigated and then solved by adopting a form of human organization and habitation I’ll term Nutshell Earth.
Just as a nutshell provides all the goods that a tree needs to sustain itself until it can grow into a great oak 200 and 300 years hence, Nutshell Earth communities would be organized to provide most goods and services, using local resources, so that all the inhabitants might enjoy full security and abundance and have virtually no deleterious impacts on the biosphere, and, in fact, could actually enrich it.
Nutshell communities would be organized around self-reliance and self-sufficiency, sustained by local resources. In that sense they would be tribal villages, wherein everyone would work in concert in a local environment to provide for the other members of the community. Such small towns would work to provide their own food, much of their own building materials, their own power and heating, a lion’s share of their own household furnishings and utensils, and so on. Because a Nutshell hamlet would produce the great majority of its own goods and services from within, transportation needs would be greatly reduced, fewer vehicles needed moving far fewer miles. Since a Nutshell Earth villages would require much less inputs than typical urban or suburban communities, their needs and therefore their impacts on the wider world would be greatly reduced.
Perhaps such a concept sounds utopian. But, in reality, throughout the 200,000-year history of our species on this planet, we have lived in small self-reliant, self-sufficient groups within local environments, providing all goods and services for ourselves. The earliest agriculture-based villages were entirely self sufficient. Even as late as 1900, the United States harbored self-contained Shaker villages that were exceedingly productive and provided virtually every creature comfort for their residents.
Among the benefits of living within a productive, tribe-like Nutshell Earth community would be the development of internal support systems for members that are difficult or very expensive to come by in American society today, such as child care or elder care, and routine care of the sick or injured. Pooled resources, cooperative industry and profit sharing, organic farm production and healthy diets, the raising of homes and community buildings by community members, low utility and transportation costs, all would accrue to Nutshell village members.
Something else would accrue to the citizenry of such tribe-like towns. They would enjoy a sense of independence, empowerment, and freedom from economic exploitation that few of us can imagine today. Such villagers would have stepped off the treadmill of global capitalism and thrown off the yoke of dependence on strangers in the far corners of the world to provide their own goods and services and even livelihoods. Nutshell citizens, once their communities were up and running well, could now control their own destinies in the embrace of their fellow villagers and could withstand all manner of tribulation that nature and humankind can throw against the lone individual.
