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Thanks for the example on trees. I guess that is the value in a symbolic project like "The Long Now", to help get people thinking about that:
    http://longnow.org/

I've found my optimism has increased with trying to list all the things I'm thankful for before I got to sleep each day, and also getting more sunlight (and vitamin D) and eating better, etc..

The good news is, lots of people are planting all sorts of "trees", like in that Paul Hawken book:
    http://www.blessedunrest.com/
"A leading environmentalist and social activist's examination of the worldwide movement for social and environmental change
    Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.
    Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another."

But he says in that book how unaware everyone is of what other people around them are doing that is positive. I guess the mainstream media does not focus much on those planting "trees"? Although, maybe, sometimes focusing attention on new trees would get them vandalized? So that inattention may not be all bad.

The number one thing suggested in the book "Small is Possible" (by George McRobie about EF Schumacher's work, from 1981) is to figure out what is going on around you.

Maybe we need a Google Maps for good news about new trees being planted? :-) But maybe we just need something simpler and more local.

Thank you too, in return. I just used that point on fish and water writing to someone else today, coincidentally.

I've been trying to get Richard Stallman and the FSF to consider supporting a campaign (suggesting maybe run by me for pay, so I'm biased, but OK if it was someone else) for fostering the cataloging, creation, and discussion of free software that explores conventional and alternative heterodox economics for a 21st century of abundance for all, based on this appeal:
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged. This situation reflects the institutional power that the unconditional proponents of main-stream thought continue to exert on university teaching and research. This domination, propagated by the so-called top universities, dates back at least a quarter of a century and is effectively global. However, the very fact that this paradigm persists despite the current crisis, highlights the extent of its power and the dangerousness of its dogmatic character. Teachers and researchers, the signatories of the appeal, assert that this situation restricts the fecundity of research and teaching in economics, finance and management, diverting them as it does from issues critical to society."

Also related indirectly:
"RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo

So, it is more than a lack of visionaries. The world has no shortage of would-be visionaries, like Paul Hawken documents:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
"Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide."

The problem is more like visionaries are filtered out or bought off or changed or isolated or starved or turned into wage slaves doing unrelated stuff to survive. Example:
"The murdering of my years: artists & activists making ends meet"
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_murdering_of_my_years.html?id=iBA7vACOwngC

Related articles on how dissent in academia is systematically suppressed:
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

Yet, things progres anyway, as a tribute to the better side of human nature. Here are examples of GPL'd software that could serve as a base for moving further into exploring alternative economics:
http://p.seppecher.free.fr/jamel/
http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.ryzom.com/en/

There is also a lot of other softwar

Some things have improved, some things have gotten worse. It's hard to say, overall, that most people in the USA are much happier than the Haudenosaunee (Iroqois) were 500 years ago, even living a bit longer perhaps on average. Are those alive now in the USA much happier or more physically fit than the Arawak in Haiti who Columbus and his successors wiped out?

See, for example:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
"They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus."

So, sure, we have fancy laptops and the internet, and that is great. But do most of us have real families, real communities, and meaningful work anymore?

See also:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

We can't go back to those days and keep our big populations. But we can at least honor the memory of what was good about those times, and try to bring that goodness into the 21st century. Some people are trying:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/

Overall, I think Eric Schmidt was trying, too. I'm sort of sorry now I made fun of him and Knol here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/5bd385feed4127d7
"""
Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against Virgle?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense.
-----
Commander #1: We've analyzed their attack on Knol, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your Golden Parachute standing by?
Governor Schmidt: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.
"""

Still, if he had listened to the points I was trying to make about Google and Post-Scarcity, maybe he would have had more success?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"This is an email I posted to the Project Virgle email list. Project Virgle was an April Fool's joke by Google and Virgin, which many did not see as that funny. ... Essentially, by focusing on "profit" (and so Empire to defend that profit and related "ownership" and "equity") this is the kind of deadly farce of the bubble of Empire that Google and Virgin are (in jest) proposing bringing to Mars. It's just the "uns

Thanks for reporting me! :-)

My rationale for that:
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en
"Maybe I'm trying to make the OM list the post-scarcity social consciousness raising equivalent for global intelligence analysts of "The Funniest Joke In the World"? ... Although, obviously, that is a metaphor, and my objective is analysts being reborn mentally as post-scarcity beings instead of any dying physically as depicted in that comedy sketch. The best way to deal with potential enemies is to make them into friends, a strategy idea lost on the previous US administration. That is why the USA has so many more enemies than it used to have compared to the 9/11 days of "We are all Americans"..."

I may be going down someday from some random martinet unwilling to understand about intrinsic security or mutual security or true patriotism, but I hope the message in my email sig will continue to spread, and the world will someday be a better place for all our children and relatives and friends and so on across the globe. :-)
    http://www.blessedunrest.com/

And along the way, I hope more potential enemies will be turned into friends, just like Tadodaho eventually combed the snakes from his hair in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) story:
        http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html

My sig had to be shortened for slashdot; the longer version is: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."

Which then implies, eventually:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
    http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives

I'm hoping for more of a gradual non-violent evolution into these changes over the next twenty to thirty years, myself:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html

But, with all the ironies of people using these technologies of abundance to produce super fancy weapons like military robots to fight over percieved scaricty, it is worriesome. Rather than military robots to enforce a social order based on gettign peopel to worl like robots, why not just build robots to do any work people don't want to do voluntarily in the first place?

If it was a "revolution", think of it on the order of women getting the right to vote in the USA,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dPF0SGh_PQ
or the UK outlawing slavery (with compensation to the owners and little violence, prompted by the Quakers, compared to the bloodbath in the USA over that),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism#Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
or the "computer revolution",
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521#
and so on.

I'm not disagreeing though with your point that the potential is there for great violence -- and not just in the streets, but also abortions, domestic violence, suicides, and so on. How can we prevent that?

I'm trying in my own nutty way to recruit the global intelligence community to help with a peaceful changeover. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319

But ultimately, some sort of change will happen regardless:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Still, it might happen with less bloodshed if more people got involved sooner and understood the basic issues better.
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

The USA already spends about US$800 a citizen a year between schooling, social security, and welfare. Why not just scrap all those programs and give every citizen a check for US$800 a month as a basic income? A family of four could then just about scrape by somewhere rural, and given all their spare time, and they could homeschool or purchase tutoring or private school lessons. Public school buildings could be turned into library-like learing centers. Teachers could become private tutors or just live frugally off their basic income. People would have more free time to help their elderly neighbors, too, like bringing over stuff from their gardens, even if old people got less than their current amount. And so on. Probably this would fly best with seniors if just everyone got the current social security amounts though (no one wants to get less), which might mean more taxes.

And the USA already spends more for Medicare and Medicad per capita than other countries need to cover their entire population with better results, so health care could be extended to all with some better management and a focus on better diet, curing vitamin D deficiency, and building healthier "BlueZones" infrastructure, which would all save sick care costs, making single payer he

It says somewhere on the CIA public website (or used to) essentially that if you are applying for a job there, you should not tell anyone. I guess, the first rule of the CIA is no one works there, except Valery Plame. :-) But the CIA suggests that in part for the reasons you imply, as it can presumably make people a target (although it also would complicated covert things). Of course, who is not a target in some way in this world? Things become an issue of "risk management", like so much in life. It's unfortunate that the US has such an organization that mixes up sensemaking, spying, and covert operations. I think a "COIA" (Central Open Intelligence Agency?) that just worked in public would be much more effective for US security. :-) Maybe to complement the "Department of Peace" Dennis Kucinich and others have worked towards? :-) Although various different agencies and parts of agencies all do part of that task, but there may be poor integration of all that. And, of course, nothing is going to work right as long as our economic religion is so messed up (and a top priority has to be rethinking economics for the 21st century so it stops being primarily a faith-based dogmatic religion that denies it is a religion. :-) Related:
"The Market as God"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm

As to me and my funding, under our current socioeconomic paradigm, I'm right now mostly one step above Kryten as a toilet-scrubbing homeschooling stay-at-home Dad, supported by a wife doing data-analysis consulting for "civilian" corporations these days, where my hobbies include developing FOSS software, writing long essays like this that hardly anyone reads, taking care of three elderly chickens, and taking part in a global "Blessed Unrest" http://www.blessedunrest.com/ towards saving a world that, way more often than not, is uninterested in being saved from its own internal contradictions and ironies. A world going mad from simple things like vitamin D deficiency and not eating enough vegetables, fruits, and legumes:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html

Best job I ever had. :-)

But if the CIA came along and offered me a big grant to do publicly available FOSS Intelligence software and related content, would I ask my wife to do even more of the homeschooling and chicken care than she does already, or maybe even hire a multilingual tutor for some of the time and/or buy a toilet scrubbing robot? Probably. :-) How's that for ethics? :-) Would I rather such work was funded some other way? Sure. We tried a bit and failed with the NSF and NASA:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Maybe we did not try hard enough perhaps... I have to admire these Concord people for their success and doing stuff mostly the right way (at least, as right as you can be if focused mostly on the needs of compulsory schools):
http://www.concord.org/

Politics and FOSS can make strange bedfellows. A few years ago there was a slashdot story on someone doing FOSS who lost a military-related contract after he said he took military money because it meant one less cruise missile or something. But he was right in a way. Imagine what some FOSS developers could do with the time otherwise made available by the money tied up in just one Tomahawk cruise missile (US$6

Looking up your reference, an interesting point was made in a comment here: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100923/01464111127/more-stories-of-people-arrested-for-making-joke-threats-on-social-networks.shtml
"The police will not be able to know anything they can just sit and wait until someone make something real or they can go in before and get every joker out there and maybe get that one that was not joking. It is not like screaming fire in a theater, is called frustration venting, take that away and probably more people will snap."

What do humans do when they think there are under 24X7 surveillance and always careful about what they to an inhumanly high standard of performance? What percentage of them will just suddenly snap with no warning? It's an interesting question. So, the security procedures may in that sense ironically make the security problem much worse.

Though with that said, I can see why the police were concerned given what Joe Lipari wrote... I guess, as a species, we're not adapted to operate in a storytelling environment (either as speakers or listeners) where whatever we say in a few seconds can be immediately viewed by billions of people and even more machines and archived for all eternity? Maybe we need a more formal policy for retractions? Or saying, I was just joking?

It's the usual problem of asking what kind of society do you want to live in for yourself and your family? When is "more safety" actually making things "less safe" when you pass even the point of diminishing returns to get to the point of negative returns? Of course, since there is a lot of money on the line (whether for programs or for individual's jobs in law enforcement) that can drive more and more excessive responses, until the entire system starts to crumble. We may need significant socio-economic change before then, such as I outline here:
    http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives

In the past when a society crumbled people could just go live in the woods or jungles because they had the skills and the power of failing cities to damage their surroundings was limited (like salting the land locally). But now, with nuclear weapons and such, when societies fail, there is much more at risk. And also, people no longer know how to live off the land, and there are so many people that we are dependent on our complex social systems for food, water, and so on. So, we really need to solve these issues rather than letting things come to a collapse. But the good news is, many people are working on related issues:
    http://www.blessedunrest.com/
    http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about

One suggestion by David Brin is that surveillance should go both ways:
    "The transparent society: will technology force us to choose between privacy and freedom?"
    http://books.google.com/books?id=UzpNEpln8V4C

And tangentially related to that, by me: :-)
    "The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1

Do you have any facts to back up your guesses here?

And do you have any idea how much land has already been devoted to things like roads and related right-of-ways (hint, enough in the USA to produce all the power we need).

From here:
http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/AreaRequired1000.jpg
"Surface area required to power the world with zero carbon emissons and with solar panels alone. ... The large square is the Saharan Desert (1/4 of the overall 2030 required area) would power all of Europe and North Africa. Though very large, it is still 18 times less than the total area of that desert."

It looks about right to me. :-) And that's probably with solar panels of 10% efficiency (the kind in production). With 40% efficient solar panels, the land use would shrink by a factor of four (or two times in each direction).

I'd be curious to see such a map of land currently devoted to fossil fuel extraction and consumption in power plants. I'd expect it would be roughly the same in overall area, maybe larger. The same for land use devoted to road use. Or land use devoted to cities.

Note that as they say on that picture; "The 19 contiguous areas show what would be a reasonable responsibility for various parts of the world. They would be further divide many times..."

So, that picture is to give you a sense of scale, but people might put panels on rooftops or over parking lots in order to have more local energy security or lower energy transmission costs. So, we might never have big sites like those, but if we did, those look like good places to put them.

I found interesting the note on the front page of that Land Art Generator site: "Art has the ability to create movements and stimulate creative dialogue. The artist community has long taken a critical approach to the problems of energy use and production, which has helped to open the public eye to the severity of the problems facing us. The time is now for artists to go further and take an active role in solving the problem through their own work."

So, all part of "Blessed Unrest" that peer production takes part in:
    http://www.blessedunrest.com/

Anyway, I don't know why people keep trotting out that "density" issue.

By the way, if you like nuclear power, take a look at this:
    http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/

If we use atomic power for more peaceful ends than harmful (like in medicine, or for structural analysis with x-rays), it is precisely because of aspects of the collective human heart that Einstein referred to. A lot of people out there are trying. But it might have been hard to imagine that in the 1940s. Examples are in this book:
"Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming"
    http://www.blessedunrest.com/
"Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice.
From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide."

Slashdot itself is an example of this phenomenon; in the Slashdot case, rather than using computers to target and kill supposed "enemies" using flying robots, post-scarcity computer technology is being used to support dialogue creating a learning community which is empowering people to make life-affirming changes in the world, to make more of the world into friends. The best way to get rid of an "enemy" is to become friends.

As another comment suggest, producing water is easy if you have power. Last week there was a "post-scarcity" way talked about on slashdot relying on cleverness:
    "Frank Herbert's Moisture Traps May Be a Reality "
    http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/09/2058241
"In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune,' Frank Herbert envisioned the Fremen collecting water from the air via moisture traps and dew collectors. Science Daily reprints a press release from the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, where scientists working with colleagues from Logos Innovationen have developed a closed-loop and self-sustaining method, no external power required, for teasing the humidity out of desert air and into potable water."

Ask yourself, why are you saying there is a water problem when this article was here last week? Could it be true for almost everything else, too? Energy? Mining? Recycling? Medicine? Education? And so on? There is so much happening out there by so many people:
    http://www.blessedunrest.com/
"Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another."

The technology is not enough though. It only makes easier the task of social movements. There is enough to go around now, and there has always been as a globe for thousands of years. But it is easier to think about sharing abundance when there is more of it.

Actually, ...

When is someone going to make a forum for discussing what should be? There's a real challenge for the wiki... creating tools for collaborating on a common view of the future rather than the past.

So, several of us are considering working on that right now, at this moment. We're just off the phone with David Korten. While it seems we won't be able to work with him directly, we're thinking about making a wiki seeded with the works of David Korten, Anodea Judith, Paul Hawken, Michael Dowd, and, ... ...well, just whoever wants to show up and collaborate, using Tom Atlee's storycology project as a frame.

I don't know that a single common view can develop by wiki, but I think a lot of major threads can be identified, mapped, collected, and promoted, and I do see a basic coherence to much of the work going on today in activist, Open Source work, economics, neurology, science, and so on-- there is a zeitgeist.

Normal discussion forums have to be read from beginning to end to make sense. A wiki statically records the present state of a conversation in summary form so that anyone can pick up from there if they don't have time to read all of what's been said before, which is kind of like what a politician's platform does. It seems like it should be possible to figure out how to make that work... or a fun experiment to try.

Well, you may want to consider our research into LackOfReworking in wiki. See also: CategoryReworking.

That said, I've never seen a better medium for making sense of the world.

I got all excited when I saw a political wiki and thought "maybe this is it". But it wasn't, and I figured I'd at least record the fact that I had hoped it might be.

My belief is that: If there is something really cool, and you can't understand why somebody hasn't done it before, it's because you haven't done it yourself.

I'd like to invite you to share your idea or vision with us on CommunityWiki, because it sounds like something we may be able to do something with.