Community:
A Functional Community
A Sustainable Community

and

Government

How should we govern our communities, states, and nations? How should we govern / guide our culture, education, ecology, economy, and health care to be the best at sustaining and enriching communities, people, and nature?

The best nations are full of thriving, sustainable, functional communities. The best worlds are full of thriving, sustainable, functional communities. May all the nations of earth be full of thriving, sustainable, functional communities. In every nation, may the federal and state levels of government support its communities to be thriving, sustainable, functional communities.

A Sustainable and Functional Community is ...

Many words have multiple meanings. People commonly use the word “community” in many ways: a professional community, a religious community, a music community, a sports community, the world community.  Also, sometimes people think of a community as people living near each other with roads and buildings, including a town hall, police and fire station, post office, library, school building, banks, and maybe a theater, and some shops and cafés.  Yet buildings and roads are merely the infrastructure, the visage of a community, the hollow shell of a community. A functional community is much more than just “people, buildings, and roads existing geographically near to each other.”  

A true community / a “functional community” / sustainable community is locally-self-sufficient. A functional community has community cooperation: people work together with each other and local nature to produce all the stuff (shelter, water, food, clothes, tools, art) that they need by using only local resources.  A community can be different sizes.  To start, think of a community as being only 1-mile in diameter.  Think of a small town surrounded by farms and wilderness (natural habitats). The town, farms, and wilderness are within that 1-mile radius. Think of a functional community as, for example, having 150 people, or 500 people. (Your community may have more than 500 people.) Think of a functional sustainable community as everyone in the community going to schools and jobs in that 1-mile diameter and getting all of their resources in a 1-mile diameter to get or make most of their own shelters, water, warmth, food, clothes, tools, and art; and simultaneously living, learning, working, and gathering resources in ways that conserve, sustain, enrich, and take care of the whole (1-mile-diameter) community landscape of people and nature, private and public properties, gardens and farms and parks and streetscapes and backyards and wild habitats.  That’s a community.  A community is locally self-sufficient.  A community has its own local credit union, generates its own energy, grows its own food, uses only local water, it disposes of its own garbage within the community landscape, makes its own school curriculum, and fashions its own moral sustainable community culture.

((A city is too large to be a community, but perhaps city neighborhoods or city blocks can be a community.  And city neighborhoods and blocks need to use gardens inside the city and farms just outside of the city to get their food and resources.  A city cannot exist without importing resources, but it is more community-oriented to import from within only 300 miles away, as supposed to over 1,000 miles away.  The more local the better.))

 

 

How to Establish and uphold a
Functional Community.
What helps a community to function, to thrive, and to have community cooperation and local-self-sufficiency? Answer: The community should pursue the 8 joint goals of CEEE: culture, education, ecology, and economy. The local government should help local schools, the local economy, and local businesses to pursue the 8 joint goals of CEEE.

8 Goals and Success Indicators of culture, education, ecology, and economy, in order to help communities, people, and nature.
1. ABC Garden of Community Education.
2. Community Standards for Schools. Get rid of state standardized testing.
3. Community Jobs. With community help, schools train students for jobs, schools offer community jobs to students and graduates, and schools help students and graduates to start up local small businesses.
4. Diminish Poverty.
5. Local-Self-Sufficiency.
6. Natural Resources.
7. Eco-Jobs: Ecologic and Economic.
8. Reduce Using Fossil Fuels.
Read more about education and economy:
Changes Needed in Education and Economy:
8 Goals and Success Indicators of culture, education, ecology, and economy.

 

 

Being local,
self-sufficient communities,
and local-community-cooperation ...

A person, who can walk and talk and earn a living for oneself, can better interact with the world than a helpless person, who has someone else talking for him and moving him around and constantly having to tend to him. Likewise, a community, which runs a locally-self-sufficient community economy for itself, can better interact with the world.

In recent modern times, “self-sufficient homesteading,” “local food,” being “local,” and using “low-tech tools” are regaining popularity. It’s not to become stupid iron-age or stone-age people of the past (if they were ever stupid), but it’s to be wise and usefully-skilled people in general, no matter what technology we use. To lose our skills and connection to local water, food, clothes, shelter, tools, and the nature of the community landscape, makes us dumb and disconnected. Today, although the electronic “world wide web,” many modern people feel increasingly lonely, isolated, and helpless. To be connected to the world, we have to stick our hands and feet into the local mud. Henry David Thoreau lived self-reliantly at Walden Pond; yet, many people consider him to be wise. Thoreau lived at alone at Walden for only 2 years; following, he lived again in society and engaged with society, such as by writing books about nature, etc.  Being skilled to be locally-self-sufficient helps a person to be wise, caring, skillful, helpful, and connected, and not ignorant, complacent, negligent, helpless, and isolated.

The modern local food movement to transition from getting food from 10,000 miles away, to 4,000 miles away, to 1,000 miles away, to within 100 miles away, to within 30 miles away, and even closer is part of that desire to have communities be more self-reliant.   The point of community self-reliance is not to live in isolation, but it is to be responsible, capable, (and to save energy!) and to NOT be helpless, greedy, destructive, and a burden to neighboring and distant communities by taking their wealth and resources.  Communities can occasionally help each other out for temporary periods of time, to overcome a brief crisis.  People can enjoy short occasional exchanges of stuff and ideas, within the region, state, nation, and globe.  It’s fun.  And it doesn’t take much info to get the gist of the condition of the world.  (Too much information is not fun and just becomes useless junk.)   Otherwise, a small group of people can be amazing and brilliant by itself, and doesn’t need billions of people helping them.   Large national governments and globalized large corporations stifle people and communities, more than help them.   Communities need to redevelop their empowerment and wealth, and national governments and globalized large corporations need to reduce their current power and influence and wealth.  A national government needs to be powerful enough to protect communities from being destroyed by globalized corporate capitalism, but a national government should not be so powerful that it destroys community self-reliance.  If national governments and corporations do anything, they should be supporting community self-reliance.   A national government may be good for some things such as postal mail, general environmental laws, court systems, helping to support foreign correspondence and peace, helping to support peace by supporting community self-reliance throughout the nation and world, etc.

A functional community is locally-self-sufficient.  Community people cooperate together to make sure that everyone in the community gets enough stuff (shelter, water, warmth, food, soap, clothes, and basic tools).  Community people cooperate together to grow and gather food and natural materials from local nature to handmake all of the needed supplies.  They do so fast enough and well enough so that everyone gets enough stuff (shelter, water, warmth, food, soap, and basic tools).  A functional community is locally-self-sufficient to be active, skillful, capable, responsible, sophisticated, loving, peaceful, moral, and ethical, as well as to not be helpless and desperately dependent on and a burden to other communities, near and far.   A functional community is locally-self-sufficient so it does not get too dependent on and too controlled by overgrown human organizations: overbearing institutions, centralized national governments, and globalized large corporations.  It is selfish, greedy, irresponsible, immoral, and unethical for any human organization to overgrow to greatly control and influence many communities.  

Think Global, Act Local: Global Love, Local Economy. Let’s globalize love, community love, brotherly love.   Loving social interaction and loving social cooperation could regularly happen between various communities, regionally to globally.  But regional, state, national, and globalized economic interaction and “cooperation” should rarely happen and only delicately happen.  No community should become economically dependent on (addicted to, under the influence of) any other community, any national government, or any globalized corporation.  No community should be taking value, natural wealth, and natural resources away from other communities.  Furthermore, no human institution, national government, or globalized corporation should be taking (including taking while “trading”) value, natural wealth, and natural resources away from any communities. Community love, family love, and brotherly love should be globalized; to the contrary, economics (especially money and market economics) should not be globalized.   On occasion and on rare emergencies, communities can help each other out with food, water, and vital supplies.  But no community, organization, national government, or globalized corporation should be regularly giving any food, water, and vital supplies to any community.  If human institutions, governments, and corporations do anything, they should help each community to culturally and economically function alone by itself. 
People should be self-sufficient, like communities should be self-sufficient.  People should learn to live self-sufficiently, not to live alone, but to be capable and skillful enough to help their families, community, and beyond.  People learn to live self-sufficiently so they are not a helpless burden to society.  Similarly, people learn to walk, talk, read, and write for themselves – again, it’s not so then they will live alone, but it is so they can be skillful to help their family, community, and beyond.  Being self-sufficient means being skillful, wise, capable, responsible, caring, aware, – and connected to the community, instead of to corporations.  Being self-sufficient does not usually mean a person will choose to live alone.

Encore: In recent modern times, “self-sufficient homesteading,” “local food,” being “local,” and using “low-tech tools” are regaining popularity. It’s not to become stupid iron-age or stone-age people of the past (if they were ever stupid), but it’s to be wise and usefully-skilled people in general, no matter what technology we use. To lose our skills and connection to local water, food, clothes, shelter, tools, and the nature of the community landscape, makes us dumb and disconnected. Today, although the electronic “world wide web,” many modern people feel increasingly lonely, isolated, and helpless. To be connected to the world, we have to stick our hands and feet into the local mud. Henry David Thoreau lived self-reliantly at Walden Pond; yet, many people consider him to be wise. Thoreau lived at alone at Walden for only 2 years; following, he lived again in society and engaged with society, such as by writing books about nature, etc.  Being skilled to be locally-self-sufficient helps a person to be wise, caring, skillful, helpful, and connected, and NOT ignorant, complacent, negligent, helpless, and isolated. A locally-self-sufficient functional community of community cooperation helps people to be wise, caring, skillful, helpful, and connected.

The ABC Holistic Education Garden helps students learn how to function as a community in community cooperation and to run a sustainable, functional community.
See ABC Garden
at www.z-hub.org/ABCgarden.html

 

ABC Garden Homepage
ABC Holistic Education Garden of Three Oaks, Michigan, USA. Community Education. See some of the class lessons learned at the ABC garden.
See ABC Garden
at www.z-hub.org/ABCgarden.html

 

Galien Valley Nature and Culture Program (GV-NCP).
Galien Valley Nature and Culture Program runs interdisicplinary classes about nature and culture. Community Education. Classes are informative and fun. Students learn how culture and nature relate to each other and how science, art, health, economy, etc. relate to nature too. Furthermore, classes include a few lessons on holistic skills as well as the ABCs of community, ecology, economy, science, art, and more.
See Galien Valley Nature and Culture Program website at www.z-hub.org/galienvalleyncp.html

 

Blog of Zoe at Galien Valley, about practicing holistic skills, science, art, teaching nature classes and the ABCs of 6 holistic skills, local wildlife, local native flowers, stewardship and landcare of local habitats, etc.
●See Zoe's Daily Blog website at
www.z-hub.org/zle-blog.html
●See Zoe's Monthly Blog website at
zoemonthlyblog.blogspot.com

 

z-hub homepage. See more information about every basic thing that is important to the well-being of people - and how everything links to everything else. See www.z-hub.org