Today many many groups have put together programs to influence government and involve fellow citizens by displaying irrefutable evidence of change happening right now, not in the future.

Still a majority of our fellow humans are either unaware of advance of global warming or simply refuse to be concerned about it. Many of those people are unaware of acceptable alternative practices and technologies to what they are used to. They believe the question is, “Will most of humanity choose to go without electric light?”

The question the new greens are asking is, “How do we replace the coal-burning plants to ensure base power needs are met while cutting deeply into CO2 emissions?”

Stewart Brand, launching his new book Whole Earth Discipline, spoke of the need to “rethink green” and accept the lesser of two evils – small, 4th generation nuclear power that has negligible carbon footprint compared to coal plants.

I was part of a very vocal anti-Nuke group in the 70s, before and after Three-mile Island. I did research in the library of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency. I was strongly opinionated. But I’ve also seen and been part of huge advances in technology over the past 30 years. And I’m convinced that coal could destroy us.

So, I hope we will all keep an open mind and get our priorities straight. We don’t have time to argue the fine points for years on end. We need to see and stimulate real action and change.

• The convergence of local needs with global media
• The next necessary stage of local collaboration
• Proactive and urgent local engagement to build resilience in a fast-changing world
• Awareness that all local communities can and should share new knowledge

Extreme Community is going beyond simply living in proximity; it is a consciousness of local interdependence and shared fortunes.

Extreme Community is self-aware, not taken for granted. It asks its members to participate in influencing the collective destiny.

What is “3.0″ ?

XC Version 1.0 – people settle in villages and towns, fill complementary roles, build physical and social infrastructure, collaborate for survival an sustainability. Communities focus on what happens in their geographic sphere of influence.

XC Version 2.0 – people gather in virtual meeting places. They transcend their physical distance and isolation by forming “mind communities” through electronic connections and computers. They explore common interests and form relationships that bring real value and a sense of community lacking in their lives.

XC Version 3.0 – people living in proximity and facing threatening change meet and collaborate in both physical and virtual environments. They share knowledge and coordinate activities, build online tools and workspaces to extend their collaborative powers. They share and learn with other local communities facing similar challenges.

Where am I going with this?

Think locally, act locally. Then go regional, then global.

I’m beginning with where I live and building out from there.

I’ll report here. Once we achieve escape velocity, we open the x-community.org site.

Extreme communities must be closely involved with the actions of government at all levels. Government – to the extent that it is honest and open to the scrutiny of its citizens – will serve vital roles in re-localized communities.

At the current Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., the importance of bringing its impact and input down to the street level has been emphasized by some key participants. Note this report from the Good.is blog, describing what success will depend on:

A sense of place, especially local
Google’s chief economist Hal Varian reminded us that the advantage of a federal system is that we have “fifty state-level civic experiments going at once.” So even though government can handle issues at a massive scale, its role as partner and service provider is best done locally. Street level makes things meaningful to people, which is a refrain we heard throughout the day. When Tom Steinberg introduced MySociety’s FixMyStreet, he made it clear that people just want to raise their civic gripes one street at a time—and they don’t think about what inter-agency dynamics take place behind the scenes to put things right. FixMyStreet’s self-generating archive suggests the range of concerns it tackles, from the pedestrian (potholes, fly-tipping) to the comical (now thankfully addressed), but also builds legitimacy for the authorities that address them. Later in the day, Monica Guzman, a news-gatherer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, lauded the grass-roots authority that citizen bloggers now command in local news journalism for the city, simply because readers appreciate that these reporters live down the block.

For years I’ve agreed with those who see the necessity of greater localization – more interdependency and collaboration among people living in the same place. There is a trend in this direction, fueled by undeniable evidence that we can no longer rely on national government or even state government to fill the social service and infrastructure gaps. At the same time, we face rising fuel prices and limits on carbon emissions that make transportation less affordable.

Where we live is becoming less trivial to our lives. How we live together in our home locales is becoming more vital. But we are out of practice.

Having been part of two fairly revolutionary experiments in community, I have some rare perspective on how bootstrapped communities form and mature. I can’t say that The Farm and The WELL were successes in terms of their original planning. But they did demonstrate characteristics of what I call extreme community as compared the norm - heightened mutual interdependency and super practical communications.

I’m going to be exploring this concept here in the blog, and I’ll soon have up a site for x-community.org (Yes, extremecommunity.com is taken, by whom and for what purpose, I don’t know.)

I’ll be describing what distinguishes my Versions 1, 2 and 3 of extreme community and make the case that Version 3.0 is going to be developing fast over the next decade.

So how can trust improve the environment? Combining social networking with carpooling  might be a good starting point.

Too many cars on the road with only a driver inside. Too much carbon pumped into the atmosphere. Too much money being spent on car maintenance and fuel. Mass transit isn’t the answer for everyone. So that leaves carpools.

The New York Times reported on a startup called Zimride that, in the classic carpooling model, “connects drivers with riders looking to carpool to class or work.” But carpooling has always suffered from the perception that one’s fellow passengers might not turn out to be tolerable for the ride to and from work.

Zimride’s  founders are betting that green consciousness combined with the familiarity and trust gained through social networking will make their service worth using. Facebook thinks they have a good idea and has invested in the new company.

Somewhere in your life or lifestyle, you’ve probably come across the term Gaia. Like zen, it’s been appropriated for marketing and commercial naming convenience, but it came into my consciousness through the  Whole Earth Catalog, which in 1980 positively reviewed a book titled Gaia: A new look at life on Earth by James Lovelock, a British scientist who had invented – among other things – an instrument for measuring CFCs (which are responsible for blowing a hole in the ozone layer of our atmosphere.)

The Gaia Theory – named after the Greek goddess of the Earth – proposes (in the words of Stewart Brand) that the entire life of Earth, through its atmosphere and ocean, functions effectively as one self-regulated organism.

Observing the Earth in that way for the past three decades has been a painful experience for Lovelock because he sees our planet from a perspective that the rest of us manage to ignore. And based on that perspective, Sir James has a dismal view of our global warming future, which he describes in his new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: a Final Warning.

Not to bum your day (or your life), but here are some excerpts from a recent article on AlterNet describing the contents of the new book:

“Most of the ‘green’ stuff is verging on a gigantic scam,” Lovelock told the New Scientist shortly before the release of his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. “Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It’s not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it’ll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning.”

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Lovelock argues that Gaia Theory offers a more holistic understanding of what’s happening to the climate than does mainstream climate science, stuck as it is in reductionist thinking and fractured into its constituent fields. Using the Gaia lens, he maintains, allows for a more comprehensive, intuitive, and ultimately more predictive approach. He spends much of Vanishing explaining why he thinks our attempts to accurately model climate change with computers is akin to the blind efforts of a 19th century doctor trying to treat diabetes.

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Of all the indicators of climate change, Lovelock maintains sea-level rise is the most important. Given the complexity of the millions of interactions within the Gaia system, Lovelock argues it is best to ignore year-to-year temperature fluctuations and instead watch the oceans. The seas, he says, are the lone trustworthy indicator of the earth’s heat balance. “Sea level rise is the best available measure of the heat absorbed by the earth because it comes from only two things,” he writes. “[These are] the melting of glaciers and the expansion of water as it warms. Sea level is the thermometer that indicates true global heating.”

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A quarter century ago, Carl Sagan issued a strange and compelling plea for nuclear disarmament. He urged the superpowers to abolish their thermonuclear arsenals for the sake of mankind’s future evolution and eventual colonization of the galaxy. Echoing Sagan, Lovelock believes it is our duty as an intelligent race, the only one in the cosmic neighborhod, to survive. Only by carrying the flame of civilization into the next century will we have a chance to evolve beyond our current tribal-carnivore brains, which are dominated by short-term thinking and thus responsible for our current predicament. Whereas Sagan dreamed of alien contact, Lovelock’s promised land is more humble: an evolved species capable of living in balance with Gaia.

The following from an article in the New York Times:

Increasingly, subdivisions, usually master-planned developments at which buyers buy home sites or raw land, have been treating farms as an amenity. “There are currently at least 200 projects that include agriculture as a key community component,” said Ed McMahon, a senior fellow with the Urban Land Institute.

*****

Here in South Burlington, David Scheuer, a developer, runs a firm called Retrovest that specializes in pedestrian-friendly subdivisions. He is adapting the Prairie Crossing model with a 220-acre project called South Village, where he eventually hopes to sell 334 homes at prices of $200,000 to nearly $700,000.

A 16-acre segment of the property, which was not previously used for farming, is now producing lettuce, garlic and other crops, which are harvested for sale to homeowners and others from the area who have joined a local community-supported agriculture group. “Agriculture can be the caboose on the train,” Mr. Scheuer said, “and housing can be the engine.” Once he is selling 20 homes a year, he said, he hopes to pay the salary of a full-time farmer.

If you live in a place, it behooves you to know the people there, what’s going on, how it’s supported, and how its services work. It’s healthy to understand the local politics and environment.

One service that seems to be doing a good job of developing the Web infrastructure at the local level is Outside.in. Their software pulls in and aggregates news items based on zip codes and other location data. This forms a reasonably good foundation upon which other local information and interaction can build.

There is a bias toward business-related content (Outside.in is a profit-making venture), but it’s a good example of the networked locality model I’m thinking of, so I’ll be using it more now to help me think about how more collaborative tools could work in such a structure.

It’s half empty not so much because there’s no reason for hope, but because there is so much obvious ignorance, superstition and unmitigated greed in influential places, sucking up the oxygen of attention that should be going to adaptive planning.

It’s half empty because there’s very little in the way of good news – that we’re actually finding solutions to our currently most vexing problems – the floundering world economy, looming threats from climate change, expanding resource shortages, inadequate healthcare, overgrown defense budgets.

And yet, that half-empty glass is, in itself, an inspiration for the half-full perspective.

The half-full view of the half-empty perspective is that humanity is now being forced to make use of the big brains, consciousness, compassion and intelligence that Nature has, for whatever reason, endowed us with. Through tens of thousands of years, going back to our ape-like ancestors we’ve had to learn and develop faculties to deal with dire situations. We learned enough to plan ahead and seek shelter in caves to avoid being attacked and eaten. We do have the capacity to think ahead and change our habits. We’ve just gotten lazy over the course of a few generations.

All of us who have experienced working selflessly with a group, a team, a community to accomplish a difficult and collectively valued goal understand the gift that such an experience can be. Individual attainment and success may be all that’s needed for some, but for most of us I have to believe that the greater feeling of gratification comes with being part of something bigger than ourselves.

As concerned as I am about the scale and degree of challenge we have ahead of us, I can’t help but be excited by the prospect that many more of us will – by choice or necessity – be in closer cahoots as we adapt in advance for 21st Century economy and climate.

We made plenty of mistakes, of course; none of us had ever done such an audacious and difficult thing in our entire young lives. And, as we discovered our mistakes, we made corrections. It was slow work. We had no formula or method for iterative lifestyle development. We didn’t have the luxury of funding for planning and r&d, so we had to live with our errors, sometimes, for years. Looking back on those years, most of us can see where we went off track, but it’s too late now for do-overs. The community disbanded for the most part in 1983.

In 1986 I began managing an online group discussion system called the WELL. Again, we were a group of people with some basic resources to share and work with. Instead of land, we had disk space. Instead of saws and tractors we had UNIX and a database program that structured our conversations and privileges. And, again, we were starting from scratch, inventing our own community. But in this case, we could make mistakes and fix them almost instantly, at least in some cases. It took us a couple years to be able to afford to replace the original CPU, which was ill-suited to multi-user sessions. But in terms of improving the features of our online social environment, we could make changes pretty quickly. As newcomers to what was then known as Cyberspace, we were amazed at the malleability of our digital village. And that was just the beginning, whcn a relative few were able to work socially in a software universe.

We tend to get jaded when we spend much of our time on the Web, but if you think about it, we have become acclimated to iterative culture. Our way of relating to one another through this collection of media relies on tools and conventions that are constantly under beta test. No platform, no user interface, is a finished product. Either because of competitive business pressure or the hacker imperative, every product – from the most successful to the striving to be successful – is constantly in flux.

Iterative culture is adaptive, though much of that adaptation may be ill-founded. Not every attempt to enhance, replace or invent offers us practical improvement. Not every brilliant idea gets noticed and adopted by a critical mass of users. There is wasted energy and creativity, and not every successful (in terms of mass adoption) product is the best of breed. But the overall trend of frenetic creativity is a good and necessary thing. Humanity needs this rather than any form of complacency. Looming over us are challenges that demand strong social invention muscles.

Iterative culture demands that many of us buy in and be part of it. If, indeed, the entire Web is a beta test, we are all beta testers, so we should be cognizant of our role and contribute at least a bit to the feedback that is necessary to follow paths to improvement. We have not, by any means, reached the promised land. Our economic system needs a radical overhaul, as do our political and environmental systems. These are much bigger challenges than getting hundreds of millions of users onto Facebook.  But participating in iterative culture on the Web is good practice for a time when iterative culture comes to our regions and neighborhoods.

Like learning to fly an airplane on a computerized flight simulator, we can make mistakes with little damage on the Web, while we learn what it’s like to collaborate on the design and function of our social environment. Resilient communities where we actually live may require a lot more collaborative skills than we are currently exercising. We need the practice.