Mobile Eco Parks

Jimmy Hirst (aka ‘Jimmyz’) is a self-professed social engineer who has played a pivotal role in bringing about wide social change.

A former Music Director, Presenter and DJ with the Nova FM radio network, Foxtel’s Music Channel [V] / Club [V], Austereo/Sea FM Network, and he helped set up radio stations Wild FM in Sydney and Brisbane. He has also worked in the innovation and technology industry pioneering electronic messaging way before the arrival of mobile phone text messaging (SMS) and the Internet and long before the arrival of the more recent additions Facebook and Google. He set up the third largest and the most popular ‘Bulletin Board System’ (BBS) in Sydney Australia with fourteen telephone lines coming into his house. He has always been passionate about positive and progressive social change and social organising. What would a national DJ know about populations? It may turn out more than you what you likely believe.

Jimmy is now actively working towards changing the western living paradigm: building future villages as sustainable communities for the mainstream, popularly known as “Eco Villages”, ushering in a shift in the way we live for the benefit of all people and to help restore humanity, and reducing environmental impact on the planet so that it may be enjoyed for generations to come.

The life experience that led to this

Towards the end of my music career, I lost my father, and then my mother, both passing away at relatively young ages early into their retirement years – they passed away living alone in separate houses, and in separate countries. They were disconnected.

My father regularly complained of feeling weak, and very tired toward the end of his life. Every medical test under the sun couldn’t pin anything on him. It turned out he was suffering from a constant feeling of fatigue, one of the chronic symptoms of depression and
anxiety – the result of a lonely, broken heart. He ultimately died of a heart attack, a common story. He made it clear to us that he did not wish to end his days in a Nursing Home, so he became trapped alone inside his own home instead.

He knew that he would be treated like a number, not a person. We currently treat our elderly as if they have little value and put them out to pasture in retirement villages, and we house them in these estates to get them out of the way so we can afford to have them looked after until they die. There is little thought gone into their humanity, their value and need for meaningful community, or the value exchange of wisdom. No matter how much you pay for your care. A far different picture to many non-western cultures who keep the
elderly ageing in community and treat them like family into their late years. Is this really the best way we can do this?

How western society treats the elderly

Introduction

We are going to deal with three major issues emerging today: Affordability, Sustainability and Community.

Then I am going to pose one possible single model for Tiny Houses and Eco Villages that can be upwardly compatible with the current system, holistic in design, and simple, in its own complex way.

This model is what I am going to introduce to you later – and they will be called ‘Mobile Eco Parks’.

What is a “Tiny House”?

A Tiny House is a description for the architectural and social movement that advocates minimalism and living simply in small homes. It is a movement that has sprung up around the northern hemisphere, rapidly spreading across the United States, UK and Europe, often
pointing back to West Coast USA and Portland, Oregon. In Australia, most people have heard about them through popular TV shows on Tiny Housing.

What is an “Eco Village”?

It is an intentional or traditional community using local participatory processes to holistically integrate ecological, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of sustainability in order to regenerate social and natural environments. (Credit: GEN, The Global Eco Village Network, Findhorn Foundation, Scotland).

Why do we connect the two?

Many academics are now beginning to believe that the Tiny House movement, particularly when it comes to Tiny Houses On Wheels (or “THOWs”), naturally lead to increased social connectivity between people by the nature of their size, design and behavioural usage, as
well as being more sustainable in terms of minimalism and promoting the practice of sharing resources.

LET’S START AT THE VERY BEGINNING

let’s first understand how people ‘work’

Decades of research support a very simple fact, that –

humans are ‘social beings’

This is what helped us evolve so successfully until today. It was how our forefathers “collaborated” in tribes, which increased their chances of survival through strength in numbers.

Remember what the biggest punishment in our prison system is? It is Solitary Confinement. This most harsh punishment is based on “disconnecting” from all people and things.

the popular workplace team-building ethic is that ‘1 + 1 = 3’

We receive a natural endorphin hit every time we be with, work with, or be of value to other people. This has evolved to incentivise collaborative behaviour, which has led to greater successful outcomes for each of us in a team, and so, we then evolved to be
successful tribal village beings, rather than the frequent misconception of the highly individualised, westernised, solitary lone-ranger type of competitive individual like for example our modern industrialist superhero icons Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Steve Jobs from Apple, Rockerfeller from Standard Oil. The lone western hero is a misconception. And they were all backed up by teams anyway.

Then I saw two documentaries that changed my life: one called The ‘Happy’ Movie, and the other ‘I Am’.

They both confirmed everything I long suspected, this missing piece of the puzzle from the western living paradigm. The current living paradigm assumes we have evolved beyond being “social beings” to live more like “caged robots”, and not actively encouraged to
engage with our neighbours in houses and apartments. In fact, many of us don’t even know much about other people living beyond a wall less than 30 feet away from our beds every night. This is how ridiculous our living model has evolved to.

RAT PARK TESTS OF THE 70’s

The “Happy” Movie makes reference to the ‘Rat Park’ tests carried out during the 70’s, where they tried putting together two different cages with rats – the first cage was inhabited by one solitary rat, and in the other cage “Rat Park” they placed a family of rats with great food, lots of toys to play with, light and places they could play with each other.
Then they placed with two drinking bottles of water in each cage, one with plain water… and the other laced with heroin.

Can you figure out which bottle of water the lonely rat in the solitary cage drank from the most?

To their astonishment, they found that the rat in the lonely cage drank more of the drug-laced water, until it died.

In the other cage, they found the rats generally ignored the heroin water, mostly drinking from the normal water.

What this led to was a light-bulb moment re-defining an empirical and game-changing understanding of how the mechanism of “addiction” works, and its root cause: disconnection. But rats aren’t humans, right?

So they went on to make another study where 20% of returning Vietnam War soldiers in the United States were addicted to heroin during the war and when they returned home to regular family life they weened themselves off their addition.

They also pointed out that when you or your grandparents stay in hospital for an operation, you are given medically pure opiates like morphine and heroin, while you recover… and yet, you didn’t turn into a junkie once you returned home, did you, ‘right?

Understanding Addiction

So I postulated from these ideas, that –

“’Community’ and ‘Addiction’ are inversely proportional”

A person is less likely to succumb to addiction if they are part of a more loving, compassionate, supportive, socially activated and secure community.

But when you are feeling down and out, homeless, on the street – like the solitary rat – you may take drugs to offset social disconnection.

Fighting the war on drugs is possibly the worst way we could fix the problem. Focusing efforts on rehabilitation and community building is how we actually win the war on drugs.

You can have a community of people living together who are not ‘socially activated’ and sometimes these are called slums or favelas – where crime, abuse and drugs run rampant. The difference is all in the social engineering.

Addiction generally appears as alcoholism, gambling, drugs (like heroin and “dope”, slang for “dopamine”), obsessive/compulsive disorder and mental diseases, obsessive social media usage, painkillers, pornography, and even exercise, extreme sports and food –
especially those that contain plenty of salt, fat, sugar and yes, chocolate is also addictive. How many of us know people like this? How many of these behaviours do we actually identify with ourselves.

They all artificially release the same endorphins we crave as a reward for our natural social behaviour to remain “loved” “valued” and “social”. It is hard-wired into our social DNA. It’s exactly the same endorphin release we get when we take heroin or cocaine.

Now we understand how humans work…

And it appears that in our current living paradigm this idea has become all but long forgotten…

So then I did some thinking about how we could really improve the way people live, and that would be by re-connecting them more often in positive, social environments.

there’s no greater feeling of isolation than being lonely in a crowd

So I started doing some looking around, and set off on a self-funded trip around the world, over six years, where I found, and ultimately learned about these “sustainable communities”, often popularly referred to as –

ECO VILLAGES

I travelled to world-famous Eco Villages like the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, Christiania in Denmark, Tamera Healing Biotope in Portugal. There I joined up with academic research groups like the International Communal Studies Association in Portugal and Salt Lake City, as well as meeting members of the Fellowship of Intentional Communities (ic.org) from Twin Oaks, Dancing Rabbit in the USA, Dahmanur in Italy, Portland Oregon’s “City Repair” Urban Renewal Project, Berkeley CoHousing Estate in the Bay Area of San Francisco, and many more communities.

But I’m going to drop a whammy here…

There was no Eco Village that I wanted to live in

I found them uncomfortable, confronting, sometimes brutal. Often there was conflict, discontentment, even weird ceremonies, and at times it felt like I was edging into cultism with a bunch of hippies. And here I am attempting to solve the problems of the western living paradigm so we could introduce these great ideas to the mainstream population. But I couldn’t see it happening.

One renowned US academic, Diane Leaf Christian, once observed that –

90% of Eco Villages fail in their first 3-7 years

This represents a real blow to our expectations for creating sustainable communities – and here I was thinking that we really needed to take sustainable communities, or these so-called “Eco Villages” to the mainstream – but how, when, largely, they weren’t working and
many people didn’t think very well of them?

I found that many of them failed to address the most important piece of the puzzle: socially engineering a successful Community.

Without Community, you just have a bunch of people living next to each other not getting along and fighting.

So, I turned my thinking to –

What Are Communities That “Work”?

Woodford Folk Festival, Splendour In The Grass, The Blues Festival, Confest in southern NSW, and even as far away as Burning Man in Nevada USA. This is when I had the light-bulb moment – people here were buzzed up, like the happy rats in Rat Park: people were
co-operating, socialising, playing, connecting and having a great time together based on few basic rules and guiding principles, and in a playful, positive atmosphere.

But why did these communities have to stop after just one week?

So then, as my music career involved travel every week to any given nightclub locations around Australia, I ended up living out of a suitcase. My life was enriched by a set of experiences DJing to hundreds of thousands of people, this was life’s great reward – I didn’t need to own “stuff”, I couldn’t take it with me around the country. The less I owned, the better. I made a natural move toward downsizing and “minimalism”.

And these are, I feel, very strong material arguments to help transition the mainstream to living in more sustainable communities.

MOBILE ECO PARKS

They say Home is where the Heart is – so, why not take it with you?

I like to call these future living ‘Mobile Eco Parks’ –

National Parks for people worth saving

They are a modern pivot on Caravan Parks but with added intentional layers of permaculture, community facilities, shared facilities like laundries, solar and water harvesting on site, socially engineered villages of the future engaging the technology of Blockchain, future governance models like Sociocracy, with a sense of vision, mission and overall, “play” but most of all low-impact, low-footprint and forever sustainable. And not using one single system, but in future a combination of -ism’s: capitalism, socialism, communism, everything, a mixture of what best fits the need at the time.

And with a purpose – a shared, inspiring, empowering vision, a mission or an exciting sense of presence and celebration.

They may come together as an Arts Festival, it could be a travelling Maker Fair, or it could be an expo, or even simply a special interest group – all of these people coming together sustainably, in one location, forming a community while living in their own houses, saving
expensive flights, car hires, packing and re-settling. It’s a throwback to the nomadic gypsy life – but for Everyone to live more contented, in these “transitionary communities”.

Travel to the Woodford Folk Festival/The Planting, travel to the Blues & Roots Festivals, travel to a disaster area requiring recovery and the trade off for land being exchange of value, and even travel to Cairns in Winter, and once you find a community you like, you may ask to stay.

Caravan Parks are already working demonstrations as to what is possible under the current legal framework in the western world to facilitate a new kind of spin on the modern “Eco Village” – although a transient community, it simply opens itself up to natural churn – you
can check in and stay for a day, or stay for a lifetime – and as long as you satisfy the requirements laid down by that community (or tribe) you should be able to live there forever. Give people a chance to re-learn how to live in Community again. Give them a chance to dip their toes in the water and test the temperature. It may even take several generations to transition. I just don’t believe that people are truly ready to deep dive into Community just yet.

It’s important to have discussions about “what type of people make up the best, strongest, most resilient Community”.

First of all, we notice in Blue Zones – places where significant numbers of the population live to the age of 100 years old or more – among many factors, is the one of the “village” and “inclusion”. The Island of Okinawa in Japan, the elderly women of the village play an
active role of raising the young children, while their parents go out and work. Old and young people bond particularly well.

In Denmark, The “Happy” Movie documents a small Co-Housing Estate where peoples units empty into a main indoor common area, the children are taught to cook and are babysat by the trusted elderly people in the community, while mother goes out to work. There are
cases in Holland where University Students are offered free accommodation and board in exchange for spending 20 hours a week with elderly people in a nursing home. The value exchanges are incredible, magical, amazing and efficient.

Suddenly not only the young are being minded by the old, they are exchanging wisdom and knowledge, and in return they are giving each other social identity or “value” which, as we have seen with the Rat Park tests, increase contentment in most cases and extend life
expectancy and quality of life when it’s done properly. This should be the new “cool”

And to help do this we would like to consider the incoming technology of Blockchain, which would help create greater trust between strangers, and provide the basis of an upwardly compatible operating system from the current living model, using the new concepts of
Digital Reputation and Smart Contracts, with a little bit of basic AI (Artificial Intelligence) to help choose where people would best live.

First of all, we may need a quick explainer about Blockchain, and for those of us who are still confused by Bitcoin and all the hype surrounding this very same technology that backs Crypto-currency.

So, what is the “Blockchain”?

Understanding Blockchain

Blockchain is, put simply, all about ‘consensus’

Blockchain is the underlying technology of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not Blockchain. It’s simply a demonstration of what’s possible with Blockchain in the future.

It is thought that the earliest currency in the world was based on a “Blockchain”.

What does this mean for “Communities”?

It means that we now have a way of giving communities self-governance free of corruption from a central authority. This also jumps into areas of governance, legal process, and new currencies, popularly referred to as ‘crypto currencies’ like Bitcoin (BTC), like Ethereum
(ETH), Digital Reputation and Smart Contracts. All of which are virtually impossible to corrupt. This leads to massive repercussions for true democracy, by establishing greater and more speedy trust between strangers, as well as helping bring about greater equality,
sovereignty, and of course, Consensus.

What is “Digital Reputation”?

Digital Reputation is about recording how good you are as a person to “deal with”, in other words, do you live up to carrying out reliable transactions, and are you say who you really are. In the past we would meet a person and read them intuitively, and for example when
advertised a new job position, we would look through a person’s Resume in the hope that their University Degree was genuine and that their job history was honest. Except we know we can easily make these things up and lie.

Blockchain and Digital Reputation puts an end to all the guesswork. And it is already among us. You can load a University Degree onto a Blockchain, authenticated by the University who awarded it, and their credibility in handing out Degrees based on their reputation is also judged.

Every time you buy something on Ebay, you are rated – not only as a seller, but as a buyer as well. Are you a good buyer? Or do you have a history of using and returning broken goods to sellers? Uber is the same, are you a good driver, and are you a good passenger.
Airbnb the same again – are you a good landlord, and are you a good tennant. It creates a desire within all people to try be on their “best behaviour” to get that golden 5/5 rating. But no one’s perfect, and few people have a perfect score.

However, the problem with all of these current services is that they are centralised – they are tied to one central database, and governed by a body (or a private corporation) that we may not vote for, they may have no transparency, and under existing company law
they can behave however they like and use our private information at will and even sell it without our basic knowledge. They are prone to frequent hacking, and corruption.

When we place information on a Blockchain, like the Bitcoin blockchain, we say it is decentralised – it is anonymously stored on millions of devices all around the world as the actual “coin” itself. Bitcoin is simply made up of a large spreadsheet of transactions made from Day 0 back in 2009 when it launched. They call this the Ledger. And by the nature of people buying a “coin”, it gets copied every time a new coin is created (or “mined”), and this is why it now gets called a “Distributed Ledger”.

People then access this “coin” (or Ledger) using a password called a “private key”, which is a “hashed number” which is a very hard-to-hack password. Without this password, it is virtually impossible to find the information stored on the coin (or Blockchain), even though it is safely stored all around the world. The wonders of modern technology and simple maths. These “private keys” would be stored on our own Digital Passport.

What is a “Digital Passport”?

Like a Travellers Passport, a Digital Passport is a secure place to store our information. Like a bank’s safety deposit box, but way more secure.

In the future, we will move towards Digital Passports which will help aggregate and record all of our private Digital Reputation in each of the transactions we make. Each of us will have control of this, and no central government, or no central credit ratings agency, or even no centralised and potentially corrupt ruling agency or bank will be able to take advantage of our information, only if we let them.

With this Digital Reputation, you would, for example, be able to spontaneously check in and out of eco villages, dependent on the requirements they stipulate for moving into their given community – they will ask, do you pay rent on time, are you of a wealth class that
would compliment a healthy and diverse village, do you have skills that they need, or possibly do you not pay rent on time but have a heart of gold or “social capital” and can prove you are worthwhile to join because you prefer to spend all your time helping others.
There will be new currencies to help metric and award to people in ways like taking money to a whole new level. It is all Currency at the end of the day, an exchange of “energy” and “value” direct from one person to another, with full verification and security. You won’t even need to take out a deposit a new major bank loan, if you can prove you have always been a “great payer”, you can borrow from a “community bank” of people who may even be your neighbours – with full trust and security. And this would be done using Smart
Contracts.

So, how do we build Digital Reputation? We use “Smart Contracts”.

What is a “Smart Contract”?

Smart contracts are defined as self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. The code and the agreements contained therein exist across a distributed and decentralised blockchain network.

And quite simply, these Smart Contracts are iron-clad, carried out by computers which generally work “logically” (is a contract being met? Yes or No), using the security of Blockchain, and they will record the outcome available for time immemorial. Having a perfect digital reputation will never be the normal, mistakes will happen, and blockchain analysts will be aware of this and adapt their models, AI and apps to more accurately and fairly paint your reputation.

And in conclusion, by using this technology, we could allow people for example to move in and out of villages, even at 3 am in the morning with full trust and security, because the Blockchain would facilitate this – you could wake up and have brand new neighbours to
wake up to who could become your friends for life based these simple new concepts of Blockchain, Digital Reputation, Digital Passports and Smart Contracts.

There is also another very compelling argument as to why a return to the Village model is increasing appealing to many, over the suburban nuclear family model.

And within this appreciation of “Village” and “Tribe” is yet another compelling reason for returning to this model of living – and it’s for valued connection with our Indigenous whom, I believe, hold one of the missing pieces to our puzzle.

“Kanjini” – Indigenous culture of ‘holism’.

In almost every non-Western, Indigenous culture, there is a very well preserved and time tested sense of Tribe, and –

connection with oneself, each other and nature

A sense of spiritualism, meaning, purpose, responsibility, guardianship and curation, rather than land ownership and entitlement, a timeless sense of responsibility for the present day, and a respect for the teachings and wisdom handed down from previous generations who occupied the same very land you are living on right now, telling stories how to understand and live on the land, not just bedtime tales, but a complex web of lore and history and ideals embedded in a long-time running ethos called “the Dreamtime”. Ancient
Wisdom is embedded across so many cultures. Western culture has believed it is too good for this and tried to evolve beyond ancient wisdom, leaving wide open gaps for depression, anxiety, disconnection, and a sense of hopelessness that people try to fill in with
“addictions”.

The Australian Aboriginals call holistic culture“Kanjini”, and the Africans call it “Ubuntu”.

They are all basically the same thing – and in Ubuntu you are primarily responsible for the welfare of your neighbours, even if they live more than twenty houses down the road.

Our Indigenous have a rich tapestry of governance which is far more complex and inherently smarter than our own centralised and easily corruptible systems. The Native North Americans even described the European influx as having the trappings of a “mental
illness”, the need to hoard resources beyond those that you personally require. We have come to know it as “greed”. These cultures that lived sustainably in harmony with the environment for thousands of years without the need for amassing and extracting unnatural, unsustainable wealth.

And this is why I feel, as do a number of Indigenous thought leaders, that the dialogue of “Sorry” and “Reconciliation” could be better termed “Unification” – that the idea that there is potentially an incredible two-way value exchange that could occur between our
Indigenous and the wider mainstream, multicultural community, by the Indigenous who would like to connect the broader population to the Dreamtime.

There is true potential to benefit all Australians, even those who are racist and wish to hang on to the blind guilt of the past, there are actually benefits for all.

This is why I feel so much can be gained by listening to our respected original inhabitants of the land. A time to listen to the land, listen to nature and feel a greater spiritual connection and sense of belonging that goes far beyond what we feel today, and may all be
“missing” a little bit, and ultimately give us a greater feeling of responsibility to “protect” it for future generations.

One good example of some of the best aspects from a number of Eco Villages in Australia, is one example known as The Eco Village at Currumbin on the border of the states of New South Wales and Queensland on the Gold Coast.

At it’s heart it is a wildlife corridor, generous in the number of kangaroos and wildlife literally thriving and living on their doorsteps. All in the absence of predatory pets – dogs and cats, sorry – every day we would wake to Australia’s natural wildlife roaming freely around our backyards – goannas, birds, all harmlessly going about their daily living routines. Made me feel nourished and more contented than living among backyards fenced off with noisy dogs and suburban communities and cats that would hunt vulnerable native wild birds and small wildlife.

And how the ideas of creating “Mobile Eco Parks” is not the end goal – permaculturalists such as David Holmgren in Victoria have been picking away teaching the holistic principles of human landscaping in terms of retro-fitting urban environments to become more
sustainable and effectively “Re-inhabiting the Village”.

The role for our community (currently named polkadot) is to help collaborate and work with worldwide leaders in many fields to help facilitate the design of an open source operating system for Eco Villages, and to help devise a fresh set of simple secular principles for
people to be able to live with each other, inspire a sense of excitement, fun and play to help transition people to truly sustainable and contented communities.

And we would like to use these new villages to help package up and deliver the most evolved, progressive living ideas like sociocracy, permaculture and syntropic agriculture, veganism, renewable energy and recycling. It may take a few generations to seat in, but our conscious members of society are saying we are ready to start – and we entirely have the ability and control to direct the future from this concept moving forward, almost like hitting the Reset button on society.

I feel that this the next best shot, and the only shot we have at effective environmentalism – because the message is still not getting through – and that if we begin re-inhabit the village model, by then setting the intention and engaging the camaraderie of people in a
positive environment to better, share resources more efficiently, more affordably, and spearhead and spread this change so it goes viral and WORKS.

What about Housing Affordability?

I was taught this in my Year 8 Geography textbook back in 1983, a graph showed that we would likely not be able to afford to work to buy a house in our lifetimes – and now we are here in 2018, and exactly this has happened.

Our economists, our governments have been asleep at the wheel so badly that the banks themselves have forced the hand of tighter regulation on loaning – of which we have $1 trillion in outstanding mortgage debt in Australia alone right now – and the property market is now beginning to slide, and predicted that the bubble may burst. Property generally is automatically set to rise in value by 7% every year, just because economists said it should. The house and land ownership model is not sustainable in every respect, it has no choice now but to change or collapse.

Tiny Housing is Affordable Housing – but so much more …

The intention for polkadot is not only to help build a new operating system for society, but help build the Tiny Houses (the ‘polkadot’) that will plug into this operating system, and help set a framework and raise the bar for builders, current land owners, and Blockchain
software engineers to enable them to create the platform to help people build and govern community much more easily and readily.

The side story is that we would like to lead building what we feel are the most eco, smart tiny houses in the world – as easy as buying an Apple iPhone. And move them into Villages that are as exciting and empassioning for the average person, as walking into, say,
Disneyland! – just much, much better.

We need all the help we can get to solve these problems and action models like these – and this isn’t the only one – there are many. It’s the beauty of finding the ones people most resound with, and work with that as a starting point. I have worked on wide social change before, and I intuitively know that these ideas are totally possible, plausible and achievable.

Look forward to chatting with each of you some time and hearing some of your thoughts.
Many thanks
Jim
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Jim will be presenting his model ‘Mobile Eco Parks’, along with another 19 other speakers at the Tiny Houses + Eco Villages Seminar, Greater South East Queensland Australia on Saturday 4th August 2018, and again in October 2018.

The 25% Discount code below will permit special entry to both events while they are on sale.

Event & Information Link: http://OpenTalks.com.au/Tiny
Enter Promotional Code: OpenNoosa25