Abstract
The question that Helen’s Town sets out to answer is whether we can create a complex system, self-renewing in nature, that includes the whole life web community. We see this particular community as performing the regeneration of herding, farming, and small village life of perhaps 20,000 people that all co-join to become a new niche in the web of life. By niche we mean the mutually supporting relational position of a species or population in an ecosystem. Often niches large and small have self-generated boundaries. We begin this work by imagining what, fifty to seventy-five years ahead, in a heat stressed planet, a small community could be like, beginning again. The ecologically based design of this 20,000-person town makes it forageable, carbon positive, and biodiverse. The town can be, and is, processed by the life web during the life of the town and after its use is over. In short, a low-entropy, small town is possible, and this document provides the key concepts for its initial design. We expect a certain number of these insights will be useful for much larger than village scale communities that may need also to form as a response to extreme warming. By entropy we mean the extraction of resources (energy) from all planetary life support systems with no equivalent energy restored. Helen’s Town by its very existence in its own small space reverses this process.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Eco-art, Life Web, Abundance, Temperature, Ocean, Extinction, Counterforce, Entropy
