By Tom & Carol Braford
We are transformed when we renew our hearts and minds. But it is never just about us, but rather how we care for and serve others, our civilization and that beautiful blue-green marble spinning through space that is our only home. However, it is not fulfilled at that level or even at the level of community.
By its very nature, we must give it away. For it to be truly sustainable, we need to pay it forward, thinking about, not just the generations that are alive now, but those that are yet to come.
Nothing seemed more improbable at the time in1960 when John F. Kennedy pointed to the heavens and declared that we will land Americans on the moon and return them safely to Earth within 10 years.
Even his top advisors told him that it was a mission impossible, that we did not have a big enough rocket or strong enough materials. He said, “I know. That’s why I’m putting you in the front office to figure that out.”
That is exactly what they did. I saw it happen live on a big screen in Trafalgar Square in London in the summer of 1969. It was a wild night! Hippies were jumping in the fountain as the craft touched down and proper English gentlemen were tipping their bowler hats and exclaiming, “Good show, Yanks! Good show!”
That is how it will be again in 2049 when the UN declares the Greater St. Louis Federation of Post Carbon Cities of Practice the first truly Post Carbon Metropolis in the world.
This is the macro scale that our moonshot is aiming for. Post Carbon Communities of Practice is the micro scale building block.
Neither can exist and reach scale without an undergirding and overarching cooperative ecosystem. Decades ago, a young priest in Mondragon in the Basque Region of Spain considered the conditions of life in his wartorn village and proposed his own moonshot based on 10 principles of cooperation. These are now transforming hearts and minds, socal cultures and physical economies in cooperatives in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Baltimore and Detroit. Once we establish this cooperative ecosystem of practice on the ground in St. Louis, we will discover that not even the sky is the limit.
Link to our Ideas: https://stlouis.citizenlab.co/en/ideas/post-carbon-communities-of-practice
Contact: braford@sbcglobal.net