By Tom & Carol Braford
What if the solutions to climate change and lots of other seemingly endemic challenges were hiding in plain sight?
What if 11.625M scientists at the National Academy of Sciences were right in 2020 when they said social tipping dynamics could stabilize our climate by 2050?
What if Nobel prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine was right when he said that small Islands of Coherence could transform whole physical, social and economic systems when they are far from equilibrium?
What if Hunter Lovins and her co-authors in their book A Finer Future were right when they said we could have a finer future if we created an economy in service to life?
Eighty years ago, Father Arizmendi set in motion a movement that over the last 75 years has proved that we can.
The $35 billion a year Mondragon conglomerate of worker-owned cooperatives that practice co-op to co-op and co-op to community solidarity now account for 10% of the Spanish economy. This is now a global movement that is also flourishing in South Korea and in the US Midwest.
What if 200 plus American cohousing communities with 50 more in the works and hundreds more already established throughout the world after 60 years can no longer be considered a fad, but instead is a stably evolving and growing movement that is almost inadvertently shoring up the broader movements to restore our climate, democracy and a just sustainable economy?
How about contagious, optimized Islands of Coherence Post-carbon Communities of Practice based on the global cohousing/ecovillage model, and built out by Mondragon-style previously unemployed or underemployed worker-owners that could stabilize surrounding low-income neighborhoods, declining cities and regions using materials and practices that take double-digit Midwesterners to subzero CO2 in socially and economically scalable, dynamically self-governed, mixed-use communities of 200 people at a time?
According to my calculations, just 13,000 of these communities would reduce the US carbon footprint by 1%, which meets Bill Gates’ definition of a viable climate solution and would be a candidate for Gates Foundation funding.
Combining this, as we are planning to do, with a postcarbon transportation solution consisting of a raised platform pod-car system, a version of which the Gates Foundation has already invested $5B in, would put us at 2% and well on our way to causing a pandemic of plenty in the world.
Please contact us at: braford@sbcglobal.net or at www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com. Check out I Am Humanity Day on October 18, 2025: www.iamhumanity.net