Why the Villages of Life?

23 minutes

How will we live tomorrow?

I would like to talk to you about the Farms of Life.

But I need to begin with a small correction.

The name has changed.

We now call them the Villages of Life.

Why?

Because, deep down, what we are building is not a farm.

It is a place where human beings must be able to continue living.

And perhaps that is where we should begin.

With a very simple question.

Our world is not doing well.

Agreed?

But we, today, are doing reasonably well.

Agreed?

So the next question is much more interesting:

Is the world going to get worse?

I will leave that for you to answer.

And if your answer is yes, then another question follows immediately:

Could that affect our own lives?

Our food? The water we drink? Our health? Our safety? Our ability to raise our children?

And in the end, behind all these questions, only one remains.

Just one.

Could what is happening eventually put human life itself at risk?

That is the question from which the Villages of Life were born.

This question is not new.

In 1972, the Meadows report, based on work carried out at MIT, already raised very starkly the problem of the physical limits of our model of development.

I became aware of that work at the time.

But for many years, like so many people, I simply carried on with my life.

We learn something.

We put it away somewhere in our minds.

And everyday life takes over again.

Then, in 2003, when I discovered, among other things, the explanations given by Jean-Marc Jancovici, something changed for me.

I no longer understood the problem only intellectually.

I began to grasp its true scale.

And in November 2003, I started doing what I knew how to do.

A project.

That is my profession.

But this time, the project had an intensely personal reason behind it.

I had granddaughters.

And I simply wanted them to have the chance of a normal future.

To grow up. To love. Perhaps to have children. To laugh. To work. To grow old.

In truth, behind everything I was going to think about afterwards, there was one much simpler thought:

I did not want them to die at twenty-five because our generation had failed to prepare anything.

That is where the Villages of Life began.

And for more than twenty years now, we have been working around this question:

how can human beings continue to live if the world in which we learned to live no longer works as it does today?

There are several ways of talking about this.

We can speak to emotions.

We can speak to reason.

We can line up graphs, temperatures, resources, population figures, agricultural production and energy needs.

But perhaps the most difficult part of the problem is not even scientific.

It is human.

Because it is extraordinarily difficult to persuade a human being living today to prepare seriously for a world that does not yet exist.

From the moment we are born, we learn something extraordinary:

almost everything we need is available.

You turn on a tap: there is water. You walk into a shop: there is food. You press a switch: the light comes on. You fall ill: you call a doctor. You want to cross the country: a few hours later, you have arrived.

All of this seems so normal to us that we have forgotten something essential:

nature does not provide all of this for us directly.

An extraordinarily complex civilisation does.

And a civilisation can become fragile.

So let us simply imagine that certain essential things become less available.

Not in a hundred years.

In our lifetime.

Water. Food. Healthcare. Safety.

Then, gradually, energy.

Education. The transmission of knowledge. Tools. Infrastructure. The environment in which we live.

At that point, the question is no longer:

"How do we preserve our standard of living?"

It becomes far more fundamental.

How do we live?

And immediately behind it:

how do we live tomorrow?

That is the central question of the Villages of Life.

We have chosen not to wait for events to impose the answer on us.

We are trying to build that answer now.

500 people able to live together

The Villages of Life are intended for ordinary people.

Not survivalists. Not heroes. Not people capable of living alone deep in a forest.

Families. Children. Older people. Women and men with their strengths, their weaknesses, their knowledge and their fears.

People willing to learn how to live in a world that may become far more constrained than the one we know today.

And our challenge goes even further than that.

We do not simply want these people to survive.

We want them to live.

And more than that:

we believe that many of them could actually be happier there than they are today.

That may sound paradoxical.

Less material comfort. Less speed. Less consumption.

But more connection. More family. More time. More usefulness. More transmission. More celebrations. More life.

To understand how far this takes us, let me describe a few characteristics of these Villages.

We imagine communities of around 500 people.

Everything begins around a first person whom we call the Initiator — a woman or a man.

They are not the leader.

They command no one.

Their role is different.

They look after the community itself. The relationships. The people. What holds them together.

I sometimes say that this person is a little like the mother of the community.

Not because they own the Village.

Not because they run it.

But because somebody has to care for the bond that allows five hundred people to become something more than five hundred individuals living side by side.

Another way of organising ourselves

And now we come to some much deeper differences.

Within a Village of Life, there is no money inside the community.

But we go further than that.

There are no prices. There are no salaries. There is no monetary value attached to the goods and services exchanged between residents.

I do not repair your roof so that you owe me three hours of work.

I do not care for your child because I expect something in return.

I do what I know how to do because the community needs it.

And tomorrow, when I need the others, they will be there.

Property rights as we know them today gradually give way to something different:

the right of use.

The important question is no longer so much:

"Who owns this?"

But:

"Who needs it, and what for?"

A house is made to be lived in. A tool to be used. Land to feed people. Knowledge to be passed on.

And above all:

there is no chief.

No pyramid.

No one at the top who is supposed to know better than five hundred people what they should all be doing.

But that does not mean everyone knows everything.

Quite the opposite.

There is one form of precedence.

Only one.

The precedence of practical know-how, experience and knowledge.

When there is a fire, the person who knows how to fight it naturally takes the lead. During a difficult birth, we listen to the person who knows how to support a birth. In a field, we listen to the person who understands the land. When a machine breaks down, we turn to the person who knows how to repair it.

Power is therefore no longer attached to a position.

It moves with the knowledge that is needed, at the moment when it is needed.

And that knowledge creates a fundamental responsibility:

whoever knows must pass it on.

Because in a fragile world, keeping knowledge to oneself is no longer merely selfish.

It becomes dangerous for everyone.

These are some of the ideas we have been exploring for more than twenty years.

And you can see that, ultimately, the Villages of Life are not simply trying to answer the question:

"How do we survive in a world that is going wrong?"

The question is much more beautiful than that.

It is this:

"If we have to learn to live differently again… how do we build a life that is genuinely worth living?"

That is what the Villages of Life are about.

Getting from today to tomorrow

But even a good idea is not enough.

Now it has to be made possible.

And this is probably where the most difficult part of our work begins.

Because the problem we face is enormous.

Tomorrow, in conditions that may become extremely difficult, we will need to be able to produce everything required for 500 people to live.

Not simply to eat.

To live.

There will need to be water, food, healthcare, clothing, homes, energy, tools, seeds, transport, knowledge, laughter, joy and pleasure.

There must be people able to repair, build, grow food, care for others and teach.

And all of this must work together.

Because a community never lives through one thing alone.

It lives through hundreds, and then thousands, of actions that depend on one another.

There are communities today that have retained a high degree of self-sufficiency.

We can think, for example, of certain Amish communities or other traditional societies.

They have a great deal to teach us.

But they possess an enormous advantage:

they inherit a culture, practical knowledge and an organisation built over generations.

They did not invent their way of life in a few years.

They received it.

We are in almost the opposite situation.

In just a few years, we have to recover, rebuild, adapt and sometimes invent capacities that our civilisation took centuries to abandon.

And we have to do it without creating a sad, rigid society concerned only with survival.

Because our aim is not to build communities in which people survive with gritted teeth.

We want places where people work, of course.

But also places where people laugh. Where they sing. Where they dance. Where children run. Where older people still have a place. Where people fall in love. Where people celebrate.

We want to save life without removing what makes life worth wanting.

And we face another problem.

We probably do not have fifty years ahead of us.

Perhaps we have a few years.

Perhaps more.

Nobody knows the timetable precisely.

But we know one thing:

we have to move far faster than a transformation of this scale would normally allow.

So we made a choice.

To use the full power of modern tools to prepare for a world that may itself have far less technology available.

It is a paradox.

But it is probably our best chance.

Look at the difficulty.

We have to begin with knowledge, a significant part of which does not yet exist.

We have to recover the knowledge that does exist but is scattered around the world.

We have to identify the women and men who still possess certain practical skills.

We have to experiment. Document. Correct. Transmit.

Then we have to enable ordinary people, who may not possess this knowledge to begin with, to carry out tasks that can sometimes be complex.

Tasks that depend on other tasks.

At the right time. In the right order. With the right resources. And sometimes in an extremely degraded environment.

So we began building something that is almost invisible when you simply look at a Village.

An organisation of knowledge and action.

Imagine a Village of 500 people.

Around 300 adults capable of taking an active part in keeping it running.

No one can know everything that needs to be done.

No one can remember everything.

No one can master agriculture, healthcare, construction, water, energy, food, stocks, animals, tools, children and safety.

It would be impossible.

So we have created a computer system whose purpose is to enable each person to know:

what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, how to do it, what is needed, when to do it and with whom.

The objective is extremely simple to state:

to enable those 300 people, day after day, to do what is necessary so that 500 people can still be living ten years from now.

The system does not make decisions instead of human beings.

It does not replace their intelligence.

It organises knowledge. It connects actions. It helps practical skills to be passed on. It helps us not to forget what is essential. It supports someone who is learning.

And gradually, something that was difficult becomes a human skill.

That is extremely important.

Because further down the road, technology itself may become fragile.

The machine must therefore help human beings become capable of living without it again.

And we have decided to make this tool available free of charge.

Why?

Because if you possess something that can help another human being protect their life and the lives of their children, it becomes very difficult to say:

"You may use it if you have enough money."

That would contradict everything we are trying to build.

Our purpose is not to sell the possibility of living.

Our purpose is to make it possible.

Helping knowledge travel

Around this central system, we are developing other tools.

Because a Village cannot live closed in on itself.

People need to communicate. Exchange knowledge. Ask for help. Share a discovery. Speak with someone who does not speak their language. Prepare an action with people hundreds or thousands of miles away.

That is why we developed a communication tool called NDAJE.

NDAJE is a Wolof word connected with the idea of meeting, gathering and discussion.

It allows people speaking different languages to work together.

That may seem secondary today.

But tomorrow, the ability to move knowledge from one person to another may be just as important as the knowledge itself.

We are also developing ways to capture knowledge before it disappears.

All over the world, there are women and men who still know how to do essential things.

Work particular soils. Preserve food. Build with very little. Repair. Care for people. Raise animals. Make things. Organise.

But some of that knowledge exists only in their heads.

If those people disappear without passing it on, several generations of experience can sometimes vanish in a matter of seconds.

Part of our work, therefore, is to seek out that knowledge.

Record it. Understand it. Turn it into something that can be passed on. And make it available to those who will need it.

We are also working around what we call the Companions of Life.

Women and men whose experience, work, courage, intelligence or way of looking at the world can give us something.

Not necessarily ready-made solutions.

Sometimes a method. Sometimes knowledge. Sometimes a way of thinking. Sometimes simply moral strength.

Because when you undertake something this immense, tools alone are not enough.

You also need human reference points.

Making this knowledge available to everyone

And then there is another enormous undertaking:

making all of this known.

Because a solution locked away inside a few computers is useful to no one.

So we want to speak. Explain. Show. Again and again.

Our aim is to publish one short video every day across the different social platforms.

And every week, two longer videos of around twenty minutes, so that we can take the time to explain a subject, a difficulty, a solution or an experience.

Why so much?

Because we are not simply trying to make an organisation better known.

We are trying to put a question into the minds of millions of people:

And me — how am I going to live tomorrow?

For more than twenty years, we have worked almost every day to build an answer to that question.

Thousands and thousands of hours.

Not merely to write down ideas.

To build methods. Tools. Organisations. Knowledge. Software. Means of communication. Experiments in the real world.

Everything that can turn anxiety into the ability to act.

And gradually, we are making this work available to the public in eight languages, so that it can move beyond the borders of the place where it began.

And I would like to finish with something that may be surprising.

None of this is based on ideological opposition to the world in which we live.

We are not saying:

"Money is bad."

We are not saying:

"All authority is bad."

Money and power have been extraordinarily powerful tools of our civilisation.

But tools remain useful only while the world that makes them possible continues to function.

In a far more fragile environment, some things that seem fundamental to us today may gradually become secondary.

Imagine that you are hungry.

Suddenly, the person who has a thousand euros and the person who knows how to grow potatoes do not possess the same kind of wealth.

Imagine that a pump breaks down.

The person with an important title and the person who knows how to repair that pump no longer have the same power.

That is what will change.

Value will move back towards the ability to do things. Power will move back towards useful knowledge. Safety will move back towards the community. And wealth will move back towards what actually makes life possible.

Perhaps money and power will not disappear completely.

But they may become far less central than they are today.

Almost anachronistic in some areas of life.

And perhaps, in the end, that is not a disaster.

Perhaps it will also be an opportunity to rediscover something our civilisation has sometimes forgotten:

a human being is not rich because of what they own.

They are rich because of what they know how to do. Because of what they know how to pass on. Because of the people they can rely on. And because of what they are capable of building with others.

That, too, is what we are trying to prepare.