Executive Summary

• Ready or not, the forces underlying the Long Emergency will force a return to the 'real' (vs the virtual)
• What regions and town/city models will fare best in this future?
• The age of the car is over: how will we transport goods and ourselves?
• Which skills will be in greatest demand?
• How to prepare ourselves emotionally for becoming less techno-dependent

If you have not yet read Part I: Returning to the 'Real'  available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

A Return To the 'Real'

John Maynard Keynes famously remarked, “In the long run we are all dead.” Which leaves the short to intermediate run, which is a lot. Start with the proposition that we’ll be compelled to reconnect our lives to biophysical reality, that is, nature. The techno-industrial adventure was about the exhilaration of overcoming natural limits — and the grandiosity in thinking that we could de-link permanently and put something synthetic and supposedly just-as-good in nature’s place. In the process, we de-natured ourselves and unplugged from the satisfactions found in being part of something wondrous and whole and larger than ourselves. We don’t have to reinvent the sacred. It has been there all along. We just ignored and disregarded it for about a century, and now we have to rebuild the social and logistical infrastructure for it.  That job will be easier than keeping the interstate highway system in repair.

Expect to be living a far less mediated existence, being more directly in touch with the patterns afforded by nature, the sun and moon, the seasons, the temperature, the sensations, the tastes and textures, the pains and pleasures. For the generation used to sensing absolutely everything through the tiny portal of a five-inch smart phone screen, this may come as a startling psychological shock, greater than the psychedelic drugs of the hippie days were to the Boomers.