How to answer this with a 4000 character limit instead of several long nights of discussion....
Mass societies necessarily mean industrialisation. Industrialisation necessarily means unsustainable consumption and a direct attack on the planetary ecosystem.
The only solution is a relocalisation of humanity. This will be partly forced upon us as resources run out.
An imminent example will be the oil crash. No credible voice is saying that we have any more than 20 years until demand outstrips supply with oil; many believable sources think it will be a lot sooner. Either way, we're talking in our lifetimes.
When that happens, the price rockets, and we not only lose the car culture, but we have to confront the other oil issues; transport and trade networks, raw materials for plastics and, most frighteningly, the nitrate fertilisers that have given such bumper food production and encouraged the population explosion.
The resulting starvation of millions is as nothing compared to what happens when climate change really takes hold.
I know that most cultures have doomsday stories involving high temperature. But usually they demand faith in some gods or the writings of the monks on psychedelics who wrote the Book of Revelations. We, however, are depending on people like the UN Panel on Climate Change and the Meteorological Office, who aren't known for mad or exaggerative wild claims.
The UN say that we can expect a global increase of up to 6 degrees by 2100. Last time such swift heating happened cos of CO2, it killed 90 percent of species; the earth was utterly incapable of supporting anything like humans for tens of millions of years.
Put bluntly, for humans to survive, the forests of the earth have to stay up. For that to happen, the factories and human population levels have to come down. People have to live less technologically and more locally and directly.
How do we achieve this?
I have no Master Plan. Solutions that are to involve and engage everyone have to be visioned and enacted by everyone. It is this first process of awareness and engagement that I'm dedicated to, rather than merely asking people to sign up to something that they didn't have a hand in creating.
What I'm talking about is something beyond politics and revolution, its a transcendence of mass culture. It's totally pie in the sky and ludicrous to talk about it as credible. But it is nowhere near as ludicrous as believing that industrialised society can continue, that it will somehow find eternal resources and not poison itself and most other species too.
The political parties vying for our support are merely arguing over who gets to drive the bus. Once we are aware that the bus is heading to the edge of a cliff at an ever increasing speed, the only job is to stop anybody driving it.
So this does mean a lot of stuff that looks 'anti', but I see it as removing our obstacles, as pointing us in a better direction. Cos wherever our solutions are, they are not in greater fossil fuel consumption, they are not in GM crops, they are not in militarism and centralised power politics.
So I fight these things as a way of curbing the worst and most accessible of the manifestations of the destructiveness of our culture.
As well as the 'anti' I also work on things like squatted social centres, where we take abandoned buildings and put on cafes, gigs, meetings, films and stuff for free. It not only makes a startling change to the buy-buy-buyness of my city, but it encourages participation. Punters are not just 'consumers'.
And whenever we work so totally on something and in groups of this size something deeply and primally feels right, the world feels a better fit. They are small things, but they give a clue to where to go, and they make us less likely to be taken in by the consumerist poison that is, literally, killing us.
Like I said, a 4000 character limit ain't the thing for this stuff. But I'll gladly expand if there's any points that you want me to expand on.
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