With the future of pensions and other welfare provisions looking decidedly fragile, fuel poverty, food shortages, disease and environmental collapse looming, it makes sense to increase your resilience to the future. To unhitch ourselves from the global roller coaster enough to stop feeling queasy about the ride. To begin the decades long effort needed to recover some sanity in the way we live our lives in this fragile skin between bare rock and airless vacuum.

Either you have wakened from the dream sufficiently to realise the truly fragile crust we walk, the imperative for determined action to reach solid ground before it is too late, or you are still dreaming, convincing yourself the threat is not real, imagining a few half-hearted gestures are sufficient to bring you to safety. The least you can do is step aside and let us make fools of ourselves.

Even if we are misguided and paranoid, what harm does it do to let us build our arks, to feed and protect our children from a flood that never comes? You can laugh at us on the TV or over a glass of wine at dinner while we toil in the fields and orchards. And if it turns out to be you who are misguided and complacent, there will be no need for argument.

The system we find ourselves embedded in is decaying from the inside. Though there is life in the limbs yet, the heart is dead. We wish to use that remaining life to fashion a way of being that incorporates the best of present and past, and reach for a future almost forgotten in the long nightmare that has engulfed humanity since the catastrophic end of the last ice age. Our true history is only now being uncovered. We are more intelligent, capable and righteous than recent ‘civilisation’ would lead us to believe. None of us are perfect, but we are all capable of flooding this world with light, we all seek happiness, and by standing together we can disallow abuse, intolerance and oppression, should we choose to. We are giants lulled to sleep with whispers telling us we are meaningless midgets. The ‘triumphs’ of our current civilisation are correspondingly tawdry and minute.

Hartwood is about much more than food and a roof over your head, but without these you cannot achieve anything of mortal value. Producing your own food, building a real, affordable home in a secure community of your own sounds great, but impracticable. Would it be safe? How could I find the time to learn, won’t it be a lot of hard work, how could I hold down a job and provide for myself? Where will I get the money?

Time is money, say the suits. If so, then of the two, time is preferable because it is a guaranteed income without a boss, no price fluctuations and no government save my own.

Surely a basic requirement of any advanced civilisation should be the ability to enable all its citizens to have somewhere to call home? A place of rest free from obligation and insecurity. Why is it that still after hundreds, even thousands of years, for most, to consume a home is the only choice, and why does that ‘choice’ require submitting to years of servitude to debt and employment? A price inflated a hundredfold or more by the extortionate cost of ‘authorised’ building plots, many, many times the actual construction costs. Add thirty years compound interest on a substantial sum, and the obstacles to even that small measure of freedom become insurmountable for many, particularly as you age beyond your mortgage-by date.

Using your own time, a single year or two is sufficient to build a complete home, easier still with the help of neighbours. No crushing mortgage stretching forever, no parasitic landlord, free to get on with the rest of your life. Hartwood has researched practical options, and offers various plans for enabling small scale low-impact village construction. It is entirely possible to create small villages where all materials are provided, residents paid for their labour in constructing homes and other facilities, the resources and facilities all community owned, much infrastructure community built, many services community provided. All this is possible, but is unlikely to be allowed. Freedom is never given. It has to be taken. Read any history book.

You do not need loadsamoney to make this happen, you need a mix of enthusiasm, vision and a willingness to learn and work, with temporary financial help from those who have assets to spare for a while to create a future they are proud to bequeath. We need land, we need people who will get their hands dirty, who will work in the rain and mud to hew a village from a forest. We need some money as gift or on loan and we need people willing to act now, prepared to stand against corruption and ignorance to achieve what needs to be done. Visit our forums to learn (and contribute) more of the practical details.