The Four Abundances
This forecast presents abundance not as excess or accumulation, but as access to and distribution of knowledge, materials and capacities. In a four-part story set in a flourishing future, this interpretation of abundance is illustrated with real-life case studies that show alternative models already taking root
The descendants found new ways to thrive in the aftermath of extraction. They worked with repurposed materials and points of connection, creating loops and constellations. Wherever they went they fostered abundance, replenishing the cycles, resources, ecosystems and intelligences that provided for their ‘great reimagining’. Enough already, already enough.
Material Irrigation
The ‘great reimagining’ began in many places at once: a desert village; a port authority; a consortium of construction firms. They all announced a moratorium on extraction and made a switch to the new system known as ‘material irrigation’. Materials were reclaimed from collapsed buildings, scrapyards and decommissioned quarries, then refurbished and channelled to wherever there was greatest need.
Miners and construction workers retrained as ‘rebuilders’, cleaning and refitting used bricks or pipework, stairways or radiators, which were made available by local councils.
African nations came together to declare the first closed-loop continent – formally recalling their mineral riches from around the world to the places they had been taken from. Tonnes of batteries, blocks of copper, diamond earrings – all sent back.
Designers re-engineered missile interception systems to halt the flow of toxic emissions. Each ‘dump’ – contaminated recycling or post-industrial ore – was pinpointed, turned around and sent back to source. After some debate, it was agreed that used clothing from outside the continent would be accepted at specific garment market sites, where sophisticated refashioning systems were already in place.
The Rebuilds
Completed ‘rebuilds’ were established as a new commons, owned and maintained collectively, between public institutions and local people. It took time and conversation for these new communities to grow into themselves. They learned from other, informal abundance economies – systems for profit share or refitting bicycles, houses of thought or library gardens. Delegates and stakeholders argued, listened, organised, argued some more.
An international conference was called to debate the new system. They related histories of extraction and modelled possibilities for reclamation – from the perspectives of an open coltan seam in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a stand of sweet thorn trees on a South Africa mine dump and a Niger Delta floodbed at the Bight of Benin.
On the final day of the conference, a contingent of former miners from Johannesburg met with others from Kentucky and South Wales to share advice on retraining and ecological restoration.
New alliances formed, and the movement grew.
Knowledge Corridors
Students at the new microcolleges don’t sit exams – they are, instead, sent out on ‘placement’. Each student is assigned a small local ecosystem – a dune, rubbish dump or single tree – and is to be present in that place, paying attention, for a period of time: learning, through looking and listening, how to support the network of life that exists there.
A network of microcolleges established an insect corridor between them, connecting a restored wetland over oilfields in the Persian Gulf to a hospital garden on the Baltic Sea. Conservation designers ‘bugged’ the corridor, repurposing old surveillance technologies to monitor and support biodiversity.
At first, the corridor was small – just a few paces wide. It rolled out slowly, through nature reserves and the scarred earth sites of historic conflicts and colonial infrastructures. Then, in its third year, it exploded with biodiversity – proliferating in all directions. Human beings were awe-struck.
It became apparent that the corridor was branching out and connecting up, until it extended a healing, protective network of life around the planet.
Abundant Intelligences
The ‘split-level’ payment system recognises all those who contribute to the generation of income – workers, shareholders, communities, ecosystems – and distributes wealth proportionately among them. The system is administered by Ancestor.
Ancestor is an abundant intelligence supercomputer. She can help you with anything – ask her about bone-setting, your next career move or the age of the stars. But her knowledge isn’t produced via server farms and fossil fuels on the old internet system now known as ‘the extractor’. She runs on renewable energy, which she forages from billions of ambient micro-sources: the movements of leaves in the wind, the pressure of typing fingertips, the bounce of a rebounding trampoline. Each unit is used and then passed on, for free.
People who work with Ancestor are known as ‘relatives’ rather than ‘users’. Relatives earn the information they require by making a practical contribution. The questioner can decide what that is – grow a seedling, work a shift at a care home, throw a party – but they must find the action that best articulates their question. To learn about babies, help out an elder or work in a meadow to understand grasses. Each act contributes energy to the network: Ancestor’s hyperwisdom is available only to those who are willing to reciprocate.
These contributions are known as ‘descendants’. They beget one another, proliferate, diversify.
