NEED FOR CHANGE
Challenge & Opportunity: The Need for Change
Everything that humankind has created started with imagination, vision, and belief, and was brought into manifestation through design and action.
We believe that humans have the capacity for great beauty, love and kindness. We have confidence that, if given the opportunity, environment, and economic-social support to do so, most of us would devote our time, effort and resources to building a regenerative, abundant, loving and thriving world. AWE Communities are designed to provide that opportunity, environment and support.
We have arrived at a point in our evolution where the technologies of extraction, industrialization and mass consumerism have created a world for machines and non-living corporations, not humans.
The world that humankind has created has become a toxic. The air we breathe is polluted, the water we drink is contaminated, the food we eat contains harsh and poisonous chemicals, and our homes and offices are often harmful to our health.
We have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet over 40 years ago and have continued to grow in population and consumption with increasing waste and ecosystemic damage. Scientists predict that humans will be the cause of the Sixth Mass Extinction. Our hoarding, waste, and greed have led to the destruction of fragile ecosystems and climate change that, if continued, will endanger humankind’s ability to survive. As well, our economy is collapsing under runaway corruption, and 80% the world's population lives in or near poverty.
We have become disconnected from each other and the planet. Our idea of a "community" has become a collection of unsustainable "McMansions" behind locked gates where neighbors rarely connect with each other, or urban and suburban neighborhoods with little connection to our neighbors and nature. Our healthcare and educational systems are broken, and our energy policy supports pollution, war and terrorism.
The expanding awareness of the global environmental, resource and economic catastrophes has led to a growing demand for regenerative, self-sufficient, smart growth communities and whole systems practices including "Collaborative Consumption." Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping reinvented through network technologies on a scale and in ways never possible before. From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist, Uber, and Airbnb, Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business and reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume.
AWE Communities addresses the growing need and demand for conscious, connected, healthy and regenerative living by providing a new model of living and working that addresses the issues of carrying capacity, pollution and dependence upon grid-based extractive economic models and centralized supply chain inefficiencies and pollution.
AWE Communities are designed to be self-sufficient, regenerative, energy efficient, zero-waste, and carbon-negative communities that balance the community's population with its internal carrying capacity. By sharing resources (e.g., facilities, community farm, community kitchen, cars, tools and equipment) owned by the community and employing meritocratic cooperative ownership of community businesses, AWE Communities is designed to reduce the time, expense and environmental impact related to the ownership, packaging, shipping, maintenance and storage of "stuff" while increasing economic abundance, passive revenues, free time, quality of life and access to a wide variety of amenities.
AWE is confident that its communities will become exemplary beacons for abundant, well and empowered living that inspires conscious community design, development and planning to foster ecosystemic thriving.