Living civilization

Human civilization is complex. If we try to imagine the kind of civilization we want to live in, we might easily imagine a world at peace where everyone is happy. For me, my mind goes to the kinds of high tech futures that were favored when I was a kid in the 1970s: flying cars, gleaming cities with clean streets, maybe orbiting colonies with farms stuck to the inside of rotating cylinders and a great view of Earth.

We can look at it from another angle and think of all the things our perfect world wouldn’t have: climate change, pollution, inequity, racism, crime, war; then add into the mix some of what we miss, like clean oceans, healthy reefs, wild places, pleasant Summers and whatever else comes to your mind.

A word that works pretty well with all of the ideas I’ve listed is vibrancy. We want to be vibrant people, we want to live in vibrant cities or in natural places with vibrant beauty. We want to know that if we were to go snorkeling, we’d see vibrant sea life in a vibrant reef.

Vibrancy is another word for life. In this case, I’m not talking about the distinction between things that are alive (like plants and animals) and things are not (like rocks). I am alive, but I may not have much vibrancy. Vibrant people light up a room when they enter; there’s a palpable quality to them. The room itself may be more or less vibrant. We can sense a difference between being in a shopping mall versus being in the Taj Mahal. It’s the quality of life that I’m talking about, and to help differentiate from the dead/alive meaning, I call it “livingness.” It is a gradual quality, meaning that a place, person or object can can have very little livingness, a whole lot of livingness, or any amount in between.

It seems clear to me that our world is a mix of low- and high-livingness