Rudolf Bahro teaches at the Humboldt University in East Berlin where he has ensured that every student studies basic ecology.
His thinking is literally post-industrial: imports should be reduced to the level of 100 years ago; our standard of living should drop to about one-tenth of what it is now; no tourism; avoid banks, pharmaceuticals and all the rest. These are unavoidable steps if we are to set to rights an ecologically-unsustainable system which carries genocide, biocide and ethnocide to the remotest corners of the earth, he tells us. Our task must be to stop the modern industrial Megamachine and develop substitutes for its supply functions: to break our addiction to it.
In practice, Bahro calls for a change of lifestyle towards one of 'frugal beauty' and 'voluntary simplicity'. One of his many suggestions is to allow everyone the use of 1000m2 of land. Small living circles should be built up as seeds for a new decentralised communitarian society, even if at the beginning we 'do the splits' and put one foot in both camps - the old and the new - while we try things out.
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