On the other hand many of the people who sympathise with the ideas, cannot see an immediate or effective route from where the world is, to where they feel it ought to be. The task of agreeing in advance upon a blueprint for a replacement world, under the conditions of a rapidly shifting context, is more than any practical person would undertake. Nor is there any holistic way of 'laboratory' testing a proposed new sustainable culture.
A route has to be proposed, rather than a destination, and that route begins from where the world finds itself this morning.
Rigidly defined alternative goals cannot be dictated. The alternative thinkers should concentrate on maintaining the social environment in which evolution is possible.
The first of these conditions is liberty.
Without liberty there is no variation. Without variation there is no advantage. Without advantage there is no competition. Without competition there is no evolution. Without evolution there is no life.
Liberty: we must assume that we have a fair measure of liberty or we would not now be proposing social inventions.
Diversity: the next step in facilitating evolution is to ensure variation and diversity.
A simple but potentially devastating idea is proposed...
A sequential size boycott.
A consumer of goods or services cannot always afford to disengage from every technology or organisation of which he or she disapproves, or has reservations about. In any case, many institutions remain necessary, pending the provision of some substitute, or development of some alternative.
While the remainder are in no way ecologically or morally superior to the largest individual unit, the process of agglomeration is put into reverse, and the tide turned.
The immediately advantageous position for a producer to hold would be second largest producer, size being reckoned in units of production (number of bottles per year).
The second largest producer would also have a dilemma: whether or not to go for one extremely profitable year, mopping up the customers who disengage from number one; for they would then inherit the leadership - and the boycott - in the next financial year.
Their computers would quickly tell them - allowing for the percentage success of the boycotting - to throttle back, or more effectively, to break up the company into smaller, still perhaps profitable, decentralised units, competing and evolving.
An undertaking to do this could of course cause the boycott to be lifted, pending the reorganisation.
So, raise your glass - having checked the label on the bottle first - to Life, Liberty, Diversity, Evolution and the Sequential Size Boycott.
Gillies Macbain, Cranagh Castle, Templemore, Co. Tipperary, Ireland (tel 0504 53104).