My heart stopped for 10 minutes following a car accident in
Kenya, Africa and, in effect performed a "restart" on my brain that
allowed me to reassemble ALL of the knowledge and skills that I had acquired
previously! This was just prior to my immigration to Britain on the day of my
28th birthday, just as it was sinking into the 1981/82 recession with its loss
of over 3 million jobs.
The 3.6 miles that I then staggered, walked and jogged 92
times in the next 15 months for a total of over 330 miles to regain the
abilities to walk, speak and remember, also gave me important insights into
what we must do to make the world 100% sustainable, in 1981-2! Since I had also
to improve my memory at that time, I simply noted the visual images that I imagined
as I jogged every evening, painstakingly, in a journal.
Those images appear, more refined, on my website at www.greenmillennium.eu, having come
with me as I ran my own design company in England 6 ½ years after the accident,
and as a professor at one of the world’s best regarded university-level design
schools, 9 years later. At that time, I could win games of Trivial Pursuits (=
long-term memory) and not remember the names of those that I was playing with
(= short-term memory), while using my child-like mind to imagine the 100%
sustainable future that still seems even more necessary to us all!
I have continued both the thoughts and the research to
investigate how we might enable a world of 6.85 billion people to live on the
resources that only supported 1.6 billion in 1900, before we began to use
petroleum as we do today. Creating and using “Linear Cities” that run north to
south, with wind turbines along their rooflines to capture the cheapest and
most abundant form of solar energy very close to where it is used, and
proximity to open farmland so that everyone can raise their own food as they
like without a drop of oil, may give our children the same promise that our
parents gave us!
We all know that our children are the future, in fact they
are the “genetic reincarnations” of both their parents, but too many of us
still abuse them, and abuse the women who give them to us, especially in these
difficult economic times! A dose of the same realities that I was faced with
may help us all to use the world’s remaining petroleum as wisely as possible,
to build an infrastructure that will support the world’s populations 100%
sustainably, for eternity!
We are the drivers of that possibility, and the sooner more
of us wake up to the creation of such a zero petroleum, 100% sustainable
existence, the more of us there will be alive 1000, 10,000, and 100,000 years
from now to enjoy it!