Then imagine grounding those dreams in our harsh reality.
Another of Gavin Mounsey’s provocative polls has me more deeply considering something I often daydream about.
What if money were no object? What if you could create anything you desired with a bottomless budget? Oh the possibilities!
In these daydreams my foundation point is naturally something I genuinely believe would be beneficial for the future of mankind, which naturally includes benefitting nature, as our earth and only home.
To that, Gavin’s added a couple of caveats:
Poll: If you were offered 100 million USD under the condition it must be used for benefiting the bioregion you live in and the 7th generation that comes after us, what would your plan be?
September, 2026’s poll in the Mirrors For The Mind, Heart and Soul series
I will turn my perpetual daydreams into speculative plans, sounds like fun and something I naturally excel at!
Gavin:
“So many on Earth today have cultivated their gifts of vision, intellect and heart that they could be channelled to make their communities, their watersheds and their bioregions so much more abundant, beautiful and healthy, and yet they tell me that their vision for gifting beauty, ecological regeneration, wholeness and empowerment to their communities is limited by their access (or lack thereof) financial resources.
Today, I would like to break those shackles from the minds of the good hearted and righteous by proposing a thought experiment.
If (as some say) the only thing standing between what is and what can be is a clear vision, faith and belief (the law of attraction and manifestation) than I want to plant the seeds for clear visions, hopeful mindscapes and best case scenarios to take root in your hearts and minds.
Daydreams into Realities, this might take some periphery explaining. And, it includes a plea to share your ideas for ‘gifting beauty, ecological regeneration, wholeness and empowerment’ too, either here or at Gavin’s Newsletter.
First, since this is bioregion-specific, that means folks should understand I’m talking about beginning right here where we live, East Texas, which many believe is something like the Texas they see in Hollywood movies, which is West Texas, and nothing like it here, so that faulty image needs to be corrected.
As a working title for my plan: Free the Waters
“The Piney Woods cover a 54,400-square-mile (141,000 km2) area of eastern Texas, northwestern Louisiana, southwestern Arkansas and the southeastern corner of Oklahoma.
The Piney Woods is a temperate coniferous forest terrestrial ecoregion in the Southern United States covering 54,400 square miles (141,000 km2) of East Texas, southern Arkansas, western Louisiana, and southeastern Oklahoma. These coniferous forests are dominated by several species of pine as well as hardwoods including hickory and oak. Historically the most dense part of this forest region was the Big Thicket though the lumber industry dramatically reduced the forest concentration in this area and throughout the Piney Woods during the 19th and 20th centuries. The World Wide Fund for Nature considers the Piney Woods to be one of the critically endangered ecoregions of the United States.[2] The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines most of this ecoregion as the South Central Plains. In Arkansas, the region is sometimes called the Arkansas Timberlands.”
Piney Woods – Wikipedia
This is a huge area, obviously, and I would never want to be confused with someone promoting any sort of central planning, so my focus is far more localized and set on slowly and consciously re-wilding nature and re-integrating communities with eco-friendly landscapes and lifestyles without relying on the current standbys for profiting from the land, which are: development, tourism, monocrop farming/ranching.
In this endeavor I would use my past professional experience in higher education and the example of Edward Slavsquat’s efforts on the other side of the world to create an Institute of Village Studies. I hope he does not expect me to name it after him. I would give him a small donation for the idea, or better yet, offer his children future dividends or some cool scheme like that.
https://open.substack.com/pub/edwardslavsquat/p/how-many-persimmons-does-a-man-need?r=87pg2k&utm_medium=ios
Part of this idea also stems from an existing institute just west of us in Waco where I first learned cheesemaking and beekeeping, which also teaches many other traditional skills and crafts, like soap making, sewing, baking, animal husbandry, smithing, etc.
Ploughshare Institute for Sustainable Culture.
My vision would be to organize the institute around a shared vision rather than a shared belief system–non-denominational, non-political. It also differs from a traditional sustainability model in that the focused goal would be ecological re-integration over current market expectations. By that I mean we would not be open to the general public, our mission would be to create a prototype others in our bioregion could follow, for complete economic seperation from the state. That is food, water, energy indepedence and autonomy.
Skills are important in my vision, but so is tech, the part that makes me especially excited, is the possibility of resurecting old tech, or what I believe was old tech, but have never seen it beyond my imagination.
For this we would need several key pieces of equipment I’ve seen available which can map the underground terrain. I believe geoscopes available here would do the trick, but I’d need expert advice on that.
Environmental XPRT – The Environmental Industry Online
We will also need to purchase the adjacent land, which just happens to be for sale. We’d eventually expand to a few thousand acres in order to ideolological compete with the current large landholders in our region and to continue in our liberating the waters. I think acquiring the land would not be that difficult with such funding, because places are going up for sale around us routinely, and for the right price I’m certain other adjacent land could be fairly easily obtained.
Liberating the waters is the first order of the plan. By that I mean first right here at home, then to our surrounding area, then extending out as we accumulate more land.
We will be locating TWO essential resources first, springs and salt. What most don’t realize is this region has plenty of both and most likely, even under just our 55 acres, we have both. With that information we will be able to locate and dig a ‘primary water’ well. Most folks don’t know about primary water, others think it’s some kind of a scam. I do not agree with those sceptics, but I’d hire this guy to find out for sure.
From his site:
“There is in fact a lot of published science supporting the existence of water stored in the Earth’s crust. It’s been described as volcanic water, crustal water, juvenile water or what we call primary water. Below is just a fraction of the more recent scientific evidence:
• 2022 Smithsonian Magazine – How the Earth’s Mantle Sends Water Up Toward the Surface: ”[…] within the first several hundred kilometers below the crust—there is another ocean. It is, most likely, the largest ocean in the world.”
Primary Water Well Locators
The reason for starting with the water is first for health, then for power generation, and eventually for transport. For centuries travel and transport in this region relied on the rivers and their tributaries and I believe on a small scale that could be restored without having to appeal to the current establishment to release the dams on the resevoirs and recreational lakes which dried up so much of the adjacent landscapes.
Canoes are unobtrusive; they don’t storm the natural world, or ride over it, but drift upon it as part of its own silence. –John Graves, Goodbye to a River
There is plenty of water for all our needs and even most of our desires, I’d bet the ranch on it!
The most pivotal part of the plan is energy. My idea is to rehabilitate old tech based on spring houses, wind towers, yakchals, and other methods, some known, some suspected.
https://youtu.be/tbUGSI6w6Wc?si=IVWMrXszZKpLkPf2
https://youtu.be/L1ZM0iNs6hA?si=10109gaDRUZUysJh
https://youtube.com/shorts/-NaJk3pNYys?si=kmkNJtFdCyYJ1W8e
Even magnets maybe?
https://youtu.be/8QXUyOQKsWo?si=c27HBBV1GfwSrKxP
I don’t know how this exactly works in execution, I’m a dreamer playing a planner, looking for an engineer! And with that kind of budget, I bet I could find a few of them!
Here’s what I see. Moats around fortified castles and canals around and through cities were repurposed a few centuries ago and originally were not about protection from invaders. The towers with the slits were not about shooting the enemies, they were about air circulation. It was a system of water circulation and oscillation with the underground currents caused by the movement of the primary waters. I believe these existed in every country of the world. I have no proof of this. I understand it goes against every accepted hisorical and technical narrative of our age.
All I have is my imagination, some speculation by crazy conspiracy theorists on the internet, and some simple art. Like this favorite of mine, which I’ve posted several times.
What do you see? Just a man in a dress standing on a fish in some sort of canal? Would that be the sort of iconic art that survives for centuries?
Why is his dress bell-shaped? Why does his rod go into the fish-as-vehicle? A cavity resonator to produce oscillation, perhaps? Why is there steam coming out of the sun? Why do the tiny fishes and the hills appear to have motion? Why so much emphasis on the color green?
Does this strike you as a great piece of art, or as art conveying a specific meaning through symbolism?
Did the artist intend a 7th generation sort of purpose to his creation? How does my plan fulfill that criteria, considering my extensive limitations and the considerable budget?
I believe they need a new paradigm based on integration of time and space. I realize the ironies on the surface–use loads of fiat cash in order to escape the extractive economic slave system–how does that alter anything for the future of mankind or the bioregion?
Because right now the development in these parts is off the chain. Because otherwise we will continue to depend on oil, gas, tourism and ranching, none of which are creating healthy ecosystems. Because I believe folks would be happier and healthier if they lived more simply and closer to nature, but that most have already forgotten this due to generational amnesia, so they need a replicable model in order to envision it. We will be that model.
A model of man and nature reintegrated. A verdant and abundant oasis in the middle of the encroarching demands of the Texas Triangle*. Not an escape, not a destination, not a resource, but a newly restored relationship between small rural life living communities and the greater landscape. Not a return to an Amish idyllic dream, but the ideal place to build on a dream, eliminating, one by one, all exploitative ties to the existing failing system.
*”The Texas Triangle is a region of Texas that contains the state’s five largest cities and is home to over half of the state’s population. The Texas Triangle is formed by the state’s four main urban centers, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio.”
Thanks for the food for thought, Gavin!
A daydream with plans in progress. . . ! Add your dreams and plans too, if you please. 😊
