From a young age, Nara was the guardian of the history of the Serra community, just as, in another time, her great-grandfather Antonio was the guardian of the warehouse. Between these two times, the world experienced a transition from material to subjective risks. Nara was born shortly before her great-grandfather’s death, but she heard and learned his stories from other people because she was always an attentive ear and a good storyteller. It seems that this attention to children’s natural talents and family and community encouragement of them is not such an old practice. It was undoubtedly the conception, so common today, that each person comes to serve the world with their talents, that made Nara be chosen as a young girl to tell stories that highlight the lineage of each person and the community.
Her great-grandfather Antônio lived during the time of the collapse, between the 2020s and 2040s and was already part of a visionary community when the great debacle hit. He left the big city with friends to found the Serra community while most people were still immersed in productivism and consumerism, blind to what was to come. They were called people from ecovillages, these strange people who embraced deconsumption, abandoned the cities to build small ecological villages, proposing to live in an ancestral way. With his own hands – and those of everyone in the community – Antônio built the warehouse that would store the food they produced: healthy food, without poison or genetic manipulation, produced in a restorative way, in different types of agroforestry. They grew food and trees at the same time.
Her grandfather Fernando, son of Antonio and Áurea who was born into this healthy world, told her how strange it was that people still lived in cities eating poison and living a psychologically poisoned life. It was with great fear that he saw the community of Serra invaded three times by hordes of hungry people coming from all sides to plunder the store. He was a child and didn’t take part in the fighting, only in the reconstruction. Grandfather Antonio had told Fernando that during the first invasion, the community didn’t react because they were sorry for the state of those starving people. The second time they had to react, because there was violence. The third time they realized that they couldn’t even plant anymore, because the warehouse would be raided when it was full again, and so they fought the invaders fiercely.
There was no fourth time, as the Serra community climbed further up the mountain towards a place that had protected them for more than half a century: Serra da Serra community. Nara was born there in 2112, a time of peace and prosperity. Her mother, Mariana, daughter of Fernando and Anita and granddaughter of Antônio and Áurea, the last guardian of history before her, had also been born in peaceful times, but her mother’s mother, Anita, a companion of Grandpa Fernando and Grandpa Adolfo, had lived through difficult times with them in the consolidation of the Serra da Serra. After fleeing the original community that they had made thrive on food, forest, people and resources amid the world’s devastation, they lived through materially hard and subjectively rich times: the communal solitude of the mountain tops.
The whole community gradually migrated to a hidden place, so inaccessible that they were disconnected – and thus protected – in the hardest of hard times. Antônio and Flor were among the first to migrate. He, a carpenter and warehouse keeper, and she, a farmer and biologist, went to invent life in the Serra da Serra with two other couples. The children came a little later, when the houses were built, and the gardens were producing. Everyone knew that they had to leave little by little to avoid attracting attention and to keep themselves protected. They already lived a little isolated because the people of the region were still mesmerized by consumption and the obsessive search for material success, while those people from the Serra lived for the land, the community, self-knowledge and the celebration of Life and Nature. So when everything collapsed, they had the most important things: food, water, cool homes and supportive neighborhoods, but they were surrounded by desolation.
The Serra ecovillage was much loved by the local people, who protected it as much as they could, but they were the “rich” ones amid the chaos and so the community was targeted, at first by the hungry, then by criminals. They had their own water, their own energy, their own fuel, their own nutritious and tasty food. They were creative and independent people, who spent hours in strange meetings full of flowers, incense, chants and silence before decide what they were going to plant, who did what, who would be part of the next leadership group. So much beauty in the meetings and methods of calming spirits were necessary because in that alternative bunch of people each person had their own ideas about how to do things. And the meetings had beautiful, harmonious moments, but they were also full of disagreements and personal outbursts when people said: “I’m getting out of here, I can’t take it anymore”.
But they continued to be there, Nara was told. Apart from some who left and others who arrived, the community in the fourth decade of the last century remained at around 80 adults and their children, who were growing up knowing that they were living in a different world. When they began to be invaded, conflicts subsided and an urgency to defend what they had created imposed an internal peace that had never been greater. The collective plan to leave came during the last invasion, but also when the signs of collapse were already daily. After the flooding of Rio Grande do Sul in 2024, nothing was ever the same again. Despite the madness of some who persisted in denying the obvious, the idea that nothing was safe in environmental terms took hold. As always, the inertia of lifestyles is only shaken by catastrophes. This was the case with the great fire in the Serra region, which covered almost the entire Chapada Diamantina.
Those visionaries were well-informed and well-educated people, with professionals coming from different fields. They had founded the Serra community at the beginning of the millennium because they could no longer stand living in a dead-end world and wanted to build something new. They prepared for what was to come on all fronts. They became autonomous on the essentials and were aware of the risks of fires, which began to occur frequently at the beginning of their settlement in the region. They surrounded their land with succulent plants that retained a lot of water inside and thus protected them – not completely, of course – from the fires that grew in intensity and area each year. In the year of the great fire, almost the entire Chapada Diamantina burned, because the fire spots met themselves, forming an unimaginable brazier in the middle of April, when in that region the rain usually had started, but it was late that year and everything was very very dry, with no significant water since November of the previous year.
The fire was fought by professional and volunteer brigades for days and days, to no avail. The planes kept throwing water on the fire in endless flights and non-stop refueling. The brigades were exhausted, as were the pilots. People went into shock with every report of towns burning, houses being destroyed… and the fear of being the next victims grew. The crops, already very dry, were razed to the ground by the fire. The solution came from an absolutely abnormal rainfall for that time of year. A historic “thunderstorm”, like divine providence, which rained all over the Chapada as it only does in November, December and January. It was so miraculous that demonstrations of gratitude to the various saints of the region were organized spontaneously and brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets in a gesture of faith never seen before. Believers and non-believers alike believed that they had been saved by divine grace.
Fernando was a boy and told his granddaughter Nara, 70 years later, how relieved he had been to see his ecovillage and plantations completely saved from devastation. Antonio, his father, had explained that the community had been safe from the fire because they had increased the humidity with a significant number of small and large water tanks and with the regenerated forests and agroforests they had created, and also because of the thick plantations of cacti on the fences of the collective property, and the road that skirted almost the entire area. It’s true that the wind also helped, but it didn’t push the fire too far in the direction of the Serra, since some neighbors had been hit. With crops lost and money scarce, the people of the region went through desperate times and a lot of migration in search of possibilities elsewhere, but chaos was spreading everywhere.
After this experience, Fernando spent some time marveling at Serra superheroes who kept the community safe from the fire. However, after the first invasion and the robbery of the warehouses, he felt unprotected because he was hungry in a way he had never experienced before. It wasn’t exactly a hunger to have nothing to eat, it was a hunger to eat the same bland thing every day, since only the roots and green vegetables were left over from the first invasion, and they had to eat this until the new harvest. They replanted everything, rebuilt everything, until they were invaded again. The methods were different, much more organized and violent in this second event, as well as in the third. It was no longer possible to stay there.
The move to Serra da Serra was planned in detail. They sold what they could, took tools and food and gave themselves the time, through the founders, to get to know and build up the living conditions in that stony, beautiful and wet universe high up in the mountains. How they managed to move around 80 people, including adults and children, to the top of the mountains with all their belongings to live without anyone finding out is still a mystery to this day, especially under the conditions in which they did it: on foot, climbing amazing cliffs. A lot of solidarity was needed to carry the old people and the small children. Fear and hope pushed them on, as the devastation of the fire and the social chaos around them showed that there would be no life left where they were. Climate change would have been enough to annihilate a way of life, but human stupidity caused a world war to break out at the same time.
Few countries went to war: those fighting for supremacy. The old supremacy fought with the new, but all nations were affected by the war. International trade came to a virtual standstill, institutions were weakened all over the world, and the war effort led to an absurd increase in the exploitation of natural resources to produce weapons, tanks, satellites and drones, rather than food. Along with the unpredictability and changes in the climate, agriculture has become unviable, prices have risen, and hunger is rife. Europe, once again, was the main stage of the war and the Far East the secondary stage. With the USA, Russia and China involved up to their necks in the war, the industries that supplied the world came to a standstill and the consumerist junks that circled the seas stopped sailing.
While the old world was crumbling, it was giving rise to a monstrous heir: synthetic life. Research centers for the internet and artificial intelligence were multiplying and operating at full speed, and cyber warfare was as important, if not more important, than the battlefields. When one of these centers was destroyed by enemy fire, it automatically transferred its research to the others in a perfect network of cooperation. Technology was making great strides in the midst of destruction and automation was replacing humans in war and production, artificially generating what Nature had produced for millennia: synthetic food, synthetic spouses, synthetic houses that gave those who lived in 40 m2 the feeling of living in 200. To escape war, climate catastrophes and chaos, a significant part of humanity became trapped in an invented world.
Meanwhile, on the other side of real life, especially in the more peripheral areas of the world, everyday life was almost back to the pre-industrial era. There was a return to producing real food in backyards and empty areas of cities, cooking with firewood, bartering for materials, building everything with local materials, using animals for transportation… only the internet was still really available, albeit with big bumps. The community of Serra da Serra was on this side of reality and the antenna they had installed high up on the mountain served to keep them – whenever they wanted – informed about the world despite being outside of it. Nara, as guardian of the past, wasn’t very interested in the present, but her brother Artur was part of the connection team.
The miracle of these times was the agreement not to use nuclear weapons. Negotiators from all sides spent so much time together to reach an agreement to keep nuclear weapons out of the war that it was the trust they built between themselves that ensured the rule was respected. Of course, and the fear of the end of everything. They became friends and gave their words. It was these seemingly fragile forces, friendship and words, that ensured that the war didn’t suddenly end humanity, as climate change was gradually doing.
For Antonio and Anita and the two other couples who founded Serra da Serra, the time they spent settling in was extremely hard. They lived in an enchanting but wild place that didn’t offer the minimum conditions for subsistence. They brought tools, supplies and seeds and had to build not only a house for themselves, but also a communal house for those who followed and plantations to provide food for everyone. This was the procedure: each group arrived with a place to live and built the next group’s home. With stone and wood, abundant in the region, within a year there were already four houses and 26 people, as well as vegetable gardens, orchards and cereal crops. The solar panels came soon and little by little they had the comfort of electricity again, including internet access. But bringing in the various installations, from the production of fuel for the machines to the gears that made the community’s day-to-day life easier, was a real epic.
The challenges were threefold: to dismantle everything into small pieces, to migrate unnoticed through the neighborhood and to climb the steep mountainside loaded with so much junk. They had to set up a rest camp, a discreet and powerful engineering system to lift elements without being noticed. The children were another challenge: curious and cheerful, they made a lot of noise, asked a lot of questions and risked jeopardizing everything. But they were also the reason why everyone wanted to migrate: to protect them, to create a good and safe world for them. Fernando was among the children who migrated first and built a childlike way of life there, allowing the other children to adapt easily.
The somewhat isolated way in which the Serra community lived helped a lot to maintain order and discretion during the transfer period. They had no outsiders in their employ, only occasional help at times of heavy workload. They were extremely organized in their autonomy, so the governance of the transfer went smoothly, with each group waiting for their collectively defined time according to criteria approved by everyone. They told their neighbors that the people in the community were giving up living in such difficult conditions and were going back to the big cities where they came from, thus explaining the emptying of the ecovillage. And so, Serra was depopulating and Serra da Serra was populating. They moved little by little and took with them a sober, cooperative, ecological and hard-working way of life.
Up in the mountains, the work was hard, but the interaction with the outside world that existed below was replaced by a deepening of the “non-material” way of life in the Serra da Serra. The world of non-consumption and few things that they had built in the Serra evolved into a world with even fewer things and even more cultural and spiritual pursuits. The second generation of Serra da Serra residents had unconventional skills far superior to their parents. Free from traditional schooling and the distractions of the old world, the children were educated in Good Living: affection, self-knowledge, altruistic behavior, shared decisions and tasks, rituals of connection with Nature. In this way, they developed their creative and intuitive potential, even allowing for the primitive development of telepathy, for example, as a new way of communicating with each other.
They were like new indigenous tribes, carrying the best of “civilized” populations: respect for each person’s individuality and choices, gender equality and listening to young people, knowledge of techniques and tools that make life easier, participatory governance where everyone had a place and not just the elders. This rebirth into tribal community life in nature held the positive of two worlds and the Serra da Serra community knew this, preparing themselves to, at some point, when peace and stability returned, share what they had learned in this fusion live with outside communities.
There was no tribal chief, but circular service leaders and working groups, and discussion circles by theme between people who were more in touch with certain essential issues linked to daily life. The community assembly was always advised by those who dedicated their lives to certain tasks: how to educate children, improve agricultural production, maintain people’s health, resolve internal conflicts, share resources and plan the future, for example. There was no one shaman, but various types of wise men and women who served the community and had authority in their service to the collective. The history of this ‘tribe’ was told orally and in writing by the guardian of history, today the place occupied by Nara, and cultural events and rituals were organized by people who showed a talent for this from an early age. Each person who was born was celebrated for the service they would provide and the form of Life they possessed; each person who died was thanked by everyone and said goodbye to meet up later, in other words, as they believed.
The first century of the third millennium had thus been turbulent and destructive, but it had engendered a new civilization in lost spots of the planet, such as the Serra da Serra. While the old-world experienced hardship, separation and war, these new worlds learned to live in peace, with the firm conviction that everything is connected and that each gesture weighs on the whole. The most advanced science of the millennium agreed with ancestral traditions, saying that everything vibrates and interferes with the vibratory whole, thus building material life. The people of Serra da Serra were as attentive to their thoughts and feelings as they were to their actions, so that the clarity, peace and harmony achieved in the subtle field would be reflected in the material world they were building.
Other communities around the world were also experiencing this emerging paradigm, so much more feminine and collaborative, so much more spiritualized and intelligent: a world of equality and a sense of purpose, a more adult world where each person sought to do their part to build the connected Whole. The panorama of the old world showed the enormity of the problem created by the infantile paradigm of separation: saviors of the fatherland followed one another, promising to solve the problems of climate and war, in internecine disputes for power and with meager results. The “masses” lived in the illusion that someone would solve their enormous problems and took refuge in religious fanaticism and the illusions created by artificial intelligence, particularly the illusory worlds of imaginary happiness and evil culprits persecuted and imprisoned. By not taking responsibility for their destiny, they were trapped in the childish wheel of dependency.
But more and more people were questioning this state of things, rebelling, moving away from this harsh and fantastical reality at the same time. Minds rebelled against the dictatorship of reason and realized that the wisdom of myths was as explanatory of the world as quantum physics or multiverse physics. And they wanted more intuition and art. Emotions allowed liberation through the clarity that sadness made sadness, oppression made evil, low esteem made illness, emptiness made superficiality, hatred made war. And they wanted more joy and love. Their bodies taught them that what you eat, what you feel, where you live, how you move, how you sleep and breathe determine health or illness. And they wanted lightness, nature and affection. And the soul teaches that without realizing that everything is interconnected in the vibratory continuum that yearns to evolve, each person cannot find their place in the web of the world where each and every one has their sacred purpose and place.
And so, those looking for alternatives ended up finding their own paths and even these innovative experiences, the communities that hid in order to survive. Finding a world like this, whole and real, functioning in such a simple, peaceful and joyful way was a balm for those who were fortunate enough to have such an encounter. It was a rebirth of hope, a portal of possibilities. And the community of Serra da Serra knew this. So did many others. They had been waiting a long time for the right moment to show themselves and now that the declining outside world was no longer such a threat, the time had come. They had tried many times before, in isolation, but had backed down in the name of their own security. Now, they were preparing to act together, flooding the world with the simple truths they witnessed in everyday life: life is much more than matter; love is built into every gesture; Nature is the Sacred Mother; the feminine and masculine are complementary souls that manifest themselves far beyond biological gender; diversity is the source of all wealth… and so many obvious things like that…
The connection between alternative and tribal communities had always existed on the great virtual information network, but without showing itself to the public. In the deep layers of the internet, people were renewing relationships that had once existed in real form before the collapse, or nurturing new ones, woven virtually over the decades. The connection committee was a reality in almost every community, perfecting technologies, assessing risks of being discovered and thus persecuted and even destroyed. Virtual communication was the material face of a deeper, somewhat telepathic communication of values, ways of life, learning, storytelling and even love stories. This is how Artur met Nzumba, virtually, and how the romance developed in a rocky way, between two members of the connection teams of a Brazilian and an Angolan community.
Artur shared Nara’s stories about his own community with the network of alternative communities, as well as dealing with the technical issues of networking on the deep web. Nzumba was the guardian of the history of her Malungo community and, unlike Nara, was also passionate about technology. With Artur telling his sister’s stories, a virtual passion developed between the two and Artur crossed the ocean – despite all the dangers and difficulties of these times – to find her and bring her to Serra da Serra. After dramatic adventures and romantic touches, today together in Brazil, they were looking ahead to bringing the almost mythical existence of these communities of Good Living to the world. Malungo and Serra da Serra, like thousands of other human settlements, had invented eccentric ways of life, so diverse and so alike in their essence of being an alternative to war and climate collapse.
In an affectionate way, the regenerative communities sought contact with the rebels who still lived in the old world and endeavored to build alternatives right there where they lived. In an articulate way they wrote their stories of resistance, in a great embroidery of human creativity in the face of barbarism that needed to be known in order to unmask the lie of a fake reality created to deceive. In a cooperative way, they discreetly and continuously wove economic and cultural ties to reinforce each other. In a virtual way, they adjusted their plans to “invade” the old world at once, so that its multiple and hopeful existence would leave no doubt that it was real. In a concrete way, they were preparing to welcome with wings and food those who wanted to come and reinforce the great reconstruction and testify that another world was possible.
The great multilingual and multicolored theatre premiered around the world on the same day, at dusk, at different times on the five continents. The Serra da Serra community came down from the heights in small groups to premiere in different cities: music, dance, joy, costumes, smiles. In many places on Earth these eccentrics came to show what they had built up over a century of retreat. It was 18 August 2146: in the winter of the South and the summer of the North, the celebration was unforgettable. The unexpected scenes of simple joy, authenticity and color, in theatres narrating the adventures of each community to survive and thrive, showed the world that the human quest for evolution had never disappeared. That withdrawing from the world had been a constructive force allowing other realities to develop. At a time when the traditional world was fighting and taking refuge in fake reality in the face of destruction, new worlds were being created in regenerated Nature, in egalitarian and loving relationships, in shared power and in basic needs guaranteed to everyone.
The warm receptivity of the people who confronted the old world from within allowed the party to expand rapidly from the original small group from outside to reach more and more curious, amazed and delighted people. The news went around the world with images and stories as diverse as they were equal. The influx of young people was astonishing: where did these fallen angels come from, showing doors to different heavens on earth? How could you not be thrilled by so much healthy joy, so much authenticity and beauty? As in the days when circuses carried with them new dreamers and artists, the caravans returned to their nests full of new members who wanted to discover the way of life that overflowed with art, lightness and sharing alongside the hard work of taking responsibility for their livelihood, for the fulfillment of their own dreams. On this day, when the old world was already reeling from its contradictions and weaknesses, the hope that had been germinating and thriving for decades carried multitudes.
Not much will be a fairytale from here on in, even if the communities are strengthened with new people and ideas that will resist the efforts to annihilate them until they are completely defeated. Nara, the guardian of Serra da Serra’s history, will tell her children and grandchildren of her lineage’s courage to start again and in doing so show the way for those who will follow. Many guardians around the world will continue to tell us about the background to 2146 and how history will unfold from today’s great planetary circus theatre. From now on, the stories of resistance and regeneration will intertwine; they are no longer isolated alternative communities, but a web of many dreams built collectively and more than ever connected. They bring with them the great force that drives the evolutionary gears of the world: the search for coherence, love and joy. Coherence between what you say, what you feel, and what you do. The joy of being whole, and of being like that together with others, lovingly.
