Sustain/ability

I've been thinking alot about sustainable living; individualized communities filled with jacks-of-all-trades. Beautiful homes made of naturally-occurring materials and powered by renewable energy. Gardens filled with healthy, delicious choices and meat raised without hormones. SHelves filled with home-grown, home-canned produce and soups. Local markets filled with foods whose recipies don't contain anything you can't pronounce. Returning to a basic philosophy in life; use without waste and honor the source.
Industrialization brought us into a bleak period in human history, but I firmly believe we can recover. We have to want to, but we can. Right now, we are feeling a deep and abiding despair. We are told we've done so much damage that we cannot undo what we've done; we're doomed. Therefore, why try? It makes it a chore to recycle, a chore to use alternate energy, a chore to do anything that moves us away from a mind-set of zombie consumerism. We have dug ourselves into the trenches of "buy!" and the walls are steep. But it's a trench, not a bottomless pit.
One of the arguments I hear so much pushing against sustainability is the movement toward globalism. We cant go back to being hippies without power and running water; how would we conduct business? How would we communicate? How would we maintain our reliance on a system which allows us to make and maintain freindships without ever actually coming face to face with another human being?
One of the advantages to this bleak period in the life of our nations is the swift development of technologies, communication and otherwise. Many people no longer have to go into the office; they can work from home, on their computer, in their pajamas if they choose. We don't want to give that up! We don't want the commute! We don't want to give up our cell phones and hot water heaters and televisions!
Here's the secret! WE DONT HAVE TO. We may have to turn them off and go work in the garden more often, or help a neighbor build a barn, maybe come face to face with other human beings who can learn from us and teach us new and interesting things. But the industrial age has bestowed more than transportation and communication. It has led to the discovery of methods of trapping the wind and sun to provide us power! We can have our computers, our electric cars, and still cease furthering the damage to the earth!
So lets start again from where we are. We dont have to go backward. We can build on what we have with what we have and work to fix what weve fucked up in the past. Lets build ourselves again. Human 2.0