Eric Bihl
»The yardstick for the new rules is always that they are in harmony with nature.«
Eric Bihl grew up in Alsace and, after graduating from high school, worked as an instructor for army personnel in French Polynesia. This is where he had his first experiences with indigenous cultures and non-capitalist economic methods. He later moved to Munich, where he still lives and works at the European Patent Office. Eric Bihl's great passion is 'Equilibrism', a holistic concept for globally sustainable economics and living, an ideology which he developed together with Volker Freystedt and others.
»In order to have any chance at all in the short time remaining for us, equilibrism does not want to "reform" flawed systems, but to completely renew them by focusing on the fundamental issues in question; It is "radical" in that it goes to its roots. Not only must faulty systems be abolished, but new framework conditions must be set at the same time. The yardstick for the new rules is always that they are in harmony with nature. We are convinced that there is no area in which we are working today where enormous progress is not yet possible, but progress in the sense that, even after us, it is possible for humanity and all life on Earth to move forward.«
The balance that the Equilibrists seek is between natural and cultural areas, but above all, between ecology and economy. In their book "Equilibrismus. Neue Konzepte statt Reformen für eine Welt im Gleichgewicht" (Equilibrism. New Concepts Instead of Reforms for a World in Balance), the authors develop a detailed inventory of the current imbalance caused by the prioritization of economics and growth. In line with this work, they outlined standards for a new, global sustainability and also aimed to realize this utopia: in Tahiti, the world's first sustainable republic was planned. To promote this republic, a novelist was commissioned to write a founding epic: it was written by Dirk C. Fleck and titled "The Tahiti Project", in three volumes. Eric Bihl and Dirk C. Fleck discuss the scientific utopia of the Equilibrists, the fear that writers may be exploited and the chance of a worldwide eco-social system.