We have all the technology and resources we need to live well in harmony with nature. We just have to apply what we've got to our pretty simple problems and live happily ever after.
So how do we do it? How do we get from here to there? How can we live in harmony with nature with a high standard of living and the peace and leisure time to enjoy it? This involve two interrelated themes or factors: living in ecological harmony and refraining from unnecessary work.
Why should we live in harmony with Nature? It's an absurd question because it's predicated on the false concept that we are separate from the rest of the living planet when in fact we are utterly dependent on the living world for air, water, food, and most medicine and building materials.
Ethically we have no right to despoil nature. It's not ours. How can we deprive future generations of elephants, of snow leopards, of Monarch butterflies? Even if we didn't need it, Nature is beautiful and would be worth preserving and protecting in it's own right just on that basis.
We should ask what does it mean to live in harmony with nature? It's a simple question with a complex and open-ended answer. Indeed all life of the Earth is the answer, the ongoing emergent quest for longevity of the primordial ooze. But practically, at the human scale, to a first approximation, it means that we should be increasing healthy biomass as a side effect of living our lives. It means that we pay attention to the extended effects of our actions on the biosphere and account for them (e.g. Low Embodied Energy and Ecosystem Services).
This goes beyond just efficiency. Due to advances in technology we should be working a lot less than we are now. Your expenses should be one tenth or less of what they are now. In other words, instead of a 40-hour work week you should have a 4-hour work week. Or if you prefer, you could work forty hours a week but only for a couple of years and then retire. The technology to do this is already here. Most of it was developed decades ago. It's only gotten better since.
Now because this is a technological rather than an ideological or political argument we don't have to wait for anybody to agree with us, we can just go ahead and implement this new economic regime. We don't have to wait. If you have money you can buy ecological lifestyle off-the-shelf. If not, how? That's the niche of Ariadne Systems: low-cost ways to switch from the old system to the new.
...a simple plan.