claire_58 | Your Niche: Collaboration and Community

We live in a time of rapid change and uncertainty. The 50 year failure of the environmental movement has left us with a tangle of interconnected problems. Ecosystem destruction; freakishly high levels of pollution of the land the water and the atmosphere; and resource depletion combine to create a looming crisis of epic proportions. We are faced with increasing political and economic instability and it’s clear that there will be no large scale co-ordinated efforts to address any of it.

This blog is about what we can do, as ordinary people in families and small groups, to create lives worth living; to build a future worth having; and to be a force for renewal and regeneration in our much depleted world. I hope to provide some possibilities based on our universal human strengths and the strategies that have allowed us to thrive in the past.

If you care about this planet; the future; and your own ability to make your way in these crazy times this blog is for you.

This is the third and final part of the section “Your Niche.” (Part one is here; part two, here.)

The fragmentation and deterioration of “community” and the resulting social ills have been a recurring topic among writers seeking to address the predicaments of modern society for decades. It’s a conundrum. We are a social species. The unit of human survival has always been the group. Yet somehow we have reached the point where for many people social interactions are fraught with conflicted emotions, discomfort and confusion. This state of affairs is completely at odds with our natural tendencies and abilities.

In her book Mothers and Others: the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding Sarah Blaffer Hrdy makes the case that the long period of helplessness and dependance of human babies made group co-operation, or “collective breeding,” essential to raising children. For early humans “It takes a village to raise a child” was a literal truth. The need for other care givers and the communal support of the family, clan, and tribe for successfully bringing children in to adulthood has been universal for most of human history.

This, according to Hrdy, has led to an amazingly high capacity for empathy and collaboration. We are intensely social, incredibly empathetic,* and working together to achieve common goals is one of our superpowers. She asserts that collaboration is a stronger human trait than competition and it is now generally accepted that mutualism and co-operation are much more common (i.e. successful) in the natural world than we once believed.

Hrdy points out that the population of early humans was very low and there was a great deal of space available for expansion. Spreading out into new territory was much more likely than engaging in conflict where there was competition for resources. Certainly the spread of early human groups across Eurasia and into the Americas seems to support that idea.

Historically and cross-culturally mutual aid and interdependence has been the norm. This began to shift in the west when we broke into the geological cookie jar that was the concentrated energy of fossil fuels. The era of colonial expansion rewarded competition over collaboration. Breaking away from the families and households, previously a life threatening punishment, became not just possible but potentially lucrative. The cult of individualism captured our imaginations and freedom of movement overtook community ties in our cultural values.

In the last several generations it has been possible to rely on institutional social services provided by governments and corporations for the essential supports of the various stages of life. In the period of economic growth following WWII this worked fairly well. However, in last couple of generations, as the unravelling of our social networks has accelerated, economic contraction has resulted in the slow but perceptible deterioration of institutional supports.

The costs of social fragmentation have increased dramatically while the benefits have very nearly evaporated. Undoubtably many of our social problems including the massive rise in mental health issues and addictions can be directly correlated to the unnatural ways we live and interact with others**. Worse, as the economic pie continues to shrink extreme competitiveness has reached a fever pitch.

It may seem counterintuitive but the adaptive response is actually to seek collaboration. Periods of vulnerability remain an inevitable part of every human life. Building a future worth having means restoring the patterns of mutual aid and interdependence that have been the foundation of what it means to be human since the dawn of time.

Your life is embedded in a specific social milieu with distinctive patterns of acceptable behaviour that facilitate either closer interactions or maintaining distance. More accurately, your life is embedded in a number of different social circles that may overlap but likely don’t form a coherent whole.

Some of these circles will be stronger than others. Some may be vestigial connections from long ago that have atrophied because of distance and infrequent contact. Some may exist only in potential. How well do you know your neighbours? How much contact do you have with coworkers outside the prescribed work hours?

Consider your role in these disparate communities. Are there ways you could up your game or contributions to these circles? Finding ways to be helpful to neighbours and coworkers or joining in to a collective project that takes your interest is the best way to strengthen tenuous community connections. Just as each species in an ecosystem has role within the community that impacts the whole, your participation or lack of it has an impact in the communities you inhabit.

Most people will naturally respond to helpful gestures by trying to reciprocate. No one wants to feel indebted. Keep the permaculture mantra “plant seeds where they will grow” in mind. Mutual aid is the goal after all. If people don’t respond or if they take advantage*** it’s not worth continuing along that path.

Wrapping up this section: Your niche consist of the balance you find between being a generalist and a specialist; the main focus of your attention and your response to the outside influences that shape your possibilities, and finally your role in, and contributions to, the community around you.

Strengthening your community ties and finding ways to collaborate will be recurring themes in these posts. But the next few posts will be about applying the tools of systems thinking to your life and using permaculture guidelines for managing resources and energy investment to shape a viable response to our shifting political economy.

Next: Getting Ahead of the Curve: Managing Your Resources

*This may seem like an outrageous statement in our current divisive political milieu but our tendency to demonize people we disagree with may a reaction against excessive empathy. As a thought experiment try spending 5 minutes imagining the difficult life history and daily challenges of someone you dislike.

**A lecturer in a first year physical anthropology class decades ago pointed out that no zookeeper would ever create a habitat for humans like the one we have created for ourselves and expect us to thrive. They would in fact expect the very social dysfunction that we experience. I’ll get back to this is a future post.

***Reading up on game theory may be worthwhile. People don’t always respond rationally and their notions about win-lose or win-win will have an impact on your success.