In this 4-part series on sustainable communities, we critique dominant western conceptions of ‘community’, try to help clarify confusions of the term in EB feature articles, review various approaches to “building community”, and call for clarity in our dialogues about “building sustainable communities”. In Part 3 to come, Gary Clausheide gives a short history of “community” — how humankind lost it, and how we might regain it. In part 4 to come, we present a radical theory on building sustainable communities, drawing on lessons from the past, and arguing that there is no more important question for us to grapple with than the question of how our community and larger society should be organized. We show that if you want sustainability and equality “at the end of the day”, you have to build them in at the start.
Introduction
The question of how to build sustainable communities is essential to surviving the predicaments of climate change, peak oil, environmental degradation, global imperialism and economic collapse that are upon us. So it is good that questions about community have entered Energy Bulletin discussions.
But so far, recent EB discussions of community have focused on the question of how to “create”, “build” or “organize” community in general terms, without examining what we mean by “community”, and without examining the fundamental features of the vision of community that we want to move toward. Instead, the focus has been on the understandably pressing concern, how do we motivate existing communities to make the transition toward sustainability, or at least to move to more sustainable practices?
We want to take the discussion further by arguing that the best way to motivate people to adopt the profound changes that real social change would require is to show them a successful model in action. This is likely a goal of Transition Towns and many other sustainability movements, but most of these are framed within the existing economic and social structures of mainstream U.S. society. Unasked is the question of how such reform initiatives can resist the centralizing and hierarchy-inducing influences of corporate America.
This question is a further expansion that we hope to see in EB discussions of community. What features need to be built into a community for it to be sustainable against the juggernaut of forces that would co-opt it back into inegalitarian and exploitive economic and cultural patterns? This question brings us into an area not yet chartered in EB discussions: the importance of thinking about the philosophical and physical design of a sustainable community.
We chart out this line of thinking in four parts. In Part 1, we examine the concept of community that has become dominant in western culture, exploring ethical problems with the watered-down version of “community” that most North Americans accept today. We ask: what does it mean about us if our vision of community does not include the human beings who build and maintain our homes, who grow and process our food, who make our clothing and technology, and who handle our wastes? (Indeed, as Tolstoy asked 100 years ago, what does it mean about us if we do not participate in these things ourselves?)
In Part 2, we trace out the discussion of “building community” that has taken place in Energy Bulletin, adding to the clarification of “communities” vs. “movements” initiated by Jerry Silberman, and hoping to make some progress toward getting clear about what is meant by “community” and all its related verb associations: creating community, building community, organizing community, even being a community.
In Parts 3 and 4, we turn to the more engaging question of what a sustainable community might really look like, arguing that there is no more important question for us to grapple with than the question of how our community and larger society should be organized. Our emphasis is on thinking not just about sustainability but also about equality in designing a community — motivated in part by the observation that “If you want equality at the end of the day, you have to build it in at the beginning.”
Part 1: Getting Clear on “Community”:
What’s a Community, and Who Counts?
‘Community’ is a concept acutely in need of clarification. It is used to refer to groups of people as geographically dispersed as “the scientific community”, as unacquainted with each other as “the video-gaming community”, as insignificant to each other as “the investment community”, and as large and meaningless as “the global community”.
In giving talks to social and political philosophy classes at the University of Prince Edward Island, we often ask students to describe the communities they belong to, and then define what they mean by ‘community’. The results are self-instructive. What stands out clearly when we ask students to do some critical reflection on their definitions is that most students feel themselves to be members of many communities, none of which contain as fellow members the people who grow their food for them, make their clothes for them, and build or maintain their homes, their furniture, their technology, and the infrastructure they depend upon.
Most people probably think of their “community” as their circle of family, friends and acquaintances. If they live in a great neighbourhood, it may include neighbours. If they live in a small town, it may even include the entire town. But for many people, any rooting in geographic place is strangely missing from their conceptions of community – as is any recognition of the people whose work our physical survival depends on.
One might argue that this lack of rooting in place and this lack of inclusion of labourers is not at all strange when one considers the history of industrialization, urbanization and electronic communication that has led to our placeless and apartheidist conceptions of community. But it is strange when one thinks about human beings in the fundamental sense as highly social and interdependent creatures whose interaction with the natural world is crucial to their survival and most often mediated with the help of many others.
But instead of reflecting this fundamental connectedness to each other and to place for our survival and flourishing, we have come to think of “community” as meaning groups of people with a certain shared interest whom we elect to associate with, whether in real life or in cyberspace: the hockey community, the nursing community, the Energy Bulletin community. And rarely is there any geographic commonality behind these interpretations of community – other than our shared location on the planet earth. We might think of such a community as a community of interest, rather than a community of place.
But this isn’t the kind of community or the kind of social thinking that is going to help us survive collapse. If we are going to build sustainable communities, they will have to be held together by something stronger than a shared interest in reading a particular newsletter or playing a particular video game.
This is why many contributors to EB have taken up the concern of building community, and their focus is on building it in existing towns, villages or city neighbourhoods. We will be arguing (in Part 3) for the equal importance of building sustainable communities from scratch – from the land up – perhaps starting with one farm and expanding outwards. But first, we’ll review the recent discussion of community that has taken place in EB.
Part 2: The Variety of Approaches to “Building Community” in Climate Change and Peak Oil Discussions
The recent EB discussion of community began with John Michael Greer’s insight that many people in contemporary transition movements fantasize about the benefits of community, but ignore or have a difficult time paying the costs: namely, the time, energy, emotional commitment, and the sacrifice of “some part” of our personal autonomy — that it takes to really live in a community and contribute to its improvement. Thus, the political efficacy of historical movements for social change cannot be achieved in our time until we overcome our cultural disinclination to pay “the costs of community”.
The discussion continued with Sharon Astyk’s wise observation that our lack of community and resultant lack of populist force is due not simply to the autonomous individualism that has been enculturated into us. It is due as well to the way that our economy and social patterns structure our lives. The modern economy usurps so much of people’s time and energy – requiring us to spend so much of our time and attention outside of our homes and communities — that we aren’t able to “build community”. Not until those structures and patterns change will we have a solid base for making social change happen.
Jerry Silberman’s helpful contribution brings into focus the difference between communities, movements, and pressure groups, terms all too often conflated. Movements (which could be conceived as well-developed communities of interest) are grassroots responses to perceived threats or raised expectations, while pressure groups are top-down, often corporate-funded organizations pursuing interests that are not usually aligned with social justice. Not surprisingly, the rhetoric used by pressure groups often reverses this terminology, identifying themselves as citizen movements, and denouncing civil rights or feminist or environmental associations as “pressure groups”.
Silberman notes that social movements draw on existing communities, uniting people “from different and frequently disparate communities to a common goal.” Think of the civil rights movement, the labour movement (Silberman’s domain), or the Vietnam anti-war movement. In contrast, Silberman points out, the unique difficulty of the climate change/peak oil movement is that “there are no bosses or segregationist politicians to beat, no clear and simple government policy to change,” nor any expansive “substrate of organization already present.” The task of building a movement in such conditions is prodigious – especially, Silberman notes, because of the pervasiveness of alienation in U.S. culture – “the sense that we are single actors” who must do everything on our own or through paid labour.
Enter Rob Hopkins and Dimitri Orlov, each with a different version of the contrary claim that “community” is not something that needs to be organized. Hopkins champions a social entrepreneurship vision of social change. With no attempt to trace out the ambiguities involved, he argues that communities don’t need organizing because they already exist. They just need a few key entrepreneurs to get social enterprises happening. Like dangling a string in a solution saturated with solutes (remember forming sugar crystals on a string?), it takes “just a few people” to “put in place the bones of a Transition economy,” and the community will “rally around it”. In effect, Hopkins’ rosy emphasis is on achieving social change through small-scale private enterprises. But the distance from a successful rickshaw company to a sustainable community is large.
Dmitry Orlov goes further, claiming that “real communities are self-organizing”. Orlov flatly challenges Greer and Astyk’s insistence on community as a product of time, effort and attention, claiming that in his experience, “communities … form instantaneously and rather effortlessly, based on a commonality of interests and needs.” It seems Orlov didn’t consider the possibility that the labour of various community members might simply be invisible to those who are privileged enough to find community life “effortless”. Nevertheless, Orlov goes on to make the important point that it can take a great deal of work to prevent communities from organizing, and this is something that establishment forces have excelled at: “– through the use of truncheons and tear gas, or evictions and mass imprisonment, or, more recently, more subtle and ultimately more successful techniques of the consumerist political economy.”
But in making this point, Orlov seems bent on constructing a philosophical tangle:
Once there were strong, cohesive communities in the US, which could organize and bring pressure to bear on their elected officials. And now, … there are no such strong, cohesive communities in the US, and so… they can’t organize, because, I would think, there is nothing for them to organize. Existence of communities allows communities to organize; lack of community prevents communities from organizing. That’s a bit of a tautology, is it not?
Not really. It’s a linguistic mirage achieved by using “community” ambiguously — in the first instance, to refer to the spirit of community, and in the second instance, to refer to the people of that community. (Perhaps instead, Orlov was referring to “strong, cohesive communities” in the first instance, and to “movements” in the second (engaging a conflation that Silberman warned against). In either case, the logical problem remains the same.) [Footnote 1] This conflation shows how easy it is for us to become (in the words of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein) “bewitched by our language” – it can happen even to so brilliant a writer as Orlov. We are especially prone to confusion with the term “community” in the climate change/peak oil movement because the movement we are trying to build is in part a movement to create “sustainable communities”! We can avoid linguistic problems only by making our key terms clear at the outset.
The more important point is that across the U.S. and other western societies, many towns that once had a strong, cohesive community spirit, no longer have such a spirit amongst their populace — but that spirit of community could possibly be rekindled. This is precisely the hope of many reformers. But while transforming existing towns and cities may seem the most numbers-effective way to move toward sustainability, it is immensely difficult and subject to resistance from powerful keepers of the status quo. In the next part of this contribution, we explore a different path to building sustainable communities; namely, building them from the ground up.
Footnote 1: What we are left with, logically speaking, is this: “Existence of community spirit allows people in those communities to organize; lack of community spirit prevents people in those communities from organizing.” These clauses are not tautologies. They are two related but logically distinct clauses of the form: “If p then q; if not p then not q.”
Pamela Courtenay-Hall raises chickens, works on Sweet Clover Farm in Valleyfield, PEI, and teaches philosophy and environmental studies at the University of Prince Edward Island. Her research areas include environmental thought, ethics, philosophy of science, and sustainable agriculture. Her focus is on trying to understand human-nature interactions, exploring the possibilities for sustainable living, and exploring ways to help younger generations grow in environmental and socially critical understanding. She has been engaged in farm-based education at the undergraduate and teacher education level since 2002. Prior to coming to UPEI, she taught pre-service and graduate Teacher Education and Environmental Education at the University of British Columbia for 11 years. (Photo: Matthew Hall)
Gary Clausheide has been an organic farmer for more than 25 years. He learned how to farm organically in the early 1970s from people who farmed, and from books that were written, before the advent of chemical-based agriculture. He farmed in Vermont for 10 years before moving to PEI in 1991 to establish Sweetclover Farm in Valleyfield, on land that had been leased out to conventional growers for 20 years. After restoring the soil, he began experimenting in the late 1990s with interplanting in vegetable production. He is currently developing a technique of perennial interplanting to reduce the need for tilling. Clausheide’s search for a gentler way to farm the land was inspired by the work of the Japanese agrologist Masanobu Fukuoka. His research on building a small-scale, agrarian, truly egalitarian and democratic community was inspired by the work of the 19th century anarchist Robert Owen. (Photo: Dominik Cruchet)
(bio at Green Party of PEI website)
