Social Capital, Resilience and the Local Community.
This is the introduction to the second week of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Centre in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV.
Subject: “Community powerdown”.
“Community” is often dismissed as a romantic notion, “harking back a golden age that never existed”. Traditional rural communities tended to be held together by the absence of choice: you were your mother’s daughter or your father’s son, and the range of possible futures – opportunities for travel, education, and employment- were limited.
From an ecological perspective, such opportunities were limited essentially by the availability of energy. This may have lead to a sense of being stifled by the conservative norms of the community, and their parochial and sometimes oppressive nature. The community became something to escape from once the opportunity arose.
In the industrial world, for the developed nations at least, the influx of energy and the cheap resources that came with it lead to a dramatic increase in opportunities for education and travel, but at a cost: as people became more mobile, and came into contact with a greater range of ideas and influences, traditional values tended to break down and along with them the “glue” of religion, family and place that may have held them together for so long.
The 1960s saw the emergence of “post-modern” feelings of loss of community and a yearning for a return to a sense of place- this can be seen in the experiments in communal living that began with hippy communes and has now evolved into the eco-village movement.
Intentional communities such as these will probably be only ever possible for small numbers of people; for the majority, we will have to rebuild community from where we find ourselves now. In effect, the resilience of the local community will be the most efficient way of making up for the decline of energy supplies. Convivial and reciprocal relationships with our neighbours will become more important as global trade links disintegrate, and many of the tasks now performed by corporations with no vested interest in the local community will need to be done instead by people with a common interest and a common purpose rooted in the resources of their locality.
There are many reasons why local community needs now to be recovered and rebuilt, and the two main reasons are as follows:
1. Energy solutions.
After Peak Oil, the energy needed to sustain the centralised urban economy will not be available. The decentralised local economy, with some productive land around it, needs far less energy than the centralised urban pattern of living which we have now. Here are some reasons: 1. It does not depend on long-distance transport for almost all its daily needs and activities. This alone is decisive. 2. It is better able to reduce its material needs, saving the energy required to sustained material flows – the production, transport, processing and disposal of materials:
- It can reduce the quantity of materials it needs (less packaging, less material needed for transport).
- It can re-use its materials (the re-use of – for instance – bottles is complicated and impractical on a very large centralised scale, but quite easy on a local scale).
- It can recycle its waste easily. For example, sorting waste carefully by type is more easily done locally, where there is a chance to give attention to individual items, than when the materials arrive at a central depot in bulk. It also becomes practical to recycle organic materials on a small scale; people are better motivated to get results which are close-at-hand, and which they can see; it becomes easier to control what goes into the waste when it is done on a small scale; and quantities of organic waste (compost) need to be limited in scale to have contact with the air.
2. Practical economics
The great disadvantage of a globalised economy is that banks will tend to invest their depositors money wherever in the world they believe they can get the best return; they are unlikely to have much interest in re-investing the profits they make in a local community.
When things go wrong, as we have seen on a global scale recently with the credit crash, the small communities are the first to suffer, with “bailouts” being reserved for the banks that lost their gambles. What will be needed is locally owned banks and financial institutions who will not bring the whole global economy down with them if they make bad decisions, but who are much more likely to invest in the resilience of their own community, for example by supporting regional energy schemes.
Many communities around the world have held intact local currencies and locally owned credit agencies, and often these communities find that they can both prosper as the surplus wealth is reinvested in the community, as well as be resilient to the vagaries of the international financial markets. { Douthwaite 1996}
Response
The success of Community Powerdown depends upon the successful integration of the interests of the local community and its ability to husband in a sustainable manner the local resources- the natural capital of soil, energy, biodiversity, skills and knowledge- it has available in its locality.
In addition, many “services” that have been progressively “outsourced” to corporations may be done much more efficiently in the home or community. An increased sense of community involvement may have tremendous healing effects on individuals and help them find a sense of purpose. This could have great benefits in terms of public health, levels of crime, and social justice. For example, a study for Feasta in 2004 found that a range of Quality of Life indicators including increased alcoholism, income disparity, poverty in old age and others increased during the very years of the Celtic Tiger. {Cullen, E. 2004}
People’s willingness to do things for each other, and to trust, depends on (amongst other things) how well they know each other and how often they see them. The fullest collaboration takes place within families, close relations and households. On this scale, people may be willing to provide care and services for each other over long periods and without expecting any return beyond the courtesies and affection which hold a family together. At the next level – the neighbourhood, consisting of some 150 adults – people are prepared to cooperate fully and persistently, without necessarily balancing up how much they get in return. The priority is to sustain the health and well-being of your street – or, it may be, of the 150 people living in houses scattered over a rural area. {Alexander 1977}
Every household maintains its own private sphere and individuality, but there will be some common assets in the neighbourhood: some shared land, some equipment and buildings, calling for a shared response. Then there is the larger scale of the parish, the village, or a small town. At this hometown level, the community meets (e.g.) to plan its future, to celebrate, to go church, or for sports. This is the level at which most interesting initiatives take place; strategy is considered at the level of the town, village or rural area, but it is put into effect by smaller groups and neighbourhoods. It is also the scale on which local currencies operate: they protect local trades, making it possible for local producers to trade with each other even though their prices would rule out competition in the open market.
Above that, there is the nation. It is vital that the community/transition movement should be understood at the level of the nation; it would be hard to get results if the nation were not an ally, and it has fundamental tasks, such as keeping the peace, and enabling the law to evolve in response to the needs of community. If all this is to happen, there needs to be a basic atmosphere of good faith, shared humour, a sense of shared destiny, a common culture, a shared identity. This is fragile. Groups or factions committed to the view that it is “us or them”, could make the existence of community hard, or impossible.
When that shared identity and a commitment to community-building does exist, however, it brings some critical assets. First, it brings common purpose, the alignment of incentives between you and the community you live in: its members’ own interests are advanced by the well-being of the community as a whole; the community’s interests are advanced by the well-being of its members. Secondly, common capability: the opportunities that open up for the individual to get results if the whole community is doing the same thing. When those results consist of developing local food production and designing mini-grids for the generation and distribution of energy, there can be no question: you are only going to make progress when the community as a whole is committed to the same aim.
Barriers
We have left it very late. We should have been building community – and preventing the decline of the communities we inherited – fifty years ago, but we have barely started. Land, housing, relevant skills, and understanding of the character and capability of community – to think about any of these, is to realise how far there is to go. We all depend on our current jobs, which most of us cannot afford to leave; and when the oil peak has happened it will be hard indeed to start the long process of transforming the communities we live in, or choosing a site to start afresh. Deep rifts of faction and divided loyalties have been allowed to develop in many nations, especially in northern Europe. For most of us, the choice is obvious: carry on as we are and see what happens.
Opportunities
On the other hand, there are some things going the other way. The most encouraging recent development is the Transition Town movement. This started in Kinsale in 2001; it started again on larger scale in Totnes, (England) in 2006, and it is spreading.
Transition Towns provide the most visible manifestation of the kind of thinking that underpins this course, including such fundamentals as producing food locally and organising local energy grids.
Crucially, everything they are doing is set in the context of community as a place to enjoy, with its own culture, its celebrations, its loyalties and rivalries, its sense of being interesting in its own way. A living, participative culture is an essential condition, not just for becoming self-reliant, but for becoming a person.
Community-building on the local scale forms the corner-stone of the transition to a post-oil future, and it has in its favour the reality that there will be no alternative.
References
Douthwaite, R. 1996 Short Circuit Online edition : http://www.feasta.org/documents/shortcircuit/index.htm
Cullen, E 2004 Unprecedented growth, but for whose benefit? http://www.feasta.org/documents/review2/cullen.htm
Alexander, C. 1977 A Pattern Language
