2020 Climate Solutions: Community

Aleksandar Malečić
729 days ago

Imagine that you live in a "primitive" society. Now, out of nowhere, you are a part of globalization. You might like it or not, but now you probably must leave your vegetables, cows and goats and start doing business. Also, you must be competitive in your business. Even worse (or better, it depends), you are surrounded with all kinds of money, investments, dividends, futures and options. You are forced to travel by a train that moves faster and faster after every station. If you decide to watch it passing by, you are lazy and useless. What happens when this globalized mechanism stops working like it used to? It leaves ruins behind itself. You, your family and your neighbours have a problem if you want to return to those peaceful and "primitive" days of your youth.

Aleksandar Malečić

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Aleksandar Malečić
727 days ago

If people succeed fast enough to make the global society greener, it will be the biggest industrial revolution ever. What does it really mean? It means the majority of our conceptions of economy and society being thrown out of the window. There is already a problem in globalization that poor become poorer if they blindly accept a wrong idea that free enterprise is a nice and polite system that can allow us to succeed in businesses in which we are competitive.

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
720 days ago

Our herd mentality is very strong. It was deeply rooted in our pre-human ancestors. We know that our habits, but we can hardly do anything about them. Our herds should be invited to at least consider joining this meshwork. Imagine this situation - You are telling to a member of your herd: "I want to show you something" (this meshwork). You are showing it, but it's slow and nothing particularly interesting or important is happening here. This meshwork and "networked socialism" (alright, I used the "s" word, but I'm not the only one using it in this context) will succeed or fail dependently on people's prejudices and early experiences.

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
717 days ago

I've found an interesting author, Emilios Bouratinos. He separates our (humans) evolution in two great phases - wandering and settling. I shall not add here the links to his works because some of them might disappear in the meantime, but you are smart enough to find them on the Web yourself. The point is, our thought patterns and ways of behaviour were very dissimilar. If we really still can become globally sustainable, we shall inevitably enter the third phase (Bouratinos claims and I agree). We obviously can't return to the phase of hunting and gathering - there are too many of us and our environment is drastically changed.

How would we call the third phase (if something like that even exists - we are the first species known to us facing with this experiment) - settled wandering?

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
704 days ago

A good interconnected community can help in "getting things done", to be your dynamic external memory, advisor and ally. You can trust me as a part of this virtual community. I don't have much to offer, but still.

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
682 days ago

If you wear clothes in public, walk on two legs and behave politely, you play a role given to you by the community. We are all actors. Some parts of our roles belong to the past. Can the community as a whole readjust its roles to emerging different circumstances (all kinds of crises and threats)?

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
664 days ago

What is the main goal of business as usual? Is it profit? Or is it success? Perhaps "better life"? Its main goal is to remain competitive, to become global and to invest. Other goals and habits (consumerism, egocentrism, broken networks, popularity and jet-set) exist just to keep business as usual running faster and faster. Can we at the same time promote selfishness and egocentrism and expect a good community devoted to collective goals?

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
591 days ago

Let's presume there is another planet with inteligent beings like this one. I wonder if consumerism, destroyed environment, and overpopulation is indeed the only possible outcome. Is any power left for you, me, and the community?

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
584 days ago

If it is still physically possible to start living lives sustainable for us and our grandchildren, our human nature will be the reason for success or failure. Past experiences are not encouraging, but we still must hope.

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
567 days ago

Economy, politics, GDP, democracy, and all those nice things related to societal order make sense only when there is - order. On the other hand, economy in its mature stage of profit and competition breaks networks of friends, families, and neighbourhoods. We are about to face with problems unprepared, with very unhealthy communities.

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
558 days ago

Will the inevitable (in my opinion) collapse of business as usual break or strenghen already loosened communities of seemingly independent people? Be nice to your relatives and neighbours, just in case.

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
507 days ago

There is a brilliant book "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New New Planet" by Bill McKibben (recommended to me by David Beatty - http://2020.global.gaiaspace.org/global/pg/profile/davidbeatty ) about globalization and communities on a new planet (with an extra "a") changed by climate change and limited resources. Anything "too big to fail" (corporations, banks, transport, energy) should get smaller and more localized where possible. The idea of eternal growth on a limited and vulnerable planet should be thrown away, but it probably won't. It will need to fail badly. We'll be witnesses of one more ride of global competition. It will fail, but it depends on us what to do next. Communities should be reshaped and corporations and their brands (destroying everything slightly inferior (or poorly advertised) on their way) should be left in their self-destruction. Peak oil, climate change and all kinds of instability will force us to pay more attention to our local communities and local supply chains (of literally everything - e.g. local organic agriculture with more cultures on one field). There was life before global corporations and financial institutions and there will be life (changed, but still life) after them. Also, if we don't do anything relevant about climate change and do it soon, we shall activate devastating feedback loops (some of them already activating - e.g. methane in permafrost). It would be nice to avoid the worst possible scenario.

Corporations (both "too big to fail" and "too big to change the direction") will keep on doing business as usual to compensate their debts and sunk costs. They will also encourage others across the globe (hopefully less competitive) to do the same thing. Nature is devastated, climate is changing (with a lot of instability) and resources are limited. We must learn how to live with this fact. We have only one planet.

There will be a lot of playing and improvisation with communities, networks and interactions. People will need to learn (more or less) from the beginning how to collaborate and interact. On an unstable planet flexibility and local cohesion will be more important than chasing for uncertain profit. The book "Adaptive Networks: The Governance for Sustainable Development" by Sibout Nooteboom is nice but, as Bill McKibben says in his book "Eaarth", "the silver bullet" doesn't exist. Complex problems need equally complex solutions. The future generations (including ours) will live in something never seen before by civilized humans, but some of them will keep on living. How will institutions as usual follow the changes and be more helpful and less distracting towards improvisation and localization (with globalized knowledge)? No one knows.

This is exactly the reason why I have joined this meshwork. I am aware that my contributions here are not brilliant, but I can't do anything better. I am even positively surprised when I come back here and read my own words in disbelief. This meshwork really works for me as an "extended mind" and helps me stretch over my limits of comprehension. There should be more active members who would bring with them their pieces of puzzle. The point of this meshwork is not knowing "the silver bullet" (especially because it doesn't exist) and trying to figure out solutions with other people. The book "Eaarth" mentions the internet and its existence just in time to deal with the increasing complexity. At least, if our egos and business as usual (ready for one more global racing) let us do so. Step on the ball and turn around. The world will change and it will change drastically. Don't react - anticipate. Do everything you can. I know I shall. Also, expect many other people to hesitate. It's definitely not usual to deal with the biggest changes ever.

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
498 days ago

Let's take a closer look at modern communities. Since we are about to change huge changes during our lifetime, communities will have a huge role in a success or failure of this process. Limited resources, peak oil and climate change will force us to behave and interact differently than we used to. There is no such thing as a typical community, but I shall still use some stereotypes and simplifications.

First I'll mention poor communities. A relatively poor community is the one in which many people don't have much money. Even worse, if such a community (or nation) is involved in free trade with the rest of the world, its goods and services are less competitive. This kind of environment, especially in urban areas, is a fertile ground for all kinds of drug addicts and criminals. People are rich or poor only in comparison with other people. Chances to be someone and stay in the "ghetto" seem to be very small. If drastic changes cause your neighbourhood to look like a ghetto, you'd better try to figure out how to find a purpose for you and your friends and family to live in this kind of environment and prevent it from becoming a warzone.

On the other hand, we've all heard stories about nice villages and neighbourhoods in which people even don't lock their houses. They may also be relatively poor and with uneducated people, but they are peaceful. The "third world" sometimes belongs to this category. Generally, people living in cities tend to treat these people as primitive and closed-minded. I mean, people from those isolated villages all look and behave like each other. Who would leave all those parties and entertainment and move from cities to villages? Or, even worse, make cities look like villages?

Now it's time to look at those who supposedly "have fun" - the rich people. First of all, they envy each other because there is always someone richer. Money will never be the exact measure of someone's work. As such, people often get rich by selling "nonsense" and encourage others to try to do the same thing. In order to remain competitive, debts and risky behaviour are being stretched to the limit. Financial crises are natural outcomes, especially with big business and corporations. First a corporation destroys small business in its area and then, when it stops working properly, it takes many victims with it - banks, employees, macroeconomic stability, the environment... So, who actually has fun? The richest people buy the most expensive things and travel all over the world. Sometimes they do so because poorer people expect to see them in yachts and sometimes they just try to buy their life purpose once lost along the way. It seems that only children of rich people have fun. Even they don't have much time to have fun because they will soon be forced to join the competition. When they are young, some of them feed their emptiness with cocaine. It's illegal and unhealthy, but it's simple to use.

We will be forced to live in more local communities with the global exchange of information and knowledge. We must find a purpose in this kind of arrangement. It reminds me of entropy. Nonliving systems tend, as the time goes by, to be increasingly disorganized and chaotic. Something similar is happening within communities with money as the strongest cohesive element and measure of one's success. When things "too big to fail" start failing, we shall still have each other. Living and conscious beings can bring more order (decrease entropy) to the world, but it can't be done without effort for changing the direction and reorganization. It's difficult because, as long as you are involved in activities such as food production, education or water supply, your chances to get rich and/or have high hopes about retirement are very slim. Taxes and politics might help, but they will never be enough. In the meantime, we can only hope that politics won't discourage too much this seemingly inevitable process.

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
471 days ago

It will be really difficult to redefine communities in these times of competition. Even scientists see a new yacht as the best reward for their work. If you criticize this situation, you are envious. A decade (or more) is very time interval for drastic changes. When components of the perfect storm star hitting us one by one (climate change and unpredictable weather, devastated environment, peak oil, economic changes...) we shall still be in our silos chasing for "success". And we are supposed to be the most intelligent animal species.

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
416 days ago

Perhaps it would be good to have some kind of experimental self-sustainable and functional localized communities. Peak oil and climate changes will force us to figure out how to transform urban areas in something like that. I don't have enough relevant connections, charisma and popularity within my community to suggest something like that. It is better to anticipate than to react. Perhaps complications related to peak oil are just around the corner.

Aleksandar Malečić

Aleksandar Malečić
400 days ago

I have already mentioned Bill McKibben and his book "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet". It might sound like hippie nonsense, but people should somehow develop ad-hoc and adaptive communities. Business as usual forces people to compete between each other and make everything bigger. Is there something that shows a similar behaviour of eternal growth at accelerating pace? The only thing I can remember at the moment that behaves this way is the universe. There are local fluctuations, but generally the universe as a whole spreads and it will spread forever. Well, not exactly forever - there is a final destination. Physicists call it death.

Since our Sun will die in a very distant future (millions or billions of years), we probably have some challenges that are more urgent for us at the moment. Speaking in a language that people who don't know much about physics understand, the positive change of entropy could be translated as increasing disorder. It applies to our ever-spreading universe as much as our behaviour at much smaller scales. You can't "uncook" an egg. An example of this increasing disorder may be globalization as we know it. Some people might claim that globalization is a brilliant thing, because it connects people, ideas and national economies. This is actually a misperception of two phenomena. One is the world becoming a global village with inhabitants who can interact across the globe more than ever. Economic growth is, according to this way of observing things, the second brilliant aspect of globalization. Well, the problem is that economic growth doesn't exist in nature. It's our creation. Politicians and macroeconomists actually "cheat". For example, when they talk about economic growth, they usually add new technologies that will be much cheaper in a few years. They also tend to ignore the environment. They usually care about the environment when they see a good opportunity to make profit. Business as usual is focused on convincing people that they need something rather on what really needs to be done. Globalization is an invitation for the rest of the world to jump in the wrong bandwagon. Our planet is dying and we can't solve the problems the same way we have caused them.

Do you know from history any ad-hoc community that developed when something bad was happening? I think that resistance movements are good examples. During World War 2, some people organized to fight the enemy. My grandfathers were both partisans, soldiers of the communistic resistance movement of Yugoslavia. Some people didn't want to send their sons into forests. They mostly lived in towns. Some of them waited a terrifying fate as betrayers. Did quislings deserve what later happened to them? I don't know. They usually weren't monsters. They were just people like you and me who presumably made historically bad decisions.

Another example of an ad-hoc community developed when the situation was urgent is Mafia, also known as Cosa Nostra (translated in English as "our thing"). It also started as some kind of resistance movement. It is not really an army like the resistance movements mentioned above. It's more like some kind of parallel system. Organized crime is an interconnected ad-hoc network of people working on the same cause. I know, it's also a network of bad guys, but it's functional, persistent and very adaptive. Mind you, criminals usually aren't very intelligent and educated (at least in comparison to managers, scientists and engineers). Also, they are violent and many of them don't think twice whether they should kill someone or not. This attitude doesn't prevent them to find colleagues.

Are there legal ways to avoid shortcomings of the system? Communities need to be redefined soon. Globalization with its mindless exploitation of natural resources, the paradigm of eternal growth (in free enterprise you are "free" to either grow forever or disappear) and climate change are the challenges of our lifetime. Maybe better laws and interventions from politics and hierarchy as we know them could do something, but it won't be enough. We must improvise. We must improvise collectively.