What do you think?
Building Community Capacity, Pursuing New Opportunities
The City has chosen to explore the issues of climate change and energy challenges through the lens of six topics –
- Buildings and Energy
- Food and Agriculture
- Land Use and Transportation
- Consumption and Waste
- Health and Social Services
- Natural Resources
While I agree that this will probably be very productive, I want to note that these are static areas that will be effected by climate change and peak oil. I would also like to see us explore these issues using dynamic inquiries like
- “What capacities do we have — or need to develop — to meet these challenges?”
and
- “What desirable possibilities could we realize while or through meeting these challenges?”
I mention this to encourage us to take into account these latter aspects of our journey while addressing the six topics with which the City will be organizing, catalyzing and supporting community response. Below are some thoughts on how we might do that.
CAPACITIES
I believe the kind of collective capacity we need to address these issues includes many of the skills, qualities, and resources we will need to address ANY issue well. So preparing well for climate change and peak oil COULD make our community stronger, more resilient and smarter in the face of ALL challenges. Four areas that I think deserve special attention are “social capital”, “process”, “democracy” and “systems thinking.” I’ll explore each of these briefly below, noting that many other capacities may be important, as well.
1. SOCIAL CAPITAL is the fabric of relationships in a community. It is like the foundation upon which collaborative thinking, response, and initiative can be built — or, to use a more organic metaphor, the ground out of which all effective community collaboration grows. Like financial capital (e.g., money), physical capital (e.g., tools and buildings), human capital (e.g., knowledge and talent), and natural capital (e.g., clean air and water), the more we have of it, the more we can invest in projects that benefit the community — or in creating even more social capital.
Social capital embraces things like trust and reputation, networks and social connections, goodwill and fellowship, mutual sympathy and respect, social intercourse and celebration, civic engagement and commitment to community, cooperation and neighborliness, reciprocity and mutual aid, social norms and culture, group identity and social cohesion, solidarity, and so forth. All these contribute to strong relationships, a strong social fabric, and strong community.
Some social researchers point to two types of social capital — bonding and bridging.
BONDING social capital emerges from the interconnectivity WITHIN the various sectors, neighborhoods, networks, subgroups and subcultures in a community. BRIDGING social capital emerges from the interconnectivity BETWEEN AND AMONG those subgroups, such as through multi-stakeholder dialogues, various interfaith activities and all-community events like a town’s annual celebration. Bonding and bridging are the woof and warp of the fabric of social capital. Together, they generate a community resource we already have to some extent, but that we can (and need to) consciously increase through our efforts to address climate change and energy challenges.
2. The second capacity I want to look at is PROCESS, our ability to explore and learn together. This includes awareness that successful work in a climate change and energy project must include not only outcomes and “getting somewhere” but being alert and responsive to whatever is happening, and knowing how to learn, create and adapt together as we go. Certain ways of thinking, feeling, seeing, and interacting can help us do all this more effectively. As part of that, we are trying out certain leading-edge group processes in the public engagement forums and events organized by the City around these issues. They have been very productive in other places and for other issues, and we expect them to do well here. But we don’t know. We are pioneering new and important territory. If we are prepared to learn from whatever happens, we will become more resilient in the midst of change — which is exactly the capacity we most need.
Becoming sensitive to and adept with process involves becoming more aware of the potentially creative role of diversity and disturbance. From a process perspective, such dissonance invites and prods us to include more of what needs to be included. Of course there are always limits to what we can take in and deal with. But the more we treat whatever happens as an evolutionary process that we can learn from and respond to — rather than as something to accept or reject — the more able we’ll become, together, to make something better out of new changes, challenges and opportunities.
3. A third capacity relates to DEMOCRACY — a system through which we have effective power to influence the decisions that affect our lives. Democracy is also — ideally — a system through which we, as diverse people, can resolve our different interests, needs, and views in ways that serve and preserve the well-being of our whole community or society. When a democratic community or society faces major divisive or collective challenges, the strength and functioning of their democracy is both demonstrated and tested. These are times when we should use existing democratic institutions and traditions to their fullest, fully review them for their limitations and for obstacles that need to be removed to free up democratic functioning, and transform them as needed to enable “we the people” to have effective rule over our lives, individually and collectively.
A strong, functional democracy provides the capacity for self-rule. Obstacles we run up against as we deal with climate change and energy issues will help us identify where we need more or better democracy. More democracy involves broader, more effective public engagement with public issues. Better democracy involves innovating forms of public engagement to produce better solutions — more desirable results for more people, including future generations.
4. SYSTEMS THINKING is the final capacity I want to highlight. Systems thinking is about interconnectedness, interaction, interdependence. It is about all the ways that diverse things — people, forces, ideas, stories, etc. — weave together into a larger whole, and how such a whole impacts the things that make it up. It is about moving beyond oversimplified explanations to understand more complex realities.
Systems thinking has many dimensions and comes in many forms, ranging from computer modeling to shamanism, from feedback loops to gardening metaphors. The most important gifts of systems thinking, to me, are a mixture of the following blessings.
a. Systems thinking breeds humility. So many things are so incredibly interconnected that we can’t really know everything about a complex living system like a planet or a community. Nor can we predict how it will behave nor the ultimate results of our actions. But we can be open, curious, empathic, and flexible — and keep on learning.
b. Systems thinking invites our awareness and inclusion of “the whole system”. This involves a dance between order and chaos: We attend to the limits to what we are able to productively include — AND we know that whatever we exclude will reduce our potential understanding and effectiveness and probably come back to haunt us someday.
c. Systems thinking helps us move beyond the obvious, the immediate, the symptomatic, into the big picture. It helps us be aware of and use the background structures, dynamics and feedback loops that shape the way things are and what happens next. Some dynamics amplify things that we want (or don’t want), while others constrain them. Some balance things out or resist change in ways we like or don’t like. Instead of blaming people and organizations as the cause of this or that, we can address the deeper dynamics that lead them to behave that way.
d. Living systems thinking awakens us to the self-organizing power of Life. We can do a lot to empower the wise vitality of life in our communities and reduce the need for top-down direction and expenditure of resources. This is especially important in times of resource scarcity which many expect to accompany climate change and energy challenges. We don’t always have to run things. We can nurture and ally ourselves with Life’s own power to support itself and evolve.
As we increase our ability to see and work with whole systems, as we increase our social capital, as we build a wiser democracy and as we learn how to play more effective co-creative roles in the larger processes of Life that we are part of, we become increasingly capable of meeting WHATEVER challenges we face. We also become more capable of realizing the many positive possibilities opened up by the climate and energy challenges.
POSITIVE POSSIBILITIES
We often hear that crisis contains both danger and opportunity. The danger is usually obvious. The opportunity comes partially from the way crisis calls forth sudden, unexpected energies, like the adrenaline rush in individuals or the way people “rise to the occasion”. Opportunity also presents itself in the tendency of crises to shake up business as usual, toppling old habits and structures and making space for something new to emerge.
Of course, just because opportunity presents itself doesn’t mean we take it. We may feel depressed or crushed by difficulties or even, as Pogo said, feel “confronted by insurmountable opportunities.” But the opportunities are usually there and some of the most profound and positive transformations in the lives of individuals, organizations, communities, and societies come out of positive response to crisis.
The crises of climate change and peak oil challenge our business-as-usual that is dangerously dependent on cheap oil and other fossil fuels. So much of the way we live could simply not continue without a continuing supply of this cheap fuel. Furthermore, billions of poor people who have not had a chance to live like middle class (to say nothing of wealthy) people in affluent societies are rapidly moving into richer lives and demanding the cheap energy they need to do make that shift. Clearly, things are not going to continue as they have been.
One fabulous example of a positive response to this situation is the worldwide Transition Towns movement (google it), involving people in hundreds of communities making new-civilization lemonade out of the global lemon of peak oil and climate change. They point out that we COULD end up even better off after the transition from oil-based lifestyles than we are now. Some of the very real benefits we could create together in response to these crises are these:
- Simpler, richer, more meaningful lives
- Less materialism, more creativity, spirit, and joy
- More deeply healthy lifestyles, work, and children
- Closer, more vibrant communities
- Richer flowering of all our unique gifts
- Wiser, more joyful and powerful use of our differences
- More authentically abundant, just, and sustainable economies
- Engaging, enjoyable education that makes a real difference
- More responsive, empowering and wise democracy
- Renewed connection with place, nature, and the earth
- More confidence in tomorrow and the well-being of future generations
- Deeper understanding of who we are and our place in the world
I would like to see us consider all these things well as we consider what our community could do to respond to the challenges of peak oil and climate change. We can pursue these WHILE exploring each of the six categories the City has chosen to frame the discussion. We can also pursue them in conversations outside of the City’s planning process.
Please share your thoughts
It is an exciting time to be alive. We are faced with tremendous challenges and incredible opportunities. The decisions we make over the next decade will be important ones for us, and for our children.
In order to see that our community thrives and is resilient in the face of change, we need to take advantage of our collective intelligence – rather than knowledge embodied in any one person, collective intelligence is what arises when we think and communicate in groups as we work collectively toward a common goal.
That is why we need you here. If you join in and invite your friends and family and the people around you who care, the conversations that follow are likely to be interesting and insightful.
Please join in the conversation and share your ideas. We need your perspective.
What’s on your mind?
Matt McRae – City of Eugene Climate and Energy Action Coordinator
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