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Foundation for Sustainable Communities
Session 2
This we know. The earth does not belong to us: we belong to the earth. This we know. All things are connected, like the blood that unites one family. Wate'er befalls the earth, befalls the children of earth. This we know. We did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the earth, we do to ourselves. This we know.
--- Chief Sealth
Executive Summary
Sustainable solutions are more likely to be created by the creative and diverse interests of a community. Individuals acting alone are unlikely to possess the wisdom and ability to decide and plan for entire communities. The different people of a community all have pieces of the answer, and their ideas and energies must be brought together to create the whole picture.
The social fabric
The relationships and connections between people of a community weave its social fabric. We can see this fabric as being beautifully woven over time, or as being weakened, stretched, and even torn by stresses. The fabric can represent the diversity of the community, or it can display exclusivity and tensions. In giving attention to the social fabric we are valuing such intangible things as trust, understanding, and commitment, and saying they are as important as other more visible and quantifiable concerns like community buildings, streets, and economic growth. A community's social fabric can be built through improving communications and interactions. A strong fabric is seen as necessary to carry a community through hard times, but also helps people to feel secure and at home.
Community history
Every community has a history. Your community might be one year old or thousands of years old. It is important to understand community history in order to sensitively move forward into the future. What organizing and planning efforts are part of the past? What are the significant people, organizations, and events that have contributed to your community and its culture?
What did your community look like in the past? Where were the forests, streams, and meadows? What buildings are historic or significant?
What is the story of your community? Chances are you identify with more than one community, and that your primary community is based on shared interests rather than geography. In any case, the culture of your community is the collection of its beliefs, customs, institutions and other products, as well as its art and other forms of expression. This culture forms the base for the story of your community, and influences what you value, and what you consider to be worth sustaining. Defining and developing community sustainability is as much an art as it is a science, and is a creative process that will vary according to each community and its particular culture.
What is your history? You also have a history. Where does your history intersect with your community? What is significant about your past? Knowing this can help you determine the role you can play in your community's present and future.
To My Coast Salish Ancestors
In the late evening, rain and fog. Who sends dancers with elk-teeth rattles to roam the alley next to my cottage? Their song enters the window, a Swinomish chorus: each step that brings them closer forms another mask of the moon, another color of the Northwest sea. I open the door and follow; they toss legends I must find in the dark. In their honor I cross knives with them; our union is a force the wind receives. I am of this coast and its keeper.---Duane Niatum, Northwest Native Poet
Community rights & responsibilities
Just as an individual's freedoms and property rights are balanced with responsibilities to the larger public, communities also have both rights and responsibilities.
Community rights - looking inward
The first objective of any community is to take care of itself. In this way communities are inward looking and the people of the community are concerned with their immediate landscape and each other. People expect their communities not to be exploited, dumped on, polluted, or taken for granted by outside interests. Ideally, communities should have enough freedom and authority to creatively develop as they see best.
Community Responsibilities - looking outward
A sustainable community realizes that it is not an island, and that it is not sustainable for very long if its neighbors are not sustainable too. A long-term perspective respects other communities, both near and far, and considers the future communities who will inherit the results of present community decisions. "Do unto others" and "do unto other communities" what you would wish to have done to yourself. Can you begin to ask questions about the land and ecosystems that sustain your community -- the farmland, the waste dumps, the gravel pits, the textile plants, the immediate surroundings and the distant places where resources come from and wastes go? What is an equitable level of consumption? What are equitable levels of waste production? Could all communities on the planet even approximately consume as much as your community?
Indigenous Peoples
The Northwest has been inhabited for many thousands of years by traditional communities that developed cultures of sustainability. There are lessons to be learned from the ways and customs of these native peoples. Stories and songs of these cultures convey a felt appreciation for life that is perhaps the strongest evidence we have of a human ability to live sustainably and respect the earth.
Indigenous people teach us that to live sustainably we will need to appreciate the sacredness of life, not just objectively and scientifically prove the ecological value of life. Other lessons are to take only what we need, and then to give thanks for what we do take.
Communities, markets, & governments
Community decisions tend to be creative because they are smaller?scale and use local knowledge. Community?based institutions mobilize local people and resources, and, ideally, build cooperation, community strength and identity.
Market processes tend to emphasize competition and the interchangeability of people, places, and products. The trend toward globalization of markets is eroding the stability and security of many local communities. Markets also tend to value efficiency over other community concerns.
Governments, as they increase in size and distance from a community, tend to be less aware of and sensitive to local issues. State and national level governments may also assume more power than is necessary, and serve to dis-empower local communities.
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Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.
The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man.
We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's graves and his children's birthright is forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.
---Chief Sealth
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Committment, ethics, and consensus
Committment
What are you committed to? Are you planning to stay where you are? What people and places do you care enough about to invest in their future? We have learned to mock people who never go far from their small towns, and we celebrate those who travel extensively and move around. It is not traveling necessarily that is a problem, but how never putting down roots might erode our caring for particular people and places. Are you committed to doing what you can to insure that people in your community one hundred years from now will have at least the same opportunities to enjoy the quality of life you now do?
Ethics
What is human nature? What are we capable of? From a reading of history, or even of a Sunday newspaper, we can see that humans are capable of both horrific and magnificent acts. People seem to be neither 'good' or 'bad' genetically speaking, but rather guided by their culture and its sets of customs and ethics. In this sense we learn what is right and wrong, and we are thus rewarded and punished from the day we are born, although not always consistently. Acting sustainably, or in the best interests of everyone, is itself grounded in ethics and values. We can ask ourselves if our current ethics help or hinder sustainable behavior. What are the operating ethics which encourage people to drive their car two blocks to the store rather than walking?
Consensus
There are always trade-offs involved in community decision-making. Sustainability is not about just finding agreement or reaching compromise; it has to do with bringing people together in ways that will get at solutions that are not just acceptable but desirable for all concerned. This tends to mean a longer decision-making process, but once decisions are made, implementation of the decisions is quicker and more effective. The consensus process works to increase committment to the decisions that are made.
I come from a very sacred land of ordinary people - we have been brought up in a time of incredible struggles no less nor more than our ancestors before us. You see our people from the beginning have always been ordinary people inhabiting the areas of our birth: we have from the beginning chosen to protect and preserve as much of our political, social, economic, and spiritual ways as possible. But because of the events of the past 500 years or so, our rights as sovereign people have been continually challenged, restricted and at times prohibited in a legal sense. Even our own tribal governments have been altered to do less for our people. To us sovereignty is as sacred as life itself. It is not something that is granted, allotted, limited, prohibited, dishonored by people with, for, or against, other people. Sovereignty was given to us at birth from the Creator of All, from our Grandfather who some choose to call Go.
You see sovereignty to us means 'power' not so much to control others as to have the ability and capability to accomplish and do things for ourselves, for our people, and for all our relations. I must explain one thing - the term 'All Our Relations' encompasses all of God's creation, the land, and that which grows on the land. Air, water, animals including the two-legged, the four-legged, these that fly, that swim, that crawl and slither, the sacred winds that carry our song and voices, our prayers to others, our sacred and special messengers that carry our prayers and concerns to the Creator the condor of our Quichua brothers in Ecuador, the Quetzel of Guatemala, the Bald Eagle of North America.
It is our belief that our Creator, God, has offered all cultures and all people of the earth very sacred and special ways and forms of ceremonies, rituals and prayers to show our respect and share those understandings and pass them on to the generations to come. For you see it is through these rituals, ceremonies and prayers, it is through the Longhouse, the Kéva, the Sweat Lodge, through the Grass dance, Ribbon dance, Corn dance, Gourd dance, Stomp dance, Sundance and all the other dances, songs and prayers of our Indigenous people, that we carry on the teaching and life ways that were offered to us by the Creator of all the supreme sovereignty, offering us the ordinary people a way to understand and live in a good way. This is our understanding.
--- Ray Williams, Swinomish |
Resources
Berry, Wendell. 1993. Sex, economy, freedom and community. New York: Pantheon.
Quinn, Daniel. 1992. Ishmael. New York: Bantam Books.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. 1980. Human scale. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan.
Maintained by:
Bill
Grunkemeyer
Ohio State University Extension
Community Development
Last Updated (February 2000).
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