Is Community an Answer to Brittleness?
Community is a vital connection layer, but is it a substitute for systems-level societal ruggedization?
Is community the answer to the growing brittleness of our lives?
I get asked this question — or versions of it — a lot. Most of the time, I think what people really want to know is whether there’s an intermediate step they can take somewhere between obliviousness to discontinuity and developing an actual personal climate strategy.
The answer’s not simple.
Certainly, community — in the largest sense, of common purpose and social cohesion — is the glue that holds society together. In that sense, it’s critical, and it seems difficult to overstate how much more connection and commonality we’re likely to need as this crisis really spins up. Having lots of kindness, caring and belonging makes us stronger. We’ll need that strength.
But there’s another sense of community resilience that’s used a lot these days, one I find unhelpful. People using community in this sense often claim that people coming together can create a kind of local resilience that can mitigate the need for big changes in infrastructure and institutions — or even replace those bigger systems and the centers of power that run them, altogether. That grassroots local efforts are the answer to the massive pressures on key global, national and regional systems. That individuals seeking stability in crisis should devote their efforts to connecting up with and growing these efforts. That, in the most extreme claims, there is no other way to improve your odds of a good future.
That last claim might be true, if lack of funds and immobility have left you with no other options. If you live in climate precarity and you lack resources, access to good information and location choice — if you can’t change the brittle systems around you, and you can’t relocate to a relatively safer and more stable place — then these kinds of efforts might be the best hope you have for managing the brutal realities of the brittleness trap you find yourself in. We shouldn’t sugarcoat how horrible a reality that represents.1
Now, I like to hold on to the possibility that we might still achieve the achievable: a massive effort to minimize the pain of loss, make rational and fair decisions about where we invest limited resources, launch supported mass-relocation programs for the millions who will need them, and build housing at inclusive scales to welcome them into the relatively safe places they ought to go. I choose the optimism of believing this scale of solidarity is possible.
Community is a vital layer in the stack of systems we depend on. Hoping it will replace the need for those systems in the face of both deep discontinuities and widespread inaction is unwise. Everyone with choices is likely to find much more success in focusing on systems and governance, relative safety and ruggedization efforts, designing effective personal climate strategies and keeping focused on implementing them. The infrastructure, expertise and governance underpinnings of modern life are incredibly valuable — a value we often don’t even recognize until we have to do without them.
The most self-sufficient rural people I’ve met know this. They are often the first to acknowledge the importance of these larger systems. They know how critical the road into town is, how important the hospital emergency room can be, how much they rely on public servants, from school teachers to firefighters. This is true especially where people have to maintain their own roads, heal themselves, teach their own kids and hope they can save their own homes in a wildfire. Nothing sharpens the mind on the importance of infrastructure like the lack of it.
The substructure matters, a lot. In wealthy societies, community life sits atop a vast machinery of systems, structures and services. Most of us have only a glimmer of an idea how vast is the weave of infrastructure, supply chains, policies, expertise and finance that carries us through our lives. Millions of people work at that loom every day, keeping us alive and, by historical standards, unprecedentedly prosperous.
Now, every system on earth is being subjected to extreme torque, as the conditions for which it was designed give way to an unpatterning of unfamiliar conditions and unprecedented extremes. Anticipated but unavoided disasters interrupt its function. Its components wear down and it requires more work to do the same job. New investments are demanded. New capacities become vital, and they have to be designed and built before they’re needed.
Indeed, the best way to think about our communities in terms of ruggedization is as a connection layer with those larger systems. Neighbors can certainly help one another in serious ways, be the real first responders in emergencies, check on the vulnerable, offer help when it’s needed. But neighbors together can accomplish systems changes that individuals cannot: inform, plan, lobby and monitor governmental institutions and their efforts to produce effective systems-level changes in our communities. The most successful places will be successful in large part because significant numbers of local citizens engage in the civic process to create real ruggedization.
See you at the block party,
Alex
PS: Want to orient yourself in the planetary crisis, and begin to chart a course forward for yourself and your loved ones?
Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics is the place to start. The next class will be on Thursday, May 28th, from 12:00-2:00 p.m. Pacific, via Zoom (Recording will be made available to registered participants, if you can’t attend live.)
Catch the Early-Bird discount by tomorrow, May 19th, and save $100.
PPS: The New York Times recently ran a feature about the Personal Climate Strategy Workshop, the month-long deep dive into making smart decisions when faced with climate chaos and growing uncertainty. The next Workshop will be in September.