CONTENT
ABSTRACT
THE
CHALLENGE
CHILD
REARING
INSTITUTIONAL
STRUCTURES & PROCESSES
THE
PROCESS OF CHANGE
A
VISIONING THE FUTURE
REFERENCES
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ABSTRACT
Because
of worsening environmental, social and economic conditions, most people
are not hopeful about the future; and certainly if we adhere to our
unexamined
values of unlimited growth, consumerism, individualism, corporate
managerialism,
and technological and curative solutions to ecological, social and
personal
problems our fears will become self fulfilling prophesies. But, if we
clarify
our values and move beyond these limited perceptions, deepen our
understanding
of nature, community and ourselves, and learn to design and work with,
rather than against, natural processes, then we can certainly achieve a
meaningful, mutually supportive and sustainable future.
This will take
greater awareness, vision, courage, collaboration across difference, a
new kind of political, business and academic leadership, and the
identification
of the driving and restraining forces for such change, and the
strengthening
of the former and weakening of the latter. At the individual, family
and
group levels it will involve identifying the "small meaningful steps
that
we can each guarantee to carry through to completion" and the public
celebration
of completions to make such change contagious.
This final
presentation will provide an opportunity for us to reflect on this, and
on the earlier presentations, and decide what we can and will do
towards
this necessary change of direction in the course of human history.
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THE
CHALLENGE
If
each of us continues doing what we are presently doing, our impact on
the
planet’s ecological systems will eventually, over a relatively short
space
of time, cross the numerous thresholds that constitute the interrelated
maintenance processes that make life on earth possible for most
species.
It will be like running the tape of the evolution of the great
diversity
of life backwards on fast rewind.
At some level
we all know this, yet we haven’t really got started on the programs of
action that are needed to fundamentally transform our culture and our
lifestyles
to ones that are genuinely conserving and life affirming.
If we are honest,
most of us would have to admit to feelings of being trapped and
impotent,
and too often naively hoping that this can all be solved by others,
particularly
those in science, technology and politics. But also, at another level,
we also know that it can’t, and that we will all be required to make
radical
changes to everything that we have come to think of as normal.
It is difficult
for us primarily because of two groups of interacting factors: the ways
in which we were raised and the nature of the institutional structures
and processes that we have constructed to support us.
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CHILD REARING
In
most cultures it is assumed that children must be socialised, moulded
and
guided - that they might have their own internally derived agendas that
need helping and support is rarely taken seriously (deMause, 1982). And
so, in the process of learning how to fit into and be successful in the
dominant culture, most of us give up our power, lose awareness, and
become
distanced from our internal agendas, visions and values. Certainly
children
need some guidance, but the balance of external control over the
development
of internal guidance is excessively in favour of the former.
The outcome
is that most of us become experts at living from the outside in and
novices
at living from the inside out. I think R. D. Laing (1971) described it
well when he observed that "it is as if we were hypnotised twice,
firstly
into accepting pseudoreality as reality, and secondly into believing we
were not hypnotised". This is why, even among the numerous
non-governmental
and grass-roots communities, it remains difficult to develop effective
programs for genuine sustainable change. This is also why most energy
continues
to be put into projects that ameliorate the symptoms of our problems,
thereby
keeping attention off and protecting the causes, which persist and
predictably
continue to cause further problems.
Williamson
& Pearse (1938; see also Stellibrass 1989), in a study of health,
recognised
this as an adaptive compensatory process - something we tend to
‘automatically’
do to survive over the short-term.
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INSTITUTIONAL
STRUCTURES & PROCESSES
The
problem is that we have institutionalised these compensatory adaptive
strategies
to such an extent that they have become the dominant structures and
processes
and are now regarded as the norms - the things that we believe we must
protect to have a civilised society. These include political systems
that
are based on power over strategies and widespread exclusion from access
to essential information, rather than access together with high levels
of citizen competency and participation; an overly simplistic economic
system that excludes most of the story when doing cost-benefit
analyses,
that regards success as being synonymous with growth, and that permits
the rich to continue to get richer and the poor to get poorer.
Clearly we
need an economic system in which money is regarded merely as one of a
number
of helpful tools (along with appropriate technologies, policies,
programs
and services etc.) that can be used to enable us to act on our core
values,
i.e., those relative to our fundamental limited needs versus our
compensatory
unlimited greeds (Norgaard 1994). This would enable us to develop our
human
potential while living within the limits of ecological systems. Our
religious
institutions have also become largely compensatory, which is why there
is so much confusion in the area of the spirit and why so many drug
pushers,
evangelists and cults are doing a roaring trade.
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THE
PROCESS OF CHANGE
Until
we acknowledge that on the one hand we are a lost people, and that on
the
other we collectively still have the capability to learn how to live in
harmony with one another and with the other life on the planet, we will
be stuck on our path of destruction, and this will certainly condemn
all
future generations to impoverished lives. To change - to be open to
learning
our way forwards into these uncharted waters of living in harmony - we
will have to be willing to move, moment to moment - between unknowing,
so that we can learn, and knowing, so that we can act. Two common
compensatory
adaptations to our current situation are to either get stuck on
knowing,
thereby being unable to critique what we ‘know’, hear critique from
others
or learn anything fundamentally new, or to get stuck on not knowing,
which
is often evident as constantly critiquing and postponing action.
What I am arguing
for here is a fundamental redesign at the personal, socio-cultural
(political,
economic, technological, business, religious, etc.) and environmental
(including
managed ecosystems) levels. None of these areas are immune from the
need
for critical examination, revision and redesign.
This all may
seem too overwhelming to consider, but this is also a symptom of how
our
culture has constructed the process of change, which is still largely
visualised
as being carried out, or at least led, by heroes, and the result of
heroic
efforts, i.e., largely acts carried out by superior others. What is
primarily
needed for the kind of change being envisioned here are a symphony of
small
meaningful actions that each of us can guarantee to carry through to
completion,
each serving as a stimulus for further actions and as a support for one
another’s efforts. These very small actions need to be recognised and
valued,
and their completions celebrated publicly to assist their contagion.
Presently
most small actions tend to be trivialised, and so are eventually
abandoned
as being ineffective, or they are kept hidden.
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A
VISIONING THE FUTURE
The
process of change that I am arguing for requires a long-term
commitment,
and we may not see the benefits immediately, but we really have no
alternative
if we are serious about playing a part in the cultural evolution of our
own species. There is no implication here that everyone has to do the
same
thing - only what you can guarantee to complete.
Certainly I
have some ideas of what a re-designed society might be like, but what
is
more important than being guided by my vision is to develop your own
and
collaborate with others to develop group visions within your various
communities.With
respect to our relationships with nature, some things are already very
clear. We are part of and can never by apart from nature. Most children
need much more opportunities to develop competencies in relating with
nature,
and this learning needs to be supported throughout our lives (Hill in
press).
We need to
find ways to live in harmony with other species throughout the world,
not
just in nature reserves. We need to reframe ‘pests’, for example in
agriculture
and forestry, as primarily indicators of problems in the design and
management
of ecosystems, rather than as enemies to be eliminated (Hill 1998, Hill
et al.1999).
We need to
become familiar with the potential uses of many more species,
particularly
those that occur locally, and to develop sustainable relationships with
them. We don’t need Ministers of the Environment, or indeed any
politicians,
who are not committed to the sort of vision being promoted here, or the
armies of bureaucrats, academics, scientists, technologists and
business
people who are keeping our maldesigned and malfunctioning systems in
place.
They all need
our support in helping them change their focus. There are many small
meaningful
projects that could be carried through to completion in this vital area
of cultural change. However, unless we are engaged in our own process
of
recovery, healing and change, all our efforts to help others will be
vulnerable
to being undermined by our own persistent adaptive compensatory coping
behaviours.
The main barrier
to what I am proposing is our unfamiliarity with the validation of
small
acts and our tendency to postpone and leave the initiation of
fundamental
change to others. Now is the moment when we need to recognise that we
are
the essential agents of change, and that small actions are the primary
means. It is up to us, let’s get started.
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REFERENCES
deMause,
L. 1982.
Foundations of Psychohistory. Creative Roots, New York.
Hill,
S.B. 1998.
Redesigning agroecosystems for environmental sustainability: a deep
systems
approach. Syst. Res. 15: 391-402.
Hill,
S.B. In press.
Autonomy, sense of place, and conscious caring: a hopeful view of the
present
and future, in J.Cameron (ed.) Changing Places: Sense of Place
in
Australia.
Hill,
S.B., C. Vincent
& G.Chouinard.1999. Evolving ecosystems approaches to fruit insect
pest management. Agric. Ecosyst. Envir. 72(2):107-110.
Laing,
R.D. 1971.
The Politics of the Family. Vintage Books, New York.
Norgaard,
R. 1994.
Development Betrayed: The End of Progress and a Coevolutionary
Revisioning
of the Future. Routledge, New York.
Stellibrass.
A. 1989.
Being Me and Also Us; Lessons from the Peckham Experiment. Scottish
Academic,
Edinburgh, Scotland.
Williamson,
G.S.
and I.H. Pearse 1938. Biologists in Search of Material. Faber and
Faber,
London.
This
paper is
based on a presentation at the Nature Conservation of NSW "New
Solutions
for Sustainability: Integrated Natural Resources Management Conference",
March 4-5, 1999, Sydney University, Camperdown, Sydney, NSW.
Professor Stuart
B. Hill
Foundation
Chair of Social Ecology,
Faculty
of
Social Inquiry, University of Western Sydney-Hawkesbury,
Locked
Bag
#1, Richmond, NSW 2753.
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