The power of changing our metaphors...
This is Part Three of my article, What’s Next? The small stories that are shaping a new sustainable narrative, which appeared in the Autumn/Winter 2021 edition of AMED’s e Organisations and People journal, on the theme of From Ego to Eco: Organising for a Regenerative Future. Read part one here and part two here.
We think the power is at the top
While we pay lip service to grassroots bottom-up action, many of us still behave as if the power is at the top of the system. When we think about addressing climate change, we focus on the top of the system - governments, and corporations - rather than the grassroots or community level.
Thus our focus is on Paris Accords, government commitments, court decisions, and corporate pledges of change, rather than the community and the city. And we tend to think that participatory activities such as peoples’ assemblies are ‘new’ phenomena rather than how we used to organize urselves before we privileged individual land ownership, extractive technologies, and a focus on individual profits and not societal costs.
Michelle Nijhuis argues in a recent essay, The Miracle of the Commons, that despite the claim that the ‘commons’ was dead, commons management principles actually underlie hundreds of conservation efforts worldwide which - unlike top-driven conservation activities - reduce costs and deliver significant benefits to people and nature.
“Many have revived and adapted conservation practices developed centuries ago, developing new rules suited to current circumstances,” she says. “Their creators cooperate in the management of coral reefs in Fiji, highland forests in Cameroon, fisheries in Bangladesh, oyster farms in Brazil, community gardens in Germany, elephants in Cambodia, and wetlands in Madagascar. They operate in thinly populated deserts, crowded river valleys, and abandoned urban spaces.”
Basil Davidson argues that many African religious beliefs were actually conservation principles framed so they could be easily grasped by widely-scattered peoples, and that perspective helps us see principles of indigenous conservation as practical strategies wrapped in story, not myth.
Cool burning, for example, now is used extensively in northern Australia in concert with ‘modern’ fire management strategies. Scientists have found that forests managed by their indigenous residents are managed at least as sustainably - if not more so - than forests managed by foresters and governments. Human-wildlife interaction is managed much more effectively when rural communities help develop and manage such strategies in relationship and as part of an ecosystem - think chilli peppers and beehives rather than electric fences.
Finally, when peoples’ assemblies are used to discuss climate change, participants often choose much more dramatic strategies than governments. Once people grasp the situation holistically and in context, they are willing to make choices and tradeoffs that governments find difficult.
We operate from a ‘deficit’ mindset
Decades ago, management consultant David Cooperrider dramatically changed how we examine systems. Rather than seeing it as a machine that needed to be ‘fixed’, he began looking for what gave life to a system. And that required asking quite different questions (Appreciative Inquiry).
Yet the deficit model is a powerful one. It is easier to look for what doesn’t work than to look for what is working. When I worked in community development internationally, I would divide a flipchart in two columns - “What works” and “What could be done differently” - and then ask project staff to share what they saw. Invariably, people wanted to start with ‘what didn’t work’. But also invariably, once the ‘what works’ ideas finally started, ideas for what could be done differently burst forward in the narrative context of what was working.
When we argue that the public must hear a dire story of climate change, we are not starting from ‘what works’. If we start from the narrative of nature as a living system whose ecosystem services make it possible for us to live sustainably and still make a living, we would have a quite different picture, and make different decisions.
If we see a shark as a million dollar resource for our country’s tourism, for example, we become willing to spend money to find livelihood alternatives for fishers, because it is in everyone’s long term interests to let the shark keep attracting tourists. Or if we think of an elephant as providing ecosystem services worth $1.75 million per animal, we treat poaching differently.
Similarly, financing ‘blue carbon’ projects is simpler if we compare the value of how mangroves protect coasts from erosion naturally with the cost of building artificial sea walls and raising houses high on stilts.
Such conversations generate inventive new possibilities. When conservation organizations In California looked at how to restore bird migration in the context of the whole system, they came up with a ‘win-win-win’ solution.
When rice farmers began flooding harvested fields rather than burning stubble, birders noticed that migrating birds began to land in the flooded fields which mimicked what existed before the state channelled mountain water to agricultural fields. Drawing on the ideas that created Uber and Airbnb, conservation groups researched exactly when and where the land was needed and paid farmers to keep the fields flooded for that time period, at rates the farmers bid. The birds started to come back, the farmers’ bottom line benefitted, and the conservation project was affordable and practical. (Additionally, salmon for which rivers are now too warm can feed on the stubble as they grow.)
Changing our thinking from ‘deficit’ to ‘appreciative’ also means we can see waste of all kinds as a resource and not as a problem. Human and animal waste is used to generate electricity via biogas, for example. Human waste is reprofiled as ‘toilet resources‘ by industry, which sees huge opportunities in new ways to treat sanitation - including mining minerals from human waste. Paper is generated from agricultural waste, saving trees. Plastic waste is shredded and added to the asphalt for roads, improving road surfaces and reducing carbon emissions.
We prefer the ‘single story’
We don’t like complexity even though it is a characteristic of what Amanda Ripley describes as ‘good conflict’ vs. ‘high conflict’. We prefer the ‘single story’, despite its misleading nature, because it is simple.
‘Solutions journalism’ grew out of the idea that in their desire to reflect ‘both sides’, many journalists were heightening conflict by simplifying stories that were much more complex. Ripley, whose powerful questions inspired this new approach, has just written a book that examines what she calls ‘high conflict’ and ‘good conflict’.
High conflict is binary, argumentative, and largely performative because it shuts down our curiosity about others. Good conflict, by contrast, happens when we are curious about other peoples’ views and ask questions without assuming we know the answers, thus helping to generate solutions we cannot see when we are stuck in the ‘tunnel vision’ of high conflict.
Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about the ‘danger of a single story’, which is in many ways the same thing. And as James C. Scott says in Seeing Like A State, the map is not the territory. It is easier, and simpler, to tell that single story as if it is the truth. This simplicity/complexity dichotomy makes it more difficult to put all the ‘small stories’ together into a new narrative.
International development activities are particularly prone to categorizing issues in silos and seeing development as a vertical ‘expert to novice’ process rather than a ‘neighbour to neighbour’ one, despite much evidence to the contrary.
Ngwenya Glass in Swaziland, now known as Eswatini, began with a South African family who collected small glass figurines that had been made in a factory established with Swedish aid. When the supply dried up, they discovered the factory had shut down, and bought it. The project now covers so much that many international organizations see in separate silos - job creation, community economic development, recycling glass, environmental conservation, and tourism - but which make complete sense from a holistic community-level perspective.
A school principal in Lesotho whose idea to use school land to grow crops to feed her students influenced an entire region, without international funding, because people heard about it from others and decided to copy it - an example of what the former South African NGO CDRA calls ‘horizontal development’ because it spreads organically from neighbour to neighbour.