Green thoughts of an anthropological intern

[Below is a piece I have written for a charity called 'Green and Away' who run a conference centre for groups to use in tents every summer. I was an intern for the organisation over the summer and have written the below piece for the organisation for one of their publications.]

During my time at Green and Away I have learn a great deal both about ecological matters and myself and I thought I would share some thoughts with you all from the perspective of anthropology on what my time as an intern has taught me, and the lessons I think that Green and Away can offer wider society:

I have always been interested in animals ever since I was a kid; I was fascinated by how they lived and how they always seemed so sure of what they were meant to do. As I got older, a regular theme kept cropping up that would spoil my viewing, that whichever amazing creature I had spent the past half hour enjoying watching was in imminent danger of being persecuted into oblivion by humans! Aside from spoiling my program it left me with a mildly misanthropic view of my fellow humans as seemingly incapable of living around other wildlife without exploiting the environment at the expense of all else. 

The enjoyment I gained from seeing all of the wonderful life around me and the thought of it not being around for others to enjoy spurred me on to pursue a career where I could do something help prevent this. Not being the most adept scientist in the world, I decided to study anthropology (the study of humans) at university to understand better the one species causing all this destruction, our own. Over the course of my degree I have gone from thinking that there is something inherently wrong with or destructive about human nature to thinking, as time has gone on, that, somewhat unsurprisingly there is a little more going on!

This mainly seems to revolve around the fact that, if any one thing can be said to differentiate humans from other species, it is that we often question what it is we are supposed to do. We ask ‘why?’ constantly, something that not even a remarkably intelligent animal such as a chimpanzee does. 

[I should also add something else that I have learnt; that it is not people per-se who wreak ecological havoc wherever they go but more certain societies with some defining characteristics]

People are also capable of doing something else extraordinary; we are capable of going beyond our immediate social groups and forming larger scale, more complex societies, I’m not talking ant hills either here! Some animals, such as bees and ants, live in very complex social groups with individuals having socially specific roles much in the way that people do in human societies. This is as far as the analogy goes though, for human social organisation is something truly new, it is truly cultural. With the advent of language and complex tool use we were able to form ideas to describe the world in which we lived and innovate new and different forms of society with different tools, modes of living and different ideas that were used to explain the way that the world works.

We human beings are only capable of forming a familiar social group of up to around 500 people, which for the majority of human history represented the maximum number of people you were ever likely to meet. That we human beings are capable of going beyond our immediate social groups and forming larger scale, more complex societies fascinates me. As societies have become more complex with the development of new crafts and technologies, which led to the use of agriculture, fiefdoms, trade etc. these communities have coalesced into larger, more complex societies.

The word ‘community’ can have a number of different meanings depending on the context in which the word is used, in this context, that of a social group of an individual, I will talk of community as having ‘four key qualities’:

• A smallness of social scale
• A homogeneity of activities and states of mind of members
• A conscious of distinctiveness
• A self-sufficiency of needs through time.

All societies have a set of ideas that form their worldview and provide the framework within which people think about the world and organise their activities. For most of the time we have been around these ideas were those of a community; the myths of a tribal group or small village of people that informed their worldview. However, since we have moved beyond the limits of our immediate social group and formed larger, more hierarchical societies communities of people are subsumed into a larger group with an ideology. 

Separating out and categorising this ideology has had many an anthropologist in their office till 4am pulling their hair out and sobbing into their desks as most societies don’t categorising ideas into neat subject areas like economics, politics, religion etc.

Fear not! Help is at hand, (bear with me), in the form of a general definition of the myths that define a society as: “A system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, persuasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in people by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”

Though this definition seems rather waffly it provides a good framework with which to think about the ideas that underpin and run a society like our own. As societies have become more complex, there have been both positive and negative effects; new technological innovations have enabled people to carry out tasks more efficiently and, for example, grow more food keeping the threat of starvation at bay. Advances in our knowledge of subjects such as healthcare have also led to a substantial increase in the human lifespan and the health of the general population. At the same time as these successes there have been vast and needless losses of life in wars, exploitation of some groups of people by others and a great deal of damage done to the ecology that we depend upon for our survival; what we really need to aim for is 'Mozart without the mushroom cloud'.

  

What has enabled this expansion are the ideas that underpin a society, the mythology upon which it bases its identity. 

At this moment elephants are harassing buffalo to gain access to a waterhole in the Congo Rainforest, people from a tribal group in West Papua are protesting the destruction of their land by multinational companies whilst they are under foreign occupation, and traders on the New York Stock Exchange are running around in a Western Equivalent of a rain dance invoking the ‘market’ to provide. 

Apparently, we currently live in the 'Modern Age'. We do of course just happen to live during a certain period of time, the idea of a time period constituting an age of any sort being a human construct. Modernity, as our ’era’ is labelled is of course an idea, one which is central to the ideas underpinning Western society.

Western society is not unique in having done damage to the ecology of the planet, or in leading to wide scale exploitation of some groups of people by others. It is unique though in the sheer scale of the damage caused. Since the industrial revolution, the economic system of capitalism in its various guises has provided a remarkably productive system of generating material wealth, technological innovation, and intellectual discovery but it has done so at great social and environmental cost. The collection of ideas that have led to our current malaise are varied both in terms of origin and the intentions behind them. 

Classical economic theories, such as David Ricardo’s idea of comparative advantage for example, have been very effective in creating much of the modern economy that we know and enjoy today. These ideas whilst leading to an efficient economy with relatively cheap goods and services do not, generally, factor in where these resources come from, the welfare and rights of those who produced them or that there might be limits to the extent to which an economy can grow. 

The result of these ideas has combined to make a very toxic brew of ecologically destructive consumerism that does little to nothing to alleviate poverty. It is in this wider landscape of ideas that the major trends that will affect our lives are emerging; A decline in the availability of cheap fossil fuels, the likely decline, or possible collapse of global trade and finance, a loss of biodiversity and climate change.

Green and Away has given me fresh insights into what is required to create a cultural response that addresses what amounts to a crisis of ecological proportions both in practical adjustment in our day-to-day living and to tackle the root cause of our problems. Coming to Green and Away I have experience a way of living (with modern amenities) that is very different to the hum drum suffocating miasma of retail parks, motorways, wall to wall advertising and wilting saplings of the post-industrial consumerist British landscape.

One of our largest problems is that we suffer a disconnect between a sense of community, within which we are personally limited to a fairly small group of people, and an economic system that delivers large material rewards but that is socially and ecologically destructive. 

A pressing question in answer to this is how we maintain the aspects of ‘modernity’ that we appreciate and would not want to do without like electricity and modern healthcare whilst regaining a sense of community that, as I have discovered, is so valuable to our wellbeing. Community-based living also provides a more ecologically sensible way of running a society i.e. we used a fraction of the resources per person at Green and Away that are used in a conventional home.

The idea that there can be an ever-growing economy and that indeed there MUST be in order to maintain our standard of living is central to our current economic system; that this is an ecological impossibility by the non-too revolutionary observation that the world is of a finite size and that resources are limited directly contradicts this idea. I should add here another observation from anthropology that though not a very cheery thought is well worth remembering. It is that societies can and have collapsed when their systems of social organisation ran head long into an ecological wall as the myths upon which their worldview was based did not correlate with reality.

This is no call for pessimism however; The very fact that our problems are essentially a problem of ideas makes them eminently changeable. It is after all one of the things that makes us human, that we have ideas, and that we can have new ones!

Whilst I worked in the light industrial area, I found an organisation where technologically we were just as happy to use solar panels and second hand tents together, using technology appropriately for purpose rather than being fixated on the new. We had well-organised management at the same time as an holistic ethos and managed our resources at both ends of the dietary cycle with ecological consideration. Green and Away is able to put together an organic community within the framework of a specific agenda that serves an economic and educational purpose whilst remaining flexible and adaptable, which, I might add, is no small achievement!

The solutions to our problems, will require context specific answers that address the social needs of groups of people without wrecking the ecology upon which we all so dearly depend. This will require the work of people at all levels of society all helping in their own way as we rethink the stories that we tell ourselves about the way that the world works. At this stage in 'the game' many of the current power structures are collapsing under their own weight, or at least becoming less relevant and useful to our everyday lives. The ensuing malaise, though not straightforward, can provide a window of opportunity in which to develop more ecologically sane and morally humane structures within which to operate human society of which Green and Away offers a fine example.