Our Legacy is Cooperative, Waste, Hope, Now #50 #cong24 #legacy

Reading Time in Minutes

4

1. Core needs are food, water, shelter, community, environment.
2. Prioritise using cooperative structures for them.
3. Work with sharers, not takers.
4. Enjoy each others company.

I am a retired dairy farmer from a tradition of cooperative and local involvement. I am a member of the Board oversight on Mitchelstown Credit Union, Knockmealdown Active that develops outdoor activities there and has just received the Pride of Place award for community wellbeing. Also involved with a local group using walks on the Knockmealdowns and the Galtees to build the community. I help to organise an October storytelling workshop on Whiddy island. Learning more about regenerating soil every day. Reading: local and general economic history, particularly heterodox economics.

You can contact Conor by email

By Conor O’Brien

Our Legacy is
Cooperative,
Waste,
Hope,
Now.
I say ‘our’ because no one can function on their own as an individual. Nor can we function in isolation from the natural world. We are a cooperative social species who evolved within the natural world . As Easkey Britton has said, We are not the protectors of the forest. We are the forest protecting itself.

Cooperation is not a moralistic development. Edward O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson debated and challenged each other for over thirty years as to whether the individual competitive gene and cell or cooperating groups of cells within organisms was the basis of evolution. In 2007 they wrote a joint paper concluding that: “. Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. ” That is what cooperation is; it is a real evolutionary process.

We evolved to prioritise sharing resources together in a group rather than taking and holding for our individual selves. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has developed a robust explanation of how the maternal instinct of mothers was the foundation of our evolution. She argues from the fact that the pelvic structure needed by our female ancestors for an upright posture limited the size of their offspring. These infants were completely helpless until three to four years old, and were juvenile till eleven or twelve years old. They could be provisioned only if the mother had sufficient trust in those around her to override her instinctive protective behaviour. The infants themselves also had to evolve a theory of the ‘other’ so that they could understand what would attract the attention of those providers to them. We took pleasure then, and still do, in mutually transcending our individuality by supporting each other to live in and understand this world as it is. Humans great advance lay in organising themselves into groups with cultures which we could consciously differentiate rather than waiting for the random mutations of natural evolution.

Organisations with a cooperative culture and structure satisfy our needs for mutuality, fairness, autonomy, and growth through mutual development; and control the inherent tendencies towards individualist extraction. The crisis in our society is caused by allowing a relatively recent culture of extremely selfish hierarchic individualism, nowadays called neo-liberalism, to hold us in a state of constant individual competition.

Nature abhors waste. All actions need energy and all lead to entropy, or waste. All nature, including us, depends on photosynthesis in plants to harvest the energy of the sun for our survival and growth. This energy is limited by being diffuse, though practically limitless. Nature reduces waste of this scarce energy by filling every niche with small and large organisms that continuously recycle the energy and the materials of organisms at the end of their life cycle. It is a process with a positive feedback that continuously enhances our world within the boundaries of our planet.

Proponents of neo-liberalism treat fossil fuels as if they were unlimited and that boundaries caused by the need to recycle do not exist. They use fossil fuels to break food production into stages so that it is no longer consumed where it is grown, breaking the nutrient cycle. Major elements such as nitrogen, phosphorous, potash or calcium are lost from the soil, along with micro-elements such as boron or cyanide, or micro-organisms, that are just as significant. If the soil is missing those, they will also be missing from subsequent crops. Gilles Billen explains how conventional agriculture uses artificially produced nitrogen to replace what is lost when a crop is harvested and exported and cannot now complete the nutrient cycle. As the US discovered, the yields and quality of the crops gradually decline as further micro-nutrients are extracted. The degraded soil is blown away in dust-storms and runs off during floods.

Urbanised countries are on the other side of the gap in the nutrient cycle. There, the effluent from the intensive livestock operations fed on imported grain does not have a matching land area to utilise it. The excess nitrogen causes eutrophication of water bodies and its gas form is a significant factor in acid rain and climate change. It’s not just that we produce waste by breaking the nutrient cycle; our consumer society actively introduces new materials which either cannot be recycled, or prevent nature from recycling other materials.

There is no legacy for a society that damages and wastes its own soil. We are like passengers on a river-boat heading for a cataract while passing safe landing place.  Terry Eagleton has used the phrase ‘Hope without optimism’ to describe how we must change our approach. We must have hope, even in the worst of times. But we cannot afford to fool ourselves with blind optimism. We must see the task as it really is, both good and bad, in order to move away from the cataracts in front of us.

We form our legacy at each moment by asserting our own purpose of growing together by sharing our real nature; or by taking from it. We cannot change the past, nor can we leap forward and change a world in the future if it is not to our liking.

The natural world is our heritage: our legacy is what we do now.

We are the forest protecting the forest

Easkey Britton speaking at the Hometree workshop 7/7/23 
David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson. 2007 Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology. The Quarterly Review of Biology Volume 82, Number 4December 2007