Dustin Larimer :: Synthesis, Part 5: Back to the Basics

My Ideas

Synthesis, Part 5: Back to the Basics

Thursday, October 15, 2009

The problems facing our world today are as complicated as they are monumental. We have seen strong evidence, however, that the roots of these problems are based upon and/or are magnified by fundamental communication failures being addressed with technological solutions, and lie within our own culture of consumption and the social values that are exchanged to inform and preserve our sense of well-being. Both of these scenarios are well within the domain of any designer’s expertise, however the major battles are being fought far from our home turf, and we need to find ways to get out there and join the fight. Our challenge now is to enable the enablers within our own ranks.

While working through this series of reflections, a pattern began to emerge at a macro-level where several different problem-points all tie back to one of the most basic necessities for any living organism: food. Globalized food production has shown a significant gravitational pull within the many issues, large and small, discussed by the authors cited throughout these pages.

Developing nations who want to participate in the global market retool their agricultural infrastructures to produce a single product through the practice of monoculture (Capra 147). Monoculture requires heavy chemical supplements to maintain crop integrity, which have a catastrophic effect on the soil and water ecology of the area (Capra 196). This puts everyone involved in the exchange at risk - even consumers oceans away. Transporting this produce all across the globe also generates a tremendous amount of CO2. According to Capra, “studies in Germany have shown that the contribution of nonlocal food production to global warming is between six and twelve times higher than that of local production, due to increased CO2 emissions” (147). Dramatic and unpredictable shifts in rainfall patterns, desertification, and the northward migration of nonnative species of insects, all due in large part to the unfolding dynamics of global warming, further pronounce the potential for disaster in these developing nations (Capra, 147) and raise concerns about the short-term security of our own food supply.

There is tremendous power in re-localizing the production of such a fundamental resource as food. This past summer I was involved in an intense project involving the local communities of Hudson Hill and Woodville, Harambee House, Healthy Savannah, the Chatham Environmental Forum (CEF), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Atlanta, Savannah Urban Garden Association (SUGA), and several other local efforts to promote environmental and social renewal. After deconstructing the relationships between the many players in the situation we realized that everyone had a common interest in bringing community gardens to these neighborhoods We also realized that community gardens would impact these neighborhoods in more areas than just their stomachs. Communication makes it possible for an organization to re-establish and sustain its culture, and ultimately its identity. What we see in many of these disadvantaged neighborhoods is that they have slowly lost their ability to coordinate effectual change and are no longer able to act with purpose in a unified, creative way. A community garden brings back a forum for communication while reactivating the residents’ agricultural heritage. It’s quite possible that these communities won’t follow through with the many strategies we introduced for transferring resource surplus into social enterprise, but that’s really not important. What is important is that when the opportunity for expansion arrives the community will be able to respond creatively and effectively to do what is within the best interests of its members.

This project was extremely complex and really dug down to the foundation of optimizing social organization and interaction. Both our goal and our strategy changed on a weekly basis, ever-simplifying as time went on. We began to see that in such a massive project the largest impact could be made by creating awareness of the many overlapping efforts and interests of different initiatives around town, then facilitating communication and partnerships between key players to make it all come together. Half of any conversation is to get folks to the table; the other half is to listen. The underlying theme that has resonated through these experiences is that people generally want to do the right thing but they may be constrained by social norms, uninformed assumptions, or their own misguided perceptions. At its very core this is a communication problem, and by focusing on amending breakdowns we create the conditions for people to unleash their own creative capacity and act with purpose, which, as we discovered earlier, is the foundation of experiencing true freedom.