What is a community? Most aid agencies see these as groups of people with common interests or with common locations. Intention can be irrelevant - we can speak of plant communities in which individuals are interchangeable because the community is the whole system, and people are just as interchangeable in the global human system. Wendell Berry and other people whove thought about human community a lot have arrived at the useful definition that community equals economy, which can be intentional and managed or just an abstraction that implies no other connection but economic - we can speak of a community of hermits, for example, each connected to the same ecosystem where they hunt and gather, but none engaging with each other or anyone else directly. Looked at this way, we can identify a global community, which proceeds from economic globalization connecting almost everyone in a single marketplace. The consequence of that global marketplace is that there are almost no self-sustaining national, regional, nor local marketplaces extant. Its hard to find people attached to any place smaller than the whole Earth that can be said to have Berrys economy. But aid agencies dont look at it that way. Typically, the policy makers for development aid will consider the neighborhood, or city, or suburb, etc, where they themselves live to be communities in the sense they think of as relevant for aid. We have a kind of schizophrenia in this regard because global civilization evolved from self-sustaining nation-communities that evolved from from self-sustaining towns, or were once comprised of such. And we still have a Dr Seuss idealization around the nuclear community and nuclear family, and we can look around and see collections of people that have some of the characteristics that fit that romantic picture, but none are self-sustaining anymore, and without individually self-sustaining communities we then live in a house of cards. Looked at this way, the communities that people and planet need are those that can care for their own essential needs if isolated from the global marketplace, and thus aid that empowers people to develop and protect local human and natural resources is whats needed. And the bottom-line indicator is local empowerment, which we can examine by looking at how many essential local resources are developed by local people for local use, and how many people are dependent on imports of essential resources. Time banking can be part of building self-sustaining communities, but most often we see such organizations serving as safety nets that actually help prop up the house of cards until, at last, all comes tumbling down. It doesnt have to be this way. Time-banking can instead be at the heart of the self-reliance we all need. Kevin Parcell reconomy.net
Posted on: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 14:57:55 +0000
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