Making change manageable - Revival of the Small Community

By Lorie Staffan

An essential element is missing from American society today. Without it, crime and alienation flourish. Its loss threatens the environment and our health and happiness. We had it once, not so long ago. The missing element is a sense of community.

“Community is one of the foundations of human life,” said Don Hollister, one of the speakers at the conference “Reviving the Small Community: Localism in a Global Era,” a conference held Nov. 9 in Yellow Springs. Hollister is vice president of the Board of Community Service, Inc., an organization dedicated to promoting community. At its annual conference, the 49 participants explored the loss of a sense of community, the devastating effects of this loss and what can be done to regain community life.

Evidence of the decline of community life can be found in the decrease in organization formation and membership in the last 20 years, Hollister said. Further evidence is found in the separation of the three dimensions of community life. The dimensions, he explained, are physical needs (how needs for food, clothing and shelter are met), social contacts (friends, family and group memberships) and culture/home style, (familiar with appropriate social behavioral for the area). In a healthy sustainable community, these areas overlap to a large extent. Fifty years ago, for instance, a person would buy food grown by a local farmer at a family owned neighborhood store. The farmer goes to his church; the store clerk is his neighbor. All three people would know the local social norms such as whether or not to speak to people you pass on the street.

Contrast this with life today. A woman lives in one city, but works in another. Her family lives in another state. She buys what she needs at Wal-Mart from a different clerk each time she is there. When she happens to see her neighbors, she is unsure whether or not to speak. Would they consider her friendly or intrusive? “I don’t think humans are programmed to deal with the stresses of the lifestyles we have now,” Hollister said.

While the sense of community is missing in many American cities, this is not the case in Europe. Conference speaker Richard Knight, an economist and author, has traveled Europe extensively and studied at the University of Paris and the London School of Economics. He discovered that European cities have strong senses of community and identity. Age and history seem to be major factors in this, since many families have lived in the same cities for generations, building strong ties to them. Another factor is that European cities are pedestrian-friendly which enables individuals to engage with others around them.

In addition, Knight said that development is more controlled in Europe and the local culture is considered in development decisions. “Its so hard to change things there,” he said. “They value the old.”

In contrast, American communities have little defense against development. “Developers know how to take advantage of peoples’ short sightedness,” Knight said. Politicians in the United States promote development by changing zoning ordinances and providing tax incentives to developers in hopes of creating jobs. Whether the citizens of the community want the development or not is often a moot point. While development can create jobs, Knight said no one considers the number of jobs lost when small businesses collapse under the weight of development. Knight said it is important to ask, “How do you enhance the environment so the culture can continue to grow?”

Development can be seen as a type of colonization. In fact, speaker Pat Murphy believes global corporations have become the new colonizers. Murphy, an engineer who works with Community Service, Inc., said the gap between the worlds’s rich and poor has widened greatly due to globalization. The middle class is disappearing throughout the world and wealth is becoming more concentrated in the hands of a few. One estimate of wealth is the number of vehicles people own. The United States has 800 vehicles per 1,000 people, while the Middle East has 57. Africa has 26 while China has 12. The International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization and the World Bank, controlled by G7 nations (United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, France and Japan), form a non elected world government, Murphy said. “This is why a lot of the world hates us,“ he said. “People are dying because of this inequity.” Life expectancies for those in poor nations are much shorter than for those in rich ones.

Murphy believes that America does not care about the rest of the world because it has lost its sense of community. The Unitest States cut its foreign aid in half between 1989 and 1999 and gives less in foreign aid than many other industrialized nations as a percentage of its national income. “We may have warm houses and big houses but we don’t have those (community) values anymore,” Murphy said.

The United States ignored the world community when it refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty, which required signers to decrease carbon dioxide emissions (use less oil). The price of oil, Murphy said, is the basis of the American economy. The more oil a nations uses, the richer it is. He gave this as the reason the Unites States refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty. Americans use more oil per capiata than any other nation. Even with the treaty the decline in world oil production is straining the US economy.

Though oil is a depleting resource, Murphy is skeptical that solar and wind energy will be able to replace it. Despite years of research, he said, they have not proven feasible. He advocated energy conservation, saying we should learn to live with one-tenth the oil we use now. That means giving up SUV’s, the suburbs and conventional agriculture. It also means living in small homes. The typical America home is 2400 square feet, compared with 1200 square feet in Europe and 800 in Asia. Americans can also conserve energy by using fuel-efficient cars, bicycles and fluorescent lights and energy-saving European appliances. And since pesticides and fertilizer are produced using oil, organic farming, with its rejection of these chemicals, is another conservation option.

Most communities have local knowledge and local goods, that can add to the sense of community, and Knight believes these should be recognized and preserved. In addition, he said the Internet provides a means to find niche markets for local goods  and knowledge.

According to Knight, people must realize they don’t have to be passive in determining their community environment. Being aware of other options for community can help people decide how they want to live.

Hollister advocates for awareness of the people around you and said we should all consider the three dimensions of community life as they apply to our own lives, so we might find ways to increase our sense of community. As a man in the audience noted, “ I think community is built when you hang out.”

“We start creating the vision and pushing the vision and not just list the obstacles, “ Murphy said. "By acting at the small community level, he said, we make change manageable”