For Elise: Social Ecology in the 21st Century

June 24, 2011 marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Elise Boulding.[i] Among the numerous contributions by Boulding to the field of Peace and Conflict Studies is the idea of a “200-year present.”[ii] Boulding writes, “Our Native American brothers and sisters talk about planning for the seventh generation, but I would like to extend that to ten — five generations back and five forward.”[iii] The idea is something understated, beautiful and awesome in its wisdom. This simple maxim forces us to look at time in a much grander way. This is especially important in our society which produces a desire for efficiency and emphasizes the here and now. Furthermore, this grander scope of time allows us to not only reflect on what has brought us to today in order to make a decision in a particular moment, but also to project into the future what the effects of this decision may be. As social beings, we humans ought to experience our decisions as relationships within the total project of humanity.

Speaking on the practice of the 200-year present, in 1995, Boulding stated:

“The two hundred year present begins of course, on November 3, 1895, the year in which people who are celebrating their hundredth birthday today were born. The other boundary of the two hundred year present is November 3, 2095, when babies born today will reach their hundredth birthday.”[iv]

Essentially, my interpretation of what Boulding wanted us to understand is the importance of history (power and formation of social institutions) and think about what our decisions will do to the course of history. What sort of institutions will we create by our actions? How long will those institutions last? We, all of humanity that is, live in a social space composed of numerous overlapping institutions that not only affect the future but also reflects the activity of the past.[v] A component often overlooked in regards to the 200-year present, is that “networking is the key word of our extended present.”[vi] This key must be reapplied to our understanding of the 200-year present, as well as all decisions we make in our social space. “We can't do just peace, we can't do just human rights, we can't do just environment, we can't do just development; we have to move in all those spheres at once.”[vii]

It is important for us to remember that not only do our actions, policies, laws and so on affect future generations of Americans, but they also affect people currently across the United States and the globe. These effects are immediate and ripple outward from the source, and the more power that exists in that source, the more consequence these actions have. Therefore, in order to emphasize the global networking aspect of Boulding’s theory, I suggest thinking in terms of 5-relationships forward and back.

We can imagine we are in a park on a beautiful spring day. There is the smell of fresh cut grass, people are walking their dogs and enjoying life and the natural world. We stop to watch children play in a playground, the sounds of laughter and childhood fill the air and we remember nostalgically similar times from our youth. Suddenly we see one child hit another child. That child begins to cry. This does not just affect the two children (prime relationship), but also those around them in the park whose day has just been interrupted by the sight and/or sound of children in conflict. Moving outward from the locus of that conflict, the effects continue in a variety of ways. Eventually the children’s parents prevent the two from playing together in fear of another incident. On my way home while reflecting on this conflict I was not paying attention and rear-end another vehicle at a stop sign. The owner of the damaged car got home and yelled at her family over a minor offence, and the ripple continued. Moving back along the relationship continuum, we know that child A hit child B because child B stole child A’s toy truck. Child A stole the truck because their older brother broke an identical one the day before, hid it in the trash out of shame and said that child B stole it.

While the power of social networks was understood by Boulding, this is often either ignored when talking about a 200-year present, or it is discussed as a separate thing altogether. For example, there has been much made about the twitter revolution, facebook revolution, and so on, which emphasize the technological social networking aspect of positive social action. However, the heart of this is the basic relationship. Furthermore, this connectivity of global citizens does us no good without a strong vision of the future many generations forward, and the only way to do this is to have a clear understanding of where we have come from. When we think about the past and the future within a larger context of relationships, it presents how complex social systems are. Furthermore, it helps to illuminate the difficulties in transitioning a culture of war into a culture of peace without focusing on the social space we live in, and the type of interactions we nurture. While it may be impossible to completely prevent destructive conflict from occurring, we can do our part to nurture a culture of peace by becoming aware of the effects of our actions throughout our social.

We ought to work to develop a culture of peace, which Elise Boulding championed. In Culture of Peace: The Hidden Side of History, Boulding argued that the way to develop a stable, sustainable and secure future was “develop a creative partnership between the marginalized and the power makers.” However, we must keep in mind that there are other relationships that persist in spite of the power makers and ought not be forsaken in the quest of power. The local community and our immediate relationships matter just as much as distant communities and centralized power. Our friends, families and neighborhoods must be thought of with the same heart and vision as any major global, or international crisis. World engagement ought to focus as much on the local community as a particular geographic location: think local; act global.

The Future of world engagement should, if we want our world and its people to survive, base itself in a 200-year and ten-relationship (five forward and back) present. We ought to strive for the creation of a peace culture, which is the only certainty for our survival and flourishing. Boulding described a peace culture as:
A mosaic of identities, attitudes, values, beliefs, and institutional patterns that lead people to live nurturantly with one another, deal with their differences, share their resources, solve their problems, and give each other space so no one is harmed and everyone’s basic needs are met.[viii]

This mosaic includes our families as much as theirs, our neighborhoods as much as theirs. This may sound utopian, and perhaps it is merely an ideal to strive for, however “we can’t work for what we can’t imagine.”[ix] Our current practices are self-destructive. Boulding allows us to see that there are better choices.
Elise Boulding imagined that “people will grow food where they live, whether in city or village. There will be more joy in work, more smaller-scale production, and more community celebration and play!”[x] Many of these initiatives are beginning to take root with urban farming and the popularity of farmer’s markets. Or, to put it bluntly, there is no excuse for the lack of imagination or envisioning the potentiality of better engagements. These engagements ought to recognize our own complicity in and active engagement in creating those issues to begin with. How have our relationships with our friends, families and corporations contributed to disparity and oppression in the world?

“We cannot do internationally what we don’t know how to do at home.” [xi] Meaning, we should not always center our focus solely on the third world and focus on the whole world. It’s a testament to human compassion that people go and interface with people across the globe to address homelessness, poverty, AIDS, workplace inequality between men and women, gender equality, or a host of other issues, however, these very issues exist in the developed world as well; and it’s time we started looking at this as a complete system of interrelated issues: Gender inequality in sub-Saharan Africa is the same thing as gender inequality at home.

The flip side to that coin is we shouldn’t do internationally what we wouldn’t do at home. Therefore, we ought not to allow our friends and family to support corporations that contribute to unsafe and oppressive working conditions in South East Asia, if we would not allow those conditions to exist next door, or wish our sisters/brothers to work in those very conditions. Furthermore, if we would not wish to see our own yards covered in trash, burnt to the ground, irreparably scarred, burned, or cleared, then this should not be allowed in the Serengeti or the Amazon.

In order to ensure that the positive triumphs over the negative, we must call on people in power to remember the 200-year and 10-relationship present and the legacy of Elise Boulding.

Notes:

[i] Bruce Weber, Elise Boulding, Peace Scholar, Dies at 89, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/us/02boulding.html

[ii] Elise Boulding, Chapter 1 Expanding our Sense of Time and History, Building a Global Civic Culture, Syracuse University Press, 1990

[iii] Elise Boulding, Toward a Culture of Peace in the Twenty-First Century Remarks from the First Annual Global Citizen Award Ceremony, 1995, Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning, and Dialogue. http://www.ikedacenter.org/thinkers/boulding_globalcit.htm

[iv] Elise Boulding, Toward a Culture of Peace in the Twenty-First Century.

[v] Michel Foucault discussed a similar concept when discussing the perpetual speaker in The Discourse on Language.

[vi] Elise Boulding, Toward a Culture of Peace in the Twenty-First Century.

[vii] Elise Boulding, ibid.

[viii] Elise Boulding, ibid.

[ix] Elise Boulding, ibid.

[x] Elise Boulding, ibid.

[xi] Elise Boulding, ibid.