In this reflective piece, Chris Taylor, Director of the Oasis Foundation, shares stories of underground transformations shaping new self-sustaining ecologies, offering hope for survival and community as we stand at a crossroads of societal and ecological upheaval.
If you listened only to the news, you could easily believe the world is spiralling into a chaos of war, environmental destruction and social decay. This may well be true. But it’s not the whole truth. Something very different is also happening. Social scientists call this moment a bifurcation – the point at which a society or civilisation pursues two completely different paths simultaneously until they finally divide, and a new direction is set.
At the Oasis Foundation we’ve been tracking this process through a project we call “Ecologies of Community”. Essentially, it’s about mapping the parallel systems and structures that local communities are creating in order to build their resilience and capacity. Let me give you a few examples to make it a bit more tangible.
For over five years we worked alongside community activists in Middlesbrough. Known as a post-industrial city of multiple deprivation, Middlesbrough also hosts a thriving network of community organisers, urban food growers and artists. One project we helped to support now has food gardens at parks, community centres, churchyards and allotments. Local residents, including refugees and people with mental health problems work together to care for the land and grow food to share.
Food and growing are at the heart of the new ecology. Another network includes farmers interested in growing heritage grains. It links them up with people restoring old water mills, with the millers themselves and then with bakers. They are creating a totally integrated local system for bread making that cuts out the supermarkets and multinational food corporations.
So it starts with food – growing, sharing, communal meals. But it also goes much further. There are people growing to produce fabrics – flax, linen, nettle, hemp – and dyes. There are people repairing and recycling just about everything (the Repair Cafe isn’t just a feature of a BBC TV programme). And there are Libraries of Things popping up everywhere. You can borrow a lawnmower or a drill or toys for your kids.
We’ve held several workshops with community organisers to map this parallel system across the country. It seems that everywhere has something. But nowhere yet has everything. If they did, it would be a totally independent, locally resilient, alternative economy. Maybe not completely self-sufficient, but strong enough to survive climate chaos, the collapse of church and state, and the disintegration of increasingly complex global supply chains.
Having reached this stage we’re left with two questions. Firstly, will ecologies of community grow wide enough and quick enough to insulate us from the worst effects of what could be coming? Secondly, what skills might we need to help the parallel system to spread and grow? The answer to the first question is to some degree dependent on how we approach the second. Only time will tell. But, this certainly feels like an extremely fruitful line of inquiry.
Chris Taylor
