Individual preparation
- What can I offer to the community?
- What can I ask for/gain from the community? What do I need?
- What are the obstacles to becoming more involved in community for me?
Simple ways to start
Places to start
- Organize a potluck in a park, yard, local garden & share your culinary creations with one another
- Start a little free library or a little free pantry
- Start a seed library
- Start a grow-your-own veggie co-op: bring your herbs, veggies, flowers harvested from your garden and exchange with others what you have an abundance of
- Bake bread and share it
- Start a communal generosity garden with a sign that says:
🔗Generosity Garden Free food for the people Take only what you need Leave the rest for others
- Join the Buy Nothing app or Freecycle and start sharing with your neighbors!
Kinship
Conscious creatures have an extraordinary capacity to form attachments without regard to the cost to their own individual fitness. Kinship is the ability to see my fate in theirs, even when the family resemblance is largely a leap of faith. This impulse toward expensive, even disastrous acts of identification—call it love—may be merely an epiphenomenon, a fluke spin-off of runaway kin selection misdirected into bonds with no apparent adaptive advantage, or perhaps even a net loss.
Or it may be that our capacity to will ourselves into kinship with seemingly remote creatures is in fact an exaptation: something that natural processes could never have selected for but that now (as with so many other co-opted genetic processes) presents altogether new opportunities for thriving. It seems to me that this ability to see our fortune contained in the fortune of others, a kinship based not on relatedness but on common cause, may be the one feature of self-awareness capable of saving our species from all the other potent (and potentially fatal) adaptations that evolution has endowed us with.1
Community Resources & Inspiring Projects
- Transition Town Network: A movement of communities coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world
- Resilient Communities Legal Cafes
Footnotes
-
”A Little More Than Kin” by Richard Powers, https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/a-little-more-than-kin/ ↩