Long Term

“We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, nuclear waste and public debt.” 

Roman Krznaric 

In a time of accumulating slow-crises, to work and think with an awareness of the long-term opposes the exploitation of the future for short-term gain. This kind of ‘cathedral thinking’ and modeling of ‘good ancestorship’ is present in economics, ecology, culture, climate discourse and many other emerging fields. To consciously work with ideas of long termism, deep ecology and good ancestorship can be an empowering yet privileged choice.  

Short termism is a privilege for those who feel no responsibility to future generations, justifying extractivist and colonial methods. It is also a burden for those whose future is precarious and not guaranteed, who exist in austerity and do not have the security of the long-term. Short termism both emerges from and reproduces ongoing realities.

Many cultures and traditions, particularly indigenous and first nation communities, inherently value long-term thinking. However these ways of being are often too isolated and persecuted to create rhizomatic strongholds. Critical forms of long-term thinking such as  formations of the commons, cooperative traditions and rights are being systematically erased by the ongoing colonisation of land, people, communities and cultures.

When working locally with long-term ideas, relationships and commitments, change can be modelled to scale. Long-term thinking can be used to gently topple and gradually adjust agendas, offering whole-community responses to challenges we are slowly getting to grips with. The challenge of thinking and working in the long term can emerge or be articulated within the collective space - it is a shared challenge that has been rehearsed, modelled and continues to evolve in our community centres by mothers, organisers, ecologists and activists. 

Embedding the long-term within our curriculums, schools and local government is to confront another realm. New pedagogies born from crisis can be formed, which teach and undo outdated knowledge frameworks, to give hope and make imagined alterities. 

Collaboration

“There is only one field of transformation, and no-one is outside.'“

Shelley Sacks

Collaboration or co-labouring; co is the collective, labour is the activity or work. It is used to describe relationships, though it’s less likely to be used to describe the relation between a person and an animal, or a plough and a horse, or the horse and the earth. But these identities, relationships and beings can be in dialogue. Collaborative ways of working can undermine and question normative and linear ways of thinking and working. They can open an experimental and collective space for dreaming, for the collective imagination, for time and gestation. In late capitalism, this is at odds with the economically driven realities and multiple crises we exist within. In the word collaboration there is equity and understanding and the possibility to work through friendship and the politics of care. It is not something entered into alone. It is a state of recognition, a soft contract of trust, moving you forward into doing.

Collaboration holds within it the possibility of renewal, growth, and of cultivating a network of ever-expanding relationships – a mycelia of relational ways of working. It offers ways of exploring empathy, sensitivity, privilege and mutual recognition in being together.

How can we organise differently? How can arts and culture organisations collaborate in ways that radically and poetically challenge existing structures, and reinterpret what is meant by ‘culture’? How can we learn from historic and emerging, radical cooperative models? Those that have been systematically dismantled, those that remain hidden and covered over yet near at hand, and those that are just taking root.

Collaboration is process work. Working collaboratively is an act of calling to the future, of manifesting change by doing. This act can often be spiritual, but is always, at the least, hopeful and disruptive.

Local

Working and living locally is a practice at odds with globalism and capitalism. Currently, failed systems are made and remade through continuous cycles of regeneration. Standardised concepts and homogenised plans are applied through impenetrable and coded systems. This is a rip tide carrying us further away from local agendas - climate action, autonomy, alternative economics and community organisation.

These uniform landscapes repeat systems of oppression, marginalisation and privatisation in our communities. Locality, nuance and culture are pushed to the edges in increasingly neoliberal and antisocial ways of working and living, in the name of levelling up and place making. This regeneration happens behind cladding, hiding ideologies of capitalism and anti-localism. Instead, we need to see the workings, the implications of our investments. What global carbon trade systems and weapons sales are our pension schemes and high street banks tied into?

A proposal to work locally on an alternative scale is necessary to understand and question systemic racism, climate collapse, and that which shapes our environment. This involves challenging power and unpicking existing frameworks so that we can, as the architect Caroline Steel says, “model a landscape for human flourishing”. To work in ways where we see our achievements, learn from our failures, make anew. To work locally feels like working urgently.

Permaculture could be viewed as a kind of localism, a vernacular form of design and living. Working with what is at hand, organically, in dialogue with the earth, through whole systems thinking; informing new biodynamic and ecological relationships. To work with locality could be to explore radical change in an everyday guise.

When we look at radical models of resistance which speak truth to power, they begin, and sometimes remain and flourish, at a local level. They take root and break through pre-programmed landscapes, containing within them the power to influence regional, national and global change. Centres of local activism are centres of resistance, from which we can re-imagine and redesign everyday systems; Who cooks our school dinners? Who are our carers? Who maintains our parks and public spaces? We live in landscapes of crumbling monuments to a radical local past; they are resonating in their dilapidation. Yet capitalism, planning and neoliberalism forces continue to repeat a failing pattern. 

Is a definition of local possible or useful anymore? The idea of a localised set of resources in the form of friendships, allies, relationships, tools and systems is more relevant to the work of forming and working with urgency to support one another.

Dig Where You Stand

“The idea is that by researching and learning about their own history and the place where they are living, individuals and groups would regain some control over the understanding of their lives and their interconnectedness.”

Sarah B Dhanjal

“White people: I don't want you to understand me better; I want you to understand yourselves. Your survival has never depended on your knowledge of white culture . In fact, its required your ignorance.” 

Ijeomna Oluo, White Fragility 

“The mainstream manufactures people as a monoculture. It turns us out like cloned rows of apple trees on pesticide-manicured fields. The mainstream ‘trains’ people by pruning. It forces growth in standardised ways. The song that we sing from within the mainstream is thereby not our own song. It does not issue from the opened gates of the soul. And so our personal branches and cultural roots atrophy away. We yearn for connection with one another and with the soul. But we forget that, like the earthworm, we too are an organism of the soil. We too need grounding.”

Alastair McIntosh, Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power

Dig Where you Stand can be seen as an instruction, invitation and provocation - one  that proposes action and reflection. Movement and stillness. Digging where you stand is a phrase that emerged from the promotion of  local history, adult education and greater understanding of our surroundings, inspiring the History Workshop movement. Sven Lindqvist, a Swedish author used the term which became a cultural and historical movement in adult education across Europe. 

Its meaning could now take a different focus and applied with urgency in this period of time in late capitalism when government & economics consistently fail us - yet we look to these systems for answers.