Are we hard-wired to compete for scarce resources?
Darwinism states that “evolution is the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual’s ability to compete, survive, and reproduce”.
While this is a great insight, it has blinded us to another truth: Cooperation is often a much more efficient way to survive and thrive. And many animal species use this. They live in family groups or other loose societies.
Currently, there are 7.63 Billion people on Planet Earth. It is a big figure, but hard to imagine. David Attenborough recently shared that 98% of the body mass of mammals are made up of humans and their livestock. To me that makes it much more visible how much we have actually taken over as a species.
When species grow out of proportion to the resources they consume, they die.
We’ve got the benefit of somehow being able to grasp how this is happening to us. At the same time, the lives we live on the Sunshine Coast are so sheltered from the impacts of our growing global population, that it often does not seem relevant.
Paying bills, getting the children through school or going surfing is much more real.
If something triggers my awareness around our global challenges, it is often hard to take specific action. Or it asks our government to take action. Or corporations.
At the core though, I believe that we can only survive as a species if we change our focus from competition to collaboration. And that we need to take small steps at the “edges” in our own “family” groups.
My goal has always been to offer simple solutions that not only have great communal impacts, but also rewards the individual taking the action (e.g. by lowering power bills).
Noosa Power is doing this with the solar project.
But there is a deeper level to it.
The goal is to package up all processes and tools we are building to make them available to other communities. In this blog, we’ll share our learnings along the way. We’ll lay bare our failures and successes.
Here is our current definition of what is required for effective collaboration:
- Personal relationships (trust)
- Agreements around roles (responsibilities and rights/rewards)
- Reliable accounting and distribution of rewards
I have been working on this project for the past 4 months (a lot of the ZEN volunteers have been at it much longer). My biggest takeaway: building trust takes time. And it cannot be replaced by technology. Technology can augment it and support it, but real world face to face contact is essential.
So if you have a project with positive community outcomes, pick up the phone and talk to others who are working towards similar goals and share your vision.