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PREFACE TO THE COMMUNITY ANSWERS
Judit Farkas
The next chapters will discuss some communal examples in Hungary. These
initiatives have the same attitude to contemporary environmental, social, economic
and ethical problems as that of the Environmental Humanities. They also try to
answer the challenges in a complex way. It holds true for all of them that
superseding technological optimism, which is convinced that science and
technology can solve every problem hand in hand, they see the solution for the
problem in collective responses based on cooperation. They share the recognition
that there is a considerably large gap between present and desired reality and that
the social sphere has dysfunctions which have an impact on environmental aspects
as well. All of them have elaborated and live some social innovation that tries to
provide conditions for the more ideal functioning of each actor (on social
innovation see: Paunescu 2014).
Cooperation is interpreted by several authors as something unavoidable, rather
than an option. Andrew Hubbell and John Ryan explicitly declare that individualism
and the pursuit of self-interest are the motors of the Anthropocene and the
industrial-capitalist system, while earlier they were regarded as anti-social values
and behavior.' Individualism is the opposite of what evolutionary biology and
ecology teach about the advantages of cooperation if we humans want to be
successful in the long run. “The Anthropocene shows us that we must cooperate
or die” (Hubbell — Ryan 2022: 50). They add that we have to learn to give other
species a “say” in the future of the Earth, too, because everyone is equally important
for sustaining life on this planet (Hubbell — Ryan 2022: 50). Cooperation applies
to all living beings, not only humans. In Anna Tsing’s similarly radical phrasing:
“staying alive — for every species — requires liveable collaborations. Collaboration
means working across differences ... Without collaborations, we all die” (Tsing
2015: 28). An excellent example for bringing home this truth is the — now widely
known — importance of bees: their disappearance jeopardizes our food production,
not to speak of the health of ecosystems (Oppermann — Iovino 2017: 12).
The communities introduced below all have some ties to contemporary
worldwide environmentalism. They create local and global networks: they are
groups organized from the grassroots, which apply the DIY methods typical of
such groups. They offer an alternative to the apocalyptic vision of the Anthropocene,
striving to create and spread a new worldview, a new social vision (Emmett — Nye
2017: 117-118).
' This is why several contemporary (ecological) communities turn towards earlier cultures. The
academic literature terms them re-traditionalist communities.