Page 249 [249]
OCR
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.
