Portraits of the Park

Keeping reading to learn more or click "blueprints" above to hide. 

Sustainable communities follow simple rules, not blueprints.

Before we examine those rules, it is helpful to consider that unsustainable communities also follow simple rules.  Such rules can be perfectly well-intentioned, yet lead to harmful and dysfunctional results that are persistently stable and difficult to change.  

• The (now defunct) US Forest Service 10 am rule is a good example.  Established in 1935, it mandated that all wildfires be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day after detection. While this policy aimed to prevent large-scale fires, it counterintuitively led to larger, more destructive wildfires in many regions over time.

• Trying to "fix" persons experiencing homelessness (instead of removing barriers) is another example of a well-intentioned "rule" that has failed to reduce the incidence of homelessness. 

The most stable rule in modern Western civilization falls into this same well-intentioned trap: it states that maximizing gains at lower levels (for individual businesses) will produce a common good for everyone (consumers, communities, the world).  This is known as the "invisible hand" rule.  The idea is that,  by prioritizing a company's profits (or shareholder value), a company will be incentivized to outcompete other companies, setting off a complex competition resulting in better services, medicines and products for everyone.  This "result" appears as though it was produced by an "invisible hand".  Unfortunately, there is tremendous evidence that the naked pursuit of profit underlies most social pathologies, economic inequities and environmental degradation.  The emergence of monopolies, price-fixing, and the high costs of life-saving drugs are all examples of the maladaptive results of the invisible hand rule. 

Portraits of the Park builds on multi-level selection theory, which holds that higher level outcomes (such as life expectancy for a community) are instead the result of selection pressure at that level, not at lower levels.  However, we rarely "see" this type of higher level selection. Notable exceptions in the U.S. include:  the U.S. Constitution inspiring the rule of law over the rule of men; Westward Expansion inspiring the end of slavery; and the Cold War inspiring the U.S. Voting Rights Act. But higher level selection need not be centrally coordinated, slow or coercive.  That’s because higher level selection can be achieved through simple rules.  

For example, the rise of market-based economies arose from trusting strangers: money lenders, tax collectors, shopkeepers, police officers and firefighters. This kind of trust arose from a combination of a few simple rules, including: monogamous marriage, married couples moving to a new home together (not with the bride or groom's parents), and refraining from cousin marriage (Henrich 2020).  If those customs sound commonplace to you, it's likely because you live in a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (W.E.I.R.D.) society.  In the Ethnographic Atlas, only 1% of 1,200 societies known to science exhibit those rules. Though simple, those rules created human experiences that nurtured free association with non-family members (literally, strangers).  Working with strangers opened up whole new worlds of learning, cooperation and innovation.  

"The ants and the birds are not intelligent in the human sense, but they follow simple rules that lead to complexity." – E.O. Wilson

In the history of science, devising a good rule is not a matter of making observations and creating a rule to favor the most desirable outcomes.  Observations are infinite.  So, too, are rules.  Instead, we rely on our genetic inheritance (in the case of ants and birds) and/or our cultural inheritance and learning history (in the case of humans) to acquire a set of rule-based behavior.  For ants and birds this means a slow process of genetic evolution. Fortunately, for humans this can be accomplished with double-loop learning: examining our theories about how the world works.  That's because theories narrow our attention to make observations in the first place.  This is the crux of all science.

For example, Darwinian evolution was in plain sight for hundreds of thousands of years of humans observing plants and animals, however Darwin didn't observe evolution as a foundational process until 1859, with the help of his own modern education.  The history of the ice age and the impact of long-ago glaciers on today's landscapes and soil is another example.  Darwin himself admitted his own blindness to observing the evidence of glaciers until he was taught about it later in his adult life.  This is despite spending lots of time in post-glaciated landscapes in Wales.  When you are taught about evolution and glaciation, however, it's easier and easier to spot examples - you can stand on Darwin's shoulders.  When you are not taught, it's virtually impossible to "see" those examples, even though learning does nothing to alter your eyes and vision.  Seeing is with the mind. 

Portraits of the Park is designed to help us explore how the social rules of human communities have more of an impact on indivudal and community health (human, natural and agricultural) than any other variable we could observe. Those rules supercede worldview, religious belief, use of technology, means of production, history, geography, climate, and more. Such variables are local flavor to our social rules in practice. In other words, what matters is the relationships between people, governed by their rules. In this way, social ecological systems theory makes it easy to make observations about rules that enable or hinder sustainable communities.  

The best theories tend to make the most accurate predictions of what we will observe in the future.  As a proto-scientific process, it could take generations if not millenia. In most human societies, from the deep past to the modern era, the best bet has been to mimic group members who were older, (perceived to be) more successful, and more dominant.  The survival of those group members up to that point was proof of their adaptedness: they must have made the best predictions of the world, based on the best theories and rules. The repertoire of behavior needed to survive was also immense, leading to gender specialization and mimicking group members who shared your gender identification. 

Why all the mimicking? Sifting between theories, their rule-based behaviors and their real-world consequences can take decades if not centuries or millennia.   What is an individual or business or organization supposed to do today?  Even modern science has trouble keeping up. Questions around human genetic engineering as a safe and ethical practice are an example of how scienctific theories and technologies must yet be guided social norms and governance structures.  Nuclear power generation (and nuclear waste storage) is another example of this need for guidance.  While faster than genetic evolution, this cultural evolutionary process can still be slow compared to a human lifetime.  For instance, it took 50 years or more for the science of lung disease to lead to less smoking. The impact of alcohol consumption is just emerging.  Global climate change relies on scientific models of Earth's deep history, long before human records, and challenges everything about the way that we live (from what we eat, how we travel, and how we stay warm or cool throughout the year).  Unsurprisingly, for most people, who are not scientists, these dilemmas evoke deference to older, more successful and more dominant leaders.  But with accelerated changes, we can't rely entirely on adaptedness. We must master adaptability. 

"The challenge is to build institutions that allow people to solve collective action problems without resorting to either government control or [the invisible hand]." - Elinor Ostrom

Dedicated to the search for adaptability, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Elinor Ostrom in 2009 for using a theory of social ecological systems to accurately predict sustainable common-pool resource use for diverse groups around the world.  She wasn't against government but was responding to the mismatch between rules made by policy makers in one central location and their workability for stakeholders locally. She was aided by the creation of a set of simple rules that successful groups and communities follow.  Predictably, the rules in every case vary widely as a feature of diverse group languages, culture, geography, climate, methods of production, application and history.  This made the "rules" hard to see even with the theory in hand.  Functionally, however, the rules all performed the same services.  That's what makes them a rule.  Ostrom's rules are to culture as DNA is to biology. Hard to "see" but facultative, and not impossible to find when you know where to look.

More importantly, the rules are not necessarily held by each group as a “rule”.  They may be a custom or tradition.  Or arose by accident and discovery.  Likewise, each rule is subject to being replaced or discontinued, as such processes wittingly and unwittingly continue.  These processes can result in rules that no longer lead to adaptive success at all, and may undermine it.  This entire phenomenon of some groups adopting "rules" that lead to success and some groups not, with interchangeability over time, is consistent with the notion of Darwinian evolution itself. Conventionally we refer to this phenomenon as "innovation": processes of variation, selection and retention in a cultural dimension.  In turn, our genetic inheritance makes us highly reliant on these forms of cultural evolution to be adaptable to the future, not just well-adapted to the present.

The novelty of Portraits of the Park is an intentional implementation of Ostrom's rules in a generalizable fashion on a large scale, not as an accident of history and development, and not confined to disciplinary silos and their specialized terminology.  

“Real democracy is not about power in numbers, it is about collaboration as an organizational system… because the solution [must] belong to everyone for all their own reasons.” - Jeannette Armstrong, Syilx Okanagan (First Nation)

Coming full-circle, our model of school-based community science provides a rigorous, flexible and nimble, democratic process to ensure that community stakeholders decide what rules work and don't work, for them, here and now.  The crux is that it achieves this while orienting all groups to Ostrom's functional rules for within-and-between group collaboration at multiple levels, up to the Park and beyond.  Involving students is necessary because students are community, business and organizational members in training. 

But schools and colleges need implementation support, which requires grant funding.  In turn, grantors generally lack a conceptual understanding of successful sustainable communities and community science.  It's not something they learned in school.  Their peers and leaders in their field haven't learned or relied on it either.  That's why we are also seeking visibility partners to communicate the value and prioritization of Ostrom's rules.

And yet there is a third path.  Portraits of the Park combines Ostrom's simple rules with what we know about human behavior and the evolution of cooperation.  Ostrom's rules are presented in everyday language and with the highest integrity for small functional groups and their own values.  Group members get to anonymously decide if they value the rules for their group, and how well their group or organization puts those values into action.  The result will be a self-portrait, revealing a set of value-action gaps (and strengths).  Self-evaluation ensures integrity for groups while the value-action gaps present a creative tension or problem.  Humans are nothing if not problem solvers.  Groups with strengths are natural role-models and peer mentors for groups with gaps. 

According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (D.S. Wilson et al 2023), groups that identify and work to close value-action gaps for these rules are more likely to foster the conditions for positive change across social, economic, health and environmental sectors.  Research also shows a high correlation between these practices and measures of trust, satisfaction, cooperation, and commitment within these groups. 

“Knowledge is not a piece of data, something immobilized, concluded, finished, something to be transferred by one who acquired it to one who still does not possess it. I cannot think authentically unless others think. I cannot think for others, or without others... " - Paulo Freire

In closing, every group is being asked to participate.  This creates a powerful social nudge by placing selection pressure for participation between groups.  Non-participating groups will be easy to spot.  Participating groups can signal their participation while keeping their portrait anonymous.  Even so, only a small percentage of groups need to engage in such a process to transform the entire system (Axelrod, 1984).  That's because, armed with clarity around their own values and the ability to find groups who share them, groups can preference their interactions with participating groups.  The result is a flywheel for cooperation and innovation.   A sobering example of this kind of flywheel is how extreme (and relatively small) political factions use the same clarity (however arbitrary and nonsensical) to build strength in numbers to achieve their self-serving aims.  Sustainable development is a virtuous cycle while political extremism is a vicious one.  The difference lies in a subtle set of rules.