Change what?

04Feb07

So, what is “social change”, anyways? The Journal of Social Change describes it as “change that improves the human condition and progresses people, groups, organizations, cultures, and society toward a more positive future.”

That’s fairly obvious, I suppose – but what would that “positive future” look like? Is it always ‘change’ that we really want? When is ‘change’ really about preserving status quo? When is is about going back to some perceived golden age? When is it about going to something altogether new?

Most of us resist change. We may work constantly on stretching and growing ourselves… but in the outer world, we want things – familiar, good things, at least – to remain the same. Most of us crave constants, comforting islands of stability amid our frantic lives. Trees we remember from childhood. Old friends. Favorite stores and familiar old houses.

But in my tribe of friends and colleagues, we share a com

mon understanding, more or less, about what a ‘changed society’ would look like. We hardly ever talk about it – we just assume. Mostly what we talk about is stopping things: funding cuts, environmental degradation, disempowerment of minority populations – shitty things that take us backwards.

Yesterday I was chatting with Kevin, a veteran organ

izer from the U.S. Mid-West. We’d been in a 3-day gathering with the Environmental Capacity-Builders Network. “Social change assumes change is progressive”, he said. “But I have a problem even with the word ‘progressive’.”

For most Americans, he says, ‘progress’ implies technology and indistrialization – which have largely meant environmental degradation. But alot – not all -

of jobs that are ’sustainable’ are more labour-intensive, not less. Think eco-forestry – messy clearcuts, site-specific stream buffers. Or take organic farming – more dispersed, heterogenous small plots, vs. large homogenous plots. You get the idea. More or less the way things used to be done.

I grew up watching Star Trek and reading Isaac Asimov, along with Ecotopia and the Fifth Sacred Thing. So the particular utopia I envision includes a mix: high-tech mixed in with organic messiness. Holographic phones, crazy mixed-up fashion, a zillion languages and cultures and ages, all living in clustered homes with green spaces, roof-gardens, bikes an

d trains and littleairships… did I mention great food? Maybe made out of replictors when, say, organic shade-grown taro root is out of season?

Still, I get his point. What I think is that the change we want is a mix. Some will be familiar – old, traditional – from the so-called ‘golden age’. And some will be brand new – maybe beyond what we can imagine right now.

All this brings home the message, yet again: If we’re going to change – and change society, no less – then let’s start spending some considerable energy describing that change. Let’s paint a picture – or a million pictures – of what it is – not just what is isn’t. Pictures we can imagine stepping into. And that others can, too. After all, that’s the whole point, right?

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