Taking the bait

One of those neolithic buttons, that globe-trotting ideas push, triggers xenophobia. Taking the bait means that, once pressed, the drumbeat that "subhumans threaten" competes for attention with sustainability issues like community health.

For instance "lose-lose" situations now unfolding in Africa suggest that taking the bait is a long-term recipe for state failure, through oscillatory cycles of indiscriminate response and reactions thereto. Jared Diamond points to older examples in his book "Collapse". Have you noticed other examples say in the past 100 years?

Unfortunately focus on community health is not a useful sound byte, since it involves multiple scales of time, space, and organization. Nonetheless avoiding the bogeyman button could help us do what we can to strengthen all communities involved.

Dollars and longevity are not the whole story. The most robust measure of progress (or its lack) may be niche-layer multiplicity i.e. the extent to which individuals in a community are able to: (i) stay fit, (ii) cultivate friendships, (iii) care for a family, (iv) function as a citizen, (v) participate in a culture, and (vi) contribute as observer to our understanding of the world around.

What fraction of your time have you managed to spend on each of these things in the last week? If your ability to do some of these things is starting to suffer, then perhaps you too will benefit from a collective effort to make these things possible for all. How can I help?