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Boundaries: Living at the Edge in Search of Self Identity and CommunityEach of us has the waves of every other organism entangled within our own make-up. . . no person is alone. . .each of us is supported and constituted, ultimately by all there is in the universe. In this entangled universe, we cannot do violence to our fellow human beings or our fellow inhabitants of the Earth without doing violence to ourselves. And the most effective way to benefit oneself may be to benefit others. Mae-Wan Ho, biologist, in YES, spring 2000 I remember as a child thinking that borders between countries and states, cities and counties did not make sense. No discernible difference seemed apparent as one traveled across the boundaries. No lines or fences marked the separate entities. Rivers and lakes, forests and farms, mountains and valleys flowed freely between without discernible differentiation. Crossing boundaries has been an integral part of my life. For twenty years I worked for National Ministries of the American Baptist Churches, USA as director of social and ethical responsibility in investment, spending time in churches, corporations, and communities, with clergy and corporate executives, with employers and employees. My travel took me to South Africa, Central America, India, Korea, Japan and Europe and to most of the fifty states. I slept in four star hotels and one room houses. I saw people in mansions and barrios, in cities and in the countryside. I sat in corporate boardrooms and walked the streets of ghettos. Wherever I went, the similarities of people and their institutions struck me. Whatever the organization - community group, church, multinational corporation, or citizen coalition, the problems, hopes and fears appeared more alike than different. The dynamics of power, self identity, ambition, mistrust and fear played the same roles. Structures and perceptions served to define boundaries that separated people and groups--black and white, rich and poor, homosexual and heterosexual, indigenous and colonizer, religious and secular, activist and corporate, outsider and insider. In the patterns developed from accentuating these differences, people became alienated and antagonistic, anticipating the worst rather than striving for commonality, thus undermining their ability to work together for a common future because of their distress. In the fall of 1999 I resigned my position with National Ministries, recognizing that my experiences crossing boundaries laid the groundwork to cross another. I realized that the vision I had developed stretched beyond the institutional church that had been my home and could no longer effectively be contained within the boundaries it defined. Thus began a new phase of my journey at the edge, living and working across boundaries, challenging perceptions and positions. While employed at National Ministries, I worked with ecumenical colleagues in the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR). Many associates in ICCR are Roman Catholic sisters and priests, already living at the edge of the largest Christian body in the world. Other colleagues included social activists in local communities, labor union leaders, national environmental advocates and social investment professionals. We worked together. In 1989 a group of us founded the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES). CERES saw its unique role to provide a mechanism for corporate public environmental accountability. We wrote the CERES Principles and sought corporations to endorse and follow the Principles and produce an annual report on their progress. We ran into a solid wall of opposition from corporations that did not want any group outside their self-defined boundaries defining their environmental policies and practices. In 1992 I led the way to negotiate with Sunoco to endorse the CERES Principles while at the same time developing their own set of environmental Principles. Sunoco thus became the first major company to endorse the CERES Principles, breaking the boundaries that separated corporations from CERES and taking a stand at the corporate edge. As I identified with concerns of those with whom I was working to bring change in places where we had leverage, I brought the experiences back. The reception often was one of rejection rather than accepting and facing the challenges. Institutional identity and the inherent loyalty expected came from an attitude of radical differentiation from others in a way that broke off communion with them. That attitude produced institutional distress that called for self preservation and withdrawal rather than creative engagement with those seeking change. The contrast was striking—imposed monoculture within isolating institutions that appeared diverse by some indicators, yet were institutions defining themselves by exclusivity compared with institutions seeking to build bridges between diverse groups, understand differences and build community and coalition. The resulting stress and distress of employees was evident. Now I have formed a consulting business, Earth Ethics, to work on building a sustainable society within the framework of the unity of the earth and the universe, a society that recognizes differences as an integral part of the whole and affirms dialogue. I continue to work on many of the same issues I did previously with corporations and churches. My personal mission statement, largely unchanged since 1993, still provides the foundation for my work as I seek common ways to build a common future that is just and healthy for the earth. For many years I have turned to the natural world to look for models and lessons. The borders in the natural world are constantly changing. It is a universe of penetrable barriers from the cell to the solar system. We could not survive if the walls of our cells were closed. Nutrients and energy flow constantly, providing life. Communications exist between living cells that we have yet to understand fully. Even our physical body is covered with a permeable membrane of skin. We are constantly interacting with the world outside our skin. Life would not be possible without breathing, eating and drinking. Nor would it be possible without the community of life that supports us, from the enzymes, proteins and bacteria to the forests, atmosphere and oceans to other humans. The universe is one, constantly in motion, constantly interacting. We are not separate from the universe. The universe exists within us and we, within the universe. In the natural world, life at the edge is creative. Nature hates a monoculture and seeks to reclaim the life giving diversity that sustains it. New growth at the edge of forests and fields, oceans and streams prepares for the life that follows. Insects and plants invade agricultural monocrops, seeking to replace them with diverse cultures that are healthier, self supporting, and give back nourishment to the soil and other plants rather than mining nutrients without replacing them. A word from Africa ubundu means “I am because you are.” To be human means a shared identity. An individual self is nothing apart from community. I am beginning to understand the meaning of that term as I see that my self is entangled with many other selves. My experience is only possible because others are with me and have gone before me. This universe is a unity from which we cannot separate ourselves. Our perceptions and our place influence our observations. The more we learn, the better we understand that the environment does not exist outside us. We are part of it, and it is part of us, integrally linked in a cycle of life and death. Our Western idea of human uniqueness as a separation from the rest of the natural order no longer makes sense. Our uniqueness lies in our ability to interact creatively with other humans and the other than human. Unlike most indigenous and Eastern cultures, the world we have created in the West places the sacred outside or above the created order. We have lost a sense of the chi of Eastern understanding, the spirit present in everything, or the ruach of the Hebrews, the breath of the Creator that is also the wind and the spirit, or the ase of the Yorubas, present in all plants, animals and humans and a reason for reverence in the presence of the natural order. Our Western understanding has given the freedom to explore, experiment and invent without reference to the presence of the sacred in the other than human. In less than 200 years we have created an industrial culture and an economic system that have the power to bring an end to the Cenozoic era, the previous 67 million years that saw the rise of most present forms of life on earth. The basis of this industrial economic system is the underlying belief that humans are separate from the other than human that exists only to serve humans. We mine the soils, deplete the oceans and destroy the rainforests, all in the interest of “development.” Yet as the most advanced organism in the universe, we fail to grasp the import of our actions or the necessity to examine the myths that underlie them. Today the choice is ours. We can continue to build a take, make, waste society that devastates the earth and increases the divide between the rich and the poor and spread that society around the world in the name of globalization and economic development. Such a world is pathological, embedded with the seeds of its own destruction. We can project the world we know today into the future, thereby multiplying the problems geometrically as we have the population, and hastening the end. Or we can re-examine our driving cultural myths, shift to recognizing our place within the universe and take the steps necessary to change our course. What does it take to be at home where we are, to become indigenous people of the earth and the universe? The possibilities are as profound as the shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the modern era. Whether we call it post modern, ecological, sustainable or ecozoic, the choice is ours. Reclaiming and rebuilding earth community is our task in dialogue with one another and the universe. We can no longer deny the reality or accept the false boundaries of the past as binding, whether racial, sexual, national, political, economic, cultural, material or spiritual. We must begin today coming from our own places, seeing each other as allies, rethinking our personal identities, restoring the ravages of our past actions, remaking the institutions of society and transforming our vision for the future.
Andy Smith
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