asked in 2005

1. What is the most important outcome of your work?  

This is a question that should be put to God or, at least, to historians if the thread that I hope I have been and still am contributing to is still evident. I label that thread the building and regeneration of “triple community” as distinct from its opposite “triple pollution” – which I mention in my reply to the third question below.


2. What are the tools for building community?

As my teacher and late friend Ivan Illich pointed out to me, literally anything can be used as a tool or instrument to do something, whether designed to do so or not. I regret making the mistake of using ‘tools for building community’ in too broad a sense.  I can only make partial amends by clarifying what I mean by “building community” and so referring only to those tools, whether technical, heuristic or managerial, when they are used for building community in the sense below.


3. What does the “perfect community” look like?

The short answer is that there can be no such thing on Earth. As offered above, I summarise (from work-in-progress) what I mean by ‘community’; inevitably leaving what I say wide open to misinterpretation:

From my reading on the “amoeba-word” ‘community’: I have found three complementary meanings so far:
From Herman Daly (RLA 1986) and John B Cobb’s “For the Common Good” (1990):
Communities of mutually tolerating persons (or individuals) within personal reach of one another, shearing a common interest that they can deal directly, through face-to-face or (ear-to-ear) relationships. Communities of mutually respecting persons, know to each other at no more than one remove, are therefore limited in size. Observations of territorial communities suggest that the maximum is around 4,000, the scale of a Greek polis, a mediaeval town a political ward in an urban borough or rural district in Britain.
From the above quoting Ferdinand Toennies:
Communities of communities of which non-totalitarian societies are built. Societies can be totalitarian, by definition, communities cannot be.
From Edward Hyam’s “Soil and Civilization” (1952)”:
The community of all life, whether seen as the biosphere, the Earth (or Gaia) of the Macro-cosmos.
The opposite is suggested by Illich’s essay “triple Pollution”: as interpreted in the Oxford English Dictionary ‘pollution’ means defilement (of persons), dirtying or fouling (of habitat through dysfunctional human behaviour at all scales) and desecration of all life and the meanings genuine cultures give to it.  

The “perfect” community must be one that builds itself in all three senses and pollutes in none.


4. What effect has the Right Livelihood Award had on your work?

It made me free to concentrate on my own priorities so, in effect, it underwrote all the work I have done since, almost all of which has been voluntary.