01081 Extended Families, Groups, and Organizations

Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten. — David Ogden Stiers

While growing up in a rural community in southwest Oklahoma, I was part of a large extended family. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins of all degrees, nearly everyone in our family still lived in our home community where all eight of my great-grandparents settled before statehood, all of whom, together with my grandparents, are buried in the town cemetery.

That’s changed. The era of Cheap Fossil Fuels has not been supportive of the extended family. As the older generations died, younger generations moved away. It no longer mattered if you had your kinfolk around, because if you worked reasonably hard and regular you could make it without help from others. Family size declined, so there aren’t as many new cousins being born. There’s no one with my paternal surname living in that county anymore.

I now live in a large city with none of my relatives within shouting distance. The individual nuclear family, consisting of a mother and father and 1.3 kids, or a single parent and 1.3 kids, is the new normal.

We’ve eased our way into this, one little step at a time.

Extended families used to get together for work. As a large group of people working together, they would —

  • Put up firewood for the winter,
  • Can, pickle, dehydrated, and ferment foods,
  • Plant and harvest gardens,
  • Do repairs and build buildings.

Now what do we do?

We turn up the thermostat and burn fossil fuels to get warm, thus we don’t need friends or family to help put up wood for the winter.

We buy canned and frozen and bottled foods at the supermarket, thus we don’t need friends or family to help put up food for the winter.

We buy meats and veggies at the supermarket, so we don’t need friends or family to help with our garden.

We hire contractors, so we don’t need friends or family to help us do repairs and or build buildings.

Note how important fossil fuels are to these typical household equations:

The natural gas and electrical grids, which bring us energy for cooking, refrigeration, heating, and cooling, are possible and affordable thanks to cheap fossil fuels.

Canned and frozen and bottled foods at the supermarket come to us from the four corners of the earth, thanks to the expenditure of large quantities of fossil fuels.

Contractors can build cheaply because of cheap fossil fuels.

But the era of Cheap Fossil Fuels nears its end. Here we are, in our little households of one to three people, together with our “energy slaves” that have made life easy and comfortable. Alas for all of us, those energy slaves become more expensive and harder to find all the time.

One of the consequences of the demise of cheap fossil fuels will be a rise in the importance of the family including the extended family. Living in small households of one to three will become increasingly problematic and expensive.

By Blood or Adoption?

Extended families may come back together based on blood kin relationships or they may come together based on friendship and mutual adoption. As blood-related families have declined, the importance of close personal friendships has increased. It’s not much of a step from a group of people being “close personal friends” and those same people, under the increasing pressure of external circumstances going from bad to worse, deciding to form an extended family by mutual adoption.

This could be looked at as the formation of a clan or tribe, or in a more secular terminology, a mutual assistance group.

Four Tiers of Cooperation

I am a fan of the work of permaculture thinker Vinay Gupta. He describes four basic tiers of cooperation among human beings:

  • Individuals
  • Groups
  • Organizations
  • States

Individuals and Groups

Individuals are the base of the pyramid and we constantly form ourselves into groups. We acquire membership in some groups by birth — our families and extended families, clans, and tribes. Others invisible structures have secular or religious purposes. We may be affiliated by default, or by our own voluntary choice. Whatever that case may be, a group has a definite idea of its own identity. Group members know who is in the group and who is not in the group.

Four Functional Necessities of Groups

There are four kinds of infrastructure necessary for the group to work effectively:

Space — the group needs a place to come together and meet.

Communications — the group must be able to communicate amongst its membership and with its leaders.

Transportation — groups need mobility.

Resource allocation — groups have scarce resources, so a method of allocating them for group purposes must be developed and implemented.

Three Necessary Characteristics for Organization Formation

An organization requires all of the conditions and infrastructure of group. In addition, there are three levels of social infrastructure that make it somewhat different from an ordinary group.

Shared Map. People and families come together based on a shared model of reality. They may not agree on everything, but they will have more in common than not. They will need to agree on the purpose of the group for it to be effective. This includes a definition of boundary conditions — who is in the organization and who is not in the organization.

Shared Plan. As the organization develops, a shared plan emerges based on their shared map.

Leadership succession. To be successful, an organization must have an common agreement on what happens if leadership does not perform and/or otherwise needs to be changed.

The Nation State

Sitting on top of everything these days is the nation state. There are five characteristics that support a state and make it possible.

Jurisdiction. This is manifested by systems of law and enforcement.

Citizens. States have citizens and there is a definition of who is a citizen and who is not a citizen, as well as a path to become a citizen.

Territory. Each geography comes with a governmental jurisdiction. Conflicts result when more than one nation attempts to exercise jurisdiction over a given geographical area.

Effective organization. A state must get things done and it does things through ancillary organizations.

International recognition. Full sovereignty requires the support of other nations.

The nation state is the arena where the individual citizen has the least control or influence. When considered in its totality (government at all of its levels — local, regional, and national) a state has enormous life and death control over its citizens, for good and for ill.

The Impact of Invisible Structures

For better and for worse, all of the invisible structures of our lives have enormous influence over us and the planet. At present, our invisible structure systems actively work against all movements towards sustainability. It is hard to do the right thing for the planet, for the human race, and for the future.

So it comes to pass that work on invisible structures is every bit as important as building compost piles, riding a bicycle instead of driving a car, and increasing the density of our housing.

This is particularly true for those of us who live in urban areas.

Since we will not be able to raise all of our own food, we will need to be part of structures and systems that supply us with food.

We will not be able to grow all of our own energy, we will need to be part of structures and systems that supply us with energy.

For most of this, this process of affiliation with new invisible structures that support more sustainable ways of living begins with our own families — whether those be by blood and birth or by adoption and friendship.