Dwelling in Expanded Biotic Communities: Steps Toward Reconstructive Postmodern Communities - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 322

that human beings, as persons who take a conscious and decisive role in the development of
a particular mixed community, will take on responsibility for all the members of that com-
munity. They will respect the process the individuality of all the members of the community,
since they contribute to the dynamic processes that make up the community.
The second , a successful reconstructive postmodern version of community, will be char-
acterized by attempts by community members to seek a diverse set of insights about the
nature of community. This postmodern approach will strive to include various accounts
of community that affirm not only the value of persons in community but also the value of
persons who recognize that they also live in a biotic community in what I earlier referred
to as a mixed community. To maintain the reconstructive postmodern community struc-
ture, the most up-to-date ideas of natural and social science should be included in the
management of these places, especially the principals of ecology and ecological design.
The community would benefit from the use of ecological insights that would identify
manners of linking the community within a broader biogeographical framework and use
ecological planning to guide decision making by community members. These principles
would incorporate wise use of energy sources and pathways, food production, and make
use of appropriate level technologies and sustainable development programs. As physics
was the paradigmatic science that underlay modern world views, it is to be ecology that
plays the same role in postmodern mixed communities.
A third feature common to reconstructive postmodern community involves adopting
policies and practices that take a long-term approach rather than focus on short-term gain.*
Recognizing the need to develop community economic structures and features that reflect
and foster this long-term view is an essential part of the development of postmodern
communities. Most “modern” communities reflect some theory of political economy
concerned primarily with the manipulation of property and value so as to maximize
short-term monetary exchange value to the owner.
Postmodern communities will need to reflect a management approach that does not
measure wealth solely in terms of money, and the wealth of the community and the homes
there derive from the ability of the property to produce what is actually needed for the
well-being of all the human and nonhuman members. The problem for creating a success-
ful postmodern community is that in the modern economic models that underlie much of
modern community development, the concern for short-term profit making trumps the
concern for developing long-term wealth and inherent value of the community and its
members. In profit-driven development models, individual investors seek to advance their
own personal goals, based on their perception of only when their own self-interests are
met, the common good of the community will result.
The fourth general feature is that any reconstructive postmodern concept of
community must avoid theories of community development and of human nature where
certain features of human existence in community are abstracted out and erroneously
considered to be the fundamental concrete facts of existence, to the exclusion of other
real facts. One such instance is the way any theory radical individualism can abstract
individual human existence out of the real connections people have with the world, and
then considers these isolated humans as fundamentally real, autonomous individuals.
When we forget where food, power, or water comes from, or where waste actually
* This is distinction made by Aristotle in Bk. 1 of the Politics , the difference between chrematistics and oikonomia .
The former is the branch of political economy relating to the manipulation of property and value so as to
maximize short-term monetary exchange value to the owner. Oikonomia , by contrast, is the management of
the household so as to increase its use value to all members of the household over the long run. See Aristotle,
The Politics , Bk. I.