Training institute held at the Baha’i Centre in Funafuti, Tuvalu (Copyright 2006, Baha’i International Community)

Still mulling over yesterday’s post on the connection between individual and social transformation and a post from almost two years ago, “WorldChanging and the End of Earth Day.” In that older post, we examined WorldChanging’s concept of “the myth of individual responsibility.” The basic argument was that we’ve become so focused on what individuals can do – recycle, drive less, eat less meat, use less water, and so on – that we’ve forgotten the concerted institutional change that drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require. The unrelenting focus on personal responsibility clouded our minds to the structural changes that were needed, according to the good folk at WorldChanging.

Wary as always of dichotomous thinking, we now have to ask whether the way forward on climate change won’t require some synthesis of individual action and institutional change. If reality is one, how do these two spheres of action fit together into a coherent whole?

If the only action I take is to reduce my own greenhouse emissions through eating less meat or driving less, then small island nations like Tuvalu (some Tuvalan residents pictured above) will still be subsumed by rising sea levels. But can our existing social institutions really rise to the challenge of climate change? I suspect a way forward lies in the concept of “walking a path of service.” From the Ruhi Institute:

According to this vision of social change, the Ruhi Institute directs its present efforts to develop human resources within a set of activities that conduce to spiritual and intellectual growth, but are carried out in the context of each individual’s contribution to the establishment of new structures, whether in villages and rural regions or in large urban centers.

At this moment in history, Baha’i social action is largely focused at the neighborhood scale. Visiting neighbors in each others’ homes to share stories, caring for the intellectual and spiritual development of children, empowering young people to contribute to the betterment of the community. But within these efforts are the seeds of new social structures.

I guess my conclusion is that we’re going to see more bad times before it gets better. Drought is real; rising sea levels are real; 7 billion of us are spewing CO₂ and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Until we develop both the individual discipline and the institutional cooperation needed to address climate change, we won’t see many improvements there. But if we want our social institutions to function better, we need to start walking a path of service today that lays the foundation for new social structures.

Related Links

• Presented at the UN Climate Change conference in Poznan, Poland December 2008: Seizing the Opportunity: Redefining the Challenge of Climate Change (pdf)
• Ethics are ‘missing dimension’ in climate debate, says IPCC head
• Presented at the UN Summit on Climate Change September 2009: Moral and Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change: Appeal to World Leaders (pdf)
• Therese over at Interns@BIC blogs on Global Civil Society and Climate Change
• Make this Earth Day your last! (WorldChanging)

A study circle in the fields of Kamashi, Rwanda, in June 2004 (Copyright 2006, Baha’i International Community)

Therese over at the BIC Interns Blog posted on last month’s opening session of the UN Summit on Climate Change. She writes honestly about the speed with which political institutions have responded to climate change, and about the challenge of “developing an adequate institutional framework for intergovernmental cooperation.”

Her comments reminded me of this passage from the Ruhi Institute:

The Ruhi Institute tries to understand the process of the transformation of human society in terms of a far more complex set of interactions between two parallel developments: the transformation of the individual, and the deliberate creation of the structures of a new society. Moreover, just as it does not view the human being as a mere product of interactions with nature and society, it does not identify structural change only with political and economic processes. Rather, it sees the necessity of change in all structures—mental, cultural, scientific and technological, educational, economic and social—including a complete change in the very concepts of political leadership and power.

–The Ruhi Institute

What do these two things have to do with each other? Therese points to the need for a new institutional framework to approach climate change as a global community. This seems consistent with the quotation from the Ruhi Institute, but it is unclear to me how we get from one to the other. The Ruhi Institute approaches social action as neither limited to individual transformation nor solely focused on transforming social structures. Rather, the intellectual and spiritual development of the individual is expressed not through personal salvation but through a set of activities that contribute to the establishment of new social institutions:

This continuous interaction, between the parallel processes of the spiritualization of the individual and the establishment of new social structures, describes the only dependable path of social change, one that avoids both complacency and violence and does not perpetuate the cycles of oppression and illusory freedom that humanity has experienced in the past.

–The Ruhi Institute

Dear reader, what do you think? What is the role of social institutions in addressing climate change? How can the individual contribute to such seemingly out-of-reach efforts?