Zita Cobb
In a six-week series of interviews, Canadians with a variety of experiences discuss the major challenges our country is facing and how best to address them. This instalment deals with building healthy communities.
Zita Cobb, president of the Shorefast Foundation, was interviewed Oct. 17 by Adam Kahane, chairman, North America, of Reos Partners.
Kahane: What concerns you about Canada these days?
Cobb: I am worried that we are failing to invest sufficiently in our "sacred capital" (natural capital, social capital, cultural capital, community capital) and in protecting our ways of knowing. In our small communities, there is an increasing poverty of hope and a despair is taking hold. I don't understand why we're not more alarmed and doing something about the fact that we're losing a fundamental part of our Canadian identity, ways of knowing and sources of strength, imagination and resourcefulness. Our identity and strength emerged – and emerges – from our relationship with this amazing piece of nature that we call Canada.
We haven't done nearly enough to fortify, invest in and enable our special places in a time of rapid globalization, where bigger always seems better and the local and specific is too often allowed to become subservient to a quest for efficiency. I talk to people who grew up on small farms in Saskatchewan, and this way of life seems to have been lost. The fishery is another example: In many cases it is controlled by people who do not live on the ocean and fish for their livelihoods, who don't have "embeddedness" in place, who are not sensitive and responsive to place. [They are] people who manage financial capital – who are in board rooms far away from the smell of fish. They are not likely to optimize for place and yet they have the power to bring 350-year-old communities to collapse with the stroke of a pen, and without the benefit of a proper conversation about alternatives.
Kahane: If things turn out badly over the next 20 years, what would they look like?
Cobb: We would have allowed reductionist thinking to get out of hand. We would have forgotten that nature and culture are the two great garments of human life. We'd all live in mega cities and suffer from a kind of placelessness. We would have lost our intimate knowledge of and ability to learn from the natural world. We'd have lost what [artist] Pam Hall refers to as "the ways of knowing that come from an embodied, interdependent relationship with the still-wild world." We'd be eating industrial food that's produced by enormous companies that transcend all borders. We'd be subservient to financial capital, and we wouldn't have a clue who we were. We'd have no sense of continuity with the past. The wisdom and nuances of heritage, and of the natural world would be lost.
Kahane: What lessons do we need to learn from our past failures?
Cobb: Canada as a whole is like a lovely patchwork quilt. There are so many cultures and communities in Canada, and the way you sew all these little patches together to make a quilt is through our business and government systems. We used to put them together in a way that respected all the patches, big and small. Now we seem to expect all the patches to be the same. If one or two fall off, we don't seem bothered by a hole in the quilt. Do we have a vision any more about the value of culture and identity? Are we able to work in a collaborative way among all the players – including businesses – to make decisions that are in the best interests of the fabric of our communities? There is an increasing presence of reductionist thinking that is causing us to lose the things that are essential and sacred. Maybe we can't save every community, but I would like to see a national statement that says, "As Canadians, we value our small rural communities." That would be very encouraging and a good beginning to finding a way to optimizing for community well-being.
Possible Canadas is a project created by Reos Partners, the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation and a diverse coalition of philanthropic and community organizations. For longer versions of these interviews, or to join the conversation, visit possiblecanadas.ca