The other day I watched a documentary that focused on one main question: are humans innately competitive or cooperative, or a mixture of both? This question really struck me because I realized I had never really thought about it much, considering how much it applies to sustainability and the actions we take in relation to sustainability. Are we competitive or cooperative? The documentary emphasized, based on certain studies and observation, that humans are mostly cooperative in nature, and it is how we have prospered for so long as a species.
While watching the news one day, the anchorman brought up a graphic showing the top 3 happiest countries in the world based on a recent survey. The first 2 countries floated into space on the screen–Australia and Norway–and as the name “United States” floated up to #3, the anchorman screamed out, ‘Yeah! There we are!’ or something of that sort. It was pretty ridiculous. I am not sure about the validity of those statistics, but that moment made me realize that yes, we may be cooperative in nature, but here in America at least, we tend to focus on competition and being #1, and this is the attitude that is celebrated and taught in this country.
And then I realized that I have been one of those people celebrating that attitude, even through my work in sustainability. RecycleMania is an 8-week long competition held every spring between universities. A competition. This last spring I led a project called Operation Opt-Out during which I emphasized our need to win RecycleMania to all I spoke to. I have been enabling an attitude of competition among the students I reach out to under the name of sustainability. Isn’t this completely wrong though? Isn’t sustainability itself supposed to be a cooperative effort? A cooperative effort merging environment, society, and economics; individuals, organizations, and governments; cities, states, and countries?
RecycleMania is a wonderful effort to help universities reduce waste and increase recycling, but may I ask: is it really doing more good than harm? RecycleMania pits universities against each other in a competition, and within each university the competition is spread through every level of campus: dorms against dorms, floors against floors, hallways against hallways. It’s like a microcosm in a microcosm in a microcosm of competition. Of course, a little bit of competition is not a bad thing. But competition is like salt: the recipe only calls for a pinch. Cooperation, on the other hand, includes all of the yummy vegetables that your body needs a lot of in order to function properly.
I propose that we focus more on cooperation and less on competition and take pride in that as a university. The ability of people to come together for the good of the community is one of the greatest forces driving this world. If you do not believe me, think about all the macroscale examples we hear about everyday. This Tuesday marked the 1-year anniversary of the Joplin tornado, an event that showcased the power of a community to come together and start anew. Many may disagree with the controversial Occupy Wall Street movement, but surely it is one of the most powerful examples of a cross-country, cooperative effort this country has seen in years. Finally, this coming June many countries will set aside politics in order to come together at the Rio+20 Summit in order to make commitments to the environment as an international body. I propose we stop celebrating competition and live our lives in a way that fosters cooperation and celebrates unity as a university, community, and country.
As this upcoming school year approaches, let us strive to do our part for recycling and reducing waste year-round and to embrace a sense of cooperation and community in our daily actions. And let us not limit this to recycling but expand this to every aspect of sustainability, including those efforts to build a better and stronger community. As university students, let us embrace this attitude of cooperation so that we may set an example for those generations younger than ours, and even those older. Even if we must make dramatic changes within ourselves, let us not be scared of change. I leave you with this:
“If you want to be incrementally better: Be competitive. If you want to be exponentially better: Be cooperative.”
- Author unknown
Here are some related articles:
- www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/co-operation-more-important-competition-charles-leadbeater
- blogs.livingroutes.org/sustainabilityeducation/2011/05/18/why-academia-needs-ecovillages-p-3-competitive-vs-cooperative/
- www.shareable.net/blog/birds-do-it-bats-do-it
I appreciate your concerns, Holly. You’re right that our inherently competitive consumer market-based model of industrial production has caused severe problems for our environment. Still, if RecycleMania gets more materials recovered for recycling (and it does), or even better, gets more campuses to reduce wasting our Earth’s limited resources in the first place (and it does), doesn’t the end justify the means? The effort to achieve sustainability will need to find every possible way to motivate people to be thriftier about materials use. Like it or not, competition based on school spirit motivates college students. So I say, let’s use RecycleMania to make every school’s colors include green.
Sure, the end may justify the means sometimes, but that does not mean that more than one mean does not exist. I concede that RecycleMania has assisted universities in their effort to reduce waste and recycle more. However, RecycleMania is not the only way to get people and campuses to recycle more or use less. Surely there are several alternative strategies we could use to encourage communities to recycle that are innately more collaborative in nature. RecycleMania is just one mean for getting people to recycle more, and it just happens to also have the negative side effect of encouraging a deleterious attitude of competition among students. So, does the end always justify the means? No, not always. It is important to take into account all of the means before answering that question. I agree that we must find every way we can in order to encourage people to reduce and recycle more, but that does not mean we have to be narrow-minded in our pursuit of such methods. If we are to improve sustainability substantially, within the near future, we will have to destroy barriers and use new ways of thinking; RecycleMania is not a part of this future.
You say that competition is the primary motivator for college students, but I am a college student myself. I have used competition as a motivator to get people interested in RecycleMania this past spring but realized that my doing so did not excite students anymore than they already were. Many people tend to believe as you do, that competition is the best way to motivate college students, just as candy and ice cream is the best way to motivate a child. But we are not children. We are adults and human beings, and we are driven by human emotions and desires, and the desire to be a part of the community, to give back to the community, to cooperate and work with others is surely one of the strongest forces in this world. Comparing the drive of competition to this force is like comparing a trickle from a faucet to the immense power of the ocean, the ocean which is fed by hundreds upon thousands of individual rivers and streams. If you doubt what I am saying, please refer to the examples I have given in the above post. It is this force, the power of community and cooperation, that will determine the future of sustainability initiatives on college campuses.
Well, the reality is that individual motivation is not the same for everyone – a great evaluation of individual motivation in work situations is McClelland’s Theory of Motivation, developed by Dr. McClelland of Harvard, which discusses three main types of motivation: Achievement, Affiliation and Power. All of us are variously motivated by aspects of all three, and our motivation will also vary depending on the circumstance. I think Holly brings up a good point, we tend to assume that everyone is motivated by the same thing (usually the same thing that we are motivated by), and we really need to take into account all the different ways in which people are motivated, including cooperation and inclusion.
Thank you for this insight. You bring up an interesting point and study. It seems the process of determining an individual’s source of motivation fits right in with the implementation of sustainability. Sustainability teaches us that though the overall picture is important, we must also manage problems on a case-by-case basis because all situations have varying economic, social, and environmental circumstances. It is the same with people; though there are overarching factors, like cooperation and inclusion, that contribute to most people’s motivation, we must still look at each individual person on a case-by-case basis in order to get a clearer picture.
What a wonderful heartfelt and courageous essay. Oh to ask questions the challenge the orthodoxy of our times!! I’ve read the many defensive responses, which I can appreciate. But having doused myself in reading about economics for the past few years let me be one that dares to support and possibly extend the critique so gently authored by our young thinker.
Many economists, most especially perhaps the ‘ecological economists’ (Daly, Korten, Farley, Jackson, Schor, Max-Neef, Cato, Frank, etc.) have been arguing that we have the economic model upside down – that the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the biosphere, not the other way around. The myths that have been created to affirm the competitive neo-liberal model have, while benefiting a few very well (including most everyone reading this – if you think not try www.globalrichlist.org ), have left the planetary systems and most of the human family worse off, in part by trading off the possibilities for future generations. One of the chief underlying myths as the student bravely dares to challenge is this distorted belief that Darwin thought (see Frank’s “Darwin Economics”) we were only competitive (survival of the fittest) and that this misreading of his observations also we dominant in humans (aligning themselves with the emergent natural science could help make economists believe they were creating a ‘science’ too).
Perhaps the equally big myth is that you can grow infinitely on a finite planet (see this great 2 minute video to help understand the fallacy of this one). But let’s stick with the one on competition – how it is reinforced every day in winner-take-all elections, in awarding best actor or best book awards, and of course the almost total hegemony of sports in our culture, starting with younger and younger children. The almost total alignment with competition as the ‘uber alles’ of the human organizing principle, does need challenged (see Hawken’s “Blessed Unrest”, Michael Edwards “Making Change”, Susan Davis and David Bornstein’s “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Should Know”, etc.).
Let me end this note of appreciation to our anonymous student thinker with this example. A favorite form of competition we shall see repeated this year is the election debate. This is where we line up two or more individuals to debate whose ideas, or at least their ability to convey them, are better. In an increasingly complex and quickly changing world, simple ‘one wins the other loses’ contest of ideas is, in my opinion, a ludicrous way to develop the necessary collaborative approaches to governing , since there aren’t simple answers to most of our collective challenges. What if instead of debates, we created forums that nourished the conditions for better ideas to emerge, something more than a winner and a loser, or even more than the sum of the parts? Something collaborative. We’ve rigged all the rules, as so cogently written by sociologist Michael Schwalbe in his “Rigging the Game: How Inequality is Reproduced in Everyday Life”, so that we’re heading towards a future where we’ve inculcated an atmosphere of everyone for themselves.
In their recent work, “Economics Unmasked”, physicist Philip Smith and economist Manfred Max-Neef, highlight how distorted the game has gotten. The UN determined at about the time of the economic collapse in 2008 that for $30 billion/year we could end hunger. But of course we couldn’t find the money to do that but we could find it to bail out banks to the tune of TRILLIONS of dollars. That’s what building an economic system built on competition has provided us. I concur with our thoughtful student, there is a better way.
We are so embedded with competition in our culture that we can’t see that we are constantly reinforcing it and thus unable to challenge other approaches. We have yet to find all the possible ways to build a culture of cooperation especially beyond nation states. Our defense of competition uber alles needs reconsideration. As the late A J Muste once said, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”
Al good things,
Terry Link, former director of Campus Sustainability (MSU)
Senior Fellow, US Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development
President, Starting Now, LLC
One Planet, One Family, One Future
This essay reminds me of a project I did for Catamount Institute many years ago. We put together a stuff management workshop ostensibly around home organization and feng shui, but really it focused on the positive benefits of recycling, downcycling and upcycling your stuff to holistically cleanse your life.
I think we managed to inspire a few people when we brought in the goodwill and county managers to talk about the positive things that come out of recycling.
I occasionally see this type of positive side effect at schools participating in Recyclemania sometimes too – x pounds of stuff will end up at Goodwill or a school will forge a permanent partnership with another non-profit or government agency.
Anyway, my point is that cooperation and competition are not mutually exclusive activities, but perhaps Recyclemania could do more to recognize the collaborative efforts going on as well.