Forget competition. It's time for cooperation.
Have you ever felt that sense of wholeness, fullness and completeness walking through a forest? That feeling whereby everything is in its place as it should be, has its own interlaced task and is deeply in harmony with everything else? It’s the interconnectedness of Nature, something magical yet so simple that we, as the human race, should understand better and fully embrace it to make it ours.
If you think about it, even though they can't really move and leave when the surroundings don't suit them anymore, trees have been around for close to 400 million years, and they've survived all four extinction events. We assume a tree is a static and silent living being, but there is much more that it's going on. Trees are wise creatures. They love their ecosystem and help their fellows in need by sending useful substances and water. They move their roots when they want to make room for a young. They protect each other. In their ecosystems, there is no discrimination, only reciprocity, only mutual respect. One for all: before it dies, a tree donates valuable elements to those around it, leaving a unique legacy of knowledge and nourishment. Forests are built on relationships where everything is connected and shared and where greatness is a collaborative work. "Plants are attuned to one another's strengths and weaknesses, elegantly giving and taking to attain exquisite balance. There is grace in complexity, in actions cohering, in sum totals." Suzanne Simard, the well-known Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and leader of The Mother Tree Project, had it clear for a long time. Her research investigates how the complex and extensive tree relationships contribute to forest resiliency, adaptability and recovery.
We have all heard these words countless times in the last period, and many of us have even used them so much that they have become wasted and meaningless. Speaking them loudly like slogans isn't enough: if we want to better ourselves and our society, we need to truly reimagine a new way of life and respond to this need with new working models based on collaboration, not competition. As forests do.
Let’s go back to Simard once more: "The object of my work is a perfect representation of the relationships between humans and our social organization. Among us are journalists, scientists, teachers, doctors, and all together we form a community: if we were to eliminate, for example, all teachers, the whole structure would suffer." It may sound obvious and easy, but here therein lies the lesson we can learn from these ecological communities: they are more egalitarian and efficient than our own society. They cultivate diversity. They cooperate rather than compete. A forest lives in a synergistic system in which the whole ecosystem's productivity goes way up because the species are helping one another and because there are a few special ones that Simard called the Mother Trees. They are the largest and oldest of all and the custodians of the forest's wisdom. They create links, exchange information with fungi and other trees that live in the forest, and pass on the knowledge accumulated over the years to cope with their surroundings.
We are taking inspiration from Mother Trees and building a new large, open and inclusive ecosystem where specialists from all areas of communication and creativity can come together and work on international projects. We want to activate cooperation, not competition. We are not saying that individual self-interest has to simply vanish. We will forever continue to be individuals, but our self-interest needs to be reconciled with the good of the communities where we live. Indeed, we believe cooperative synergy will replace competitive exploitation. The answer is to collaborate instead of competing and support each other instead of hindering each other. This is why the philosophy we are building day by day is that of a collective, horizontal and holacratic organization.
(Photo by Emma Gossett / Unsplash)