Beyond the Monoculture
Lately I keep thinking about monocultures – why we create them, how they shape the land, what happens in their wake… and how monocultures also extend beyond the land, into culture.
In agriculture, monocultures are the practice of growing one single species at a time. It might be a tree for logging, a crop like wheat or soy, or even the ubiquitousness of lawn. They’re planted like this because they’re easy, efficient and at least initially often very cost effective – things our culture loves.
Their lack of diversity also makes them highly susceptible to disease and pests however, frequently requiring more fertilisers and chemicals, which often leads to poison and pollution in our soil and in our rivers.
Monocultures also lead to soil depletion, as the soil becomes malnourished and starved of the diversity of riches and resources it needs.
Monocultures are also a mostly human creation – they rarely exist in the more-than-human world, as they fail to create the conditions for thriving.
What happens then, when our dominant culture is one of a monoculture?
Because, walk down any high street, and you’ll see the same chains of restaurants and cafes.
Tune into Spotify, see the algorithms offer the same songs in different playlists.
Hit the shops and see the same fashion in each store, the same athleisure wear at every yoga class.
Listen to how we talk about "the economy" as if there's only one way to organise human exchange, one definition of value.
Have a look at our schools and educational centres, with standardised measures of success, and often standardised learning experiences.
Scroll through your Netflix recommendations and notice how almost every show follows the same narrative arc, the same character types.
In a conversation around language loss and the value of old or indigenous languages, hear how people can’t see the ‘value’ of certain languages if not many people speak them…. English is just more practical.
Western, globalised culture is one of a monoculture.
Here’s what we know about monocultures though: they lack resilience, are often devoid of soul, and rarely create the conditions to thrive.
Now, the monoculture we live within is not one born just in the soil. It’s one that shapes our economy, our democracy, our leadership.
It’s one that is convinced there is a right way, that promotes and sells a certain image and disregards (or deports) anything different.
Our current crises are all related of the struggling monoculture: the increasing, war, violence and atrocities; climate change and biodiversity loss; rising authoritarianism; increasing loneliness and depression; heightened rates of burnout and disconnection.
These all exist and are born out of the monoculture.
Because the response within monoculture to dis-ease – with monoculture thinking - is one of control, force, violence, eradication.
When weeds or pests appear in a monoculture, the response is pesticides and herbicides – to destroy what doesn’t belong (and to assume it must not belong in the first place, which is another conversation).
Instead of asking:
What conditions would prevent this issue? Or
Why is this issue occurring? Or
What might need tending, or be out of balance?
We ask:
How do we force/control/fix our way out?
And we do the same thing with monoculture thinking – whether that’s at a macro level within our responses to crime and policing, “stop the boats”, military responses or even how we respond to and treat burnout.
The answer becomes one of ‘fix’, ‘control’, ‘suppress’, rather than working with the root and understanding why something is occurring in the first place (which threatens the status quo).
In another lens, we can see that monoculture has no ability to hold complexity or nuance - everything gets reduced to simple binaries: us vs them, right vs wrong, disposable vs valuable.
This mindset is also one of rugged competition and scarcity: it’s a dog eat dog world, survival of the fittest, hyper-individualism.
It’s this thinking that results in more damage, more labour, and more violence.
But importantly, while we might see the monoculture at the macro cultural level, it can also shape our changemaking and activism.
Burnout in your workplace? Resilience trainers, wellness workshops, encouraging self-care - rather than questioning whether our approach to change itself is extractive, whether our working styles are mimicking the same systems we’re trying to disrupt.
(That’s why we must to do the work of Getting Free…starting soon, register your interest here).
Opposing viewpoints? "Platform" or "de-platform," cancel or amplify - rather than asking what conditions created these beliefs in the first place, or how we might engage with them.
Organisational conflict? Push for your way, build stronger coalitions to outvote (or oust!) the opposition - rather than examining what unmet needs might be present, what the deeper roots of the conflict might be offering.
When change isn't happening fast enough, our instinct can be to push through, fight harder. To exert more pressure, force, control, resistance - the exact energy with which we work a monoculture.
We can see this even in the language we use – fight for change, resist, tackle climate change, defeat the other side.
We approach liberation and healing with the language of violence.
So what do we do in the face of a monoculture? Particularly when we know that monocultures are rarely sustainable, and the world we are living in is radically reshaping itself.
How do we plant the seeds of diversity, seeds of abundance, seeds that will grow in the shadow of this monoculture, while it begins to compost itself?
These aren’t questions with simple, neat answers.
In fact, I often find neat answers quite boring. It’s the questions that hold real potential. A good question has the power to uproot everything, to change the way we view the landscape entirely. After all, a good question doesn’t always lead to an answer, but it can lead to a deeper truth.
But I do believe there are some seeds we can follow – we find them in the work of Getting Free, we find them in the development of wisdom, we find them in working with our whole body, not just our head.
And, we can find one here: the reality that planting seeds requires less a change in what we do, and more of a change in how we do it.
This is one of the great challenges we can face in leadership as changemakers – we assume that our answer to the conflicts we face, or the results we’re seeking must come from what we’re doing.
And what we’re doing is important – this world needs lots of tangible, hands-on work right now, which, dear reader, I suspect you’re already doing.
But transformative, lasting change comes from a deeper place– it comes from the why and how.
Let me give you a tangible example of the shift I’m talking about.
Let’s say like a lot of changemakers, you’re working with tight deadlines and budget restraints.
Maybe let’s add in some organisational conflict and strained communication, where team members are increasingly resentful and complaining about other teams.
The monoculture response to this would be entirely to jump to the what: analyse the problem, implement better systems, shuffle team members, meet the deadline – a focus entirely on ‘fixing’.
And there’s a place for this – who doesn’t want better systems? And those grant deadlines are very real.
But seeding change – polyculture responses – would also look at the how and why:
Why are deadlines struggling to be met in the first place?
Why is their tension in the communication?
How might we better create conditions for open communication, collaboration, wellbeing?
The aim is not fix or control – but to create the conditions for change to occur.
This how starts with questions:
What are we afraid of by missing these deadlines?
What are we assuming the other person is saying, doing or thinking?
What needs of ours are unmet here?
Maybe the answers are ‘losing funding’, or ‘looking incompetent’ or ‘feeling unseen’ or ‘they don’t value my work’.
Whatever they are, when we can identify them – and create space to acknowledge them, and in some cases, dialogue around them – we can shift the underlying ways we’re working.
We can shift the how.
Instead of an environment where a team is acting from unacknowledged, unexamined fear, scarcity and information hoarding – we can lean into trust and collaboration.
Instead of defending a sense of ‘rightness’ or territory, we can begin sharing resources or asking for help.
The what might stay the same, but the how - the energy, assumptions, relationships, beliefs that underpin the ways of working - are transformed.
The root has been worked with – and that is part of what we need in a time of monoculture and polycrisis.
To transform the roots of our shared world, starting with the spaces we live, work and play as changemakers.
