Life at the Ecotone

Andy Smith talks about what happens when we come to an edge.

[six minute read] 

I am writing this whilst preparing to teach a five day intensive facilitation training in London in February 2025. It’s called Collective Dreaming: Embodying new patterns for facilitation, relationships, communities and the world. It’s also marks the start of an exciting two year training called Facilitating the Future. 

When our identity comes up against some kind of edge and there is feedback that we don’t like, what do we meet there? How can sharing and dreaming together about these edges make a difference collectively?

I was 17 years old and a student of ecology. It was a breezy but sunny day in October at Rest Bay near Porthcawl in South Wales. I remember that day clearly. I loved learning about the edges and lines and separations and integrations, hybrid seaweeds. I had a sense of the creative impulse of life itself and working late into the evening, taking notes, fell asleep dreaming of being out and about again on that curious shore.

We were there learning to map species distribution, following the slope of rocks down from the high tide to low tide mark and noticing how different ecological zones held space for different species and how they sometimes mixed, mingled and met up in different ways. There is a term in ecology which I love –  ecotone – it sounds like the name  of a new wave rock band form the late 70’s ‘The Ecotones’ but that’s not only why I like it.  

 The ecological term ecotone refers to these areas of meeting, the transition between biological communities, where two communities meet and integrate (1). You often find ecotones where there are slopes like when ascending a mountain or at seashores, or in wetlands where there are changes in the moisture level or soil type. 

 Edges can be fuzzier than we think.

Ecotones are thought to generate evolutionary processes because of the mix and closeness of different ecologies. They are a great reminder of how edges are created in nature, not always definite lines but something altogether more fuzzy and abundant, allowing for crossover at the edge. 

It can be a lot more difficult to consider psychological and social edges in the same way, even though they offer relationship opportunity and are creative spaces. The edges that appear when we meet something that is not ‘like us’, not our type of person or we are challenged in our identity or identities by others, can feel more friction-full.

The ecotone perspective views edges as places to meet, where there is transfer and connection as well as a line that some don’t want to or can’t cross.  Edges are not always barriers.

We are not just us.

Many things in life, like ecotones, test our ideas of straight lines and separation, they don’t have clear edges and are more porous. For example, although our skin feels like an edge we also absorb all sorts of stuff though it. Most of us have an identity as a human separate from others as if we are observers who look upon the world. The world is out there and we are not joined to it. Reality is not really like that. We aren’t even “just us” anyhow, we contain many species of bacteria and other life forms and we carry a lot of DNA that’s not human but is essential to seeing us alive. 

Looking through to Bass Rock from Ravensheugh, Photo by Andy Smith 

 For example, you might identify ( like many of us do that you are a decent person, but then out of the blue you meet an accusation. You are accused that you have disrespected someone else. Of course unintentionally. But something slipped off your tongue that had an impact and now you are being challenged about that. 

Different forces are in play at this ecotone. Firstly something happened that you didn’t intend – maybe you were completely unconscious about it  and yet now you are being asked to take responsibility its impact. And here ,  ‘your identity’, that which you feel as the core of your being, is also been called into question. Why is this threat to our identify so powerful in its effect? 

Letting go of identity whilst not rejecting identity.

Identities sometimes provide us with a sense of belonging, of self worth, they affirm something important about us, for us. So when they are questioned or shaken we may lose a sense of who we are, our feeling of belonging or a diminishment in our sense of power.  i am grateful for the training in Processwork, which over many years has helped me let go of my attachment to identify whilst not rejecting identity. For example, I have an identity as being working class Welsh (Cymry) , white, sis gendered male. That has appeared to be stable over the years but if I trace carefully that line into the past, I realise it has not always been the same The words might stay the same but the attributed meanings change as i grow and also as our culture changes.  On one level I can realise it maybe doesn’t matter at all to be Cymry, yet there is also a shared rich cultural identity of being Welsh that has been and continues to be marginalised and put down and I feel that. So, therefore this identity also allows me as an older white guy to have an experience of being oppressed. But this is a double edged problem. Without awareness I might be less likely to identify with privileges of being a white man in western society because of that identity.  I can then unconsciously contribute to oppression in how I relate to others whilst identifying with my difficulties and so the impacts are less easy for me to see. It takes work and reflection to realise the complexity and the difference between my intentions and their impacts, to hold ambiguities.

 Identities contain personal and collective dynamics 

So, our identities in the moment show both personal and also collective dynamics. Working on the less known parts of the collective dynamic can have profound effects. For example, I have also have an identity as an activist with 30 plus years working on inclusion and diversity and in recent years on environmental issues and local democracy. If you are like me you may know something about the identity that grows from this work. A sense of working hard, being creative, making things happen. 

Well a couple of years ago I began a gradual slide into long covid.  This really challenged my identity as an activist, as a leader. It brought me to a huge edge. I needed to embrace slowness and discover something similar to what Erin Manning refers to as the Pragmatics of uselessness (2), or as I heard Bayo Akomolafe (3) call it the ‘Utility of Uselessness.” 

My edges were still there but not serving me anymore. I had to learn to go through the edge into the slowness, a collective edge in this culture too. 

Identities are great but they are only one component in the creation of ecotones. By learning to welcome and embrace the history behind them and the ambiguity they might contain they become much more elastic and porous. It helps me to remember that they help explain who we are and perhaps my edge in the moment but that they are not in any way a complete description of me. It helps to consider identities as places of meeting, a place to begin and not a place to end.

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Awareness of how all the parts are interacting is key to the Worldwork paradigm and if you are interested in how to utilise the shared wisdom of our dreams, and difficulties to transform projects or help facilitate groups then the upcoming intensive training workshop in February 2025 might be for you. We will explore what is trying to emerge in our lives in our projects as new patterns that are shared with others. This intensive can also be taken as part of a longer two years Facilitation Training: Facilitating Our Future created with CFOR and which is now accepting applications.

Andy Smith (he/him) is a member of Processwork UK faculty. He is also a UKCP registered psychotherapist, supervisor, training supervisor and faculty member of the Spanish Processwork training programme. He centres his work on transformational change in communities, organisations and participative democracy, inclusion and diversity. This has resulted in international awards for educational design at both university and grassroots levels, with awards for inclusivity, diversity, changing workplace practice, lifelong learning. A GENE award for global innovation in education was recently given to the Go Deep Project.

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(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotone

(2) Erin Manning 2020 For a Pragmatics of the Useless, Duke University Press

(3) https://www.esalen.org/podcasts/bayo-akomolafe-on-tricksterism-post-activism-and-artificial-intelligence-032724