CULTURAL ANALYSIS: THE LORD OF THE FLIES
The use of norms, culture and attitudes is strongly influential in sustainability and natural resource control. “The Lord of the Flies” by William Golding is a great example of resource allocation and sustainability. “The Lord of the Flies” and its thesis of controversial intergroup relations and human survival tactic have been acknowledged by sociologists and psychologists as well as discussed in many higher learning institutions. There are some passages in the book that emphasize how human social behavior influence the way natural resources are utilized and kept. The group of boys who find themselves stranded on an island create a new civilization from scratch, a community whose operations and growth is immensely dependent upon the natural environment. This environment will entail the sea, the beach and the jungle. It is this mini cultural evolution in “The Lord of Flies” that illustrate how communities and nature interact.
A group of young boys are washed ashore on a superficially virgin tropical island after a plane crash. Promptly, they determine Ralph as their leader. The group begins to scavenge for food and shelter in the wilderness. The children start a continuous fire on the top of the island in order to signal ships or planes that may come within distance. However, the conditions become increasingly complex when the eldest boy, Jack, is no longer willing to yield under the leadership of Ralph. “If A influences B, and B assists A, then A is ‘leader’ and B is ‘follower,’ but the nature of A’s leadership will depend upon the extent of B’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
Ralph underlines the need for peace, consistent burning of the signal fire, and fishing as the most vital roles. Jack, a daring and offensive leader, recruits his own subgroup of boys off of Ralph’s pack. Jack underlines the need to hunt pigs as a vital source of food. This group is settled far from the beach, painted their faces in war paint, practice tribal rituals to fend off the spirit of a jungle monster that Jack has created. The groups with no delay run into a disagreement and Jack’s crew, with their weapons and more physical way of settling conflict, recruits more members of Ralph’s civilized group. In due course, Jack’s group attack Ralph and the few remaining members who have not yet joined Jack’s tribe. The assaults develop into violence and death, and in the end Jack and his boys hunt for Ralph, the last islander who has not yet joined Jack’s tribe. Ultimately, the boys are found by US soldiers who harbor at the island and Ralph is spared from being killed by the Jack and his followers.
Directly after the group of boys assemble on the island, one of the boys finds a large conch from the shoreline. To give the survivors some form of organization, Ralph decides to use the conch as a device for practical debate. The person who has the conch in his hands should have the right to speak. Everyone agrees on this directive. This lowers the complication the survivors face in self-organizing their new group, due to the fact that there is now agreement and direction within the “rule of the conch”. The conch develops into a custom, constructing relationships and fair distribution of power between the boys. Whilst the conch in itself is futile, it may have been a tradition in mankind to utilize objects in order to systematize rules and regulations with the use of “material tokens” (Gamble et al. 2014). With the aide of the conch, the boys agree to fish and wield the palm trees to construct shelter. What may this suggest for the control and distribution of natural resources in small-scale territories? Management is impossible without fair distribution and accordance within a group.
Conflicts of interest begin to start and the welfare of the boys reduces without the use of the conch. Primarily, the conch was still able to permit consequences to those who did not adhere to it (a vital stability that is usual of institutions). For instance, when Ralph uses the conch to call a meeting to speak to the boys who are not adhering to the rules within the group. Nonetheless, Jack begins to gain more power and followers which forces the conch to lose meaning. Jack’s response to the conch is: “Nobody’s interested in you and your f*cking conch!” This formal change has entirely changed the governance of the group and their resources. The group of boys are now more concerned with hunting.
Jack begins to assimilate an army that hunts wild pigs in the jungle. Additionally, he utilizes tribal symbols in order to create social unity: wearing of facial war paint for himself and his “warriors”, dresses apart, and initiates the common enemy called “jungle monster”. The hunting encounters, the fear of the monster, and the stirring leadership that Jack exhibits changes how the boys make use of their natural resources. They begin to stop spear fishing and settling by the coast, as accustomed for Ralph’s members. The rapidly expanding and quickening mobility of people combines with the refusal of cultural products and practices to “stay put” to give a profound sense of a loss of territorial roots. Jack’s members were more concerned with hunting mammals in the forest as opposed to trying to attract bypassing travelers to rescue them. By forming a custom culture of hunters, a new way of living emerges. Exceptionally, Jack’s group becomes contingent on the pig population for a source of nutrition and living sacrifices in order to appease the “jungle monster.” It has been accepted in the field of natural resource governance that ecological behavior and customs are not bound to the mere physical benefits they provide, but also provide cultural benefits. For example, Oleson et al. (2015) accounts that in Madagascar coastal inhabitants value fishery as their source of culture and way of living. How sustainable is the recent hunting custom long-term? This is dictated through the behavior towards the signal fire.
Ralph had stressed the importance on maintaining the signal fire at the top of the island’s hill. Jack allow the fire to die out and spends his time hunting and conducting rituals. “Those who stress internal motives, norms, or goals have tended to ignore environmental factors” Ralphs rule to execute signal fires ceases and dismantled by Jack. Jack’s followers also feel that maintaining the fire has become boring. Therefore, any possibility of being rescued is diminished. Ralph exclaims: “Face it Jack, you fucked up! We could’ve been rescued.” Why do these boys, aside from Ralph, lose importance on being rescued and sustaining survival? There is similarity between the boys who lose momentum on wanting to be rescued from the island and the global struggle to stabilize climate change. Climatic change is an environmental challenge that calls for collaboration in its most problematic form: aide of many actors, with large doubt and extremely detained benefits. We do not know how climate will change, nor which nations will genuinely subsidize climate protection. (George Marshall 2015). The group of boys are able to collaborate when they go hunting, a problem less definitive in our human social psychology. This is due to the fact that the benefits from this cooperation are immediate (meat and nutrition), the groups are small and united (bonded by joint control and a cogent leader), and the fact that the boys enjoy hunting pigs. All these characteristics are nonexistent when the boys have to collaborate in order to maintain the signal fire. It is still unknown when and if they will ever be saved, which lowers the momentum of why the boys should spend time keeping the fire alight. In essence, avoiding climatic changes appears to be very similar to the boy’s goal of maintaining the fire. It is not a logical action
to continue to maintain a fire that has no certainty will save the boys so they’d rather pursue hunting during their time.
With this idea, it is very paradoxical that while war and death start on the island community, the boys begin to question: “We did everything in the same way grownups did. Why didn’t it work?”
Thus, overseeing our interaction with natural resources through a socio-cultural lens, what can society do in order to reach a more steady way at maintaining sustainability? Culture is essentially both, risk and chance. Altering our awareness, traditions, and values learning processes can form cultural revolution. For example, as soon as we incorporate collaboration for the climate as a priceless norm, it can develop into a custom to protect Earth’s temperatures. There is a large role that can be played by images, media, publications in order to illustrate cultural processes by the direction of natural conservation.