The Canopy of Scarcity
Lateral Violence and the Fight for Light
There are forests where the canopy grows so thick that very little light ever reaches the ground below.
From above, these places can appear lush, even thriving. The crowns of the tallest trees stretch wide and green against the sky, their leaves shimmering with the appearance of abundance, while beneath them the forest floor twists itself into impossible shapes just to survive.
Ferns bend sideways toward fractured beams of sunlight. Saplings grow thin and reaching. Roots spread desperately through crowded soil searching for nutrients that should have been plentiful.
Everything beneath the canopy learns,
eventually,
that survival is tied to access:
to light,
to space,
to nourishment,
to the fragile permission to grow.
When living things are kept too long in deprivation, the forest begins to change. Not always through dramatic collapse, but through quieter transformations: vines tightening around neighbouring trunks, roots competing where they should have intertwined, smaller growth choking other small growth simply to touch one brief patch of sun. In forests shaped by scarcity, even beautiful things can begin wounding one another in their search for what should never have been rationed in the first place.
Lateral violence within institutions often grows this way. Not from inherent cruelty or some individual moral failing untethered from context, but from systems that distribute dignity unevenly. From environments where recognition is scarce, safety is conditional, resources are withheld, and proximity to power becomes mistaken for power itself.
Under institutional canopies that hoard light, people who have themselves been bent by exclusion, precarity, silence, and survival sometimes turn sideways toward one another because upward confrontation feels impossible, dangerous, or futile. The tragedy of lateral violence is not only the harm itself, but the way institutions often remain untouched while communities already carrying the weight of marginalization exhaust themselves fighting for scraps of sunlight beneath branches they did not plant.
When Roots Forget They Are Connected
In healthy forests, light is not treated as a reward. It moves freely through the canopy in shifting patterns, touching bark, moss, water, fungus, fern, sapling, and stone alike. Growth does not depend upon another living thing’s diminishment because the forest understands itself as interconnected, each layer participating in the survival of the whole. Fallen trees become nourishment, dense root systems stabilize the soil for neighbouring growth, mycelial networks carry nutrients beneath the surface toward weakened trees, sustaining life in places where the eye might only perceive decay.
Even in struggle, there is relationship.
Even in hardship, there is reciprocity.
But forests shaped by prolonged scarcity begin to forget this.
When sunlight becomes inconsistent, when nutrients are depleted, when the canopy thickens beyond what the forest floor can sustain, survival behaviours emerge. Branches stretch wider, not toward beauty, but toward possession. Roots compete where they once intertwined. Smaller growth bends itself around whatever fragments of light remain, learning to survive through proximity rather than collective flourishing. Over time, the ecosystem itself becomes strained by conditions it did not create. The tragedy is that the living things beneath the canopy often begin responding to one another as though they are the source of deprivation, rather than recognizing the structure above them that has interrupted the natural flow of nourishment in the first place.
Institutions can alter human ecosystems in much the same way.
In environments where affirmation is rationed, where opportunities are inconsistently distributed, where visibility determines safety, and where recognition becomes tied to survival, people can begin experiencing one another through the logic of scarcity. A colleague’s success may feel like evidence that there is less room for your own voice. Another person’s relationship with leadership may begin to feel threatening rather than relational.
Recognition becomes currency.
Access becomes protection.
Proximity to institutional approval begins masquerading as stability,
even when the institution itself remains fundamentally unstable.
Under these conditions, lateral violence rarely announces itself as violence.
Sometimes it arrives through exclusion disguised as professionalism: through silence where care should have existed, through strategic distancing, through storytelling that subtly repositions harm, through the quiet withholding of support in moments where solidarity would have altered the outcome. Sometimes it emerges through competition so normalized that people no longer recognize it as a symptom of institutional design, but instead interpret it as personality, conflict, incompatibility, or individual weakness.
Perhaps this is part of what makes lateral violence so difficult to name within justice-oriented spaces in particular. Many people enter these environments carrying genuine care, deep convictions, and histories of harm themselves. Yet institutions structured around scarcity can still pull even well-intentioned people into patterns of survival that fracture trust and redirect pain sideways.
The forest does not become strained because every tree is malicious;
it becomes strained because ecosystems deprived of nourishment
begin adapting to deprivation.
There is a profound grief in realizing that some institutions teach people to guard light instead of share it. That systems capable of producing collective transformation can also produce quiet territorialism. That communities built around liberation can still replicate conditions where people feel forced to compete for legitimacy, belonging, visibility, or safety. Under canopies of scarcity, even those committed to justice can begin fearing one another’s growth instead of recognizing it as evidence that the forest itself is still alive.
The Difference Between Survival and Consumption
Not every struggling thing in a forest becomes dangerous.
Some trees grow crooked after years without sunlight and still manage to leave space for neighbouring branches. Some root systems, though deprived themselves, continue sending nutrients through hidden fungal networks toward weaker growth nearby, participating in the survival of the ecosystem even while carrying the marks of drought within their own bark. Some plants adapt to difficult conditions without turning the forest itself into a site of extraction. Scarcity changes living things, certainly. Prolonged deprivation leaves impressions upon ecosystems just as it leaves impressions upon people; however, difficulty alone does not inevitably produce destruction. There is a difference between being shaped by drought and becoming devoted to it.
There is a difference between surviving within wounded systems
and learning to recreate those wounds wherever you go.
This distinction matters deeply within institutions.
Conversations about lateral violence often remain fixed at the level of systemic analysis, as though understanding the conditions that produce harm somehow softens the impact of the harm itself. Systems absolutely matter. Institutional scarcity distorts relationships. Environments structured around precarity, conditional belonging, inconsistent safety, competition for recognition, and proximity to power create fertile ground for sideways harm to emerge. People who spend long enough beneath canopies that ration dignity may begin absorbing the logic of deprivation into the way they move through community. It is important to remember that although ecosystems influence behaviour, they do not erase responsibility. Even within damaged forests, living things still participate in choices about what they cultivate around them. Some continue reaching toward reciprocity despite the drought while others begin organizing themselves around possession.
There are people who remain capable of noticing when fear has begun narrowing them. People who recognize when exhaustion sharpens their tone, hardens their posture, or pulls them toward defensiveness and control. People who understand that survival can distort perception and who remain willing, even imperfectly, to return to reflection, repair, and accountability when harm is named. Like forests recovering after wildfire, they retain the capacity for regeneration because they are still responsive to relationship itself.
Their roots have not entirely closed,
their bark still softens when touched by water,
their understanding of justice continues expanding
beyond their own immediate injury.
These are not flawless people.
They may still cause harm.
They may still stumble under pressure, react from fear, or struggle beneath institutional strain.
But somewhere within them remains an orientation toward collective flourishing rather than domination.
They have not entirely surrendered themselves to scarcity.
…And then there are other forms of harm that emerge when survival calcifies into identity.
In damaged forests, there are forms of invasive growth that no longer merely seek nourishment, but begin reorganizing the ecosystem around their own expansion. Vines tighten around neighbouring trunks until the weight of them becomes suffocating. Dense overgrowth spreads across the forest floor so aggressively that younger saplings cannot access enough sunlight to mature. Root systems deplete surrounding soil while offering nothing back in return, extracting from the ecosystem without participating in its renewal. The issue is no longer adaptation to difficult conditions; the issue becomes domination itself and the gradual restructuring of the environment around one organism’s need for control, possession, visibility, or survival at any cost.
Human ecosystems can begin mirroring these patterns in ways that are often difficult to name directly because the harm rarely arrives dramatically at first. More often, it emerges through subtle but cumulative acts of erosion: chronic undermining disguised as concern, public allyship paired with private exclusion, intimacy weaponized into information gathering, stories reshaped carefully enough to preserve innocence while destabilizing someone else’s credibility. Sometimes the harm takes the form of strategic closeness to institutional power, where proximity itself becomes leveraged as protection or influence. Sometimes it appears through the quiet withholding of support in moments where solidarity might have altered the emotional terrain entirely. The behaviours may remain just deniable enough to evade accountability while still reshaping the atmosphere of an entire team, community, or institution.
Long before people can always articulate what is happening, their nervous systems often already know.
Conversations become cautious around certain individuals and rooms subtly reorganize themselves in response to one person’s moods, ambitions, or insecurities. People begin overexplaining themselves, rehearsing interactions afterward, second-guessing their own perceptions, or shrinking parts of themselves preemptively in order to avoid becoming the next site of tension. Creativity diminishes beneath chronic vigilance. Trust thins slowly enough that people sometimes mistake the exhaustion for normal workplace stress rather than recognizing it as an ecosystem adapting itself around ongoing relational harm.
One of the clearest distinctions between someone still capable of repair
and someone becoming dangerous to the ecosystem
lies in their relationship to accountability itself.
Living systems capable of renewal respond when disruption occurs. There is movement within healthy ecosystems, a responsiveness that allows life to remain interconnected even after disturbance; however, people deeply invested in lateral violence often experience accountability not as an opportunity for reflection, repair, or reconnection, but as a threat to identity, status, control, or institutional positioning. Reflection gives way to deflection, harm becomes narrative management, and vulnerability becomes performance carefully calibrated for self-preservation. Other people’s pain is no longer encountered as something worthy of witness, but as an inconvenience that must be minimized, redirected, discredited, or absorbed quietly for the sake of maintaining appearance.
Over time, entire communities can begin organizing themselves around the person causing harm. Emotional energy shifts away from creativity, connection, curiosity, and collective purpose and toward anticipation, management, and survival. People become careful in ways they were never meant to be careful with one another, language narrows, honesty becomes risky, and tenderness retreats underground like water during drought. Meanwhile, the institution above often continues mistaking endurance for health simply because collapse has not yet become visible from the canopy.
This is part of what makes lateral violence within justice-oriented spaces especially heartbreaking.
Shared language about liberation does not automatically produce liberatory behaviour.
People can speak fluently about equity while reproducing domination interpersonally. They can understand oppression structurally while still weaponizing vulnerability, relationships, institutional proximity, or moral credibility against others. Awareness alone does not transform relational practice; sometimes, people learn the language of healing before they learn how to stop harming the living things beside them.
This does not mean communities should abandon compassion, but compassion untethered from discernment can become another form of ecosystem collapse. Not every struggling tree requires removal; some need healthier conditions, some need restoration. some need space, accountability, and the possibility of renewed relationship in order to recover their capacity for reciprocity. Yet ecosystems also require boundaries against patterns of growth that repeatedly choke surrounding life. Forests cannot survive if every living thing is expected to endlessly absorb damage in the name of understanding the drought.
At some point, protecting the possibility of collective flourishing requires naming what is happening clearly, carefully, and without cruelty…because forests do not heal by pretending that every form of growth is equally life-giving.
Reading the Forest for Distortion
In every ecosystem, there are signals that something is no longer moving in balance, although they rarely arrive in ways that announce themselves cleanly or insist on immediate recognition, instead emerging through a slow accumulation of small shifts in tone, in trust, in relational ease, where what once felt open begins to feel increasingly careful, and what once felt mutual begins to feel subtly managed.
Not all forms of harm enter a space as rupture. In fact, some of the most destabilizing patterns in institutional life arrive without overt conflict at all, unfolding instead through sequences that only become visible over time, where trust is not broken in a single moment but gradually reconfigured through omissions, selective framings, and the quiet redistribution of certainty, until people find themselves no longer fully confident in what they experienced, only that something in the relational field no longer feels stable.
Lateral violence rarely begins as a single identifiable rupture. More often, it unfolds through patterns that only make sense in hindsight: trust is eroded in small increments, clarity is interrupted just enough to create doubt, and over time people begin adjusting their own behaviour to avoid further destabilization.
One of the most common mechanisms in this pattern is not overt aggression,
but narrative control.
It can look like selectively sharing information so that only partial versions of events circulate. It can look like reframing relational breakdowns in ways that remove context while preserving innocence. It can look like alignment in public spaces paired with withdrawal, omission, or distortion in private ones. It can look like professional correctness that masks a relational field becoming increasingly uncertain, cautious, and fragmented.
And because none of this is always explicit, people often begin to doubt their own read on reality long before anything is formally acknowledged.
This is how covert harm survives in institutions:
not through visibility,
but through accumulated ambiguity
that produces confusion without rupture.
Over time, these patterns do not remain contained within individual relationships; they begin to reorganize the ecosystem itself, as people adjust to them (often without conscious awareness, but not always) by becoming more cautious in what they say, more measured in how they interpret interactions, more careful about what they bring forward, until the relational environment itself begins to reflect the distortion.
By the time harm is named, the system is often already conditioned to interpret it as misunderstanding, personality conflict, or competing perceptions, because the absence of a clear rupture makes it difficult to anchor what has actually been happening, even when multiple people have been quietly adapting their behaviour in response to the same pattern.
It is often at this point that another layer of distortion can appear in institutional environments that value relational language: the introduction of “boundaries” after trust has already been eroded and accountability has been raised.
Boundaries themselves are not the issue. In healthy systems, they are clear, consistent, and communicated early enough to support mutual understanding over time.
In distorted relational dynamics, boundary language can appear retrospectively (after harm has already occurred) and function less as clarity and more as containment, redirecting attention away from what has happened and toward the person who is finally naming its impact.
The sequence matters.
What is often experienced is a reversal of relational orientation: the person navigating confusion or erosion becomes positioned as the source of disruption for naming it, while the original pattern of harm is reframed as misunderstanding, miscommunication, or boundary violation.
This is one of the most disorienting aspects of lateral violence in institutional settings, not because it is always loud or dramatic, but because it is often coherent enough on the surface to avoid intervention while still producing a deep internal fragmentation for those closest to it, who begin to question their own perception in order to maintain access to stability, belonging, or professional safety.
The question is never simply whether someone is “right” or “wrong” in isolation, or whether their language is technically justified, but what pattern is being produced over time in the relational field: whether clarity is increasing or decreasing, whether accountability produces movement or containment, whether repair is possible or whether narrative stabilization consistently replaces it.
When this pattern persists,
systems often struggle to read
what is actually occurring.
On paper, everything can look reasonable: someone is “setting boundaries,” someone else is “reacting,” someone else is “misunderstanding.” But underneath that coherence, there may be a much more accurate pattern: a relational rupture that was not addressed when it occurred, followed by a reframing that shifts attention away from impact and toward optics.
In healthy relational ecosystems, accountability tends to create movement. There is discomfort, yes, but also responsiveness, clarification, repair (even if imperfect).
In distorted ones, accountability often produces containment instead of movement. The story becomes fixed in a way that protects the person enacting harm from having to re-enter the relational field with transparency, and over time the system learns (quietly) that certain forms of inquiry are not safe to pursue too deeply.
The ecosystem then adapts around what cannot be questioned.
This is where discernment becomes less abstract and more urgent, because it asks us to look not only at intention, language, or isolated incidents, but at what the forest becomes over time when certain patterns remain uninterrupted.
Not all harm is loud.
Not all harm is visible in the moment it happens.
Not all “boundaries” function as care.
Some are repair.
Some are protection.
…And some
are the final shape
that avoidance takes
when accountability finally arrives
too close to the source of impact.
Over time, when these patterns remain unaddressed, the ecosystem begins to reorganize around them, not because they are understood, but because they cannot be interrupted. Distortion does not always announce itself while it is still unfolding.
It often becomes visible
only once the ecosystem
has already begun
to adapt around it.
What Becomes Visible When We Look Again
The following questions are where we can begin and are for reflective purposes that can be used to unearth the thoughts, emotions, and lived experiences that shape our relationship to one another and to lateral violence interpersonally and institutionally. We hope that you find time for introspection and that the following questions provide you the opportunity to check in on your root system!
For noticing patterns in real time:
What is the pattern over time, not the explanation in the moment?
Is clarity increasing in this relationship, or is it becoming more difficult to trust my own read on events?
Do I feel more grounded in my perception over time, or more uncertain and self-questioning?
For relational accountability:
When I raise concern, does the dynamic shift toward understanding, or toward defensiveness and narrative control?
Is there space for mutual reflection, or does accountability consistently move in one direction?
Does repair actually change future behaviour, or does the pattern repeat in new forms?
For boundary language and distortion:
Are boundaries being communicated early and consistently, or introduced only after harm is named?
Does boundary-setting create clarity and mutual understanding, or does it redirect attention away from impact?
Am I being asked to focus more on my reaction than on what happened in the relationship?
For systemic awareness:
Where is the system unintentionally rewarding avoidance, narrative control, or proximity to power over relational accountability?
What patterns persist even after they are named or surfaced?
Who consistently adjusts their behaviour to maintain stability, and what does that reveal about the ecosystem?
Where the Light Asks Us to Look Again
There are moments in any ecosystem where understanding alone is no longer enough and what is required instead is a different kind of attention. Not the kind that rushes toward resolution, but the kind that stays close to what is difficult long enough to notice its shape, its pattern, its return. In forests shaped by scarcity, harm is rarely contained to a single moment; instead, it moves through repetition, through relationship, through what becomes normalized when no one is naming it clearly enough, or early enough, or often enough.
Reflection must shift depending on where we are standing in the ecosystem.
Not all questions belong to the same place.
Not all sightlines are the same.
There are questions for those who have been harmed.
Where did I begin to change myself in order to remain safe in a space that was not consistently safe for me?
What parts of my perception were shaped by needing to minimize, explain, or absorb harm in order to survive it?
Where did I start confusing my adaptation to harm with responsibility for it?
What would it mean to trust what I noticed in my body and relationships, even when it was not validated by others?
What has this experience taught me about what I need in order to feel grounded, seen, and protected in future environments?
Where do I still carry responsibility that was never mine to hold?
There are questions for those who may be causing harm, whether intentionally or through patterns learned in scarcity.
Where am I protecting my own position, influence, or proximity to power in ways that may be diminishing others?
What feedback have I received more than once, even indirectly, that I may have explained away instead of truly sitting with?
Where do I experience accountability as threat rather than as invitation to change?
In what ways might I be organizing narratives that preserve my own comfort, power, or position at the expense of clarity or repair?
When conflict arises, do I tend to move toward reflection and repair, or toward control of perception and outcome?
What would it require of me to stay in relationship with discomfort long enough for my behaviour to change, not just my intention?
There are questions for those tending systems, holding leadership, or shaping the conditions in which these dynamics emerge and are either interrupted or allowed to continue.
What patterns of interaction become visible only when I look across time rather than in isolated incidents?
Where might I be interpreting relational harm as personality conflict, communication breakdown, or mutual misunderstanding rather than systemic pattern?
Who carries the burden of emotional labour, interpretation, or mediation within this ecosystem, and what does that reveal about power?
Where are behaviours being indirectly rewarded, even if they contradict stated values?
What forms of lateral violence might be subtle, strategic, or relationally complex enough that they evade immediate detection, and what structures do I have in place to surface them anyway?
When harm is named, what tends to be protected first: people or stability?
And what does that answer tell me about the system I am responsible for shaping?
And then there is another lens, one less often named, but deeply present beneath the surface of all of this.
Not the lens of individuals or systems alone, but the ecology of witnessing itself.
Harm persists not only because it is enacted, but because it is mis-seen, under-seen, or too narrowly interpreted to be interrupted.
There are moments when the ecosystem is not failing because nothing is being noticed, but because what is being noticed is not being held in its full complexity.
Where am I naming individual behaviour without seeing the environmental conditions that make it more likely to emerge?
Where am I naming systems without acknowledging the specific relational dynamics that carry harm through them?
What do I assume I understand when I label something as conflict, toxicity, or misalignment?
What becomes possible when I hold both structure and behaviour at the same time, without collapsing one into the other?
And where might I be asked to see again, not because I have seen nothing, but because I have only seen part of the forest?
When the patterns begin to become visible in full (not as isolated incidents, but as repeating structures across time, across relationships, across the quiet ways an ecosystem learns to contort itself around imbalance), something in us is asked to shift.
Not toward certainty and not toward resolution,
but toward responsibility
for what we now
can no longer unsee.
Seeing clearly is not the end of this work; it is the beginning of a different kind of participation inside the system itself and one that requires more than naming harm after it has already circulated, more than holding understanding in private reflection, more than tracing patterns once they have already taken root in the relational field.
It requires interruption.
It requires practice.
It requires refusing the quiet ways
distortion reproduces itself
through us
when no one is paying close enough attention to
how it moves.
What follows are not universal solutions, but possible interventions and ways of engaging lateral violence at different layers of the ecosystem; not as an abstraction, but as something that can be disrupted in real time, in relationship, and in structure.
Interrupting distortion at the level of perception and narrative interpersonally:
Refuse “single-story closure.”
When someone offers a clean, self-contained version of events that removes relational context, do not engage it as complete. Hold it as partial data, not truth. Lateral violence often survives through the social permission to let incomplete narratives stand unchallenged.
Name the shift in epistemic power, not just behaviour.
Instead of only naming the emotional impact, try naming the relational pattern itself: “I notice I leave these conversations feeling less clear about what actually happened…” or ““I notice I leave these conversations questioning my own understanding of events…” or “I notice clarity keeps dissolving in these conversations rather than increasing.” Lateral violence often survives not through overt conflict, but through the gradual erosion of relational clarity.
Track reversals of repair responsibility.
A key marker of distortion is when the person naming harm becomes responsible for stabilizing the relationship after naming it, where the individual denying transgression situates their lack of accountability not as a behavioural concern, but insinuates the harmed individual has overstepped, been oversensitive, or is not addressing a concern that is rooted from clear patterns of lateral harm. Refusing this reversal is itself an intervention.
Interrupt “retrospective boundarying.”
When boundaries are introduced only after accountability is raised, treat it as a timeline event, not a relational fact. To course correct this and vocalize acknowledgement of the avoidance, try stating: “I’m noticing this boundary is being introduced after harm was named, can we return to what happened before this point?”
Do not over-explain clarity into ambiguity.
Over-explanation is often where lateral violence feeds: people start negotiating their perception instead of trusting it.
Disrupting how harm circulates through proximity and silence in community:
Stop routing trust through informal power.
Communities often unconsciously decide that credibility flows through closeness to certain people. Interrupt this by refusing to treat proximity as validation.
Make “social consequence drift” visible.
When someone’s behaviour changes how safe others feel to speak, the community must name that shift explicitly, not just the behaviour, but the climate change it produces.
Refuse triangulated truth-making.
If understanding of a situation requires going through multiple intermediaries, the system is already distorted. Communities need direct relational accountability channels that bypass narrative laundering.
Treat silence as data, not neutrality.
In lateral violence systems, silence is rarely absence and is often adaptation. Communities need to learn to read what silence is protecting.
Do not let “conflict fatigue” replace pattern recognition.
One of the most common institutional failures is exhausting people into accepting distortion as normal.
Interrupting the conditions that make lateral violence stable institutionally:
Audit where ambiguity increases someone’s protection or authority.
If unclear communication, selective framing, or informal interpretation consistently benefits the same people, the system is structurally producing lateral violence conditions.
Track “accountability inversion points.”
Identify exactly where the system flips: the moment the person naming harm becomes the risk and the pattern becomes background noise. These are structural failure points, not interpersonal misunderstandings.
Separate narrative fluency from relational integrity.
Institutions often reward people who can explain situations well…even when those explanations obscure harm. Build processes that privilege pattern impact over rhetorical coherence.
Interrupt proximity-based immunity.
No one should gain protection from accountability because they are close to decision-making structures. If they do, lateral violence becomes structurally protected.
Design for “pattern exposure over resolution.”
Most systems rush to resolve conflict. Lateral violence thrives there. Instead, build mechanisms that prioritize making patterns visible over making them disappear quickly.
What ultimately becomes necessary is not a final resolution of the forest, but a different relationship to what it has revealed. Once we can see how easily scarcity reorganizes perception, how quickly relational harm becomes normalized when it is distributed through proximity, silence, and narrative control, the question is no longer whether these patterns exist, but what we choose to do in their presence.
Not from urgency alone,
not from moral clarity in abstraction,
but from the ongoing practice of refusing
to let distortion settle
into inevitability.
Forests do not change through awareness alone; they change when those within them begin to interrupt the conditions that make harm feel natural, when they protect what remains possible in each other rather than what has already been justified, and when they remember that light was never meant to be hoarded at the top of the canopy, but carried through the entire system as a shared condition of survival.
Maybe that is where this work quietly returns to us.
Not as something finished,
but as something lived,
again and again,
in the small,
often unglamorous choices
to pause before repeating a story,
to notice what a system rewards,
to stay present
when it would be easier
to look away.
The forest does not ask for perfection from its inhabitants; it asks for participation in its ongoing possibility.
This is why we keep learning how to be with one another in ways that do not reproduce scarcity in the very places where something more generative could take root, choosing instead (imperfectly, repeatedly) to tend what makes shared life possible.
Here’s to the slow, steady work of learning how to make enough room for one another to grow.
Yours in shared sunlight (and stubborn hope),
- Ms. K
