Plan B isn't Planet B

No Planet B is the title of a current post from the Parliament of World Religions. They are aunching a webinar series entitled Faith and Climate Webinar series and you can find out more about that here.

Their Climate Action Program is also launching a special "WebForum" page on the Parliament's website to provide background about the Faith and Climate Webinar Series and begin a discussion of webinar topics ahead of time. The WebForum will feature a lead essay by a panelist from the upcoming Faith and Climate webinar, with written responses from other panelists and invited experts from the field, as well as comments and questions from readers. Each WebForum topic will include background information about the specific webinar topic, with links to further reading in anticipation of the webinar itself.

Plastics - A mini-history

To take on plastics is to take on consumerism itself:

 For some time we have agreed that too much is bad – but without doing anything about it.  Scientists, though were aware of it much earlier.  The current focus on microplastics – tiny bits entering the food chain – has increased awareness. As well as the perceptions changed by images of waste islands at sea or suffering animals, there has been a shift from seeing plastics and other waste as litter to understanding of it as a dangerous pollutant.

 Climate change is hard to understand – but plastics are everywhere in front of our nose.  I believe I share basic ignorance with most around me.  What is plastic, who makes it and where does it come from?  I turned to an article by Stephen Buranyi in the Guardian published last November for some basic information. It’s comprehensive, thorough and quite long so I am summarizing with some direct quotations:

• ·Plastic is a global industrial product.

• ·Plastic is a catch-all term for the product made by turning a carbon-rich chemical mixture into a solid structure.

• The raw materials come from fossil fuels, and many of the same vast companies that produce oil and gas also produce plastic, often in the same facilities.

• The story of plastic is the story of the fossil fuel industry – and the oil-fueled boom in consumer culture that followed the second world war.

• To make it requires coal, water and air

• By developing new plastic products – like Dow’s invention of Styrofoam in the 1940s, or the multiple patents held by Mobil for plastic films used in packaging – these companies were effectively creating new markets for their oil and gas

• Thin plastic wrapping was introduced in the early 1950s, displacing the paper and cloth protecting consumer goods and dry cleaning. By the end of the decade, DuPont reported more than a billion plastic sheets sold to retailers.

• At the same time, plastic entered millions of homes in the form of latex paint and polystyrene insulation.

• Soon, plastic was everywhere, even in outer space. In 1969, the flag that Neil Armstrong planted on the moon was made of nylon.

• The following year, Coke and Pepsi began replacing their glass bottles with plastic versions.

• Plastic did more than merely take the place of existing materials, leaving the world otherwise unchanged.  It actually helped kickstart the global economy’s shift to disposal consumerism.

• Plastic meant profit – but it also meant rubbish. A backlash started in 1969 heavily opposed by the industries that produced it.

• Rather than blaming the companies that had promoted disposable packaging and made millions along the way, these same companies argued that irresponsible individuals were the real problem.

• Household recycling was later seen as the answer – a solution pushed by the manufacturing industries as simple and effective. The problem with these rosy predictions was that plastic is one of the worst materials for recycling.

• In the intervening years, global plastic production has rocketed from some 160 million tonnes in 1995 to 340 million tonnes today. Recycling rates are still dismally low.

• Plastic isn’t just an isolated problem that we can banish from our lives, but simply the most visible product of our past half-century of rampant consumption. 

What prompted me to do more research on this was after reading the article on bioplastics (materials based on plants rather than fossil fuels) in Paul Hawken’s Drawdown, a book that I highly recommend in my book section here on the site. You can also go to the related Website.

I like the idea of a Drawdown challenge after just completing one. I want to be sure that a future one related to plastics makes me learn more about the industrial side and question its impact - not just my personal use.

Skills versus Jobs

There is a good article in today's Globe and Mail by the president and CEO of Royal Bank of Canada on a topic that is good reading for any parent - and a worthwile reflection for any of us who have to deal with both skills and jobs.

When I was finishing university, and trying to choose whether to continue with graduate work in English language and literature or become a secondary school teacher, my father's advice was "Be a teacher.  You'll never make much money but you'll always have a job".  As it turned out he was wrong on both counts.

My father was someone worth listening to in terms of his own career.  His own father died in 1916 when he was only 16 and the last child of a large family.  He went to work in the munitions plant in the nearly town of Nobel and dreamed of becoming a chemist like his brother-in-law, but also felt responsible for helping his mother financially.  Good at math, he became the town clerk of Parry Sound in his 20's and later the City Treasurer in Kitchener, then a mid sized industrial city.  With its twin city, Waterloo, the pair were home to several Canadian insurance companies and he was recruited to join one of them as assistant general manager as its 13th employee.  From there he went on to become general manager,  president and CEO and ultimately chairman of the board. 

I did become a secondary school teacher and married soon after., abandoning the dream of going to Yale. Over the next 20 years, we had four children and I also had several teaching jobs - and of course became redundant when the high school student population evaporated, because I had not stayed with the same school board but had moved and taught in several communities. 

Like many of my contemporary out-of-work teachers, I became an arts administrator in an era when there was no professional accreditation for such a job.  "We used to ask our colleages, "So what did you used to teach?"  All we knew was how to organize and be ready for whatever happened tomorrow.  We were mentored by colleagues who had done it longer and over the next decade universities woke up and created MBAs in Arts Management.  I was soon redundant again but not unhappy about it -  this time I took some additional skills along learned on the job - writing, editing, fundraising, conference planning, touring, concert production - all learned in depth over eight years.

They were useful in the next "job" which was actually a series of consulting projects involving creation of new arts facilities - finding the financial resources to make them happen, building the governance and operating structures, marketing - and assessing feasibility and operating plans.  But since these were not "jobs" but contracts, I also became a software vendor of a tool that mapped and organized ideas and plans.  This made me work more in the digital as well as the real world and I still feel quite bi-cultural - even though the new digital wolrd is both exciting and daunting.

AI and the Internet of Things have been around for a while and if Globe readers are just waking up to them, they are in trouble.  Like me, two of my working sons have had several disruptive careers rather than jobs -  another still continues to teach at a university, though not in the field he pursued at a graduate level.   There will be lots of work going forward - but not the secure job that leads to be chairman of the board. 

The Globe's writer cites a collection of "C" words - critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, core skills, competency - as the skills for today and tomorrow in the changing landscape.  Acquiring these starts long before people enter the workplace.   I'm glad that RBC is starting :Future Launch" that omits the resume and will actually pay interns.  But creating work in future generations starts with how we embody attitudes toward about whatever our age and stage. The kids will be all right if they have good mentors.

Smart Girls

The morning paper - read on a tablet - has a headline "A new way of thinking" promoting a "growth mindset".  (Globe and Mail, Report on Business)

Carol Dweck, author of Mindset

I'm amused at what are seen as radical new ideas by the author. She cites Carol Dweck's book, Mindset, the New Psychology of Success as the road to be travelled.. Dweck, a Stanford professor has excellent credentials, but I find it a tad depressing that anyone has to tell us of the perils of fixed mindset. The evidence is all around us in the older generation but I'm more optimistic about the young.  I like to spend time with young children, and a four year old recently had no hesitation in interrupting me in a  class session to check out something that she didn't quite understand. No fixed mindset there.

I tried the test on Dweck's site.  I scored 0 on Fixed Mindset.  Good start to the week! One of the things I noticed is how devoid of image the site is.  I wonder what that says about her interaction with the world outside of research and academia.

The article posits that fixed mindset is holding girls back from STEM fields - science, technology, engineering and math. That may be true - but I also wonder if the current worship of these fields is obscuring the fact that other things are equally important to these girls. Maybe, like this old girl, they are interested in learning to create beauty and goodness - maybe even truth of other sorts.  Tomorrow's article will probably decry soft skills and the lack of emotional intelligence.

Life long learning never stops. Even when I know this, it doesn't hurt to go back to school for real or online.  The best recent exposure to learning how to learn came from Barbara Oakley's two courses on Coursera, Learning How to Learn and Mindshift.  It's worth noting that Oakley taught herself how to create an online course and did so for less than  $5,000 - and she was summoned by Harvard to find out why her course had attracted more users than all  their courses combined - produced at hundreds of thousands of dollars. No matter where learning wants us to go, there are many practical ideas here that consolidates what I already know but also provides some new helpful strategies.  Check these out.