Influence

This past Monday I participated in a conversation with a friend over a summary of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s thoughtful book, Commanding Hope. It was a good way to celebrate Earth Day and it was pleasing to hear that several participants were involved in local initiatives. We talked about the challenges of where to enter the climate conversation without becoming completely discouraged about the lack of inaction.

So it was worthwhile to stop by my local independent book store - it is their day tomorrow on April 27th by the way - and I try to patronize them when I can. It was good to find a book by Toronto’s former mayor, David Miller, who moved on to work with several major cities in the world and tell a positive story of what cities are doing. He reminds me of what a former colleague used to say about the arts. It’s important to act locally where the action is.

After all, these things are the local government responsibilities: planning and development, clean water, parks and recreation, housing, public transit and public health - and more. They affect our lives directly every single day. Miller also looks at how city concerns and responsibilities connect with the major environmental issues; official plans, energy and electricity, existing buildings and new ones, and management of waste. Miller provides lots of evidence of how cities worldwide are dealing with these matters in a positive way. Since these are places that most people in the world live, they matter. The book is called Solved and an earlier edition has just been reissued. It’s a worthwhile read.

I know my local city councilor through his excellent monthly newsletter and I have met him in person. He has my support. A friend remarked that another one never answers calls or responds to questions. There is a solution to that one. VOTE!

Curiosity

It has been said to kill the cat and may lead to endless experimentation and dangerous and unnecessary exploration – but I’m guilty as charged.  For me, it is even a positive value. The danger for us in the modern age is that it leads to endless exploration of trivia.  Sometimes though, it can lead in positive directions following the threads to new sources and insights.

I have been working on a project for nearly almost a year as the recording secretary of a steering group developing a plan for a regional institution.  Like most, it is concerned with its own survival and the effects that the pandemic has brought – lack of engagement and donations on the on hand, but also leaps into new technology as a means of communication and rallying the troops. What has been somewhat surprising is little consideration of a wider context. The pandemic plays largely of course, but the environmental crisis hardly receives a mention. The institution had a key role in the suppression of indigenous rights and culture, but that is seldom mentioned either. Maslow’s priority of needs, where food and shelter are primary for everyone in the world get little attention, because they are assumed for all, which is by no means the case.  It is the survival of the institution that counts – even though the institution’s important message is action in the world, rather than a place to escape its needs and look for comfort instead.

At least one participant in the plan decided to look at other models – one well known, but new to me - permaculture. Starting with an agricultural focus, it proposes a different model from the agribusiness one so common in developed countries; there are links to indigenous land practices that make sense too. Its principles can be used as a metaphor for other ways to think. Since I didn’t know anything about it, I looked it up and took out books from the local library – including a beginner’s guide that made me think differently about my balcony garden and trying different plantings next spring – more vegetables and herbs, fewer flowers.

Further research led me to a book entitled Human Permaculture. It is interesting that it is translated from the French version – and that one of the authors lives in Quebec. Much of it relates to better use of intuition which involves the right brain cortex.  I was already better versed in some of that theory, created by Ned Herrman; similar curiosity more than twenty years ago had made me travel to North Carolina to become licensed in training that promoted more balanced use of the brain’s capabilities. Getting out the old manuals confirmed the strength of that model.

Returning to Human Permaculture, I met a reference to Rob Hopkins, another Permaculture practitioner.  I’m not one to look up everything on my phone as some among us do, but I dropped the tablet and went to the laptop with its big screen attached. Rob Hopkins looked like someone to pursue and suddenly his book, The Transition Handbook, arrived on my tablet thanks to one click from Amazon. It got read cover to cover. It was originally published in 2008 and reprinted three times in 2009. I was reading the 2010 digital version.  Among the things that really stood out were two – a description of what tar sand oil extraction really involved – a crazy use of energy to extract even more – and an understanding of change based on a plan to move away from addiction. Both these are extremely powerful. I found it interesting in talking to a psychologist friend that he has used this book for a long time.

But it was 2023, not 2010.  What does Hopkins think now.  Of course he had written another book since, and it was soon on my tablet.  It has the engaging title, From What is to What If. Now I was reading it – equally worthwhile.  But it struck me that I should go back to his first book and finish that.  Human Permaculture wasn’t finished either, but I could renew it from the library and drop back later. I finished The Transition Handbook, and knew that it was a book that I would want to reference many times in the future. The advantage of digital books is the strength of hyperlinks that allow one to move so effortlessly. But of course there are all those suggestions. Rob Hopkin’s list of must read books referenced one by Thomas Homer-Dixon.  I knew the name and even the name of the book, The Upside of Down. Back to Amazon to find that he had written a couple of others since.  I settled on Commanding Hope, written in 2020. I’m now at Chapter 15, while the other books languish.

Is this a fatal bout of curiosity?  One side of me suggests that this is a busy-bee path flitting from here to there without settling anywhere or anything.  But the other side suggests that some of it makes sense.  Homer Dixon’s book is the toughest and most thoughtful.  He sets the stage with the reality of all the matters that the others have been dealing with – the institutional crises – what would he be writing today with Hamas and Israel and two countries who fired their speakers in their respective governments?

I’m just on the cusp of his actual recommendations of how we must go forward. I’ll soldier on because it will be the most demanding. As a parent, he shares his concern for his own children’s future, and he admires the simplicity of Greta Thunberg’s directives. He is inspired by one woman’s fight against nuclear bombs decades ago – the mother of Elizabeth May, the Canadian politician, who has often been the sole voice of reason even in that self-centred parliament. I’ll keep reading – because all of these writers call me to action. I simply want to act in the most effective way possible – and not stop searching.