My writings - and those of others.
Celebrate Earth Day
Happy Earth Day!
Last year was bitter sweet as I had to cancel an arts event, where several artists donated their service to support environmental efforts as part of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary. The earth continues to need our reverence. Thomas Berry suggests the need to reframe our understanding - that humans are subjects along with all the other evolutionary creatures and elements which we have too often thought of as objects for our use and exploitation.
Even in a pandemic there are ways to celebrate:
Try the quizzes at the Earth Day 2021 site and see what you know: (I’m doing better on climate change than on climate literacy but I have work to do on both.)
Watch one of these videos:
Life in Color With David Attenborough,” on Netflix,
“Secrets of the Whales” the project of an even bigger power player, the filmmaker and deep-sea diver James Cameron.
Cher and the Loneliest Elephant,” streaming beginning Thursday on Paramount+ and playing on cable May 19 on the Smithsonian Channel,
the three hourlong episodes of “A Year to Change the World,” being shown in succession Thursday night on PBS stations. It follows Thunberg, then 16 and 17, as she travels the world in 2019 and 2020, giving speeches at climate conferences and educating herself — and through the documentary, us — i
Eco Anxiety and Climate Grief
In a discussion a year ago before we were all locked down, one participant expressed the view that there was little we could do about climate change and we should grieve and accept the death of many things we now take for granted. Another expressed how she was trying to do make small changes in her personal life – like using laundry detergent processed in small sheets. I wondered whether small changes mattered in the face of their impact and thought we should get better at lobbying. All these expressed our anxiety. We’re now more likely to be anxious about new spikes in the virus or access to vaccines, but these feelings are still there.
Some practitioners of mental health are doing something about it. A recent New York Times article reveals some interesting examples. One practitioner noticed how her students were reacting when they said they were losing sleep or constantly worried about the effect of climate change. Another remarked that hearing activists report on current issues left her in tears. In the last five years anxiety has doubled from 13 to 26 perc cent, according to research conducted jointly by George Mason University and Yale.
One scientist, Britt Wray, decided to do something about it. She started a weekly newsletter called GenDread. She offers practical advice and asks questions of her readers about what should be the priorities – moving them from depression to focusing on realistic actions they might consider. She also recognizes that negative emotions also can relate to denial and can serve as an invitation to wake up. Using a common Covid-19 mantra, she minds us that we are in this together.
Most of us have experienced eco-distress. I have it when I buy food in supermarket plastic containers – and as a single person, find that I throw out far too much packaging and food waste. I’m even experimenting with a food box order, where portioned ingredients create less waste and packing materials are recyclable. I’m reminded that my anxiety is minor and that the mental health professional remind us that serious anxiety or depression needs therapy.
One such therapist works with anxious Americans in workshops – but also counsels India farmers who have real threats to their crops caused by changes in weather patterns that threaten their livelihood. This is a good reminder to us affluent North Americans how privileged we are in avoiding the brunt of the problem so far. She notes that some of her American participants are moved to volunteer.
We can also learn from our First Nations people who express their grief with a much closer recognition of their unity with the land – taken from them by settler first by seizing it and then creating practices that destroy it.
Dr Wray reminds us that supporting one another can reduce our stress. The sense that we are in this together creates hope – and studies support this. Her own hope was well demonstrated when, after dealing with her own anxiety, she and her husband decided to bring a new infant into our challenged world.
A friend also sent me a link to the site of a European writer who is tackling the mental health and spiritual dimension of these problems as well. you can find them here.
New Books a New Era
A new administration in the US has meant that new roadmaps are being developed - and not a moment too soon. Visit Yale Climate Connections writer Michael Svoboda to learn more about these new books that will help us all move forward. You can find reviews of the books here.
Climate Emergency & Covid-19 - a Crisis of the Spirit
My college, Trinity at the University of Toronto, is currently initiating a Centre for Sustainability, a multi-disciplinary teaching and research facility examining the inter-relationships that the many facets of sustainability involves. The Alumni Society recently sponsored an online seminar to present some of the issues we face.
Taking the lead was Dr. Stephen Scharper, director of the institute’s sustainability initiative and well known across the campus for his teaching and involvement in several colleges and departments. He called us into a diagnostic moment in which we have agency – a spiritual space, he says.
It is time to question our role as a human species. What is our purpose and what is the response we are called to make? What on earth are we doing? First, epidemiology and ecology are both systems that focus on the common good and we need to learn more about both and how they work together.
Second, we are no longer nomads separated by distance and lack of knowledge of one another. We live in an earth community – which makes us responsible for social, cultural, political, economic and gender health with a responsibility to work against oppression and seek justice for all. The poor are affected most.
Third, we lead lives wherever we live with joy, love and hope. The response of our spiritual practices must relate to the natural world as our partner and we need to build new relationships with the economy, the culture and the biosphere. Thomas Berry is always a primary source in encouraging us to “Befriend the earth” as a subject to be embraced and valued rather than an object to be exploited.
What is required is balance. Oikos, the Greek word used for family, property and house – the household becomes a common prefix “eco” for both economics and ecology. There needs to be a balance between them. Scharper defines the economy as “a wholly owned subsidiary of the earth”.
We are in a position comparable to that of some Old Testament prophets who protested their summons from God by saying, “We didn’t ask to be here”. We are the ones to be here now.
Joy Fitzgibbon, Associate Director of the Margaret MacMillan Trinity One Program followed. She echoed the recent reports on the pandemic and agreed that the record of Canada is not great. Decisions have been made that are both helpful and unhelpful and we need to understand more of both. Public health tries to deal with trauma and our current situation reminds us of the trauma of the earth itself in need of healing. Fear, denial and attempts to control are common to both. Public health does not show as much evidence of global policy as environmental protection does – though the latter is more aspirational than effective. Fragmentation is less effective than collaboration and poor patterns of working together have a history.
Nevertheless she has hope and sees many opportunities to respond in a crisis – to learn, to embrace needs, to alter person life practices, to not waste time, to refashion society and to re-order better relationships between the human and non-human in our environment - and to admit many of the wrong things about the way we live. It’s possible to look at political and social structures and to listen to suffering through the voices of the marginalized, especially the poorest of the poor. She cites Henri Nouwen who describes being led out of the desert by someone who has been there.
There are good examples for learning. Among them are the Sustainable Development Goals, Access to Care, the Global Drug Facility and The Johns Hopkins site where one can monitor the progress of countries world side and track their progress in dealing with Covid-19. In our own country we can learn from places that have done well – the Maritime provinces – and the indigenous communities which in some places has done well with the pandemic by saying the have a “deep respect for the virus”. They also have much to teach us in their deep respect for the earth.
Sarah Levy, a graduate of the college and a past president of its Environment Society focuses on her post-doctoral research of animals. The pandemic has reminded us we are among them and subject to all the links in the chain with no vacuums among the levels. Pandemics are zootic and jump from animals to humans. We have not absorbed this reality.
While we may not have shopped at live animal markets for food, we are now living with finger pointing and racial epithets about their counties of origin. But we don’t acknowledge our own culpability in supporting factory farming, industrialized meat production and the use of immigrant farm workers, who are often housed and have been made to work in places that encourage the spread of disease. Sick animals get excluded from the food system only when there are serious outbreaks reaching our attention – like Mad Cow disease – and Canadian mink farms have recently come under scrutiny as dangerous.
These are not just symptoms but recognition of the spiritual dimension of “The Other”. What will our new normal look like, she asks. An opportunity is to listen to the animals, who have no voice. We have to be theirs. We love them and indulge them as pets. But there also needs to be recognition of how they serve us – less for physical labour now than they have done throughout history – but still for food. Their suffering during brief and incarcerated lives harms them – and by extension ourselves, as fellow creatures. We could return to smaller scale farms and develop more plant based diets – helping both the animals and the environment.
Much food for thought.
Airborne - Revisiting the Black Death Now
As we settle into a marathon rather than a sprint of Covid-19, the word “plague” is on the rebound. Jill Lepore outlines several in her New Yorker article “Don’t’ Come Any Closer”. She notes that in 1666 people weren’t very different from us as they examined their bodies for possible changes. They prayed, raged and poured over “books that frighted them terribly”. While journalists wonder today whether they should cover the meandering utterances of the president, the British government then thought that banning books would help. People in Britain fled to Hampton Court rather than the Hamptons, and shortages of horses for travel parallel our empty shelves of toilet paper. Instead of Zooming, some people in Italy fled to quieter realms and told the stories of the Boccaccio’s Decameron while in hiding from the Black Death.
It reminded me to look at what Thomas Berry said about that same Black Death in his article, “A New Story”, written in 1978 — the first of many works that influenced a rethinking of theology in many quarters. Berry saw the Black Death as a turning point in human understanding.
The Christian world up to that point, he observed, had been predictable. Seasons arrived and passed in the mediaeval world and it was not without hardship and suffering, but there appeared to be balance and renewal. But in a Europe where a third to a half of the population was wiped out, things changed forever. To many, the Black Death was a punishment from God. That perception enhanced a need for redemption and emphasized personal salvation through repentance. This change in emphasis from reliance on the original creation story happened long before the Protestant Reformation, Berry notes, but the reaction to the plague set in motion the individualism that would later question the power of corporate Catholicism and a move to Protestantism.
The other change of direction was almost like being drawn to a fire in spite of fearing it — a fascination with the cause of the plague that led to exploration and ultimately to the development of modern science. It gave birth to geology, a science that explored the origins of the planet and initiated our ability to move beyond history, Its sister science. paleontology, with its new ways of extracting bones of our ancestors, enhanced our understanding of history even more. The telescope and the microscope gave us entry to new worlds not previously imagined, and we gained a growing understanding that humans as a species evolved from simpler life forms. Our growing consciousness gave us the additional sense of being a species with a right to dominate the earth. Medicine and biology could save us,
Those times resonate today. One the one hand we have thought with confidence that we are in control of the environments that surround us through our growing advances in biological research — but suddenly we’re not. On the other hand, we have individuals who resolutely say they are “washed in the blood of the Lamb” and can go to their megachurches no matter what. When asked whether these folk might put others in danger by getting infected, they simply don’t care - because they are saved. The more secular adherents of capitalism want everything to open up and if that means sacrificing the elderly, even including themselves, — well fine.
The impact of the modern virus is small compared to the loss of life in the Black Death, but today’s news travels with the speed of the virus itself. Viruses have always moved along trade routes. In another New Yorker article, Kate Brown notes that the modern crowding of humans and animals in some parts of the world has contributed to zoonotic disease transmittal not only from east to west, but quite possibly through American megafarms. Their monocultures sent diseases from chickens and livestock to other parts of the world. Viruses have little respect for border or walls.
The poor in crowded cities, Brown notes, are often dependent on foraging on urban borders to find wild animals to eat and survive. Their manufactured factory goods travel the world. More affluent modern traders include people who exchange their boring local lives for more exotic foreign shores on planes and cruise ships — hothouses for viruses to grow and penetrate. We congregate in conference centers, concert halls, restaurants, bars, and some of us even in churches. We’re totally focused on our self created worlds and pay no attention to corona viruses unless we are research scientists. And the news that reaches every point is processed selectively. We like the metaphor of butterfly wings flapping on one side of the world having a direct impact in organizational seminars as a neat idea without applying to us — until it does.
I also can’t help getting Clive Hamilton’s book, Defiant Earth, out of my head. Has Gaia looked around and pondered, “I sent them hurricanes, I sent them floods, I sent them tornadoes, I sent them fires — all with increasing intensity. While the environmentalists moan and the politicians deny or ignore, what do I have to do to get their attention? Are they not seeing what they are doing to despoil the earth? Maybe I should try something that they can’t see but has a universal effect to scare the bejusus out of them”.
One of the effects is that climate change and the Anthropocene have almost disappeared in favour of the viral scene front and centre. The omni-present press can talk of nothing but medical disaster and economic disaster in an endless news cycle and when there is no news, they turn to analysis to assign blame. The battle between economics and health can suck up all the oxygen. If that is isn’t enough, add in the drama of federal versus state. Paying attention to the news these days is a disaster leading to outrage or despair. It’s as though climate changes and its ongoing danger have disappeared. The only odd glimmer that “Hey the air is cleaner now that there are fewer cars on the road” disappears as we now decide that the contamination of the virus isn’t caused only by travel and congregating. It’s in the air.