My writings - and those of others.
Drawdown Ecochallenge!
I recently signed up for a one day symposium on global warming and an additional lecture by environmentalist, Bill McKibben. One of the benefits of this is learning about another great initiative for the month of April – the Drawdown Ecochallenge. Using an approach to Global Warming that focuses on solutions rather than problems, it posits 100 actions that ordinary people can take that are already tested as effective. The large project is full of names I know from my previous life as an organizational consultant – founder Paul Hawken, biologist, Janine Benyus, and behavioural researcher Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit, which still resides on my Ipad. As a background document of the project attests:
““Several studies have shown that one’s belief that they should act and their intention to act are often not enough to help a person change an ingrained behavior, or to develop a less convenient or more difficult alternative to the habits they currently perform.””
When the project started in the US Northwest in 1993, there was a scarcity of information. Now we have too much data that is frequently unfocused, delivered in sound bites and of questionable authority. It’s good to see these concerns addressed in a positive way. This project, running from April 3rd-24th, is designed to do just that. It presents an attractive list of choices – some one-time actions, others to be attempted daily – and it includes a built- in tracking system. The Drawdown Ecochallenge encourages people to join an existing team or form one of their own – and includes another important behavioral technique – points like the stars we earned in second grade; they support the team as well as the individual.
Some of the options include educational awareness. Others include interaction with politicians that remind us to be citizens rather than numbers with names that they like to pin on us such as “taxpayers” or members of the “middle class”. Some actions get right down to how much food we are putting on our plates, or food packaging and food waste. EcoChallenge, the parent of the Drawdown project, also offers course suitable courses for a variety of organizations and enterprises.
I signed up with enthusiasm and forwarded the invitation to a list of colleagues, encouraging them to join our City of Toronto team – which so far is small. The enrollment bot told me that I have been overly ambitious and selected too many options. It already knows me too well and I’ll have to rise to the occasion. It is wonderful to see a positive structure that responds to our wish to begin collective action and gives concrete options to do so in a positive way.
Today's Leaders Have Arrived
Recently I watched a video of a panel in Georgia where a member of the audience asked panelist Mary Evelyn Tucker, “Where are today’s leaders”? He referenced some names of famous adults; Tucker reminded him that Martin Luther King was 26 years of age when he started his crusade for freedom. The moderator noted that emerging leaders are even younger and challenged the audience to watch Greta Thunberg tell us how we are doing so far.
You can see a recent talk here.
Thunberg says that she recognized the crisis on her own and her parents listened to her concerns. Her single action of sitting outside the Swedish Parliament She has inspired thousands of other teens to join her and has spoken at those who enjoy the title of leaders at the UN and Davos.
At the recent WaterDocs festival I became aware of another young leader, Autumn Peltier, who sat at the feet of her great aunt. Josephine Mandamin, known as Grandmother Josephine. She was an Anishinaabe grandmother, elder and water activist involved with the Mother Earth Water Walkers. They have riased awareness of the importance of water and our need to protect it.
Her great niece, Autumn Peltier carries the torch after re great aunt’s recent death and has already spoken to the United Nations on World Water Day in 2018 and earlier berated Canada’s Prime Minister for his inattention to the importance of Water. She connected with Swedish activism by attending the Children’s summit where she shared her story of the sacredness of water from an indigenous perspective. You can see her UN address here.
Both of these young women in their mid teens have a long perspective - already imagining themselves as grandmothers and having to tell their grandchildren how negligent we were in facing up to reality. They already show the pain of their wisdom in their serious young faces when they speak. At very least it has inspired me to share the story of the Water Walkers with the younger children that I know. As information speeds up, they know too much already and will hold us accountable.
Artists and Water
I’m looking forward to attending the WaterDocs Festival in Toronto next week. One person heavily involved in the film festival before her death was Marjorie Sharpe who was also the founder of the Toronto Community Foundation. The arts organization that I headed up for in the 1980’s was the Foundation’s first grant recipient and it was a privilege to connect with her every year - and wonderful to learn only now of her passion for water and the need to care for it.
Thomas Berry stressed the need for all disciplines and organizations to converge in the great work of telling the new story. The young founder of Unify noted in a presentation at the 2018 Parliament of World Religions that film is the Shakespeare of our day in terms of impact -and his own film on water attests to this, Music is a natural too - and I look forward to coming performances of Missa Gaia.
But I was especially moved by Bill McKibben’s article last fall about the role of two young poets. One watches ice turn to water. Another sees her home go under water. The UN reports give access to real rather than alternative facts. But we human beings need stories to bring the truth home in a way that encourages us to change. It was Shelley who told us that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". See how the poets help McKibben bring reality to this very important message.
You can see the full article here which also contains this video:
Out of Fashion
Fashion appears to be killing us. Fast Company tells us several really disturbing things about its effects.
Think you are helping by sending your old clothes to Goodwill? In California alone, the company spends seven million on dumping them.
In Vasteras, a town in Sweden, a power plant relies on unsold H&M products as a fuel source.
Every piece of unsold clothing has relied upon materials to make and package them and fuel to transport them. Now destroying them takes additional resources that are destroying us.
Clothing companies are making 53 million tons of clothes. Much of it ends up in landfill or in oceans; much of it includes plastics.
The writer of the article notes that some companies are trying to reduce their carbon footprint. Nevertheless 100 billion pieces of new clothing for the seven billion humans on the planet in 2015 and that number has doubled in 15 years. The 80-20 rule also applies. We wear 20% of what we have 80% of the time.
The journalist’s solution is to buy better quality and more expensive and fewer clothes. But she doesn’t deal with the reality that those of us in the West have far more clothes than we need already - or that our identity is tied so closely to what we wear. Other kinds of beauty are all around us. We’re not the most important species on the planet and the most clothes or the most luxurious clothes will never change that.
A recent documentary of CBC’s The Passionate Eye documents the real cost of cheap fashion to those who produce it ad you can watch it here. The effects of the use of water is particularly sobering and the devastation of the environment is heart-breaking. The telling moment is when some of the young women who promote fast fashion on their websites saw this for themselves, they changed their attitude. Telling the full story to the consumers is our greatest challenge.
An important anniversary
50 years ago an iconic picture from space gave us a real sense of the planet when the image Earth Rising was taken by one of the Astronats. The wonderful writer Bill McKibben has reflected on this recently in the Huffington Post and also outlined how the world has changed.
The image brought a sense of hope then., he says. It was the inspiration for the first Earth Day. The Silent Spring had been published. The Grand Canyon had been saved. Here’s what McKibben quotes Margaret Mead saying about that era:
“Earth Day is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space,”
There was a brief period when the idea of limits to growth had traction - but McKibben notes that it didn’t last and quotes Margaret Thatcher’s contrasting “There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women and their families.” Decades later this is an all too common prevailing view where we live off the earth instead of on it. In watching a show on Netflix recently, I was disheartened to hear a cosmologist join the voices of the Silicon Valley mega-millionaires who looked forward to space travel so that we can “colonize” some other planet. That’s madness. Read the full article from the link above. The scientists warn us - but it may have to be the poets that move us:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.Maya Angelou
There is no one but us.