My writings - and those of others.
Positives among the negatives
It’s good to see the end of a year that brought suffering, death and destruction to order, work and the democratic process. In the midst of these it is also good to see some things that had a positive effect on the environment and a chance to change the way we think and live in Canada. We have a new start today.
A model for climate change
When we realize the threat we are under, we are not afraid to take action. Unlike our neighbours to the south, we took responsibility for others generally by following the leadership of public health and adjusting quickly. We could do this in nearly all cases by understanding that this was a collaborative effort that in no way infringed upon our rights. What if we could apply the same energy and commitment to climate change?
People rediscovered the value of personal action.
Early in March I was asked if I still had my sewing machine. I couldn’t remember how long since I owned one and it seemed like two decades. But two people I know made masks for family and friends and donated them to others. It relieved the initial shortages that needed to go to front line workers. It also created a world of interesting design and pattern. What if we rediscovered our respect for craftmanship and rewarded it appropriately?
Governments gave away money
We didn’t hear about welfare bums and single moms misusing public funds. More of us were among the needy – restaurant owners and staff, musicians, actors and others whose lives were often precarious. We didn’t realize how much we valued their services until they were gone from our lives. The whole idea of a guaranteed income gained weight. What if we could implement it, drawing on our recent experience?
Trees are planted in a new way
We have known that destroying trees is madness. In a country that already has many covering its footprint, we still try to plant more. College students have gone into remote areas for years to do so during the summer but it is hard work with limited productivity. But a company is now producing drones that can plant seedlings at speeds surpassing any human effort. Technological development often harms the environment What if it could focus more fully on improving it?
We have rediscovered the inner city
Some of our streets have bike lanes now better protected from adjacent traffic lanes and more bike kiosks have appeared. I’m lucky enough to live in the fifteen minute walk to everything – grocery markets, drugstores, bookstore, bank, restaurants for dining outdoors or takeout, medical centres and services for eye glasses and hearing aids. Roadway lanes in good weather have been narrowed to allow for pavement seating and while traffic has to continue, there is less of it. I’ve filled the gas tank of my car exactly three times last year. What if we saved these features to benefit the environment?
Working from home has some advantages
The dogs are very happy about it – the cats, perhaps less so. While parents have been challenged to work from home and cope with children who compete for attention and have work challenges of their own, neither work nor schooling has faded entirely. What if we reflected on the strengths and limitations of both workplaces and built some of the advantages into future life?
Inequities have been laid bare
Warehousing the most vulnerable, underpaying those who care for them, crowded housing and neighborhoods = all these increase vulnerability. We know they exist but we have been able to ignore them. For those who are more fortunate – what if we resolve to take on one aspect of inequity to act upon in 2021 even in the smallest of ways?
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.
Comparisons
This is Bill McKibben’s take on why Facebook and the oil companies think in the same way
“For decades, people have asked me why the oil companies don’t just become solar companies. They don’t for the same reason that Facebook doesn’t behave decently: an oil company’s core business is digging stuff up and burning it, just as Facebook’s is to keep people glued to their screens. Digging and burning is all that oil companies know how to do—and why the industry has spent the past thirty years building a disinformation machine to stall action on climate change. It’s why—with the evidence of climate destruction growing by the day—the best that any of them can offer are vague pronouncements about getting to “net zero by 2050”—which is another way of saying, “We’re not going to change much of anything anytime soon.” (The American giants, like ExxonMobil, won’t even do that.)
(From an article recently appearing in The New Yorker)
The Way to Net Zero
In the midst of two crises - the pandemic and climate change, it’s easy to forget the promises that goverments made re the latter - to bring carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 - that’s thirty years away. It seems a long time except we also promised to be half way there by 2030 - and we are not even close.
I heard Isabel Turcotte, The Pembina Institute’s Director of federal policy speak at a seminar of the University of Toronto’s Department of the Environment late last year - and she has recently written a good article for Corporate Knights, outlining some principles that the corporate world needs to follow - reminding us that goals are not solely about government initiatives.
Carbon budgets are necessary to measure progress. We have to know where we stand and whether we are making progress or just talking
We have to start early. It’s no point in having a long term goal and delaying putting it into action.
We have to effect the reductions by using all the tools at hand - not just one.
Corporation s have to work together and initiate policy - Turcotte terms it “turning up the heat.
Good reminders.
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.