Imagination deficit

I’ve enjoyed listening to Adam Gopnik read from his book, Through the Children’s Gate, written some years ago, after he and his young family returned to New York City from Paris - not too long before the horror of 911. The children are grown up now, but the author brings them to life in a way that is charming and revealing for as long as readers continue to meet them.

At age three, his daughter Olivia developed accounts of her interesting imaginary friend named Charlie Ravioli. The parents listened to long telephone calls on a toy phone that somehow revealed the patterns of their own New York lives. Charlie was usually too busy to play or grab lunch. He was constantly in meetings. Eventually Olivia had to try to connect with Charlie through an administrative assistant - something of an anomaly in the world of imaginary friends. One day there was a surprising report that Charlie had been married - to a woman with an exotic name, that made her sound like an African princess. And even more surprising sometime later, there was a report that the wife had died. What did she die of, the parents asked. The answer was Bitteroscity.

Gopnik goes on to say how Bitteroscity afflicts us all - resentment, disappointment, jealousy, A good word indeed. How will we escape it? Probably the answer is Olivia’s. When we are three, we can imagine a really interesting world and pick and choose elements of the real one to create something totally new. When we’re decades beyond three, we lose our ability to imagine something better in the real one. We spend most of our time on the screens and social media of a digital one.

The next time you go to Twitter or Facebook, check out how you really feel as you exit - more imaginative, more inspired, ready to think of something to create a better future - or more envious, more exhausted, more jealous, more depressed, My guess is that Bitteroscity has more likely hit home. There’s a remedy for that. We all know what it is.

Edges

Edges

A project I have been working on is concluding – a written report with recommendations. My volunteer role on this one has been that of recording secretary, though I have worked on similar projects as a consultant, and it reminds me of why consultants exist in the first place. There is some degree of truth in the cynical definition, “A consultant is a person who borrows your watch to tell you the time”. In my own experience, working with clients who wanted to build a cultural center, the client was full of ideas, but had reached an impasse. Their RFP to the prospective consultants told them what to provide next, though if they knew that, why did they need consultants? The senior one on my projects had wide experience and knew that the real task was to forge a deal among a variety of stakeholders to make it happen. The missing elements of the dream were the funds. Much of the job was re-educating the clients to the needs of their finished product – design ones, that they had never considered. In a theatre for example, the lobby and backstage each had to be bigger or comparable in size to the auditorium. Bar sales in the intermission often generated more revenue than ticket sales.

In applying the framework to organization change instead creating of a building, the client wants something better, but also doesn’t know how to get there either.  Describing “better” very often means a return to a past with better memories.  This has been particularly true after the pandemic with a “Make our organization great again” but ignoring the current context. Sometimes that’s easy to correct via demographics and other cultural changes within the broader context.  Nearly all organizations swim in their own environment – sometimes feeling guilty at their lack of success without realizing the changes in the wider world over which they have little control.

One of the remedies in the 20th century was polling, without recognizing how polling suggested how things were going to end, and influenced choices before individuals made them. In the recent exercise this became translated as listening to as broad a membership as possible. They participants were given a chance to meet on Zoom, in contrast to a previous one where surveys were the form of polling, though surveys were used as well.  Those in charge of the process were so inundated with data, that they soon had to hire another person to make sense of it – which almost sounded like an assignment for AI.  Instead, the data was carefully coded to find out what views rose to the top. As someone well versed in interpreting data, she was helpful in warning of unrealistic expectations in what was hoped for and did an excellent job of showing why it was untenable.  In my own reading of the raw data of the Zoom sessions, I noticed a reinforcement of what early participants identified as a problem. It was easier to agree than to offer dissent.

In the course of history, group opinion matters a good deal, but the initial formation of something new often happens at the edge. One person offers something interesting, and it is ignored by the group. If the consultants already have a plan as to how they want a study to unfold, they will also commend the unusual but then dismiss it. 

I’m sometimes on the receiving end of the study as well as the strategic side and I’ve offered something on the edge, I used to feel hurt when my idea gained no traction whatsoever. But I’ve become more patient and learned to smile when I see a revolutionary concept or model shot down.  Often a seed gets planted when even one person picks it up and shares it.  Years later, the idea or model re-emerges to gain traction and the seed becomes a bright new thing to be planted; it grows.  The later adapters take all the credit of course, but that’s all right. The importance is that the new model is born and is alive and well. We shall wait and see what happens on the next round as to whether the interesting idea takes root.

Report Card

The Parish Agreement 2015 was the best one to date on climate change. I still remember the enthusiasm of one person I know on his return from the COP Conference compared to previous ones he attended. There is a great story in the book, Not Too Late called “How the Ants Moved the Elephants in Paris”.

The Climate Vulnerable Form was formed in 2009 and composed of the countries who stand to lose the most from climate change. While rich countries wanted global warming limited to 2 degrees centigrade, in the long term, it meant that the vulnerable would still lose their right to food, health, shelter, and water. They asked for an increase of 1.5 degrees. Everyone would have to work on carbon reduction - and the largest countries would have to work better and faster. One hundred countries had supported them, but the recommendation hadn’t made it into the proposed final goal.

The CVF broke into action - having the Eiffel Tower light up with the the goal “1.5C” and a statement read into the record, which ended , “The parties which stand in the way of recommending a sound decision base on the information available will be remembered by the children of today for the failure of Paris, and we will shout it to the rooftops.” Eventually even Saudi Arabia chimed in and agreed.

It is now 2023 and heading into the next COP conference soon. The most recent report commends what has been done. We can take a minute to rejoice that the rise of greenhouse gases as slowed. In 2015, we were then on track for a rise of 4C degrees if we did nothing. Then we have to face that it is not enough. By 2100, we had reduced the pace to 3 degrees Celsius. Many countries have made promises - largely still on paper. If these are followed through, the predictions are a rise of 2-2.4C by 2100. That takes us back to the fears of the CVF as the real scenario.

The Climate Action Tracker has been created to measure our progress. SCroll down on the tracker to find out progress. Here are Canada’s for the year 2050:

• Our policies and action: Highly insufficient. We’re contributing to a future 4 dgree world

• Our target: almost sufficient for a 2 degree world

• Our target against taking our fair share - insufficient for a less than 3 degree world

• Financing climate change - Highly insufficent.

  Our overall score: Highly insufficient.

  Get angry if you like. But act. Elect people who support the right policies and get the right people on the bus. Keep the wrong people off it. This applies anywhere you have a say - with government, with corporations, in communities and community groups. We have voices. We need to raise them.

Doing it Right

The Washington Post recently published an article about a poll that asked the best ways for our individual actions to tackle climate change. It states that most of us get it wrong.

These were the items in order that people polled in the USA thought were the best ones:

• Installing solar panels

• Recycling

• Driving an electric car

• Taking fewer plane trips

• Using a heat pump for air conditioning an heating

• Choosing an electric stove over a gas one

• Living in a smaller house or apartment

• Not eating meat

• Driving more slowly

• Not eating dairy

I wanted to see how I scored.

• Estimating the value of recycling: I do it, but I know that most of the things discarded end up in landfill. I’m trying to reduce my use of plastics by paying more for containers in glass, but I still have far too much garbage. I live in an apartment with a gas stove installed so I can take no credit there. I drive slowly in town only and not often, though the grandchildren borrow the car for trips Nevertheless, the experts say these are not climate solutions in any case, and they don’t make much difference.

• The best steps were flying less and cutting out meat and dairy. I win on the first flying only twice since the end of 2019 - but I lose on the second two = perhaps I eat less of both than previously, but that is more a factor of age than choice. The article says, “Project Drawdown estimates that if three-quarters of people around the world adopted a plant-rich diet by 2050, they could avoid the release of more than 100 gigatons of emissions.” What is noticeable here is how small individual actions have a huge collective impact - but they do have to be collective.

• The winner for both the experts and the people is solar panels. I don’t have a choice on that one personally, but I can be an advocate for them.

• Some of the other items are proportionate to size. If everyone did an energy audit and responded. there would be some true benefit.

• Our most important action is at the ballot box to vote for climate friendly policies and monitor them in between elections. I get a B plus, I guess, for writing to the premier of Ontario to protest his opening up environmentally protected land for housing. Our combined protests have at least led to the firing of a chief of staff and a resignation of a cabinet minister. Our task is not over.

But neither is our need to reduce our carbon footprint when it is one of the largest in the world. Every choice we make enhances that world or diminishes it.

From Despair to Possibility

I’m now re-reading a book I went through very quicky to savor the contents. The editors of Not Too Late, Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua have assembled a number of articles under the book’s subheading, Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. In another context I have been participating in an organizational review where the pandemic has brought deep grief and despair, though the participants seldom link the pandemic to the larger story.

One chapter I found moving and helpful was entitled Meeting the More and the Marrow. It began with a quote from Terry Tempest Williams, currently writer in residence at the Harvard Divinity School. Williams wrote. “A good friend wrote to me, ‘You are married to sorrow". She replied, “I’m not married to sorrow, I just choose not to look away”.

The writer of the chapter is Roshi Joan Halifax, a Buddhist teacher and some of her own insights are worth reflecting upon too. Here are a few of them:

“Before we touch briefly on the givens of hope and wonder, I think we must navigate, at least a little bit, the tough geographies of fear and of grief, as well as the moral suffering, to discover what these harsher landscapes might offer us.”

“We now face the loss of stable ecosystems in which humans have during the twelve thousand years of the Holocene. Yet it is also important to know that like grief, fear can be a kind of doorway.”

“So perhaps we can discover that fear and grief are givens. Working our grief, facing our fears can transform us”

“Transforming our suffering doesn’t mean that we are going to be returned to the state that we experienced before. But we can discover that suffering and loss have given us a greater ability to live in the present, rather than be overwhelmed by the past”.