Local & Global

This morning’s parish newsletter arrives as usual with a reminder of a coming Community Dinner. This is a project going back more than twenty years. Once a month we feed 80-100 urban poor - some occasionally homeless, but most with some kind of permanent shelter. What they don’t have on a welfare income is the ability to buy enough wholesome food. We try to provide that. It is the least we can do for these regular guests that we have come to know over the years - and sometimes they tell us their stories.

Stories count in the world of climate change and too often they are horror stories. The fires in Hawaii have hit home and in a recent Zoom meeting, people talked about the places they had been - now completely devastated. Being there in the past made it matter. They understood the loss.

What is difficult is the stories we don’t hear. I’ve been reading the book, Not Too Late, which is full of stories of parts of the world with which I have no direct connection. Many are heartbreaking as the people affected suffer the climate degradation caused by mining, deforestation and other forms of exploitation that lay waste their world, while we ignore them. What if it were mandatory for any community like mine to adopt a far off island where the people face the disappearance of their land through erosion and flooding and hear their stories regularly in their own words? It might knock some sense into us as we recognize what we are doing to our island home and its effects on our siblings.

Finitude

I have a new word in my vocabulary. It comes from a book that attracted my attention when I escaped from being too involved with a project, walked some final letters to the post office - because there are still people without email - and crossed the street to my neighborhood independent bookstore. Book City combines a large range of magazines, new books and remaindered ones in a relatively small space. I tend to head toward remaindered, after looking at the new releases.

But this time a new one published in 2023 appeared to have my name on it. Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. by Oliver Burkeman. Its cover reads Embrace Your Limits, Change Your Life. My life needed a change. Being burned out as a retiree ought to be an oxymoron.

Four thousand weeks is what you get if you live to be 80 years old. I’m already beyond half way to 4700 weeks if I make it to 90. The introductory chapter is headed, In the Long Run, We’re all Dead. Time Management seems like a solution and I have read all the books for years. This one does take a different and salutary direction.

The author is quite witty and well read - he has lived through both Trump and the Pandemic nad like me, still here. Perhaps the kernel of what he says comes from - of all people, Martin Heidigger, who defeats all students of philosophy by being more obsessed with the subject of finitude than any other. An d there is the addition of the two strikes of being a member of the Nazi party for ten years, and being almost impossible to read. Burkeman though, helps us through Heidigger by pointing to the question, somewhat like Hamlet, :What does it mean to be”? He says the only real question is whether we are willing to confront that one or not. The answer is that we are mortal. We are born here, we live here, we die here. All we can do is live our one miraculous life - a gift that never depended on us.

I’ve also been reading a report this morning of the results of some consultations - with one group of people saying, “If only we could get back to the past when everything was the way we wish it were now, it would be so wonderful” - and another group saying, “What do we have to do to make the future exactly the way we want it to be - which will be so wonderful”. I tend to join the second group with all its worry and anxiety. But the truth dawns. The only life over which I/they have any control is the one I/they have right now. It’s not as if we can manage time. Our life is our time - with limits.. It’s not as though our choices don’t matter because clearly they have consequences. But to pretend that we can fully control the future by our actions or recover the past is crazy. Learning finitude is important before it’s too late - both for me and everyone else.

Morning Coffee

Reading what comes in via email reflects the world we live in precisely. First one. Several are responding to a letter and a report designed for the same audience. I wrote one them. The purpose of both is to ask for more money from the organization’s supporters and they differ in how to do it. The matter needs action and a further discussion will determine the direction. One view is that a more folksy and emotional approach works better. Another is that maybe we shouldn’t be too forward in asking for money since we will want to do it again later in the fall. Meanwhile the organization is surviving by drawing down its shrinking endowment. The meeting happens tomorrow night,

A second comes from the admirable George Monbiot of the Guardian. The newspaper’s online communications arrive for free and I generally support them occasionally. There is always an ask - and today’s suggestion is that it could start at as little as $2 a month or a one time donation. That’s a rather good way to put it. Is it time to send through the $25 that I occasionally give, with a reminder that I value this organization each month about the same as I do as one cup of my morning coffee. Can do both without sacrifice is a bit ridiculous? Monbiot’s article surrounding this appeal notes the same thing that I did in my previous post. The weight and seriousness of the climate emergency competes with lots of trivia about an affair of a British film producer with 10,000 recent new items - contrasted with five for a serious science report - trivia always wins. The media world is not the real world, but we believe it is. As he says, celebrity gossip is always more important than existential risk,

Third there’s Gas Busters. This is a group that wants to ban gas powered leaf blowers. Most people complain about the noise - and I join them there. I think much less about the air pollution they cause. The Toronto City Council voted to pursue a ban - not pass it even yet. At least that is better than doing nothing, but I am now asked to do more writing to City Councilors and staff. Anther item for the task list.

Then there is the organization of seniors working on climate action - now. They have a coming meeting that conflicts with one of my own. A report of a subcommittee focuses on the allocated number of members, and says that a person who recently volunteered will be excluded because of lack of experience with this spsecific organization. What if that person was one that turned up unexpectedly once in my world - who had just retired as chief geologist for the provincial government. We’ll never know - being a current member matters more. There is also a complaint about more men than women on the committee - six to four. A financial report indicates $65. in new memberships. That means 15 of them, because one of them at $5 per year was mine. Even for a very new organization, Five dollars a year isn’t enough to make it go anywhere,

What comes through is how easily we are distracted by incoming news all with the organizational appeals - and all arguing the side issues, which saves us from having to act on matters we think are important or support them. And the health of the institution or group always ends up at the forefront, not the causes they espouse. How do create our personal priorities? They matter. I might need a second coffee to sort out my own.

Importance

We’re influenced by what we read. We certainly know that newspapers are biased and we are likely to choose ones that correspond to at least some of our values, as well as hoping for a degree of objectivity in actual news items. I’m glad that the ones I read make it clear whether an article is news or opinion.

But what about items that appear as actual news? The Washington Post sends me a daily summary of the seven top stories of the day, They appear below:

1.Ukraine has started firing a controversial U.S. weapon at Russian forces.

2. We are living through Earth’s hottest month on record.

3. A nationwide UPS strike appears increasingly likely.

4. Seven big tech companies agreed to alert people to AI-generated content.

5. Ancient soil from Greenland suggests some of its ice could disappear

6. The U.S. plays its first game at the women’s World Cup tonight.

7.The biggest movie weekend of the year is here: It’s time for Barbenheimer. (Barbie plus Oppenheimer).

And here are some questions about the ordering:

• Which ones have implications for our long term future? What would that order be?

• Which ones show the priorities of our culture?

• How would I number these in order of importance? I’ll let you decide for yourself. To do so says much about what we value as we skim over the realities of our universe.

Faster

“A report published in Nature on the last day of May concluded that we have already exceeded seven of eight “safe and just Earth system boundaries” that it studied—from groundwater supplies and fertilizer overuse to temperature. “We are moving in the wrong direction on basically all of these,” Johan Rockström, the paper’s lead author and the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told reporters.”

The date was 1972 and the report was published by the Club of Rome with the title, “Limits to Growth”. A year ago there was a 50th year anniversary gathering called “Beyond Growth” with very low attendance - but for one this year, thousands packed the EU meeting rooms. We are starting to accept the reality that that we have already exceeded seven of eight “safe and just Earth system boundaries” and we are moving in the wrong direction without knowing how to stop.

We hear often that the solution is Green Energy - forgetting that the creation of new systems takes energy to produce the required minerals. Hello Mining. Bill McKibbon suggests that maybe we have to slow down, returning to the lifestyle of the 60s “consume less, travel less, build less, eat less wastefully.” He has also been a fan of Green Energy, realizing that its growth creates local problems. Clean energy does not mean clean production, and those who produce it usually live closest to the environmental degradation it causes. Those of us who live well are the ones that are going to have to learn to live more simply - and that means a different ethic than the one of More - Now.

To stabilize the earth’s temperature:

• Reduce passenger car transport by 81%.

• Limit per-person air travel to one trip per year.

• Decrease living space per person by 25%.

• Decrease meat consumption in rich countries by 60%.

Sounds rather like my life in the 60’s - and a happy one it was. Slowing down might be more attractive if it would lessen the world from heating up - which it is.