My writings - and those of others.
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.
Gender Violence
Marking the anniversary of the violence against women at the Montreal Polytechnic is an appropriate time to visit this topic and how it affects the environment. I am indebted as always to Dr. Dennis O’Hara’s presentations for the monthly EcoSabbath and research he does to support his themes.
He started with an overview
“Rooted in discriminatory gender norms and laws and shrouded in impunity, gender-based violence (GBV) occurs in all societies as a means of control, subjugation and exploitation that further reinforces gender inequality. …Occurring in all countries, in all communities, at all stages of life and across settings, GBV encompasses many different expressions of violence, including: physical, sexual and emotional abuse sexual harassment; stalking; rape, including “corrective” rape and rape as a tactic of conflict; domestic violence and intimate partner violence; child marriage; human trafficking; and female genital mutilation. It is any violent act, including threats, coercion and the potential for violence, perpetrated against someone’s will and based on gender norms and unequal power dynamics. GBV is the result of long-standing, deeply entrenched discriminatory norms that treat gender inequality with permissibility and further embed these inequalities within societal structures and institutions.” Castañeda Camey et al, “Gender-based violence and environment linkages: The violence of inequality,” ed. J. Wen, (Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, 2020), xi, 3,
Here’s a quick look at the extent of the discrimatory norms and laws.
These discriminatory measures also relate to the environment:
We are starting to hear about food insecurity in our own country during the pandemic. The numbers are appalling in other parts of the world. They are affected by all our assaults on the environment. The above report went on to say that the rnvironmental discussion needs to address gender disparities as follows:
“A Feminist Green New Deal would center the right of access to clean air, water and land for all. It must remediate gendered food insecurity and nutritional disparities by bolstering social safety nets that include healthy food access as a human right. It would invest in regenerative agriculture and food provision strategies that transition away from extractive land practices that only fuel environmental degradation. Programs focused on shifting the cultural conversation around gender-based violence should also be developed; include participation and education of all members of society; ensure engagement of children, extended family, and the wider community; and target institutional and political structures as well.”
The video below is not totally complete with surtitles – but the energy of the participants sends a message that we all need to hear. As is so often the case, those among us with less teach us to care more for the life of the total planet.
Anti-Social Media
As someone always interested in new technology, I set up a Facebook account first -then LinkedIn, then Twitter and then Instagram and Pinterest over the last twelve years. I still visit the first from time to time and Twitter even less often, and the others hardly ever. Distant family members draw me to the first two. My followers are modest in number. As places for either information or stimulation, the word for these sites that comes to mind in my personal experience is bland. Canadians offer the odd “tut-tut” comment about life within and beyond their borders but few comments there affect my blood pressure – because, of course, I agree with them.
I still read one newspaper on a tablet in the morning and scan the headlines of two leading American ones every day. I switch between two Canadian news networks, CNN and PBS in the evening. Am I in a bubble? Of course. Do I know what is going on in other bubbles? Only what my existing sources tell me. I have a colleague whom I have talked to for years – who told me recently that he refuses to follow any traditional sources for his news. He recently joined Facebook – and by linking up with his alternate news sources he now is pleased to have 2300 “friends”. While I am one of them, the algorithms never allow his posts to reach me. It’s just as well, perhaps, since he says Facebook occasionally shuts down his account for a few days.
I came across an article by Charles Warzel, an opinion writer for the Washington Post, who has followed the divisions within social media for years. He recently decided on an interesting way to experience the divided worlds firsthand. He asked two people to give him the passwords to their Facebook accounts for three weeks leading up to and immediately following the US election. He wanted them to be typical older Americans - not conspiracy theorists - who nevertheless received more news via Facebook than they did in the past. Both had been mildly conservative but were drifting toward more progressive politics and both voted for Biden because they thought he had more capacity to reach across the aisle.
The 62- year -old male first saw a picture of grandparents admiring the new baby. Next was a picture of Joe Biden with a For Sale sign photoshopped on top. Then an image of a Democrat wearing a tutu giving the viewer a middle finger, Then images of a dingy hospital, an inner city store with empty shelves, a politician’s palatial residence – all labeled “ SOCIALISM”. These continued with no context and were interspersed with the usual feed items of the dogs and cooking prowess of friends.
Like many of us, this viewer joined FaceBook some years ago to keep in touch with friends. He took early retirement and when the Covid pandemic struck he found himself with even more spare time and glued to his phone. It started harmlessly but soon he found himself arguing with friends he hadn’t seen for years, whose political views now shocked him. While it started with mild expressions of disagreements and attempts to fact-check sources, he became more involved and addicted to the discourse. He discovered that the anger expressed actually scared him. Post-election claims of fraud were even more frequent and without sources. There were accusations that one should not trust fact checkers. Democrats were linked with Satan.
The feed of the other baby boomer, a 55 year old woman, was different. She never questioned anything political and consequently had far fewer political entries. Most simply endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket. Even so, she was distressed by the issues that were debated and the polarization expressed. While Warzel saw little of this on her news feed, she explained that she had left Facebook after it started. She shared how she felt disturbed in the same way that the male viewer was, by seeing old friends and acquaintances espousing conspiracy theories full of hate and meanness.
Warzel came out of the experience with some learning:
The worst part of social media is in the comments section. That’s where the infighting is most intense with no attention to content and where the vitriol flies. These are what often get shared and go viral. Comments are not subject to either moderation or fact checking. One of his colleagues terms it the “Town Hall for Fighting”.
We don’t think often about the people whom we admitted into our lives as digital “friends”. At the beginning we are pleased to discover people at a distance or people we knew from past contexts, but they are acquaintances at best. We are often invited to add friends of friends – and suddenly we are part of a network of people who are communicating with us in ways we have never intended.
Warzel quotes Joan Donovan of Harvards’s Kennedy school describing this as an “economy of engagement’. We are giving our time and emotional energy to those on our self-created platform. The cost in some cases may be watching our friends lose touch with reality. This is not my personal experience of the social platforms I follow but it is easier after hearing these stories, to understand the experience of my American contemporaries.
But in a recent experience, just through Email, I saw a similar pattern. People in one of my communities received news that they initially responded to with shock and anger. The immediate response to shoot the messenger, and to scapegoat the perceived henchpersons was remarkable – and reinforced by the ease of sharing gut feelings. Few perceived that this was perhaps enhanced by our being locked down in a pandemic and giving it more energy and time than we could normally afford. When a requested public meeting online was set, and when the agenda became a different one, it was not at all unreasonable for some participants to be even more upset, but the result was very much like a social media name calling which now involved bystanders who watched members and long term friends within the community turn on one another.
How do we recover socially in poisoned environments? A wise counselor in that situation suggested two ways in a parting address. He told the story of his own background of participation in a world body with thousands in attendance, where views were so deeply divided that some participants would not even attend. It affected him deeply enough that he proposed a small forum of participants from around the world to meet in person following the gathering.
The large body met again ten years later, and the difference was palpable. Some of those taking part in the small discussions had listened to other views with respect and realized that they could hear other perspectives without having to accept them. The processes followed the South African one called Indaba. Indaba is an African Zulu cultural process for engaging different points of view on a shared concern. It involves listening to the stories and experiences of others and how they came to be where they are.
Over time those who participated in Indaba process became more knowledgeable of others’ views. It did not result in a melting pot, where everyone now felt the same way. The difference was respect for the reality that we don’t all think the same way. As another wise counselor commented brightly when dealing with two strong opposing views in another situation, “Isn’t it interesting how different we are”.
The engaging American Episcopal presiding bishop Michael Curry who recently spoke at my College’s annual Larkin-Stewart lecture, perhaps has the last word.
“We will either live together as brother and sisters (Siblings) or we will perish together as fools – either community or chaos – the choice is ours.”
An elder comments.
If there was ever a person worthy of being called an Elder of the environmental movement it is Bill McKibben, who I heard speak at the Bader Theatre in Toronto more than a year ago to a packed house. In his 60th year he has been writing about climate change for thirty of them. As well as teaching at Middlebury College in New York, he writes regularly for the New Yorker Newsletter and here are some excerpts leading up to the US Election. Did people listen?
“Authorities told all forty million people in California to be prepared to evacuate—indeed, they told them to park their cars facing out of the driveway, in case they had to leave in seconds. But the pandemic has made evacuation more complicated, because heading to a shelter might carry its own dangers, and it has left California’s firefighting force depleted, because the state relies on prison inmates, a group that has been hit especially hard by covid-19, to fill out its ranks. And that’s just California. The flooding crisis in China intensified again last week, as record amounts of water poured into the reservoir behind Three Gorges Dam.” (August 28, 2020)
“. . . we need people fully committed to the task of building out solar and wind power as fast as possible. Those technologies are much cheaper now than they were thirty years ago, which helps change the game. (Indeed, news came last week that ExxonMobil, not long ago the most valuable corporation in the world, now had a market cap smaller than a big solar-and-wind company.) As the credit-rating agency Moody’s pointed out in an analysis released last week, natural-gas pipelines are now an unwise financial bet, partly because activists have become adept at blocking them. The pincers created by the confluence of cheap clean tech and a stronger environmental movement should give Biden the opportunity to move far more nimbly than any President before him. “ (October 7, 2020)
“Heat waves widen the achievement gap between students of color and white students, mostly because the latter are far more likely to be in buildings with air-conditioning.” (Oct 14, 2020)
“It is clear, first, that regulation is going to be essential to bring greenhouse gases under control, and, second, that it’s going to have to happen fast. The world’s climate scientists have stated plainly that the next decade represents the critical time frame: without fundamental transformation by 2030, the chances of meeting the Paris accord’s climate targets are nil. Given Barrett’s performance at her hearings, it seems doubtful that she’ll let America play its role—if you’re not even clear that climate change is real, how much latitude will you give government agencies to attack it? As with so many things about climate change, the problem is ultimately mathematical. Joe Biden, should he be elected, acting not out of anger but out of sorrow at Republican gamesmanship, could make sure that the will of the people, not just the will of Charles Koch, is represented on the bench. The composition of the Supreme Court has varied over time from five Justices to ten; eleven seems like the right number for 2021. Or maybe thirteen.” (October 21, 2020)
“In 1959, when humans began measuring the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, there was still some margin. That first instrument, set up on the side of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, showed that the air contained about three hundred and fifteen parts per million of CO2, up from two hundred and eighty p.p.m. before the Industrial Revolution. Worrisome, but not yet critical. In 1988, when the nasa scientist James Hansen first alerted the public to the climate crisis, that number had grown to three hundred and fifty p.p.m., which we’ve since learned is about the upper safe limit. Even then, though, we had a little margin, at least of time: the full effects of the heating had not yet begun to manifest in ways that altered our lives. If we’d acted swiftly, we could have limited the damage dramatically.
We didn’t, of course, and we have poured more carbon into the atmosphere since 1988 than in all the years before. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has topped four hundred and fifteen p.p.m.—that’s much too high, something that we know from a thousand indicators.
. . . . If November 3rd doesn’t mark the start of a mighty effort at transformation, subsequent November Tuesdays will be less important, not more—our leverage will shrink, our chance at really affecting the outcome will diminish. This is it. Climate change “is the No. 1 issue facing humanity, and it’s the No. 1 issue for me,” Biden said in an interview on Saturday. With luck, we’ll get a chance to find out if the second half of that statement is true. The first half is already clear.” (October 28, 2020)
Learning through Reflection
Watching a recent video on Farnham Street, I noted the emphasis on reflection after decision making. Shane Parrish observed that if we don’t review the choices we make after the fact, we don’t learn. Organizations that want to make a difference have the same weakness as individuals as the story in a recent Globe and Mail reveals. When someone like the Auditor General Brenda Lysyk releases a report, it reveals we fail to learn from past experience. Ideally all organizations would have such a function as an auditor general – non partisan, independent and speaking to the wider community. While taking a mini-sabbatical from some volunteer work, I found the report on how my province is doing in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic revealing – and thought provoking in the way organizations of all sizes operate.
In an emergency a command structure matters. I remember one I was involved in some years ago and the number was two persons. That made it clear and fortunately we didn’t have to add to it. Who leads? What is the meeting structure? Who takes minutes? How are decisions followed up?
Regrettably, this emergency response got off to a bad start. Ontario was one of the worst sites of the SARS epidemic earlier in the 21st century and recommendations from the Auditor General started in 2003. Among them was a Cabinet Committee for Emergency Management consisting of the Premier plus eight MPPs. That committee finally met for the first time in 2019 and three times in the early part of 2020 for updates and discussion. No minutes were taken. It never took the lead. Efforts instead were led by a group of 21 that expanded to 83 and ultimately to 500. Some did not know whether they were attending with specific responsibilities or were just there. Meetings started by teleconference with unidentified speakers or roles and only later moved to video conference. While the Chief Medical Officer of Health was named Co-Chair, he never chaired. Minutes of decisions were not made. Discussion, as we know, does not necessarily involve making choices.
In most organizations changeover in leadership occurs, but often a new team has no mandate or record from the past. Emergency plans were out-dated and staff was insufficient. To remedy that, the government hired consultants. I know that is a pattern for trying to fix things and I’ve even been one of them. In this case it was a top of the line firm (*single sourced with no competitive bids) resulting in a billing of $1.6 million to create a plan with its first meeting in April – and another $3.2 million to plan for the opening of schools. Neither plan has ever been released There has been little coordination with municipalities.
Lessons from the past were simply not learned. The SARS experience suggested taking early precautions even when the world was still learning about a new virus. Though travel was clearly a source of infections, people were encouraged to go on holidays during the March break. Expertise is often disregarded. The Chief Medical Officer of Health did not exercise his full powers in a medical emergency. Masks were not required until October 2020. Instructions to local authorities were delayed and had been requested as early as May. The Ministry of Health collected data rather than Public Health. Transparency of data was identified as a problem when the CMOH did not release information until Cabinet had approved it. There was a good deal of variety in how local authorities responded, causing further confusion.
The lessons learned were not carried out over time. The Auditor General’s department reviewed the recommendations of 2003 again in 2007, 2014 and 2017 and focused on the need for updating of contact tracing and laboratory procedures. The latter were still paper based and not integrated with public health information systems. Good procedures for testing, tracing and isolating could have reduced the spread by 80%. Targets – always a favorite of governments, were set – but never met, with the worst results in the largest populated areas. By the end of August 2020, Ontario had the third highest number of cases on the country and the second highest rate of deaths per 100,000. We could have done better.
But will we? Rather than reflect, all the government parties have immediately become defensive when they are faced with the reality of choices made in the past. What if, instead of defending themselves, the party in power could respond, “Yes, most of this is true, much as we don’t like to face it” rather than slamming the Auditor General. The opposition could respond, saying, “We agree and we wouldn’t necessarily have done better” rather than “We didn’t cause all these problems when we were in power in the past – it’s the current government’s fault”. What if they all stopped saying “It’s not US and THEM – it’s just US”? How are WE going to do this better from now on?