My writings - and those of others.
Questions? Answers?
My website starts bravely with questions like these:
Why are we here?
What is our role?
How do we use our gifts?
How can we learn and grow?
Well drilling down this morning, the answers don’t come to mind, but simply more questions. The morning paper (read digitally but in facsimile format) headlines the impasse created by six wheelers parked in front of the Canadian House of Parliament with their drivers determined to stay until their demands are met. The Ukraine is angry with us because we won’t send them lethal weapons. The British Prime Minister is saying sorry, sorry, sorry about 20 parties at 10 Downing Street when everyone else was locked down. Canadian Conservative Party members seem ready to throw out yet another leader - this one because he apparently reneged by supporting conversion therapy when several others didn’t want it banned. On a brighter note, the Webb telescope seems to be behaving the way it was intended.
I’ll have to leave the Conservatives here in Canada and in the UK to fend for themselves, but I feel more sympathy for those residents in Ottawa. I lived there for several years and it is a beautiful and livable city - 30 minutes from anything even if you live in the burbs, the best shopping, the ski hills, the lakes, the Canals. Six Wheelers have become weaponized to support political agendas - and they seem to be towing all kinds of other angry folks with them. Confederate flags and Swastikas are rightly condemned by all of us and it’s appalling to have to even say so - but we are having more trouble with Freedom.
It’s been said that when most think of America, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness comes to mind - and the Constitution. Move over to Canada and it’s Peace, Order and Good Government. Somehow I hear echoes former NDP Leader Tom Mulcair asking the party in power some years ago with a twinkle in his eye, “So How’s That Working for You?”.
It gets personal. So I’ll start today asking a bunch of questions of myself, because living the questions sometimes gets me where I need to go.
Have I ever spent any time on framing documents? What if I set an agenda over the coming weeks to read the US Constitution, The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms - and perhaps ones written by the UN?
What if I looked more seriously at protests? The one going on right now in Ottawa doesn’t have a permit. The citizens who live in the city are rightly put off by visitors who desecrate monuments, harass their citizens, impede their traffic, and break their pandemic protocols. The police have make judgment calls in applying the law judiciously when verbal anger can lead to physical violence. It doesn’t always erupt that way in a protest, but the latter is almost always preceded by the former. What’s the right call? What does the law say? What’s the right course of action? How does the treatment of white protesters compare with that of visible minorities.
Most of the protesters are angry white men. Have we failed them? If yes, how? If no, what do we do about it?
Here is a what-if. What if politicians stopped demonizing one another? What if any member said simply, “I disagree with member X. This is what I think is important instead”. They complain about the use of social media - but is there an opportunity to think about parliamentary civil discourse?
Here is another? What if we expected less of leaders and more of members? Do heroes always ultimately disappoint us because we expect so much of them when they are simply human beings - often letting us off the hook of doing much except judging them?
With the decline of institutional religion, is anything still sacred?
What are we really going to learn in the next two decades from the Webb telescope? Spoiler alert - how many of us will last that long? One good writer recently suggested that it will confirm that we are finally just tiny specks in a universe. Like Odysseus we act like his followers, when encouraged to stay the course and look ahead - and then drown - but do we just move forward anyway?
It looks as though my work is cut out for me over the rest of the week - and for future posts.
Awe and Awful
Matthew Fox titled a meditation this way and I’m shamelessly stealing it. In a world as beautiful as the one I view every morning - with a clear sky, an indigo lake below, snow covered fields an roofs, it’s easy to remember what a gift life is.
Not so when I look at the morning paper - threat of war in Ukraine, translators stuck in Afghanistan,, disagreement about timing of reopening, government overspending, departing health care workers. isolation in nursing homes. It is hard to look for good news. Reality does seem much more awful than awesome.
Another recent article looks at how identity is becoming linked to political party in the USA. Canada does have its anti-vaxxers, but they are a mall proportion of the population and generally dismissed. Our oldest province has the highest vaccination rate, all all of them are well ahead of American states. We are still one country, whereas the recent study suggests that America has two.
American Journalism makes the assumption that any judge appointed during the term of a political party will always vote the party line - and backs this assumption up every time there is a Supreme Court vote. This amplifies the impression of identity - and is sometimes wrong. Surely a judge has more integrity than that. I fault the American press - and on occasion my own in Canada for falling into that trap. If they want identity politics to lessen, why do they mention it at every turn.
More than three quarters of those who have died n the US are over 65. Probably ours are similar in percentage - but the numbers are significantly smaller. The Canadian deaths are largely due to poor protocols in nursing homes. The American staggering ones in the US relate to identity. Only 13% of Americans over the age of 65 are very worried about becoming infected. But a full 65% of the population say they are going to continue their life without taking precautions in the middle of a pandemic. 865,000 have died so far. Most of them are unvaccinated - and most of them are Republicans.
Most people scratch their heads and give up on ways to persuade dissenters. It’s just based on politics and religion and they have now collided. I have a modest suggestion for both. Do you want to win elections? Do you want to have congregations in the future? Both of these depend on people being alive.
Deep Time and Deep Work
“Deep” is in and these two terms will yield results when you Google them or check them out in Wikipedia as I just did.
Google says this:
Deep time" refers to the time scale of geologic events, which is vastly, almost unimaginably greater than the time scale of human lives and human plans. It is one of geology's great gifts to the world's set of important ideas.
Here is what Wikipedia has to say:
“Deep time is a term introduced and applied by John McPhee to the concept of geologic time in his Basin and Range (1981), parts of which originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine.The philosophical concept of geological time was developed in the 18th century by Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726–1797); his "system of the habitable Earth" was a deistic mechanism keeping the world eternally suitable for humans. The modern concept shows huge changes over the age of the Earth which has been determined to be, after a long and complex history of developments, around 4.55 billion years.
The DeepTime Network tries to come from a broad perspective, though it doesn’t have an emphasis on geology and might benefit from more references to it. I created a map of the main components of the perspective just to provide a big picture view.
When you Google Cal Newport, you go straight to the book order site loved and despised by all. Deep Work is the title of a book by Cal Newport. Wikipedia tells us this about him.
“Newport coined the term "deep work," in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016) which refers to studying for focused chunks of time without distractions such as email and social media. He challenges the belief that participation in social media is important for career capital. In 2017, he began advocating for "digital minimalism. In 2021, he began referring to the role email and chat play in what he calls "the hyperactive hive mind".
I’ve read the book and it has some useful advice for a curious and distractable person like me. I’m also currently participating in a DTN course that attempts to prepare leaders in to use the new cosmology.
Much of its framework depends on the writing and teaching of Thomas Berry, a Passionist priest and a cultural historian who pondered the impact of culture and religion on our attitude toward the environment. He called as early as 1978 for a New Story that incorporated the learnings of science and religion. The purpose was to create a new spiritual framework for all institutional forms that included the entire universe story into religious and cultural history – especially those of the West. Later he framed this as a journey, a sequence of non-reversible events. To follow through would have a profound impact on education, government, law and world religions themselves. The assigment went far beyond simply learning about other faiths through social gatherings, study groups or visits to places of worship, but getting down to the business of saving our common planet together.
Berry’s impact on his graduate students was immense and his teachings have found an impressive home at Yale in the Yale Forum for Religion and Ecology. There are solid resources there which come for free to all who are interested. One of the aspects I admire is their thoroughness. There is a continuing relationship with world religions. In contrast the DTN is going more in the direction of creating a new one – for the spiritual but not religious. Some of the participants are RC nuns, who have every reason to distrust their hierarchy. Much of the energy of some has a stamp of Berry’s teaching. He was willing to spend lots of time teaching them and they were good students. But other participants may be enthusiasts of their own individual spiritualities that used to be called New Age – and which Berry warned against.
I find it really interesting to spend time in worlds unlike those of my former not-for profit one or my institutional church one. At times I have to draw back a bit from endless new processes and their acronyms so much loved in America. Any workshop attender has been there. The temptation is to go down rabbit-holes of suggestions to explore that sometimes are a waste of time – though at least I would not say, dangerous. I’m starting to become impatient as to how many websites suggested by participants are focusing mainly on sales and donations even with a url of .org. My own .url is a leftover from the days I actually did have a business.
There is sometimes a tendency to think in such courses that a quotation substitutes for a entire body of learning. Understanding and absorbing any worthwhile body of work must be gained through serious study. Such a body of work is not like a short poem – a very good one does have the capability of creating a universe of its own. Some sessions on life long learning are coming up. I have some good track record in that area - long life a t least - of longer duration than the presenting academics. We’ll see how they relate to deep time and deep work.
Metaphor and Meaning
The CBC had a recent Ideas podcast had a recent rerun of a one entitled The Greenest Metaphor. I’ve taken to listening to programs like these at 10:00 pm to wind down from too much looking at screens. All the programs are thought provoking and could actually work against getting to sleep, but I was able to come back to this one in the daytime.
Unless our religious or cultural background is fundamentalist, the place where we probably first encounter and start to understand how metaphors work is in scripture. The Psalms particularly are full of other names for the divine - fortress, rock, shepherd. The story of the Prodigal Son is rich in metaphor and as theologian Sallie McFague notes, metaphors and parables carry much more than a one-to-one connection between two words and their meanings and creates within us an experience that is much broader and rich. Since climate change - now climate emergency - is such a large subject, we are reduced to try and deal with it in a more comprehensive way that single words or concepts can convey.
The Ideas program suggested several metaphors - a race, a sickness, a puzzle, a war - and one more. I don’t recall all the comments on these, but I’ll reflect on my own response..
When I think of a race, I think of a challenge and a contest. The Tortoise and the Hare is a familiar fable. There is a sense of fun and games in a race - and of course, winning. In the case of this fable fable we run into the difficulty that we are already facing. Devastation is coming quickly, so patience is hardly the right response this time. It’s not a matter of fun and games either, but disasters that are destroying us and if we want to stay as the winners - as we have been up to now - it is at the cost of the earth losing. So this one isn’t working so well.
A puzzle is a possibility until we think that some puzzles are so challenging that we tend to give up - or never start. I never try Sudoku like a clever sister-in-law, who does them daily. if it is not the kind of puzzle I like - such as Wordle - now the new family craze - or those regular word puzzles in the New York Times. It doesn’t matter if I can’t solve those on a daily basis - but dealing with climate change does matter. Giving up or not starting - or even saying that I don’t like that kind of puzzle isn’t going to help. There is a lot of not liking the climate change puzzle going around.
We have learned through Covid that sickness is not as straight-forward as we had hoped. Some deny that a sickness even exists and persecute those who believe it. Caring is a good response - but its problem is that we can care passionately without ever doing anything. Taking an aspirin and calling in the morning if it doesn’t work, might not be bad advice for a minor infection, but we now know this is neither minor or simple. This one isn’t going away in a day or two. Pandemic arguments are mirrored in climate change ones. If we do one thing, we risk another. If we stop using fossil fuels, we harm the economy. So there are shortfalls in this one too.
War is a metaphor that is especially popular in North America - the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War to end all Wars. It suggests aggressive action and it also suggests that we are protecting ourselves against an enemy that is evil and must be conquered. But doesn’t that reverse the roles? Nature isn’t our enemy. Over the past two hundred years of industrial activity, we are.
And that’s the conundrum - and the urgency of the last of the words in the Green Metaphor that the Ideas program suggested. It was love. For thousands of years people had positive metaphors for the natural world. Matthew Fox has a lovely series right now talking about Father Sun and Mother Earth - ways of understanding that countless indigenous communities had, until western culture decided that the Earth was something to be exploited. We haven’t loved it enough. Love involves some of the metaphors I have looked at already. Earth isthe great teacher. Its own journey has encouraged us to the challenge of the race, as we look at our own challenges. Its complexity has inspired us to puzzle over its enormous diversity. Its caring for us by providing light, food and air and so much else invites reciprocity.
Recent floods and fire suggests to some that earth is now wreaking revenge on us. But that points out the fallacy we fell into many times in human history and we are having to learn anew. We are not the centre of the universe - we are a species of it - one of its more recent creations. We were the last one to turn up - after stars, galaxies, planets, insects, fish, plants and animals. Watch a newborn calf or foal and we realize that we are also the most fragile of creations and are dependent on others to survive. We need to return that understanding to the earth itself - by loving it enough to start to take care of it.
A New Start for our City
The City of Toronto where I live has spent the last five years addressing climate change:
In 2017 the City Council unanimously approved a long term climate strategy to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions and improve health - also considering economic and social well being.
Two years later in 2019, the council declared a climate emergency. Emissions were 38% lower that year than they were in 1990.
On December 15, 2021, the Council Approved the TransformTO Net Zero Strategy. It includes the following goals for 2030:
Homes & Buildings
All new homes and buildings will be designed and built to be near zero greenhouse gas emissions
Greenhouse gas emissions from existing buildings will be cut in half, from 2008 levels
Energy
50 per cent of community-wide energy comes from renewable or low-carbon sources
25 per cent of commercial and industrial floor area is connected to low carbon thermal energy sources
Transportation
30 per cent of registered vehicles in Toronto are electric
75 per cent of school/work trips under 5km are walked, biked or by transit
Waste
70 per cent residential waste diversion from the City of Toronto’s waste management system
Identify pathways to more sustainable consumption in City of Toronto operations and in Toronto’s economy
City of Toronto Corporate Goals
City of Toronto corporate greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by 65 per cent over 2008 base year
All City Agency, Corporation and Division-owned new developments are designed and constructed to applicable Toronto Green
Standard Version 4 standard achieving zero carbon emissions, beginning in 2022
Greenhouse gas emissions from City-owned buildings are reduced by 60 per cent from 2008 levels; by 2040, City-owned buildings reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions
All City-owned facilities have achieved zero waste
Generate and utilize 1.5 Million Gigajoules of energy from biogas
Approximately 107,700 tonnes CO2e per year are reduced through Organics Processing with Renewable Energy and Landfill Gas Utilization
50 per cent of the City-owned fleet is transitioned to zero-emissions vehicles
50 per cent of the TTC bus fleet is zero-emissions
Greenhouse gas emissions from food the City of Toronto procures are reduced by 25 per cent
It includes a directive to everyone.
The suggestions in this short video may not apply to everyone directly - renters for example - but even here, tenants associations can play a role. Most of the suggestions are actionable by families and bring participation down to the local level. Cities are where we live and work. They are also the places where we have the most impact on local policies. I commend all local councillors - and especially two who send regular newsletters I have signed up to receive. I’ve met in person with both on occasion. In the amount of noise in the news, it’s good to go back to local sources and see that citizens can have an impact.