An Elder Paves the Way

So many messages don’t receive an audience. Jane Goodall could teach many of us who want to communicate about a cause to think of the channels used by the receivers rather than the senders. She founded Roots and Shoots to speak to the coming generation about the three crises we currently face - biodiversity loss, climate change, and environmental inequality.

“Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.” she says. She notes that we have been stealing the futures of the young at least since the industrial revolution. But the young are interesting what she has to say - and they have influence over their parents and grandparents and the way they think. Those adults may be CEOs or senior government officials and the influence of the young reaches others with decision making power.

She founded a global institute in 1991 - and it now has a Canadian chapter here. In a recent interview with Fast Company, she spoke about partnering with a comic book publisher to tell the story in a meaningful way for its readers. Starting as a book called Rewriting Extinction, the formats are monthly cartoon videos - webtoons - with scripts read by celebrities. What we can do alone is wonderful, she reminds us - but what we can do with at least one other person can be even better. The cartoon reading platform has 72 million global readers. You can become another one and share it with kids you know.

Insights and a Question

I’m quoting from Matthew Fox today as he examines the need for a sense of the sacred - and contends that the opposite of evil is not good - it’s the sense of the sacred. For a renewed discovery of the sacred, he turns to the astronauts - whose experience, he says turns them into cosmonauts.

“That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart.” James Irwin, Apollo mission.

"On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious. . . "My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity." - Edgar Mitchell, the Moon landing

And here was a statement from Russian cosmonaut Boris Volynov:

“During a space flight, the psyche of each astronaut is reshaped. Having seen the sun, the stars, and our planet, you become more full of life, softer. You begin to look at all living things with great trepidation and you begin to be more kind and patient with the people around you. At any rate, that is what happened to me.”

Matthew Fox then asks: What would it mean if these testimonies from space truly coursed through decision-makers in various countries from which they come?

What indeed!

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.

COP 26 - the Takeaways

These are the key points of agreement after two weeks of COP26 conferring.

• Fossil fuels were named in the final report for the first time. The young were furious when language was weakened, but the words were at least used, if watered down. Now that the need to reduce their use is on record, no matter how weakly, a new degree of accountability can begin.

• A fund for loss and damage is not included. This, of course is terribly discouraging for those who have been the most damaged by fossil fuel use in the richest countries. Some of them are already under water.

• A 1.5 degree target increase still exists - but in a less than adequate way. Projections of actual results based on current realities and the announcement of actual future plans lessen the possibility of it happening.

• The timelines for report national results are higher. That, at least, is good news. Most countries want to have good reputations and there are now better methods to separate results from aspirations or as Greta would say, blah, blah, blah.

• The young are awake and aware. One hundred thousand of them were present for the conference and many of them were not old white men, but young women of colour. The young are getting older, will have increased influence and they are not going to depart from activism any time soon. Politicians who want to be re-elected need to take note.

All in all, some progress, but there is still a glaring need to speed things up. Let’s hope the young people keep on the case, and inspire the rest of us to support them.

Progress not Perfection

This blog is becoming a site of qualfiers as COP 26 proceeds. Among the recent complaints are too many old white men, so here is a refreshing message from a different cohort.

The young East Indian CEO, Svanicka Balasubranian was watching it from home on her family’s farm, where over several decades, ground water has fallen by more than half resulting in crop failures. She recognizes the frustration of many with lack of progress, but has some wise things to say.

First, when we tell stories we have to stop painting them as black or white and introduce some nuance. Few stories in the media are as glamorous or positive as they sound in terms of generating results. She sympathizes with the young, but at the same time, their dismissal of every effort may not be helpful either.

Second, we have to become more holistic. Favorite agendas can blind us to the strengths of other options. Often the agendas - especially in their marketing efforts - are filled with self-interest. It doesn’t hurt when opposed groups like Nestle and Green Peace actually sit down together and see what they can come up with that might work for both.

Third, the silos long decried in the government and corporate sectors are just as evident in the stakeholders of climate change. There are no single silver bullet solutions, she says, To over-engineer one, may be a waste of time and energy. It is more like a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces needed for completion. What matters is accountability in particular situations. Solutions may indeed be local rather than universal and the point is how much positive small changes can happen.

Small measures can indeed have good consequences. You can see what she says about that in her TED Talk.