My writings - and those of others.
The Funniest News of the Year - So Far
Things have changed since my high school days and those before that. My father could recite all the counties in Ontario because that was deemed important yo know when he went to school early in the twentieth century.. I learned the main features of Canadian Federation with the acronymn, LACEFUR, because in Grade Ten we were supposed to understand the country we lived in. I no longer know what these letters stand for of course. Nevertheless if I needed the terms of Confederation again I could look them up - perhaps in an encylopedia. I still keep an Oxford Dictionary on the shelf to shed light to an unfamiliar word.
It’s just as well I don’t live in Escambia County, Florida - the state’s, westernmost and oldest county - because they have taken book banning to a whole new level, according to a favourite columnist pf mine in the Washington Post. They temporarily pulled Webster’s Dictionary from school shelves of along with other books, including the Guinness Book of World Records, much loved by young grandsons some years ago.
Horrors - think of all the words some kid could look up - perhaps, “black”, “white” - or even “they”. Sixteen hundred books were on the list - including two children’s Bibles. The good news is that a lawsuit against the ban brought by some publishers and writers’ groups is allowed to proceed.
Ann Patchett, an author I like, has protested the banning of one of her early novels, The Patron Saint of Liars. It’s not perfidy that is the objection here, but something she thought the book banners might actually applaud - like unwed mothers delivering their bobies at full tem giving them up for adoption.. You can meet her at her own bookstore- and on her Instagam account. Try the link here.
Anyone who thinks history can go away might be surprised.
To Start Another Year
Happy New Year!
I am told it is inappropriate to offer such wishes after January 7th - but I don’t know the source of such rules that carry any weight. So Happy New Year to you, as I move into another year well beyond my three score and ten - and celebrate my 39th year of blogging. In those days in 1995 on Blogger, the options were pretty limited to black and white text - and probably the content wasn’t very nuanced either.
The new year has started well with the arrival of a great niece as the first baby to be born in her city. I could continue by quoting from all the year-end reports that promise either relief or disaster for the planet, but I won’t for today at least. What did strike me in one newsletter was encouragement to enter the fight for climate change - in this case by a bunch of seniors against a a major Canadian bank. I wonder about the wisdom of war and battle metaphors for change of any kind. If all our relationships with others, whether individual or corporate, are to be primarily adversarial, is this the right approach? Making war is literally not working out well for many who have life within our planet right now. Is this the right way to move hearts and minds? Are there other and better options? That’s going to be something to explore this year.
A Season of Hope
All of us are busy at this time of year and daily news is depressing. Thus it is worthwhile to share some of the insights of a recent article by Simon Appolloni, Assistant Professor, at the School of the Environment, University of Toronto. I first became aware of him after attending the book launch of Convergent Knowing, where he outlines the contributions of several key thinkers in the field. Bad news predominates, but we need to pay attention to some good news.
Solar power and purchases of electic vehicles are increasing.
Democracy and civil participation in some countries is growing
Taking action is something that can be learned. As David Orr has said, Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up
Project Drawdown has done considerable research on the roles of women and girls. When the receive more education, they become healthier, wealthier, and have the ability to manage reproduction. More than 60% of them now finish primary school.
We need to sort out negative facts and positive ones - and share more of the latter. There is more encouraging news at Project Drawdown.
Promises?
I’ve been away from writing here for some time since I am working on other projects. Nevertheless I feel compelled to share some things to watch at the coming COP28 Climate summit from an article in the Guardian. the Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, is the CEO of the UAE’s state oil company, Adnoc. He contends that only someone in the fossil fuel industry can call the others to account.
He is also head of a renewables company. But here are some of the problems:
Adnoc has a terrible record in reducing emissions. They have huge expansion plans.
The United Arab Emirates also fail to report methane emissions for almost a decade.
The industries spend their profits on new exploration. It is clear that new resources become much more challenging to find - and getting them out of the ground costs energy in the process. That means our costs will rise to help them stay in business.
Renewables can’t come fast enough to save us, if they don’t change to renewables themselves.
So we can watch this rather bizarre scenario and see what happens!
Curiosity
It has been said to kill the cat and may lead to endless experimentation and dangerous and unnecessary exploration – but I’m guilty as charged. For me, it is even a positive value. The danger for us in the modern age is that it leads to endless exploration of trivia. Sometimes though, it can lead in positive directions following the threads to new sources and insights.
I have been working on a project for nearly almost a year as the recording secretary of a steering group developing a plan for a regional institution. Like most, it is concerned with its own survival and the effects that the pandemic has brought – lack of engagement and donations on the on hand, but also leaps into new technology as a means of communication and rallying the troops. What has been somewhat surprising is little consideration of a wider context. The pandemic plays largely of course, but the environmental crisis hardly receives a mention. The institution had a key role in the suppression of indigenous rights and culture, but that is seldom mentioned either. Maslow’s priority of needs, where food and shelter are primary for everyone in the world get little attention, because they are assumed for all, which is by no means the case. It is the survival of the institution that counts – even though the institution’s important message is action in the world, rather than a place to escape its needs and look for comfort instead.
At least one participant in the plan decided to look at other models – one well known, but new to me - permaculture. Starting with an agricultural focus, it proposes a different model from the agribusiness one so common in developed countries; there are links to indigenous land practices that make sense too. Its principles can be used as a metaphor for other ways to think. Since I didn’t know anything about it, I looked it up and took out books from the local library – including a beginner’s guide that made me think differently about my balcony garden and trying different plantings next spring – more vegetables and herbs, fewer flowers.
Further research led me to a book entitled Human Permaculture. It is interesting that it is translated from the French version – and that one of the authors lives in Quebec. Much of it relates to better use of intuition which involves the right brain cortex. I was already better versed in some of that theory, created by Ned Herrman; similar curiosity more than twenty years ago had made me travel to North Carolina to become licensed in training that promoted more balanced use of the brain’s capabilities. Getting out the old manuals confirmed the strength of that model.
Returning to Human Permaculture, I met a reference to Rob Hopkins, another Permaculture practitioner. I’m not one to look up everything on my phone as some among us do, but I dropped the tablet and went to the laptop with its big screen attached. Rob Hopkins looked like someone to pursue and suddenly his book, The Transition Handbook, arrived on my tablet thanks to one click from Amazon. It got read cover to cover. It was originally published in 2008 and reprinted three times in 2009. I was reading the 2010 digital version. Among the things that really stood out were two – a description of what tar sand oil extraction really involved – a crazy use of energy to extract even more – and an understanding of change based on a plan to move away from addiction. Both these are extremely powerful. I found it interesting in talking to a psychologist friend that he has used this book for a long time.
But it was 2023, not 2010. What does Hopkins think now. Of course he had written another book since, and it was soon on my tablet. It has the engaging title, From What is to What If. Now I was reading it – equally worthwhile. But it struck me that I should go back to his first book and finish that. Human Permaculture wasn’t finished either, but I could renew it from the library and drop back later. I finished The Transition Handbook, and knew that it was a book that I would want to reference many times in the future. The advantage of digital books is the strength of hyperlinks that allow one to move so effortlessly. But of course there are all those suggestions. Rob Hopkin’s list of must read books referenced one by Thomas Homer-Dixon. I knew the name and even the name of the book, The Upside of Down. Back to Amazon to find that he had written a couple of others since. I settled on Commanding Hope, written in 2020. I’m now at Chapter 15, while the other books languish.
Is this a fatal bout of curiosity? One side of me suggests that this is a busy-bee path flitting from here to there without settling anywhere or anything. But the other side suggests that some of it makes sense. Homer Dixon’s book is the toughest and most thoughtful. He sets the stage with the reality of all the matters that the others have been dealing with – the institutional crises – what would he be writing today with Hamas and Israel and two countries who fired their speakers in their respective governments?
I’m just on the cusp of his actual recommendations of how we must go forward. I’ll soldier on because it will be the most demanding. As a parent, he shares his concern for his own children’s future, and he admires the simplicity of Greta Thunberg’s directives. He is inspired by one woman’s fight against nuclear bombs decades ago – the mother of Elizabeth May, the Canadian politician, who has often been the sole voice of reason even in that self-centred parliament. I’ll keep reading – because all of these writers call me to action. I simply want to act in the most effective way possible – and not stop searching.