Two visions

There are a lot of articles about the two American parallel universes that we are going to have to live with for the coming months. I’m already trying to wean myself from any political articles on this without total success. I was nevertheless impressed by another duality that Tom Friedman talks about in the the New York Times this morning - These are networks of nations with opposing battlefronts. He calls them “resistance” and “inclusion”.

They also have some common elements, One tries to bury the past. The other tries to work toward a more connected and balanced future. Russia and Ukraine are one pair. The Middle East is more complicated but also has opposing forces. The same alternatives might be seen in the United States.

Life is not quite that simple, of course. There are elements of the past that we are discarding and immediately adapting the new thing - like an acquaintance who thinks AI can solve all kinds of things that it clearly can’t. We have abandoned some of the civility that creates a greater degree of trust. On the other hand we hang on to things that don’t seem to please anybody in a new and changing world. But perhaps “either-or” needs to give way to “both-and”.

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!