Recycling?

Living in a big building and looking out on five huge bins for pick on the street below, I’m well aware of how much stuff I and my fellow apartment dwellers are throwing out in god faith that it matters. Yale Climate Connections recently exposed a few myths:

• Just putting stuff in the recyling bin - even when following local guidelines - does not guarantee that recycling happens. Much of it still ends up in the garbage. To make it worse, the triangular symbol for recycling isn’t trademarked and anyone can use it.

• Recycling is not the best thing we can do. Three things that would be better are: not driving a car, not flying somewhere, and not eating red meat. It also wouldn’t hurt to vote for the party that cares the most about the environment. The last one here probably hurts the least and matters the most.

• Reduce, re-using and recycling are not equally beneficial. The first two are much more valuable.

• Not everyone can recycle - and some have bigger priorities - for example indigenous communities trying to keep oil rigs or coal plants off their land

• Education is weak about the impacts. There is very different experiences for those who have to live near land fill sites. We all need to be educated re greenwashing and call it when it happens.

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.

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.

Imagination deficit

I’ve enjoyed listening to Adam Gopnik read from his book, Through the Children’s Gate, written some years ago, after he and his young family returned to New York City from Paris - not too long before the horror of 911. The children are grown up now, but the author brings them to life in a way that is charming and revealing for as long as readers continue to meet them.

At age three, his daughter Olivia developed accounts of her interesting imaginary friend named Charlie Ravioli. The parents listened to long telephone calls on a toy phone that somehow revealed the patterns of their own New York lives. Charlie was usually too busy to play or grab lunch. He was constantly in meetings. Eventually Olivia had to try to connect with Charlie through an administrative assistant - something of an anomaly in the world of imaginary friends. One day there was a surprising report that Charlie had been married - to a woman with an exotic name, that made her sound like an African princess. And even more surprising sometime later, there was a report that the wife had died. What did she die of, the parents asked. The answer was Bitteroscity.

Gopnik goes on to say how Bitteroscity afflicts us all - resentment, disappointment, jealousy, A good word indeed. How will we escape it? Probably the answer is Olivia’s. When we are three, we can imagine a really interesting world and pick and choose elements of the real one to create something totally new. When we’re decades beyond three, we lose our ability to imagine something better in the real one. We spend most of our time on the screens and social media of a digital one.

The next time you go to Twitter or Facebook, check out how you really feel as you exit - more imaginative, more inspired, ready to think of something to create a better future - or more envious, more exhausted, more jealous, more depressed, My guess is that Bitteroscity has more likely hit home. There’s a remedy for that. We all know what it is.