The Coming Decade's Work

Bill McKibben has changed the narrative from the incredible events of the past week that have been termed surreal – and only now have to be recognized as all too real.

The good news that a black man from the American south finally can be elected to the Senate was swamped by a riot and what to do about it as well as increasing hospitalizations and deaths from the pandemic.  At the same time we forget that we are now we have passed the half way mark for dealing with the climate crisis.

 The following were milestones:

• Prior to 1990 scientists and oil companies study the effects of climate change

• 1988: James Hansen testifies to US congress

• 1990: Climate change is recognized as a problem by the public1992: The Rio Earth Summit initiates attempts to deal with it as an international problem

• 2050 becomes the target year for carbon neutrality

 McKibben goes on to say that the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century were basically a waste of time in addressing the issue. Oil companies and politicians united to make nothing happen and the Copenhagan conference in 2009 failed, as did the US Cap and Trade legislation in 2010.

 But after that evidence was hard to ignore. We could not ignore rising temperatures, fires and floods.  Solar energy and wind power developed and became cheaper. Activism started from the ground up and politicians now had another force than oil companies.  The Paris Conference in 2015 had new commitment internationally.  The US president didn’t help but momentum was there.

 It has to continue. Scientists tell us that to keep on track we have to cut emissions by half by 2030.  Moving the goal posts simply won’t do. That means several changes

• An end to new fossil fuel infrastructure – which McKibben says may include the closing down of Alberta’s tar sands

• Retrofitting of buildings to make them more energy efficient

• Changes in transportation – including how we move ourselves

• Stopping of Deforestation

• Less use of carbon in food production Elimination of tax support of fossil fuel industries

These things have to happen now – and everywhere. There are some positive changes, including the diminished size and strength of many oil producing companies, the growth of electric cars, and positive responses from governments, especially the incoming Biden team. It’s the next 500 weeks that have to make the difference.

 There is encouraging news.  United by dealing the pandemic, cities of the world are uniting to work together as well as pressuring other levels of government to act.  You can find out more about the organization here and watch the brief video below.

Gratitude

Last year on the day after Christmas, family members and I boarded a plane in Toronto. Five and a half hours later we were enjoying a late lunch at a lovely Chinese restaurant in Richmond, British Columbia. We texted relatives that we would catch the six o’clock ferry to join them on Bowen Island and anticipated the celebration of marriage of a family member and her new husband the next day.

This year some of the same family members picked me up to transport me to the one permitted household - with presents for exchange,, a floral arrangement sent from the BC relatives, home-made cookies from an exchange among Toronto friends, and my dinner contribution of an English trifle.  We settled in for a leisurely lunch, while my son did the cooking and viewed an interchange on his laptop in the kitchen and the rest of us visited with extended family members on another one in the dinning room – one from a recently purchased schoolhouse getaway in Eastern Ontario, one from a dacha outside Moscow, another from an apartment in Winnipeg, Manitoba at minus forty degrees – where Fahrenheit and Centigrade temperatures actually meet – colder than the home of one of the residents from Finland – and another stuck in Ottawa where the meeting of the Canadian Senate kept him from flying home in time. 

 On Christmas Eve we had gathered on Zoom for an even larger gathering where another family member read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”.  Three generations of one family had lived there, either teaching at or attending one of the United World Colleges. Members were now spread out in different countries but still seeing one another on the screen.  Another presented a radio presentation, where he acted as Trinculo in Shakespeares’ The Tempest - reprising a performance that his grandfather had done decades earlier. Another accompanied himself on a guitar while singing a Psalm in both Hebrew and English. His sister played and sang a carol. His aunt played a clarinet to show us what she could do after working with one for only six months. I read my Covid parody.

And all this is seen as possible – and normal during a pandemic. And we would never have thought to connect with so many at once - until we couldn’t do so in person.

 How different it is from the pandemic of 1918. My father was 18 years old that year and my mother was 15.  I never thought to ask them what that pandemic was like for them. This morning’s paper details some similarities with the present one.  The number of patients strained the hospital and the number of deaths - 50,000 in Canada – 50 million around the world – meant the large number could not be interred quickly enough.  Businesses were shut down.  Prime Ministers caught the flu.  The Stanley Cup was postponed.  But there were differences too.  Children and young adults were the most threatened. There was little government help – either national or provincial – and local governments had to work on their own.

 Let’s hope that some of the patterns don’t recur.  There were swings between opening up and needing to shut down again.  There was initial avoidance of the severity of the pandemic. There was resistance to closings.  Public health officials were both congratulated and denigrated.  Health workers were infected and shortages were severe.  Quack cures prevailed.  Indigenous communities were hit hardest. The disease faded away in most countries but Canada continued to have sporadic outbreaks until 2020.

 The key difference is the development of vaccines. Some were developed in 1918 at Queen’s University and by Connaught Laboratories at the University of Toronto.  What scientists did not know then was that the disease was produced by a virus.  Their vaccines did reduce the severity but vaccine development with both new understanding and speed of production were decades away.  We are so fortunate to live in the new century where over time we will overcome the effects of the current one.

 The amazing opportunities afforded by technology where we can see each other from a distance and be safely together in new ways is so taken for granted that we forget the creators of so many inventions.  I searched for a timeline and found one here

 And I was fascinated by those with impact on my own life:

My Mediaeval Manuscript

The handwritten page from a psalter hanging above my electronic piano had some precursors. Anod of course they were followed by the printing press to allow books to spread through the known universe, open up learning and change the world

My great grandfather hated the telephone

When the family in Parry Sound installed on the first in the town, he hated the idea of people intruding on his privacy. Now I text my grandchildren.

This doesn’t even show how I do it now

A Google Nest responding to my oral request to play some Christmas Carols on Combo - with a number of the best ones sounding in three different rooms on three small units.

My TV watching at home started in 1950

Now I ask my TV to head toward Prime or YouTube on the big screen with hundreds of choices in spectacular colour - or switch back to one of the many cable stations - not exactly like the small screen of the past.

Communication machines

In university, the weekly newsletter in my college was printed on a ditto machine - and I still have a purple version. Then came the fax machine in the 80e where in 1985 one board member had one - and 1986 where only one member didn’t - and no parctically no one does. I’d still like it better if my all in one printer would print in colour even though only the demo does.

From turning on a desktop in 1984

To meeting the family on Zoom in 2020. It’s been an amazing journey through it all.

As I write, I am restricted to my apartment but my life is both safe and rich.  It is so easy to forget how fortunate I am compared to most of the world during a pandemic.  Mu family came up with an innovative way to enjoy company on my balcony in cold weather – electric fleece throws. The view from there of the canopy of trees is beautiful even missing their former leaves and the lake and sky still dominate the extensive built environment.

An obituary of  famous nature writer Barry Lopez reminds me to put all this technology in perspective.  We, like the wolves he spent time with and wrote about so lovingly, are also creatures of the planet.

 The New York Times quotes the British writer Robert Macfarlane as he  put it this way in The Guardian in 2005 writing about the author. “Throughout his writings, Lopez returns to the idea that natural landscapes are capable of bestowing a grace upon those who pass through them. Certain landscape forms, in his vision, possess a spiritual correspondence. The stern curve of a mountain slope, a nest of wet stones on a beach, the bent trunk of a windblown tree: These abstract shapes can call out in us a goodness we might not have known we possessed.”

 The technological and the natural are part of our lives in the Anthropocene and both bring us grace..  Many of our journeys this season involved a much smaller carbon footprint, though they depended on electricity and that is a small benefit to the planet.  The human connections in my small world were made well – while all around us there are evidence of such connections and care that are made badly. So much will depend on our choices and sense of a sacred that we must receive with grace as we move ahead.

Anti or Not?

Words matter and how we use them causes confusion.  I was struck by how this works after recently finishing the book, How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X Kendi. It made a much deeper impression than Robin Diangelo’s White Fragility. What both deal with at length is denial, something that Canadians as well as Americans must come to terms with, both in their roles as settlers who felt they had the right to steal lands inhabited for thousands of years by first nations people. While slavery is not as large a part of our history as that of our neighbors to the south, we are not innocent in systemic racism in Canada.  Kendi’s book helps us cut through our denial.

 Kendi, an author, professor, anti-racist activist, and historian of race and discriminatory policy in America, recently assumed the position of director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. His book combines his own upbringing and development as a memoire while also making clear argument about the distinction between “not a racist” and “anti-racist”.  It’s not hard to cite the example of a former president, who after delivering unsavory remarks about some citizens of Baltimore then stated he was the least racist person in the world. Our own gut reaction is to say, “Well at least I’m not a racist”.  Kendi’ book is a history of his own journey from racist to anti-racist. He says he used to be a racist most of the time. He no longer claims to be “not racist.

 What is an anti-racist?  He starts with two basic definitions:

Racist: one who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inactions or expressing a racist idea.

Anti-racist: one who is supporting an anti-racist policy through their actions or expressing an anti-racist idea.

 Subsequent chapters take us through historical patterns. Assimilation results when one group suggests that another group is culturally inferior or behaves badly, and thus needs to be improved. Its opposite, segregation, suggests that one group will never improve and therefore should be segregated.  An anti-racist idea is that all groups are equal. He characterizes these opposites as dueling consciousnesses.

 He calls race a power construct with false historical roots, including differences in biology, In early childhood, his teacher assumed that his behaviour was bad and suggested that he should behave like an adult.  The converse is that many black adults have been treated as children unable to reach maturity. The bible starts with the notion that all are equal and then puts a curse on Ham who will forever be a slave. Ethnicity also enters the picture with notions of group characteristics.  Some bodies have been characterized as more animal-like or violent. Some group’s cultures are denigrated as not being really sophisticated. A bad individual becomes the poster child for the whole group.  Colour has created hierarchies within the groups themselves – including both blacks and whites. We ascribe divisions within class, space, gender and sexuality. Racism is always present and it is subconscious. To support his argument, Kendi relates amazing stories from his own life to illustrate it. The task for all of us is to bring it into consciousness.

 The struggle is to be fully human and also to see others as equally fully human. The focus has to be on power – not on groups of people – and on changing policy not on changing groups of people. It has to start with a recognition that we know and admit that such policies are wrong. What are policies that suggest certain groups of people are more dangerous or violent or mentally challenged than others?  How can policies that support such ideas be upended? How can pledges for diversity be replaced by policies for diversity? How can stereotypes based on one person – “black angry woman” be demolished as applied to any group?

 In a recent talk, Kendi cited the book’s chapter called “Failure” as the most important one in the book.  He says that to understand failure to remove racism is related to failed solutions and strategies – and that the cradle of these lies in failed racial ideologies.

These are not social constructs.  They are power constructs.  Current solutions offered to us when we feel bad or sad include reading a book, donating to a cause or marching a time or two.  But as soon as we do that we feel better – oscillating between feeling bad and feeling good means that generally we do nothing at all.

 It’s not a sequential march toward progress.  It’s a back and forth pattern.  It’s not saying “I’m not racist”.  It’s admitting, “I am racist and starting to act in a different way”. It’s not hearing stories and feeling sad about miserable mistreatment of others. It’s about attacking policies in any place and at any level where we have agency.  Education may help individuals but it may not affect groups.

 Resistance does work – it takes a long time, but it has to be constant and focus on ideas and policies.  There are two such policies I learned about in the morning paper that require my resistance.  An app to promote cheating is being used in a local university.  It does not recognize black faces. Whatever its merits in stopping cheating, it has to go.  A first nations community in the north is worrying that the vaccine is not on its way to them fast enough because of small population density, even though their caseload of Covid-19 is much too high.  I can send an email to a policy maker re both situations. It’s paltry as an action.  But I now know about ways to start being an anti-racist – and I can begin. Read this book.

 Postscript: I did send an email to the federal director of indigenous services, after finding him on the government website.  I was thanked for writing almost immediately and my short request to act was copied to three other persons in the department. No reply from the province on the cheating app yet.

Gender Violence

Marking the anniversary of the violence against women at the Montreal Polytechnic is an appropriate time to visit this topic and how it affects the environment.  I am indebted as always to Dr. Dennis O’Hara’s presentations for the monthly EcoSabbath and research he does to support his themes.

 He started with an overview

 “Rooted in discriminatory gender norms and laws and shrouded in impunity, gender-based violence (GBV) occurs in all societies as a means of control, subjugation and exploitation that further reinforces gender inequality. …Occurring in all countries, in all communities, at all stages of life and across settings, GBV encompasses many different expressions of violence, including: physical, sexual and emotional abuse sexual harassment; stalking; rape, including “corrective” rape and rape as a tactic of conflict; domestic violence and intimate partner violence; child marriage; human trafficking; and female genital mutilation. It is any violent act, including threats, coercion and the potential for violence, perpetrated against someone’s will and based on gender norms and unequal power dynamics. GBV is the result of long-standing, deeply entrenched discriminatory norms that treat gender inequality with permissibility and further embed these inequalities within societal structures and institutions.” Castañeda Camey et al, “Gender-based violence and environment linkages: The violence of inequality,” ed. J. Wen, (Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, 2020), xi, 3,

 Here’s a quick look at the extent of the discrimatory norms and laws.

These discriminatory measures also relate to the environment:

 We are starting to hear about food insecurity in our own country during the pandemic. The numbers are appalling in other parts of the world. They are affected by all our assaults on the environment.  The above report went on to say that the rnvironmental discussion needs to address gender disparities as follows:

 “A Feminist Green New Deal would center the right of access to clean air, water and land for all. It must remediate gendered food insecurity and nutritional disparities by bolstering social safety nets that include healthy food access as a human right. It would invest in regenerative agriculture and food provision strategies that transition away from extractive land practices that only fuel environmental degradation. Programs focused on shifting the cultural conversation around gender-based violence should also be developed; include participation and education of all members of society; ensure engagement of children, extended family, and the wider community; and target institutional and political structures as well.”

 The video below is not totally complete with surtitles – but the energy of the participants sends a message that we all need to hear.  As is so often the case, those among us with less teach us to care more for the life of the total planet.

An elder comments.

If there was ever a person worthy of being called an Elder of the environmental movement it is Bill McKibben, who I heard speak at the Bader Theatre in Toronto more than a year ago to a packed house.  In his 60th year he has been writing about climate change for thirty of them. As well as teaching at Middlebury College in New York, he writes regularly for the New Yorker Newsletter and here are some excerpts leading up to the US Election.  Did people listen?

 “Authorities told all forty million people in California to be prepared to evacuate—indeed, they told them to park their cars facing out of the driveway, in case they had to leave in seconds. But the pandemic has made evacuation more complicated, because heading to a shelter might carry its own dangers, and it has left California’s firefighting force depleted, because the state relies on prison inmates, a group that has been hit especially hard by covid-19, to fill out its ranks. And that’s just California. The flooding crisis in China intensified again last week, as record amounts of water poured into the reservoir behind Three Gorges Dam.”    (August 28, 2020)

 “. . . we need people fully committed to the task of building out solar and wind power as fast as possible. Those technologies are much cheaper now than they were thirty years ago, which helps change the game. (Indeed, news came last week that ExxonMobil, not long ago the most valuable corporation in the world, now had a market cap smaller than a big solar-and-wind company.) As the credit-rating agency Moody’s pointed out in an analysis released last week, natural-gas pipelines are now an unwise financial bet, partly because activists have become adept at blocking them. The pincers created by the confluence of cheap clean tech and a stronger environmental movement should give Biden the opportunity to move far more nimbly than any President before him. “  (October 7, 2020)

 “Heat waves widen the achievement gap between students of color and white students, mostly because the latter are far more likely to be in buildings with air-conditioning.” (Oct 14, 2020)

 “It is clear, first, that regulation is going to be essential to bring greenhouse gases under control, and, second, that it’s going to have to happen fast. The world’s climate scientists have stated plainly that the next decade represents the critical time frame: without fundamental transformation by 2030, the chances of meeting the Paris accord’s climate targets are nil. Given Barrett’s performance at her hearings, it seems doubtful that she’ll let America play its role—if you’re not even clear that climate change is real, how much latitude will you give government agencies to attack it? As with so many things about climate change, the problem is ultimately mathematical. Joe Biden, should he be elected, acting not out of anger but out of sorrow at Republican gamesmanship, could make sure that the will of the people, not just the will of Charles Koch, is represented on the bench. The composition of the Supreme Court has varied over time from five Justices to ten; eleven seems like the right number for 2021. Or maybe thirteen.”  (October 21, 2020)

“In 1959, when humans began measuring the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, there was still some margin. That first instrument, set up on the side of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, showed that the air contained about three hundred and fifteen parts per million of CO2, up from two hundred and eighty p.p.m. before the Industrial Revolution. Worrisome, but not yet critical. In 1988, when the nasa scientist James Hansen first alerted the public to the climate crisis, that number had grown to three hundred and fifty p.p.m., which we’ve since learned is about the upper safe limit. Even then, though, we had a little margin, at least of time: the full effects of the heating had not yet begun to manifest in ways that altered our lives. If we’d acted swiftly, we could have limited the damage dramatically.

 We didn’t, of course, and we have poured more carbon into the atmosphere since 1988 than in all the years before. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has topped four hundred and fifteen p.p.m.—that’s much too high, something that we know from a thousand indicators.

 . . . . If November 3rd doesn’t mark the start of a mighty effort at transformation, subsequent November Tuesdays will be less important, not more—our leverage will shrink, our chance at really affecting the outcome will diminish. This is it. Climate change “is the No. 1 issue facing humanity, and it’s the No. 1 issue for me,” Biden said in an interview on Saturday. With luck, we’ll get a chance to find out if the second half of that statement is true. The first half is already clear.”  (October 28, 2020)