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.

A worthy successor to St. Francis

“If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact.”

Pope Francis Laudate Deum 2023.

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.