As part of a global call to host Inner Climate Global Villages, tomorrow my daughter Aine and I will host a cafe at her learning centre with 16 young people aged 11-14 on these questions:
- What is it as young people that helps us feel connected to a big global issue like climate change without fear?
- How can we learn and contribute and make change from a place that is not based in fear?
As part of the day we will be watching this video on fun behaviour change.
We will try to harvest with video and photos and send something along to Cop15, to my friends who are working there to compile similar gatherings and harvests into strategies and inspiration. Hopefully we can discover some strategies and principles that will be helpful for leaders in recruiting the support of young people in joyful contribution. I’ll post the harvest here too.
You can be a part of this movement too. Host and post!
Natalie Angier, inspired by Kandinsky, celebrates the circle,
I also learned of Kandinsky’s growing love affair with the circle. The circle, he wrote, is “the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally.” It is “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.” Kandinsky loved the circle so much that it finally supplanted in his visual imagination the primacy long claimed by an emblem of his Russian boyhood, the horse.
Quirkily enough, the artist’s life followed a circular form: He was born in December 1866, and he died the same month in 1944. This being December, I’d like to honor Kandinsky through his favorite geometry, by celebrating the circle and giving a cheer for the sphere. Life as we know it must be lived in the round, and the natural world abounds in circular objects at every scale we can scan.
Canada is about to be roundly shamed at the Copenhagen summit, and it can’t happen swiftly enough or with enough emphasis for me. Our government is showing itself to be a dinosaur when it comes to tackling climate change. Here is Stephen Harper touting a total myth:
“Without the wealth that comes from growth, the environmental threats, the developmental challenges and the peace and security issues facing the world will be exponentially more difficult to deal with,” Harper said in an address to South Korea’s National Assembly.
via Harper Says Global Recovery Must Precede Environment (Update1) – Bloomberg.com.
The truth is actually the other way around, but Harper is so willfully blind to the realities of system thinking, climate science and global consensus that he has chosen to act as a bully and a coward all at the same time.
George Monbiot recently wrote a slamming indictment of our potentially negative contribution to these climate talks coming up. It seems that, doing the bidding of big oil, Canada will try to scuttle the talks by dividing and conquering the conference. The Saudis will be hiding behind our skirts delighted that they don’t have to be the bad guys.
So, rest of the world, you need to know that Harper has never governed in Canada with a majority of Parliamentary votes, nor has his government ever had anything close to a mjority of the popular vote. It is a particular set of regional political anamolies that has resulted in him becoming Prime Minister. Canadians have never wanted him to govern in numbers that would give him a mandate to speak with such surety about what we want as Canadians, or what our role in the world should be. He has refused to govern cautiously as a minority leader, and has refused to even try to build consensus, choosing instead to be a brinkman of the highest order and calling the bluff of the Opposition parties who have ended up supporting his bullying through a fear of their own political hides being hung out to dry.
So knowing this, world, and speaking as a Canadian, I hope you will not hold back in exposing Harper for what he is, and challenging at every turn his right to speak for Canadians. He should be a marginal curiosity at this summit, and he will be if YOU ALL put him there. Please do not accord the Canadian government’s position at this conference with any of the respect that is usually accorded to us. We sometimes are allowed to punch far above our weight, but in this case, call the man’s bluff. He does not speak for most of us.
Comfort
Oh, the comfort–
the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person–
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,
but pouring them all right out,
just as they are,
chaff and grain together;
certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,
keep what is worth keeping,
and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
–Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1826-1887)
Sweet to find that faithful hand in the space between me and the other.
via easily amazed.
Twenty years on, and I still remember them.
- Geneviève Bergeron (b. 1968), civil engineering student.
- Hélène Colgan (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
- Nathalie Croteau (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
- Barbara Daigneault (b. 1967) mechanical engineering student.
- Anne-Marie Edward (b. 1968), chemical engineering student.
- Maud Haviernick (b. 1960), materials engineering student.
- Maryse Laganière (b. 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department.
- Maryse Leclair (b. 1966), materials engineering student.
- Anne-Marie Lemay (b. 1967), mechanical engineering student.
- Sonia Pelletier (b. 1961), mechanical engineering student.
- Michèle Richard (b. 1968), materials engineering student.
- Annie St-Arneault (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
- Annie Turcotte (b. 1969), materials engineering student.
- Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (b. 1958), nursing student.
The work is never done.