Links and short reflections that were posted this month on my Mastodon page and rolled up here for your interest and reflection.
- I remember learning that the annual allowable cut in British Columbia’s forests was effectively a floor, not a ceiling. The level was set to ensure that mills had a sustained amount of fibre to process. The writing was on the wall. BC’s forests are everywhere, but they are essentially wallpaper now. They look good but lack life and usefulness.
- Here is an incredible collection of resources for supporting immigrants, refugees, and newcomers to Canada produced by the Local Immigration Partnerships of Canada.
- Revealed: Canadian government owns Scots property via tax haven. I wonder how many other Canadian Provinces own land and assets in other countries? Certainly, we worry when other foreign governments do the same here.
- The bizarre origins and deeper history of the false pet-eating story that swirled through the Republican Presidential campaign this month.
- Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars from Defector. A fantastic dose of reality that should, by all rights, shock delusional space cowboys back to consciousness so as to redeploy their resources and attention at appreciating and sustaining this planet rather than building coffins for themselves on other worlds. Just read it.
- A really good analysis on how a policy vacuum on climate change has evolved in Canadian politics. It’s unacceptable to me that all the major parties vying for power in this country are delaying action on climate. Even the Liberals are missing targets despite having some ideas. The NDP and Conservatives have shat the bed on this issue, and it is THE number one issue for our collective future.
- Richard Powers brought his deep-seated curiosity and ability to take the facts of nature and turn them into a story and put them together into a new novel about the ocean. And here is some of what he learned along the way.
- My friend and mentor, Christina Baldwin has a new novel in the world. It just arrived in the mail!
- If you want to make a material donation to Indigenous communities and organizations today, check out the One Day’s Pay campaign. If you live in Squamish territory, as I do, consider donating to the Snichim Foundation to help fund the needs of language learners who put their lives on hold and commit to becoming fluent in Squamish.
Because I lead a lot meetings, I often get asked to do territorial acknowledgements before the work begins. And because I’ve been a supporter of Squamish language education and fluency through the Sníchim Foundation I’ve been trying to learn how to do that in the Squamish language. The text above is a very basic acknowledgement of territory, that was shared with me by Khelsílem a while ago and I’ve been using it for gatherings held here on Nexwlélexwm (Bowen Island)*
* my current blog fonts settings can’t cope with some of the characters in Squamish orthography. I recognize that’s a problem. Any suggestions for addressing that are welcome!
A detail from the monastary at Mont St Michel in Normandy showing a person overwhelmed with ripening fruit. He’s probably rushing off to his next zoom meeting.
So much has changed since the pandemic began, and it is hard to notice what is happening now. I feel like my ability to perceive the major changes that have happened to us since March 2020 is diminished by the fact that there is very little art that has been made about our experience and very few public conversation about the bigger changes that have affected organizational and community life in places like North America and Europe. All I seem able to grasp are fragments of patterns. Because I work with all kinds of clients in all sorts of different sectors and locations and situations, I do find myself getting struck with similar patterns that seem to transcend these differences, and it makes me wonder a bit about what is creating these patterns.
One of those repeated patterns is “we don’t have time” or “I’m too busy.” The effect of this is that convening people together is becoming increasingly difficult. I used to do lots of three-day planning sessions or organizational retreats where folks would come together and relax in each other’s company and open up a space for dreaming and visioning and building relationships. It was not uncommon for three or four-day courses to take place. Between 2011 and 2019, When we ran the nine-month Leadership 2020 program for the BC Federation of Community Social Services, we began and ended with five-day residential retreats on Bowen Island. We had two-hour webinars every fortnight. While some organizations found it hard to give up that amount of time (10 days away from the office on professional development training in a year!), we nevertheless put nearly 400 people through that program. Nowadays, when we do similar programs, the most we can get are three-day in-person retreats, and usually only one throughout the time together.
This is costing us big time. I am working with organizations where folks are meeting constantly but only spending time together a couple of times a year. The pandemic threw us into an emergency stop-gap approach to remote work that served the purpose of the times: to keep things going while we remained isolated. However, much of what happened throughout 2020 and 2021 was just stabilizing and concretizing these emergency measures. There wasn’t much thoughtfulness to how to make remote work and schooling work well. As a result, I think that many organizations made an over-compensation to being back together in person, and we are seeing some of that backlash now. Some people are six and seven years into their working careers who have only ever really known remote work. Their engagement patterns are radically different from those of us who came up in the days of long off-sites, of days spent in offices and work sites developing relationships and figuring things out together. And that isn’t even to mention schooling. Before the pandemic, there were some excellent programs in BC to support distance education for elementary and high school students, thoughtfully prepared and designed. When the pandemic began, teachers and professors were thrown into a completely new pedagogical context, and very, very few had any practiced ability to work in these contexts.
Of course, what makes this even worse is that we did a terrible job of managing the pandemic. Had we been able to return to office in the summer of 2020, with the virus squashed by a good public health response, it would have been an interesting time. We would have been equipped with experiences of different ways of being, what it felt like to work from home or support communities with a universal basic income. We would have run an experiment without entrenching structural constraints that made it hard to un-run the experiment. Instead, as the pandemic dragged on, temporary structural changes took hold. People moved away from their homes near their offices into cheaper and more distant communities. Public transportation funding shifted as ridership disappeared, and office leases were let go as companies and organizations realized that they could save on overhead and facilities costs. It is now far too late to be thoughtful about integrating the lessons of a global three or four month experiement into an existing society.
It feels to me that the urgency hasn’t gone away. Every day is a slew of online meetings, stacked back to back and on top of each other without any rest between sessions. Work hours are extended beyond a reasonable day, and those of us who are neuro-divergent are tipped into a world of near-constant distraction and dysregulation from the various and persistent demands on our time and attention. My first wide open day on my calendar for which I have no work committments at all is November 27, two months away. Since I turned 55 I have started taking Fridays off which means that I occasionally book full day sessions for that day. And I can move calls around and make time and space when I need to, but in general, I think my calendar probably reflects yours.
Our time and attention has been divided into hour long units, largely dictated by the default setting on our videoconferencing software. A half hour meeting feels like a blessing, as does a three hour session when we can take breaks and slow down.
My relationship to time is changing. Our relationship is changing.
I’m lamenting the loss of deep long engagement. Pre-pandemic we used to even have great online meetings that were rich and deep. People saw them as special and treated them like face to face meetings, giving the work it’s full attention. Cameras were always on.
Nowadays I bet there are heardly any meetings where everyone is focused on the task at hand. There are browser tabs open, phones to play with, tasks to accomplish while the meeting is going on. In some cases when we are doing workshops in organizations, and people have simply accepted the calendar invitation without giving any thought to how participatory it is, folks will just ghost the whole meeting. We have presented to zoom rooms full of black boxes with names in them, every camera off, every mic muted. One meeting I was involved – with elected officials no less, on the subject of engagement – I simply cut it short. No one was paying attention, no one was participating. There was nothing to do. Clearly the work wasn’t important enough, and so I just said something like “Instead of pulling teeth, I’m just going to suggest we finish this session.” A couple of people took a moment to say goodbye, and most just blinked off. I billed them my full rate.
I reallize that my life history as a facilitator has left me ill equipped for these kinds of meetings where attention is splintered into shards and no one seems to have the time to prepare or follow up becasue the next task is coming right up. Instead what I end up doing is focusing deeply on the invitation to the gathering so that everyone who comes has placed the time we have together at the top of their list. Sometimes this means shortening the meeting from two days to one day, or a half day to an hour and a half. I always warn clients that we can’t do the same quality work in half the time, so we make do. If we need a large amount of time together, we will plan something for a few months out so folks can clear their schedules. It’s now all about invitation and preparation, even more so than it ever was.
So…how are you with time and attention? What adjustments are you making to deliver quality in the meetings in which you are participating?
PS. If you want to read a good literature review on this stuff, check out “Remote work burnout, professional job stress, and employee emotional exhaustion during the COVID-19 pandemic.” i need not remind you that we are still in the pandemic; we are just pretending we aren’t.
Sometimes a line runs right through people and communities, and sometimes that line is in the middle of road we are all travelling on.
…how to address the polarization that is currently plaguing our world.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I have some ideas, maybe only one idea. But I’m not sure that there is much work that can be done in facilitating conversations across political divides. Instead, I think we need to focus on shared work.
This isn’t a new idea to me. I first saw Tuesday Rivera (Ryan-Hart) grapple with this reality back in 2011 when we were working with a group of social justice activists in New York, in the early days of Occupy Wall Street, and back when the Obama Administration was starting to suffer from weird attacks of The Tea Party, the movement that eventually took the US Republican Party off of the edge of rationality and into outrage, delusion and violence. For most of this century, polarized conversations between populists and policy wonks have been a feature of North American politics. It’s happening in Canada right now, and of course, we are all aware of what’s going on in the USA.
But here’s the thing. I think that these weird ideas that have plagued the social discourse for the past 15 years in earnest are down to folks who are doing very little else with their lives other than amplifying propaganda, hatred and inciting violence. In other words trolling. I have recently, finally, left Twitter because their CEO is one of those guys now, and that place, like much of social media, including Facebook, is a cesspool of delusion and hatred and bots and algorithms. There are so many bad-faith actors, bots and algorithms at work in those places that the discourse is now useless for doing anything other than getting populist politicians elected or inciting genocides. We’ve known this since 2016 when it was revealed how much Cambridge Analytica was influencing elections and politics in dozens of countries, and we’ve seen the result in places like the USA, Burma, Trinidad and Tobago and the USA. Other countries are now actively influencing domestic elections by poisoning the discourse between citizens. Canada’s populist right-wing is thoroughly infected by Kremlin-based operations now. There is no polite dialogue that will compete with the misinformation and hormone-fueled rage-baiting of these operations. Facebook and Twitter have built a fortune for their owners on the rage induced by this discourse, and they have used that money to invest deeper and deeper in the kinds of tech tools that continue to fuck us over.
I’m not being polite about this. Facebook, Twitter, and the like have poisoned everything from global policy making about climate change to local politics. These aren’t good places, and they don’t make us into good people.
That’s the preamble. But if you know me, you know I’m a bit of an optimist, and I’m always looking for places where possibility can take root. Lately, I’ve seen it in the work I’ve been supporting in community health care in the USA and practical reconciliation with First Nations in Canada.
Basically, it all comes back to Tuesday’s idea that shared work is more powerful than an abstract purpose or a set of shared values. When there is real work to do and urgency is in play, my experience is that people are much more willing to work together despite their politics and rhetoric. This isn’t to say that hate isn’t an important force to combat in our society; I believe it is. But my experience says that when folks roll their sleeves up to work on something that no one has the faintest idea how to solve, we can create something that transcends the abstract nonsense that social media drives amongst us.
If you’re tired of the rhetoric, get to work on a local need that is stumping your community. You will need to pull together diverse folks. You will have disagreements and arguments. But if you are committed to doing work together, a centre might emerge between you all that holds your efforts together, even if those with nothing better to do try to yank you apart.
There is real suffering in the world right now, and there is a real need to address it. If polarization is getting to you, get out there and do some concrete work with people who also care to alleviate it. They will not be the same as you. You will have deep disagreements about some things and deep commitments about other things. You have to learn to work together. There are no perfect partners.
And a reminder: This is a blog. It’s just a place where I share half-formed thoughts and ideas. Sometimes, they work, and sometimes, they are naive. However you react to this idea, I’d love to hear your affirmation or your alternatives, as long as they don’t require me to go back to Twitter and engage there.
HFN guide Qiic Qiica, wearing his Three Stars vest, leads us across the beach at Kiixin, the ancient capital of the Huu-ay-aht Nation, and a site that has been occupied for more than 5000 years.
Two hours to kill in the Departure Bay ferry terminal because I forgot to reserve a ferry. Missed the 4pm sailing by three cars. But it was worth it to stop in and have lunch with my dear friend and colleague Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier in Port Alberni. I’m grateful for my friends. And for the time to reflect on my week.
I drove through Port Alberni on the way back from Bamfield, or more accurately, the Huu-ay-aht territories, where I was invited to lead a little debrief session at the end of a two-day Dark Skies Festival. The festival was inspired by and connected to the Jasper Dark Sky Festival. It was hosted and organized by the Huu-ay-aht First Nation and Foundry Events from Calgary. I was invited by my new friend Niki Wilson who is one of the organizers of the Jasper Festival and a science communicator with a growing interest in how dialogue can help us get past polarization. We both have an interest in that, so I would say we are co-learners because these days, polarization ain’t what it used to be.
There were 30 or so of us at this event, a pilot project designed to explore the feasibility and challenges of doing dark sky events at Huu-ay-aht. Present was a mix of folks, including amateur and professional astronomers, Indigenous cultural workers, leaders and territorial guardians, folks working in Indigenous and local community economic development and Indigenous tourism. The mix and diversity meant that we could absorb presentations and conversations on topics as diverse as exoplanets, Huu-ay-aht history, marine stewardship, economic development, astrophotography, Indigenous sovereignty, and economic development. Hosting becomes very basic when a diverse group of people is collected with a shared curiosity for both offering their expertise and learning from each other. Create containers in which people are connecting and, as councillor n?aasiismis?aksup, Stella Peters remarked to me on our first afternoon, the principle of Hišuk ma c?awak comes into play, and we begin exploring connections and relationships. Everything is connected.
Huu-ay-aht history begins with the descent of the original ancestors from the sky and so the skies are important, just as the land the sea and the mountains are, to the core identity and principles of Huu-ay-aht life. I quickly got enamoured with the idea of ensuring that the sky had a matriarch to govern and guardian that part of creation. With Elon Musk polluting the very skies over our heads with an infrastructure of connectivity and delirium, the sky needs a protector.
Over the days and evenings we spent together we were absorbed by story, guided through ancient Huu-ay-aht history and culture by Qiic Qiica, through the deep passion of Emma Louden for her research on exoplanets, to the astrophotography of Jeanine Holowatuik and her despair at the sky pollution of satellites and ground light. We toured the territory by foot and by boat, and spent the night around the fire talking and drinking tea and hoping for the fog to life so we could catch a glimpse of the starry sky, the partial lunar eclipse or the auroras.
Alas, the starry night evaded us as we were blessed with two foggy days, but for me the Dark Sky experience was only enhanced by being socked in. I am lucky enough to live in a relatively dark place, but darkness is a luxury for many who live in towns and cities. I have seen folks equally awed by the thick, inky darkness of the forest under cloud and fog as they are under a sky full of stars on a clear, dark night. Darkness is another of our diminishing commons in this world, and in this respect, the fog and cloud are a blessing, restoring a healthy circadian rhythm and deepening the rest we need. There is perhaps nothing better for understanding how arbitrary the boundaries between living things, landscapes and the universe are than a dark, foggy night where every edge is slightly ambiguous, and you are unsure if the sounds and sensations you feel are coming from inside or out.
I have long felt that on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in all the Nuu-Cha-Nulth communities in which I have been fortunate enough to travel and work. The west coast is one of those places where experiments like the Three Stars Dark Sky Festival seem more possible. First Nations have important and intact jurisdictions in these territories and are actively engaged in massive cultural resurgence. This means that relationships are constantly being reimagined between colonial governments, settler communities, foundations like the Clayoqout Biosphere Trust and Indigenous governments and communities and people who are governing, directing and stewarding their lands and resources with more and more of the recovered authority that was wrested from them over the past 200 years.
The first place I ever visited in BC was Hot Springs Cove in Hesquiaht territory back in 1989. We flew, drove and boated from Toronto to Hot Springs without stopping in Vancouver or anywhere else along the way. I think from that moment, my view of possibility for what could happen in this part of the world has always been informed by the week I spent, staying with my friend Sennan Charleson’s family, fishing herring, listening every night to Simon and Julia Lucas tell stories of all kinds. Coming out here wakes up those experiences in me, and I always return from the Nuu-Cha-Nulth worlds, which are a little different and a lot better for being there.
I hope this Dark Sky Festival thrives. There were so many ideas generated and so much goodwill created between folks this week. So much good can come from that.
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