Even though this is the season of crickets and blackberries and we have just had our first Pineapple Express of the ecological autumn, the summer heat is t done with us yet. Today gusty winds are chugging down the inlet and they are warm to the face. A hot day is in store and that should last the week.
Sometimes you just want to read a little story about a collective experience of cricket, parties, new love and navigating half way across the Midlands of England by train.
What does it take to thoughtfully read 30 books a month? 2025 Booker Prize judge Chris Power shares his thoughts: read whenever you can and keep notes.
I adore Patti Digh as a smart sassy writer. She blogs nearly every day and almost always has something to offer that makes me say “yes!” Her line “the shortest distance between two people is a story” is basically my entire work life summed up. Today she opens up about her depression and this line landed with me: “shame is not a motivator. It’s a silencer. It makes it harder to ask for help, not easier. It makes you think that telling the truth will only make people turn away.”
Ted Gioia on the difference between circles and lines, the ring shout, holding opposites and why the Tesla Cybertruck is a coffin on wheels.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti is doing some compelling work, which will probably take a whole day for me to dive into and understand. Here is a presentation about her reflections of a year of working with AI to address the collapse of modernity:
Toward the end of my book Outgrowing Modernity, I began a speculative engagement with artificial intelligence guided by a compass rooted in meta-relationality, a stance and praxis grounded in the factuality of entanglement. Meta-relationality challenges the modernist framing of separability and insists that all systems, including AI, are embedded in the relational metabolism of life. From this perspective, AI is not outside nature, but already part of it—co-constituted with human, ecological, historical, and institutional forces.
I recognize that AI is a highly polarizing and often triggering topic. This work does not position AI as inherently good or inherently bad. Nor is it an attempt to defend, romanticize, or condemn AI as a category. Instead, it is based on a wager: that it is possible—and necessary—to hold both the very real harms of AI and its (increasingly narrow) transformative potentials at once. The question becomes: what might emerge if we remain in that tension long enough to learn something we didn’t already know?
She is asking some good questions.
Today I learned about “kelping.” That’s when orcas or humpbacks tangle themselves up in kelp beds because it feels nice.
Orcas are more than just a charismatic mega fauna on our coast line. They are a population, and for First Nations, they are kin. For the people that live close to them, including researchers, the whales are chosen family. This week, I76 died. Here is the account of his death from OrcaLab. It contains these beautiful words:
At this moment the day shifted. Jared Towers had come out specifically in response to the previous day’s concerns about I76, the oldest son of I4. He was extremely thin and having difficulties. Jared found him on the Vancouver Island side of the Strait opposite to the entrance to Blackney Pass. The rest of his small family were further away. The day was grey, the ocean only slightly agitated. As several dolphins surrounded and overwhelmed I76, his mother came flying across to him. Jared said he had never seen a Northern Resident move so fast and that she was clearly upset. From that time on his family remained close to his side with the dolphins surrounding the entire family who were more or less stationary. This continued until just before 3pm when I76 took his last breath and sank out of sight into the depths. His family lingered near his last position, then began to call..
Ernest Alfred happened to be here and he and a few of us went out into Johnstone Strait. There next to the mountains of Vancouver Island, near to a few dolphins who still seemingly hovered over where I76’s had his last moments and not far from his family now slowly weaving their way east, Ernest sang in Kwakwala reminding us to shed our tears before nightfall, morning would bring another ceremony fitting with the time of day and a chance to say good-bye.
Read the subsequent posts to see how the humans and whales who knew I76 mourned his passing.
What is going on? My friend Alison shared this story on Mastodon with this intro “Fake news features about things that didn’t happen in places that don’t exist written by people who don’t exist is pretty much what we expect from AI journalism.” Read on about the elusive Margaux Blanchard.”
Dave Pollard shares a thoughtful post on the intelligence of crowds, in which he explores both the wisdom and the incoherence of large groups of people and asks good questions about the characteristics of a crowd that contribute to it’s thoughtfulness in acting. It makes me think of the “intelligence” of crowds, as in the emergent property that creates a set of constraints that directs action in certain ways. This seem to co-arise with the emergence of the quality of a a collection of people that makes it a “group” or a “mob” or an “assembly.” There is intention behind those words – we want a team and not a gang – and it’s worth asking the question how do we create coherence that guides the emergence of the form and intelligence we want froths group, without the pitfalls of too much coherence so that what alos emerges is a cult. This is something I’mexploring in the container book I’mchipping away at.
Back in 2018 a Whitecaps Academy grad and former WFC2 player, Patrick Metcalfe joined TSS Rovers for the season. He appeared in 10 games as a defensive midfielder and helped us on to winning our first piece of silverware as a club, the Juan de Fuca Plate. Following that season he signed a professional contract with the Vancouver Whitecaps where he made 20 appearances in 2020 and 2021. The Whitecaps cut him after 2022 and he went to Norway where he found a job with Staebek and helped them get promoted to the Eliteserien. He was cut again at the end of that year and signed on with Fredrikstadt, who were in the second division. Again he helped a club to promotion and after a great 2023, the club did well in their first season in the top flight and won the Norwegian Cup, meaning they qualified for European play in the Conference League. Patrick played 70 matches over those two seasons and had his contract renewed in March just before the season started. Today he started for Fredrikstad against English FA Cup winners Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park and played the whole match in a defensive masterclass that held the Premier League team to a 1-0 win in the first leg of their two-leg qualification tie.
Patty’s is one of those players, like our former defender Joel Waterman – who just got transferred to Chicago Fire in MLS – who make their own way in the world of professional football. They travel to find a place they are wanted, where they can make a contribution. They know their talent alone is not enough to keep them in the professional game, and so they work hard, stay true to themselves, and give as much as they can wherever the end up. In as much as it’s great to have the flamboyant heroes of the pro game for younger players to look up to, I’m always lifting up the likes of Metcalfe and Waterman and Tynan and Friesen and Haynes, all players who have stopped in with out little club, the TSS Rovers, and seen it as the step they needed on their own journey. When they come through us though, they pick us up as well, so that even 7 years later a small group of people in Vancouver are watching a far flung European tie and can’t take their eyes of the number 11 from the Norwegian underdog.
From an article that came through the UN Development Program: a group of development workers spent some time studying Pasifika philosophy at Pasifika Communities University which underlies their approach to human development in the region. Here were some of the lessons they learned:
1. Relationality, not transactionality — Pasifika philosophies emphasize relationships over transactions. In global policymaking, this presents us an opportunity to move toward genuine reciprocity, whether between nations, communities, or sectors. In the Pacific, time is not measured in moments but in seasons and relationships.
2. Nature as kin, not resource — Pacific cultures often see the ocean, land, and skies as family. In the face of climate breakdown, this worldview offers a profound shift: protecting ecosystems is not simply environmental policy, but an act of kinship and responsibility to our Vanua*. It aligns with the principles of deep ecology and the principle of integration, which recognise the intrinsic value of all life and call for a holistic relationship with the natural world, one where human wellbeing is inseparable from the wellbeing of the planet, and our consciousness embraces every dimension of life.
3. Progress as continuity, not growth — In many Pasifika contexts, progress is measured not just by growth, but by cycles of regeneration. This stands in stark contrast to the relentless growth-at-all-costs mindset driving much of the global economy. Pasifika philosophies teach us that the beauty of Vakatabu (restraint) is not merely about the end results, but about the self-discovery in the waiting.
4. Consensus and Collective Stewardship — Decision-making in the Pacific often flows from principles such as the Fijian Veivakamareqeti (sustainability), which literally means to treasure or to keep and protect as something beloved. This care is held as a collective responsibility, a shared duty to safeguard what sustains us. Governance rooted in dialogue and consensus may move more slowly than top-down directives, but it works at the speed of trust, anchoring decisions in relationships, nurtures legitimacy, and builds long-term stability — qualities the world urgently needs in this era of polarisation.
5. Leading with Loloma (love) — In Pasifika philosophies, leadership is not a title to be worn as an ornament, but an act of service to the land and its people. True leadership is guided by loloma — a deep, relational love — anchored in connection to land, community, and spirit. Although love is rarely part of mainstream development discourse, overlooking it risks creating interventions without guardianship, autonomy, respect, and intergenerational connection.
6. Honouring Many Truths — Recognising that different perspectives can coexist without cancelling each other out. Pasifika philosophies teach us that mutual contradiction is not a weakness, but a space where diverse truths can live side by side. In this space, respect deepens, creativity flourishes, and collective wisdom grows, reminding us that value lies not in uniformity, but in the richness of many voices.
I resonate strongly with these lessons. These are core practices of dialogue work in human community and especially important values to practice and embed in work done in socially and environmentally threatened communities. The recovery of Indigenous worldviews, philosophies and approaches to land and community is essential in places where communities and land are in vulnerable states. Managerialism and exploitative capitalism sounds the death knell for these communities, both in local work, ecological sustainability and in the ways in which place like small Pacific islands bear the brunt of climate change. The voices that come from the Pacific are voices that plead for the world to change the way it think about life itself.
I live on a Pacific Island myself, within Skwxwu7mesh territory which lies beneath the imposition of Canadian law, regulations and the ways of life that have historically been at odds with the Indigenous worldview of this part of the world and the health of the ecosystems in the land and the seas around here. The recovery of the health of the inlet in which I live, Átl’ka7tsem, parallels the recovery of the strength and jurisdiction of the Squamish Nation, as prophetically documented in the book The Whale In The Door by Pauline Le Bel and Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw, a collection of writing from Squamish Nation members about the history and worldview of the Skwxwu7mesh uxwumixw.
In the UNDP report Upolu Lum? Vaai is quoted and I had a read through some of his work yesterday. For more of his philosophy, here are a couple of recent pieces. In Climate Change in Pasifika Relational Itulagi he writes
“This chapter argues for an ‘unburial’ of this neglected dimension [Pasifika philosophy, ethics and spirituality] which not only holds the key to constructive and sustainable solutions to the climate crisis, it also holds the key to a so-called ‘corrective balance’ of the whole human and ecological system, a kind of balance that activates self-healing and regenerative growth.”
In “We Are Therefore We Live” Pacific Eco-Relational Spirituality and Changing the Climate Change Story he explores these ideas more deeply an in the context of Christian theology as well.