Today was a day of hosting on webinars, with a group looking at the emerging edges of the non-profit sector in BC and with a group od UNited Church ministers and lay leaders who are hosting transformation and learning together in a community of practice. At the end of our second call, this Thomas Merton quote was shared with us:
“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
This resonates strongly with the tack Meg Wheatley takes in her no book, So Far From Home, which is a call to spiritual warriorship, despite everything.
Several really stunning insights fell at me feet today, from this five hours of online discovery. Forexample, a friend working with victims of sexual abuse in northern BC talked about how people who do this work are not burnt out by the work – humans have been caring resliiently for each other for eons. What burns them out is maintaining the systems that formalize that work of community. As humans we are easy in relationship, but our energy and lives are sapped by turning away from what nurtures us and tending nto a system of professional practice, regulations, administrative accountabilities and resource deployment that leaves us tapped out.
Or another insight today that the real practice of making change is making space for dissent so that there can be an authentic yes from the centre of the work. Or that evolution is a difficult metaphor for change work, because so much of what we are aiming to change has been put in place intentionally and which purpose.
We are one learning journeys with these groups, and these little insights trickle in like sunlight when you are listening openly and sharing in each other’s discovery. Nice way to end the week.
Today I heard the premier of Alberta, Alison Redford use the term “bitumen bubble” to describe the reason why Alberta’s provincial revenues have fallen so much that the province now faces an $8 billion deficit. The obvious answer – surprisingly being trotted out by Chambers of Commerce, oil companies and conservative governments! – is that we need to build a pipeline to the west coast to get Alberta tar to an Asian market so that Alberta based oil companies can charge higher prices and therefore more tax revenue will flow to the coffers.
I have a new term too: “gaiacide.”
Over the last few years, the primary case being made for building a new pipeline to the coast has been this. We are “leaving money on the table” and every barrel that goes uncontested to the USA is being underpriced because it’s hungry competitor to the east doesn’t have a chance to drive the price up.
But this is not a reasoned response to the Basis of opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline. The reason I am opposed to it is exactly because it will facilitate the mass burning of fossil fuels. Burning the tar fields of Alberta will irrevocably push the temperature of our atmosphere to catastrophic levels. It will endanger all life on earth.
If you have planned your provincial budget around enabling this eventuality, it makes you almost an accomplice to a crime against humanity. Why on earth are you not using the current revenues from the oil sands to diversify the economy and wean yourselves off oil?
Let me give a clear example. You could, by Alison Redford’s logic, argue that BC is missing a huge opportunity by not attracting producers of toxic waste to locate here. You see we have a huge ocean and we could make billions by charging people to come here and then dump uranium, toxic chemicals, PCBs and asbestos into the ocean. Think about it. Other disposal technologies are expensive, but the ocean is right here. We could just fill it up, and the water carries it away. We are clearly suffering a “toxic waste bubble” and all that needs to happen is to make a few regulatory changes to allow us to dump it all in the sea.
Of course this seems absurd. We don’t plan our economy around that opportunity because it would permanently destroy the health of the oceans, and by extension human beings. That seems obvious. So why all the noise about needing to do the same to the atmosphere? Alberta and Canada needs to be told that this is illegitimate economic activity, and that we should not be encouraging it. We are deeply buried in oil and we need to get OUT of it, not get deeper into it. When the ones with the policy and economic power can’t even entertain this possibility, I despair. I cannot wean myself off oil, and neither can you, not alone. All I can do is wait until someone comes along that can change this, and somehow prepare my kids for a life in a hot world.
Until oil is priced according to the externalities that are foisted on to the atmospheric commons and future generations, we will never wean ourselves away from this, and the narcissistic and psychotic minds that plot their own personal profit at the expense of the future of life on earth will continue to believe that they are legitimate business people and not gaiacidal maniacs.
Just beautiful weather here the last week. We have been living under a high pressure system that is forcing some wonderful meterological phenomena. Notably, the high pressure traps cold air near the sea and creates an inversion, meaning that the moisture can’t escape and form clouds, so it lingers at sea level forming think banks of fog that fill the Strait of Greorgia and Parts of Howe Sound.
Last night the fog bansk were as thick as they can get and all night long we were treated to the soothing symphony of dozens of different fog horns sounding out in the dark. the Point Atkinson lighthouse, which is miles away at the entrance to English Bay has a classic two tone deep “eeeee-ooooo” and the whistles and horns from moving ships in the night answered the call.
This morning in the bright sunshine on Bowen, the fog did it’s best to fill the Sound, but we somehow escaped the cool, and we are being treated to an incredible display of light and blue sky and grey fog flowing in from the Strait. There is something to be said about how bright the sun is when it rises out of the fog and reflects off the tops of what previously obscured it.
Yesterday, the kids and I went skiing at Cypress and the view from Mount Strachan shows the way the fog coats the city and eases part way into Howe Sound. It made for beautiful views, and a gorgeous sunset.
Just in from an hour SUPping around Mannion Bay and Miller’s Landing. It is sunny and warm today – 5 degrees C – and there is not a breath of wind out. The water is so calm there isn’t even any swell in the Queen Charlotte Channel. Everything is flat and calm and quiet, like a long sigh.
I started out from Pebbly Beach and rounded the north point. Headed out towards Miller’s Landing for 20 minutes, and then sat on my board, bobbing on the sea. Out in the channel, a seal was splashing. No sign of the huge pod of hundreds of dolphins that had been spotted earlier this week of Cowan Point. Utter calm. Utter, utter calm.
It could have been a summer evening on the water except that there were no boats around. I had the whole of Howe Sound to myself.
Coming up from the beach I ran into Norma Dallas who owns the Bowen island Marina and we talked about what it feels like to be out on the water all alone on days like this. We agreed that the words to describe it are “humility” and “gratitude.” That we are alive to experience this is simply a gift. To have snow capped mountains and a calm ocean to hold me, is an incredible thing. To feel my smallness in all of that timeless beauty is a fine teaching.
Very few of us have our hands on the real levers of power. We lack the money and influence to write policy, create tax codes, move resources around or start and stop wars. Most of us spend almost all of our time going along with the macro trends of the world. We might hate the implications of a fossil fuel economy, but everything we do is firmly embedded within it. We might despise colonization, but we know that we are alos guilty of it in many small ways,
The reason challenges like that are difficult to resolve is that we are embedded within them. We are a part of them and the problem is not like something outside of ourselves that we apply force to. Instead it is like a virus or a mycellium, extending it’s tendrils deep into our lives. We are far more the product of the problems we wish to solve than we are the solutions we long to develop.
Social change is littered with ideas like “taking things to scale” which implies that if you just work hard enough, the things you will do will become popular and viral and will take over the world. We can have a sustainable future if “we just practice simple things and then take them to scale.” The problem with this reasoning is that the field in which we are embedded, that which enables us to practice small changes is heavily immune to change. Our economy, our energy systems, our governments are designed to be incredibly stable. They can withstand all kinds of threats and massive changes, This is a GOOD THING. I would hate to have the energy system that powers my life to be fickle enough to be transformed by every good idea that comes along about sustainable power generation. So that is the irony. In the western world, the stability that we rely on to be able to “make change” is exactly that which we desire to change.
We are embedded in the system. We ARE the system. That which we desire to change is US. You want a peaceful world, because you are not a fully peaceful person – violence has seeped into your life, and you understand the implications of it. This is also a GOOD THING. Because, as my friend Adam Kahane keeps quoting from time to time “if you are not a part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution.” Real change in stable societies like Canada comes only from catastrophic failure. That may be on our horizon, but I call you a liar if it’s something you desire. It will not be pretty. Living on the west coast of Canada, I sometimes think about it because a massive earthquake will strike here – possibly in my lifetime – and it will change everything instantly and massively and forever. So, while climate change and economic collapse are probabilities, earthquakes are certainties.
So let’s forget about prototyping new things and “taking them to scale.” But let’s not forget about prototyping new things. Because one of the big lessons from the living systems world view is that change happens in an evolutionary way. It happens deep within the system and it requires two resources we all have – creativity and time. It does not require hope. Living systems do not hope. They just change.
Years ago I was inspired by Michael Dowd’s ideas captured in “Thank God for Evolution” in which he talks about mutations as the vehicle of change in evolving systems. Of course this is a widespread thought, but it was quite liberating to me when I first discovered it because it compels us to use our own creativity to make change. Practicing something different, as some small level, is not a useless endeavour. There is no way to know what will happen when you mutate the system. And so that is a reason for practicing. That is why I love Occupy and #IdleNoMore and other social gathering practices. They are creative mutations of the status quo. And they are undertaken without any expectation of massive change. Instead they seed little openings, the vast majority of which don’t go anywhere. In an evolutionary system, mutations may introduce new levels of adaptability, but they might alos kill off the organism. But to survive and evolve, an organism needs to mutate. Remaining the same is also suicidal, because everything else is mutating and changing, and you will lose your fitness if you don’t also change.
So the second resource we all have is time. if you are beholden to making change along a strategic critical pathway, especially in a complex living system, you will suffer terrible delusions. Very few of us have that kind of time. The kind of time we do have is the time to let whatever we do work or fail. To orient yourself to this kind of time, you need to practice something with no expectation of it’s success. The moment you cling to a desired result is the moment suffering creeps into your work, and the moment you begin to lose resilience. Adaptability is reliant on creative imaginations working resourcefully.
So changing from within has something to do with all of this. Watching #IdleNoMore is to witness a celebratory mutation in the system of colonization. It is impossible to say if it will have the desired results that people project upon it. But of course it will “work.” We need to sit and watch it work as a mutation in a living system. And the bonus is that we get to round dance while we do it!