
C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) appearing in the night sky October 17 over Lake Opinion in Ontario. Shot with my iPhone 13
A collection of interesting links I found and posted at my Mastodon account this month. Happy Hallowe’en!
- A really nice overview of Edgar Schien’s book “Humble Inquiry” and his approach to working with clients. Please read this if you are a consultant.
- This is what happens when you privatize a public service. This is no surprise. We absolutely get what we deserve. Don’t want to pay taxes? No problem. Stick your finger in the wind and see what’s what.
- I truly believe that Citizens Assemblies are the way to go now. Public hearings are not helpful, not transparent, and not generative enough. Here in BC, we undertook a significant initiative back in 2004 when we looked at changing our provincial electoral system. It produced a remarkably creative and well-supported result. There is currently one beginning work to examine the amalgamation of Saanich and Victoria.
- The missing people of North Carolina. My heart is constantly breaking for my freinds and colleagues who are mired in disaster that continues. It is nowhere near over, and the trauma and permanent damage to communities, hearts and brains will not abate any time soon
- Dave Winer is one of the guiding lights in the field of #blogging. I discovered him not long after I started my own Parking Lot blog back in 2002 and followed along with some of the folks that helped inspire him to create RSS and podcasting. RSS should be protected as a treasure of the heritage of humanity. It keeps things open. Scripting News is turning 30.
- The Alberta government’s recent legislative actions are deeply troubling. It’s heartbreaking to see a policy based on exclusion rather than inclusion.
- Traditional Waters, Modern Threats: The Gitga’at’s Fight for Humpbacks. First Nations asserting jurisdiction over their lands and waters generally result in good things for life within their territories.
- A nice collection of Complex Systems Frameworks rendered by my friend Sam Bradd for Simon Fraser University .
- LIstening to Rob Piltch and Lorne Lofsky have an intimate conversation on guitar through Cole Porter’s Everything I Love. These two are absolute masters in very different styles and lions on the Canadian jazz scene.
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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!
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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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Dry Falls, Washington, which is where the Missoula Flood waters poured over the rim of the Grand Coulee and created lakes from the plunge pools at the bottom of the cliffs.
It’s feeling familiar. After four years of mostly working from home and staying fairly close to my home place, I’m travelling more. The difference is that I’m doing it more with Caitlin, as we are working together with groups and organizations on longer-term projects that we are holding together with others. Much of our work together is around building deeper capacity in hosting and participatory leadership with larger institutional organizations such as universities, human services networks, unions, quasi-government organizations and the like. On top of that, we have been doing some Art of Hosting workshops in Vancouver and Manitoba and I have two more coming up in Ontario this fall.
Last week we were in Central Washington State working with a group called Thriving Together which helps build networks of health care providers for whole person health and health equity. This is the second year we have worked with a cohort of folks from that network. We met in Soap Lake, Washington, which in September is quiet. The kids are back in school, the tourists have all left and the town has very little buzz. Soap Lake, which is known as Smokiam (Healing Waters) in the local nxa?amx?ín language is a small, muddy, and very alkaline lake at the southern end of the Grand Coulee. The mud and waters are said to have healing properties and many visitors, especially from northern Europe and Israel, flock to the tow in the summer to partake.
The town itself is not affluent. Soap Lake does not have the water resources or the connection to the interstate to make it rival the towns in the rest of the county. Quincy, about a half hour to the south, is on the Columbia River and is a hub for big agriculture food processing and data centres, both of which use the river to power and cool their operations. Computing “in the cloud” is a misnomer. The cloud needs to rain, and the rain needs to be captured, and the water needs to be swirled around hundreds of thousands of computers that have a real live footprint on the ground. Cloud computing makes it sound so ephemeral. The reality is much more material.
To the north, in the town of Grand Coulee, also on the Columbia River, stands the great dam built during the 1930s to contribute to the two systems change points everyone needed to haul themselves out of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl: water and cheap electricity. In a country where almost every public service is privatized, the Bonneville Power Authority remains a public utility and sells the electricity generated by the dozen or more dams on the Columbia. These dams did their jobs, immortalized in song by Woody Guthrie, (he wrote these songs in less than a month, keeping in line with massive events that happen in a short period of time in these parts) who placed a limited and naive optimism in the people’s power and water, but they also flooded out dozens of Indigenous communities of the Colville Tribes and destroyed the Columbia River salmon runs. The landscape is stunning and captivating and has been radically changed by human hands.
Those human hands worked upon a foundation that was laid down by catastrophic flooding at the end of the ice age, when somewhere between 40 and 100 megafloods cascaded across central Washington, carving deep canyons from the volcanic basalt that had coated the bedrock millions of years before in thousands of feet of lava. the sheer scale of geological processes in this region are mind-blowing, and I found myself absorbed by YouTube videos of the Missoula Floods that carved out features on the land in as little as 48 hours as hundreds of meters of water flowed across the plains and carved the Columbia River gorge on its way to the sea.
Central Washington is no stranger to catastrophic shifts in fortune in the human time scale either. While Quincy and Wenatchee have done well, the further you get away from the Columbia, the harder it is to make a living. Agriculture held a lot of promise in Woody Guthrie’s time and irrigation canals crisscross the whole landscape. But like most industries, agriculture has been largely concentrated in a few hands, and automation has eliminated the jobs Guthrie was so optimistic about. While we were in Soap Lake, except for a single bottle of local wine, none of the food we ate was locally grown. If it was, it was only because it was part of a Sysco order that threw it together with Florida oranges, California lettuce, and bananas from God knows where. Someone is making a killing in agriculture, but it wasn’t the local folks I saw around me.
Instead, what Soap Lake had in spades was community, although it wasn’t obvious to the visiting eye. After spending a week there, we started to meet folks like Simon, the window washer who was sent by the drinkers at the local pub across the street to come and find out what we were up to. Or Nels Borg, who is the defacto golf pro at the Lava Links golf course, which has to be seen to be believed. Nels was in our workshop and is an undaunted community booster, even long championing the funding and construction of the world’s largest lava lamp, something which has very much remained the concept of a plan for 25 years. Like all small towns, Soap Lake has a long story for every “why?”
It’s political season in America and Grant County is a pretty conservative place in general. While there were plenty of Trump signs up (and a bunch of Harris/Walz signs, too), my experience working in the US during these times is that there is just too much work to do for the large-scale silliness to be top of mind for folks. When you are working with people who are caring for folks with addictions, childcare issues, educational challenges, and access to health care and housing, politics and policy are very real. We aren’t in weird arguments about people eating cats. We’re trying to meet the needs of vulnerable people and build public support and collaboration for health and well-being.
The work is real. Caring for veterans, fair housing policies, providing resources for neurodivergent middle schoolers, inclusive economic development, and peer-based support for people in recovery and active addiction. All of it is real and requires collaboration and multiple approaches to meeting needs. The participatory approaches and practices we are called to teach in these settings help set people up to lead in more open and participatory ways, even in a world where public conversations are coming apart and being subjected to lies, intimidation and ideology.
This group is really drawn to the methods we teach – Open Space, World Cafe, Circle, LImiting Beliefs Inquiry – and the theories and tools that help us think about creating participatory work and responses to really complex challenges that overwhelm people and systems. Sometimes, when the questions are just too big, the answer is – at least in the beginning – community. In our rush to do SOMETHING to respond to urgency, it is very easy to create situations that disempower and degrade connections. Organizations like Thriving Together play an important role in supporting the social infrastructure that builds community resilience. They can convene conversations that help diverse groups of people share knowledge and make sense of their conditions, leading to collaborations and resources. Without organizations like that and practices rooted in participatory work, agencies and organizations become siloed, disconnected and lonely.
Soap Lake is really no different from thousands of other communities around the United States and Canada and the rest of the world. It is a small town looking around for help and not necessarily finding it from higher levels of government or the corporate world that has extracted so much of its wealth and talent. It has to rely on its own resources to keep going, and remember what is essential about being a community: connecting, knowing each other, devoting a bit of time and energy to something a bit bigger than yourself because you know that when some are suffering, all are inhibited from full wellbeing.
I love working with groups like this. I admire their work and their undaunted commitment to solving absolutely diabolical problems. I learn so much about the imperative of participatory work from places like this, and I’m grateful for the reciprocal relationships of learning and change-making that we create together.
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I’m back in Tlaoquiaht territory on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This is a place I once described as The Land of Tsawalk as it is the cradle of a philosophy and cosmology of interconnection and interdependence that has been refined by centuries of Nuu-chah-nulth philosophers, leaders and families. We’re here to do an Art of Hosting with the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust and 40 or so local leaders and organizers. This will be the fourth Art of Hosting I’ve done here and they are always different, responsive to the land and the ocean and the people and the way time works here. We will plan tomorrow and then we will allow things to happen, and it will be, as it always is, a rich and abundant experience.
On the way here, Caitlin and I listened to some podcasts. Two of these had moments that spoke to the place and the quality of time and landscape, and this is the real purpose of this post.
The first is. A Radiolab episode called “Small Potatoes” is about how observation and reflection can transform the most mundane of things in our daily experience. One segment of this episode featured a clip from Ian Chillag’s podcast Everything is Alive in which the philosopher Chioke l’Anson plays “a grain of sand” in conversation with Chillag. l’Anson brings an incredible perspective to this interview, including these gems:
CHIOKE:
Yeah, I mean, I think that if there’s one difference between them and I… Sorry, I’m just having
trouble with the pronouns, you know, we’re doing this interview and I’m a grain of sand.
IAN:
Yeah.
CHIOKE:
But that’s not really the way I would think of myself. I think normally I would just say, “We are sand.”
IAN:
OK.
CHIOKE:
So, you see that there’s the mass noun thing happening and it’s weird to talk to you because you
don’t have a mass noun thing. Or you don’t seem to have a mass noun arrangement. So, you say
yourself that you’re a person, right?
IAN:
Yeah, I would say I’m a person.
CHIOKE:
So, like why aren’t you a grain of person?
IAN:
Like why do I not consider myself as like a fraction of all of humanity?
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like that makes more sense. It just seems to me like if you recognise the degree to which you
owed your existence to other people you might also be nicer to other people.
Or then there is this meditation on time and change:
IAN:
Right. Do you know how old you are?
CHIOKE:
Not exactly, no. I think, it probably would amount to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of
years. Like, I mean, I wasn’t always sand, right? Like there was a time when I was a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, yeah.
CHIOKE:
Yeah. So, you know, like do you know about the myth of Sisyphus?
IAN:
Yeah
CHIOKE:
Yeah, that’s a funny one to me because Sisyphus is cursed to roll this boulder up the hill for eternity,
but really the boulder would eventually erode. I mean, a hundred thousand years or so. It would be
like a little pebble. Like, just stick it out, Sisyphus. You’ll be done in no time, you know?
IAN:
Eventually it’s just going to be sand.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, exactly. And in addition, the hill will also erode. And so, you know, Sisyphus after some time
would have a flat plain instead of a hill and maybe like a marble instead of a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, so, yeah. So, he’s cursed for eternity, but really, he just needs to get through I don’t know
50,000 years or something.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like he should really stick to it. And then that’ll show the Gods.
Amazing.
In another podcast we listened to, a To The Best Of Our Knowledge episode on deep time, Ann Strainchamps interviews geologist Marcia Bjorneru about changes to our earth and climate:
AS: Do you think the perspective of deep time can help with any of the existential fear and dread that comes with an awareness of climate change and global warming? Does being aware of the many long ages of the planet put climate change in perspective? Or make it more frightening?
MB: From a scientific point of view, I can say that Earth will be fine. The Earth will deal with the changes in climate that we’re causing and eventually, new ecosystems will emerge.
But the human part of me mourns what we’ve done and the rapidity with which old, well-established ecosystems and landscapes have been changed. And I worry for humanity, for what the next decades or century will bring as we cope with a new set of rules. That’s the scary thing to me. We’ve been able to understand the way the planet has worked through the Holocene, but now we’re changing the boundary conditions and parameters, and so many of the models we’ve developed aren’t going to be very relevant as we go further into the Anthropocene.
The past won’t necessarily be a key to the future. And there’s real sadness there. Our cultures have grown up with a certain version of Earth, and it’ll be radically different.
These insights seem to hit so much deeper out here in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth territories, where a deep sense of time and a deep connection with the ancient marine and forest ecosystems are responsible for thousands of years of occupation and well-being. Indeed, Bjorneru’s observation about the new boundary conditions of life on earth brings added importance to preserving intact large amounts of wild and ancient ecosystems. In 300,000 years as a species, humans have never lived in an environment that is as heavily degraded as it is now. We were nurtured in the complex life-giving cradles of the very ecosystems out of which we arose. We have changed those conditions of life, and who knows what effect it will have on our survival, the survival of millions of other species and the evolution of new forms of life on Earth.
Out here, on the edge of the world, the principles of tsawalk compel us to engage these questions. The perspective of deep time and deep interconnection lies all around us.