It's a Holiday ... Let's Just Have Some Fun!

This is a holiday weekend for many people in the world, so I thought I'd keep it short and light. Well, short and fun (cuz the topic of climate chaos is never light). 

Please enjoy Baba Brinkman’s Rap Guide to Climate Chaos. This hiphop artist's lyrics are both ingenious and educative.

Let's Get Our Priorities Right

There's a little war going on in my tiny community. An arts group has fired its founder just as that person was handing over the reins to a new artistic director. Someone's retirement plans have been scuppered. Reputations and relationships are being ruined. Recriminations are zinging around the ether.

It's got me upset. But not for the reasons anyone involved might assume. I'm upset because all the time, money and energy being usurped to fight this battle would be infinitely better spent on fighting the climate change emergency.

I'm not saying the arts aren't important. They are. I know that music, along with other creative pursuits, has saved many a life -- and will become increasingly important as respite for those fatigued from battling government inaction, Big Money and Fossil Fuel Corporation intransigence, pignorant (from pretend ignorance) deniers, and, especially, pervasive public apathy in the face of the climate crisis.

But these days, ANY argument, quarrel, disagreement, squabble, fight, fracas, dispute, wrangle, clash, altercation, feud, contretemps, falling-out, tiff, row, blowup, rhubarb or shitstorm (thank you, online dictionary) that ISN'T about climate change and getting humanity to zero carbon is a dreadful waste of valuable time and energy and possibly money.

I'm trying to summon the courage to present that very rant at their next AGM. I'm going to ask them to rewind ... back to before the relationship went sour. (It's a technique that works in marriages.) And then to move forward like the adults they all are. Life is too short and there's too much good work to accomplish to squander precious personal and organizational time, energy and resources on misunderstandings, missteps and regrets.

Wish me luck! It's time we all start to realize what's important in this lifetime and get our priorities right.

Follow up: It's sadly vindicating when I write about a topic here on this blog and then a few days later see that someone famous and infinitely more scientifically literate than I am has since said something similar. Bill Nye, the Science Guy, has been lamenting the lack of scientific literacy in the United States. You can watch his video, How Science Skeptics Hold the World Back, here. (And hey, is he getting cuter or what? ;-)

Are "Pictures" Still Worth a Thousand Words?

Want to keep it simple this week. These posters are courtesy of Climate Change News (along with Prophets of Hope and my sister). Enjoy and share!

Get Inspired!

Well, folks, if we have the energy and creativity to do this:

... and the skill and creativity to do this:

... then we can save the world! (We've got to find our inspiration anywhere we can. ;-)

Where are we going, and why am I in a handbasket? — A Guest Post

I love that saying on a bumper sticker! A "virtual friend," Norma Lundberg, wrote the other day to say that her father used to use that expression ("We're all going to hell in a handbasket"), and would then add, "One of these days, people will get off their hind legs and then we'll see." (We're not off our hind legs yet, unfortunately.)

Today, I would like to hand over this space to my online friend, Norma, who is wise and artistic and eloquent: a Renaissance Woman, storyteller, quilter, polyglot, lover of the arts and culture and a mentor in considering how these traditions can help us do the right thing today for future generations — if we choose to.

Cassandra ... had the power to predict the future, and none of us has that. Climate change science people are getting very good at predicting trends derived from all the data accumulating, but you don't have to be a scientist to have lived long enough to note some significant changes over time that indicate sufficient deterioration leading to high risk of collapse. Just think: it was only in the past year that Toronto city council [in Ontario, Canada] decreed that it would now not be illegal to hang clothes to dry in one's backyard.

In fact, you don't have to be a futurologist at all to see, from our privileged and only partly informed position in the well-to-do northern countries, that the disaster has ALREADY struck, is already ongoing, in the poorer countries to the south after decades, centuries of ongoing pillaging, plundering, and rapacious greed from the north, demolishing cultures, social systems, natural resources, local governments and so much more, leaving in their wake drought, disease, famine, warfare, and dictatorships practising fear and torture. Too many years of treating the planet and all its creatures as disposable.

[...]

You wrote that "it's good to have resources for starting to learn what this new world could look like," [but people] don't listen to the music, look at the work by people making art engaged with the land and the weather, don't read poetry, don't read much of anything it seems, don't read philosophy, don't speak or read other languages, don't gather for coffee and actually TALK about politics....

[...]

Yes, call people stupid and incapable and feed them sanctioned pablum, don't for whatever god's sake be passionate, partisan, informed.... Listen to Shostakovich, read about his work, his times, the history, and see if you're not a little bit stirred by the music. It doesn't need subtitles. It just needs to be listened to, and poetry needs to be read, and art has to be looked at. It's all part of having eyes, ears, senses, and of finding out what we think of what we see, hear, sense. We don't have to be told what to like, but we do have to think, and experience, and wonder, and question. Isn't that what education is about? Isn't that what being part of the world means?

My appreciation, Norma. Anything earnest and honest is a joy to read these days (given the "pablum" we're mostly fed). I should point out that Norma's heartfelt "rant" was in response to my rant in response to an educational listserve's discussion of the role of education in transforming the world in order to safeguard the future for our students.

*****

Many thanks to artist Camille Rose Garcia and Jonathan Levine Gallery for the image, Going to Hell in a Handbasket, a 2005 painting in acrylic and glitter on panel. I'm not an artist, nor am I an art critic, but this painting speaks to me of the innocence of those whose future we will turn into hell if we don't change course.