There Are So Many Things We Can Be Doing!

I think I'm just going to make a list today. I haven't offered this sort of thing in a long time, but we attended a meeting the other night where lots of ideas for what a nearby city (and the capital city of my province in Canada) can do about the climate crisis. I'll add in some of my own ideas.

Change now, as philosopher Krishnamurti taught. Picture … dream … envision how the world needs to be: free of war, terrorism, violence, cruelty and slaughter. A world free of fossil fuels, a “golden age” of zero-carbon renewable energy, will be safer, cleaner, kinder, healthier, more equitable, and more peaceful. It’s a beautiful vision, isn’t it?

For the sake of the children – of all species – find the strength, the courage and the compassion to truly feel the pain of the climate crisis. Next, lament. And then, get active. Remember that the most vulnerable are being impacted worst and first, but we are all impacted. People around the world are losing their lives or their loved ones, their livelihoods, their food security and water sources, their homes and entire homelands, in extreme weather events caused or exacerbated by climate chaos. We also need to understand this from the perspective of indigenous people, who have nowhere to move to because they are their land.

If you and your family are not already eating a plant-based diet, go vegan now, for the sake of your own health and the health of the planet. It’s the quickest – and most significant – way to lower your greenhouse gas emissions. Further, how can we create peaceful transformation in a world filled with slaughter and cruelty?

The Burning Age is over. Support a carbon fee and any other strategy that will encourage people to switch their investment money to zero-carbon, non-combustion renewable energy. Work towards a combustion-free society by transitioning away from the internal combustion engine.

Call for your government to keep its pledge to end taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuel industries. According to the International Monetary Fund, every year governments around the world give $5.3 trillion in direct and indirect subsidies to fossil fuel corporations. Just think how much faster we’ll make the transition to zero-carbon, non-combustion energy when all that money is switched to renewables.

Make a plan for reducing your family’s carbon footprint as rapidly as possible. Invest in the future by ensuring that your investments are ethical and green. Divest from fossil fuels. Vote with your dollars. Invest in a heat pump for your home to lower your heating bill. If you need to drive, save up to purchase a hybrid or electric vehicle. Figure how far you and your family are willing to walk, bicycle, take public transit, car share, etc., and set up systems to help you use these greener modes of transportation more often. Be willing to make changes, compromises, even sacrifices for the sake of the future.

Support fair elections and electoral reform so that governments are made up of elected officials representing all voices, not just those beholden to fossil fuel industries.

Learn the basic science of the unprecedented crime of greenhouse gas pollution and the anthropogenic (human-caused) climate and oceans crisis it has led to. Then learn why climate disruption and the trifecta of ocean heating, ocean acidification, and ocean de-oxygenation represent an urgent emergency. Understand that the climate change denial campaign is deliberate and extremely well funded. They can sound convincing, but don’t be fooled. Do your own research, check your sources, and stay strong.

The greatest immediate threat is food and water insecurity. After all, we have evolved over the last 10,000 years into a species dependent on agriculture – and agriculture is dependent upon a stable climate, which we’ve had globally for the last 10,000 years – until now. Encourage ecological and regenerative agricultural practices and the implementation of permaculture principles. Mulch your garden. Plant trees. Lend support (time, money, energy, expertise) to food-growing programs for children and schools. We can’t grow food overnight; nor can we learn to grow food overnight. Be a champion for a different kind of education … one that will help create the world we need.

Permaculture the heck out of your community. Turn public spaces and boulevards into food forests. Build food security, food sovereignty, food resilience. (If climate chaos is going to lead to worldwide hunger, at least we'll be among the last to go.)

Get your local municipal government/s to declare a climate change emergency. (The Climate Mobilization can offer guidance with this.)

Protest outside of any bank that is investing in global destruction. Divest while you're at it, and put your money into a community bank or credit union.

Pull off some "intersactions." Take your protest signs to the busiest intersection in your community and keep crossing the road when the walk sign is on walking around in a square. Get it? High visibility. Not illegal. Drivers won't be turned off because you're not blocking traffic.

Remember to make your planning meetings and your public actions inclusive (invite others who might not normally participate) and accessible (for example, to people with disabilities, to parents with small children). 

Finally, do your spiritual work – pray, meditate, dance, go for walks, whatever – but don’t stop there! Remember, we all have at least a little bit of time, money, energy and/or expertise to share.

 And hey, if none of these actions feels right to you, you can always bake muffins for those on the front lines of saving the world. Even protestors have to eat!

Adapted from Henry Van Dyke

Living Off the Interest?

Much talk of interest and investing and capital and capitalism and the economy in my life lately. Not only has my local little transition group given up the ghost (well, it's morphed into something less oriented to transformative change, even before we got around to relocalizing our economy), but I just had a meeting with my "green" financial advisor the other day, and I'm editing a series of (quite damning) reports on "socially responsible investing" by my favourite investigative writer. 

I'm pleased to announce that I'm now pretty proud of my investment portfolio (miniscule as it is by some standards) — or at least I was until I started reading the latest installment in Cory Morningstar's series (you can read Part I here; scroll down a smidge). Suddenly I realized that, well, many things:

• That by the sheer fact that I have money (from years of teaching and living fairly frugally) to invest, I am part of the world's 1%. I must remember to remember how blessed and lucky I am. I must remember the power and influence that money gives me, and put it to good use.
• That any sort of investing where I lose track of my money (ie, I'm not investing in my neighbours or my community ... yet), I am part of the economic system that is annihilating life on Earth, without conscience.
• That even an investment in solar, wind or geothermal energy might still be responsible for environmental degradation and displacing people and other species.

And that's just off the top of my head. Capitalism, by its very essence, along with the rules (crutches) we've developed to prop it up, is inherently dangerous. We allow business, as Bill McDonough explains, to get away with murder because we appreciate how speedy and innovative it is compared to government. We give it a free ride when it comes to the damage it creates, allowing corporations to keep all the benefits (aside from a few pesky taxes) while externalizing social and environmental costs. Through our taxes and other government income, we subsidize (to the tune of almost $2 trillion per year, according to the IMF) the most devastating and destructive companies on the planet (fossil fuel corporations). 

But here's what I really wanted to share with you today. It's an odd little message that I scrawled to myself while I was on vacation:

Build your sustainable economy from hair and nails and bellybutton lint. Once you start harvesting fingers and toes — or worse! — you know you're going to run out eventually. And not raw hair and nails, either. Value-added hair and nails!

I don't remember why that came to me. But it struck me one day that our capitalist economy is (and I'm sure I'm not the first to notice) rather cannibalistic. I got this picture in my mind's eye that it's like each of us is chopping off our fingers and toes (our "capital," a word that kind of eerily comes from the Latin caput, meaning head) to keep things chugging along, and you know how long that can last! 

So no, we need to be living off the interest, the bits that grow back, like hair, nails and, yes, bellybutton lint. My fear is that if we don't get this straight, we'll get to the end of our fingers and toes and start going for the organs.

And not only that, but we're losing some wonderful friends from our little community at the end of this month, and it's making me sad. They're leaving because they can't make a living here. They've struggled for years and they're tired and ready for some financial ease. Why don't we ever insist that industries can't ship our hair and nails and bellybutton lint away "raw" — they ought to be ensuring local jobs through value-added hair and nail products.

Okay, the metaphor has gone on long enough. At the very least, please could we start talking about these issues? Instead of pretending there's nothing wrong? Please?

Is Green Investing a Compassionate Climate Action?

I heard someone ask this past week, "Who will be the first to accept 0% on their investments?" The answer, of course, is (a) all those who keep their money under their mattress, and (b) all those who lost huge chunks of their nest eggs when the Big Banks orchestrated that collapse in 2008-2009.

But the question also reminded me that we're not moving in the direction of economic revolution fast enough to safeguard the future; we aren't beatin' 'em, so we'd better join 'em. Let's use "thuh market" to do the right thing.

If you have money invested in stuff that's snuffing out the future, then think again. Investing in renewable energy technologies, for example, is good for you and for the planet. Here's a recent update showing that people are making good returns on their investments in green.

It's called Global Investment in Green Energy Hit Record in 2010 by Todd Woody at Grist, and subtitled The Quarter-Trillion-Dollar Opportunity.

The numbers are in and 2010 proved a record year for green energy, investment with venture capitalists, corporations, and governments worldwide pouring $243 billion into wind farms, solar power, electric cars, and other technologies, according to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

That's a 30 percent spike from 2009 and nearly five times the money invested in 2004, the research firm said.

"It flies in the face of skepticism about the clean energy sector among public market investors, who have been concerned about the sustainability of subsidy programs in Europe, the failure of the Obama administration to deliver a climate or an energy deal, and the crescendo of ill-informed doubts about climate change," Michael Liebreich, Bloomberg New Energy Finance's chief executive, said in a statement.

So, if you've got money to invest, find a green way to invest it. And keep encouraging governments to drop fossil fuel subsidies and increase renewable energy subsidies (which are driving investment and progress in renewable energy). That's such a no-brainer, but we all know that most governments don't run on brainpower these days.