I Think Permaculture Can Save the World (or At Least Delay Our Demise)

I finally found it. In the least expected place!

I was listening to a wonderfully inspiring webinar yesterday morning called Regenerative Moringa Farming. But it was about much more than that. Aaron Elton (a Vancouverite) was actually talking about a model that is lifting orphanages and villages in Uganda (his adopted homeland) out of food insecurity and poverty with large scale permaculture projects that include regenerative moringa farming.

As someone who's going to be teaching an introduction to sustainable development to first year university students in the new year, I was excited to hear Aaron talking about initiatives that are profitable (economy), healthy (social equity), beneficial (environment) — the 3 Es of sustainability — and fun (if it ain't fun, it ain't sustainable).

One of my most important take-aways from the webinar was the importance of being open to and building partnerships (including unlikely ones) when trying to get something new off (or on!) the ground.

I think I've admitted this before, but sometimes the only thing that can get me up in the morning is the potential for preservation of our species found in the principles and processes of permaculture.

Okay, so what was it that I finally found in this unexpected place? Aaron shared a quote that crisply explains my view of hope in the face of demise.

There is nothing so well known
as that we should not expect
something for nothing —
but we all do
and call it Hope.
— Edgar Watson Howe

There. That's it. You want hope? Then do something about the climate change emergency! Do not do nothing and expect a result. False hope never saved anyone's skin.

And if you want to do something exciting, take a class on permaculture ... and then get to work in the soil.

The Perfect Education Model for Our Times - Forest Schools

Charlotte's beautiful eagle, after storytelling in the woods

I seem to do at least one nifty thing every summer that I want to share with you here. I've told you about my nature daycamps and growing wheat with my students and my community's Fall Fair Young People's Agriculture division. Well, this year it's the Forest School Educator training program I attended last week. 

Forest School Canada's Maureen Power and Jon Cree from the UK's Forest School Association spent a week with us, pretty much all in the woods (on an urban university campus, so it doesn't have to be in the wilderness), including two rainy days in the middle of the week. 

The magic of the program came partly from the wonderful synergy of the 18 participants, partly from the lovely wooded site that was chosen for the training, partly because the instructors work (and play) and teach so well together, partly from the great food, and partly because I was so ready for this. 

Forest School is as close to our species' original education "model" as you can get. It's based on regular and repeated access to the same natural space, whether for half a day per week or every school day. Children and adults spend their time in "their" woods or other natural setting in every sort of weather, year round. 

The kids play (play is a child's learning work) and the role of their teachers is to supply "loose parts" like tools and art supplies, and to keep the children safe while observing their growth and development. 

All the things we were learning and developing

It's not the same as outdoor education or environmental education where there is a pre-determined learning goal. In Forest School, the "curriculum" is emergent, which is to say that the children choose what they want to do next and so that's what they'll learn next. The learning is experiential, inquiry-based, play-based and place-based. 

Making a mallet (woodcraft and safety)

It might be climbing a rock or a tree (they'll learn courage and strategy, gross motor skills and pride of accomplishment) or sitting quietly in their magic spot with a journal (where they'll develop self-regulation skills, the gift of contemplation, and perhaps their writing skills and artistic side). 

Our week of training was a rich, warm, powerful, loving and learningful experience.

Here's what I know, for sure, in the depth of my heart. If our training course was a taste of what we can create in our own educational settings, then it's what I want for my students ... and for all the
human children in the world!

(For a history of this movement, check out Forest and Nature School in Canada: A Head, Heart, Hands Approach to Outdoor Learning.)

When Lack of Hope Meets Self-Doubt...

… the result is not pretty. The result is how I'm feeling these days, just a week before I head to San Francisco, by train, to be trained along with 999 other people by Al Gore and his Climate Reality Project.

If you're a regular reader, then you know what I think of hope. It's not an action verb, but a lot of people hold onto it as though doing so is actually doing something to mitigate the climate change emergency. With so many hopesters in the world still, I don't hold out much hope anymore that we're 
going to turn this juggernaut around in time.

And we're still not seeing any action on the part of governments or the big banks and fossil fuel industries. I guess they're going to squeeze every last drop of oil, lump of coal and molecule of gas out of the ground before they admit there might be a problem with their "profit over planet" mantra.

But at least I used to feel okay about the few modest things that I do. This blog, my website on transformative sustainability education for teachers, workshops for educators and community members.

Now, just as I'm about to be trained to give even more presentations to even more people, I'm losing my way: my sense of direction and my nerve. I'm thinking, "What's the point? We're hooped anyway. What can I possibly do now that will have the slightest fraction of an impact?"

In other words, depression is setting in. And it's not pretty. It's not enough to have a partner who is also a climate change activist. Our activities are so different, it's like we're living in different worlds. Most of our friends and all of our relatives either "admire" us (and take no action) or think we're nuts for all the work we do (and take no action), which creates a crazy-making loneliness and lack of connection. What if I get to San Francisco and discover that I really am crazy, and that even Al Gore and the other "goracles" don't understand how incredibly deep and acute and rapid our changes and cuts and transformations must be?

A dear friend and life coach recently helped me see that my joy in living has been eroding away. Sure, I still delight in the tiny bird outside my window, a luscious sunset, or a yummy meal that I've thrown together in the kitchen. But I used to spout the aphorism "Happiness is not a destination but a way of travel." Now, both our destination and our way of getting there make me miserable.

I want to recapture the joy and light in my life, even while carrying on the hard, desperate work of telling the world what no one wants to hear. (Can you say Cassandra?) And so, I'll sign off with my signature of old. It's who I used to be, and who I want to be again. If we're going down, I want to go down ablaze (and I don't mean literally), not all grey and downcast. Not dancing on the graves of tomorrow's children, mind you, but helping today's children celebrate the life they still have in them.

Sunshine,
Julie

Friendly Insights on the Human Condition

A handful of insights this week from friends.

During a walk with one good friend this week, she exhorted me, out of concern for my emotional wellbeing, to quit writing to a local "newspaper" (the term is used lightly) about climate change. (It tends not to be a nice experience.) "You create change in people through example, by what you do, not what you say," she said.

At that moment it became very clear to me. I am trying to get other people to take the time and care enough to write to the paper about climate change (in defense of the future and the children and the planet), so I guess I'd better keep writing to that paper. (Talking about climate change, as I mentioned last week, is one of the most important things we can be doing right now. Praying would also be good.)

Another friend wrote: "And then I got to thinking, what would this planet be like if we all believed in our own beauty? And when did we get so disconnected from how wonderful we are? So... if we are, in fact, all connected — the earth, the cosmos, the plants, the animals, you and I — then when we look at the awesome beauty outside of us, perhaps we can use this as a mirror to see our own divine beauty. Just a thought...."

And at that moment, I realized that our culture certainly does not view humanity as connected to all other life on this precious Earth, but nor do we think of humanity as beautiful or worth saving (worthy of saving?). We have been so steeped in our own individualistic, neurotic need to be beautiful or feel worthy that we can't think beyond ourselves.

Another friend said, in conversation about food security and the climate change sh!t hitting the fan and social breakdown, "Oh, I don't think it'll get that bad. After all, during the Depression and the world wars, people looked out for each other." Ah, I thought to myself, economic crises and times of conflict are similar in that they both hold promise of improvement. When it comes to global heating and climate disruption, once the positive feedbacks kickstart the tipping points and lead to points of no return, there will be no "improvement" for centuries or thousands of years.

And finally, a cherished friend told me that he feels he's close to achieving what he set out to accomplish on the climate front (and his accomplishments are many!). That helped me realize that one of the reasons I feel like I'm flailing is that I have never defined exactly what I set out to achieve. (I should mention that I'd confided in another friend that I've been feeling like I'm sinking. You know, under the weight of all this knowing and caring. He said, "There is no sinking allowed." That pulled me back up!)

So, folks, you're hearing it here first ... I cannot "save the world," but I want to achieve transformation in the education system. If I accomplish nothing else in this second half of my life, I want to help children everywhere acquire the skills, understandings, and habits of mind and heart that they're going to need in order to create the best possible future out of the chaos we're bequeathing them. I want every school district everywhere to ensure that their students learn how to grow food, build soil, collect rainwater, and generate energy.

That's all. (Ha!) But at least it's a focus.

Thanks, dear friends, for your wonderful insights!

Here's to a Courageous and Compassionate New School Year

In my part of the world, students and teachers are heading back to school. Here's my wish for the new school year:

May all the educators — at all levels, everywhere — find the courage and compassion they need in order to teach what their students most need to learn, whether that is how to connect with the rest of Nature (for the young ones), how life works on this planet (ecological principles), what the state of their planet (and hence, their future) is, or how to move into the world of work and adulthood and citizenship as practitioners of sustainable (or better yet, survivable) development principles.

But we teachers also have to be brave enough to say NO! to irrelevant parts of the curriculum or syllabus and YES! to teaching what our students need for creating the best possible future for themselves: food growing skills, water collecting skills, energy generating skills. No matter what else you teach, you can teach with the Earth and the future and the children of all species in mind.

As I was writing an article for the 2009 issue of the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education (Transformative Environmental Education: Stepping Outside the Curriculum Box - pdf), I originally penned "Teachers are a timorous lot," timorous being the gentlest word I found amongst the 44 synonyms* for "wussy" I uncovered. (I was afraid "wussy" would be too offensive, thereby proving my own point.)

Teachers do not go into teaching to become heroes. We do not suffer from Fireman Syndrome. But heroes we must become! The lives of all our students are at risk, and we can and should and must be doing something about it. (I do a professional development workshop or webinar for teachers entitled Greening Education with Courage and Compassion.)

We in the education field consider our time very precious, but how precious is it compared to the lives, the future, of our students? (Not to mention the lives of tens of thousands of children lost to the famine in East Africa.) If we don't understand the climate change emergency, the crisis of biodiversity loss, the importance of protecting forests, the urgency of moving to a zero-carbon economy, then we must take the time to learn!

To my colleagues, a reminder that we teach best what we most need to learn. Please, consider how you can help safeguard the future for the children of all species through your teaching, and summon your courage and compassion to help you do the right thing. Visit GreenHeart Education for ideas and enCOURAGEment.

Have a wonderful new year at school ... but keep in mind and hold in your hearts all the kids who don't have (or won't have) enough to eat or drink due to droughts and floods and storms and heatwaves, let alone a school to go to.

************

p.s. Despite job action in my jurisdiction, I am organizing a Soup for Somalia school garden harvest luncheon for my school. Please try to find some way to help the youngsters in your school or community connect to and help out

their peers in the Horn of Africa.

* Actually, it was only 43 synonyms; turns out I had "namby pamby" twice! Here's the rest of the list of synonyms for "wussy," in case you're interested:

1. timorous
2. faint-hearted
3. fearful
4. doormat
5. weakling
6. insipid
7. softie
8. crybaby
9. irresolute
10. wishy washy
11. sissy
12. wimp
13. timid
14. afraid
15. unassertive
16. feeble
17. weak
18. ineffectual
19. cowardly
20. weak-willed
21. jejune (I'm pushing it with this one)
22. suck
23. banal
24. prosaic
25. tame
26. anemic
27. vapid
28. lacking zest
29. flavourless
30. dull
31. boring
32. bland
33. diffident
34. doubtful
35. insecure
36. reticent
37. trepid
38. nervous
39. tense
40. apprehensive
41. jittery
42. collywobbly

One Family's Adventures in Sustainable Living (and Eating)

I work with homeschoolers who are enrolled in our local school district, and I'm often amazed and inspired by the richness, depth and breadth of my students' home-based learning.

Here's one example that I really want to share with you. The Kikuchi family lives on a smallish plot of rural land, and they've done wonderful things with it, including "rescuing" and replanting native plants that are being torn up by development elsewhere, and growing a lot of their own food.

They just completed a cookbook called Respect for Nature Sustainable Cooking Recipes. Father Koïchiro ("Arthur") wrote the introduction — as important an introduction as you'll ever read! Mother Sanae created the recipes, and I know for a fact that they're delicious. Elder son Kenta took the photos, daughter Yoko did the artwork, Shinta and his siblings made the serving dishes you'll see in some of the pictures, and baby Kota is the one who is all smiles. He learned how to use a hoe before he was two!

So, I don't want to take any more of your time. Please go and look through this wonderful family endeavour. I hope you'll learn lots, enjoy the experience, and cook some of the delicious recipes. Click here for an online version of Respect for Nature Sustainable Cooking Recipes, where you can also download it.

Bon (and sustainable) appétit!

A Movie to Solve Our Progressive Paradox

Today, I simply want to recommend an online movie to you. The Progressive Paradox Film is rather brilliant, and I think we will all benefit from watching it.

It's not on You Tube or anything like that, so I can't embed it here. You have to download it from http://www.thwink.org/sustain/videos/FilmSeries/index.htm, but it's well worth the time and inconvenience.

It will give you a clear path to a solution to unsustainability. (Which reminds me, the only thing I don't like about the movie is that they include "sustainability" in with a list of problems like war, corruption and poverty — hence I think they meant "unsustainability," but that's not what they say.)

Anyway, this movie will make you think and question your role and your activities as an activist.

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.

22 Days - Teaching as if the Future Matters

I offered a workshop yesterday on Transformative Sustainability Education at a wonderful independent girls school in a large city. I offer that workshop to school staffs knowing full well that the issue is no longer one of sustainability, but of survivability.

For that reason, I started yesterday's workshop with a participatory activity showing all the connections between melting Arctic summer sea ice, the livestock industry, doomed coral reefs, our driving habit, killer droughts/floods/famines in Africa, our addiction to economic growth.

I was glad to see that the teachers attending this workshop were open-minded and got it. We talked about the climate emergency, and how our job as educators must now include sounding the alarm on this crisis.

One of the teachers then politely and thoughtfully offered to play devil's advocate, saying that he could imagine some parents balking at this, accusing teachers of being political and "poisoning their child's mind."

As you can imagine, I suggested several possible (and rather irreverent) responses. "Can we assume that we both want what's in your child's best interests?" is always a good way to start this conversation. But then I moved on to "Well, if we don't take emergency action on climate change, then we're poisoning your child's entire future."

We can no longer afford to be afraid to sound the alarm, as educators, as parents, as concerned citizens. If we love our students, if we love our children, if we love anything (besides money), then we must screw up the courage to sound the alarm — and risk whatever derision from deniers/skeptics/ignorers/delayers that comes our way.

If teachers believe their role is to help their students create the best possible future (and why would we want anything less for them?), then we must start taking their future seriously.

And while we're sounding the alarm and educating parents about the crisis (through their children), we ought to be teaching environmental solutions. The school I visited yesterday was having solar panels installed — what a wonderful way to help students make the shift from the Burning Age (like the Stone Age or Bronze Age) to the Perpetual/Renewable Energy Age.

We talked a lot about the importance of reducing meat consumption and getting as many people as possible to go veg, in order to drop our anthropogenic methane and other greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough to buy time to implement other solutions. (Please, no complaints from English teachers on that run-on sentence!) This school has already implemented Meatless Mondays, which is fantastic!

And then we all said goodbye and went to the diningroom for a roast beef lunch. Ah well, at least they had a yummy climate-change-fighting vegetarian option.

184 To Go - What Children Don't Know Will Hurt Them: Let's Teach the Carbon Cycle, Deeply!

A dear young friend spoke to the Eco Club at my school the other day. It was unseasonably hot, so they gathered in the shade under some trees in the school yard.

Nadia and her sister are joining other Canadian youth this summer in bicycling across this vast country to make people aware of climate change and its threats to their future. (She's one of my climate heroes!)

Before telling the students about her trip, and about the sustainable transportation event she's planning here in our community before she goes, she asked them what they know about climate change.

Educators everywhere, listen up! Our children do not understand the carbon cycle. They do not understand global warming. They do not understand climate change. And they certainly do not understand how it threatens their future. They are still stuck in the "Don't Litter" mode.

Now, if you look at GreenHeart's Green School Curriculum Model, you'll see that I believe (or at least I still want to believe) that we can wait until students are about 12 years old before we start focusing their attention on environmental solutions. (Get it? They will need to understand the problems before they work on the remedies, but their focus is positive and creative.)

But starting before then (at about age 8 or 9), students must learn how the Earth works and how life works on Earth. Knowing both carbon cycles (long and short) should be required for graduation from elementary school; full ecological literacy should be a requirement for secondary school graduation.

Two or three carbon-cycle-illiterate generations are responsible for the mess we're in. Let's make sure the students in our care become a generation that is creating the solutions instead of perpetuating the problems.

For more information, visit

• Global Warming as the Overarching Focus of Curriculum for Sustainability
• Climate Change Primer

198 Days - Learning to Go Local by Growing Local

With new appreciation for the Italians, I tried making my own pasta today. It was a disaster, but my heart was in the right place — I'm trying to go as local as possible.

My students and I grew our own wheat last year and made pizzas from scratch. It was a wonderfully transformative experience for me — sowing the seeds, tending the crop, harvesting, threshing and milling the wheat, and then making pizza dough from the freshest flour in the world. Talk about the circle of life!

My students are so young that they probably didn't recognize this as an extraordinary experience for practically all Canadians. This year we're planting enough wheat for everyone in our whole school to make their own pizza from scratch.

My pasta was decidedly not delicious, but it was a fun way to start realizing how we can start going local.

It's not just the Italians I feel new-found respect for, it's the "ancients" who somehow knew/learned how much of everything they needed to grow and store for the winter.

One of the categories in our Fall Fair's Young People's Agriculture section is "If I grew the food my family needs, I would...." I wonder how many of us adults could answer that question correctly! (Nifty math lesson though.)

And to keep you reading on learning to feed ourselves as transformative education for sustainability, check out Orion Magazine's Destined for Failure by Jason Peters.

My students' pizzas, made from scratch...ing in the dirt, planting, tending, harvesting, threshing, milling, mixing, decorating and baking.