This November we marked one year of community and hospitality at the Louisa Street Hospitality House. Over the past twelve months we’ve welcomed fifteen individuals from eight different countries seeking protection, asylum, and safety here in Canada.
Canada’s fair share of climate action is greater than what our governments are promising, let alone doing. In fact Canada’s fair share of climate action is greater than our society’s capacity. The amount we would need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to be fair to other nations is greater than our ability to do so, technically and physically. The gap between what we should do and what we can do becomes what we owe – our climate debt – to those countries whose fair shares we are, in effect, borrowing.
At the beginning of May the Catholic Worker movement turned 90 years old. The newspaper Dorothy Day and her collaborator Peter Maurin launched still sells for a penny a copy. The hospitality houses they began still exist on the lower east side of Manhattan, feeding over a hundred people a day and housing some thirty-odd people. Meanwhile across the United States and around the world roughly two hundred hospitality houses and farming communes persist in the daily practice of the works of mercy and with the slow work of building a “new society in the shell of the old, where it is easier for people to be good”
We are living through a climate emergency. But are we acting like it? Imagine you are in a crowded building – a school, a mall, maybe an office. The fire alarm starts to sound. But nobody does anything. They just keep doing what they were doing before: the students sit in class, shoppers keep shopping, and the office workers go about their business. It’s an emergency. But nobody is acting like it. To keep doing what we were doing before is not what we need to do now. Is this a parable for an age where we declare climate emergencies and go on acting like we always have?
We have the power to stop war and help solve the climate emergency if we act now. Bill McKibben argues that installing millions of heat pumps in European homes ahead of next winter will dramatically reduce reliance on Russian natural gas, cutting off a key source of Vladmir Putin’s power. Currently oil and gas make up 60% of Russia’s export earnings, and 40% of Europe’s natural gas comes from Russia. Such a project would not only help slow the Russian war machine, but would contribute meaningfully to lowering carbon emissions and addressing the climate emergency. It’s a win-win situation.
We can regenerate our soils. If we want healthier soils – and therefore healthier food, healthier bodies, healthier minds, healthier waters, and a healthier climate – then we can have them. Choices abound for us to do right by that which sustains us. In our backyards, on our farms, and within our whole food system options are available that protect and nurture the soil. In this final article of our three part series we explore just some of these methods and systems. While the threats to soil health are great, the opportunities for regenerative practices are equally so. The choice is ours.
To save our soils is to save ourselves. We all know that in order to live we need to eat, and in order to eat we need good soil. But soil means much more than good food. Soil is also essential if we want clean water, a stable climate, and physical and emotional health. Soil is a critical part of our wider ecological community, living in reciprocal relationship with humanity and the rest of nature. In our first article of this series we explored the critical dimensions to good soil – soil organic matter, soil structure, and microbiology. In this article we will explore the ways soil relates to the rest of nature, and in turn to us as human beings.
Soils deserve our attention. This has been one of the most important lessons at the Working Centre’s Market Garden over the past decade. Every year at the Garden as our community plants, weeds, waters, and harvests we have seen how caring for the soil leads to stronger, heartier, more fruitful plants. We’ve learned and explored different methods for caring for the soil. Soil is capturing our imagination. As the power of soil to store carbon is seen as an important way to reduce our emissions.
What was normal before COVID-19 was a world of ecological, economic, and social woe: climate change, the sixth great mass extinction, extreme wealth inequality, rising xenophobia, drug addictions, epidemic anxiety, depression, and loneliness. In a COVID-19 world what we need is not only a vaccine and a bail-out package – we need a new normal.
We now have less than a decade to avoid catastrophic climate change. As has become common knowledge, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that to keep average global warming below 1.5 degrees humanity needs to cut our carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. This is a tall order. To do this requires a deep transformation of our whole society and of ourselves.
The Integrated Circle of Care is a fluid and collaborative approach followed by workers from different agencies weaving through St. John’s Kitchen. Within this approach, staff members from each agency are aware of their specific personal roles. However, the high level of collaboration between workers means that people can approach any worker, without knowing their agency association or specific role, and still receive support – either that worker will support the person directly, or they will introduce the person to another worker who can support the person more appropriately.
This approach makes relationships more natural and support more accessible. Workers from different agencies are easily approachable, meaning that people build relationships with multiple workers. Having relationships with different workers is important to a person’s support – it makes support from a trusted source easy to find, and means that people have a choice of worker to approach in any given situation.
In order to maintain a circle of care around a person, workers from different agencies ask for consent from the person for information to be shared between workers. Continuous communication between workers helps to ensure that people do not fall into gaps between services, and also that services are not duplicated.
