By Joe Mancini
Published in December 2019
One way to read the signs of the times is to draw together seemingly divergent social and environmental issues. From our backyard of downtown Kitchener, social issues and the environment are equally pressing. These are signs that can be seen in most Canadian cities. The main social issue is the fallout from the decline in affordable housing and the resulting rise in homelessness. We see the stark reality of people surviving on the streets without access to shelter. We also know that the intertwining of addiction and mental health adds to the burden of surviving on the street.
Recent surveys in the Region are demonstrating that there are well over 400 individuals who are homeless and are using emergency shelters but even with the addition of about 70 overflow beds this winter there are not enough beds. Rents are rising, affordable units are hard to find and people are left struggling to stay warm.
At the same time, there is a growing awareness that we can no longer take the environment for granted. Every week, we are confronted by the reality of Climate Change as this report from the World Meteorological Organization makes clear.
“The tell-tale signs and impacts of climate change – such as sea level rise, ice loss and extreme weather – increased during 2015-2019, which is set to be the warmest five-year period on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have also increased to record levels, locking in the warming trend for generations to come.”
We perceive homelessness and the environment as separate realities, but perhaps they are better understood as interconnected.
Dislocation is a term that draws these separate realities together. For most people dislocation is a description easily applied to someone who is homeless. After all, anyone who is without a home must be dislocated. But what if the definition of dislocation had deeper connotations? What if homelessness and environmental degradation were seen as emblematic of a society which easily breaks relationships of trust and loyalty, of a society that pursues objectives without consideration for the air, water and soil and whose spirit is concerned more for the winners than creating community supports for those who struggle?
Dislocation in this context is a reflection of how we have narrowly organized our communities and is also symptomatic of how we walk on the earth.
Too often our human condition has adapted to ignore the pain and rejection that many go through as they lose their housing. When family relationships are broken and emotions remain unacknowledged, when there are few outlets to heal the pain, people are mostly left to their own devices. This is the breeding-ground for dislocation that feeds addictions and homelessness.
We lose sight of the bonds of social solidarity when we allow our competitive, fragmented world to be solely focused on economic growth. We ignore the matrix of human well-being when we allow nature to be a dumping ground for our misuse of resources. Our dislocation then, is from our community and our environment.
On November 5th 2019, over 11,000 scientists signed a statement warning of a climate emergency describing how the earth’s environment has dramatically changed over the last 40 years.*
We know already that three quarters of the earth’s land has been severely altered along with the earth’s marine environment. Vast wetlands have been displaced. The production and use of methane and carbon continue to rise, while monoculture agriculture dominates and biodiversity declines. We see it in the accelerated natural disasters of unprecedented wildfires, draughts, hurricanes and typhoons.
Was Leonard Cohen thinking of our dislocation when he wrote the song The Future:
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it has overturned
The order of the soul
In this time of dislocation, there is no better healing than to reflect deeply on the structures of society and to act into the change we would like to see.
It is as basic as considering how we treat each other and how we treat the environment around us. Do we give space in all social interactions to allow the common good to be expressed? Why are bureaucratic regulations so counter-intuitive to creativity and community responses?
How can we recognize our oneness with the living world by reducing our separation from the natural world and from each other? How can we learn to share our spaces and make room for others? This can be in our houses, our apartments, in our workplaces. The more we heal our separateness the more we can heal the environment.
Can we more fully touch the earth by growing and cultivating all forms of plants? Can we make room for the unlimited variety of seeds and plants so they have places to expand and grow, especially around our houses and parks? Can we work to protect small farmers and market gardeners? This is where the soil is regenerated and seeds and compost are turned into healthy nutritious food.
The world outside of consumerism is intrinsically meaningful through work that is less convenient. It is the manual labour that is healing while you produce things that you need. The difference between walking and riding a bike compared to being car dependent is the fresh air and direct connection to the community around you. This is the opposite of the experience of driving. Ivan Illich taught us how tools bring us into contact with soil, culture, shape and order. They teach us that limits are the conditions of living. Joy and suffering teach us to walk gently on the earth.
As we start to experiment with a carbon free economy, we can start to heal the dislocation. If we are to ensure that shelter is affordable and plentiful, then we have to find ways to generously make this reality come to fruition. In any case, it is direct personal action that heals dislocation.
*https://academic.oup com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biz088/5610806#165912541
