This year, the Mayors’ Dinner helps us to reflect on the importance of determined hopefulness in the face of despair. Determined hopefulness is not a gentle wish for the future, it is an intentional act to choose the kind of world that we want to live in. It will take courage and it will take care. Looking at the world around us, the need for courage is clear.
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.
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.
The decade of the 2020’s will be momentous for turning away from the endless growth economy by learning to walk more gently on the Earth. If we don’t, these coming decades will be characterized by attempts to hopelessly navigate around the climate and ecological barriers that are directly in our path.
Walking gently is a new priority. If we don’t start revising society’s relationship to the living world, the next generations will inherit a world that will not be recognizable – and eventually not habitable.
In June of 2019 Canada officially declared the climate crisis an emergency. But are we acting as if this were really an emergency situation? Author Seth Klein contends the Canadian government is not stepping up to the urgency of the moment. He argues for a wartime level of mobilization to respond to the climate crisis, modelled after Canada’s response to the Second World War.
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 effects of human activity on the climate has resulted in massive biodiversity loss, increasingly volatile weather conditions (including hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, etc.), and many other adverse effects which impacts the daily lives of more and more people. In this article I want to consider what effect this has on our understanding of freedom.
In North America, freedom is commonly understood to refer to the absence of limits on our actions. Any constraint or rule represents the limits of freedom. In philosophical circles, this understanding of freedom is usually referred to as “negative freedom.” It is defined by what it is not.
For many people, in our community, the idea of dealing with the potential consequences of climate change is both frightening and overwhelming. The threat is real, but its very complexity makes it hard to tackle, hard to address. What can we do to protect ourselves, our children and the places that we love and want to preserve?
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.
