I wish to offer that two great societal forces seem to be cancelling each other out in terms of moving society forward during this critical moment. The first of these forces are those of hope and gratitude and promise for a better future; and the second those associated with the stubborn insistence on maintaining, at all cost, the established economic and social status quo.
In this dispatch, please allow me to share elements of both of these forces as four keen observers presently see them playing out.
1. Taking Heart
Let us begin with a new book Take Heart: Encouragement for Earth’s Weary Lovers, written by Kathleen Dean Moore with illustrations by our very own Artist-In-Residence Bob Haverluck.
While I was unable to take in the live book launch for Take Heart: Encouragement for Earth’s Weary Lovers, I was later able to watch a recording of this remarkable and moving event which featured an utterly heartening back and forth between Kathleen Dean Moore and Bob Haverluck regarding their intentions in publishing this amazing work. What they said to all the Earth’s weary lovers who were turned into the virtual launch was that they knew those who cared about the Earth were increasingly weary and that we all need one another to help us along the necessary path. We can carry on because we must, and we must so we care. You cannot look at the broken Earth without having a broken heart. We are, as the cover illustrates, pushing our heavy hearts up a big hill. Yes, there is something of Sisyphus in this but we are not Sisyphus. We are not alone. We have others who give us heart and the animally Earth to push with us. The work itself is the reward. But there is also a moral force behind us. Art is the means by which we can confront the truth of our time and not be turned to stone. The goal of art is to open people’s hearts without breaking them.
We have become a society that doesn’t take the time to see or make the time to be grateful. But that, too, may be changing. In a recent poll some 70% of Americans said they were “concerned,” or “very concerned” about climate change. Of these 70%, some 79% said they were angry and 76% said they were disgusted by how governments were ignoring the threat. Despite this, at Fort McMurray, the Dark Heart of the World, 54,000 square miles of the Northern Boreal Forest has been desecrated, and the rate of destruction is not slowing. But we can’t give up.
As Bob Haverluck put it: “If you believe the watery Earth can be healed, you believe too much. If you believe it can’t, you believe too little.”
It is possible to make a difference, even if it isn’t all the difference in the world. When we are deflated, we need others to pump us up, to inflate us again. (Which is what this book very much does.)
People ask “What can one person do?” Kathleen Dean Moore’s ready answer: “Stop being one person.” There are miracles out there, we just have to make room for them to occur. We cannot forget to laugh and sing!
The book launch concluded with a book giveaway to ten people nominated for and having and taking heart.
You can find a recording of the event here. We invite you to share the recording with friends and colleagues. If you really want to be inspired, read the book.
2. Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
Throughout the more than two years of The Great Pause during which the invitees have shared their experiences and ideas through The Transformational Moment: Global Reset & the Future of Hope dialogue, many of us have read a great deal and, in some instances, had our minds and hearts changed by what we have read. In this way, we can say that, while the larger transformation in the way our society viewed itself and our future that we had hoped might take place as a result of the pandemic crisis has yet to occur, many of us have been significantly influenced by having and taking the time to examine and discus powerfully transformative ideas that could, in time, still bring about the larger transformation we seek. As Yogi Berra, that most legendary of all catchers for the New York Yankees once noted “It’s not over until it’s over.” And clearly, it ain’t over.
As we wind down The Transformational Moment: Global Reset & the Future of Hope dialogue for the summer, I would like to offer for your summer pleasure reading a summary synthesis of a book some of you may very well want to read in full. The book, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World is a posthumous collection of essays by Barry Lopez who, while considered by many to be one of the finest natural history writers of our time, demonstrates by way of this remarkable collection that his intellectual and literary reach extended far, far beyond writing about natural and cultural history.
While two chapters later on the book during which Lopez describes in painful detail the four years during which he was sexually abused as a child may demand a great deal from readers, their brutal honesty and his progression through the damage pedophiles do to the lives of their victims to arrive at some degree of peace makes for unforgettable reading as does his last chapter on aging.
This summary synthesis will not include the narrative of those chapters but will focus, instead, on Lopez’s simply amazing capacity to feel profoundly and articulate precisely his feelings for the places and the peoples he has visited in his peripatetic world travels and to ground these feelings in where he lived for more than fifty years in rural Oregon.
If you love where you live, Lopez will speak to you in a way that will leave you breathless with wonder and astonishment at what you may have long known and felt about your engagement with where you live but could not find the words to express. Lopez will help both the placed, and the displaced, to situate themselves in the place that means most to them.
3. The Power of Crisis
While we have seen the world coming somewhat together in response to COVID, it could hardly be said it was a unified global response. Mostly countries took care of themselves first, without any thought of the rest of the planet. We also saw divisiveness grow inside our country and between nations as new geopolitical alignments formed that, instead of bringing a fractured world together to deal with global problems, created new divisions and deeper divisiveness. While there was progress at the community level in parts of the country, the unravelling of our democracy has continued apace with an even more rapid unravelling of the established social contract that threatens to tear the United States apart, not sometime in the future, but potentially within months.
So, it appears, that even a crisis as catastrophic as a global pandemic that killed millions and disrupted the lives and livelihoods of billions was not enough to spark a global reset leading by way of applying the lessons we learned from it to a positive transformation of our society. The question then becomes this:
If a pandemic of this scale cannot make us step back from the abyss we have created for ourselves as a society by way of the relentless growth of our numbers and our needs and greeds that, in tandem with our unwillingness to govern ourselves, or to be governed, or to so much as cooperate effectively even in the face of immediately pressing existential threats that make our future not just uncertain, but filled with peril, how big of a crisis will it take to have us wake up in time to save ourselves?
This is just one of the questions Ian Bremmer asks in his new book The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – And Our Response – Will Change the World. This book is about what we can learn from the pandemic so that we do not lose faith or abandon hope – or that hope does not abandon us – during this rupture we are witnessing in human history that is about to be a transformational moment, whether we like it or not. Bremmer has some interesting perspectives. Expect to be surprised.
4. On Decline
Over the past more than two years since the beginning of the pandemic I have been meeting on a more or less biweekly basis, usually in a backyard, but in restaurants of late with a group of thinkers, writers and futurists that happen to live in the same town. Each of the members of this informal group, which I have taken to called The Foreign Affairs Council, have specific grave concerns about the current state, not just of our local environment, but about global ecological overshoot and the deteriorating condition of the planetary biosphere. Nor does their concern about the effectiveness of government stop at local political issues, their concerns extend more and more outward to embrace the unravelling state of democracy, not just here in Canada, but also abroad. Many of their concerns have been put into relief or even validated by disturbing societal trends that emerged during the course of the pandemic.
One of the most recent books to come to the attention of this group came to us, as so many good books do, by way of an interview on CBC radio. The book was Andrew Potter’s short but dangerously potent On Decline.
While the book may not ignite a revolution, the one thing this small book does is clearly describe the revolution in which we find ourselves engaged, whether we see it or not, in this most remarkable and potentially transformational time in the long history of the human journey. The value of this small book, as the reader may see, resides in the way it puts us on notice of the danger we are in, and the kinds of reasoning in which we must engage if we are to be able somehow organize ourselves in a way that will collectively allow us to successfully address the manifold existential threats to humanity’s future we now face.