Resilience Roundtable - The Human Predicament in 2020: Interacting Global Crises and the New Normal

[Music] welcome everybody uh i am kyra epstein i'm the program coordinator for the new school at common wheel and we're really pleased to be co-presenting this resilience round table today with the resilience project at commonweal and you'll hear more about them soon we are going to be recording this conversation and produced audio and video files will be available in about a week or two on our website and on soundcloud youtube apple podcast and amazon music so you'll be able to find us pretty easily and ken adams is behind the scenes as always helping us and doing a great job with the production so our round table today will be moderated by christina conklin i'd like to say a few words introducing her and then i will turn it over to her and she can introduce the panel and get started christina is a senior volunteer staff person at commonweal she's an artist writer and researcher her book the atlas of disappearing places our coasts and oceans in the climate crisis will be published by the new press in april her sculptures interactive installations and participatory walks examine culture's role within nature natural systems at this time of rapid change and ask people to engage with both personal and societal responsibility thank you christina for pulling this this round table together and i'll turn it over to you thank you so much kira for that nice introduction i'm so glad you could all be with us today and i especially would like to thank our panelists who are in many time zones and uh sometimes halfway around the world so um thank you so much for making the time time is a gift it's one of the forms of wealth we have and we are probably the most precious one so we're very um pleased you and happy you would all be with us this morning so i'm an artist and a lot of my work is about engaging people and setting the conditions for something to happen and then letting it unfold so that is what we are all here doing today um trying to perhaps stretch the bounds of the webinar format a little beyond its usual constraints so here's a brief outline of what we're going to be doing today uh each of our panelists is going to speak briefly for about four minutes and um in response to a thought prompt that i sent out and they'll have a chance to explain a little bit about their work in that process we will then have a half hour conversation and uh some q a um and throughout we're gonna have a a creative language exercise where i'm going to ask everybody on the call including the panelists that they would like to put in the chat box what is resonating with you especially strongly as the panelists speak and as we have our conversation uh my feeling is that we don't have yet all the words we need to talk about the difficult situation we find ourselves in with so many intersecting crises and that there is a space for a more embodied language um that's not purely in our heads but also in our hands and hearts so i'm hoping today we can generate some of that language together so i think of it as like a crowd-sourced intelligence so thanks for being part of that and as an artist it's also important for me to have a material practice so i'm going to be making something as a result of this call i don't know if it's a poem or a painting yet but um if you want to be in on that in some way later on i will share it with everybody who is on this call who signs up for our mailing list so please feel free to do that this round table is being co-sponsored by the new school which ones runs wonderful programs and dialogues as you were just hearing and the resilience project which is a relatively new program of common wheels um that is seeking to create a learning community around these intersecting global crises and how do we respond to this new normal that we are all living in um the resilience project is a non-partisan interdisciplinary intergenerational international project so we're not going to talk about politics and elections um but we are going to talk about uh resilience in its broadest sense as we consider um these many intersecting global crises the pandemic income inequality um war there are there are so many um problems we are all struggling with right now that are connected if you would like to become part of those resilience projects learning community please join trp's mailing list um the website is resilienceproject.ngo as in non-governmental organization and i'm sure somebody will put that link up yes and um there is a in the menu there there's a contact form so please sign up there we hope to make this a series and to build a community around this issue so please join us our topic today is the interacting global crises that have become so evident on all our lives this year we have seen how many global stressors are deeply interconnected and how small of events in one part of the world can cascade into multiple larger crises all over the world this year of course pandemics climate change food insecurity income inequality big data autocracy and racism have all been linked in a web of cause and effect but i came to this topic quite recently so i wrote this book on climate change in the ocean and i thought i had chosen quite a large topic but as i was making final edits to the book in april it was actually uh yeah late march and early april you know the world was falling apart and i realized that i had only seen uh you know one piece of the puzzle that there were many more pieces um one of the uh scholars i was reading was johan rookstrom from sweden and he has a model of nine planetary thresholds and climate change is only one of them um there are many others and they have to do with biodiversity and the ozone layer and um chemical pollutants and it was just so clear that we that that a lot of people are talking about this as a climate change issue but it's actually much much bigger so i realized i needed to widen my lens even further so i reached out to commonweal which does remarkable programming on healing and resilience and justice and so i just wanted to let you all know that i'm coming to this with beginner's mind as well um our panelists are experts and i am not so i'm but i have been studying this i these interactions through the climate change lens for for four years now and it you know it's just so clear that um you know that this web that that the microbiome of the ocean is connected to um you know so many other other things that uh we just need to begin to understand how systems work and how we are part of the system and reintegrate the system so that is what this project is about i have a few slides i'd like to share that are visual representations of this challenge close the chat so this is uh some of those are visual learners so this is a recently created slide for the millennium alliance for humanity in the biosphere the mob which uh joan diamond its director is with us this morning um this was created by michelle guiller who's working with mob on an arts community project which is really marvelous so um you can check out the arts community at um what's next for earth on instagram and it's there's some really cool stuff happening this these are the un sustainable development goals we're all familiar with these two um and they you know they they the challenge with the the sustainable development goals is that they are in buckets um they they they tend to be in silos and and thinking in silos has been part of our challenge so far something we need to learn to work across rather than in these narrow color bands so that's i feel you know in an incomplete model this is one i've um been working on uh and and i think it takes common wheels view of the um interacting stressors and because the it usefully sees biological stressors and societal stressors and technological stressors and the technology piece is very interesting um and and is pervading all our lives in ways that we can barely compute and i also uh like that it works from the individual out to the planet because each of these issues affects us each at at all these different levels but it's an incomplete model i've been also looking at the ostrom institute and this is based on the work of a woman who i've forgotten her first name at the moment but anyway this is the university of indiana she's a nobel prize winner and she speaks of polycentric circles and how this particular model of the berlin governance doesn't really matter but it is a it shows the complexity of different governance models so i thought that this is interesting but but really it might look more like this um that we are all in different parts of space and time interacting at all these different levels so there are many ways to think about organization and um and as i said i think visually so i am just opening this up to people for consideration um as we think about resilience in um the context of this conversation okay at this point i'd like to share with the audience the prompt that i sent to um the panelists last week um because i think it's it's important for us to speak about the language we're using as i mentioned for instance if we're talking about natural resources or human resources in our conversation those terms imply a certain sort of utilitarian economic view of the world whereas if we're talking about socioecological systems or emergence we are using a different set of assumptions um and i think this is important to consider as we move forward so some experts call this subject the human predicament the poly crisis existential risk deep adaptation sustainability or resilience studies all of these things mean slightly different things some scholars have been studying this web of connections for years and there have been many ways of describing them in nouns that kind of describe a set of conditions so the global challenge the human predicament the poly crisis and systemic breakdown are all descriptions of a situation other terms focus more on methods of addressing these intersecting crisis so sustainability studies regenerative design deep adaptation systems change community resilience these are all processes so they have verbs implied in each and both description and action are necessary and have their advantages and disadvantages so my question to the panelists is what roles do these or any related terms play in your work and can you speak a little bit about your work and how you use the language of the these crises um and the second question i had was that nouns and verbs description and action live in different places in our minds and our bodies and spirits and how do we navigate um the intellectual and emotional and practical aspects of this very challenging work uh this is a this is a problem almost beyond description so um how can we use language to better embody the complexity of these issues in our lives so as we listen to the panelists uh talk about what's really a very complex and heavy subject i would like to invite each of you to share in the chat as they're speaking the words and phrases they're using or that you're thinking about that resonate with you really strongly um this is a way that we can hopefully generate something something new together for instance vulnerability grief and trauma are all part of this conversation as are compassion and hope and helplessness and they get these words get past the uh the purely intellectual um a lot of this work has been done in academia so far and i think we want to generate a broader conversation in society so that is that is uh my goal at the end of the dialogue we will take a minute to reflect on what we've heard and uh create a kind of word storm in the chat after that to see what people are thinking and feeling and responding to and uh so please contin contribute to the chat generously as we go um we will have a q a and then we will see if the the panelists have any final reflections for us um and that i think will bring us to our time so i'm going to introduce our speakers joan diamond is a leading scholar in the field of global systems change she's the director of the millennium alliance for humanity and the biosphere the mob at stanford which she co-founded with paul ehrlich many years ago and which works across disciplines to help so solve social problems i think i'll introduce people one at a time so they each have their four minutes and i'm going to turn it over now to joan thank you joan okay so thank you christina in the new school it's a great pleasure to be with you this morning i've been working explicitly i'm not a scholar in this field for over the last 10 years my main focus has been the mob which aspires to engage a broad swath of civil society into the conversation to welcome all those who know something isn't right who are seeking an understanding and to help them find their voice in this situation i also serve on the fan initiative and the advisory board for omega and the next four minutes we're going to take a spin of a kaleidoscope of the human predicament the global challenge the global problematic the global systemic problems or poly crisis different names for the same thing with nuanced differences but at their core is the meta system of problems threatening civilization and our future a kaleidoscope reflects and mirrors parts and pieces and for me is a good symbol for the complexity adaptive behavior unpredictability and interconnection inherent in the human predicament i'm going to spin us through a series of lenses for understanding and responding to that predicament to have agency in the face of the human predicament one must have a narrative that resonates and this is very tied to christina's point of language um this is a very personal thing there are many narratives out there the one that works for you is the right one a few in addition to those that um christina mentioned are the ipad equation coined in 1971 by holdren and ehrlich where the impact what's happening in the world is a function of population affluence which is a proxy for resources consumption and economics and technology which can work either way to amplify or reduce the other two another is the wicked problem model coined by west churchman who was actually um is his memorial was held at common wheel about 15 years ago a wicked problem is something that's transdisciplinary interconnected problems that are often contradictory and that have a large economic burden nate hagan uses the super organism metaphor for describing the situation the fan tells the story of civilization at risk through failing stressors underpinning the global system and there are many more narratives but all have certain things in common they're interconnecting problems non-linear systemic foundations of society and civilization they cross disciplines they're often contradictory they're social and biophysical they're embedded in all is uncertainty and all carry the threat of collapse they're not a single problem radiating out but a dense knot of problems so what is collapse because that comes up in this conversation it is not a collapse of our planet the planet will survive it may change but the planet is going to survive civilization is at risk of collapse governments not able to care for their people the worst of tribalism dominating hate and fear billions will die so it's civilization that we're concerned about so what are we missing we talk about pre-collapse some would say that's where we are now the path resilience living with the human predicament how can we reduce the threats we talk about post collapse and resets in the emergent society what do we hope comes through all of this in my opinion we don't talk enough about what we need during collapse to emerge into a compelling future during collapse we need and place a culture very different from the culture we are currently fostering a clout a culture of collaboration respect inclusion humility the ability to focus on goals values that need to be aggressively cultivated and rewarded building that culture is the most important thing to do now while doing everything else that needs to be done finally on the kaleidoscope world and i am this is it um in terms of agency we each need to find our own place of impact and contribution often the issue of hope comes up and i simply remind you that hope and optimism are very different hope energizes action one can hope and dedicate one's life to reducing the human predicament and not be optimistic they will succeed stopping collapse cannot be measured um it cannot be the measure a life lived in service of future generations is the measure thank you thank you so much joan for your your wise words um very much appreciated lots of good notes coming up in the chat okay we're going to turn it over to jason groves who is a who teaches dr in the germanics department at the university of washington but really so much more than that uh he's a writer and conceptual thinker um i met him through when he was uh the artist in residence at the exploratorium fisher observatory um where he did some great um events and thinking about our are literally our place in this world um so his latest book is called the geological unconscious which should give you a sense and we're going to now turn it over to jason hi everyone and uh thanks so much for hosting uh christina and wheel so um i'll just start off with a provocation um in response to the first two questions um start my time or two uh i think that careful description can be a mode of addressing these intersecting crises and i might say that too because i am a literature professor but i think description is related to noticing and i think about what the anthropologist anat singh calls the arts of noticing it's related to observation but it's more attentive to the unexpected the unlikely and the peripheral and i'll say more about this but i think this is what poetry describes in what poetry does with language um i'll start with a quote too this is from john feldsteiner introduction to his anthology can poetry save the earth well steener was a literary critic translator and poet in the bay area he writes when a landscape goes undescribed it becomes vulnerable to unwise use or improper action so when a landscape goes undescribed it becomes vulnerable to unwise use or improper action so i think the idea there is that description can function as a form of protection as care even as an activist undertaking i think the opposite can also be true that in describing something or someone you can also make them vulnerable or exposed something to think about there so as christina said i teach at the university of washington in the humanities division and more specifically in the german department so i think about language and language acquisition every day i also teach courses in the emerging multidisciplinary area called the environmental humanities and i co-led a research cluster on the anthropocene which is a name i propose for the crisis but if i have time i'll come back to that i want to talk a bit about this institution i worked at where i first met christina in the bay area before coming to the university of washington and i was at the exploratorium where my technical role title was an urban fellow um and the bay observatory for those of you who haven't been there is full of instruments and um tools for making technical observations and it's also full of books and text-rich posters and interpretive panels and so what i really liked about this space was that language was as much a tool for perception as any camera or any other scientific instrument there and i should say that about other people's work there was also really interesting one of the first exhibits there was um explore this relationship between the lexical and the perceptual it was called the bay lexicon it was developed by the architect jane wolf and it consisted of 48 flash cards that examined and defined san francisco's shoreline in wolf's words it was a place-based vocabulary that makes the hybrid circumstances of the san francisco bay apparent and legible to a range of audiences with escape stake in the landscape's future these were not new words but it was um yes it was a lexicon for bringing together um words which might not normally be associated with one another into and express the hybrid landscape of the city and made the hybrid hybridity of the city more perceptible and more legible and it also began what i think is important from a point of our environmental illiteracy acknowledging that the places most of us know best defy the vocabulary we've inherited um one outcome of my residency there was to reimagine the anthropocene as a the observatory as an anthropocene observatory and i think a lot about this term and how it prompts responses and how it also closes down others it's a term for a new geological epoch which has mobilized attention to planetary transformation and planetary crisis um but it's also done so in a way that might not account for the factors forces and power relations that are driving this crisis in fact some argue that this is an owl this term is an alibi for the capitalist exploitation and colonial dispossession that arguably drives planetary transformation so people propose other terms like the capitalist scene or the plantation a scene or even the white supremacy scene to better account for planetary change and i think about these a lot and i see them at times so i'll just end with my in 10 seconds my response to the second question um how can the language we use better embody the complexity of this topic to notice language be careful and vigilant in the use of language and do whatever you need to do to be more mindful of language i think about biologist rachel carson how she writes that language can further violence and legitimate violence for example when she writes in silence spring about how herbicides and insecticides should be called biocides and how that that lexical shift can activate awareness thanks wow thank you so much uh rachel carson's my personal hero beautiful use of language in her work so we will now move to ed salzburg who is founder and director of the security and sustainability forum which is a washington dc based network of professionals from government and academia and industry uh he is an environmental scientist himself and has been promoting this um intersecting view of systems uh for a decade in dc so we wanted to bring that perspective as well welcome ed start again thank you for inviting me um i was just looking forward to the conversation um i have the privilege of running an organization in which we convene experts like the folks on this on this panel from all over the world to address some of the most important issues of our time urban sustainability food security environmental justice the bigger picture of climate change so i get to talk to and listen to and learn from some of the real leaders um across the world and um i want to take some of that experience and bring in some things that i've heard especially recently into the conversation about language and the importance of language uh but i also want to talk a little bit about actions and how to how to go from the language the language itself um to some framework of for action uh most of the folks that we deal with the people that want to get educated are practitioners uh in a large and a large extent and they want to see action taken place either at the local level or um something more global so from my standpoint the language is so important because it's a lens into what the emotions are that people are feeling and without understanding that it's very hard to move forward um in a consolidated way um the emotions are are are also a lens into what the core beliefs are the individuals um and it's very hard to get consensus unless you're starting to get conversations that get down to those core beliefs which then kind of lead you to what people's convictions are which are their core values um and from there from that i think uh people can have conversations in which they can see where their convictions are the same and their convictions are different and maybe find ways to bridge that to move forward because those are truths and unless you can get down to the truths um you your your conversations don't really come together so one one quick and i didn't look at the time so just prompt me if i'm good if i go too long so so here's just one quick example i hadn't talked to my roommate from college in over 10 years we had a conversation this week we are so far polar on social issues on resilience issues and i realized that i did not really understand his motivation and he doesn't understand my motivation and we didn't have time to try to bridge that gap but i'm going to give that a try and see if i can take a really right-wing guy with me who's way left of center i think and see what we can do to bridge that gap to come to some common ground um i think that his convictions are different than mine and maybe his values are different but some of them have got to be the same overall so understanding that motivation i think is just um really important i sometimes joke with my wife that there are two kinds of people the greedy and the not greedy and that's a lens that i think is probably true for a lot of people that has to be broken broken through i'm going to talk about actions for just a minute because you've got to translate all of this into some actions and let me just talk about immediate action actions which are local actions uh not necessarily at scale but actions that people can take within their communities for adaptation and flood control and all the things that have to be done to make a resilient community but those aren't scalable they could be they can be scalable in the summation if you get enough of it going on but in order to get real transformation in any of the issues whether it's climate change or whether it's just social justice or whether it's poverty or whether it's food insecurity we need to scale those solutions up which is a transformation into a new conviction um and the question is then how do you get that new conviction and i believe it comes down to finding ways to develop frameworks like christina had put up and frameworks that have measures in them so that you can translate them so that you can tell the impact of your actions um i i know you talked about sdgs just a little bit as being an imperfect measure and i think you're correct about that but it is a much better measure of social value than the gross domestic product which does not con which does not cover all of the inputs into society i want to flip up a quick chart um from from hazel henderson one of the amazing women that i work with in which he looks at a layer cake inputs into the economy in which the gross national product or the gross domestic product only includes two things one is what the private sector contributes and then what the public sector contributes but that's not the whole value of society there's an underground economy the love economy that she talks about which is grandparents taking care of their grandchildren and finally it's just layered laying on top of mother nature and all the ecosystem services that are contributed here and if we could put a value on all of those lower layers we would find we're much richer and we have a much bigger ability to address our social issues i could go on for a while but let me just leave it at that and i'll just say thank you for giving me a chance to participate thank you so much ed i love that idea of a cake personally so um right and as i was saying multiple forms of wealth is is a way we should all be thinking in a more complex uh way about our our lives and our economy um and that we are all so much richer than we realize or acknowledge okay so our final speaker uh is samantha supaya sam who is an urban sustain sustainability strategist and consultant she uh lived in northern europe for uh more than a decade and is now back home in the philippines uh her work focuses on the global south and issues of um how the south and the global north really differ in in their perspectives on these issues and approaches and um so she is a key part of the global regeneration co-lab which if you don't know about it it's only a year old i really recommend it's a network of folks who are catalyzing resilience work all over the world especially in a with a bio regional model and they have remarkable events happening all the time so i will turn this over to sam thank you christina and thank you joan jason and ed uh i'd like to respond to your thought prompts christina by showing you what i embody in myself and how i'd like to introduce myself as a product of the british empire in asia i was born into a westernized colonized nation that celebrates to this day the arrival of the british that would be the city state of singapore one of the most unequal places in the world i was born to a chinese mother and an indian father raised in a westernized capitalist asian society i then studied worked lived and loved in northern europe i consider myself an orphan and a nomad in this sense i am lost we are experiencing late stage capitalism where most people my age have little to no economic power compared to those of previous generations when they were our age in this sense i am lost like many millennials and gen zeds i don't agree with our dominant model of civilization gramsci beautifully said the old world is dying the new world struggles to be born and now is the time of monsters in this sense i am lost like most of those in my generation i am lost joan mentioned the narrative that works for you is the right one i'm speaking to you from a fuller former american colony from a society that is deeply embedded in colonial mindset first from spanish occupation and then from the americans with the arrival of the spanish in the philippines in 1571 humanity brought into being a new type of city the global city i say all of these things because i'd like to acknowledge that the story of human resilience globally needs to be seen from the lens of real history as most of the world has experienced it lived experience aka the global south the above is important because of something christina touched upon intellectualization versus embodiment the embodiment is not only rational thought it's not mental it's not through words it's not in your head it's in your body it's in your spirit physically spiritually it's felt it's experienced it exists in the liminal spaces between people between societies it's energy it shows up in how we be that's my reality that would be my four-minute spiel wow thank you samantha so much okay we've got lots of great things happening in the chat i people really appreciated your your thoughts on decolonization and it being embodied um in in in people so thank you i would like to now just really open this up for a conversation um between all of us and oh no sorry steve last but not least steve heilig who is a valued member of the commonweal community has hosted many many many of these such conversations and is a doctor uh has the co-founder of the collaborative on health and the environment which looks at environmental impacts on human health and the complexity of that relationship so i'm with apologies i would like to now turn it over to steve no apologies needed it's usually me calling on other people i know how it goes so happy to be here thank you for inviting me about a month ago a little over a month ago on a wednesday i set off for commonweal from san francisco it's about an hour driving one of the most beautiful drives in the world going over a map down usually this was on a wednesday morning at about 7 a.m which later or has become since then a kind of a legendary day where we had a really strange uh phenomena where this the massive smoke and ash and dust from the fires was mixed with our fog and the sun never came up and it was really something to drive over there i actually pulled over to turn around twice but i kept going it was dark red orange black fog as thick as could be and it did not get better and so in the hour and a half it took me you know a lot longer to get over the hill it got darker and i spent the day out there where it was actually through the mid-afternoon getting even darker now i've spent 40 years almost now since undergrad days where i majored in environmental studies and in uh ecology uh kind of with an apocalyptic mindset and this was the first time and i've traveled all over the world and been in lots of strange situations but this is the first time where it felt truly like an apocalypse and that the apocalyptic word and surreal as a term are really overused now but that's what it was and that day was just really burned into my psyche and to many others where people actually were crying that day and were afraid to go outside and really felt it so it made it real this this this impending kind of doom that uh we've been talking about and that this great uh confluence of threats is is bringing home to us now there are you know a whole bunch of threats as we've as we mentioned and the kind of trigger for them now is this pandemic i wound up uh starting my career as in infectious diseases in epidemiology and public health and uh this was predicted by many people that we would have worldwide pandemics we've had them before a hundred years ago in influenza one we have it again now there are many things to say about that the response in some realms such as treatment has been good most of them it's been lacking quite a bit and we are now looking at a surge worldwide in the cases again which is predictable but also very threatening so add on to that i did a little essay for common wheel at request called the triple endemic a few months ago and add on to that another one of them which is the pandemic we have a misinformation uh which has been you know fostered by the internet and fostered by as i mentioned samantha mentioned capitalistic uh interests that want to keep things the way they are and really by people's psychology of wanting to spread that information really and so this is this continues and really threatens our response as well then in the great uh kind of realm of this we're living in is the climate threat climate change which is of course a big contributor to these fires and so forth too whether we really respond to that in an adequate way remains to be seen uh so far the uh evidence is not encouraging but there are possibilities um the real way i look at this is that we are now the new abnormal not the new normal it's the abnormal one it's going to stay this way for some time the uh virus is not going away anytime soon even with a good vaccine and with good responses it's going to stay with us in various parts of the world and come back for the time being so we can call it abnormal and they may become the new normal right now it's the new abnormal one of my favorite teachers and thinkers is somebody we've had on at commonwealth her name is joanna macy i'm sure many of you know about her work and she calls us i mean we're looking for a hopeful perspective perspective on this she calls it part of the great turning now you don't have to to fully buy into the buddhist perspective that she has on this but that what it means is that the crises will force a response and will force a change that will come out towards in the long run at least a more positive future i'm hoping for that too i've been trying to look for silver linings in this uh situation we're in uh the one that people first seized upon was the decline in carbon emissions around the world whether that maintains and stays still remains to be seen it's uh very uh much an unknown at this point um but i think all of these rely upon people coming together into a ecological mindset which ties everything together but then people coming together to do real systemic change and now this isn't easy we've done it in the past in this country we had the new deal coming out of the depression we had actually the world war ii effort coming out of the threat of fascism in the world and these were huge efforts that relied upon collaboration and fact-based uh perspectives and work so whether we get to that i think still remains to be seen one there's an old song that i used to listen to a lot was a group called world party actually and one of the lines i liked in one of their songs was this he was actually taking the lyrics from the work of bertrand russell history of western civilization was we are living in a slow-motion landslide so people who have been in landslides and i have unfortunately um you may know you can survive these if you do the right things often but if you don't you get buried so i will close here for now the great psychologist and thinker carl jung said the most intense conflicts if overcome and leave behind a sense of security that is not easily disturbed is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results so it's adaptation coming out of conflagration right now we are very much in i think the early part of the confliction and whether we adapt to it in a way that minimizes the the harms and the suffering which is the big key here to minimize suffering really of all species not just humans i have to say as as i think you said at the beginning christina uh the earth will survive one form or another but how we get through this by minimizing suffering of those who are most vulnerable impoverished etc already and the rest of us and other species as well that we live with that remains to be seen so we're striving for a sense of practical hope here so that's it for now thank you thank you steve um yes the word conflagration's fabulous and the other thing that your comments made me think of actually that that day with that red sky that was my birthday so that was a really hard day to celebrate um but uh yeah it really marked everybody in our region um in a way yeah you know i i'd suggest sorry i'd suggest if anybody hasn't seen this you could probably just google uh you know northern california or san francisco uh red sky day or fire day and you'll get an amazing amount of photos that are really they look like uh you know in the lord of the rings they look like sauron has come in mordor to uh you know the great forces of evil have taken over and many people were saying that it reminds me of these science fiction uh and apocalyptic literature uh you know come true right and i and i guess one thing that comes to mind for me is that this has been happening all over the world for a long time and the fact that it reached the bay area got our attention but it's making me think about some of sam's comments and in the global south and what um you know how this is affecting uh you know climate refugees uh is you know burning of indonesia there are so many of these things that are happening out of sight and out of mind for us my riding on the arctic is is catastrophic for the inuit right now so i think um right it's the waking up that needs to happen and i guess i would just um just ask the panel to you know if you have anything to say about the speed and the scale of our waking up and um yeah what what is uh what it is they call sea level rise they call the slow emergency um and it's it's sort of like some of these other crises it's um it's not going to happen all at once it's going it happens all at once geologically speaking but in our lifetimes it's going to feel like a perhaps a slow burn so what are your thoughts on scale and speed anyone joan yeah we can't hear you i look at it a little bit differently while i think there are issues that are being included in the description of the predicament now well they've always been there the injustice the inequity if you go back decades in the writings those have always been part of it but you know i look at it that what i see is that there are millions and millions and millions of people who are aware that things are interconnected that the world's not working that there is severe injustice that our environment is degrading and what they're seeking are ways to engage and that it's more the from you know from my work it's more the engagement question the response question than the um waking up question i think some of it has to do with how we assign values within societies to certain inputs so you get a lot of rich people that continue to get richer i think the um the virus really brought home the fact that undervalued services uh nurses uh health care workers first responders are their input is way more valuable than the ceo of large companies yet it's the ceos of large companies that you know make the make the large dollars so something is really upside down here in capitalism in the united states especially and you know finding ways to assign values differently i think is a step is a step forward i think that's a conversation that we need to find a way to do it there's huge resistance to that i mean they're lobbyists and there are um there's money to be made by digging more fossil fuel out of the ground but those values are not values that we can that really support society as we move forward christina i think you are muted yeah thank you of course um one of our audience members uh has brought up the idea of planetary hospice and um steve thinking of of your work in in commonwealth's work with people with illness and major illness that just struck me as a really rich phrase because it's about caring and it's about not um not rushing in with um emergency procedures that might actually make create more harm and it's about presence so anyway i just wanted to mention that and and see if anybody else had any further for the comments well i'll just say i mean i as a former hospice director um very aware of that model and very much supportive of it and what that the main ever has developed a whole new specialty in medicine over the last decade called palliative care which is basically saying you know i mean this is why the the analogy is somewhat limited in some ways it's basically saying you can't fix this the person is going to die but you're going to make that as painless and uh hopefully as even you know maybe even rewarding if possible that you can't but you're not going to jump in and try to fix things you know and that actually cause more harm perhaps so um yeah it's it's it is it is something that can work quite a bit um we're trying in this greater context of the world to do that for one thing but also hopefully to fix things to some degree that we come out of this with a better world right i think sam had something to say and then jason here um i think this is the fundamental issue with the whole concept of development in the first place that is essentially defined by somebody imposed on other people and then justified by everyone there is a huge space between understanding the problem and taking action massive there is understanding that does not translate because we haven't embodied it we don't like to sit with discomfort and when i say we i actually mean a lot of contemporary civilization we want instant gratification we want to see impact we talk about impact a lot talk about development a lot right and we don't want to sit with discomfort whereas resilience is about sitting with discomfort it's about looking at the thing that you broke or looking at the thing that has broken so for me action is dialogue about being able to sit with discomfort about you being able to sense into what this means because we are all experiencing this without acknowledging the experience of this discomfort of this pain because this is a a pain that is felt very real today you talk about for example sea level rise being a slow problem here in the philippines is not a slow problem thank you very much discomfort we are feeling and you're talking about impact development action what can we impose on other people today and when what we want for example in the global south is for you to sense with us right for youth to experience with us solidarity is what we need in humanity something that we miss in this understanding and action we forget there is a space to be um and that can only be sensed into through a deeper exploration deep knowing of ourselves as people what are we comfortable with who are we what is our identity and how do i relate to other people given that that is my identity not just other people but also that obviously translates to the skill of an organization or a society or a government or a nation etc so these are these are very sort of real things that we're talking about it's not academic this is experience it's happening now today to people alive now here yeah when sam and i were having an earlier conversation she made the very cogent point that um you know the global north is is is very up in arms and upset about what's going to happen with um uh many of these climate crises you know flooding of cities and different things and um could you could you speak a little bit about how the about that that dynamic between the north and the south as you see it i do and i wanna i wanna just briefly touch upon um the power that america doesn't always know that it has in terms of the narrative in terms of the voice right american imperialism globally is very alive very well in the media that it propagates and that's one so it's kind of my appeal in to being in this space to being able to say that because it's often not known right you guys are simply unaware of the power that you have which is a privilege a luxury it's amazing the voices of the global north especially north america and europe but especially you know for my context here in southeast asia in the philippines a former american colony we listen a lot to the american voices and that undermines our ability to build societal resilience simply because we don't place value on our voices that's colonized mindset we don't place value on our stories we don't place value on our pain we're listening to your pain we're talking about black lives matter that's crazy so i guess to round round off on this point the words that you need the narratives that you need are different from the words that we need and we need to be listening to us more and you need to be listening to you more i guess that's my point thank you sam that's that's great um insight uh jason you're on mute at the moment yeah i wanted i i wanted to let those words samantha's words linger for another minute um it's very powerful i and i want to i wanted to say something about hospice but i also want to yeah add a word one of the other terms proposed for the anthropocene was the agnato scene coming from agnostic in the sense of not knowing and the studied the studied ignorance of particularly people in the global north with respect to the impacts of the global north specifically imperialism and colonialism both within the global north and within the global south another term that makes me think of is from the bengali writer amitav ghosh who speaks of maybe some people know his novels he has the term the great derangement right the great turning was mentioned and i thought about the great derangement as and this is also particularly a term applied to the global north and to particularly colonialism and one of his examples of the great derangement is why so many colonial cities are placed right on the water's edge whereas the um pre-colonial cities are pulled back from the coast a lot and just the the the madness of situating so many of these areas now metropolis is on the water even at times when pre-climate change the um there was plenty of knowledge about the harm that people would be exposed to by placing by developing there but um yeah and one other thing too if i could just microphone a second i think too about how this sense and for me i i do approach these poly crises as impending and i think it's so important also when we kind of think about this more embodied and positionally in my own positionality um as a settler on here in seattle coast salish land how this doom is not impending and at least if we're talking about lived experience everything with which i associate climate change um has taken place here um centuries ago in terms of dispossession in terms of the uprooting in terms of this loss of um contemporary life ways um the last it's it's a certain extent not i don't want to say it's lost forever but um it's a moment of our brooding finally if i could say one more thing really briefly because this i've been thinking about hospice a lot too and it comes from an academic article and i can share it in the notes but one of the biggest changes i had in my own thinking was an article about terminality in relationship to the um uh environment various the poly crisis let's call it particularly environmentally and it was from from a writer who's identifies as queer and exposed for me um who's not identify that way um the focus in the environmental movement on futures and on salvation and on saving and this was a writer who was um was coming from and out of the hiv and writing about hiv aids epidemic and how um this one could have a relationship to endings and to terminality and to the dead and dying that was that took that for granted but which um did not also associate that with futurelessness or neglect or abandonment and i think so so many times with environmentalism there's this phobic stance towards frailty towards endings and there's this rush to to try to save everything on the other hand there's there's a stance and there's a position which just says okay this is going to happen and it's more of a place of neglect and abandonment and i was thinking about hospice in and sitting with um the dying and that being an act of care rather than act of neglect or abandonment that i found to be me myself to be really moving and something that we might scale up um when we're thinking about certain environmental crises like species extinction etc i'll shut up now sorry for taking up so much time no that's really um it's that's really rich and i think it's also really appropriate in the commonweal context um that is the the way they hold um we hold uh these issues these heavy heavy issues is to sit with them and so i um just want to ask if anybody has a has a final comment before we turn to some questions ed oh can't hear you there we go i i just wanted to agree with sam i just followed what you said and i think that here in the united states so i grew up as a caucasian privileged american here in the united states and what i'm learning now because i'm very close to the school system here is um how inappropriate and wrong our education has been over the years and how we left out so much and really tainted um actions that that western europe and the united states has taken globally um and the fight is on here in the united states to change those books but i think it's going to be a long fight um even changing the names of buildings from um racist generals to um you know people that have more the kind of values that we have right now is still a fight even in um wealthy you know progressive communities so i think that i don't know what the rest of you think about this but i think the core of this at least here in the united states is getting the education to be really inclusive and really understanding you know what what's happened over the years and what needs to be done to change that and to take responsibility for it before you can move forward i think right okay yes i agree i i think as just look speaking from my own country right now what we're experiencing is a catastrophic failure of the education system um and uh so i would like to us all because we we did cover some pretty heavy material there i thought it was very rich dialogue and i would like us to take um about two minutes in in silence now just to reflect on this this these different senses of embodied pain and the peoples all over the world who are being impacted in various scales at various times um i there's a a scholar at the university of michigan uh who i really like kyle white an indigenous scholar and he um basically says cyclical time is um something he thinks a lot about but also he says you know indigenous folks basically have already done all this work and we uh we are um we're ahead of the curve on this we we've experienced it already and so making the point that there is so much wisdom in that experience that we could and should be attending to um for everybody's sake and also to the point that this is a more than human world right that that we are just uh we are one species uh among billions and or millions and um and that is something that's always present in my mind in my research uh in the oh about the ocean um i learned that only nine percent of microorganisms in the ocean have even been identified so we don't know what we're losing um and whether or not it's utilitarian for us in terms of the next cure for cancer or whatever it it's um it behooves us to um attend to the other species as well and so anyway i'm going to um stop talking also and we will just have two minutes of silence to let this settle in our bodies thank you everyone so what i would like to do now is uh a lot of us have been commenting in the chat and um there's also going to be a time for q a's and then with the panelists we'll we'll share any reflections based on what we come up with together are there any words that really resonated most strongly with you approaches that could help um us sit with this problem and also address it uh we we've got a few minutes left for anybody who would like to uh contribute at this point i responded back to sam's observation that the question is what do we need to let die and i think that's just a way to frame thinking about moving forward um and it's just not a way i thought about moving to resilient to resilient society but i'm going to think about that because i think there are things we have to let go of yeah it's in the letting go that we can make space for what what needs to be born and if i could expand onto that a little bit it's not just about what it is we need to let die but after we've sort of understood what it is then how do we let that die that's going to show up in millions of different ways and being able to practice that is important and i think that's where community plays a role i think it's very hard to hold this individually and that part of i again my goal with this group but also um you know resilience in general i think is uh is about creating shared space where you can both let things pass and and build the new um together joan did you have any thoughts well of course many thoughts and many will continue to linger but i think this question of the letting go in the death and what's afterwards what's being built is much more complex um and and treacherous so that we don't build on the ruins of what was before but how do you envision something i'll say new and then really build towards that and i guess you know my personal challenge coming out of this is really to think about what needs to be done now so whatever is rebuilt can really be something different and that's really hard i mean in this moment it's it's um a lot of emotion but a blank um or just say blank yeah there does it does feel like the edge of something and and a a not knowing time we are we are all in this liminal space together and so i guess uh maybe my last question would be how for each of you it's again about this navigation how do we uh navigate unknown waters and um begin to lay down those pieces of of the new um that has to be that has to be born um what are your thoughts on on how we just take put one foot in front of the other um those of us who are willing to to stay with the um discomfort of it all how do we how do we work together and how do we bring other people into the conversation just a final go-round with each of you steve i'll say um you know one of the famous quotes in environmental history is from aldo leopold and he said this is from 1940s he said one of the pair of paraphrasing the perils of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of pain so if you are in alone in that world then you're immersed in pain and it's very hard to come out of that and unless you're able to have a sense of working with others so you know you i know christina you stay away from politics but i think on every one of these crises that we're talking about there is an element of a failure of leadership and so what is leadership in the broad sense it is electing supporting leaders who are in fact cognizant of the crises we face and are willing to do something about it rather than just going with the status quo or dancing to the tune of the money which is what it's always about it's you know follow the money um one of my he's actually a friend but a very famous uh musician carlos santana recently posted for the first time of a political he said vote and somebody asked him the first question vote for who and he said vote for the one who seems most compassionate to you so you got to start with that somebody who can actually look at the world in a way where they care about something other than themselves and their own interest in their own uh immediate circle as it were um so in you know i'll just add this i worked with excuse me with planned parenthood for years and partly around the world some people have observed that the countries communities who have reacted best to this so far to the pandemic at least have been led by women and i don't uh i mean that's true and to some degree part of what i see here is a need for you know i i'd be much more hopeful if we had a lot more women in position of leadership and that's not automatically a better qualifier but when you look at the essence of of development in the world and of people getting some power for themselves societies have improved you know if you want to take one variable one of the biggest variables in healthcare and community is giving women control over their lives and allowing them to lead and that actually is something that i believe is very true and uh i hope that it if we get there in some way not just here but around the world otherwise we get stuck in the same old mindsets and uh don't really get anywhere so it's not a panacea but it's an element that i think needs to be put into this in particular with regard to leadership which that's that's just what we need we've been going backwards obviously for the last few years on a lot of these issues and uh that has to change is that apolitical enough that's perfect i i was just going to add that um in the the the jim hawkins or paul hawkins drawdown climate plan um that in the top 10 things that are basically going to turn the climate price problem around literally in terms of you know co2 emissions number six is education women and girls so that shows you how how interconnected um all these systems are and i'll just add the last thing it was at the end of my my little essay there too um you know this is really tough stuff and so what i rely upon and i used a quote from the plague by albert camus you know a very famous book very relevant now unfortunately and he concluded or his character concluded who was a doctor working to fight the plague was there are more things in men to admire than despise and i hang on to that because in the personal level when you talk to individual people and even in groups people are are good it's our systems and the people who race to the top often who cause so much trouble and who you know impede progress but the goodness of the basic human heart and mind is something that i really try to settle on every day when i go about my life and i hope that this becomes uh you know becomes more prominent in our leadership over time end of sermon thank you um jason um yeah i was gonna ask to be reminded what the question was but i think i remember and uh uh and i'll be very quick because uh i think one of the things we can do and we i'm speaking from people from uh my positionality who have taken up i think way too much space in in the last kind of couple hundred years probably is often to get out of the way and one and also this is not an experience i've had to deal with so much myself but i just want to read a quick quote from this came from nancy vale someone who i don't know but people you might some of you might know who um directs and i think co-founded the pie ranch which is a really great place um in the bay area whose historic farmhouse recently burned down um and she had this to say i read this in some place that was really important to me and i read this on facebook she said with respect to this burning down may this be the beginning of transformation may we resolve to bring back indigenous knowledge heal the damage done since colonization bring justice to the lands and the people build resilient homes for all people practice climate friendly everything feed people love more so i just want to leave it with those words from someone who experienced um a very immediate uh catastrophe that was part of a much much larger one with the recent fires in the bay area yeah i i have felt a shift in in the course of my four years of researching both in awareness and in i would say you know the depth of the knowledge the embodiment of the knowledge um it's it's getting real and um and maybe we're late to the table um in terms of you know the impacts it's been having in in many other places for a long time now so um i think we need to wrap it up there i'm going to turn it over to kira in just a moment but first i want to thank each of you so much for taking the the time and sharing your wisdom um it's it's 1am where sam is so especially want to give a little shout out to her and um and hope that we can gather again in the future um thank you so much and i will take it back to cara now thank you so much again we'll have the recordings produced in this conversation available in about a week or two and we hope to see you at another event with us as soon as you are drawn to do it christina conklin joan diamond steve heilig samantha sapaya ed salzberg jason groves and stan wu and the resilience project at common wheel thank you for being with us at the new school at commonwealth [Music] you

Channel: NewSchoolCommonweal

Views: 248

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Keywords: TNS, Resilience, Climate

Id: MJGbbohd0Hs

Length: 80min 50sec (4850 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020