WORD OUT! The Blog to Build a New Society

We are pleased to be participating in the upcoming Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference: Growing the Green Economy: Practical Solutions for Sustainable Communities being held in Ottawa, Ontario from Feb. 10-12.

Join us at this national forum for leading thinkers and planners on sustainable community development. Keynote speakers include Lester R. Brown (Founder and President of Earth Policy Institute), Mayor David Miller, Avi Friedman, Steven Guibeault and Bob Willard, author of The Sustainability Champion's Guidebook.

The FCM 2010 Sustainable Communities Conference is a one-stop shop for the knowledge, tools and experts that will help you:

• CONSERVE water and energy
• CREATE a sustainable community plan
• DESIGN a low-carbon community
• DIVERT more waste from landfill
• GREEN your buildings and your workforce
• IMPLEMENT environmental pricing reforms
• MANAGE storm water close to the source
• MAP your community’s energy assets
• REDUCE greenhouse gases and COMBAT climate change
• REINVENT a suburb
• TAKE STEPS to create active, walkable communities
• TRANSFORM abandoned sites into vibrant mixed-use or eco-industrial developments
• UNDERSTAND the big picture from a systems thinking perspective

For complete information please check out the Federation of Canadian Municipalities website - hope to see you there!

On the eve of the Games, as Olympic fever slams into high gear, a group of Gabriola activists has released a new video highlighting child poverty in the province of BC. According to First Call, British Columbia's child and youth advocacy coalition, BC had the highest child poverty rate in Canada for the sixth year in a row in 2007, and over one third of children in BC experienced at least one year of poverty in the six years from 2002 through 2007.

These sad statistics are in striking contrast to the untold millions being spent on Vancouver's Olympic effort. While residents of "the best place on earth" incur huge capital costs and a legacy of debt, the profits end up in the pockets of realtors and developers. It truly is a Five Ring Circus.

Frank Preyde is a boomer – and a book reviewer for Rabble.ca. He recently had the opportunity to read Theodore Roszak’s, The Making of an Elder Culture: Reflections on the Future of America's Most Audacious Generation . He says, “The author focuses on the formidable strengths of the baby boomer generation, reminds us of the significant accomplishments of our youth and challenges us to again take up the good fight.” Preyde, I suspect, is one reader who is ready and willing to do just that. You can see his entire review on Rabble.ca.

As a boomer of course I remember all that. Paul Goodman and Marcuse, weren't they with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band? Or maybe it was the Archies. In my more honest reflections on the youth I shared with so many I recall a generation which was inordinately self absorbed and allowed itself to be the most marketed to group in history. This has only become worse over the years. The same ad agency weasels who sold us everything from Che Guevara t-shirts to hash pipes are still selling Viagra and Depends, and we're still buying. Roszak has set the bar high for we boomers, but he reminds us of both our economic might and the lofty ideals of our youth.

As an academic of international repute, Roszak has written a thoroughly researched cerebral book, but it is written from the heart and with conviction. It is a hard book to put down, and as an aging boomer I found it to be exciting and optimistic. In some ways perhaps we boomers have fallen short of our great promise, but with The Making of an Elder Culture we are given a second chance.

It would seem that mine is not a generation which will go gently into that good night.

Do you share Frank Preyde's sentiments? Will boomers embrace the second chance described in The Making of an Elder Culture?

My email inbox has been filled with calls for support for the people of Haiti from most of my newsletter and list serve contacts - Mother Jones, Just Give, Nature Canada, Link TV, Al Gore and the Alliance for Climate Protection to name a few. Locally, folksinger Bob Bossin jumped into action sending this fine example of just how easy it is to rally people to action.

"I'm just sending this to a few of us, off the top of my head. Some of you will remember that we have had some very successful, large, fund-raising events on the island over the years: the tsunami relief event, the Ryan's Well event, to name just a couple that brought out capacity crowds at the Community Hall.
Shall we do it again?
It seems to me that it might not take as much organizing as one might fear. In my experience, when there is a crisis like this, the public provides much of the impetus.
Anyway I for one would be willing to both help organize and perform. You?
Please mention this to anyone you think might help pull it together.
Many hands make light work."

I know I will be there.

But what does all this have to do with sunshine and peaches? Well, that is what I really wanted to write about today, and in a odd kind of way it is related.

Last summer, I spent a day with my family and some friends canning peaches. It was not a calm affair. I had three helpers, two of whom were boys under 12. First, we forgot to add the lemon to stop the peaches from turning brown, then we discovered that our jars were too big for the canner! Each time the peaches had to be taken out of the jars and redone. I was sure they would all be mouldy within a month.

But not so! Last night I pulled out a jar and opened it for dessert. As soon as I held the jar, the memories came flooding back. In the middle of this long, dark, rainy January, I was taken right back to that steamy, summer day with endless sunshine and crazy laughter in the kitchen. It came to me that the process of preserving my own food is about more than just food security. It is about sharing memories and experiences that build true community. It is about creating happy recollections and the lasting ties with neighbours that see you through harder times. Ties that each of us will rely on heavily should disaster suddenly strike, as it has in Haiti.

As Sharon Astyk, author of Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front and my canning inspiration, says "We turn to the security that can be found in structures other than the formal economy - to the informal economy and household economics."

In such a small way, my day canning in my little kitchen helps prepare me, my family and my friends to be able to reach out and help people in need - at home, or in Haiti.

In the wake of the H1N1 pandemic panic, Swissinfo, an enterprise of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, reported last week that a long list of Western European countries are attempting to return, resell, donate, or otherwise offload hundreds of millions of surplus doses of the swine flu vaccine. In one of the more extreme examples, France is attempting to negotiate with its pharmaceutical suppliers to cancel 50 million of the 94 million doses it had ordered. Oops. Switzerland also finds itself with millions of extra doses, after only 15-30% of their population chose to vaccinate, according to Swiss health authorities. Read the full story here. The problem is not limited to Europe - a quick Google search for "surplus H1N1 vaccine" reveals that North America is also facing the prospect of a serious oversupply. Assumedly, many other countries can expect a similar outcome.

This gargantuan global surplus raises many concerns, and even more will be raised if the vaccine manufacturers refuse to accept returns. According to the Swiss article, "Council of Europe member states are considering whether to launch an inquiry into pharmaceutical companies’ influence on the global swine flu campaign". German doctor Wolfgang Wodarg, chairman of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (Pace) Health Committee, alleges that the World Health Organization's "false pandemic" flu campaign was "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century". Personally, I would like to see any inquiry expanded to examine the role of the media in the pandemic - surely they too should be culpable for their role in creating a climate of public panic.

One lesson that should be taken from all this is that our grandmothers were probably right - an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure. Your chances of avoiding any illness can be greatly reduced by eating a healthy diet, getting plenty of exercise and avoiding environmental toxins. To learn more about personal and social responses to common public health threats, check out Cancer: 101 Solutions to a Preventable Epidemic and Diabetes: Sugar-Coated Crisis: Who Gets it, Who Profits, and How to Stop it.

       

Over the holidays I had the luxury of reading Ted Bernard's latest book, Hope and Hard Times: Communities, Collaboration and Sustainability. Too often a large portion of my reading resembles a forced double time march rather than a leisurely evening stroll so having the time to savour Hope and Hard Times was a real treat - all the more so because the stories and thought provoking analysis are so fascinating.

In 1997, Ted Bernard travelled to nine communities across the United States where residents were working collaboratively to solve difficult conservation problems. He wrote about them with co-writer Jora Young in The Ecology of Hope: Communities Collaborate for Sustainability. The common goal of all these communities was to achieve higher levels of sustainability. Bernard found there was a dichotomy between the "parochial" or "citizens of real places" and "the provincial", a growing and faceless entity affiliated with institutions and economies outside the community.

Now, fifteen years later, Ted Bernard has revisited each community to see how their dreams, hopes, aspirations and plans have progressed. In Hope and Hard Times , he tells the story of each community as they strive to create a shared future of sustainability.

From the introduction:

It may be a stretch but these stories seem to be causes célèbres in America’s quest to find better ways to manage local natural resources, build community, and truck down the road to sustainability. These documents and sources inform this project. But rather than being constricted by a rigid template, I choose to allow the uniqueness of each place to carry the narrative. As far as possible, the voices of those who related a decade-plus of history are the voices I wish the reader to hear.

In Hope and Hard Times , Bernard carefully writes the history and context of each story so it is not necessary to have read The Ecology of Hope in order to appreciate his present work. However, for readers familiar with The Ecology of Hope, this is a wonderful reunion.

In his conclusion, Bernard assesses the resilience of the communities' human-ecological systems. He grapples with the difficult task of evaluating what he has discovered within the larger context of current environmental thought.

... today’s challenges require a rapid evolution to a new consciousness .... today’s problems cannot be solved with today’s mind. ~ James Gustave Speth

Driving back from my last field session in late 2008, quietly, across the miles, my headlights piercing the darkness, I tried to get clear about where along the gradient of hope I should place the good work of these communities, knowing that the facts just summarized—the details of collaboration, the good and bad organizational behavior, even the conservation techniques and outcomes — will not alone get these communities, nor the rest of us, through “this thick night of darkness.”

As Speth rightly suggests above, the deep changes in lifeways we require must rest on even deeper transformations of the spirit. And so, at the close of my journey, I wonder: Can these exemplary communities bring forth the new consciousness demanded by the still harder years head? Were I fully forthright, I would admit that the kind of wisdom needed to get there is, at best, subliminally understood by even the most avid players in our stories. On the other hand, the expanding consciousness Speth speaks about is right before our eyes and as old as the human occupation of this continent.

Hope and Hard Times offers valuable insights to anyone working toward sustainable communities within the context of a healthy ecosystem. The lessons are not always cheerful, but Bernard remains optimistic and inspires the reader to continue to pursue the creation of a sustainable future for all.

The Ecology of Hope and Hope and Hard Times can both be purchased from our on-line store or at fine bookstores in your community.

     

Welcome back to the good work. I have been reading the usual line up of predictions for the coming decade and summaries of the year past but my favourite post comes from the Post Carbon Institute - 10 things that will inspire your imagination, 5 things that will fire your indignation and 1 thing you can do to create a better future. With entries from Richard Heinberg, Rob Hopkins, Bill McKibben, Stephanie Mills and James Howard Kunstler, how can you go wrong? You can read the entire post here.

What were your New Year's Resolutions? What are your plans for helping our planet in 2010? We love to hear what our readers are doing. You can share your ideas in the feedback section below.