“It can be helpful to think in terms of the biggest issues of all, because to do so adds clarity. Think nationally and globally: climate change, terrorism …. Do we have a strong sense of urgency to deal with these issues? Remember, words are not the test. Action is the test. … Alertness, movement, and leadership, now–and from many people, not a few–are the signs of true urgency.”

So there you go. Short post, eh?

Well, maybe not. Because while I certainly understood some of the necessities of creating and sustaining a sense of urgency if we’re going to beat climate change after reading the book, I also understood why we’re not doing better at it, and–worse–why we might not be able to.

Aim for the Heart

Kotter argues that any purely rational, evidence-based argument for change will fail because urgency is a feeling that can only be created by at least partially emotional appeals. Fair enough. You may be familiar with some of the following emotional appeals for climate change:

Sea levels are rising!

Enh, who cares. It’ll take centuries to reach my house.

Polar bears are going extinct!

Really? That’s sad. I’ll donate some money to the WWF.

It’s going to get much, much hotter!

Cool. More barbeques.

No–even hotter than that. Like, really hot. Too hot for barbeques. Hotter than it’s been for millions of years.

Wow! No more snow! I hate shoveling.

Malaria will spread! Seeds may stop germinating. 50% of species could go extinct. Our entire agricultural system could collapse. Coral reefs will disappear and the last time the ocean acidified in this way, 95% of species died.

Stop with your fear-mongering! You’re trying to drag me back to the stone ages and I will not live in a cage in the woods!

You know, people are going to die. Real people. Maybe even people you love. People are already dying. And we already have all the technology we need to solve climate change, the solutions are a tiny fraction of global GDP, we could do this in 10 years and create important new industries. If we wanted to.

Curse you and your global socialist agenda! I will not be manipulated by guilt! You are trying to make me feel, and I REFUSE.

Bring the Outside In

In Kotter’s book, this means bringing suppliers and customers and their experiences into the company in a way that informs decision making, so problems can be addressed and processes improved. For climate change, it’s those videos and articles about the kids in the countries where people are already dying from climate change–and which most people never bother to watch. In an organization, you can force people to sit down and listen to a customer rant about his terrible experience with your product; you can then change the decisions and processes that led to that experience. Managers and executives have the authority to control at least to some degree the information employees are exposed to and how that information is incorporated into the company.

But societally, we do not have the authority (nor should we) to control what information people are given outside of school. We also have no control over the execrable actions of climate change deniers, sowing deliberate misinformation in the press in order to confuse people about whether or not sea levels are even rising. And we just don’t have time to wait for the kids currently in school to grow up, start running things, and hope they make better decisions.

Find Opportunities in Crises

Like, say, the potential for renewable energy deployment to kickstart a stagnating economy, actually creating prosperity for more people while also mitigating climate change. Brilliant! Except …

Wind turbines are the devil’s work, solar is too expensive, we don’t want subsidies for any fuels that don’t already have them (oil & coal get billions every year), and actually we would just all-around prefer the crisis to the opportunity, since it’s what we’re used to. It doesn’t feel much like a crisis yet.

Deal with the NoNos

Being those people who meet every argument, every suggestion, every tactic with a “no no, we could never do that because…”. In a business setting, it’s suggested that higher-ups assign them to roles where they have no opportunity to interfere with the change process: get them away from HQ, give them a different job, and keep them very busy. Excellent advice–in a business context.

In a climate context, we have the deniers: they are not answerable to anyone outside of a legal context, and, shockingly, their actions are considered entirely within the law. We can’t pack them off anywhere or keep them busy on anything, and they’re quite happy to jet all over the world to conferences where they continue to spout the same debunked anti-scientific crap. Their stated goal? To make people just confused enough about the reality of climate change that coal and oil companies will be able to continue operating.

What this creates is a dangerous distraction for society and the climate movement: instead of building momentum for moving forward with solutions, an enormous amount of time and energy is directed at engaging with denialists and deflating their patently absurd arguments–over and over again. We don’t have time for this, but we can’t afford not to, because too many people are confused by their arguments. But then by taking the time to argue with them, in many people’s mind it legitimizes the points denialists raise and lends credence to their argument that there is a debate. But there isn’t.

If this isn’t consensus, I don’t know what is.

Kotter also suggests making fun of them. That might work–or at least be more entertaining.

A coalition of Ontario organizations, including the Royal Botanical Gardens, the Ministry of Natural Resources, and Ontario’s Back to Nature Network, are creating a Charter of Rights for Ontario children’s access to and experiences in nature. This Charter (similar to documents in other jurisdictions–see the Children and Nature Network in the US, or Children and Nature Alliance federally in Canada) is based on Richard Louv‘s work, documenting how children are spending ever less time in the outdoors, with consequent harm to their physical and psychological development.  

It took me about five minutes to fill out the Charter survey at the link, and you can bet I’ll be getting Frances to fill out the kid version this weekend. This is a great opportunity to participate in something really wonderful, and make the future a little friendlier for nature and for our kids. 

If I (or you or anyone else) want a chance to participate, we must complete and submit this application form to Enbridge–yes, that’s the proponent–by April 19th.

From the Application Form:

Page 2: “If you need support to fill out this form, please contact the Process Advisor. … The Process Advisor cannot tell you what content you should provide on the form. It is your responsibility to demonstrate that you should be allowed to participate.”

Wow. You know, if a proponent under the Ontario process were to try pulling something like this, their project would never be approved. A citizen must demonstrate to a corporate entity that they should have the democratic right to participate in an environmental assessment process?

Page 5: “If available, please provide documentation with your application that supports your qualifications or describes the source of your relevant information (for example, a curriculum vitae, a reference letter, description of your relevant experience, etc.).”

Yes, that is correct. If you want to claim special expertise relevant to the public consultation process, you must submit supporting documentation, including a resume.

Page 6: “NOTE: The Board will not consider the environmental and socio-economic effects associated with upstream activities, the development of the oil sands [sic], or the downstream use of the oil transported by the pipeline.”

The entire project is about the tar sands; the pipeline in question currently carries natural gas from east to west, and is going to be reversed to carry tar sands dilbit from west to east. How can you talk about whether or not this project is acceptable without talking about the tar sands? That’s like having an environmental assessment for a highway expansion and ruling out, from the start, any discussion of the environmental impacts of cars or alternatives to private transportation.

In the case of the pipeline, by ruling out the tar sands, you’ve limited any discussion of environmental impacts to pipeline spills. Not nothing, to be sure, but also not the important part. Which, if Canadians had any chance to weigh in on tar sands development in any other forum, wouldn’t be so offensive. But we don’t. The Government of Canada is going to develop the tar sands, come hell, high water, oil supply gluts* or, what’s more likely, all three at once.

I’m sure the NEB and Enbridge think this is going to save them all kinds of time. By eliminating 99% of the people who would like to participate in the hearings, it sure will be a lot more streamlined–to the point of being a slam-dunk for Enbridge; I’ve never heard of a project being turned down because you might have a hydrocarbon spill–and I’ll bet you they won’t have to deal with anyone showing up for a public meeting and standing in the front row screaming threats at the panel. Just my guess.

But say, wouldn’t it be fun if, before they got the slam-dunk streamlined review process, they had to wade through about 5,000 application forms first?

~~~~~

*There is so much oil being produced in the tar sands right now that a supply glut is requiring producers to sell their product significantly below market value–$80 instead of $120. So not only is Canada destroying the environment to produce a fossil fuel with enormous social and ecological impacts lasting over a geological time scale, but we’re doing it at a discount because the product is not currently needed. I’m sure an economist can fill me in here on the wisdom of the free market in this regard and how it is effortlessly taking care of our true needs.

Kotter’s book, originally published in the breathlessly fast-paced 1980s (yes, that does seem like a quaint perspective now), outlines an eight-stage process for successful change movements within business organizations seeking to adapt to changing business circumstances. 70% of change movements fail, he writes, because the people leading them don’t understand the basic dynamics of successful organization change–to wit:

Step 1. Establish a sense of urgency
Step 2. Create the guiding coalition
Step 3. Developing a change vision
Step 4. Communicating the vision for buy-in
Step 5. Empowering broad-based action
Step 6. Generating short-term wins
Step 7. Never let up
Step 8. Incorporating changes into the culture

He’s quite emphatic on the importance of following the steps in order, and describes what happened to change movements that tried to do things out of step (summary: it got ugly, and people lost their jobs). But just to put a pin in his eye, or maybe to avoid putting the conclusion into the middle of the blog post, I’m going to discuss how each of these have been applied to the global climate change movement so far, in reverse:

Step 8. Incorporating changes into the culture

Tumbleweeds. Have you seen any changes incorporated into the culture? Maybe a $0.05 fee for plastic bags, and widespread support for compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Over 30 years of activism. Pardon me while I catch my breath from considering the dramatic scope of our collective, cultural response. We’ve collectively shown more initiative in adapting to changes in cable television subscription options than we have in adapting to the greatest environmental crisis of all time.

Step 7. Never letting up

Absolutely true of the die-hard climate activists. Society as a whole and our politicians in particular let up whenever a manufacturing plant closes down or there’s a cold snap in Arkansas.

Step 6. Generating short term wins

Indeed, on a global level, we seem to take a particular glee in dismantling any short-term wins we actually manage to achieve. Kyoto! is dead. The UN climate negotiating process! died, for all intents and purposes, in 2009 at Copenhagen. Carbon tax! is a political opportunity to exploit the ruling party at the expense of the climate, and will be dismantled with all possible speed. You get the idea. If you’ve got a short-term climate win from North America that hasn’t died due to political expediency, or isn’t yet on the chopping block, please share it.

There are small-scale short-term wins on a local level. But globally? Not so much. Even national short-term wins are hard to find, and easily swamped by the Short Term Not Even Thinking About Global Warmings (see: China and India–though China, bless its despotic heart, is coming around).

Step 5. Empowering broad-based action

If the broad-based action you are attempting to empower is consumerism, congratulations! There are now thousands of products on store shelves with green labels, promising to reduce pollution and waste and species loss. But when Kotter writes about empowering broad-based action, he’s talking about making sure that all employees right down to the front line have the tools and authority they need to align all of their work tasks with the new corporate vision. Not just giving them a new colour of rubbish bin and a pin that says “I recycle!”

Instead of empowering citizens to engage in broad-based action to mitigate climate change, we collectively pat them on the head, tell them not to worry about it too much, go shopping–and maybe pick up some recycled toilet paper while you’re at the mall.

Step 4. Communicating the Vision for Buy-In

If you’re asking “What Vision?” you are asking the right question.

Step 3. Developing a Change Vision

See above.

You absolutely can go to any mid-sized bookstore and find a few books outlining the author’s change vision; some of them will even be coherent and well-thought out. You can visit any number of green blogs and websites for the same. Lots of visions. Too many visions. So many visions that there isn’t any real Change Vision on a societal level, certainly not here in North America. In fact, what we have are conflicting visions: “Stop burning all fossil fuels now!” vs. “Implement carbon capture technologies now!” vs. “Return to a pre-industrial technology level!” vs. “A high-tech-low-carbon future for all!” ad infinitum. Competing Change Visions on the part of the Good Guys, splitting public attention and commitment, vs. one over-reaching enormous Static Vision from the oil lobby: “climate change action will destroy the economy and there’s no such thing as climate change anyway, so unless you want purposeless poverty, DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.” Guess who’s winning?

Step 2. Create the guiding coalition

Once upon a time, that was supposed to be the UN. No longer.

We also might have looked to national governments to take that on. In Canada, our guiding coalition, then, is an oil-beholden Alberta-based retrogressive nightmare absolutely determined to develop the tar sands at all costs, and maybe someday get around to some generally ineffective carbon targets once it’s much too late for them to actually accomplish anything. We are 50% of the way to our target! they say, and what they neglect to mention is that, a) the target is dumb and completely inadequate, and b) most of the work done to get Canada to the target to date has been taken on by municipalities and provincial governments, and that rather than supporting those actions, the federal government has been sitting in the wings, throwing darts at them.

Some countries in Europe actually seem to have guiding coalitions that are  effectively navigating their countries towards actual change. Good for them. Here in North America, all our politicians live in fear of the Tea Party–whether they’re in the US or not.

Step 1. Create a sense of urgency

Are you feeling urgency on climate change? On a daily basis? Weekly? Monthly? Or when there is a hot spell in Sudbury? Do we have a collective, cultural sense of urgency for dealing with climate change?

I’d suggest not.

In fact, I’d suggest further that a number of environmental organizations have been careful not to create a sense of urgency. We don’t want to be called a Cassandra, they say; fear turns people off and demotivates them. We need to create a sense of the positive future we can create by dealing with climate change.

In other words, they’re determined to skip to Steps 3 and 4, and sell people on a new future without having created any sense of why the old future isn’t going to be so hot. (Actually, it’s going to be very hot–too hot. Pardon the pun.) As a result, our newspapers, governments, and the regular Guy on the Street holding his cup of Tim Horton’s coffee persist in engaging in a completely futile and utterly pointless comparison of The Future the Greenies Are Trying to Coerce Me Into and The Future I Was Promised by the Jetson Family in Grade 2, complete with jet-packs and robot maids and jobs for everyone in a stable climate with cities that aren’t underwater and agricultural regions that aren’t permanently drought-stricken, which is actually at this point impossible, since we have already dumped enough carbon in the atmosphere to prevent ice ages for the next 130,000 years.

As Kotter says, if you don’t spend enough time in Step 1 and actually create a real and lasting sense of urgency, your change project will fail. And so here we are. Without any cultural sense of urgency, and with a well-funded anti-urgency machine in oil-backed anti-change think tanks still successfully creating public confusion over whether climate change is even a thing or not.

That’s not for lack of trying on everyone’s part. 350, for instance, is trying very hard to build a larger movement and raise a collective sense or urgency to drive political and corporate will towards this problem. They’ve had a number of successes, but it’s far from being front-page material across the continent. James Hansen has been single-handedly trying to ratchet up urgency on global warming–and facing a lot of hostility for doing so. But in general, those who do try to ratchet up urgency over climate change lose the attention battle to the Kardashian family on a regular basis, and after a decade or two of trying some of them reasonably conclude that the problem must be that urgency is the wrong route, let’s compete directly with the Kardashians by engaging short-term attention via celebrity endorsements and branding exercises.

No can do. Yes, raising urgency is a long-term project that requires patience and repetition, and yes, it’s a long slow painful haul that possibly ends in the rocky bottom of a steep cliff. Granted. But according to Kotter, urgency is the needed first step of the only game in town, and  until we figure it out, we’re going nowhere.

Oddly enough, after drafting this post, I came across Kotter’s book on creating urgency while browsing in the library. I’m looking forward to seeing if it has any more climate change insights for me.

Picture by Franke James. Her artwork is fabulous; please visit her site to see more. Her arts funding was cut earlier this year by the Harper government because her work criticizes Canada's actions on climate change.

Hallowe’en is over; Christmas begins. Soon–much sooner than most of us are prepared to think–Canadians will be wrapped in blankets on the couch cradling cups of hot cocoa or eggnog, watching reruns of one of the many versions of A Christmas Carol. We will empathize with Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim (or at least I think so–have I been misreading it all along?), and drown in a pleasant soup of good feelings at Scrooge’s annual transformation.

I find it puzzling, then, that we are as a nation so determined to emulate Scrooge in every way.

Take, for instance, this recent Globe and Mail piece, In Harper’s Canada, Will We Give More of Ourselves to Get Lower Taxes?

Umm, what? Translation: In Harper’s Canada, will we give more so we don’t have to give so much? A more absurd question could hardly be posed. If we as Canadians insist on giving less, what are the chances we will use the extra money to give more? Have any previous tax reductions resulted in an increase in charitable giving? As the author of the piece himself acknowledges, no: previous tax breaks have shredded our social net and, if anything, decreased our charitable giving.

“As Stephen Harper moves toward rewriting this country’s social contract, he presents each of us with a moral question.

“If we want lower taxes, are we prepared to give more of ourselves to others?”

In fact, as the article later makes clear, we aren’t being presented with any sort of moral question; the social contract is being rewritten bit by bit without any input from Canadians on the entirely faulty assumption, which we already know is faulty, that private donations will pick up the slack.* But of course people give less when the social safety net disappears: if there is nothing there to catch you when you and your family fall, you will keep every bit of extra for yourself (or spend it on fancy toys while you can–consumer debt has skyrocketed in this same period). By slashing social programs, each one of us is made meaner through fear.

Oh, but it gets worse: “But in an era where fiscally restrained governments confront rising need created by economic turmoil, the private sector must do more. And the private sector is each of us.”

Excuse me? The government is fiscally restrained? Then why on earth is tax reduction even on the table? Which is it: are we being asked to give more so we can be rewarded with a pat on the head via tax break, or are we being asked to give more because the government is out of money? If the government is out of money, the last thing they should be contemplating is tax breaks. We need to raise taxes.

At the same time that Canada is rewriting the social contract (i.e. eliminating our supposedly-costly safety net) for citizens–the ones who vote for them–we continue to subsidize private industry to the tune of many billions of dollars annually. According to a 2008 Kairos study, the federal government gave $8 billion dollars in subsidies to the oil and gas industry alone between 1996 and 2002. That’s a million dollars a day, according to Kairos. Meanwhile, studies show that these subsidies create no jobs because the industry is so heavily mechanized–our tax money buys them machines so they don’t have to hire workers.

Isn’t this supposed to be a free market economy? Don’t companies survive or fail based on their merit? Why are our children’s educations and the health of our planet’s climate being sacrificed via slashing social programs to keep bad companies afloat?

Worse again? In 2011, the federal government cut $222 million from Environment Canada’s annual budget, mostly affecting climate science positions and programmes, although that funding creates jobs and costs less than one year’s worth of oil and gas subsidies.

Do we have a fiscal problem? No: we have a priority problem. Canadians pay taxes (moreso than corporations; corporate tax rates in Canada in 2000 were 28%, and as of January 1 2012 will be 15%. Yes, boys and girls, they’ve fallen by almost half) to the federal government, who distributes them to large international corporations while crying poor when it comes to supporting individual Canadians. We transfer money from the people saving the earth to the ones wrecking it. We transfer money from the budget for crayon for our kids’ kindergarten classes to Exxon’s budget for buying earth movers.

Between 1994 and 2007, Canada gave $203,000,000,000 to bail out corporations. Two hundred and three billion dollars!** Are we poor, or are we rolling in cash?

Canada used to be a socially progressive country with a healthy safety net; for the past 20 years we’ve coasted on this reputation, though no nations but our own fall for it any longer. We undermine international climate negotiations, push tar sands oil into as many countries as we can for our own gain and damn the consequences, slash social programs while raising corporate welfare–in effect forcing Canadians to subsidize private industry, block the Robin Hood tax, cut arts funding and funding to charitable organizations, eliminate public funding for political parties (thereby cutting off any parties without corporate sponsorship at the knees), and force students to carry an ever-larger load of their own education costs–turning them into debt slaves for decades. Oh, but we still have quasi-universal health care and some of our jurisdictions now allow gay marriage. That’s great, Canada. Very impressive.

Canada is well on its way to becoming Victorian London, complete with smog, extreme poverty, female subservience, eradication of job security & rights for workers, usurious interest and crippling debt, and a sentimental and totally ineffective reliance on private charity to provide for the needs of individuals and families fallen on hard times. I guess we’re still missing those prisons & workhouses….

No, wait: Harper’s taking care of those, too.

~~~~~

*An American stat, just to complement the Canadian stat and show that this is not a uniquely Canadian phenomenon. Lower tax rates do not result in greater charitable giving. Period. Bury the idea, and move on.

**This lovely figure comes from a right-wing think tank, no less, and represents total corporate subsidies between all three levels of government.

But when bumblebees threaten extinction on us we panic.

Why?

Because what’s big, ultimately, is expendable. It’s what’s very very small that matters, ecologically speaking; our world belongs to the bugs, the worms, and mold. We are visitors only, and while we like to look down on the rest of the planet because it could never have been Shakespeare (as if you or I were ever capable of being Shakespeare either–but I digress), the fact is, Shakespeare could never have been, could never have breathed nor eaten nor grown, without the bacteria, decomposers, insects, and photosynthesizers that made it all possible. Not to mention all of the, you know, actors and set designers and stuff.

Polar bears are very cool, don’t get me wrong, I want to live in a world with polar bears. But if polar bears were to go extinct tomorrow, their ecosystems would hobble along until a new status quo establishes itself. Whereas if plankton disappear (and they might), every aquatic ecosystem on earth is toast.

I went down to Occupy Toronto at St. James Park last Saturday, just as they were setting up the tents and tarps. A sign reading “Abandon Greed, Kindness is Worthwhile” greeted me and stuck a goofy grin on my face that stayed all afternoon. People were smiling, friendly, laughing, playing guitars and singing in a rainy 10C. Two mics let people give short speeches to the crowds, and the diversity of speakers and opinions was heartening and lovely. Buy local! Find the love within! Let go of fear! Do God’s work and help the poor! Tax corporations! Remember we are already on occupied land; native rights are important too! Health care for all! Forgive student debts! Build wind and solar! Solve climate change! Stop pollution! Racism kills! Listen to my hip-hop song about the revolution! There’s flouride in the water! Stop buying crap!

Disorganized, yes, but my activist heart sings because all of these conversations ARE related and important and we’ve needed these disparate communities to sit down and talk to each other about how they’re related and how to fix it for at least fifty years. The same system that gives banks millions of dollars for depriving average folks of education and a home, while doing nothing to help those average people, is the same system that gives corporations inalienable rights to destroy the atmosphere and climate upon which human civilization depends. The same mechanisms that send some kids to Harvard and Yale send other kids to the army or jail. That 1% on top doesn’t just depend on corrupt government (but hey, it doesn’t hurt); it also depends on sexism, racism, environmental degradation and externalities, cheap foreign labour and globalization, debt slavery, fossil fuels, and, yes, the internalized terror that keeps most of us from doing more than making a largely futile x on a piece of paper every four or five years. (“Why don’t you just vote!” the columnists scold. “Has it occured to you that we’ve tried that and it hasn’t worked out particularly well!” we reply.) It’s all related. No meaningful solutions will come until all sides have come together and discussed the common sources of their problems.

Regardless:

As with ecology, so with the economy: the big need the small. The charismatic carnivores of the economic system–billionaires, millionaires, banks, and in a global sense much of the first world–intimately rely on and cannot function without the producers and decomposers–mothers, teachers, janitors, manufacturers of clothing, farmers, plumbers, etc. The charismatic carnivores have done a pretty good job of convincing the rest of us that we need them–their money, their ‘jobs,’ their ‘investments,’ their continued presence gracing our lucky countries–but nothing could be further from the truth. They need us.

If every CEO on earth vanished tomorrow, how would it affect your life? Now imagine a world tomorrow without waste collectors, truck drivers and electricians. Our society could not function. The 2009 garbage strike in Toronto brought the city to its knees.

Generally speaking, your contribution to society is in inverse relationhip to the size of your paycheque. If, as a mother, your paycheque is $0, congratulations: you are truly indispensable and will, as a partial reward, spend your lifetime hearing about how your personal choice should in no way affect anyone else’s tax share and, by the way, please keep the brats out of any restaurant where you order at a table from a menu.

Every so often, literal charismatic carnivores wipe out the underpinnings of their own species by devouring their prey to near extirpation. The prey population collapses, then the predator population collapses, then both rebound, and balance is restored. Again, as with ecology, so with the economy: every so often the charismatic carnivores devour the underpinnings of their prosperity by pushing the working class to the point of collapse; but human beings, being human, generally respond by fighting back and swiping a few fangs from the carnivores’ mouths. And you get slave revolts. Class warfare. The civil rights movement. Feminism. The anarchist rebellion in Spain. The Magna Carta. The American Revolution. The Arab Spring. You get Occupy Wall Street and its many, many derivatives. Whenever the very small (economically speaking) remember that the rich need us, but we don’t need them.**

Just like bears need bumblebees, but bumblebees could manage just fine without the bears.

~~~~~

* Please note that all of these species are still facing extinction. We’ve been enormously unsuccessful at rescuing our victims.

**Not a plea for the extinction of the rich, just for a little mutual perspective and humility.

This has been a good couple of weeks to be a leftie, eh?

Occupy Wall Street just keeps growing–and I wish them much luck and the donation of several outdoor heaters, because I’m sure it’s getting cold in NYC at night. Watching the march and the protests online Wednesday evening (you really don’t need cable for anything important) was amazing.

I tried to explain to Frances what was going on, and why they were angry, and how it all happened (“Well, see, some people at the banks did some really bad things and it got the whole economy in trouble–the “economy” is all of the things that people buy and sell put together–so the banks were fine but regular people lost their homes and jobs and a lot of them in America don’t have the money for food and medicine any more. So they are all getting together so they can talk to the government about changing it, because they are very angry and very scared”). She stared at them for a while, and asked, “Why are they all yelling? It’s making a lot of noise,” and then sat down with her stuffed brown squirrel toy and tried to explain to him why some squirrels hate black squirrels, and why they shouldn’t.

“Squirrel racism,” I said. “Yes,” she replied.

“Did they talk to the government yet?” she asked me later. “Did they win?”

“Umm, not quite yet. They’ve been out there for a few weeks already and will probably be out there for a while longer.”

The green movements have signed on, the labour unions are joining in–this is good stuff. Rumours are going around that the White House may actually not allow the Keystone pipeline after all–this after Transcanada has already started mowing up endangered habitats in preparation, for which they are being sued.

You can just picture me madly waving my little green flag over in the corner, cheering.

Meanwhile, in Canada–the Tories aren’t getting the Ontario majority they’d banked on just six months ago. I’m writing this on Thursday, before any of the results are in, so I’m being cocky but:

Ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, I’ve wanted to do work that would make the world a better place. Now, when I was five, I wanted to follow in the family tradition and be a missionary–this does not work as well when you’ve left the Church.

I went to University for Environment and Resource studies, never really expecting it to lead to a job that earned more than $20k/year (remember this was 1994), but I didn’t care. I was prepared to be broke pretty much forever if only I could make a difference on issues I cared about. That I graduated and found work that paid relatively well (not fabulous, but when your expectations are poverty-level it takes little to exceed them) surprised no one more than me–but the work itself was uninspiring. The whole system seemed set up to prevent the kind of meaningful changes we all knew needed to be made: environmental assessments focus on trivial projects over those with real impacts, so I spent my time writing screening reports for bridge repairs over drainage ditches or posting signs or building fences; government silos and committee culture mean it takes years to come to the slightest bit of agreement on anything, by which time there’s an election and a new government and you start over from scratch; too much consulting work is focused on how to mitigate a project rather than evaluate whether or not it should proceed. It’s disheartening.

A few years ago, I cracked into freelance journalism by writing articles about renewable energy–solar and wind. I dug deep into the academic literature, as I had access to academic libraries at the time; I interviewed the experts and activists on both sides; I read reports and checked their footnotes and references back through three or four levels to figure out exactly what was said by who when based on what evidence; and concluded that anti-renewable sentiment was based on a large steaming pile of crap. For the articles I wrote, I was paid the princely sum of $50. Freelance journalism does not pay well, at least not in Canada, not when you’re starting out–but it wasn’t about the money.

Then the Liberals passed the Green Energy Act, the FIT program started, and I saw a job posting for a management position working on renewable energy approvals–and I jumped at it, and here I am. Living in my lovely small town with my daughter who is as happy as I’ve ever seen her, doing work every day that makes the world better, cooler, safer for my daughter. I even get paid more than $20k/year to do it, though it was a pay cut from the government job. (Worth it, too.) Then the provincial Tories turned wind energy into a political football and we got kicked around for a year for votes, and wondered what would happen on October 7 if they cancelled the GEA and FIT program as promised with all those big leads they had in the polls….

But here we are. The program is safe, for now, and I get to keep working hard every day to make the world a meaningfully better place.

So thank you, Ontario. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I will be spending this Thanksgiving weekend feeling very grateful indeed–because what I have, right now, is all I ever really wanted.

This isn't my house, no, but you get the idea

I have been thinking, lately, about weeding my driveway.

It is paved, yes; and apparently the impermeability of asphalt has been vastly overstated, as there are weeds growing through the cracks all over the bloody thing. Oddly, I don’t want to weed it. I like it. All of those supposedly fragile bits of green cracking their way right up through our technological magnificence. Take that! they say. Ha! Some Masters of the Universe you turned out to be.

I have been thinking about raccoons, too.

We have no garage; therefore, the garbage is kept outside; therefore, raccoons eat it. This does not philosophically bother me. After all, simply by putting something in the garbage, I’ve declared it to be a useless thing of no further value to anyone, and as such, I’d rather it find a good home in the warm belly of a living creature than sit, unrotting, in a landfill for 500 years. That this places me outside of mainstream North American opinion I am well aware. I don’t like the mess, but honestly, how can I complain? We came in, chopped their homes to the ground, and now we expect them to slink away quietly like friendly and cooperative wildlife and make a home for themselves somewhere we don’t have to be inconvenienced by the needs we prevent them otherwise from filling. I say, if our occupied human communities showed this grit … actually, when our occupied human communities show this grit, we call them terrorists and blow them up. In any case, my sympathies are firmly with the raccoons.

Which doesn’t mean I enjoy scraping rotting food off of the patio stones once a week, so I caved eventually and found a heavy rock to place on the lid. The raccoons, clever devils, chewed a hole near the bottom of the plastic garbage can and spilled it all over the patio stones anyway.

Frances says that raccoons are “messy little composers” and that if she were a raccoon, she would do the considerate thing and take away what she’d like to eat in a garbage bag, and eat it neatly after climbing through the crack in the front steps where we suspect the raccoons hide out in poor weather. That would be very much like a Frances-raccoon, but it’s not like the actual raccoons, who make a mess.

I admire them. They’ve made a life for themselves in hostile surroundings, and proven to be clever and much tougher than we are.

My home was never going to be separate from nature anyway. There’s bugs in the walls, eh? Ants, spiders, millipedes. Let them stay. Why not? There’s air–air’s nature, right?–there’s water, and water’s definitely nature, even chlorinated and filtered. There’s Frances’s little pots of half-starved seedlings on the windowsill. There’s the wood beams in the walls–that’s nature–the steel posts–nature too. Gypsum, concrete, cotton; nature, nature, nature. And, of course, there are the warm animal bodies themselves: two guinea pigs, two primates. And apparently a couple of raccoons eating silently under the front steps.

I am a sorry excuse for a suburbanite. I like my civilization happily permeable, hopelessly intermixed with nature–because the suburbs are nature, just mangled to within a bare millimetre of their lives. I like to think of the human nature of my little home and the non-human nature of its surroundings knotted together like the warp and woof of a woven fabric.

I’m not going to keep non-human nature out of ‘my space’ no matter how hard I try, so why not welcome it in?

I'll bet you this housefly-sized frog knows better

Hello, and welcome to my new think tank.

On Monday, 117 people were arrested for standing on the wrong patch of a paved, public area in Ottawa, Ontario, after trying to access their democratically-elected government.

Meanwhile in Alberta, an undisclosed number of tar-sands executives furthered environmentally-destructive projects that will ultimately kill Canadians via smog and others globally via climate change, and furthered the collapse of Canada’s international reputation, and are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the accomplishment. (Information on salaries at the upper-levels is hard to come by, but a high-school grad working labour in the field makes $00,000-200,000/year. You’ve got to figure their bosses are earning a lot more.)

You know what? That’s just fucking nuts, and I don’t need to be a trained psychologist to say so.

And neither do you!

It got me to thinking–if the bad guys can do it, so can we, right? I mean, a mechanical engineer headed up the Global Climate Coalition; the Renewable Energy Foundation in the UK is an anti-wind front group funded by wealthy landowners living close to proposed wind projects and staffed by non-experts with a long pedigree on anti-wind activism; the Greening Earth Society was a front of the Western Fuels Association–no bias there–with a bunch of coal industry expats on board; Fred Singer headed up the Science and Environmental Policy Project which had as its chair the very same Frederick Seitz who churned out the misleading “science” on the health effects of tobacco for a couple of decades, convincing millions that cigarrettes wouldn’t kill them.

And yet they write up their tidy little press releases on attractive letterhead and sign it very officially, “So-and-So, Head, Made Up Front Group for Coal Lobby,” and the press, pressed for time and apparently none too skeptical these days, runs it. Without comment, without interpretation, without investigation, thus leading the public to believe that the Global Climate Coalition, for example, could correctly distinguish the climate from a kitchen grease-fire.

I have exactly the same credentials in psychology as they have in climate science: which is to say, I’ve read a bunch of pop psychology books, I know some psychologists, I have many excellent and wonderful friends who have been through the psychiatric wringer (irony: those who are actually nuts appear to be universally worth knowing, except for the psychopaths and narcissists; so when did the term become derogatory?). I have subscriptions to psychological magazines. No, I’m not a psychologist, but do you need to be a psychologist to know that it’s completely bananas that our society would rather drive our cars off a cliff than stop driving? That we won’t for the love of the holy trinity touch the sacred treasures of the super-rich for fear of the impacts on the Mighty God of the Economy, but we’ll gladly wrest bread from the mouths of hungry children without apparent reflection that their parents probably, you know, bought that bread, so reducing their ability to buy bread may also not be so great for the GDP? Do I need psychological training to know that there is something fundamentally broken in the brain of anyone who can state with a straight face that since it isn’t entirely politically expedient at this exact moment to ask people to pay the true cost of the things they buy since they’re so used to deep deep discounts that they might revolt, so the global carbon cycle’s just going to have to sit tight and wait until we feel like dealing with CO2?

I don’t think I do.

I think I can safely say that this is crazy.

For the love of Prozac, according to climate experts and scientists, western industrialized nations have until 2020-2025 to decarbonize. That’s not “stabilize carbon emissions” or “reduce carbon emissions by x% below 1990 levels,” that’s “STOP EMITTING ALL CARBON COMPLETELY, FOREVER.” That’s nine years, give or take, and that doesn’t save the climate, it just gives us 66% odds of avoiding complete catastrophe. And the government of Canada, god love ‘em, has approved a new coal plant to be commissioned in 2015.

That is fucking nuts.

Oh, but it is a marginally cleaner coal plant that will pollute about as a much as natural gas plant–and we fully expect the global climate, apparently, to pat us on the head, give us an A for effort, and let us off the hook.

So. Welcome to the Global Psychologists for Sane Policy. I am your Host and Head, Chief Diagnosticator of Official and Institutional Stupidity. Please join me. It’s not hard. All you have to do is hurl epithets at world leaders and corporate masterminds running the planet into the ground for a measly thirty pieces of silver, and you probably do this already. If you’d like I’ll give you a title and you can make it more official-sounding.

Because it’s all well and good to stick to the moral high ground, especially since if sea levels keep rising, the moral high ground may be all that’s above water. But ultimately 8 billion people aren’t going to fit on the mountain peaks, so let’s do our part to keep the moral low ground dry too, eh?