Without you, who work with such persistence in the trenches of the climate crisis, how would Canadians know that we face such danger?
How would we know that most of the solutions we need already exist, or that progress is being blocked by those who profit from continued climate pollution, and those who believe their lies?
We are truly blessed to have so many great climate journalists.
Without your work it would be hard to persuade our fellow Canadians that the climate crisis is real and urgent. And without public support, it would be hard to persuade our leaders that they need to tackle the crisis with far greater urgency.
Knowing that I speak on behalf of climate activists, scientists, and champions all across Canada,
we raise our hands to thank you.
THANK YOU!! YOUR WORK IS APPRECIATED
At 24 heures: Andrea Lubeck, Élizabeth Ménard.
At the CBC: Benjamin Shingler, Bob MacDonald, David Thurton, Emily Chung, Jill English, Kyle Bakx, Laura Lynch, Lauren Pelly, Kristin Nelson, Moira Wyton, Molly Segal, Rachel Sanders, Susan Ormiston.
At CBC Radio Canada: Catherine Perrin, Élisa Serret, Étienne Leblanc, Thomas Gerbet, Valérie Gamache, Olivier Arbour Massé.
At the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives: Ben Parfitt.
At Canadian Press: Bob Weber, Mia Rabson, Nicole Ireland.
At CleanTechnica & Forbes: Michael Barnard.
At Corporate Knights: Adria Vasil.
At Le Devoir: Alexandre Shields, Alexis Riopelle
At the Globe and Mail: Adam Radwanski, Alex Bozikovic, Jeff Jones, Ryan MacDonald, Sierra Bein.
At The Energy Mix: Chris Bonasia, Gaye Taylor, Mitchell Beer.
At EcoParent Magazine: Andrea Koehle Jones.
At Energi: Markham Hislop.
At Glacier Media: Stephan Labbé,
At Global: Megan Robinson.
At the Guardian: Naomi Klein.
As independent climate journalists: Andrea Koehle Jones, Anne Shibata Casselman, Dustin Patar.
At La Presse: Éric-Pierre Champagne, Jean-Thomas Léveillé
At the Narwhal: Carl Meyer, Carol Linnitt, Emma Gilchrist, Emma McIntosh, Fatima Syed, Jesse Winter, Julia-Simone Rutgers, Matt Simmonds, Mike De Souza, Sarah Cox, Sharon Riley, Stephanie Kwetásel’wet Wood.
At the National Observer: Barry Saxifrage, Chloe Logan, Chris Hatch, John Woodside, Marc Fawcett Atkinson, Natasha Bulowski, Rochelle Baker.
At the Toronto Star: Kate Allen, Marco Chown Oved.
At the Tyee: Andrew Nikiforuk, Geoff Dembicki.
Written and compiled by Guy Dauncey, climate author and organizer. Co-Chair of the West Coast Climate Action Network.
If you are a professional Canadian journalist who is researching and writing original climate stories and I have failed to include you, I apologize. Please let me know. guydauncey-at-earthfuture.com
Our world needs more kindness. People need more kindness. Nature needs more kindness. But we need it deep within our economies, where so many of our troubles begin.
We have been told a thousand times that the capitalist free-market economy is the best and indeed the only kind of economy that works, but for so many people, it’s no longer working. Surely, there must be a better way. Our economies have been built on the primacy of selfishness and greed. What is the alternative? The economics of kindness – and it’s not just an idea. It’s a very real thing. Before we begin, however, we must answer the question that’s being asked by so many people around the world:
This is an extract from Chapter 12 of my forthcoming book The Economics of Kindness: How to End the Economics of Selfishness and Build an Economy that Works for All, for which I am seeking a publisher.
So much has been written about the urgency of the looming climate disaster that I’ll skip straight to the solutions. I am a climate alarmist, just as Churchill was a Nazi alarmist in the 1930s. But I am not a climate doomer. I am of one mind with Paul Hawken, author of Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation,who believesthat we can do this if we put our minds to it. The alternative is too dire to contemplate.
To the left of me, to the right of me, in front and behind, I see people giving up on the belief that we can change the world.
Saying awful things about humanity, fearing awful things about the climate crisis, feeling awful things about the future. Feeling panic. Feeling trapped. Good people, kind people, thoughtful people, drowning under all the bad news. Just can’t see a way forward. Concluding that it’s all too late.
Guy Dauncey’s Big Solutions: Raising interest rates is a cruel cudgel that hurts the most vulnerable. There are other responses that governments and central banks should consider.
First Published in Planning West (PIBC), Summer 2022
By Guy Dauncey PIBC (Hon); Rob Buchan Ph.D., FCIP, RPP; Jack Anderson MCIP, RPP; Heather Pritchard; Kent Mullinix Ph.D. August 2022
There’s a global food catastrophe coming our way, and we’re not ready for it. It’s being caused by a disastrous combination of climate-induced deluges, droughts and heat waves; the war in Ukraine; supply-chain disruptions; and food export bans by leaders who are worried about popular insurrections if they can’t feed their people. Meanwhile, farmers’ profit margins are being squeezed by the rising cost of fuel, fertilizer and animal feed.
While we have been quietly growing our tomatoes, kayaking on the ocean, and working at our jobs, a team of the planet’s most brilliant people have been sending a telescope one and a half million kilometres into space.
It’s sunset, at the end of another beautiful day in Honolulu. The high tide is arguing with the seawall, which was raised another metre last year to protect the Capitol Building – but what’s new? They’re still not on good terms with each other.
My name is Ben Danner-Pualani, and tomorrow I will give the biggest speech of my life in front of all my peers. They say it will be broadcast to every schoolchild. I’m 87, and for my sins I have been granted the pomposity of being a Senator, so I’ve seen a bit, but this has the butterflies crawling all over my poor weak heart, under my great grandfather’s ancient robe.
In his book, Value(s): Building a Better World for All, former governor of The Bank of England Mark Carney, looks at value beyond dollars and demands your attention. Review by Guy Dauncey. First published in The MINT Magazine, September 2021.
When the world’s best-known central banker writes a new book, we should sit up and pay attention, especially since Mark Carney is one of the few central bankers who really gets the climate crisis.
It’s a quite personal book; his writing reveals a deep commitment to ethical values, and service to the wider community. He makes me feel that I know him, and we’d get along well over a pint of beer. He often shares stories from his time at the Bank of England, and as chair of the Financial Stability Board, which was set up after the 2008 financial crash, resulting in over 100 reforms. Will they work? Time will tell.
For those who understand, it’s crystal clear. Our educational traditions need to be transformed from infancy to old age, to give us the skills and understanding to tackle our huge civilizational challenges: the climate crisis; the biodiversity crisis; the crisis of injustice, inequality, dominating corporations and destructive economics; and the crisis of purpose, trust and deluded populism. They intertwine, creating a tangled knot that generates cynicism, anger and despair.
The authoritarian rote learning that causes so many to dislike school and cease learning once they graduate needs to be replaced with learning that nurtures creativity, curiosity and joy, as Ken Robinson explains in the world’s most popular TED Lecture, with 69 million views. I have organized my thoughts into ten headings, and I conclude by asking how we can make change happen.
“We are facing a disaster of unspoken suffering for enormous amounts of people, so please, treat the climate crisis like the acute crisis it is, and give us a future.”– Greta Thunberg
For years, Guy Dauncey has tirelessly warned of the urgency of tackling the climate crisis and provided practical ways to achieve reductions in our emissions. While the crisis has only worsened, the window of opportunity to shift direction has shortened. Here is a blueprint for concrete action. Read it and act! – David Suzuki
Have you ever been invited to write a blog, and felt intimidated? Well don’t. Here’s some advice to get you going. I wrote this for the Yellow Point Ecological Society, which is why it is full of nature references, but the advice applies to all good blogging.
Who are we? And where are we going on this tiny planet of ours, this bright sparkle of life in a Universe so ridiculously vast? It’s a question worth exploring, if you have five minutes in your busy COVID day.
Almost all scientists assume that the Universe is a solidly material realm, consisting of packages of atoms that have, by the happenstance of chance, turned themselves into polar bears and poets. We may have come from stardust, but we have no inherent direction or purpose. Where are we going? You might as well ask what a stone wants for breakfast.
300 years ago, the Enlightenment generated an inspiring vision of scientific, technological and economic progress. What was once global ‘progress’, however, has become a climate, ecological, economic and now pandemic disaster.
We need new inspiration.
When we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic we can’t afford
to go back to business-as-usual.
We need to build ourselves a new ecological civilization
in which we live, work and play in harmony with Nature,
We face not one but three simultaneous inter-connected crises: the COVID-19 Emergency, the Climate and Biodiversity Emergency, and the Crisis of Capitalism. We urgently need connected constructive responses.
When you recall the movie When Harry Met Sally, your horny mind probably goes straight the scene in the delicatessen, and “I’ll have what she’s having”. Setting that aside, it took Harry and Sally a long time before they realized that they were natural partners. In my version of the story, Harry is the climate and biodiversity action movement and Sally is the COVID-19 community response movement. For each, the movement includes a wide mix of people, organizations, scientists, health workers, artists, businesses, banks and governments who have realized the urgency of their respective crises. Ideally I need a third character to represent the new economics movement, but since there was no suggestion of polyamory in the movie, I’ll settle for tradition. It would make for a great sequel, however.
The Mint Magazine despatches Guy Dauncey to Switzerland, a decade into the future, to report on the global summit.
It was pouring when we arrived in Davos. The local news channels were full of complaints about how useless the artificial snow-machines were in the rain. Everyone knew the continuing climate crisis was to blame. Their glum expressions said it all.
When the invitation arrived for The Mint to send a journalist I volunteered because I wanted to see how my Tesla Raven Model 5 would manage the 1,000 km, 12-hour journey on just one recharge, ride-sharing with three others. Success. We arrived with 154 km still in the battery.
How can I describe the mood among the delegates? The world had entered the final year of the 2020s, and the steady reduction in global emissions along with the full-on engagement by China and India made many people feel optimistic. But the ongoing litany of disasters, including the massive flooding in Holland and the forest fires in the Amazon, made most still feel fearful.
by Guy Dauncey, March 27th 2020 Updated March 30th.
Our food chain in BC is hugely dependent on imports, making it extremely vulnerable. On Vancouver Island, 95% of our food arrives on the ferry.
BC has tens of thousands of acres of farmland that are lying fallow, or growing hay for horses that serve no agricultural purpose. In the Cowichan Valley Regional District there are 17,700 hectares of land in the Agricultural Land Reserve, of which in 2010 only 10,840 hectares were in agricultural production, and only 2,120 hectares were set up for irrigation.
The COVID-19 pandemic is growing in its reach every day. Now is the time to be planning for worst-case scenarios, including:
How can we stay strong during this crisis? With love, careful planning, and care for others – and total lockdown.
The end of the tunnel may be a long way off, but if we treat it with the utmost seriousness, keep our social distance, wash our hands regularly, and look out for each other, we can stop the spread of the virus and reach the light at the end. When we emerge, huge numbers of people will hopefully want a more caring, cooperative approach to life, and a new kind of economy, based less on greed, selfishness and the destruction of Nature, and more on the economics of kindness.
The pandemic has seized our attention, and so it should – but the climate and ecological emergencies haven’t paused out of sympathy, thinking “Let’s give the humans a break.” That’s not the way Nature works.
We can’t afford to relax our climate and environmental concerns just because we’ve got other concerns. We have to do both. And being stuck at home gives us an opportunity to do some serious planning. Serious, as in “Let’s make our family 100% climate and ecologically friendly within five years.”
A video of Guy Dauncey presenting a brief summary of this paper is here.
“This is a practical, down to earth concrete step by step transition strategy for the Canadian government to get real about the climate emergency. A must read for all Canadians to make a difference and communicate to their elected officials new policies and programs that will make a difference now.” – Professor Ann Dale, Trudeau Fellow Alumna, Canada Research Chair, Royal Roads University
“This is vital reading. It maps out an evidence-based route ahead; to open real conversations around what we actually need to do in these testing times. It should be read by politicians and policymakers, local and regional councillors, business front-runners, university and health service delivery managers, indeed everyone who wants to explore how we can collectively build the new zero carbon world we so urgently need.” – Paul Allen, Project Coordinator, Zero Carbon Britain project at the Centre for Alternative Technology
“Visionary and thorough, Dauncey’s 26 week Transition Program deserves close scrutiny in Canada and beyond. His passion for a clean economy shines.” – Raffi Cavoukian, C.M., O.B.C., singer, founder of Raffi Foundation For Child Honouring
A new ecological civilization, it whispers ever so softly
By Guy Dauncey
There comes a time in the evolution of every civilization when the Universe sends us a new message. Slowly, it works its way through the multiple layers of a long-established culture. It is buffeted by resistance and repulsed by rulers, but in spite of this it finds its voice in the songs of poets, the impulses of teenagers, and the dreams of millions.
This is most of the final Chapter 34 of my novel Journey to the Future: A Better World is Possible. The book is set in Vancouver in the year 2032, by when it has become the world’s greenest city, alongside Portland and Copenhagen. Patrick Wu, a 24-year-old Chinese Canadian, is visiting a future world brimming with innovation and hope, where the climate crisis is being tackled, the solar revolution is underway and a new cooperative economy is taking shape. But enormous danger still lurks. The final chapter consists of this Dinner Party. All of the philosophers and scientists mentioned in the text are real, except Satyanendra Mukherjee, who wrote the First and Second Laws of Syntropy.
This is a long read. It’s about syntropy, entropy, religion, the question of whether the Universe has purpose, the omnipresence of consciousness, its relationship to quantum theory, the relationship between the inner and the outer realms, the nature of free will, the shortcomings of the standard model of physics, deep history, and why this is relevant to the multiple crises we face today.
Guy Dauncey is an author, speaker and ecotopian futurist who works to develop a positive vision of a sustainable future, and to translate that vision into action. He lives on Vancouver Island.
Guy Dauncey is founder of the BC Sustainable Energy Association, co-founder of the Victoria Car Share Cooperative, and the author or co-author of ten books, including The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming and Journey to the Future: A Better World Is Possible. He is currently completing The Economics of Kindness: A Ten-Year Transition to a Green Cooperative Economy. He lives in Yellow Point, on Vancouver Island, Canada. His website is www.thepracticalutopian.ca.
I premise my analysis on five statements:
The climate emergency is real.
The ecological emergency is real.
The inequality, household debt and affordable housing crises are real.
A new global financial crisis is lurking, caused by excessive corporate and private debt and banking deregulation.
We need a ten-year mobilization to achieve a rapid transition to a green cooperative economy that is human-friendly, community-friendly, climate-friendly and nature-friendly, leaving self-interested capitalism behind us.
There are massive forest fires in Siberia. Greenland’s melting is accelerating. Record heatwaves are roasting Europe. The world’s insects are dying off. The scary news keeps accumulating.
We are living on the edge of an emergency that is just getting started, and climate is only the half of it. There’s also an ecological emergency. How are we to respond? It’s easy to slip into complacency, or to be overcome by fear, followed by a sense of impotence. You know the crises are real, but the children are coming to visit, there’s a holiday to plan, and don’t get me started on the problems we’re having at work.
The first step to end complacency and neutralize fear is to put the crisis on your weekly to-do list:
Weed the garden
Visit your friend in hospital
Sign the kids up for karate/soccer/piano/dancing lessons
Do something to tackle the climate and ecological crises
In September 2018, the Paris-based Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) published a report on An agro-ecological Europe by 2050: Multifunctional Agriculture for Healthy Eating, in which the authors found that a fully agro-ecological Europe could sustainably feed 530 million Europeans by 2050.
I have captured the possibility of an agro-ecological future and compared it to the current reality in these two diagrams. They are too big to display, so click on each phrase below to see the full diagrams:
How can we turn around the world’s financial institutions so that their creation of money serves to construct a new ecological civilization, rather than destroy our current civilization through the financing of ecological and climate catastrophe? It’s a massive problem that needs multiple solutions.
Before we turn our attention to some possible solutions, we need some context. Global GDP in 2018 was $87.5 trillion. Global debt, created by the world’s financial institutions, was $247 trillion, growing by $14 trillion a year. Between 2005 and 2016 the debt increased by 73%, split between governments ($63 trillion), non-financial corporations ($68 trillion) and private households ($44 trillion).
June 2019. The summer days bring exquisite shades of green. The bees are out, the ants rush around, and the wind rustles quietly in the tops of the trees. A fresh-baked rhubarb sponge cake sits on the kitchen counter. Life is sensuous, beautiful, and quite frankly, exquisite. Tiny mauve butterflies flit in and out of the flowers.
And then Cassandra arrives, she of the noble Greek ancestry, admired by the god Apollo, she with the golden locks and the long white flowing dress, reading from her list of warnings:
For 200 years, students have been urged to learn the 3 R’s of reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic. In recent years, thinkers of various political persuasions have proposed adding a fourth R including running, relationships, religion, race, rithms (for algorithms), respect, road safety, ritalin, rifle-shooting, revolvers and (appropriately) resuscitation.
There is another 4th R that is even more essential if we are to survive the 21st century. It is the knowledge of ecology, of how our planet works, and how to regenerate healthy ecosystems from the atmosphere and the rainforests to the microbiomes in our own guts.
Will you join me? I need lots of people to join the November Offensive, so that together, we can make a difference.
This summer’s forest fires and smoke-filled skies have left many of us asking, “What will it take to end the climate dithering and start DOING something to tackle the growing emergency?”
The IPCC has just reminded us of the urgency of the crisis, and the need to reduce emissions globally by 45% by 2030 if we are to limit the warming to 1.5C.
The BC NDP government is getting ready to launch its climate plan at the end of November, somehow combining climate action sufficient to meet its stated goal of a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030 with its recent climate-disastrous decision to approve the big LNG Canada project.
The timing is critical to impress our New Democrat and Green MLAs of the need for urgent action to speed the transition to 100% renewable energy and protect the forests.
Saturday October 20th was Election Day, and we had such great results! Of the 55 candidates who I recommended for your support, 38 were elected and 17 were not. In Courtenay and Comox progressive candidates were also elected, pushing out old-school conservatives.
This was my pitch for these candidates: I want Vancouver Island to become a place where people are really committed to living in harmony with nature.
It’s simply not on your radar. You know more about Taylor Swift or Beyoncé than you do about climate change, or whatever it’s called.
Phase 2: What is This – is it Real?
I keep hearing about it, but it’s all so confusing. One person says one thing, someone else says another. So I’m reading blogs, articles, and even some books. trying to fathom it all out.
Phase 3: OMG, this is Awful. It looks like a Real Catastrophe.
Massive sea level rise? Huge droughts, storms and downpours? Freshwater running out? This is terrible. I read that the word most scientists use to describe the future if we don’t tackle the climate crisis is ‘catastrophic‘. Continue reading The Seven Phases of Climate Awareness→
What does it mean to be so worried, because you really can’t afford the rent? To have to surrender your hope of ever owning a home? To face the end of a rental lease and know that there is NOTHING out there that you can afford? To stare homelessness in the face?
Many of us are comfortably housed, but many are not. The autumn rains have arrived, and the harvest crops are being gathered in. Everyone seems to be getting on with their lives. And yet for many people, the smiles and kindnesses that make life worth living mask a level of stress and worry that should have no place in our community.
How can there be such a housing crisis?
How can it be that in this Cowichan Valley that we love so much, there is such a housing crisis? How can democracy, the housing market, and local government have failed us so completely?
Like so many, I watched the Senate hearing on Brett Kavanaugh, transfixed. A lot of us do things in our teenage years that we later cringe at and regret. It’s how we handle our regrets later that matters, once the stupidities are done. What struck me first was how belligerent and defensive he was, and, how whiney.
What struck me next is how he could if he had wished have adopted a much easier approach, and won the hearts of all Americans, of whatever political stripe. Since he seems unwilling to do that, I am willing to do it for him: Continue reading Brett Kavanaugh’s Better Angels→
Democracy is a very recent social invention. Most people don’t like it when the societies they live in are blatantly unfair, with privileges and glory for the rich and hard labour and exploitation for the poor. In consequence, starting a thousand years ago, people in nations all over the world have gradually prised power out of the hands of their ruling elites and established democracies.
It has been incredible hard work. In 1794, Thomas Hardy, a London shoemaker, was charged with high treason for proposing one person, one vote. His sentence, had he been found guilty, would have been to be hanged by the neck, cut down while still conscious, disemboweled, beheaded, and his body to have been cut up into quarters. Fortunately, a Grand Jury of nine respectable citizens, after debating the matter for nine days, found him ‘Not Guilty’. The London crowd went crazy, dragging him through the streets in triumph.
Trudeau: ‘No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there’
Trump: “We’ve got underneath us more oil than anybody … and I want to use it.”
I have very little to add to this. Emotionally, culturally, empathetically, educationally and behaviourally, Trump and Trudeau are as different as different can be. Trump is a bully, a braggard and a boor. Trudeau is a refined classical decoration on the carpet of civilization. Trump is a dirty stain.
Yet when it comes to energy and oil, their brains and their political instincts think alike. Trump is a proud climate denier. His “Grab them by the oil-wells” thoughts are at least consistent with his larger outlook, which is nationalist and mercantilist, as if the eighteenth century had never ended.
It cools us in the summer, it warms our hearts all year,
It provides a home for owls and flowers, for herons, cedars, fir.
It shapes the landscape, painting peace, away from the urban rush,
It protects our water all year round, surrendering it clear and fresh.
In Japanese, the word shinrin means forest and yoku means bath, so shinrin-yoku means ‘forest bath’: being immersed in the forest with all our senses. Listening to its quietness, seeing the variety of trees, mosses, lichens and rocks, tasting the air as you breathe in deeply, touching the rough Douglas fir and the smooth red arbutus, going barefoot across the earth, dipping your feet in a forest stream, lying down to gaze up at its beauty. Such bathing brings healing to the body, heart, mind and soul. Continue reading Protecting the Coastal Douglas Fir Forest: Seven Practical Solutions→
I wish I didn’t have to write this. I count myself a friend of the NDP/Green Alliance, and I had high hopes for the government’s new climate action plans. [1]
BC’s Ministry of Environment has published a series of Clean Growth Intentions Papers, with a deadline for public feedback of August 24th, in the heart of this fire and smoke-filled summer. In my head, I can see that they have been framed in a very positive way, emphasizing the multiple economic benefits of engaging in climate action, reframed as clean growth.
But the policies floated contain little that is new. They are really timid. And by downplaying the climate crisis almost to a state of mental non-existence, they have written the urgency out of the picture. In my heart, I feel as if they have been written by a holiday season policy-drone operating on auto-pilot. Hard words, but that’s what I feel.
Once upon a time, there was a revolution. I have never read about it in any history book, yet it was the ancestor of all revolutions, from the earliest slave revolts to the French and Russian revolutions, the gay rights movement and the #Metoo movement.
By not knowing about it, and not understanding its consequences, our interpretation of history is missing a critical dimension as we struggle to free ourselves from the tentacles of neoliberalism and build a new economy that is friendly to humans and nature, not just to bankers and greed. In the light of this revolution, our understanding of thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Marx, Owen, Kropotkin, Nietzsche, Polanyi, Keynes, Hayek, Rand and Ostrom is changed.
We may never know when it happened, but a quarter million years ago is a good possibility. To understand its origins, however, we have to go back six million years, to when we shared a common ancestor with the chimpanzees and bonobos. Even today, we share 99% of our genes, and the same impulses to mother, to play, to help each other, to use social skills, to hunt together, to form tribes, to fight, to bully and to dominate.
Through it all, the non-alphas resented being dominated
$4.5 Billion Dollars to Subsidize Fossil Fuels? Here’s a Much Better Idea
$4.5 billion of Canada’s money, to buy a bitumen pipeline? Some suggest that it could rise as high as $12 billion, including future construction and legal costs.
So what if the money was invested in solutions to the climate crisis, instead making things worse by being invested in the primary cause, which is our use of fossil fuels? When Canada signed the Paris Climate Agreement most people presumed that it was being signed honestly, not as an act of laugh-behind-your-hand hypocrisy.
Thirty to Fifty Times More Jobs
That much money could leverage enough electricity to replace most of Alberta’s coal and gas-fired electricity, and generate between 30 and 50 times as many jobs. It could also power 18 million electric vehicles for 25 years. Continue reading Canada’s Choice→
Submission to the Agricultural Land Reserve Minister’s Advisory Committee by Guy Dauncey and Rob Buchan. Deadline for letters and submissions Monday April 30th 2018.
Throughout the world, in every culture, farmers have lived and raised their children in small farm villages.
Here on Vancouver Island, 95% of our food is imported every day on the ferries. At the same time, good farmland sits empty or grows hay, while younger people who want to get onto the land to grow food are unable to do so because of the incredibly high price of land.
If we are to live in a fair, just, ecologically sustainable world, many things in our economy will need to change, from the way banks create money to the way environmental losses and gains are accounted for and measured.
Let’s start with the businesses that grow the food, manufacture the products and provide the services we all depend on and enjoy.
It’s almost impossible to imagine a successful economy without its businesses. The Soviet Union tried, and Cuba is still trying, but neither has had much success. It’s hard to have success when the spirit of enterprise is not allowed to flourish. Continue reading Let’s Make Every Business a Social Purpose Business→
They say we are self-interested, we’re always out to win. Always individualistic, though it used to be a sin. They say we need free markets, the better to compete, and the economy will flourish if we only think of greed.
This is Economics 101, the way it’s taught today. Not a word about nature, community, caring, sharing, or cooperation.
During the mid 19th century, advances in science, democracy, education, literacy, public healthcare, labour unions, technological breakthroughs, banking, and the power of fossil fuels to generate rapid economic growth certainly made it seem that after ten thousand years of economic stagnation the competitive pursuit of profit was improving life for all. In the 1760s it took eighteen hours of human labour to transform a pound of cotton into cloth. By the 1860s it took one and a half hours. Today, it probably takes five seconds.
If you want to see what this EcoRenaissance looks like on the ground, click HERE.
Until a thing has a name, it doesn’t really exist
I can feel this future. I have written a novel about it. I love its colour and vibrancy, its harmony with Nature. But what is its name?
One of the realities of the spoken language is that until a thing has a name, it doesn’t really exist. When we want to create something, we name it.
The feeling that comes to mind is one of Renaissance – the birth of a new vision, the promise of a new future. The Renaissance that was seeded in the 13th century and blossomed into glory in the 15th and sixteenth centuries filled people’s hearts, souls and minds with art, imagination and ideas. It took inspiration from the rediscovered science, art and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome. It made souls take flight, washing away the dull dogmatism and cruel muddy feudalism of a world where nothing much changed except by disease, disorder and death.
Back on the trail, I passed a sign that told me that Fourth Avenue was closed to cars every Sunday, and open only to cyclists, rollerbladers, runners and strollers.[1] I rode north over the Cambie Street Bridge, crossing the waters of Vancouver’s False Creek. To see the banners of colored silk fluttering from the streetlights and the central median ablaze with rhododendrons and flowers set my soul ablaze. A banner at the end of the bridge proclaimed ‘The Land that Ugly Forgot’ and welcomed me to the downtown.
I cycled to Wei-Ping’s office on Water Street in Gastown and found a space to park Carl’s bike in a bike-rack designed like a red dragon. I had a while before my meeting, so I walked to the Waterfront station and turned up Seymour, enjoying the wide sidewalks, ample bike-lanes and colorful food carts. Several buildings were covered with ferns and flowering plants tumbled down their walls, as if a rainforest had taken up residence in the city. [2] At a crosswalk, instead of saying WALK it said DANCE, and there was music that made it impossible not to—not just me but others too, laughing and smiling at each other. [3]
It was a week before Christmas, and Santa was busy polishing his boots in the big Winter House, up at the North Pole. It was a pleasant evening, and he was feeling good about life.
“My, don’t these boots look good!” he said to himself as he sat in front of the big log fire, admiring his reflection in the polish. “That should make a show when I’m ready to do my rounds!”
Most of the presents were neatly stacked in the Store House ready for delivery, and the reindeer were asleep in the barn, resting up before the big journey.
All except one, that is – Binky.
Binky was a mischievous young reindeer who was full of energy and ideas – way too many ideas for a young reindeer.
Calvin Sandborn’s Speech on Retiring from the University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre
Delivered to 160 former law students, clients, and First Nations leaders, June 15, 2023
This summer I leave the Environmental Law Centre, but our work is far from finished.
We face an unprecedented crisis in biodiversity
And as I speak, Canada is on fire.
The question is unavoidable: Can we turn this around?
Realistically speaking, it looks very grim. And it is particularly grim because the public is divided about whether or not human-caused climate change is real.
But there is still hope. You can still imagine a pathway where we could:
Reduce greenhouse gases
Perhaps have some rough years
But then, 100 years from today – our great grandchildren could possibly inherit a stable climate. Perhaps an even better climate future than we have.
We must cling to that hope. We cannot surrender to Climate Fear. We cannot afford the luxury of pessimism. The stakes are too high for despair.
Our generation faces an existential choice. As the Youngbloods put it:
“We hold the key to love and fear in our trembling hands…One key unlocks them both you know, it’s at your command.”
The fundamental question facing each of us individually is the one posed by Plato:
“How then shall we live?”
How do we find meaning in our lives? How do we live a life of purpose in a world shadowed by fear?
Today, we can certainly learn from the courage and purpose that President Zelenskyy and Ukrainian people have forged.
“There can be no greater purpose than to work together to save the future of the human race. We have the opportunity to live lives of great purpose.”
But here’s the thing:
There can be no greater purpose than to work together to save the future of the human race. We have the opportunity to live lives of great purpose.
Future generations call out to us to have courage.
An ancient wisdom provides an answer to our dilemma. It counsels us to choose love and hope over fear and anger. In fact I would argue that in the struggle ahead we must be guided first by love – by a love of nature, and by love of all of our brothers and sisters – including those we don’t agree with on everything.
A loving approach is our surest way to a positive future for the human family – and the surest way to an individual life of purpose.
A famous Vermont environmentalist put it well. On her 100th birthday she was asked, “What advice can you give to the young – what is the secret of a meaningful life?” And she said quite simply:
“There are three things:
Love yourself.
Love others.
Love Nature.”
The greatest prophet of our age, the Rev. Martin Luther King, lived in times as divisive as our own, fighting some of the same political currents – and some of the very same people — that we face today.
It is important to remember that Reverend King brought down the entire fascist political system of the US South, while carrying a book of his sermons entitled simply, “Strength to Love”.
King called everyone to join together in a beloved community. He clung tenaciously to that vision, even when the Ku Klux Klan bombed his house where his wife and children lay sleeping.
An angry crowd of King’s neighbours gathered, many vowing revenge. One black man threatened a policeman with a gun, others brandished broken bottles. But King stepped out onto his shattered porch — which still smelled of dynamite — and called on his neighbours to love their enemies.
King repeatedly preached, “Segregationists are not our enemies, we will change their hearts.” In the end, his call for a “beloved community” changed a Nation’s heart — and the apartheid system collapsed.
Today, King’s approach is needed to heal the divisiveness of our times.
I remind you that King copied the philosophy of lawyer Mahatma Gandhi, who liberated India from the mighty British Empire. Gandhi put it this way:
“My goal is friendship with the world and I can combine the greatest love with the greatest opposition to wrong.”
In turn, another lawyer named Nelson Mandela utilized King’s methods to bring down Apartheid in South Africa.
“We here have a beloved community. We have been drawn to this room because we have fallen in love with the Earth – and with each other.”
The idea of a “beloved community” is as compelling an idea as any in history. We here have a beloved community. We have been drawn to this room because we have fallen in love with the Earth – and with each other.
We fell in love with nature in different ways:
We have seen the photos of Earth from space – a fragile blue-green emerald with a very thin layer of air, water and land that supports the only known life in the universe.
We have stood open-mouthed as the orcas leapt out of the ocean.
We have seen the heron silently stalk fish in a shallow lagoon at dawn.
We have seen the salmon runs — tragic as Shakespeare, joyful as Easter.
We have watched eagles clenched together, riding the updraft.
Indigenous elders have taught us to recognize Sister Cedar.
And they have taught us to welcome the Trout Children and “all of our relatives”.
We bonded with the natural world. We were touched in the deep heart’s core.
“If we are going to save Sister Cedar, the Trout Children and our grandchildren, we have to extend that beloved community to Conservatives, Republicans, and a whole bunch of people we may not agree with on other issues.”
Yes, we have fallen in love with the Earth, and with each other.
We found community as we hiked together in alpine meadows.
We found community as we sang songs around campfires.
We found community as we lay on the earth under a vast canopy of stars — talking half the night with our friends, our brothers, sisters, our community.
But now, if we are going to save Sister Cedar, the Trout Children and our grandchildren, we have to extend that beloved community to Conservatives, Republicans, and a whole bunch of people we may not agree with on other issues.
Like Martin Luther King we must win them over with the truth and a beautiful vision of a Common Future – a healthy planet, with a healthy climate, jobs, houses and food for all – and a healthy future for everyone’s kids.
If we are going to deal with the environmental crisis that we face, and if we are going to save the Earth and save the community of humanity, we must share:
our love for Nature and its beauties and wonders;
our love for the Future;
our love for our grandchildren;
our love for ALL PEOPLE; and
our common destiny.
As far as the climate fight goes, united we stand, divided we fall. We must all stand together, or we will all fry together. We cannot afford to allow the forces of reaction to mobilize people to vote against their interests by fanning grievances. We must fight “grievance politics” with the politics of a Beloved Community that we all share.
We must abandon finger-pointing, sneering, cynicism, and blaming other people – and invite all people to work together. The fact is that we are all in the same boat, all on the same Earth. We need a little less calling people out — and a whole lot more calling people in. We need to invite and persuade everyone to work together and keep this fragile boat from sinking.
In this existential quest to save the future, we need powerful voices to speak. Nature needs lawyers to give voice to the river and to the forest. We need voices to speak for the grizzly and the marmot. We need voices to speak for the caribou and the falcon. Finally, we need voices to speak for climate and future generations.
“If you succeed you will be heroes to coming generations.”
We need our own Gandhis and Mandelas.
All of you – law students, lawyers, community leaders and community activists –you have a grand opportunity to work together now, to work in community to save the natural world. And no life can be more meaningful, more full of purpose, more satisfying, than to work to save our Earth in this time of its greatest peril.
If you succeed you will be heroes to coming generations. A future Shakespeare may write of our beloved community:
“This story shall every good parent teach their child;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters…”
Of course, if we fail, that will be tragic. Yet, still, we will have had moments of beauty, moments of loving each other, of building community, of a noble quest more consequential than Star Wars.
At the least, we will have lived lives of purpose.
And if we create a loving community, if we reach out to the broader community with a positive message, humanity has a much better shot at actually making it through to a beautiful future for everyone’s grandchildren.
You can do this – you stand on the side of truth, and of love, and of community and the Earth. Remember, by protecting the Earth, you, like Gandhi, are friends of all, you’re the friends of the future.
Epilogue
And finally, now that I am old, let me take the liberty to offer a few brief tips:
First of all, learn from your clients – the community heroes that donate thousands of hours of unpaid time to fight for our land, air and water. They include some of the smartest – and I daresay, most noble — people you will ever meet.
Listen to the elders. One of the most fortunate things in my life has been the opportunity to learn from the wisdom of the resurgent Indigenous peoples of British Columbia.
Make friends and allies everywhere, and enemies nowhere. Avoid the backbiting and division that has destroyed so many organizations and movements.
Build bridges with the visionaries in business, government and elsewhere. There are like-minded people “on the other side”. Don’t write people off. Win them over!
Have fun! Dance. Play music. Share joy with others. Love each other. It is in community that we break the epidemic of alienation that drives environmental destruction.
In closing, it is clear that the environmental crisis is daunting. The work will not be easy.
But take heart. As Martin Luther King told us, the arc of history is long – but it bends towards justice. We shall overcome.
Guy Dauncey’s Big Solutions: Let’s end exclusive zoning, empower non-profit developers, and use the right balance of carrots and sticks to make housing affordable
From Corporate Knights magazine:ways to produce rapid affordable housing
Guy Dauncey’s Big Solutions: Solving Canada’s housing crisis will take time. So, what can governments do to lessen the burden for those suffering now? Click here to read the full story
by Guy Dauncey
Submission to the Agricultural Land Reserve Minister’s Advisory Committee by Guy Dauncey and Rob Buchan. Deadline for letters and submissions Monday April 30th 2018.
By 
The Practical Utopian 