Rebecca Solnit puts it starkly:
The carnage associated with fossil fuel is why speeding the transition to renewables is good for international stability as well as everything else. Fossil fuel is inseparable from violence, and dependence on it it has created a brutal world order in which some states have corrosive outsize power due to their possession of oil and gas while others have corrosive dependency on these often-human-rights-abusing regimes.
This has been true so long it seems normal, but when it is over we will see it as a second cold war that sometimes became a hot war…
This is why the climate movement has always been a peace movement. A movement for peace with nature, since climate chaos is the result of a war against nature and life on earth, but also for the peace that could come after the fossil fuel era winds down. Oil Change International founder Stephen Kretzmann said this morning: ” The fact that wars and lots of blood for oil are somehow an acceptable price to pay for energy has never ever been ok. This alone is more than enough reason to phase out fossil fuels asap.” Sun, wind, geothermal, and hydropower are widely distributed across the earth and will not generate any such conflicts and corrosive geopolitics.
I added the emphasis. it doesn’t matter who is in control. The price we pay for prosperity brought through fossil fuels is violence. Of course scarcity and control are the dynamics that drive these, and those apply to the scarce minerals and materials needed to use renewable energy too. Even in a country of abundant water resources like Canada, the development of hydro electric energy has been the vanguard of colonization for the past 100 years, displacing people from their lands, destroying entire ecosystems by flooding and requiring massive industrialization to produce “clean” energy.
But in a moment when the stark reality is laid bare before us it’s worth remembering this basic truth. There is no peace where there is oil and gas.
Share:
I have a vague recollection of coming across Fernando Passoa at some point recently. Perhaps it was through Jose Saramago, whose novels I love, or it might have been that I read him directly in translation. I may also have come across his work when I visited Portugal a couple of years ago.
Regardless, I had no idea of the extent of to which he developed and wrote in voices that were much broader and deeper than mere pseudonyms or alter egos. He called his characters heteronyms, and they became channels for particular forms of artistic output.
In the current issue of Poetry there are a number of translations of poems by Ricardo Reis, Passoa’s heteronym who writes in a classical style.
Here is one:
I love what I see because one day
I will cease to see it.
And simply because it is.
In this placid interval in which I feel my existence,
More because I love than because I am,
I love both everything and myself.
They could give me nothing better were they to return,
Those primitive gods,
Who also know nothing.
Share:
The other day I wrote a post looking at religion as an emergent container of meaning making that is both difficult to define and important in civic life. I’m writing this as a person who is religious to the extent that I practice within and belong to a 100 year old mainline Christian tradition with a mixed history in civic affairs, the United Church of Canada. It was involved in the establishment of both residential schools and public health care. It has championed and supported global solidarity and peace work and no doubt has left people feeling hurt by actions of its leadership. It was the first church in Canada to ordain gay and lesbian ministers and an early adopter of same-sex marriage. In many ways my life has been shaped by this tradition, even the two decades or when I wasn’t an active practitioner in a congregation.
As I have worked with many churches and faith communities of all kinds, I am acutely aware of the influence that religion can have on civic life. I am acutely aware that that is often “not a good thing” especially in this day and age. In the post I wrote the other day I was trying to explore how religion functions as an emergent product of a set of constraints. My basic idea is that religion itself is difficult to define and therefore difficult to either adopt or throw out in terms of its influence on civic affairs. Those of us that belong to religions have very different conversations about the role of religion in civic life than those who do not. Very few of my friends are religious, but with those that are, critical conversations about the role of religion in society are very different with them than with those who simply reject religion at all or say it should be a private matter.
Today I awoke to a beautiful Christmas present (yes this is the liturgical season of Christmas). My friend AKMA, an Anglican priest, Biblical scholar, and critical thinker, read and reflected on my post and offered some beautiful responses offered with grounded and gentle assertions from the perspective of one who inhabits a religion. He shared some sources which inform his thinking (knowing that I will chase these down for further reading!). Most importantly, he shared from a place of deep lived truth, with his characteristic humility and respect:
” I should own up that I take my faith and the sorts of congruent Christian discourse as true and real in a more than merely notional way. That applies even in a way that excludes other ‘religious’ claims. That’s just part of what I take believing to mean, and I’m keenly aware of the risks and presumption baked into that. At the same time, I know and recognise that other profound, admirable, illuminating people do nothold to what I believe, and some believe things that my faith contradicts. Since I have no specific reason to think I’m cleverer or more pious or more receptive to divine revelation than these among my neighbours, I must hold to my faith with a humility that obliges me to treat people’s divergent faiths with the respect that I’d wish them to show mine. I have more to learn than one lifetime…so I can’t by any means rule out the possibility that my Muslim neighbour has arrived at the true, real way of faith and I am wrong about many particulars.
All of which is to say that where Christian nationalists take their faith as a warrant to oppress others because they can’t imagine that they’re wrong, I take my faith as an obligation to honour others’ faith up to the point where our claims conflict, and there to handle that conflict as gently and respectfully as circumstances permit.”
His whole post is worth multiple reads, because what I think he is saying in response to what I am writing is that he isn’t necessarily interested in my framing and exploration of religion-as-container, but instead in sharing the way in which his participation in his religion guides his participation in civic life. And he does so in such a nuanced and expansive manner that it validates the point I was trying to clumsily make in my original post.
Viz:
The tricky task set before us entails finding a modus vivendi by which we who hold to particular exclusive claims about human flourishing can honour and respect people who take a different view, but who still want to live in a civic community with us, and how we can work together to minimise the damage done by fascist-nihilists who will contentedly imprison, torture, kill anybody who gets in the way of their implementing their will.
This is what I mean by religion as a powerful dialogic container. It is a bounded space of shared identity and meaning-making. Inside it, you see these conversations with contemporaries and with ancestors who have carried a deep questions about how we live together. AKMA’s distillation of such is an example for me about the role that religion plays in both personal and civic life. It feels brave to say it aloud. Thanks AKMA.
Share:
Spider ballooning blows my mind.
100 years ago on Christmas Eve, Winnie the Pooh appeared for the first time in print. I was named for the boy in the story.
Watching Algeria v Sudan in the Africa Cup of Nations on Christmas Eve. One of the things that makes the tournament so interesting to me is learning about the teams and players and what they give to be able to play. In the case of Sudan, their national team is largely made up of players from the two big clubs of Al Hilal and Al Merreikh who have played their past two seasons in exile, joining the domestic leagues in Mauritania and Rwanda. Algeria was never going to lose the opener, and indeed they beat 10 men Sudan 3-0. But watching Sudan play their hearts out and especially their keeper Elneel, who stood on his head in the match, you see what it means for them to play and give hope and distraction to the people of Sudan.
Farewell to the bandicoots, farewell to the shrew. Farewell to the Slender-billed curlew. These are just some of the species officially declared extinct this year.
The Ontario government wants elected local officials to secretly waive archeological studies for development proposals. This year I visited Pompeii. Imagined if the local officials had just allowed a canal to be built through the ruins? Indigenous history interacted differently by people in Canada who believe that only European history and archeology is valid. There is a word for this blatant disregard of one person’s history over another’s simply because you don’t believe their story matters as much.
Share:
Rogue black holes, hacking LinkedIn and playing the birth lottery.