The last line from a prose poem by Grace Yee called “Living Among Trees” From the latest issue of Heat:
…I know that when lightning strikes a giant sequoia and burns out its heart, you can step inside the trunk, look up at the sky and hold it.
I had a lovely call with Cynthia Kurtz on Friday, discussing all manner of things including an upcoming retreat with a client where we will explore complexity and use Participatory Narrative Inquiry and a NarraFirma capture to explore an important issue for the organization. Like me, and a few others, she has gone back to her blog and has relaunched it, so if you had her in your feedreader, you'll need to update her RSS feed.
When the US government took down its climate science site a group of scientists put all the material back online at Climate.us
Dave Snowden has been at his favourite knowledge management conference and offers blog posts with many reflections that caught my eye on intergenerational management cultures (older workers attend to contexts; younger workers to rules), the inability to preserve implicit knowledge through compression, the fundamental question of what is lost between wisdom, knowledge and information, and the journey of the experiences practitioner who has won wisdom through wading through the maze of transactional work.
Alice Jing Shan was there too!
It is always helpful to see how the long arc of history often bends towards justice. The fight to protect west coast ecosystems and Indigenous rights and title has spanned my entire life and I will tell anyone who will listen that Clayoquot Sound and Haida Gwaii (and the north coast of BC) are some of the best examples of what can happen when First Nations assert their rights authority and recover the ability to properly govern their territories.
I spent yesterday afternoon on a phone call with my friends and colleagues Jenn Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle talking about our next offering of Reimagining Education, to be held in Peterborough Ontario, near Toronto, October 16-18.
Our conversation was very much about the role of the practitioner in fields and contexts of uncertainty and complexity and how our work aims to support the capacity of practitioners who shape those systems.
This is an Art of Hosting, and its focus is one asking how to to bring more hosting and participatory learning work to education. In the past we have had folks from schools systems and post secondary institutions attend who come with a deep inquiry about how to improve the systems they are working in. We’ve had government folks, people who work in community services and folks who work as consultants with larger systemic issues as well. These gatherings have become an important place for people in education to encounter folks from outside their usual orbit, and for people who work with groups and systems to meet educators who are trying to deliver learning within systems that often conspire against them.
To me this focus, and the diversity of encounter, makes this a rich Art of Hosting workshop.
This is the place of no easy answers, fraught choices and no obvious way to effect the changes that are needed. In that sense, the conversations and the projects that we work with in this Art of Hosting are representative of the very biggest social challenges we face: cracking open places of genuine learning and co-creation in a context that seeks control and certainty.
Our team is well suited for this work. Jenn has been carrying this calling for her whole career as an experiential educator and consultant. She has worked on tall ships, in wilderness settings, in classrooms and in conference halls crafting spaces of encounter and genuine learning. Troy has spent his career in Indigenous education as a teacher, and leader, mustering resources to support Indigenous students and communities, and tending to a network of Indigenous educations leads in Ontario. Cédric teaches at Concordia University in the Human Systems Intervention program, working to prepare change makers in human systems.
Because of this team;s work and the people who come to this gathering, the particular Art of Hosting goes into a deep examination of what it means to lead, catalyse, and design interventions within powerful and seemingly unchangeable systems The focus is on education, but the applicability is broad. That focus though brings a grounded imperative to the work. We teach methods, tools, and perspectives that are going to be used right away to support change work. And we host in a way that the brilliance of the group, and the experiences each person is able to offer becomes a key resources for the learning.
We’d love to have you join us. Working in a forest for three days in a southern Ontario autumn with 30 other people who will get you and challenge you and support you is a gift. Registration is now open.
Instead of addressing the economic crisis of the pandemic, monetary stimulus made it worse. It has contributed to a global affordability crisis in housing, a private insolvency crisis for tens of millions of people, provided the weathiest people in society with amounts ranging from hundreds of billions to trillions to buy more property and companies, all while increasing worker layoffs.
It created the economic distortions and crisis that our countries are all living through, pouring trillions of money into driving up the price of existing assets while nothing is going into productive activities. Trillions of dollars that could have gone to modern infrastructure, new power plants, housing, research and development or building everything from chip factories to battery plants to electric vehicle factores was squandered.
What is just as frustrating is that while central bankers seem oblivious, elected governments keep getting the blame for economic disruptions caused entirely by bad monetary policy and tsunami of debt it has unleashed. This is equally true across the political spectrum: debates centre entirely on government taxing, government spending, but not on reforming the policies of central banks who, in addition to the trillions of dollars they created for quantitative easing, also helped create over USD $25-trillion in credit with nothing to show for it.
Instead of recognizing that the housing affordability crisis, our productivity crises, and our personal debt crises were caused by this mind-boggling misallocation of investment, the blame has fallen on people, especially immigrants and refugees, for the fact that people in developed countries cannot get jobs that pay enough to afford a roof over their heads. It’s blamed on immigration, or Indigenous people, or whichever usual suspect is on the list, including by respected economists, who fail to recognize that we have a money problem that needs to be solved with money.
Wealth inequality, long identified as the biggest threat to the stability of democracies, has increased since the pandemic in entirely predictable ways.
The people I work with are now mostly facing years of austerity and at least a decade or more of catching up to underfunded services, infrastructure, and social needs, stagnant pay, and over inflated prices for essentials. Young people are having their future earnings extorted for an underfunded and over-valued post-secondary education and housing prices that are kept high to insure that middle class retirements don’t need to be funded by the state.
When governments praise economic growth as the way out of this mess, it’s important to remember that the gains of that growth largely go to the same people who benefit from low interest rates, which means that the people in the higher tranches of Lamott’s tables will continue to reap the benefits. Money that can be borrowed at 3% to make a 10% profit is a tasty proposition if you can afford it. Borrow cheap money, but “growth” equities and return the money. Awesome. If you have the capital to do it. And to get a few more percentage points of profit out of your equities, lower the operational costs of the company by replacing salaries with automation, or making the whole thing “efficient.” Which means throwing thousands of people out of work. All the while you aren’t taxed in that wealth because it isn’t year realized capital gains. In fact you can now borrow even more cheap money using your equities as collateral.
When governments start making noise about taxing that wealth, you can raise a stink about how inefficient and expensive public services are and how that puts a drag on investment, even though “investment” isn’t producing tangible and material development, just more vaporous equity.
And anyway, Lamont says that’s not even the right conversation to have. Wealth inequality is enabled by darker constraints and I appreciate that he brings a bit of light to what these are. We have no governments that are willing to address this situation meaningfully. Collapse is likely the only way out.
We live in an era of austerity during which there is more “money” in the world than there has ever been.