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The energy of violence and peace

January 9, 2026 By Uncategorized No Comments

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.

Arising out of apathy

January 9, 2026 By Democracy No Comments

My neighbour Don Shafer’s substack is a really good extended exploration of dialogue and democratic participation and today he names an important aspect of the apathy and overwhelm that citizens are feeling.

What many of us experience as chaos is better understood as administration.

Robert Arnold writes that power hasn’t advanced only through spectacle, but through paperwork, procedure, and pace. Executive authority expands while legislatures stall. Oversight is performed rather than enforced. Institutions remain visible, but unreachable. The rituals of democracy continue even as their capacity to interrupt harm thins.

That produces a uniquely destabilizing effect. When the forms remain intact, but outcomes fail, it becomes harder to know where responsibility lies or where pressure can still be applied. In that environment, outrage becomes ambient. Constant. Untethered. And all of it happens faster than it can be named, faster than oversight, faster than response, faster than writing this Substack.

We teach the Chaordic path, the dance between chaos and order that enables self-organization, as an idea that helps leaders and facilitators understand the boundaries of action between those that enable participation and those that induce apathy. At the opposite ends of control and unbounded chaos, which we call “chamos” lies apathy or, as Dave Pollard has written, cultural acedia.

Don nails this. What we can sometimes experience as complete chaos can actually be control and vice versa. It doesn’t matter because the result is the same. I think authoritarians understand this. It’s quite easy push people to apathy through control or chamos. The challenge, especially collectively, is maintaining the structure and form that enables and channels the natural creativity and unpredictability of life towards the emergence of life-giving contexts. Bootstrapping our collective capacity to do that from a place of widespread disenfranchisement and dehumanization is the work right now. As it always has been.

Notes from the road

January 9, 2026 By Travel No Comments

Travelling and working in Arlington, Texas this week. Here are a few things that caught my eye.

On reading at random:, Elspeth Wilson notes:

Just before Christmas 2019, a friend told me that the less they know about a film, the better. If they see a trailer or read too much about it, it makes them less likely to want to watch the film. They explained that there’s something about encountering a piece of art with as few preconceptions as possible that makes you meet it where it’s at, on its own merits. This also basically made them uninfluenceable, I realized. Why not try it with books?

I started off by picking up books from the library in the tube station near my house, swapping ones I’d read for whatever caught my eye. I might glance at the blurb but considering I was choosing from a limited selection, I usually had no choice but to pick something I wouldn’t normally gravitate towards. I asked family members—often older with different interests—if they’d got any books they were looking to pass on. I joined a book club with people with different taste from me and made myself read the books, even the ones I didn’t like the sound of.

My reading has certainly got less aesthetic as I have read more randomly. My shelves don’t always look beautiful but they are a lot more varied than they were before.

A bunch of my reads from last year came from little free libraries scattered around neighbourhoods, or as is the case on Bowen Island, the waiting shelter at the ferry dock. The book I’m reading now is from my local library’s “give away” shelf.

Patti Digh reflects on a trip she took to East Germany as a student and an uncomfortable stop by the East German police.

I did not yet know what a wall could hold in place. Only that the air felt heavier on that side of the border, as if weather itself were governed. Rules applied not only to movement but to posture, to appearance, to how long one could be looked at without flinching. At twenty, I mistook compliance for safety. I believed that if I followed instructions closely enough—kept my hair where it belonged, my hands visible, my answers brief—I would pass through unchanged.

The post is called “Close enough to share weather” and it’s a pretty powerful story.

Patti is always good for some insight a couple of times a week! Here she is talking about imperfectly tending a garden – which I can relate to – and drawing it into a reflection on the stewardship of we can do:

Tending the garden you can touch does not require mastery. It requires that we return to it. It asks only that we keep coming back to what is in front of us, willing to notice what failed, what survived anyway, and what might still grow with a little more care.

One of the profs I met this week at University of Texas Arlington is Desiree Henderson. She’s teaching a course called Literature and The Good Life. It’s designed to cultivate a love of reading in students. The featured novel is my favourite book of last year, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, but it also features which features works by George Saunders. I don’t know Saunders’ work but Open Culture has me covered with links to ten of his short stories available online.

Another professor I met is Tim Richardson who teaches English and dives into his passions around ambient sound and music. We had a great conversation about radio, the artist Chainsaw and our various artistic endeavours over the years using sound and music in multimedia performance contexts. Our conversation reminded my that somewhere I may still have a recording I made of a flute and guitar improvisation recorded in a squash court at Peter Robinson College at Trent University. I made it with Todd Hildebrandt, one of the original members of the Born Again Pagans.

We met these folks through participatory leadership training we have been doing at the university. This is our fourth cohort of senior leaders from UTA and one can imagine all kinds of conversations that we are having these days. Over lunch today a group of us were discussing assessment, compliance and the bigger purpose of higher education. This afternoon I came across this interview with Jennifer Frey from the University of Tulsa. Worth a read and a think. We need an active conversation about this stuff outside of the academy.

Final boarding. I’m travelling back on American Airlines. When you check in the ask if you’d like to check a bag which we needed to do for one of our small otherwise-carry-ons. The charge is $25. You pay it and the next screen says “would you like to check your carry on bags for free?” That represents the shittiest behaviour of customer facing businesses who see their customers as eternal ATMs. So word to the wise. Try checking in first WITHOUT paying for a small checked bag on American and see if you get the free screen.

Where do we learn how to write?

January 7, 2026 By Learning No Comments

Writing isn’t just a way of communication. It is a way of learning about yourself and learning how to show up, how to speak, how to develop and wrestle with ideas. Learning to write is enabled by good constraints, by a purpose that is not about the artifact but about the process of its creation. Cory Doctorow today talks about learning to write in the university context, where writing is almost always about the artifact and not the process. He shares experiences of great writing workshops because his experience is that learning how to write is relational.

It’s revelatory. It teaches you what you know. It lets you know what you know. It lets you know more than you know. It’s alchemical. It creates new knowledge, and dispels superstition. It sharpens how you think. It sharpens how you talk. And obviously, it sharpens how you write.

I appreciate too how he talks about the stakes that students face. Reporting on a faculty meeting he attended at Cornell, Doctorow writes:

It was a faculty discussion, and one of the people at the table had been involved in a research project to investigate students’ attitudes to their education. The research concluded that students come to Cornell to learn – because they love knowledge and critical thinking – but they are so haunted by the financial consequences of failure (wasting tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars repeating a year or failing out altogether, and then entering the job market debt-burdened and degree-less) that they feel pressured not to take intellectual risks, and, at worst, to cheat. They care about learning, but they’re afraid of bad grades, and so chasing grades triumphs over learning.

That is unreal pressure. It usually takes several years in a professional context before people are allowed to make six figure decisions that impact people’s lives and yet we expect that students take this into consideration with every test and reading and essay they have to write.

If you find out that your degree isn’t what you want to study, or you had shitty profs who ruined your learning experience, or you drop out to do something else, you still owe the money back.

So try being a student with $50,000 in debt on the line. Why wouldn’t you use ChatGPT to produce something the exactly matches the rubric for success upon which you will be graded? The risk not doing so is too great.

Cory’s meditation on learning to write is a microcosm of what universities are facing. The constraints that now exist on teachers and students of higher learning have transformed institutions ever further away for their stated missions of being places of learning and inquiry. Universities are trying hard to balance their core missions of creating spaces active and powerful learning, research and intellectual formation with the ill informed political mandates that are constraining that very mission. The result will be devastating over the long term, doubling down on a generation of students who are already indentured debtors, who were educated in a way that minimally supported their learning by teachers who were prevented from teaching good process and helping students explore, stumble, fail, and grow.

That has impacts on the workplace because it requires employers to do the education that universities are no longer able to do. If a student doesn’t learn to write in university because the cost of failure is too high they are going to have to learn on the job. Most employers trust the education system to provide them with generally competent well rounded people that are capable of basic permanent skills. That’s the bargain of public education.

When I hear employers complaining about “this current generation” of new graduates it makes me want to ask them what they did to ensure that the public education system was working at its absolute best. The ability for folks to teach and learn at every level of the education system has been eroded by resources cut by austerity measures or ideological decisions. The pressure from people who are employers to cut government funding or to go to war against particular ideological bugaboos, be they social, cultural or scientific, further erodes both the resources and methods that are used to educate students.

Writing, reading, expressing yourself, engaging in dialogue, collaborating, and creating are all permanent skills. The trend in education of all kinds is to make these skills inferior to the measurable and temporary skills because they are not measurable in transactional and financially relevant ways. They are life skills. They require mentorship, safety in failure and exploration from teachers who can help a student see where they are and grow. Education should be the place from which students are launched with the ability to develop and refine their practices of these skills over a lifetime.

This is how a university turns out citizens who contribute to the world from a secure place of knowledge and confidence. Trained as permanent learners.

Short-term thinking driven by fiscal or ideological concerns builds a system that encourages students to cheat, or more precisely, waste their learning time gaming the system so they achieve the carrot of approval. It drives teachers crazy, who grow more and more powerless to stop it. And it turns out into the world young adults who are woefully ill equipped for a world of massive uncertainty which requires diverse brilliance, talent and creativity.

Tracking the shape of a play

January 6, 2026 By Complexity No Comments

It’s a gift to read thoughtful takes on that language, concept and practices of being in complexity I never cease to be inspired by folks who write on this stuff. As someone who has to teach and explain this to all kinds of different people in all kinds of contexts, that inspiration matters.

Here’s Jen Briselli writing on her experience playing hockey:

Like much of our day to day lives, hockey is both complicated and complex. The complicated parts can be trained. The complex parts must be sensed.

Much of this has been made clearer for me because I came to the game late. Though I watched hockey as a fan, I didn’t grow up playing. I started skating in my late 20s, which means I don’t have the same muscle memory as people who’ve been on skates since toddlerhood. My stickhandling won’t turn heads, and my shots don’t challenge most goalies. But I do possess a fluency for the dynamics of the game and I know how to respond to whatever scenario I find myself in. I can track the shape of a play, notice when the energy shifts, sense when to step up and when to hang back.

Even when I’m one of the slower, smaller skaters surrounded by faster, larger men, my anticipatory positioning keeps the puck out of dangerous places. Despite my unremarkable skating, passing, and shooting skills, when I turn off my goal-oriented pre-meditative brain and rely instead on a visceral connection to what’s happening around me, I can often hold my own with players that are objectively more skilled. (It doesn’t hurt that we’re talking recreational beer league hockey here, but the principles hold true across any type of dynamic human environment.)

That echoes my experience of really learning how to play soccer in my early 40s, never in competitive full-sided games, but rather in small-sided rec leagues or friendly tournaments, where I get to practice all of those embodied skills.