I live in a small island which is a part of the Islands Trust, a level of governance that ensures that the unique character and ecosystems of our islands our protected and preserved on behalf of all British Columbians. I happen to like the Islands Trust and consider it a useful level of governance, not without its need to reform and change, but in general we live in a unique place and we need to unique form of stewardship.
Not everyone feels the way I do.
There is a tiny but extremely vocal group of anti-government fear mongers who go by different names and handles. Mostly they remain anonymous hiding behind titles like “Concerned Island Residents.” Their leaflets are transparent attempts to stoke outrage, promising that the rapacious appetite of the Island Trust is coming to eat all of your wealth,or that a tree policy “Is putting your home at risk of forest fire.” and that it’s an archaic and dysfunctional organization that is bloated and dictatorial. The usual libertarian talking points. Their communications are often handled by Bill Tielmann, a notorious freelance political muckraker who never seems to say no to lighting dumpsters on fire for pay.
Today in my mailbox I got a leaflet from the Gulf islands Coalitions (or the Southern Gulf Islands Coalition, or the Concerned Island Residents or the Southern Gulf Island Resident and Business Coalition, its hard to tell because every one of these groups is listed randomly throughout the leaflet as the contact or sponsor or organizer.) At any rate, the leaflet contained this pie chart used to show the results of a survey of 189 people.
Along with the fact that their listed social media handles are wrong and their email address is either misspelled, or they misspelled it when they signed up at gmail, makes me almost think that this is a parody.There’s not much more to say about this kind of thing. Every couple of months before the Islands Trust quarterly Council meeting, something like this gets mailed out and honestly, it leaves me wondering if they know anything about the issues they purport to be outraged about. They seem to be mostly interested in raising anger, pointing fingers, and endlessly whining about their right to have bigger houses, more docs, and lower taxes.
There are issues to discuss about how we are governed in the world, and how we need to change things – especially in fragile social and environmental contexts like the Gulf Islands. Climate change, the financialization of property and land, reconciliation, development and population growth pressures, increasing needs for social services in remote and small communities, food security and local economic sustainability are all issues that require us to constantly engage in meaningful and real policy issues.
We need a mature conversation about the policy implications of these issues and how to address these challenges. I know why anonymous groups send out these kinds of pamphlets. I know that they think they are coalescing a righteous movement towards a bright future.
But honestly? An elementary school child will tell you what is wrong with that chart. So, sheesh. Let’s stop this nonsense and have some proper, informed conversations about our common future.
The difference between what's whole
and what's held, what's withheld
or revealed, what's real and what's
revelation - that's what I seek,
rest of my life spent in search
of little epiphanies, tiny sparks surging out of the brain during the clumsiest speech. - Allison Joseph from Little Epiphanies It feels like that, combing through stories, looking through graphs and charts and frameworks to find the little insights that spark the little actions that spark the little changes that might topple the biggest dragons. (Poem published today at whiskey river)
I live about 60 meters above the sea, facing southeast on the side of a mountain that is covered in Douglas-fir trees. My mornings at this time of year begin with light in my windows by 5am and the air full of birdsong. Up here, we are perched in the canopy of the forest and if I look out towards the sea, I am looking through to tops of tree that are 40 or 50 meters tall.
As I have grown older, my eyes are not as good as they once were and while I can spot movement in the canopy, it is hard for me to see details on little birds that live there. But becasue I am a musician, my ear is very good and I can hear and discern the many types of birdsong that fill the morning air. I am a bird hearer now rather than a bird watcher.
My mornings often begin with a 1.5 kilometer walk down to the sea through my local neighbourhood. And this time of year there are three distinctive movements to this walk.
In our canopy, Swainson’s thrushes, chickadees, the Townsend, Wilsons and Yellow-Rumped Warblers, sing from the tree tops. Ravens and bald eagles soaring above and through the forest, often silent expect for the wing beats of the raves. Robins are everywhere, towhees and juncos scratch on the ground in the garden and Ana’s hummingbirds visit the flowers. Pileated woodpeckers,northern flickers and red-breasted sapsuckers drum their mating calls on the trees above us on the mountain.
On my walk down to the sea, I descend along a road that has houses on either side, large ornamental trees like chestnuts and dogwoods and more gardens. The birds change midway down, and there is a small flock of starlings and a very large flock of pine siskins drawn to the bird feeders. Stellar’s Jays, patrol the mid-layer, chattering between the calls of song sparrows and white-crowned sparrows. Black headed grosbeaks at this time of year sing their rapid, nervous ringing song. A Pacific-slope fly catcher can be heard catcalling from the thick deciduous bushes and from out of nowhere comes the powerful rollicking song of the Pacific wren.
The final stretch of my walk takes me on a gravel path down to a beach. This is the territory of bald eagles who call and whistle from ancient perches and nest sites. In the little cove where i sit, there have been eagles for generations and beyond, and the bald branches at the tops of their look out trees are worn smooth by their talons. By the water there are sea ducks like scoters and goldeneyes, mallards, cormorants, glaucous-winged and short-billed gulls, and a crow that patrols the beaches and the cove and sometimes mimics the far off sounds of geese that softly honk as they forage around the rocks and beaches.
If I’m lucky here I might sea a seal of a sea lion coming up for air, or catch the call of oyster catchers moving around the rocks.
In a month or so, once the nesting is done and the warblers have begun to head south again, the sound will change and soften. Songs become calls, the resident birds (except, this year, the nuthatches) take over and the mornings are quieter with robins, towhees, juncos and chickadees providing most of the music.
I think this quote really captures my own social justice practice and my own spiritual practice. Ilia Delio is perhaps what we would call an evolutionary theologian and what she says here about “becoming something that is not yet known” says volumes to me:
By evolution, I mean simply that change is integral to life. We are becoming something that is not yet known. To live in evolution is to let go of structures that prevent convergence and deepening of consciousness and assume new structures that are consonant with creativity, inspiration, and development.
Evolution requires trust in the process of life itself. There is a power at the heart of life that is divine and lovable. In a sense we are challenged to lean into life’s changing patterns and attend to the new patterns that are emerging in our midst. To live in openness to the future is to live with a sense of creativity and participation, to use our gifts for the sake of the whole by sharing them with others.
— Ilia Delio, The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey (Orbis Books: 2021), 220–221, 223–225.
It is hard to stay open to possibility when we are confronting a choice between the familiar and the new. I have always imagined that a world that addresses climate change, one that properly restores dignity and equality and essential relationships to land and sea and between peoples is one that will deliver a better world than the one we have now. But power and familiarity breed intransigence and unless we can truly let go of what we know and fall forward into the theoretically innumerable realities that are better than this one, we remain trapped in these patterns of behaviour in these ways of relating, in these ways of making a living.
We need moments of disturbance to move into new realities, and the more we refuse to accept the painful truths of the status quo, the less chance we have of actually making something better.
We are emerging from 2020, a year that was terrible in so many ways and one in which we saw many stories of governments mobilized to retool systems to create universal programs of health and economic care; stories of mitigated climate impacts and the support for local economies; stories of massive logistical challenges solved; stories of racial equity and justice being foregrounded and new conversations and actions around changing the coercive structures of power that perpetuate injustice.
We have evidence that we can quickly make massive changes that take us into that “becoming” but we remain trapped in the fear that doing so will cause loss and harm to people (let’s be honest, people who look like me) that benefit from the status quo. It might do, but the status quo is such that we are at a moment in history when we have enough wealth to mitigate those losses and usher people into a better world. There will be contraction. We can manage. Some of us have no idea how much resilience we actually have, because we’ve never been tested.
We can’t know what we are becoming, but we have enough evidence to know that the path we have been on and the vector on which we are travelling is heading towards a world where our gifts are increasingly discarded and our regard for life diminished. Perhaps at some point the fear of the immediate reality will outweigh the fear of choosing something different. I wish it weren’t so, that we have to be motivated by fear over love. And we need not hope for this future – it is the hope that kills – but rather we simply need to act now and trust in one another differently, listen to the voices that are at the margins of our world, at the ecotones between the thriving systems of life and the social clearcuts in which we are immersed. Those voices are bringing us the new patterns, the challenges, and the invitations. Hear them, amplify them, exchange gifts, follow them and let’s journey away from this hellscape.
Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz.
Engineers, scholars, women.