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Expecting Rio+20 to have concrete outcomes is like asking 193 couples to decide on what movie they're going to watch together.

J.G.

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… the ratio of record highs to record lows so far this year in the United States.

But with state legislatures declaring that talking about things like projections of rising sea level should be illegal, we can all go ahead and look the other way.

Actually no we shouldn’t. Climate science battles are fought with armies of thousands of informed citizens. Check out this guide on how to talk to a climate skeptic (and maybe learn something yourself).

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At the Smithsonian Natural History Museum

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thunderstorms, electricity, and champagne

on Thursday I went to a Climate Change event at the Newseum hosted by the World Bank. I've gotten a tad bit bored of hearing the same platitudes about climate change that I've heard twenty times before (I know, I know, jaded already at the ripe old age of 23). There's also just so many contradictions with having big traditional events to encourage action on climate change - one of the biggest, if not the biggest, drivers behind climate change in the developed world is overconsumption. So I'm thinking that the three glasses of free champagne I drank on Thursday, in a beautiful space with a 30-foot TV screen and tons of free food is maybe a little counterproductive. But maybe, if it gets the issue out and generates enough concern amongst the public, the cost-benefit works out and it's worth it in the end.

using the tenuous  connection to electricity consumption, I'll move on to the thunderstorm we had here in D.C. last night. it was probably the most exciting night I've had here so far, for a variety of reasons (one of which is the obvious romantic being-swept-up-in-a-sudden-flash-of-lightning kind of thing). There were fallen tree bits everywhere, awnings were ripped off of buildings, and we got soaked running next door. I almost got hit by a bus coming out of the metro, since the street lights weren't running! Overall, tons of fun. 

But it got me thinking about how useless we are without the human constructs we've become accustomed to (#firstworldproblems). Right now I'm getting pretty worried about all the food in my freezer, for example. I don't really know how to do a lot of things without electricity - and I'm guessing I'm not alone in that. Luckily, it's so hot here that there's no need to learn to make a fire, and I live in a city so navigation is pretty easy. Still, I feel pretty useless not knowing how long food will keep outside of the fridge, or not knowing how to call a taxi if the metro isn't working - especially when my first thought for both of those is to google it (not terribly effective when there's no power for your wifi). Oh google. How you've revolutionized how we think of knowledge such that I know longer really know anything.

OK enough musing for now - it's hawt out, I gotta pull on a romper and get my sun on. Consuming some natural solar power instead of electricity!

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if you want proof of global warming, just step outside.

- S.B.

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worth a thousand words

Today my dear friend Amanda and I explored the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. I had been once before for World Oceans Day (if you haven't seen our AWESOME oceans video with  the wonderful cartoonist Jim Toomey, please check it out here), but didn't have much of a chance to check out the exhibits - so thanks, Amanda, for giving me a great excuse to return!

One of the exhibits that I think struck both of us the most was a display of nature photography contest winners (exhibition info here). Oddly enough, the photos manage to capture something that was lacking in the 3D exhibits full of life-sized stuffed animals. I loved the remarks I overheard in the gallery, people laughing and guessing what might have been behind an animal's expression. Their comments belied recognition of human dynamics in the photos: a fox cub waking up, a lion snarling at its young, giraffes cuddling.  The photographer caught a scene that might as well have been acted out by people, and in so doing, helps break down the barrier of us v. them we often construct between humanity and the environment. We're all just part of the same rock circling round the sun - something each of the photos in the exhibition really brought out, subtle but strong.

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Canada's Spiritual Quest: Learning to imagine ourselves.

by John Ralston Saul , 19 Jun 2012 (Article taken from here)

Here we are, a good half-century into the environmental movement. This half-century could also be described as tens of millions of hours devoted by citizens to lobbying on behalf of the environment, protesting, calling for change. And we haven’t advanced very far. Enormous efforts have been made. Enormous numbers of wonderful people have dedicated their lives to environmental change, overseeing as it were, 50 years of planetary siege. Of course, there have been some changes. Here and there. Small, specific changes. Perhaps most important, the environmental cause has occupied the public language. Several generations now talk with these ideas as an integral part of their assumptions. But on any big question we seem to just slip along in the same old dangerous direction, the breakthroughs too small to affect what is happening. And at the same time, those who oppose the environmental movement have succeeded in making changes which actually worsen our situation.

How could this be happening? Is it inevitable? are our possibilities doomed by our condition? The answer – the blame – cannot be placed primarily on politics. Or financial structures. Or narrow, short-term self-interest.

There must have been some basic mistake in strategy – trip lines we set across our own path decades, maybe centuries, ago. I can think of three, and each of them has to do with how we imagine ourselves. After all, how we see ourselves shapes what we can do. And what we think we can do. We believe we live in an era of facts and of proofs. Yet what we don’t feel able to take on has little to do with those facts and proofs. It has everything to do with a failure of imagination.

The first error has to do with misunderstanding the nature of power. The environmental era mirrors almost exactly that of the rise of the NGOs. Why? The central characteristic of the globalist era is that we came to believe the power of the citizenry had been weakened by the power of economics. We gradually accepted that the power of national politics was therefore limited. It followed that the power to ignore the public good was international and amorphous in the sense that it had to do with broad economic assumptions. In that case, the best way to fight back was also international. And since there were no international representative legislative institutions devoted to the public good, well then, we would devote ourselves to creating institutions that would set the global agenda, our contemporary NGO army.

These new institutions would not have actual power – the power to act. But they would speak for us all, for the shared public good. And those devoted to the international economic interests would have to listen. We convinced ourselves that the persistent sound would be too loud to be ignored by those with power.

Except they didn’t listen to these NGOs. And they didn’t – don’t – have to listen. After all, economics is power. Real power. The NGOs – the new institutions of the public good – have only influence. Influence can have periodic successes. But this is a weak hand to play if you have other options. Imagine if the tens of millions of hours devoted to influencing power and opposing power had been devoted to taking power. Imagine if the millions of NGO members had joined political parties and virtually taken them over. That is how change is actually made – through political parties, elections, governments and laws.

Our reality is that several generations have refused to imagine themselves as making changes. Instead, in the role of the angry outsiders, they have called for the people they do not respect to make the changes on their behalf. This is the traditional role of writers, including of course journalists, not of the engaged population as a whole. You could call this a strategic error with enormous political consequences.

Along with this there was a belief that experts with facts would shape the debate, giving the NGOs support, and so force the hand of power.

That was to misjudge the endless number of facts. Endless and shapeless. And to forget the ease with which such a jumble could create any argument or simply create a confusion which would make action impossible.

Ethics can serve the public good, as can humanist ideas, as can a clear belief in that public good. Facts and expertise are just as likely to be the whores of interest groups, whether public or private, as they are to serve the public good. This was the second strategic error.

And it leads to the third, but also to an opportunity for profound change.

Modern society is built on a war between rationality and superstition. Logic and religion. Method and habit. And a myriad of other supposed opposites. A Manichean dreamland.

The rational, logical methodological column expresses itself through facts and experts. That is, those same facts and experts which have not been clearing our minds or solving our problems. And their failure to deliver has produced a revival of the second column – superstitions and religion beliefs. With this comes a growing desire for stability – for old habits. Why? Because we now live in an atmosphere of instability which most citizens find impossible to handle. Unstable employment. Unstable funding for old age. Unstable housing. All of this in the name of an inevitable, logical progress which does not include people. So people fight back in unpredictable ways. The explosion in evangelical churches is just one of these.

But the real point here is that the either/or version of life – of how we imagine ourselves – doesn’t work. There are other options. Other ways of looking at ourselves and our choices. Spiritual ways, which is not to say religious ways.

For example, the Aboriginal message to our society is quite different to the European-derived view. In Canada, Aboriginal society, in all its complexity, is growing in numbers, in political weight and in legal power. And it is raising its voices in an increasingly sustained way. We do everything we can not to pay attention, but they are speaking clearly.

The foundations of this message involve a very different way of imagining ourselves; so different that our education system, our state structures, our elites, all have difficulty digesting the implications.

Why? Because the established system in the West – the one I have been describing – is profoundly linear. The Aboriginal, on the other hand, is deeply circular or spatial. When they speak of the spiritual, they are talking about the wholeness of existence. They are speaking about humans as an integral part of the physical.

And when you look at something like our environmental crisis you can easily see that our errors come from our linear approach; one in which humans are intellectually and morally separated out and placed on a higher level. This sets us in an artificial position when it comes to the survival of the world. The Aboriginal theory, on the other hand, takes a more inclusive approach; one in which humans are an integrated part of the whole physical process. Richard Atleo has written about this as Tsawalk. Cree theory talks of Witaskewin. There are Aboriginal intellectuals in universities across the country writing about this. Some of them are legal scholars. Others literary historians. Philosophers. There are remarkable leaders. A growing variety of new, young intellectual voices. Political leaders. They are putting forward propositions which make sense for our time and place.

The point is that their approach radically changes the way humans imagine themselves, and therefore what they can do, or not do. This is not idealistic or romantic. It is a different way of thinking. And when you look at the environmental crises, it is obvious that we need a sophisticated, inclusive, tough and modern way of thinking. The linear either/or approach is simplistic compared to the circular. The latter takes human interests into account, but not in isolation from the rest.

An expert might say, “This is hardly a way to get on with things urgently in the middle of a crisis.” The reality is that humans often solve crises by escaping the intellectual prison they have created for themselves. They do this by reimagining themselves. And because of the power and influence that Aboriginal peoples will increasingly have over land in Canada, there is a real opportunity to attempt one of those profound intellectual changes of mind, by seeing how we could adapt to their approach, with their help. This would involve a revolution in our educational system, in the methodology of our experts, and in the fabric of our thinking, from logical understandings to forgotten possibilities.

John Ralston Saul is one of Canada’s leading public intellectuals and President of PEN International, an organization dedicated to promoting literature and freedom of expression. His recent books include The Collapse of Globalism and A Fair Country. His latest work, Dark Diversions, is his first novel in fifteen years, and comes out this autumn.

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This is UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon addressing the delegations at the opening of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development at Rio de Janeiro. How cool is it that you can watch a webcast of the UNCSD (Rio+20) from anywhere in the world?

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The Future We Want

Rio+20 is underway (I can tell because of the onslaught of emails in my inbox)! Temperatures are running high, and not just in D.C. I find myself increasingly convinced by the argument for breaking down these large, unwieldy meetings into smaller groups, perhaps by sector, emissions, or region. The World Resources Institute recently came out with a book, Building International Climate Cooperation, that shows how such a break-down could be achieved, using examples from the international trade and nuclear arms regimes (check it out here). It's well-written and well-researched, and convincing - but the question is, how? How should these types of negotiations be segmented, and will smaller international groups carry enough weight to instigate binding action at the domestic and subnational level?

The draft text to be agreed upon at Rio+20 is titled "The Future We Want". By looking at the text itself, you might reach the conclusion that the future we want is  watered-down, and noncommittal. I don't believe that, though. I think politics, infighting, and fear of going it alone have stymied real action. In a way, that's encouraging, though, because those things can be overcome - perhaps even by fragmentation of bulky world conferences.

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questions, questions, questions...

On Thursday I was at an urban planning event, and a woman from the World Bank urban planning department voiced her concern about the limited ability of urban planning to change when aspirations don't. Or, in simpler terms, how can urban areas become more sustainable when everyone wants to live in suburban mansions with sprawling kelly-green lawns?

I always find this question to be the most interesting and most crucial of the environmental movement. It really strikes at the heart of the environmental movement, and at the heart of human identity, because it asks: How much is enough? Does it matter whether you have enough, if someone else has more? Could a paradigm shift change these aspirations of wealth, or is it hard-wired in us to be insatiable, selfish creatures?

History, and perhaps common sense, demonstrate the continuity of human wealth-seeking in terms of the land and things controlled by a person or family. From classic emperors to middle-age sovereigns to the Catholic Church to industrial capitalists, a desire for more stuff seems to be a recurring theme. I'm sure the reasons behind the desire are multifarious, but the problem remains: our global population is now over 7 billion people, and our natural resources and living species are rapidly declining. If we haven't reached this point already, pretty soon our planet will no longer support this human desire for more.

Now, before you start running away from the computer and calling me a fatalist, I'll admit that when resources start really running low, we'll all probably figure out a way to live more cheaply. It's just that it might mean a serious decline in quality of living, or take resource-driven warfare to get to that point, which is, you know, kind of a shame.

But really what I'm interested in is this question about our collective nature as human beings. Why do we crave wealth and the power that goes with it? Sure, having financial security and freedom to make your own choices requires some level of wealth, but that doesn't explain the big suburban homes and impressive lawns. More importantly, is this quality something that a normative shift can transform, or is it immutable? Maybe if birds and trees and oceans and honeybees played a bigger role in our consciousness and decision-making, we'd think of wealth differently, and seek it out in more sustainable way.

More questions than answers, really. I'm putting some faith in that "maybe". Fingers crossed for it to pan out sometime before those kelly-green lawns wither up for good.

[^like to think this one's a universal truth :) ]

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Burt's Bees Shampoo - Product Review #1

Name: Burt's Bees Very Voluminizing Shampoo with Pomegranate

Price: $9 at CVS (in D.C.)

What's in it: Lots of plant oils, natural fragrance, soy protein, jojoba protein, lactic acid, citric acid Water (full list of ingredients here)

What's NOT in it: Sulfates, Parabens, petroleum products, artificial fragrances, alcohols

Performance: It's a bit thinner than other shampoos, which wouldn't be a problem except it means you need more shampoo to get the same amount of lather (thereby depleting the bottle quicker, which might be an environmentally problematic in itself - purchasing more bottles more frequently = more packaging = more waste, but I digress). Once you have enough of it though, it lathers nicely! 

More things: Smells GREAT. Really. Plus the cap is easy to use, and the bottle is shaped so it will stand on either end (mega bonus if you're impatient like me and can't stand waiting for the last drops shampoo to come out).

Afterwards: No residue, which is nice. And I promise your hair will smell amazing after using this, but in a real fruit kinda way, not in the chemical-y/perfume-y Herbal Essences kinda way.

Worth it? For me, absolutely - I love that it smells awesome, works, and doesn't contain all the things I try to avoid (saving me some serious time in the toiletries aisle).

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the sustainable office

Ok from now on, this will be a (at least) weekly blog about environmental stuff, I promise. 

I started my new internship the last Monday in April, and it both is and isn’t exactly what I expected. It’s a large, well-known, international environmental organization, that works on law, policy, and advocacy, and I’m stationed at the North America head office. The people are immensely qualified, efficient, and devoted to their work. But like any office, progress on the sustainability front is hard. Often it’s stymied by lack of availability, or because changing entrenched practices requires constant attention (as Mad-Eye Moody would say, CONSTANT VIGILENCE!), and boy, that can be tiring.

Still, I think being famous in the environmental industry means you have to be a trendsetter for sustainability. I know that the office wants to be environmentally progressive, that it’s just a matter of consistently adopting practices so that they become second nature, but how do you get to that point? Should an office make such policies mandatory? Should it encourage them by helping out financially, e.g. paying for commuter transit passes? Should office supplies/transportation be mandatorily sustainable, but workers left to make their own choices, hopefully influenced by the office’s choices? Aren’t these the exact same questions facing governments and supranational bodies these days?

 I don’t have the answers. I do think these are the types of questions worth asking. I certainly think about them all the time, and I have a few hunches as to what might work best (I went to law school, which should give you a hint or two). I’m hoping I can be a good influence, and that I learn more about behaviour change by working at this organization – through the atmosphere as much as through the substantive material I’ll be working on.

Thoughts?  

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This pretty much makes my life. Sad I didn't think of it though!

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When someone says: "what's so bad about law school?"

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Book List

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens (yesssss) 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan 51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

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