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Reaping the Whirlwind and Looking for Hope

Posted by :James Howden On : April 13, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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I quoted Theodore Roosevelt  back in the dim reaches of my “He Said/She Said” collection, but anybody can do that. Recently on Grantland, I read a piece on Don King, the once-dominant promoter in

Teddy was no saint, but I like his attitude.

professional boxing, in which he pulled the Man in the Arena passage that I love so well out of his well-worn pouch of salesmanship. (Heck, maybe he loves it like I do, but after all his flim-flams and showmanship and indictments, it’s hard to tell.) This isn’t about Don King, though he did get me thinking back to a November 2010 piece I wrote about wanting to be on the front lines of life, wanting to have that “face marred with dust and sweat and blood”, as Roosevelt put it in a 1910 speech, to be an embattled veteran of causes worthy and noble. At moments, sports have given me that taste. So have wild-eyed efforts as an educator. So has Shakespeare, and a growing mid-life consciousness of ecology.

Being in China helps, too, and not only when I’m bombarded by cultural noise that I still can’t get my head around, not to mention fireworks or the adrenaline rush of getting across a busy street. The Baha’i teachings I battle to live by find many responsive ears here, and its community-building processes are of blatantly obvious value. The response to both is routinely gratifying, yet given the frantic movement and

Can a threatened planet become a cliche? (This is OURS, btw.)

incredible size of this population, it’s all pretty darned humbling, too. I am surely not patient enough; for four years, China has done its best to teach me, but I am a slow learner. There’s a lot of that going around, as you may have noticed, particularly if you’re a climate watcher.

Recently, we’ve been thinking of the front lines of the climate wars. EnviroBride has taught me much about the crisis we’ve created in the global ecology, and the search for sustainable ways to live with and within it. We have avoided, it seems, a third World War, though Native American prophecies of the three “great shakings” that the world must undergo before the age of peace are an eerie warning.

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Spirit, Ethics and Climate Change Action: IEF 3

Posted by :James Howden On : October 28, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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Here’s a third quick instalment on the International Environment Forum’s conference earlier in October. As with the earlier three synopses, I give you a link to somewhat more expansive notes that I posted on the IEF site. The following link takes you to a news story, with photos, from the Canadian Baha’i community. (It focusses especially on the Friday sessions that I didn’t attend.)

Here’s a peek at what Saturday afternoon’s IEF session had to offer.

Living Lightly, With a Smile

David Chernushenko is an environmental consultant, activist, and author, and a former deputy leader of the Canadian Green Party. He took the conversation from the abstract and the global to tangible, immediate and home-based actions. His personal motto is “live lightly”: reduce our ecological footprints and do it with joy.

He emphasizes the following characteristics. Resilience. (Are we ready to ride out the rough spots?) Integrity. (Walk the talk.) Empowerment. (Are we encouraging our children?) Equity & Fairness. (Am I taking more than my share of the planet’s resources?) Redefining growth. (It’s not all economic indicators.) Humility. (Who do we think we ARE?) With that in mind, he suggested a range of simple, practical steps that any family can take. Make one step. Then make another. It’s simple, and it’s light. (Upon light!)

“Learning to Make Responsible Choices: The Consumer Citizen Network”

Victoria Thoresen, Ms. Thoresen, an Education professor from Norway and the manager of the CCN, challenged the conference. Many of her frankly imploring messages – I beg of you, please consider… — urged the perspective of parents and teachers, and the needs of their children/youth, about these concepts:

Sufficiency. How much is enough? How do we withstand the barrage of materialism? Courage. Sustainable consumption has powerful enemies. Encouragement is golden. Diversity of response. Not everybody should be doing the same thing, even if it was possible!
Empathy. Thoresen, with her wide travel and international experience, called upon us to remember how the majority of humans live. “We are only a small corner of the world, even if we DO own most of it!”

Dr. Thoresen also implored us to remain mindful of the UN Decade for Sustainable Development, 2005-2014, as well as the earnest United Nations’ Millennium Goals which many have already forgotten. She spoke briefly of the Consumer Citizenship Network (“’consumer’ is such a bad word in Canada!”) and its work to create debate and enlightenment about “the pressing need for consumers to understand the ethical choices that they make”. She concluded:

“For humanity’s nobility to emerge, its qualities of trustworthiness, compassion, selflessness, dedication, loyalty, sacrifice and service need to be nurtured and gain ascendancy over its selfish, baser impulses.”

Retroactivity Is Still Activity, Right? (IEF 2)

Posted by :James Howden On : October 27, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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I live in a mental and emotional framework in which, much to my bride’s consternation, time is elastic and late is a long sight better than not at all. Besides, as one of the great thinkers said, literature is news that STAYS news…

Not that my two-week-old reports on the International Environment Forum’s 11th conference are literature — my hubris has bounds — but the ideas and the challenges that bubbled during those consultations are as current as next year’s news. Such is my justification for this late report: this stuff MATTERS, no matter how tardy the messenger is. As before, I’ll give you a quick taste and link to the more full report on the IEF site, where there’s even some moderate-quality video, too.

Saturday afternoon, October 13: Local Eco-Action

Here is the briefest of summaries of a panel discussion on the theme “Value-Based Approaches to Environmental Action”, and featured two of Ottawa’s citizen leaders and an American guest.

Jessica Lax spoke of the Otesha Project, a “light living” NGO that seeks to empower and train young people. This initiative of Ms. Lax and friends came after a life-changing period of service in Africa. With joy and practiced optimism, Otesha’s theatrical and bike-tour activities have made a strong impact on the youth culture of Ottawa.

Clive Doucet is one of Canada’s strongest voices for re-imagining cities. His work for the greening of Ottawa, as a city councillor, has allowed him to see both what is possible and the nature of the obstacles to those advancements. Check out his book Urban Meltdown here.

Peter Adriance is the NGO liaison for the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States. He outlined some of the experiences and learnings of various elements of the American Baha’i community, and its collaborations with other faith-based organizations. Movingly, he told of grassroots development among impoverished women in Kenya, and struggling American fishers.

Session 2: The Development of Moral Capabilities

“Let your vision be world-embracing, rather than confined to your own selves.” This famous passage from the Baha’i writings, Gordon Naylor (a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Canada), began, is a radical call to moral and ethical advancement.

He urged the participants to adopt a humble, learning mode about the developments of human civilization to come. We don’t know and can’t imagine the civilization that we need to build, and we shouldn’t waste time and energy trying to make it in our own drastically limited images. Mutual encouragement is key. We must find ways to joyfully appreciate the talents and capacities of others. A mature respect for the rights of others is another of these capacities.

At Nur University in Bolivia, a set of 19 moral capabilities was developed to allow rural communities to move forward. They include the capability to:

• evaluate one’s own strengths and weaknesses without ego
• imbue one’s actions and thoughts with love
• take initiative in a creative and disciplined way
• contribute to the establishment of justice

Mr. Naylor advocates the following elements of a moral framework.
1. An orientation of service to the common good.
2. Leadership whose purpose is individual and social transformation.
3. Twin moral responsibilities to truth: know it, enact it. (Serve it.)
4. Transcendence through vision.
5. Belief in the essential nobility of the human being.
6. The development of capabilities.
7. Commitment to a world-embracing vision.