Earth Day: Let’s Shift from the Colonial Model of Hoarding in Fear, to Diversity-Driven Collaboration and Reciprocity

Every Earth Day I feel the need to put together a list of ‘things we can do’ to bring a solutions approach to a sea of overwhelm. The following ideas are inspired by my time at Food Stash Foundation and courses I’ve had the privilege of taking in Anthropology, Conservation Biology, Indigenous Governance & Resource Relationships, Conflict Resolution, Waste Reduction, and Life Coaching.  

Source: Government of BC Ministry of Forests & Range

Being depleted by debate rather than energized by collaboration: One thing we all have in common is a human brain that wants to resist being ‘wrong.’ It’s totally normal for us to defend our positions when they’re challenged. It’s also natural for a strong emotional response when our values are challenged. So, if we keep talking about climate change like we’re in Debate Club, asserting “I’m right, you’re wrong, and here’s why,” the natural response is not only for the other party to defend their original argument, but to dig into it even deeper and seek evidence for why they’re the one who’s right. The result is that we keep spinning our wheels and getting nowhere. Solution: To have conversations that result in collaborative action to mitigate and adapt to climate change, we can instead explore the discipline of Conflict Resolution and wisdom derived from negotiations, facilitation and mediation. For example we can read Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William L. Ury. It's about focussing on one another's shared interests rather than getting stuck on our differing positions. We can also check out David Suzuki Foundation’s Climate Conversation Chatbox. To explore how we make sense of opinions that differ from our own, there’s this fascinating podcast on naïve realism. Perhaps most importantly, we need to take care of ourselves and find time to relax. Drawing or writing our thoughts to get out of the emotional brain and into the neocortex also allows calmer, clearer thinking and enables our creative problem solving. Self-care is the pathway to making difficult conversations easier, enabling us to connect on a human-to-human level to understand one another’s lived experiences and needs.

Focusing on our own point of view rather than enabling awareness:  The extinction crisis is something that often takes a back seat in the daily ‘What is Worst Olympics.’ If for no other reason, we should pay attention to the rapid loss of other species because diversity is key to survival. Biodiversity is where we derive our medicines, food and ‘ecosystem services’ (such as the production of oxygen). When a disaster hits, we need so much biodiversity that some of it overlaps or is ‘redundant.’ For example, if a forest gets wiped out by a fire, there needs to be other forests to protect us from ensuing floods. Without redundancy, we have no resilience in a crisis. Solution: I’m not a fan of only seeing biodiversity through the lens of its ‘services’ to us, but I acknowledge that not everyone sees the world the way I do. For effective communication, I need to be able to use a diversity of lenses to describe the problems we face to reach the greatest variety of people. Not just biodiversity, but human diversity (in language, skills, knowledge, values, etc) brings the greatest possibility for problem solving and creativity--if we let it.

Centering colonial ideas rather than listening to the voices colonialism tries to silence: I remember sitting in biology class as a teenager learning about the extinction crises and thinking “humans are a disease.” I thought this because, as a species, we were always represented as innately destructive, no explanation or apology needed. It was only later, through Anthropology, that I learned it’s not humankind that’s destructive, it’s just the particular Euro-North American culture I grew up in that wrote my high school textbooks. Whether you call it colonialism, capitalism or something else--my culture was/is destructive because it centres on hoarding. Through domination, extraction and frontierism, my culture drains our surroundings of resources while simultaneously extracting from foreign lands and waters to accumulate as much as possible; more than we could ever need. In my culture, it’s perfectly acceptable to exploit other people in other places rather than focusing on renewing our own environment. We do this because we have lost our ecological literacy, because our surroundings are now more synthetic than natural. But, what about the multitude of cultures and voices that would represent humans and our relationship to ‘the environment’ differently? Voices that would say such behaviour is not acceptable? Solution: We can increase representation of marginalized Peoples to see our species, history and environment differently. We can seek examples where communities sustained and protected the natural resources they depended on for time immemorial; examples where humans made their surroundings more diverse and abundant than they would have been without their human allies. Instead of living a guilt-bound life of trying to be ‘less bad,’ assuming that’s just part of human nature, we can ask to hear the often-silenced voices describe relationships between place, humans and the non-human world (while also understanding such knowledge is protected and we do not have an inherent right to it). It’s also important that we honour the way in which expertise from BIPOC communities inform supposedly ‘new’ movements like regenerative farming and permaculture. 

Passing down the failures of the single-bottom-line rather than adopting the triple-bottom-line measure of success: Reflecting on how I felt in that biology class brings up so much compassion for young people today, grieving those same extinction losses. I also think about how we are downloading the debt, or “negative externalities,” of neglected social and environmental issues onto younger generations. This isn’t to say climate change is a future problem--it’s certainly well underway--but we aren’t doing enough to mitigate the worst of it and adapt to the changes (like sea level rise) we already know are coming. Solution: We need to support young people and make space for their representation in every conversation. We're going to need intergenerational dialogue to actually take intergenerational equity seriously. It’s time to put aside the single-bottom-line thinking (profit and shareholder wealth above all else) and adopt the triple-bottom-line measure of success: economy, ecology and equity.

Having a ‘scarcity’ rather than ‘reciprocity’ model of the world: Climate change is, and will continue to, displace people and force migration. Yet I’ve seen such hateful migration politics in North America in my lifetime. Maybe those hateful politics come from scarcity thinking (the assumption that everything’s running out and there’s not enough to go around). Environmentalism is also subject to this mindset; scarcity thinking factors big in Environmentalist rhetoric. But all scarcity thinking does is create fear, which creates irritability and quick reactions. Despite all this, as a nation, a continent, or even a world, we don’t have a scarcity problem, we have an unjust distribution problem: 

• Every year Canada wastes 58% of the food we produce;

• North America throws 12 million pounds of textiles into landfills per year; 

• Chocolate is a $100 billion dollar industry, and yet West African cocoa farmers make around $1 a day, and child labour is on the rise;

• Two thirds of the world’s extremely poor employed workers (the threshold being $1.80/day) are agricultural workers.

How can we deny something (like land, resources or social safety nets) from someone while simultaneously taking that something for granted or trashing it? Solution: There would be so much more to go around if we didn’t consume things only to use them short-term or not at all! For example, if the world didn’t waste food, 2 billion people could be fed. Furthermore, what if we grew food in a way that didn’t necessitate leveling forests? What if fishing never trawled up entire ecosystems? There is so much room to do better, if ‘racing to the bottom of the well’ only to hoard becomes a thing of the past. I wonder what could happen if we all applied a model of the world where the more we gave the more we received.