March 2023

How are rucksacks and Climate Action Leadership alike? Both are rugged and designed for carrying heavy loads. Their use is intended for longer excursions and is quite large to contain numerous and varied items that might be required for challenging adventures.

 The newly minted Master of Arts in Climate Action Leadership program (MACAL) asked students for a reflection on what climate action leadership (CAL) is and why it matters. I believe from course readings, activities and lived experience that CAL is a container similar to a rucksack. It holds the much-needed space for the massive complexity of what climate action, and therefore, climate action leadership involves. This includes theories, tools, processes, models, strategies, relationships, experiences, worldviews, competencies, learnings (and unlearning) across many disciplines. CAL matters because alternative pathways to live, work and play –  within limitations are – urgently needed.

Humans have an immediate problem. We have tied our demand for natural gifts and services to a financial system with annual exponential growth obligations and interest-bearing debt requirements (made possible by fossil fuel energy), resulting in global ecological overshoot. Global ecological overshoot occurs when the earth’s biosphere can not adequately regenerate over her natural cycles (Hallsworth & Moore, n.d.). There is too much consumption over too short a time period. Overshoot plays out as climate disruption, ocean acidification, soil desecration, chemical toxification, sixth mass extinction and many other ‘tions’. With continual over-extensions since at least the 1970s, we face the likelihood of global polycrises (Janzwood & Homer-Dixon, 2022). Polycrises are multiple spontaneous and simultaneous large-scale systemic catastrophes. Human impacts, overshoot and polycrises feed into tipping points (which are not reversible on a human timescale). When tipping points are enacted, unstoppable change takes place. Triggering multiple tipping points leads to colossal social, ecological and technical failures across the globe. As such, we are ill-prepared for a journey in this direction. Nevertheless, here we are.

 The work of climate action leadership to alter the current trajectory of collapse is rooted in a still-unfolding complex dynamic of co-creation for the future. Climate adaptation and mitigation explorations are necessary for ourselves and our organisations, but we mostly need to make these Odysseus collectively as cultures. 

CAL can help to guide such wayfaring by holding space for undeveloped emergence through the work of complexity science, knowledge gathering and interpretation, collaboration, planning, and capacity building as we decide together how we will live once again within planetary boundaries.

 Like some rucksacks purported to be mystical, red and used in December, the container of CAL provides the alchemy for things like transdisciplinary thinking, learning and design to occur. Transdisciplinary thinking asks us to consider the potential within the process of inquiry ‘between and beyond disciplines’ (Corman & Cox, 2020). This type of thinking begs us to wonder how the contents of this CAL container can mingle, be mashed, be turned upside down, and fuse to address our human circumstances in unique and innovative ways.  

In the presence of climate action leadership, transdisciplinarity enables the possibility of transformation over iterative adaptive cycles resulting in innovations that are not otherwise likely. For example, what might be achieved if the CAL rucksack contained (but was not limited to) items such as:

• a Climate Adaptation Competency Framework that ensured expertise, behaviours and attitudes for the work (Cox et al., 2020); 
• Alternative forms of sensemaking and intuitive responses that centre on excellent questions for complex problem solving; learning through story-telling, dreams, and ceremony; and drawing on perspectives with an ethos that centres on all living beings; 
• a place-based approach that strives for synergy between government ministries, across various sectors, is multi-disciplined and uses food to make all of this possible, as outlined in Nourishing Communities from Fractured Food Systems to Transformative Pathways (Blay-Palmer et al., 2017); 
• A leaning into uncertainty and contradiction by beholding deep historical ancestral myth (Shaw 2022) with an allowing of unpredictable and uncontrollable positive emergence (Wahl 2017);
• tools such as the Living Environments in Natural, Social and Economic Systems (LENSES) framework, which help to envision, language and map regenerative transition and development processes (Plaut et al., 2016);
• An ecofeminist-informed ecological (Dempsey 2019), Indigenous (Hilton 2021) regenerative (Wahl 2021) well-being economic theories that account for ethics, politics, limits to growth as well as dwindling energy inputs and heat externalities;
• A true cost accounting system that tracks ecological inputs, impacts and paints out a 360-degree picture of sustainability in regional economic systems (Miller & Loyd-Smith, 2012).

Could what emerges contribute to a Just Transition translating to regional climate adaptation and mitigation strategies which produce regenerative systems? Ummm… maybe?

As we live with floods, smoke from forest fires (from our regions and sometimes from hundreds of kilometres away), and extreme winds as regular events, a reflection of climate action leadership and why it matters could not be more timely. The rugged design and development of climate action leadership can enable the transformational potential at personal and cultural levels. Human overconsumption coupled with a predatory economic system is the root cause of ecological overshoot and climate crises. Current paths are leading to collapse. Climate action leadership contains the means for co-created collective changes to emerge during an arduous transition towards existing within ecological limitations.

References

Blay-Palmer, A., Nelson, E., Mount, P., Levkoe, C. Z., & Knezevic, I. (Eds.). (2017). Nourishing Communities: From Fractured Food Systems to Transformative Pathways. Springer International Publishing.

Corman, I., & Cox, R. (2020). Transdisciplinarity: a primer. Royal Roads University. https://commons.royalroads.ca/macal/wp-content/uploads/sites/88/2021/04/MACAL_Transdisciplinary_Thinking03-31-21-3.pdf

Cox, R., Niederer, S., Forssman, V., & Sikorski, L. (2021). Climate Adaptation Competency Framework. Adaptation Learning Network. https://adaptationlearningnetwork.com/sites/weadapt.org/files/aln-competencyframework_2021_1.pdf

Dempsey, J. (2020, May 24). Ethics and Politics in Ecological Economic Practice. YouTube. Retrieved May 23, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goNYBooIuZs

Hallsworth, C., & Moore, J. (n.d.). Global Ecological Overshoot. http://www.sfu.ca/~tnn3/vancouverecologicalfootprint/global-overshoot.html

Hilton, C. A. (2021, November 17). #BCIROC21 | Keynote Presentation: Carol Anne Hilton. YouTube. Retrieved May 23, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gUScWyCOVE

Janzwood, S., & Homer-Dixon, T. (2022, April 22). What Is a Global Polycrisis? Cascade Institute, 1(1). https://cascadeinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/What-is-a-global-polycrisis-version-1.1-27April2022.pdf

MIller, E., & Loyd-Smith, P. (2012, March). The Economics of Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity in Ontario: Assessing the Knowledge and Gaps [prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources]. http://sobr.ca/_biosite/wp-content/uploads/TEEBO_20120501_HighQuality.pdf

Plaut, J., Dunbar, B., Gotthelf, H., & Hes, D. (2016). Regenerative Development through LENSES with a case study of Seacombe west. Environment Design Guide, 1-19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26152198

Shaw, M. (2022, May 12). Navigating the Mysteries. Emergence Magazine. https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/navigating-the-mysteries/

Wahl, C. D. (2017, April 27). Designing for positive emergence (Majorca as a case study). Medium. https://designforsustainability.medium.com/designing-for-positive-emergence-majorca-as-a-case-study-eb12629cc912

Wahl, C. D. (2021, December 17). Regenerative economies for regenerative cultures — Daniel Christian Wahl | Euroskills 2023 |. YouTube. Retrieved May 23, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtVo0ze3yAI

Image credit: City of Timmins

These are the lands and waters that raised me. But unfortunately, some of those lands and waters no longer exist due to this above-ground mining project. 

This visual poorly conveys the full scale of impacts and actual size of this mining operation. It might help to know that the rock pile’s elevation brings sunset 30 minutes earlier for the residents at the south end of the lake compared to those who live on the west side. The open pit is about 900 metres wide and about 350 metres deep.

Image credits: Kelleigh Wright, 2021

About 15 years ago, I moved 6 kilometres away from where I grew up. This home has an urban food forest and a red sit spot chair. Summer brings borage flowers (which taste like cucumbers). After the cedar waxwings have left their nests, an orchard of twelve sea buckthorn trees is ready for picking in the fall. Salads used to be made with a diverse range of plants, roots and vines which grow in this place. 

Image credit: Northern Ontario Business, 2010

I moved to the west side of this lake, pictured in the upper left-hand corner of this image. A few years after the move, a new mining project began at the end of my street. It is a 10-minute walk from my home. 

Image credit: Mark Joron (drone footage) May 2022

The water tower is present on the left-hand side in the before and after photos. This hole is 1.5 km long and about 500 metres wide. The permanent berm encircles the operation butts up to residential backyards in three separate locations. 

Climate adaptation ‘solutions’ are not neutral when they require mined minerals. Hence, the word ‘radical’ is a relative term in climate adaptation orientation and climate communications.

The previous photos convey a lived reality at the neighbourhood, municipal and regional levels. However, none capture the emotional depth and breadth of the situation like the following digital image.

Image credit: ‘Betrayal’ by Mario Sanchez Nevado, created for the exhibition “Empathy” of the international artistic collective Hysterical Minds, 2012

This image presents tensions through colour, emotions, gender, power dynamics and violence. Symbolism and metaphors are used with waterfalls, birds, skyline, red lips, scalpel/gun/city, a burning hand and a partially cleaved breast of land/trees. Implied complex relationships are suggested by the positions of the three entities and their ecosystems.

Much of what is currently being confronted in climate communications are predicaments and processes (as depicted in the above image) with outcomes and not problems with solutions.

What if climate communication ‘dream teams’ worked on outcomes from a mindset of potential with a ‘palette of practices’ to mobilise and evoke meaningful and ongoing bioregional awareness campaigns? What if these teams expanded conversations, contributed to relationship restorations and offered alternatives to the dominant neoliberal, techno-optimist paradigm? These teams could contain the following skills, talents and beings:

• vessels of water, wagons of soils and buckets of rocks;
• visionaries, regenerative engagement/conversation designers, linguists, provocateurs, contrarians, raconteurs; 
• traditional ecological knowledge keepers, medicine wheel teachers and mythologists, immersive storytellers;
• JEDI activists, wise community elders, youth; 
• researchers, data analysts, subject matter leaders;
• systems thinkers, speculative designers and transformative/transition designers;
• social media designers and strategists, calendar content planners, campaign & event coordinators;
• graphic, mixed-media and visual performance artists, photographers, videographers, musicians and sound technicians;
• copy writers, song writers, comedy writers, screen writers, policy writers;
• print, video, photo and sound editors; 
• well-resourced funders and kick-ass legal representatives.

“There’s no such thing as an unsacred place. There’s only sacred places and desecrated places.” ~Wendall Berry

Ecology of Influences on my Thoughts this Week

• Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy: A Reality Check | Manhattan Institute
• Golden hope for a wasteland – Northern Ontario Business
• Pedagogy of agency and action, powers of 10, and fractal entanglement: Radical means for rapid societal transformation toward survivability and justice
• Design in Perspective: Transition Design_Monograph 
• Systemic Design: Live Discussion 
• Irresistible movie, available on Netflix