Social Contract

As we start the new year, a big question on my mind is: what will become of our relationships with people we don't know, people who aren't like us?

It's tempting to feel like the social contracts in place to ensure we aren't blatantly reckless with each other's lives, health or humanity have started to untangle just recently. But I suppose that would be my privilege talking.

If I get a little too bummed that it feels like people are no longer bothering to balance their self-interests with the greater good, I try to remember that Black people, people of color, women, poor people and many other populations have been affected by of some version of that imbalance for generations, and have often suffered greatly because of it.

Still, there's nothing like being headed toward a preventable year three of a pandemic to crystalize the ways  in which so many people seem to be saying an active "screw you" to any notion of addressing a public health crisis through even minimal personal sacrifice. And I too often feel a great big "screw you back" welling up inside of me in response, as much as I wish it weren't so.

I'm working on that, but I'm not always sure if working on it means embracing that energy and letting it inspire me to action, or suppressing it in favor of more diplomatic responses. (You know, for the greater good.)

I guess these are all versions of the questions I asked in June 2020:

  • How can we get people to care about and act on problems that don’t seem to immediately or directly affect them?
  • How can we get people to care about making the distinction between what’s verifiably true and what’s not?
  • How do we make change happen fast enough to matter?
  • What should I do?

There is a great deal of good in the world, and a great deal of good in my own life. I have so much to be thankful for.

But I used to believe that People are, on the whole, good and wanting good things for each other. Now I'm not so sure, and I don't like that uncertainty. It feels like it could poison the future. My future.

I'd like to raise my daughter with an optimistic outlook about the nature of humanity, but I may need to scale that back a bit. An optimistic outlook about the good she can create in her own life and for those around her? An optimistic outlook about next week's dinner menu?

Happy New Year.

Sustainability challenges in Richmond

I recently met with a local organization involved in environmental education efforts to talk about the status of sustainability education in Richmond and Wayne County.  In preparing for that conversation, I put together a list of what I see as some of the challenges our community faces when it comes to becoming more sustainable and self-reliant: Continue reading "Sustainability challenges in Richmond"

On practicing what you preach

Preparing for High RopesIs it really important to practice what you preach?

Must we really become the change we wish to see in the world?

As I try to work in my life and community to create a peaceful and sustainable existence, these are questions that churn in my head daily.

On a personal level, I think a lot of us struggle with living out the values we hold - we have aspirations and ideals about ourselves and the world we live in that can seem hard to enact, even when the path might feel clear.

But when you start to talk about how the rest of the world could be - even should be - the conversation goes beyond issues of self-discipline, time management, or having sufficient support and encouragement. When we talk about sharing a message with others about how we want the world to be and perhaps suggest they change their behavior to get there, it becomes a question of whether there's a practical or ethical obligation to already first be living out that existence well as the messenger.

Some people say you have to transform your own life first before you can expect others to transform theirs at your suggestion. Do we?

Continue reading "On practicing what you preach"

On volunteering

IMG_1141.JPGIt's a privilege to volunteer in one's community. In one sense it's literally a privilege of having the time and means to say "I'm doing okay enough in my own life that I want to share some of my energy in service to the lives of others." In another sense, it's a privilege of publicly holding up what's important to us, a way of honoring our own roles in a community and the value that it has to us. My involvement in the Wayne County area is a way of showing not only my own interest in making it a better place for me and my loved ones to live, but also a way of making a commitment to the lives and needs of those who I don't know that well, who I can't necessarily relate to, who will be here long after I'm gone.
Continue reading "On volunteering"

Beyond sustainability

Thanks to Paul Retherford for pointing me to this essay, Beyond Sustainability: Why an All-Consuming Campaign to Reduce Unsustainability Fails. Highlight:

Our very approach to solving the “problem” of unsustainability is grounded in a mindset that prevents sustainability from emerging. Always anchored to the past, the future is envisioned as being bigger or better. But such an approach will always keep us rooted in the past. To escape from the past, one must think in an entirely different way.

The current ideal of sustainability, as sustainable development, is not a vision for the future. It is merely a modification of the current process of economic development that its proponents claim, in theory, need not cause the terribly destructive consequences of the past. Sustainable development is fundamentally instrumental. It suggests new means, but still old ends. Sustainable appears as an adjective; the noun is still development.

As I look at sustainability efforts in my own life and at sustainability as a local progressive value, it's important to me that someone out there has the right words to say what so many people are afraid to say: there are ways in which the survival of life on Earth is in conflict with traditional economic development, a.k.a. the continued growth of our civilization. Many sustainability efforts are purely or primarily anthropocentric, and therefore fail by definition.

This essay doesn't have all the answers, but it's got a good grip on that particular problem.