Bottoms up

A brief voyage into the world of polycentric systems was a nice way to tie together the major ideas from this course as well as the entire online portion of this program.  It’s easy to get lost in the world of wordy academic vernacular and lose sight of the big picture, or better yet the local picture.  As Ostrom (2010) alludes to, people seem to be waiting for some agreement at a global level to validate or motivate them to alter their values or shift their behaviour in a more sustainable direction, when in truth, this change, in order to be effective, needs to start at a local level.  As was mentioned in the group discussions on Moodle, centralized authority can result in fast changes, but it usually precludes any local knowledge,  undermines adaptability, and in the end results in the alienation of local stakeholders.

Change needs to come from everywhere, cascading vertically, laterally and diagonally.  Values oriented approaches have the capacity to motivate change that can build resilience at local levels and in the end create the paradigm shift necessary to address global concerns.  Ostrom (2010) mentions that there is perhaps no better catch phrase than “think global, act local,” and it is at this level that change can and must begin.  In the words of Margret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

  Ostrom, E. (2010). Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change. Global Environmental Change, 20(4), 550-557.

Path to our future

Last night I found myself in front of the T.V watching the final fleeting moments of what seems like an endless hockey playoff season, contemplating meaningless questions relating to les Canadiens de Montreal when I was suddenly awoken from my slumber by three successive advertisements on the CBC.  The first one was a message from our darling Federal Conservative party, reminding us how important jobs are to all Canadians (not to be confused with les Canadiens), the second was sponsored by Enbridge, promoting the Northern gateway pipeline as a path to prosperity for all Canadians, and the third was a message from the oil sands producers, praising the oil sands as the savior of Canadian Industry (I’ll post the links below).   AHHH!! So much green washing and values washing!  The advertisements were filled with beautiful images of natural landscapes and “working families.” The Enbridge add took the cake with its “path to our future" slogan, complete with a green oil tanker (see link below).  Just made me think, as I read through Leichenko, O’Brien, and Solecki (2010), that we are a very long way from grasping the complexity of interactions between global environmental and economic changes, at least the people with money are.  They do however provide great learning opportunities for the development of critical media skills.

Enbridge Path to our Future: http://www.youtube.com/user/enbridgepipelines?feature=results_main

Point of no Return

In the midst of this week’s discussion of a values oriented approach to climate change, on the front page of the news paper today (ok, it was actually the front cover of the B section- Vancouver Sun) I found this title jumping up at me: Earth near point of no return, scientists warn: Effects of civilization on planet threaten collapse of ecosystems in 50 years- with no going back.  Inspiring stuff!!  This may very well be our reality, but if the intention of this article is to bring about change (It is the Vancouver Sun, so I doubt this was their goal), I imagine the words read as relative white noise on the backdrop of what appears on the actual front page (immanent economic and ecological collapse).  After some initial intrigue and a brief hope that Bridget Fonda would reprise her 1993 role as Maggie Hayward, I fell into a haze of statistics and doomsday predictions. 

Shore, R. (2012, Thursday June 7th). Earth near point of no return, scientists warn, Vancouver Sun, p. 1.

What if?

I seem to be falling a little behind with these, it’s now Tuesday June 5^th, and I have just returned from a great week down in San Francisco, as well as a beautiful trek through California’s redwood forests and the Oregon coast.  I am going to comment on some of the readings from week 7, as well as my own reflections on the emergence of the International environmental movement.

It seemed that everyone in the group enjoyed the Jansanoff (2010) article, in particular the discussion on the difficulty in creating meaningful communications strategies that are based in climate facts.  “The work of science tends to erase specificity and remove traces of the human mind and hand” (Jansanoff, 2010,p. 234).  If people are to buy into the narrative (it’s more than a narrative, but sounds better for this line of reasoning) being communicated by the environmental movement, then it will need to be a narrative that the general public can attach meaning to, nothing groundbreaking there. We’ve spent a great deal of time looking at framing (Lakoff, 2010) and conceptualizing the importance of messages that speak to values.  However, it’s always refreshing to read a new perspective on an old problem.  The language of science itself seems to be a limiting factor in sharing our experiences with nature, and fails to capture the true essence of the symbiotic relationship that humans share with the natural world.

Jansanoff (2010) speaks of the need for change on four fronts: community, politically, space and time. I think that our concepts of time are one of the great obstacles in addressing climate issues.  “Climate change occurs over spans of time” (Jansanoff, 2010, p. 237) that don’t necessarily resonate with our typical standards of time, but perhaps even more challenging is our willingness as environmental communicators to accept the duration of time it will take to reverse the negative consequences of our industrial development.  I know we are running out of “time,” and while scientists like James Hansen are arguing that it is already too late, it is going to take “time” to reframe the human/nature relationship.

Political change is an interesting topic to grapple with, especially in Canada as our current administration seems to be headed in the opposite direction of our desired paradigm shift, as they wage war on “radical” environmental groups in their on-going quest to turn Canada into an “energy superpower” (O'Neil, 2012).  In the United States I doubt if the environment will ever be mentioned in the lead up to the November election as Mitt and Barack make empty job promises, likely at the expense of future generations.  It is interesting to consider where we would be if people in the United States had taken the words of Jimmy Carter seriously in the late 1970’s as he tried to promote alternative forms of energy and supported conservation, unfortunately his popularity was undone through a series of foreign policy mishaps, and his replacement led America down a different path (one propagated on limitless growth).  What if the 2000 election had swung in a different direction, what path would Al Gore have chosen, would his attempts to warn the world of the dangers associated with global warming have taken center stage had he held the presidency.  The answers to these questions are irrelevant now, here we are, with Harper in Canada, likely a republican as the next American president, as the fall of the European economy will no doubt be blamed on the current U.S administration.  Will the future leaders be bold and lead their nations down a new path, or will they look romantically to failed policies of the past for answers.

I think that at least some of the answers will come out of increasingly autonomous localized economies that seek to separate themselves from the failing global markets.  Nice thought, should be interesting to see how it plays out!!

References

Lakoff, G. (2010). Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 4(1), 70-81.

O'Neil, P. (2012). Pipelines, protests and recession collide in B.C., Vancouver Sun, pp. A1,A6.

Jasanoff, S. (2010). A new climate for society. Theory, Culture & Society 27(2-3), 233-253.