Journal #2: Sustainability

 (Continuation of the Journal begun in the previous entry. The text dates from the early 1990s.)

World March of Women 2015 - Quebec

    When I was born World War II raged. At the end there was a promise of a new age of prosperity and peace through technology and science. And through the fifties and then the sixties, it seemd to deliver. Lester Pearson (then Prime Minister of Canada) offered "Atoms for Peace." Among the very first books I ever read in the local library was a simple explanation of atomic theory. I learned how reactors worked. I became fascinated with science. The green revolution promised prosperity for poor countries. The United nations, which I visited when I was 15, promised an end to war between Nations. Kennedy came along, with Martin Lucher King, and we dreamed of racial equality (in the U.S.A.). And then ... it began to unravel. And we began to recognize the limiations and not only the limitation but we began to take stock of the dimensions of resistance (from privileged interests, from the transnationals, from governments and the media, from the military, even from the rigid attitudes of the poor who had bought the dream - and from the Church. It was not going to be either easy or quick. The entire structure had to be dismantled and reconstructed. Maybe we'd never see more than some signs of utopia in our own lifetime.   ...
     The struggle for a sustainable way of living, a sustainable economy and politics involves a careful mapping out of a new way of understanding fundamental human ventures. It means a new way of looking at science and technology, of the secular and the rleigious. It is a question of revisioning, but it is also a quesstion of evoling a strategy of moving from where we are now. ...
     Chicken Little cried, "The heavens are falling, the heavens are falling." And indeed they are. The world will end. I have seen the world end several times in my life. ... But we learn to survive the crises and the deaths. Each provides a challenge and also an opportunity.

Journal #1: State of the Planet

Quebec lake

Over the years I have done a lot of writing. Too much perhaps. Anyway, in the early 1990s I took a program called "Global Transformation Studies" at OISE (Toronto). One course required a journal. Over the next weeks, I will post a few excerpts from there. Here is the first:

My initial reaction to rereading the "state of the planet" is one of disbelief. It can't really be all that bad. After all, twenty years ago, the scientists were telling us that the worlds" resources would be exhausted by the end of the century. (Dennis Pirages and Paul Ehrlick, Ark II,W.H. Freeman & Co, 1974). et we seem to be going on with "business as usual." Then I listen to a CBC news report a couple of days ago: the last virgin forest in North America is opened to logging, the entire fishing industry of Newsfoundland (Newfoundland!!) has to be dimantled, there is a hold over Antarctica as big as the U.S.A. All in one news report.
The planet may be able to regenerate from our destructiveness - though there is no assurance of that. The critical issue for us as humans, is that we may not survive the process! When I read about how the CFC's operate in the stratosphere, it is frightening. We don't really know what we have unleashed!
...
Can we let go of the addiction to privilege? Can the Third World free itself from the encroaching enslavement to the same dream? Can we return to an earlier vision of our place in the scheme of things? - which is never really just a return but a reinventing of the old in an entirely new and transformed setting.   (to be continued...)

World Forum on Theology and Liberation

At the same time as the World Social Forum takes place in Montreal, a World Forum on Theology and Liberation will take place in Montreal from August 8-13. This second Forum will integrate itself into the World Social Forum as has happened in several recent occasions. About 300 participants are expected. From August 10-12 the Theology and Liberation activities will take place within the programming of the World Social Forum and will be available to all. An important part of this forum will be devoted to Indigenous people and to dialogue among spiritual traditions.

Harper Lee: Set the Watchman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Set_a_Watchman

This is a book that is making waves, the subject of many reviews. I enjoyed it enormously.

Coming at this time, it is a bombshell. Everyone is pleased that South Carolina has taken down the Confederate. It had become a symbol of racism and a growing obstacle to race relations in the South. Yet there are people, many people, in the South - Whites of course - who saw the flag in quite another light. The Civil War in the United States was a war about slavery and race, but it was also much more. It was a war to retain the agricultural society that had been built there over a period of two hundred years. Slavery and racism had to change; the society remains. Racism is still a key to understanding the South but so also is the distinct society that Southern Whites fought for.

Harper Lee and especially her publisher have taken on a huge issue in the South with the publication of this book. I cannot judge it on its literary merits. Many are saying it is a failed novel. Perhaps so; I enjoyed reading it and it spoke deeply to me. I think much of the criticism of the novel will come from Northerners. I am waiting for some reviews from the South.

Much of what I found in the novel has a parallel with the situation between Quebec and the ROC (Rest of Canada): Not an exact parallel but nonetheless…. French Quebecois are, for the Rest of Canada much like the South is for the North and the issue of racism, framed in terms of immigration and multiculturalism, is very much part of the tensions today.

White society lives on in the South and it includes the powerful issue of racism but also of the unique identity and sovereignty of the South.  The novel suggests that diversity in dialogue is the way forward. I deeply believe that!