100 Day Sustainability Challenge: Lessons Learned

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

And that’s that. October 12 was the last day of my 100 Day Sustainability Challenge. This week, some time to reflect on the Challenge and lessons learned.

Recap of the backstory: the idea for the challenge came in early July, inspired by discussions with people around the world who were also taking the online course Learning for Sustainability: Developing a Personal Ethic, my sweet spousey’s “My Summer in Photos” creativity project (taking at least one photo every day), and also spousey and a friend CM’s environmental action challenge done a while ago on Facebook. I decided to do a “100 days of sustainability” project where every day I do something that is related to sustainability, and not count in the list of 100 any actions that are repeats from something I already listed during the challenge. In our house we already do a lot of the “50 simple things you can do” type stuff, so in this challenge I aimed to be creative and think about things I can do that reflect specifics of who I am, where I live, what I value, etc. and that genuinely did stretch me a bit.

In part this was sparked by the past year of mental health struggle that started with a total breakdown and severe depression, which then morphed into alternating between depersonalization/dissociation (being totally checked out) and hypersensitivity/agoraphobia (being hypervigilant and overwhelmed by intense memories, thoughts, and feelings). As I worked on recovery I got to a point where it was obvious that to be able to recover personally, I also needed to recover politically. To feel real, I needed to actually do things that felt important and meaningful.

So, how did it work out in the end?

In going back over all my posts from the Sustainability Challenge, I was struck by five things:

  • Lesson #1: Even if you’re a mess, you can get a lot of shit done in 100 days.
  • Lesson #2: There’s always something that can be done.
  • Lesson #3: You have to start where you are, but you can’t stay there; there is no final resting place.
  • Lesson #4: Sometimes it’s better to do something badly than do nothing at all.
  • Lesson #5: I have so much to learn.

I’ll write a bit more about each of these in the next few posts. First things first:

Lesson #1: Even if you’re a mess, you can get a lot of shit done in 100 days.

Here’s the list of everything I did during this Challenge – with no repeats, as per the Challenge rules.

Rallies, gatherings, and other “on the ground” actions

  1. Action to support the Regional Housing First initiative: worked with a small group of people to plan the action, learned how to set up a Facebook event and created the event listing, created a poster and handbills, put together a list of groups to send event info and promo materials to, and sent promo materials out
  2. No consent, no LNG! action in solidarity with camps at Lax U’u’la, Madii Lii, and Unist’ot’en: worked with a small group of people to plan the action, created an information flyer and event promo handbills, sketched out a banner, attended the event, and helped cover event costs
  3. Went to Sanctuary City rally calling for Victoria city council to implement a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy so undocumented migrant workers, refugees, and immigrants can access health and social services without fear of imprisonment or deportation
  4. Supported local “Refugees Welcome” rally that was part of a cross-country mobilization organized by various organizations and movements: talked with organizers about how to address the many things that are fucked about Canadian immigration laws without reinforcing colonial control of Indigenous lands and participated in discussion about this post-action; folded booklets and helped paint a banner for the event; went to the event
  5. Participated in Community Tool Shed to help remove invasive plants from Meegan (aka Beaconhill park) as part of a broader initiative to reinstate the Lekwungen Kwetlal (camas) food system
  6. Went to Unist’ot’en camp solidarity action (banner hanging from a local highway overpass) and connected with a couple people at that action about ways to provide ongoing support

Lobbying: government, businesses, etc.

  1. Talked with my local MP and current NDP candidate Randall Garrison about my concerns around the NDP’s shift to the right
  2. Challenged a Conservative Party canvasser who came to our house about the party’s stance on immigration and Canadian nationalism and xenophobia
  3. Signed a petition and wrote letters to regional and municipal governments supporting a proposal for regional housing first strategy that would include building 367 units of supported housing by 2018
  4. Wrote Victoria City Council regarding the need to address conditions for people who are currently sleeping outside, and to build non-exploitive, genuinely mutual relationships between housed and unhoused people where together we can think about how as a community we can make sure everyone has a safe place to live
  5. Contacted our municipality’s sustainability coordinator to encourage linking to the current City of Victoria food security initiative and offering to volunteer to help with something similar in Saanich
  6. Signed petition opposing BC government’s agreement with commercial water companies, including Nestlé, permitting them to take groundwater for access rights of $2.25 per million litres and then resell it at a huge profit
  7. Contacted the local 40 Days for Life (an annual anti-abortion vigil) group to urge them to move their location away from the Island Women’s Health clinic, to reduce the harm and stress on clinic patients and staff
  8. Wrote a letter supporting release of Eddie Africa, one of the MOVE 9, who is (after 37 years in prison) scheduled to appear before the Pennsylvania State Parole Board in October
  9. Marked Labour Day by signing the “No 4 and 4” petition calling for the Canadian government to meet 4 demands relating to justice for migrant workers
  10. Sleuthed transit systems in Canada to look at alternatives to disposable monthly plastic bus passes, then contacted BC Transit to request & suggest alternatives
  11. Contacted the maker and seller of our home’s air purifier system to press them on how to recycle HEPA air filters
  12. Participated in provincial government climate action consultation process both to be able to learn more about how the BC government is spinning things, and also to provide comments that challenge the fundamental assumptions embedded in the consultation
  13. Wrote a letter on the 1st of each month to all Canadian federal party leaders & environment reps/critics, as part of the ClimateFast campaign

Mutual aid: Supporting community initiatives to address real community needs

  1. Explored right livelihood, i.e., what it means to make one’s living in a way that does not cause harm and that is ethically positive: followed job ads over a period of time, did sleuthing on farm internships and volunteer opportunities, and scouted farms that are realistically bikeable from where we live
  2. Started volunteering with Mother Felker Farms (MFF), an organic neighbourhood-scale suburban food farm farmed primarily with hand tools and bike-accessible from our home; talked with the farmer who runs MFF about ways to support the MFF community-supported agriculture program in the next growing season
  3. Wrote local government about Bullfrog Power’s new biofuel option as part of supporting localized community-controlled, environmentally sustainable power and fuel generation
  4. Wrote piece and invited input on idea of safe house network as a way of addressing homelessness – as, just like food security, the problem is not that we don’t have enough physical buildings for everyone to have safe shelter, but rather that we have collectively created a culture of fear, mistrust, isolation, hoarding, and individualism, and have lost practical skills around how to look after, relate to, and share with each other

Building and sustaining relationships

  1. Reconnected with old friends/activist comrades who I worked with on Palestinian solidarity and Indigenous solidarity years ago, but had lost touch with, to find out what they are doing and get their suggestions/advice on how to start getting involved again; and asked new friends for input on this question
  2. Started getting to know and working with a local network of people doing local Indigenous solidarity work from an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist perspective
  3. Looked into renting American Revolutionary, a documentary about brilliant activist Grace Lee Boggs (who died in October at age 100), and approached a collective house to put on a film night
  4. Met with the Pie Project coordinator to try to connect with other local folks interested in working on climate change at a neighbourhood level
  5. Reached out to support other people struggling with mental health challenges (inc. depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and panic disorder)
  6. Connected with a local trans health researcher who is interviewing trans people and primary health care providers about best practices in the primary care setting: participated in the study (did an interview), and shared history of past work and materials/reports from past work as part of supporting her current work
  7. Signed up to be a remote letter writer for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners responding to 3-5 letters per month from non-trans women and trans prisoners, as CCWP receives a lot of mail but has limited staff capacity to respond
  8. Talked with local folks interested in ongoing work on refugee rights to brainstorm ideas about local organizing
  9. Celebrated my 11th anniversary with my beloved partner and talked about how to intentionally put energy into sustaining our relationship over the long term; reconfigured our living space at home to reflect other changes happening in our lives, and started discussing a possible longer-term change that would provide more opportunities for collective living with other families
  10. Supported my sweet spouse through return to work and the start of a new school year, by taking care of making dinners and doing house chores for 1 week
  11. Visited my sister, talked with her about sustainability, and decided on sustainability work that we could do in our visit
  12. Practised calling in when white people in my life said things I felt were racist
  13. Went to the Alt Pride All Bodies’ Swim and connected with other trans people for the first time in a long time
  14. Invited my neighbourhood association to sponsor a screening of the film The Good Life, The Green Life as part of an attempt to build connections between people interested in working on sustainability and environmental/social justice

Fundraising, donations, and other financial support

  1. Put call out through personal networks for individual donations to support the Society of Living Illicit Drug Users (SOLID) Indigenous Women’s Action Group, and did some sleuthing for potential longer term grant funding
  2. Donated funds to charity:water to support a running buddy who has committed to running up to 500 miles (!) in 2016, in exchange for funds to support community-based projects to build simple clean water technology (for accessible drinking water, safe sewage disposal, etc.)
  3. Donated funds to support the Medicine Drive for the Unist’ot’en Camp and contacted local herbalists and herbal medicine stores asking them to support the drive
  4. Donated funds and shared public support/solidarity requests from Indigenous land and water defenders, including the Madii Lii camp, the Lax Kw’alaams Lelu Island camp, the Yaakswiis Action Camp, and the Unist’ot’en Camp
  5. Donated funds to support a local group that is working within the Canadian refugee system to sponsor a Syrian family of 5 to come to Canada
  6. Donated funds to the Equal Justice Initiative
  7. Put together cookie dough ingredients for sale to people in line for a local music festival, to raise funds and awareness of Indigenous land struggles
  8. Approached a friend who lives in a collective house to see if they would be willing to host an anarchist seder in spring 2016 (using a haggadah adapted from the one I grew up with) as a fundraiser for Palestinian solidarity initiatives

Building and supporting a sustainable Buddhist sangha (community)

  1. Worked with my Zen teacher to revamp our sangha’s financial accessibility guidelines to further reduce barriers to participation
  2. Started working on a way for our Zen sangha to explore environmental and social responsibility together: discussed possible project structure with my teacher, contacted 4 Buddhist sanghas seeking advice about how to increase sangha engagement in environmental and social justice, organized a Zen crew to go see a local screening of This Changes Everything and participated in post-film discussions
  3. Wrote article on sangha (community) for my Zen sangha’s newsletter
  4. Put up posters for the upcoming Zenwest Orientation to Zen course
  5. Started hashing out with my Zen teacher some ideas for the new Administrative Assistant role I’m taking on
  6. Participated in my Zen sangha’s annual strategic planning session
  7. Transcribed a session of the One Earth Sangha EcoSattva Training, to make the content more accessible to people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, and committed to transcribing two more sessions; explored possibilities for providing real-time closed captioning
  8. Attended trans* Buddhist virtual meditation and participated in post-sit video chat
  9. Started drafting a chapter for the Trans* Buddhist anthology

Using resources responsibly (including time)

  1. Worked on taking basic care of our home and food garden: e.g., daily cleaning of kitchen/living room, fall cleanup of food garden, pulling invasives from our garden, harvesting and processing food from our garden
  2. Worked on reducing compulsive computer use, esp. compulsively checking email and Facebook, and reducing time spent on online entertainment (e.g., Netflix)
  3. Did research on potential rain barrel setup at our home to help divert roof water away from the storm sewer system
  4. Went on a date with my sweet spouse to a local organic food store to try to source plastic-free alternatives to food that our usual grocery store only carries in plastic packaging
  5. Helped my sweet spouse set up a drying rack for indoor clothes drying during rainy/colder weather
  6. Looked into sourcing for LED bulbs to replace regular lightbulbs as they burn out
  7. Looked into how to make one’s home a net zero energy building (including looking into offsetting)
  8. Checked all electrical appliances in house and, where possible, reduced standby power draws by setting up power bars or unplugging appliance when not in use
  9. Water conservation: took shorter showers, skipped showers, experimented with capturing clean water in kitchen and bathroom, looked into ways to safely use greywater to water garden, re-used dishes to reduce dishwashing; used cloth wipes instead of disposable toilet paper; checked water consumption stats against previous year to confirm water conservation efforts were going in the right direction
  10. Sleuthed ways to reduce fossil fuel dependence and made a list for future actions
  11. Retired an old, energy-sucking beast of a desktop computer and moved everything over to an energy-efficient laptop; made arrangements to donate our excess computers (including 2 donated by friends to be used by youth who had been living with us) to not-for-profit organizations
  12. Increased my use of bike for transport rather than bus/carpooling, including some long (> 20k) trips
  13. Returned to being vegan after a few months of eating dairy and eggs in large quantities
  14. Experimented with looking at everything from a “I have enough” mentality instead of anxiety that I don’t have enough ____ (time, money, food, happiness, information, meaning etc.) and racing around trying to get more of whatever I feel I am lacking
  15. Looked into making food for our cats using local sustainably caught fish, rather than relying on commercial product

Personal well-being and mental health recovery

  1. Created a balanced structured weekday schedule
  2. Re-established daily meditation and yoga practice
  3. Reconnected with my spiritual home and family, going out to Kokizan-ji (Red Flag Mountain Temple) for the first time in a long time
  4. Worked on re-establishing basic personal hygiene: showering, clean clothes, etc.
  5. Worked on relationship with food: tried to reduce compulsive eating, eating low-nutrient food, and using food to try to soothe anxiety; practiced eating when hungry and stopping when full
  6. Worked on exercising on a regular basis: daily dog walks, running and strength training as part of a half marathon training group, did part of the Zenwest annual pilgrimage
  7. Worked on improving sleep
  8. When I had a relapse of agoraphobia, read about lapse, relapse, and how to respond in future so a lapse doesn’t turn into a relapse
  9. Worked on challenging fear-based avoidance (not leaving house, making excessive commitments, procrastinating to put off doing an activity I’m scared of, etc.)
  10. Practiced setting goals, making commitments and taking responsibility/making amends where possible for times when I didn’t fulfill commitments to other people
  11. Went to appointments with psychologist who specializes in the mental health stuff I struggle with
  12. Tried out BCALM’s Art of Living Mindfully course

Learning (all reading materials available for free online or through the Victoria public library)

  1. Watched a live stream of the last in Our Place’s 3-part series Transformation Through First Nations History – Gwawaenuk Hereditary Chief Dr. Robert Joseph speaking about reconciliation and the importance of engaging in sacred, respectful dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to transform the relationship
  2. Attended online Refugees Welcome direct action webinar facilitated by Toronto migrant justice organizers
  3. Participated in first 4 sessions of One Earth Sangha’s EcoSattva Training (in process; 4 more sessions to go)
  4. Completed “Story of Stuff” Citizen Muscle Boot Camp
  5. Completed the Coursera course Learning for Sustainability: Developing a Personal Ethic and wrote & posted reflections on what I learned in the course
  6. Learned more about the work being done by the Anti-Violence Project and visited the harm reduction resource space at UVic Pride
  7. Participated in discussion with other Buddhist Peace Fellowship members about actions by Black Lives Matter activists interrupting Bernie Sanders’ speeches to draw attention to racism, anti-black violence, and black liberation
  8. Participated in discussion with other students in my Coursera sustainability course on multiple topics, including food sustainability and food justice; water sustainability; environmental racism; immigration policy and social cohesion with respect to sustainability; re-skilling; what we each do in our own lives to try to live sustainably; environment and social impacts of mining and implications for “green” technologies, esp. “renewable” energy; and environmental impacts of keeping animals as pets and the ethics of domesticating animals
  9. Sleuthed information on the history of voting rights for prisoners and people with disabilities in Canada, and posted information as part of online discussion about women’s voting rights
  10. Commemorated the 44th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion by watching film Attica is All of Us and looking back through archival writing by Dacajewiah, an Attica survivor and longtime Indigenous rights activist. **Warning**: The film includes graphic footage of the state massacre of prisoners and prison staff in Attica, as well as graphic footage of the state humiliation and torture of prisoners following the massacre.
  11. Marked Labour Day by watching the No One Is Illegal video We are the Silent Slaves
  12. Marked the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and learned more about the rebuilding of New Orleans by watching 10 Years After Katrina: ‘Resilience’, ‘Recovery’, and REALITY
  13. Watched A Guerilla Gardener in South Central LA, a TED2013 talk by Ron Finley
  14. Read Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, by Rev. angel Kyodo williams
  15. Read The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century by Grace Lee Boggs
  16. Read For Indigenous Minds Only: A Decolonization Handbook, edited by Waziyatawin and Michael Yellow Bird
  17. Read Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview and Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis, by Umeek – E. Richard Atleo)
  18. Read Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society, edited by Dr. Amie Breeze Harper
  19. Read Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
  20. Read Plastic-free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and You Can Too, by Beth Terry, as well as various articles by Beth on her site My Plastic Free Life
  21. Read The 100 Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, by Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon
  22. Watched documentaries on addiction & the war on (people who use) drugs and posted a review/critique on a local addiction recovery website, and read Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari
  23. Read the Commit to Racial Justice pamphlet produced by participants in an activist camp and wrote a piece on taking anti-racist vows (commitments) as a white settler
  24. Read articles: Privilege Discomfort: Why You Need to Get the Fuck Over It, by Noor Al-Sibai; Why it’s so Hard to Talk to White People About Racism, by Dr. Robin DiAngelo; and Challenging Racism and the Problem with White “Allies”, by Dr. David Leonard
  25. Sleuthed information about the environmental and social justice implications of computer use (including manufacture and disposal)
  26. Started reading the NOII Vancouver Principles and Statements
  27. Started reading Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations, edited by Leanne Simpson
  28. Started reading Active hope: How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy, by Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone
  29. Started reading about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) to try to understand what some of the local impacts might be
  30. Compiled list of anti-colonial, anti-racist reading and learning materials to work on during and after the Sustainability Challenge

Other

  1. Started working with yes2scs to put together a visual map of their social justice approach to harm reduction
  2. Drafted and put out for feedback a draft piece for two local art projects — All Bodies Are Good Bodies, a fundraiser for the Vancouver Island PWA Society, and Free All Bodies

So, geez. What a great way to challenge my feeling that my mental health problems make me a waste of space (in and of itself a weird capitalist equation of value with productivity). Even struggling as I do, and as frustrated as I often feel with my limitations, I can still get a lot of shit done when there is a setup that is sufficiently flexible to enable me to participate in things.

And, in many ways this ability to get shit done is a reflection of my privileges. My basic physical, emotional, and spiritual needs are covered: I have safe housing, disability insurance that provides enough money for food and water and heat and other necessities, and also extended health insurance that subsidizes to some extent my health care expenses. I have an amazing supportive partner, parents, and sibling, and broader support through networks of friends, spiritual community, political community, and online peer networks. I have a long-time spiritual practice, many opportunities for group practice, and access to a teacher. I have a computer at home that provides me with a way to get shit done and also receive and offer support on days where I can’t leave the house. For many people with mental illness, this is NOT the situation and people are profoundly struggling with day to day survival resulting from poverty, exclusion, and isolation. I am also cognizant that the shit I have been able to do in part reflects that I have an abundance of time – as my illness means I’m not able to be consistent enough to work, and I have no caregiver responsibilities for looking after kids or aging parents.

This lesson is, fundamentally, another reminder to appreciate what I have, and an opportunity to recommit to using my privileges to work towards a society without these kinds of inequities and injustices — where nobody benefits from the exploitation of others and we collectively look after each other and share our responsibilities and resources in an equitable and joyous way. And also to challenge beliefs, including my own, around measuring a person’s worth by a particular kind of productivity and accomplishment – an ideological system that has been so profoundly devastating to people with disabilities, children, and elders.

And what about you?

I would love to get feedback from you. What do you think of all of this rambling? What resonates with you, and what doesn’t? Are you trying your own sustainability initiatives and if so what are you learning?

100 Day Sustainability Challenge: Results from Week #14

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

Day 98…Two more days! TWO MORE DAYS! I can definitely feel myself moving into winding-down mode with this project, wanting to look back over the entire 100 days and reflect on lessons learned.

In some ways I would have loved to have an Announcer Guy style Hollywood linear arc to this 100 Day Sustainability Challenge. Cue voice: “He used to be afraid to go outside (image of Eddie Vedder*, playing me, peeking through the blinds looking scared of the outside world). Then through the magical powers of activism he became…Super Tran!”
[* That casting’s for you, sweet spousey. Wait till you hit the love scene.]

The actual story of the 100 Day Sustainability Challenge:

There was a start, and there will be an end. And a whole lot of squiggle in between.

Recap of the past week

In my recap of Week #11 I mentioned having had a relapse of agoraphobia and outlining 5 things I needed to do to get back on track: go outside every day, reflect on stressors within my control, take responsibility for bailing on commitments, get back into an appropriate self-care routine (including saying no to new commitments so I have time to do self-care stuff), and set up regular appointments again with the fear specialist dude who I saw previously.

Now 3 weeks later, I can look back and be reminded that hey, if I don’t actually do what I know I need to do, there’s a good chance things will get worse. Not my first time around with that lesson, but a good reminder nonetheless. I am back to really small goals for outside time, like taking a 5 minute bus ride.

The question of how much effort to put into my own individual healing vs. stuff out in the world comes up again and again in my life. On the one hand it seems super self-indulgent (and frankly pretty boring) to put in the massive amount of self-care that seems to be needed if I want to be mentally well enough to be able to function out in the world. Part of me says fuck it, just figure out how to leave the house for the bare minimum – get groceries, walk the dog, go to the doctor/dentist, and go to my Zen sangha sits – and use the rest of my energy to work on stuff from home instead of expending it practicing things like taking the bus that, if I neglect them, I lose ground on the ability to do. But having those limitations means I can’t do certain kinds of things that I think are really needed in this world, like be in community and build relationships and do blockade actions. And of course there is financial survival. And whether it’s fair to sweet spousey and my family and friends to not make more of an effort to be well, as being somewhat crazy means I need a lot of help with things. And whether it is lazy and irresponsible to not make more of an effort.

So, mental health-wise more questions than answers this week.

Ironically, my Sustainability Challenge actions this week all relate to events that I would actually need to leave the house to do.

  • Most of my Sustainability Challenge work this week related to planning an action to support the Regional Housing First initiative. Way back in Week #11 I mentioned signing a petition and writing letters to regional and municipal governments supporting a proposal for regional government to build 367 units of supported housing by 2018. Since that time 1 of the 13 municipalities that make up the regional government voted to support the proposal, and it’s going before the rest at a regional meeting on October 14.
    As context, over the past 25 years Canada’s population increased by 30% while annual national investment in housing decreased by over 46%. This shortage of affordable housing plus other factors that have increased poverty mean that homelessness is on the rise. Rather than continue to sit around waiting for the federal government to live up to its responsibility to ensure housing for all, the proposal — co-drafted by the Capital Regional Hospital District (CRHD) Chair and Victoria mayor and councillors — suggests taking action now through borrowing funds to be serviced by a regional levy of ~$11 added to property taxes for house owners across the region.
    Housing First posterAlthough this is a very mainstream proposal and one that should be easy to get behind, mayors and councillors for some of the municipalities have been saying they don’t have any homeless people in their municipality and this is just an urban core problem. So an ad hoc group of folks will be gathering outside the building just prior to the meeting, then go into the meeting to show CHRD reps that homelessness is an important issue to people across the region, and that the community supports this proposal as a step in the right direction.
    So, this week I worked with a small group of people to plan the action, learned how to set up a Facebook event and created the event listing, created a poster and handbills, put together a list of groups to send event info and promo materials to, and did a bunch of outreach.     I’ve made a ton of mistakes along the way and lots of things I’d do differently next time around but am glad to have at least tried, however imperfectly.
  • Although I know that I need to say no to new opportunities (doh!), this week I agreed to work with a couple friends to help yes2scs put together a visual map of their approach to harm reduction. I love harm reduction work, and frankly would never turn down any opportunity to work with one of the yes2scs folks no matter what the project/issue (we have worked together lots in the past and I really respect his work), so there ya have it. I did at least manage to postpone getting going on it till next week.
  • Approached a friend who lives in a collective house to see if they would be willing to host an anarchist seder in spring 2016. I haven’t done one of these since 2004 but won’t take much to tweak the haggadah from back then, which is based on the secular progressive haggadah I grew up with as a kid. My parents have come to past anarchist seders I’ve put on and it’s been really fun to have this continuity with them so am hoping they’ll be well enough to come in the spring.
  • Looked into renting American Revolutionary, a documentary about brilliant activist Grace Lee Boggs who died October 5, age 100, and approached the aforementioned collective house to see if they want to do a film night. Really looking forward to watching this and talking about it with folks afterwards!
  • Did some sleuthing for potential funding to support a local organization’s Indigenous women’s action group. The funder recently suspended all grants so they are scrambling for interim funding.
  • Started reading about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) to try to understand what some of the local impacts might be.
  • Talked with my local MP and current NDP candidate Randall Garrison about my concerns around the NDP’s shift to the right and especially its emphasis on increasing middle class comfort (hello, the middle class is doing just fine on that front) and plan to increase funding for policing. Everything I’ve seen of Randall while he’s been my MP is that he works really hard and takes feedback seriously, and I really respect that despite being busy as hell with the campaign he has tried calling our house three times to follow up with me after I wrote expressing concerns and declining to put up a sign for his campaign.
  • Donated to support a running buddy who has committed to running up to 500 miles (!) in 2016, to raise funds for charity:water which puts 100% of donations into community-based projects to build simple clean water technology (for accessible drinking water, safe sewage disposal, etc.). Go April!
  • Worked with my sangha’s teacher to revamp our financial accessibility guidelines to further reduce barriers to participation. I’m proud that my sangha prioritizes making Zen practice accessible to everyone regardless of income!

It’s funny, this past week has felt like a total failure and write-off because my mental health has been so crappy and I’ve not succeeded in doing some of the basic life stuff I had set out to do. But putting together this list I can see that actually I did manage to do quite a bit of positive stuff. That is one of the helpful things about this Sustainability Challenge, as I can’t always trust my brain to accurately assess what is going on it does help to have an accountability process where I review each week and can find good things that happened every day.

Looking ahead

With two days left in this current Sustainability Challenge, I have started wondering about what is next. Is it a good idea to put another kind of structured challenge in place to keep momentum, or wait and see how things go?

In the half marathon training program I recently participated in, one of the coaches gave interesting advice about the cycle of goal setting and completion. After all the build up of working hard to reach a goal, once you actually reach it after the initial elation fades there’s often a let down period. It is an uncomfortable experience and many people try to avoid it by rushing to set a new goal. She suggested doing the opposite – let yourself actually experience the full cycle, including what happens after you achieve a goal. This made a lot of sense to me as I’ve experienced it with big political projects and race running. Reaching the 100 Day conclusion to this Sustainability Challenge doesn’t have that same feeling of intense buildup, but it is something I worked at nonetheless and so I do want to just take a bit of time afterwards to let the completion sink in. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to continue to do sustainability work, just not necessarily rush to create a new structure for that work.

Leaving this space open means I can finish the next 2 days the same way I’ve done the rest of the challenge, by finding something new to do on Sunday and Monday, instead of being in a blur those days as I try to anticipate and scheme about what will happen next. So…here’s to Sunday and Monday! 🙂 I already have some great sustainability stuff planned for Monday (if I am able to leave the house) so am hoping to end the Sustainability Challenge with some anti-colonial/Indigenous solidarity research and a climate justice film night with my sangha.

And what about you?

I would love to get feedback from you. What do you think of all of this rambling? What resonates with you, and what doesn’t? Are you trying your own sustainability initiatives and if so what are you learning? Do you have suggestions or ideas for what my next challenge could be?

100 Day Sustainability Challenge: Results from Week #13

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

Getting close to the end…9 more days to go on the Sustainability Challenge. I am looking forward to reviewing my blog posts from start to finish and seeing all the stuff I learned from this process.

Recap of the past week

Last week I talked about having two types of goals for this week:

  1. Mental health sustainability goals: stuff to help recover my mental health, even if it’s stuff I have talked about before so doesn’t meet the requirements of this 100 Day Challenge. I set out 7 goals as part of this: shower every day, clean the kitchen and living room every day, eat when hungry and stop when full, exercise every day, make a positive contribution to someone else’s mental health on an interpersonal level, do the exercises from Active hope: How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy by Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, and do some kind of activism around the mental health system and the need for respectful, accessible mental health services.
  2. Other sustainability actions: make sure I’m doing something every day to fulfill the rules I set out for myself in this Challenge (1 new thing every day towards sustainability, no repeats). My starting list was: Create a balanced structured weekday schedule, max one evening activity (aiming to go to Black Seas: How Migrant Justice has Failed African Refugees), work on my draft chapter for the Trans* Buddhist anthology, and read Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations (edited by Leanne Simpson).

So how did it go?

Mental health sustainability

  • Daily showering: I didn’t shower every day, but did manage to do it 6 out of the 7 days, which is a vast improvement over the previous week. And I actually put on clean clothes some days, which hasn’t happened in a while. Progress!
  • Daily cleaning of kitchen/living room: I managed this for the living room but not the kitchen. Cooking and cleaning is something I really enjoy doing but when I’m struggling with mental health find it difficult to handle all of the steps involved in cooking so tend to just eat stuff that I don’t have to cook (like massive amounts of bread and peanut butter). When I don’t cook I’m much less likely to clean the kitchen so there were a few days where my sweet spousey cooked, and I just let the dishes sit there. This week I really noticed that when I have a reasonable schedule it is so much easier for me to do stuff than when I have to be spontaneous.
  • Eat when hungry and stop when full: Ok, I knew this wasn’t likely to be an easy one. But I did do it one day, which is better than zero days. And it’s something to continue to work on, for sure. I also noticed that I’ve become more secretive about eating which is part of a binge pattern for me. So, also back to the drawing board about eating with other people, or at least out in the open where other people can see me.
  • Daily exercise: My goal was to do some kind of exercise in addition to daily dog & spouse walks. I biked 4 days and did yoga 5 days, and am really happy with that. And, it was a good reality check on how much strength, balance and overall fitness I’ve lost in the past couple months since I stopped running – couldn’t do some of the balance poses that require holding body weight for a short period of time, which was a surprise. Good to know.
  • Contribute to someone else’s mental health: I had a few interactions with various people struggling with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and panic disorder. Am happy with how the conversations went and hope that I did make some kind of difference. And wow, did I ever benefit from talking about agoraphobia and panic disorder with an old acquaintance who I had tea with this week – they have a lot of the same stuff going on as I do, but they’ve been dealing with it for 20 years – so much that I can learn from them and it really helped me feel less isolated and…well, crazy — to find out that someone who I really respect as an activist and a human being has experienced the same things.
  • Did not do the exercises from Active hope: How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy, and I’ve run out of library renewals, so will put it on my “do at a later time” library list.
  • Mental health activism: Oops, I totally forgot about this one. Nope!

Other sustainability actions this week (Challenge actions – something new)

First, the stuff I had planned:

  • I did indeed create a structured weekday schedule, and followed it Mon & Tues and it worked really well. One of my main goals has been to get back to being able to volunteer with Mother Felker Farms and that work happens in the morning, so my schedule is structured around mornings outside and afternoons inside. Which was a good reality check on the days that I did it of how much time I’ve been spending inside online, because wow, when I don’t do that I quickly get really behind on all my computer work. Anyway…so stuck with the schedule for 2 days, then got wrapped up in doing some work on an Indigenous solidarity “No consent, no LNG” event (more on that below) and neglected all the other stuff on my to do list as well as spending way too much time on the computer. But even though that type of intensive computer time is not healthy or sustainable, it was OK in the short term and didn’t totally tank my mental health, so yay.
  • Max one evening activity: The intention behind this was to try to improve my sleep schedule. I generally don’t sleep well and wake up really early, so when I am doing stuff in the evenings can quickly get sleep deprived. This week the way things unfolded with the Indigenous solidarity event there was some stuff that needed doing that conflicted with the evening event I had planned to go to, so decided to let go of the evening event. And it confirmed for me that my mental health is way better when I don’t do stuff in the evenings. So, that’s something I’ll need to continue to look at going forward – how much evening stuff I can actually sustain (a lot of the stuff I want to do happens in the evenings, e.g., activist events, Zen sits).
  • I drafted and put out for feedback a draft piece for two local art projects — All Bodies Are Good Bodies , a fundraiser for the Vancouver Island PWA Society, and Free All Bodies. The feedback has been great and I’ll be working on revising the piece as a chapter for the Trans* Buddhist anthology (so finally did some work towards that!).
  • Started reading Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations (edited by Leanne Simpson).

And the spontaneous stuff:

  • No consent, no LNG! The “BC” (settler) government has been pushing hard for extraction and sale of liquefied natural gas for sale in Asia. Large companies and global investors are being vigorously courted to build pipelines, processing plants, and shipping terminals for export. As of September 2015, 20 LNG proposals had been announced – if approved this will mean massive fracking in Treaty 8 lands, pipeline construction through multiple Indigenous territories in the north, and construction of new plants and terminals on Indigenous territories on the coast. As the BC government has ignored its legal, political and ethical obligation to obtain consent to use of Indigenous territories, and industry contractors have attempted to start work without Indigenous consent, Indigenous people have set up camps at Lax U’u’la, Madii Lii, and Unist’ot’en to protect their territories from trespass and damage. These camps have continued despite harassment and threats by industry contractors. So, when it was announced that there would be a pro-LNG lunch for government and industry reps here in Victoria it was a great opportunity for a solidarity action. Very amazing speakers Mary Vickers (Heiltsuk) and Charles Elliott (W̱SÁNEĆ – Tsartlip) were present in person, and Chief Yahaan Donnie Wesley (Tsimshian) and Richard Wright (Gitxsan) were able to join by phone from, respectively, Lax U’u’la and Madii Lii. I was also very grateful to learn from working with the organizers who did an amazing job pulling things together and MC’ing. LNG is new to me so I spent some time learning about it before the event to produce a flyer for the event, and am happy to send the flyer by email if anyone is interested in reading more…
  • Donated funds to support the Medicine Drive for the Unist’ot’en Camp.
  • Put out an invitation to my sangha to go see a local screening of This Changes Everything, based on Naomi Klein’s book about climate change. The film re-imagines the challenge of climate change, presenting portraits of 7 communities around the globe and asking the question: What if confronting the climate crisis is the best chance we’ll ever get to build a better world? Thus far it’s looking like 14 people are going to go together, yay! Hopefully this will help with my longer-term goal of creating some kind of structure within our sangha to explore both environmental and social responsibility within the community (e.g., ways to reduce our carbon footprint as a sangha) and also provide a way for people to learn from and support each other to engage in activism from a practice perspective.
  • Connected with a local trans health researcher who is interviewing trans people and primary health care providers about best practices in the primary care setting. Looking forward to meeting in the upcoming week to learn more about her work, talk about my personal experiences as a trans person in the health care system, and share some of the lessons learned from past work I’ve done in this field.
  • Watched a live stream of the last in Our Place’s 3-part series Transformation Through First Nations History. Gwawaenuk Hereditary Chief Dr. Robert Joseph spoke about reconciliation and the importance of engaging in sacred, respectful dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to transform the relationship. The event was at First Metropolitan United Church and apparently the church will be putting out a DVD of all three events in the series – this is the only one I was able to watch so am thinking about buying the DVD, and potentially doing a community screening and/or donating to the library.

Looking ahead to the next week

This is my last full week of the 100 Day Sustainability Challenge – wow!

Still a bit shaky, but I feel like I’m on the right track with mental health sustainability and am going to continue with many of the things I started last week – consistent yoga practice, structured weekday schedule, taking care of my body and our house, working on eating when hungry and stopping when full, keeping evening stuff to a minimum to try to get sufficient sleep, etc. Am also aiming to start running again this week. I have a terrific running group of online folks who all started half marathon training together in April, and even though our official training program has finished we have decided to continue to stay connected and support each other to keep setting well-being goals and do accountability check-ins with each other.

This will be a busy week catching up on Zenwest volunteer work that I neglected last week, and also busy work in the garden (autumn waits for no person), so it will be interesting to see what things I can come up with to continue to do new things each day. I am not going to set specific goals, but have a few things in the calendar to provide some structure. Mostly I just want to buckle down and get regular work done, so will likely try to find some small things to do this week.

I will do the usual weekly report next weekend, and then will take some time in the following week to review and reflect on the 100 days as a whole. It’s been an amazing process of going from having a very tiny, constricted life to having tons of new relationships and opportunities to do thing and so appreciate the many people that have been part of that process!

And what about you?

I would love to get feedback from you. What do you think of all of this rambling? What resonates with you, and what doesn’t? Are you trying your own sustainability initiatives and if so what are you learning?

Have a great week!

100 Day Sustainability Challenge: Results from Week #12

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

Wow, just 2 more weeks + 2 days to go on the Sustainability Challenge. Time flies…the challenge has been great but I must admit that I’m looking forward to not having to write down the stuff that I’m doing. Some people love accountability challenges like this but I find it hugely time consuming to report back. It will be interesting to see if once it’s over I st art totally slacking off, if so maybe I’ll start a new/different challenge…

Recap of the past week

The point of this Sustainability Challenge was to, for 100 days, do something that is related to sustainability and not count in the list of 100 any actions that are repeats from something I already listed during the challenge.

How to sustain individual and collective mental health is an ongoing challenge that goes far beyond 100 days. After the mental health meltdown last week my goals this week were to, each day, (1) refrain from doing something that harms my mental health, and (2) do something that helps my mental health. All of my ideas were things that are not new, so I tried to balance these goals with still doing something that would stretch me in a new way every day.

I definitely found it easier to refrain from doing harmful things than to do the things that I know are beneficial to my mental health.

Stuff to refrain from (things that harm my mental health) What I learned this week
Spend most of day sitting on couch Using the computer = sitting on the couch. So, if I want to sit on the couch less, I need to use the computer less.

The best way I found this week to do this was to get outside and do fall cleanup of our food garden. This is a huge task involving cleaning out the annual beds, pulling invasives from around the perennials, getting the greenhouse ready for winter, cleaning tools, etc. This is a huge task and usually in past years we just give up at some point and then have a crapload of work to do in the spring. This week I tried to just get outside and start somewhere, rather than being caught up in how much more there still is to do. Right now everything in my life kind of feels like that – big mess, start somewhere.
Compulsively checking email and Facebook Using the computer for long stretches of time makes it very easy to compulsively check email and Facebook. Hey, a theme! Any guesses what a goal will be for the upcoming week? 🙂

Facebook has been fantastic for connecting with local activism, but I am back to questioning how to use it so it’s not such a constant stream of information – all very interesting stuff, but way too much.
Multi-tasking When I just do one thing before doing anything else, I am way less tired and overwhelmed. Not having multiple browser tabs open at a time helps me reduce compulsively checking email and Facebook.
Excessive Netflix I tend to watch excessive Netflix when I’m not doing well mentally (can’t focus enough to do stuff like read, write, etc). When I’m doing well mentally, I tend to binge on reading political stuff and talking politics on Facebook, and quickly get bored with Netflix.

So, this week I’m going to play around with finding things to do that don’t require mental focus/concentration, so when I’m not doing well mentally I can draw an activity out of a hat – making decisions is really difficult when I’m mentally not doing well, so choosing from a list will I think be unlikely to work.
Fear-based avoidance: not leaving house, making excessive commitments (avoiding saying no), procrastinating to put off doing an activity I’m scared of, etc. I’m back in the shallow end of the pool and need to get stronger here before moving to deeper water.

Having already explained to people that I’ve had a mental health relapse and taking responsibility for bailing on commitments last week, it was pretty easy to say no and not take on new stuff this week.

What I tried to do this week was make commitments to myself for relatively simple things to do (clean kitchen, shower, be outside in the garden for at least 2 hours, etc.) and then actually do them, so I can practice the whole process of making a commitment and then seeing that commitment through, and also test out whether I’m ready to make commitments to other people. Most of these commitments were in or near the house which was helpful in building up to a morning of errands on Friday.

And…yeah. Still not able to consistently do what I say I’m going to, even small stuff like personal hygiene and basic cooking. Friday errands were in familiar locations but still had me totally twitchy and fearful about people being behind me. So, just need to be patient and keep plugging away. Actually, writing this is helping me to clarify weekend plans. Yay for journalling.
Eat excess processed foods, sweets, and foods low in nutrients Food stuff is a mess for me right now on every level. So, like the fall garden cleanup, I just have to start somewhere.
Insufficient sleep My body is wired to get up really early (and I am also assisted in this by cats who get bored at 5:30 and want me to get up and pat them so they can then fall back asleep for hours). So when I stay out past 8 PM I quickly get exhausted. This week I didn’t do any events in the evenings and it made a big difference. But a lot of the things I want to do – Zen sits, activist events, organizing meetings, etc. – happen at night. Am going to see if I can find a compromise by doing one evening thing a week and regretfully saying no to other stuff, no matter how wonderful it is.
Stuff to do (things that help my mental health) What I learned this week
Get up early enough to start day off with strong self-care routine Getting up early is not a problem, but I haven’t yet figured out a morning routine/schedule that works well for me. A bunch of things tie together here (more on those below).
Zazen for at least 30 min/day Starting the day with zazen makes a huge positive difference in setting the tone for the day overall, and is one of the foundational practices for everything else – if I don’t sit zazen first thing in the day I tend to write off self-care altogether. Which is overly rigid and not at helpful, but does motivate me to do zazen first thing in the morning.
Walk with sweet spousey and our dog every day Our morning walks are so lovely and wonderful to start the day together, outside in nature. We are just about at the point where we’re walking in the dark, so it’ll be interesting to see how this unfolds as we head into winter.
Do yoga 6x/week Number of times I did yoga this week: zero.
Run 3x/week (start with run-walk intervals) Number of times I ran this week: zero.
Make nutritious food and eat when hungry Number of times I ate when hungry this week: zero.

OK, so obviously there’s some stuff going on here. Hmm, just realized that anything relating to self-care for my body has gone totally awry in the past couple weeks (even basic personal hygiene, which is usually a total no-brainer for me as I love long hot showers). Aha, another theme for next week.
Communicate with my ancestors I put this on the list last week because a strong connection to memories of my grandparents in a counselling session is when things started to turn around in a very positive way for my mental health in the summer. My mum’s parents were very different than each other but both very strong activists and also very strong in their love for me, and it is easy to feel a lot of love and gratitude for them (easy to feel that with my parents too, but they are still alive so communication with them is pretty regular and not something I need to be attentive to in the same way). This is a practice I want to continue to work on.

In previous weeks’ posts I’ve talked a lot about interdependence and the ways in which my mental health is contingent on trying to make a positive difference in the world. So, although activism was not on the list of goals this week, in part because so many of these mental health activities are ones I’ve already talked about (so are not new things in the Challenge) and also because it helps me to be able to find things I can do instead of focusing on things I can’t do, this week I also did the following new things:

  • Read The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century by Grace Lee Boggs. She wrote this when she was 95 and is now 100 years old. AMAZING. The best activist book I’ve read in a long time. She has so much wisdom and insight and such sharp analysis, all rooted in 70 years (!) of experience as an organizer. Yay for interlibrary loans.
  • Attended online Refugees Welcome direct action webinar. facilitated by Toronto migrant justice organizers Tings Chak and Syed Hussan. Such great information not only about non-violent action possibilities but also the need to emphasize transformational changes — not just opening up the borders so there is more readily exploitable labour, or to fill up prisons, etc.
  • Contacted local herbalists and stores asking them to support the Medicine Drive for the Unist’ot’en Camp
  • Contacted the local 40 Days for Life (an annual anti-abortion vigil) group to urge them to move their location away from the Island Women’s Health clinic. As part of the letter I shared with them my experience of giving myself an abortion when I was 19 years old, as a way of making more visible to them the consequences of actions that increase shame around accessing reproductive health services. I hesitate to post this here as it’s so personal, and so gender-weird for me as I’ve lived as a trans guy for 20 years, but think it is really important to remember that this is not just an ideological issue, it is something very real for many people.
  • Transcribed a session of the One Earth Sangha EcoSattva Training, to make the content more accessible to people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing.
  • Contacted 4 Buddhist sanghas seeking advice about how to increase sangha engagement in environmental & social responsibility, and talked with a teacher from East Bay Meditation Centre on this topic (thanks so much Mushim, very happy to have connected with you and grateful for your time and insight!).
  • Put up posters for the upcoming Zenwest Orientation to Zen course. I feel a lot of fondness for this course as it is the introduction to becoming part of the Zenwest sangha – taking it totally changed my life.
  • Started hashing out with my Zen teacher some ideas for the new Administrative Assistant role I’ll be taking on, to help improve the human resource sustainability of my sangha and also hopefully move towards right livelihood in the future (when I’m able well enough to be able to work again).
  • Did part of the Zenwest annual pilgrimage. My mental health had been rough all weekend and I also had a migraine on Saturday, so did not think I would be able to do any of the pilgrimage on Sunday, but at the last minute decided to meet up with the walkers partway along the route and just do what I could. I ended up walking around 12k of the 36k. It was very hard to be out in public but I was able to do a pace that put me a bit ahead of everyone, which helped with the fear of people being where I can’t see them. The people in Zenwest are people who for years have had my back on so many levels so it felt pretty amazing to go through the experience of having panic attacks out in public with such a strong group behind me.

Looking ahead to the next week

As I said above, I’m back in the shallow end of the pool mental health wise and need to get stronger here before moving to deeper water.

So am going to continue to practice setting commitments to myself and then doing them, and not make new commitments to other people. And for the stuff that seems overwhelming, start somewhere.

Mental health sustainability goals for this week:

  • Shower every day. It is so strange to suggest this given my practices earlier in this Challenge of water conservation (including not showering every day), but mental health wise this is, I think, the right thing to do for right now. They do not have to be epic, water-wasting showers.
  • Clean the kitchen and living room every day. This is where I spend most of my day, so having it be a total mess has an impact on my mental health, as well as feeling disrespectful to our home and to my sweet spousey.
  • Eat when hungry and stop when full. This is a pretty big challenge for me but is so totally out of whack right now that I think it is important to try working on it.
  • In addition to daily dog & spouse walks, do some other kind of exercise every day (e.g., cycling, running, strength training). Regular physical exercise is critical to my mental health.
  • Make a positive contribution to someone else’s mental health on an interpersonal level – provide support to someone who is struggling, do something to encourage someone else’s mental health self-care, etc.
  • Do the exercises from Active hope: How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy, by Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone.
  • Do some kind of activism around the mental health system and the need for respectful, accessible mental health services.

Other Sustainability Challenge goals for the week (consistent with the rules of the Challenge, something I have not done yet as part of the Challenge):

  • Create a structured weekday schedule that balances between time on the computer and time offline, makes the most of my “more able to mentally focus” time (e.g., make sure Zenwest administrative volunteer tasks are getting done), and includes physical activity throughout the day (e.g., garden fall cleanup, running).
  • Max one evening activity: Aim to go to Black Seas: How Migrant Justice has Failed African Refugees (a round-table discussion about anti-blackness in migrant justice activism), and say no to the 3 other excellent evening events happening this week.
  • Work on my draft chapter for the Trans* Buddhist anthology.
  • Read Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations (edited by Leanne Simpson).

And no doubt there will be other opportunities that come up through the week! I am committed to seeing this Sustainability Challenge through and being creative about ways to find one new thing each day that contributes to sustainability.

And what about you?

I would love to get feedback from you. What do you think of all of this rambling? What resonates with you, and what doesn’t? Are you trying your own sustainability initiatives and if so what are you learning?

Have a great week!

100 Day Sustainability Challenge: Results from Week #11

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

Hello friends! This week has…well…pretty much sucked. After several months of no agoraphobia and greatly diminished panic attacks/dissociation, and as a result being able to do quite a lot (more able to mentally focus, more energy, more able to be outside, etc.), this week it all went to shit. I’ve had panic attacks every day while out in public, and some days on a loop of panic attack > tap out of adrenalin (body can’t produce it forever) > exhaustion > brief moment of calm > panic attack. Rinse and repeat.

It is very fucking frustrating. There are so many actual real terrible things going on in the world that require attention, and yet all I can hear is my brain screaming YOU ARE IN DANGER AND NEED TO HIDE! Even though I know logically that is not real, when the lizard brain is firing on all cylinders logic kinda goes out the window.

But I am trying to learn from the experience by:

  1. Learning more about lapse, relapse, and how to respond so a lapse doesn’t turn into a relapse. Mostly this means going outside every day and forcing myself to endure having a panic attack in public, so I remember that it is not the end of the world when that happens and I don’t get back into the pattern of avoiding leaving the house.
  2. Reflecting on the factors that were within my control that created additional stress in the past week. (Some stuff not in my control happened this week, that’s life.)
  3. Acknowledging the situation to people who I’ve made commitments to and bailed on, taking responsibility and making amends where possible. Everyone has been extremely gracious, supportive, and understanding.
  4. Getting back into an appropriate self-care routine, including sufficient sleep, regular exercise, healthy eating, and daily meditation and yoga. This all takes time so means I have to do less other stuff, so am also saying no to new commitments.
  5. Following up with my fear specialist dude to set up regular appointments to make sure things are staying on track.

Part of the disappointment is that it felt really good to be able to stop focusing on recovery and be able to start making new relationships and doing work again. (Recovery work is really boring, narcissistic, and have I mentioned boring?) I am determined to get back there again, and it will require both patience and persistence.

Recap of the past week

Of the actions I mapped out last week, here are the things I did…

  • Participated in the first session of One Earth Sangha’s EcoSattva Training.
  • Spent some time on fall garden cleanup.

…and did not do:

  • Attend the first in Our Place’s 3-evening series Transformation Through First Nations History to learn more about local Indigenous history and resistance to colonialism.
  • Work on my draft chapter for the Trans* Buddhist anthology.
  • Write a piece for the All Bodies Are Good Bodies website, a beautiful art fundraiser for Victoria PWA Society and a great opportunity to think about how to articulate my paradoxical and complicated relationship with this crazy, stitched together, fragmented, strong, scarred, dysphoric, good enough body…
  • Make knishes.
  • Start hashing out with my Zen teacher some ideas for the new Administrative Assistant role I’ll be taking on, to help improve the human resource sustainability of my sangha and also hopefully move towards right livelihood in the future (when I’m able well enough to be able to work again).

[Plus other commitments that involved leaving the house, but have already been mentioned on this blog so aren’t “new” items in the Sustainability Challenge.]

I did find some other things I was able to do:

  • Read For Indigenous Minds Only (love Inter-library loans!)
  • Put together cookie dough ingredients as part of a bake-a-thon to raise funds and awareness of Indigenous land struggles – a crew went down to Rifflandia (local music festival) to sell to people standing in line – brilliant idea SB!
  • Went to Sanctuary City rally calling for Victoria city council to implement a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy so undocumented migrant workers, refugees, and immigrants can access health and social services without fear of imprisonment or deportation. This was part of a national day of action call by the Canadian Council on Refugees and also builds on the “Refugees Welcome” cross-country mobilization organized by various organizations and movements including No One Is Illegal.
  • Signed up to be a remote letter writer for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (responding to 3-5 letters per month from non-trans women and trans prisoners, as CCWP receives a lot of mail but has limited staff capacity to respond). CCWP has been around for a long time doing really good work and am really happy to have a way to support their efforts.
  • Explored with One Earth Sangha and a fellow EcoSattva Training participant some possibilities for providing real-time closed captioning to make the sessions more accessible to Deaf and Hard of Hearing participants, and committed to transcribing 3 sessions.
  • Signed petition and wrote letters to regional and municipal governments supporting a proposal for regional housing first strategy that would include building 367 units of supported housing by 2018.
  • Wrote article on sangha (community) for Zenwest newsletter.
  • Contributed $ to Yaakswiis Action Camp. This action by Ahousaht people and supporters was successful in closing down a Cermaq salmon farm that was operating without full consent of Ahousaht people. Fish farms pose risks to wild salmon populations, by polluting the water with diseases and toxins.

Looking ahead to the next week

As I mentioned last week, the Sustainability Challenge rules I set for myself are to do one new thing per day. In the next week I’m going to try to focus on mental health (as without that I can’t really do much), with each day (1) refraining from doing something that harms my mental health, and (2) doing something that helps my mental health. Some ideas for this week:

Refrain from things that harm mental health Do things that help mental health
Compulsively checking email and Facebook Do yoga 6x/week
Spend most of day sitting on couch Run 3x/week (start with run-walk intervals)
Fear-based avoidance: not leaving house, making excessive commitments (avoiding saying no), procrastinating to put off doing an activity I’m scared of, etc. Zazen for at least 30 min/day
Multi-tasking Walk with sweet spousey and our dog every day
Excessive Netflix Communicate with my ancestors
Eat excess processed foods, sweets, and foods low in nutrients Make nutritious food and eat when hungry
Insufficient sleep Get up early enough to start day off with strong self-care routine

And what about you?

I would love to get feedback from you. What do you think of all of this rambling? What resonates with you, and what doesn’t? Are you trying your own sustainability initiatives and if so what are you learning?

100 Day Sustainability Challenge: Results from Week #10

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

Funny thing about sustainability, you have to sustain it.
– Ron Finley, TED2013, A Guerilla Gardener in South Central LA

Hello everyone. This week, in addition to being super proud of my amazing sweet spouse (who works as an education assistant in an elementary school, so has just survived the total chaos of back to school week) I have been blown away by the generosity, warmth, good-heartedness, and brilliance of local activists. And feeling hopeful, for the first time in a long time, that it might actually be possible to sustain activism for a lifetime.

When I think of activists I often, to my chagrin, think of all the obnoxious, arrogant, petty, vindictive, counterproductive, mean-ass shit that I witnessed and experienced in movements of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. There was a lot of anger/rage, not a lot of love/heart. And I was as much on the giving end as I was on the receiving end. So, small wonder that people got completely burned out and left town, drifted away, turned to heroin, or killed themselves. Really. Because we were a mess. The combination of the trauma that many of us grew up with, the stresses of being marginalized, and the twisted things we learned from the dominant culture, all made a great recipe for hating ourselves and each other, and for violence (lateral and otherwise). No wonder we couldn’t sustain anything.

It was in large part these past hurts that left me so scared about re-engaging with activism when I started this blog 3 months ago, especially coming off an 8-month down-the-rabbit-hole experience of alternating between depersonalization/dissociation and hypersensitivity/agoraphobia. But there came a point in recovery where it was obvious that to be able to recover personally, I also needed to recover politically. To feel real, I needed to actually do things that felt important and meaningful.

Six weeks ago, in my report on Week #4, I wrote about taking some baby steps around connecting with people and building principled community – very shyly, awkwardly, and nervously going to a Unist’ot’en solidarity action despite not knowing anyone else who was going. (Big deal for me as the panic disorder is way more manageable if I am accompanied.) At that action I connected briefly with a friend of a friend. [Side note: let me take a moment here for some Annie Appreciation, to acknowledge an absolute gem of an activist and human being. All of the reconnecting I’m doing now with activism is made possible by who Annie is, and the impact she has had on my life personally as well as on activism here. Yay for Annie!] Through the friend of a friend – who despite a very full life has been tremendously gracious in talking with me and sharing ideas, critique, and invitations to take part in things – I am meeting other people. And OK, I know there is a honeymoon period where everything new seems amazing, but I have to say, thus far I am truly surprised by how lovely people are. Truly. After so many years of being deeply wary of people and having that drive so much of what I do, and especially wary of other activists, to be able to relax and be less defended (physically, mentally, and emotionally) is AMAZING. It’s reminded me that even though relationships take a lot of time to create and nourish, they are such a necessary and vital component of sustainability. Am feeling very grateful for how welcome and generous people have been with their time and energy.

Recap of the past week

Last week I wrote about affirming that anti-colonial, anti-racist activism is where my heart is and mapped out some ideas for this week and the following week. I did many of those actions in the past week, including:

  • Continuing to learn, in various ways – reading, having conversations, observing, practicing, and learning from my mistakes. I finished reading Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview and started Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis (both by Umeek – E. Richard Atleo), and also started reading the NOII Vancouver Principles and Statements.
  • Reconnecting with an old friend who I worked with on Palestinian solidarity some years ago. She hasn’t been able to do that work for a number of years and still isn’t able to do ongoing actions but it was great to talk about ways to support the Unist’ot’en camp and reaffirm our basic human connection — so much food for thought as she has been through a lot in the past 4 years. Inter-generational friendships mean a lot to me and am grateful for the chance to spend time together, especially as she’s in her 70s now and the impermanence of life is so ever-present.
  • Contributing funds to support a local group that is working within the Canadian refugee system to sponsor a Syrian family of 5 to come to Canada. The settler immigration system is so fucked on so many levels, so working within it always has for me a gross tinge of not wanting to in any way legitimize what underpins it, but also never want ideological rigidity to get in the way of making a difference for someone’s situation, especially in a context like this that is about family reunification.
  • Talking with local folks who are interested in ongoing work on refugee rights to debrief last week’s action and brainstorm ideas about what next steps might be.
  • Supported my sweet spouse through return to work and the start of a new school year, by taking care of making dinners and cleaning the kitchen and other house chores. Nourishing and sustaining our family is super important, and food is such a basic cultural staple for me, so physically feeding someone always feels particularly meaningful for me.
  • Participated in my sangha’s annual strategic planning session to help sustain the long-term viability of my spiritual community.

And as usual there were many other things that came up during the week:

  • Learned more about the work being done by the Anti-Violence Project and visited the harm reduction resource space at UVic Pride. Wow, such a beautiful thing, thanks so much to everyone involved in creating and maintaining that space.
  • Wrote a letter supporting release of Eddie Africa, one of the MOVE 9, who is (after 37 years in prison) scheduled to appear before the Pennsylvania State Parole Board in October.
  • To commemorate the 44th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion, watched film Attica is All of Us and read some old writing from the SISIS (Settlers In Support of Indigenous Sovereignty) archives by Dacajewiah, an Attica survivor and longtime Indigenous rights activist. **Warning**: The film includes graphic footage of the state massacre of prisoners and prison staff in Attica, as well as graphic footage of the state humiliation and torture of prisoners following the massacre.
  • Marked Labour Day by watching the No One Is Illegal video We are the Silent Slaves and signed the “No 4 and 4” petition calling for the Canadian government to meet 4 demands relating to justice for migrant workers.

Looking ahead to the next week

Having completed 70 days of the Sustainability Challenge thus far, I am surprised by how much has changed in those 70 days. I was so stuck in the teensy life resulting from months of agoraphobia that having to do one new thing per day was a great way to get moving again. Now my life is very full and as I wrote last week, I am getting kind of full up as many of the activities that I’ve started doing through this Challenge are ones that I want to continue to do for the long haul.

But, the Challenge rules I set for myself are to do one new thing per day. So, in addition to continuing work that I’ve already talked about here, for the remaining 30 days I will need to dig in and press into the last third of the Challenge. Some ideas for this week:

  • Attend the first in Our Place’s 3-evening series Transformation Through First Nations History to learn more about local Indigenous history and resistance to colonialism.
  • Work on my draft chapter for the Trans* Buddhist anthology.
  • Write a piece for the All Bodies Are Good Bodies website, a beautiful art fundraiser for Victoria PWA Society and a great opportunity to think about how to articulate my paradoxical and complicated relationship with this crazy, stitched together, fragmented, strong, scarred, dysphoric, good enough body…
  • Make knishes. I have been really missing my grandparents and hankering for Jewish food lately, and we have beautiful potatoes from this year’s harvest.
  • Start hashing out with my Zen teacher some ideas for the new Administrative Assistant role I’ll be taking on, to help improve the human resource sustainability of my sangha and also hopefully move towards right livelihood in the future (when I’m able well enough to be able to work again).
  • Participate in the first session of One Earth Sangha’s EcoSattva Training.
  • Last but definitely not least, fall garden cleanup: As our food harvest winds down for the year, it’s time to put the garden to bed for the winter. In past years I have really let this go and was reminded again this year that doing that allows invasives to totally take over which is not respectful care for this land. So, this year am determined to do a better job.

And on that note, some closing wisdom by my new hero:

So basically, if you want to meet with me, you know, if you want to meet, don’t call me if you want to sit around in cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit – where you TALK about doing some shit. If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit.
– Ron Finley, TED2013, A Guerilla Gardener in South Central LA

And what about you?

I would love to get feedback from you. What do you think of all of this rambling? What resonates with you, and what doesn’t? Are you trying your own sustainability initiatives and if so what are you learning?

Have a great week!

100 Day Sustainability Challenge: Results from Week #9

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

Recap of the past week

Last week I mentioned that many of the activities that I’ve started doing through this Challenge are ones that I want to continue to do for the long haul, and so I’m having difficulty doing a new thing every week. Because there are so many longer-term actions already on the go, this week I decided to go back to my list of more contained, one-off actions so I’m still stretching myself to try something new every day.

In the first part of the week I did a number of the actions I had planned out:

  • Marked the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and learned more about the rebuilding of New Orleans by watching 10 Years After Katrina: ‘Resilience’, ‘Recovery’, and REALITY. The film, produced by the Greater New Orleans Organizers Roundtable, exposes the spin doctoring behind the 10th anniversary celebrations, documenting the US government’s attempted opportunistic use of the hurricane to advance an agenda of gentrification, displacement of communities of colour, and privatization of public places and public services in New Orleans and other storm-damaged communities of the Gulf Coast region; and the lived experiences of African American, Vietnamese American, and Latino community organizers defending human rights against a tide of disaster-profiteering and displacement.
  • Attended trans* Buddhist virtual meditation and participated in post-sit video chat. The stories of violence, disrespect, and marginalization trans people have experienced from their Buddhist communities, and the continuing impacts, were painful to hear. I was reminded (yet again) how fortunate I am to have a Zen sangha that is inclusive and respectful.
  • Did research on rain barrel setup to help divert roof water away from the storm sewer system. Unfortunately it’s looking like we won’t be able to pursue this as from the type of roof we have the regional district recommends only using the water for non-food plants, and having turned almost all of our space into a food garden that’s all we’ve got at this point. Will continue to sleuth options to see if there is something we can do on this…and definitely will be looking at alternatives to asphalt roof tile the next time we are needing to repair a roof!
  • Went on a date with my sweet spouse to a local organic food store to try to source plastic-free alternatives to food that our usual grocery store only carries in plastic packaging. This was a bit of a bust as although they have a great bulk food selection their jars and bottles all have the same plastic seal as our regular grocery store – will have to keep sleuthing.
  • Talked with the farmer who I’m volunteering with about ways to promote her CSA program in the next growing season.
  • Attended the first session of BCALM’s Art of Living Mindfully course (an 8 week course that “provides participants with a firm grounding in mindfulness based strategies useful in navigating stress and in recognizing patterns of thought, speech and behavior that may be contributing to stress and suffering”). The setup totally didn’t work for me — doing body-centred work is often tricky for me both around gender dysphoria and also trauma, and doing it in an unfamiliar setting with unfamiliar people and squished in so close that the guy next to me kept touching my leg, I was a triggered dissociated panicking mess for 90 minutes. So, I won’t do the rest of the course but am happy that one of the 800 (!) people on the waitlist will have a chance to do it – there are so few resources in the public mental health system. The experience, and the resulting reoccurence of agoraphobia for the first time in a month, was a good lesson for me about how difficult I still find it to recognize and respect my boundaries, and the difference between unhelpful avoidance behaviour (which can > agoraphobia) vs. unhelpfully staying in a situation that doesn’t work for me.

And then on Wednesday Nilufer Demir, a Turkish press photographer, was snapping a picture of Pakistani migrants by the coast when she noticed 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s tiny fragile body washed up on the beach. Alan, his 5-year-old brother Ghalib, their mother Rehanna, and 9 other Syrian refugees drowned when the boats they were in capsized on its attempted journey to Greece.

This horror is not new. The United Nations refugee agency (UNCHR) estimates that there are currently more than 51 million people who have been forced to flee their homes as a result of war, violence, persecution, oppression, environmental disasters, climate change, and extreme poverty (16.7 million people who have fled their home country and 33.3 million internally displaced people). Every day an estimated 42,500 new people become refugees. And as wealthy countries such as Canada, the USA, European nations, and Australia have become increasingly hostile to refugees, increasing both physical and financial barriers to people seeking asylum, people are forced into more and more precarious means of trying to find refuge. Thousands of Eritrean, Somali, Syrian, Yemeni, Nigerian and Balkan refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean, with the United Nations estimating 3500 deaths last year and 2500 deaths thus far this year. Following last year’s expansion of Border Patrol searches along the US-Mexico border, there has been an increase in the number of people drowning while attempting to cross the Rio Grande as the expanded patrols and surveillance have caused people to try to cross the river in more dangerous and secluded areas. Earlier this year hundreds of Rohingya people from Burma and Bangladesh died at sea and on land-based human smuggling routes, refused entry by multiple countries.

But the story of the Kurdi family — the family photos showing the children full of life and beautiful bright smiles, the photo of a tiny toddler’s lifeless body being carried by a Turkish paramilitary officer, the anguished interview with husband and father Abdullah Kurdi who described how his wife and children slipped out of his hands as the boat capsized, the news that Canadian family members had been trying to bring the family here but had been thwarted by the bureaucratic nightmare that is the Canadian government application system — made directly and viscerally real the human face of the suffering, and the complicity of affluent countries. As one friend put it, “people woke up to what is happening”.

Like many other people I was horrified by the story and wanting to do something constructive with all of that emotion, both to express my grief for the family and also to call attention to the Canadian contributions to the conditions that caused their deaths. “The things that happened to us here, in the country where we took refuge to escape war in our homeland, we want the whole world to see this,” Abdullah Kurdi told reporters. “We want the world’s attention on us, so that they can prevent the same from happening to others. Let this be the last.”

Through Facebook I found out about an event being organized by a few local activists as part of a cross-country mobilization organized by various organizations and movements across the country.

Although support for recent immigrants and refugees have been part of my personal, cultural and political landscape for as long as I can remember, and No One Is Illegal has definitely helped shape how I’ve approached anti-colonialism work with respect to Indigenous solidarity and anti-Zionist work, I have not been directly involved in organizing specifically for immigrant, refugee, and migrant worker rights. I’ve written in earlier posts about having to come at activism as a beginner again after so many years away, and in this movement that is even more true.

So, I have been very grateful to new friends for helping me figure out some things I could constructively do to support the action (the lesson for this week: “There is always something you can do”), and for providing me with a sense of connectedness and confidence to be able to have some difficult public and private conversations with a number of people relating to how to address the many things that are fucked about Canadian immigration laws without reinforcing colonial control of Indigenous lands. This week I have been getting tons of practice calling in, and hopefully am getting better at constructively discussing when there is something I disagree with. Helping fold booklets and paint the banner in the photo at the top of the blog post, and then sharing food and laughs and discussion around a big kitchen table with a group of very thoughtful, smart, funny, and caring people, was wonderful. I have so missed that! The action itself was, as is usually the case for me, pretty overwhelming with a lot of people packed into a small space so we stood at the back the whole time and didn’t stay for the march, but it was good to do something to contribute, even if all the things I did were small contributions.

And it was also fun to engage with a Conservative Party canvasser who is probably wishing he did not come to our house… 🙂 My intention was to practice engaging with him in a respectful and firm way, and not just beak off at him, but try to genuinely find out why on earth someone would support that party. We had a very interesting discussion about the party’s stance on immigration and Canadian nationalism and xenophobia and he admitted at the end that he didn’t actually support the party’s policies, he just believed that the other candidates were professional politicians and he wanted to support someone who he felt was more grassroots. Surreal!

Looking ahead to the next week

It is so important not to just do a one-off action and flit from crisis to crisis in a superficial way. The experience this week affirmed for me that anti-colonial, anti-racist activism is where my heart is. So, I’ve thought a lot in the past couple days about what the next steps could be in the upcoming weeks. Here are some ideas:

  • Continue to learn, in various ways – reading, having conversations, observing, practicing, and learning from my mistakes. This week my goal is to finish reading Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview and Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis (both by Umeek – E. Richard Atleo) and read the NOII Vancouver Principles and Statements. I am also looking forward to reconnecting with an old friend who I worked with on Palestinian solidarity some years ago, and curious to talk more with her about what if anything is happening in the Jewish community on this.
  • Contribute funds to support a local group that is working within the Canadian refugee system to sponsor a Syrian family of 5 to come to Canada.
  • Continue talking with local folks who are interested in ongoing work, to discuss what next steps might be to support the beautiful vision articulated in Urbane Adventurer: Amiskwacî: “What does it mean to build solidarity between racialised peoples desperate to find refuge here while also asserting Indigenous self-determination?…What would Canada look like if we centred the solidarity between self-determining, self-governing Indigenous peoples and those people also violently displaced by neo-colonial wars, resource projects, climate change?”
  • Pitch in to support a Unist’ot’en solidarity event – not sure yet what that might look like but open to doing any kind of logistical support (e.g., making copies of posters and putting them up to help advertise the event, room setup/cleanup).
  • Attend the Our Place series Transformation Through First Nations History to learn more about local Indigenous history and resistance to colonialism. This will be a big challenge for me to be in a space that is unfamiliar (and a church to boot), with people who I don’t know and nobody accompanying me for support if I have a panic attack. But I have been reminded again this week that my own personal mental health healing is inextricably entwined with communal political healing and that even though it is scary to stretch in these ways, it is important to do so, both for accountability and also for my own sanity.

And there are also some other actions that are important to me in the next couple weeks:

  • Support my sweet spouse through return to work and the start of a new school year – nourishing and sustaining our family is super important. It is going to be a huge change of pace and lots of ambiguity/uncertainty as support staff can be moved all over the place for the first month.
  • Make knishes. I have been really missing my grandparents and hankering for Jewish food lately, and we have beautiful potatoes from this year’s harvest.
  • Participate in my sangha’s annual strategic planning session and help sustain the long-term viability of my spiritual community.
  • Work on my draft chapter for the Trans* Buddhist anthology.

And what about you?

I would love to get feedback from you. What do you think of all of this rambling? What resonates with you, and what doesn’t? Are you trying your own sustainability initiatives and if so what are you learning?

Have a great week!

100 Day Sustainability Challenge: Results from Week #8

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

Whew, intense week.

Recap of the past week

In last week’s post I chronicled my failure to do something every day that contributes to local and global movements for survival and liberation. This week my goals were to keep working on that by reaching out to the people who I know locally and have some kind of activist relationship with, explaining where I’m at and where I want to get to, and asking for help; doing some more searching; being open and seeing what comes up and not spending all my time on the computer (i.e., making time for actual engagement).

I started the week by sending friends the following message (via email and Facebook):

Hello friends. I am slowly and stumbling-ly getting back into grassroots activism after many years away and am struggling to reconnect. So, a question to those of you who do amazing work that I have been inspired by over the years as well as new friends who are involved in grassroots work – any suggestions for people doing good work here that might want volunteer/$ support? I’m particularly interested in anti-racism & anti-colonial organizing. Thanks for any suggestions you can offer! And thank you also for keeping me hopeful about grassroots work even during my most bleak, cynical, and unhappy times.

Am very grateful for all of the suggestions and ideas, thank you. It seems that there is nothing to instantly plug into but much that can be done to nurture old and new relationships and see what emerges. This week I was really happy to visit with a friend-of-a-friend who has been doing local organizing for a while, and next week will be reconnecting with an old friend who I worked with on anti-colonial organizing 8 or 9 years ago. It makes such a difference to spend time with other people who are committed to social and environmental justice, principled solidarity, and actual organizing (as well as wrestling with some of the same questions as the ones I have about how to use race & class privilege to be of maximum benefit).

While continuing to build relationships I have been wanting a framework to help me keep perspective on what well-rounded activism looks like and not go down an overly narrow, unproductive path (e.g., endless social media). The Commit to Racial Justice pamphlet produced by participants in an activist camp outlines 11 anti-racist commitments that I found useful in thinking about how, as a white person, to educate myself in order to see racism and then take action to end it.

  1. I commit to viewing mistakes as opportunities for learning.
  2. I commit to disrupting patterns of domination.
  3. I commit to working on my own defensiveness.
  4. I commit to including the interests of oppressed groups while making decisions that affect them.
  5. I commit to respecting the complexity of issues in my community.
  6. I commit to disrupting the status quo in order to share power and privilege to all.
  7. I commit to reflecting on topics that might feel uncomfortable.
  8. I commit to promoting cooperation over self-interest.
  9. I commit to serving the interests of people over my own personal objectives.
  10. I commit to recognizing the legitimacy of people’s concerns.
  11. I commit to educating myself and working to address the issues that contribute to oppression.

Thus far I’ve mostly been educating myself. Having been away from activism for a while it’s been pretty obvious as I take tentative steps back in that I’m out of touch with what is going on, and need to educate myself. And, that is not where it stops – as I’m well aware from Zen practice, reading about something is not the same as doing it; in the list above “educating myself” is half of one of 11 commitments white people need to make. But it is a place I can start.

So, I spent 3 days nursing a wheezy drippy cold and spending massive amounts of time online – reading articles and collecting future reading materials relating to decolonization and anti-racism and anti-colonial organizing, as well as specific things white people need to learn, challenge, and practice with respect to our own racism. Grateful for a public library system that makes so much accessible; it was great to read Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society (edited by Dr. Amie Breeze Harper) — totally re-inspired me around food — and am looking forward to reading Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview and Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis (both by Umeek – E. Richard Atleo), Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations (edited by Leanne Simpson), Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender (by Mia McKenzie), and The Comeback: How Aboriginals Are Reclaiming Power And Influence (by John Ralston Saul). Also looking forward to reading online resources Unsettling Ourselves: Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality (compiled by Unsettling Minnesota), Catalyzing Liberation Toolkit: Anti-Racist Organizing to Build the 99% Movement (compiled by Catalyst Project and Chris Crass), the Victoria Sexual Assault Centre’s core training resources, and the Anne Braden Anti-Racist Organizer Training Program 2015 Reader, and the archived articles on the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and Meta-Activism sites.

With all this reading material now piled up I have been trying to move away from obsessively looking for more resources (although your suggestions are always welcomed) and balance reading with practising taking action. Thus far it has been all spontaneous actions as things arise, for example practising “calling in” when white loved ones say things I feel are racist, getting the word out about RCMP and industry harassment of the Unist’ot’en Camp, sharing public support/solidarity requests from the Madii Lii camp and the Lax Kw’alaams Lelu Island camp, and contributing money where I can. Thus far all of these actions are pretty small and not world-changing, but through these small actions I am practising old skills that I’m rusty at, learning new skills, doing something that hopefully is of bigger picture use, and also taking tiny steps to build relationships with other people who also care about these issues.

This week there were also opportunities for other actions:

  • Completed “Story of Stuff” Citizen Muscle Boot Camp
  • Helped my sweet spousey set up a drying rack for indoor clothes drying during rainy/colder weather (their engineering system for our cloth wipes is genius)
  • Harvested drying beans and had a mini-shelling party
  • Learned about the history of prisoner rights to vote in Canada as part of discussion about women’s voting rights
  • Started a discussion with my Zen teacher about a climate change-focused initiative within our sangha as my project for the upcoming One Earth Sangha EcoSattva Training
  • End of month is bus pass time – reminded of the insanity of throw-away monthly plastic passes I sleuthed transit systems in Canada to look at alternatives to disposable monthly plastic bus passes, then contacted BC Transit to request & suggest alternatives

Looking ahead to the next week

As this Challenge progresses I am struggling with how to do all the things I want to do, as many of the activities that I’ve started doing through this Challenge are ones that I want to continue to do for the long haul (for example practicing from the 11 anti-racist commitments listed above is a long-term commitment, and my volunteer work with a local farmer will continue till the work winds down for the winter). Because there are so many longer-term actions already on the go, this week I decided to go back to my list of more contained, one-off actions so I’m still stretching myself to try something new every day. Planned actions are:

  • Mark the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and learn more about the rebuilding of New Orleans by watching 10 Years After Katrina: ‘Resilience’, ‘Recovery’, and REALITY
  • Promote local food – talk with the farmer I’m volunteering with about ways to raise her profile and encourage community-supported agriculture (CSA) sign-up for next year, e.g., local “farm feast” event, neigbourhood flyers; contact friends who might be interested in CSA
  • Look into rain barrel setup for roof runoff: check gutter/downspout options for barrel placement, and source non-plastic rain barrels
  • Excursion with my sweet spousey to a local organic food store to try to source plastic-free alternatives to food that our usual grocery store only carries in plastic packaging (e.g., tamari, seaweed)
  • Finish reading The Pet Poo Pocket Guide and sort out what to do with critter poop (other than sending to landfill, which is what we currently do)
  • Mental health: Attend first session of BCALM’s Art of Living Mindfully course (an 8 week course that “provides participants with a firm grounding in mindfulness based strategies useful in navigating stress and in recognizing patterns of thought, speech and behavior that may be contributing to stress and suffering”)
  • Spiritual health: Attend trans* Buddhist virtual meditation and participate in post-sit video chat

And what about you?

I would love to get feedback from you. What do you think of all of this rambling? What resonates with you, and what doesn’t? Are you trying your own sustainability initiatives and if so what are you learning?

Have a great week!

100 Day Sustainability Challenge: Results from Week #7

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

As I started to write this I realized that last night I reached the halfway point of this Challenge (50 days done, 50 days to go). So, today starts the 2nd half of the Challenge.

Recap of the past week

In Week #7 I had two goals: (1) reduce computer use (with a gradual cessation of specific computer activities), and (2) use that freed up time to do something that contributes to local and global movements for survival and liberation. I already wrote quite a bit last week about the reasons behind these goals, so won’t recap that context here.

What I learned this week: The short answer — it can be a lot easier to refrain from doing an activity (even an entrenched habitual activity) than to actively do something outside my comfort zone. The long answer — read on!

My computer reduction plan for the week went mostly as scheduled. I went for 7 days without Netflix, 6 days without Facebook, 5 days without checking the news, 4 days without email, 3 days without YouTube or any other form of online entertainment, 2 days without internet sleuthing, and most of the final day completely unplugged from the computer (I ended the week’s challenge at 6:30 PM as without the ability to do any of the other stuff, I ended up unplugging a day early). There were two minor “life happens” glitches – did a quick internet sleuth when my sweet spouse needed help with something that could not be sorted out via phone, and computer problems prior to a planned Skype meeting required I shoot off a quick email to let my long-distance colleague know I’d be late. As I know already that it’s pointless to be perfectionistic, I didn’t stew about either of these.

The experience of being unplugged was really pleasant. I was shocked by how much time it freed up (a good reality check on how much I have been using the computer lately). I was also surprised by the cessation of the feeling that I am never doing enough to keep on top of things, always feeling pressed for time and rushing through each task – which speaks to the emotional and mental fatigue that comes from information overload. Definitely I enjoyed life a lot more the less I was plugged in.

As for using my freed up time to do something that contributes to local and global movements for survival and liberation…FAIL! This was a really interesting experience as it is the first time since this Challenge started that I totally hit a wall. Without the computer, I could not think of more than a couple things that I could do. And even of the few things I had planned out, I did not do most of them. Before I get into what I think was going on with that, I want to first identify the things that I did do, as there are some amazing initiatives that I hope readers will consider supporting:

  • Community Tool Shed (CTS): For many years a member of the Lekwungen community has invited Indigenous people and allies to work together in reinstating the Kwetlal (camas) food system. This food system has endured over 150 years of colonial impacts, and today the 5% of the remaining Kwetlal food system remains threatened and weakened through the suppression of cultural roles, land fragmentation, and proliferation of invasive plant species introduced by colonial settlers. Through the CTS participants come together for a couple hours once a month to help restore and caretake the Kwetlal food system, learn about the impacts of colonialism, and learn about traditional food systems and the land. This month we met in Meegan (Beaconhill park) and removed Scotch broom and English ivy. I’ve known about the CTS from its inception in 2011 but this was my first time actually participating.
  • Unist’ot’en coastal tour: As mentioned in Challenge Week #4, for the past six years Wet’suwet’en people from the Unist’ot’en clan and allies have been maintaining a community in Unist’ot’en yintah (territory) that is directly in the path of planned oil and gas pipelines that are opposed by grassroots Wet’suwet’en people. The Unist’ot’en camp is, in the words of the Unist’ot’en Declaration, “an expression of the continuing and unbroken chain of occupation and use of our territory by our clan”. This past week Unist’ot’en hereditary chiefs and the official camp spokesperson have been travelling in Coast Salish territories to share their experiences and also raise funds to support the camp. I had planned to go to the local event but was overwhelmed after having a bit of an adventure getting home from visiting sweet spousey’s campsite 28k from where we live, and decided to spend the night at home and just send a donation separately.
  • Equal Justice Initiative: From a friend’s book suggestion, this week I read Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. The book is a beautifully written, heavy and important indictment of the prison-industrial complex and capital punishment, and the ways that racism and poverty tie into both; and also tremendously hope-filled stories of grace and compassion from the individuals and communities most affected. The author founded and still works for the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), and wow – the EJI does amazing prison justice, economic justice, and anti-racism work, including litigating on behalf of prisoners who have been sentenced to death, youth in prison, people wrongly convicted or charged with violent crimes, people living in poverty who have been denied effective legal representation, and others whose trials are marked by racist bias or prosecutorial misconduct; working with communities that have been marginalized by poverty and racism; advocating for reform of the criminal justice system; and raising public awareness about the impacts of mass incarceration, excessive punishment, and the ways that the prison-industrial complex both reflects and re-entrenches systemic oppression. As a starting point I donated money to the EJI last week and this week plan to work through the EJI’s other posted suggestions for ways people can get involved.
  • Catalyst Project’s Anne Braden Anti-Racist Organizer Training Program for white social justice activists: This 4 month political education and leadership development program is designed to support the vision, strategy, and organizing skills of white activists in becoming accountable, principled anti-racist organizers building multiracial movements for justice. I first learned about the program in 2013 when a dear friend and very inspiring activist, organizer, and all-round amazing human being took the training. The program’s course reader is publicly available and I had hoped to, at minimum, use some of my time this week to start reading from the 2015 reader. But I didn’t do this – instead I read 2 other books: Plastic-free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and You Can Too, by Beth Terry (who runs My Plastic Free Life, a great online compendium of resources) and re-read The 100 Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating by Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon.

Some reflections on these efforts: honestly, I’m disappointed in myself, and also curious about why I took this route. Having identified in last week’s post so many potential issues I could have learned more about and found ways to contribute to, why didn’t I actually do anything on most of them? Why, if I wanted to learn more about plastic, didn’t I look at social justice and survival issues relating to the plastic industry? There are many resources I found in a quick Google search, e.g., Van Jones on the link between the concept of disposability of plastic and the white supremacist ideology of disposability of certain groups of people, the Center on Health, Environment and Justice factsheet on the disproportionate location of PVC plants in low-income communities of colour, or the PBS documentary on North American/European countries dumping toxic plastic waste in Ghana, China, and India. Why then did I focus on a book that deals only cursorily with the intersections between social justice and environmental justice? Ditto re industrial agriculture – reconnecting food with place is super important on so many levels but why did I go with a book that is mostly a personal foodie journal by two white people, and a book I’d already read to boot (and how freakin twisted is it that I did that right after taking part in something specifically about Indigenous food systems?!).

There are some obvious answers:

  1. Individually: I’ve been racist and buying into white-supremacist thinking (dismissing, marginalizing and trivializing the expertise of Indigenous people and people of colour; positioning white people as more central, knowledgeable, and relatable to me; and not being consciously aware of this process).
  2. Systemic: On a systems level what I just described about individual thinking applies as well to who gets coverage in media, library $ allocation for book purchases, etc.

Both of these are I suspect true to some degree. But I think that in large part the answer comes from what I wrote in Week 6: “I was also reminded this week of how my race and class privilege gives me the option to decide if, when, and how I put time and resources into supporting certain survival/liberation movements, and the obscenity of that privilege when so many people are fighting every day for their lives and the survival of their loved ones.” That it is uncomfortable, painful, and challenging to confront the reality of one’s own privilege is not news to me, but my resistance to following through on it was a bit of a surprise.

I often clarify my own thinking by reading other people’s writing, so started by reading Noor Al-Sibai’s piece Privilege Discomfort: Why You Need to Get the Fuck Over It, and was struck by this:

It’s an enormously uncomfortable feeling to sit with — to be accused of racism by one’s simple existence, by the accident of birth and genetic pigmentation, or accused of sexism by being comfortable with the male gender one was assigned at birth. Most white people and men choose not to continue that line of thinking….But the fact remains that it is the discomfort and isolation of the privileged that stops them from recognizing and doing something about the oppression of others. I could lament all day about how difficult it has been for me to come to grips with my white privilege, but that struggle is nothing in comparison to the oppression faced by people of color.

That moment of discomfort and isolation is so essential to becoming a better ally and to becoming a better person, because it’s at that moment that, consciously or not, the privileged person recognizes that their whole entire life is based upon a system of inequality that is inescapable and wrong. It’s at that moment that the majority of “liberals” become turned off to race, gender, queer and disability theory. To look at oneself and claim that “I benefit from institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and ability-discrimination” isn’t exactly a walk in the park.

And it’s at that moment that we must remind ourselves that as dissonant and uncomfortable and perhaps even painful as it might be to admit that we perpetuate oppression simply by existing, it’s a hell of a lot easier than actually being oppressed.

Buddhist practice gives me lots of tools to work with resistance to a feeling of discomfort, to just be with it (not hanging onto it and not pushing it away), and the curiosity to investigate it and try to understand it more deeply. I haven’t used any of those tools this week. What I’ve done instead is to fill up my time with something that is less challenging and more comfortable, to try to move back into ignorance, to fall asleep again. Without the computer to give me busy-ness (and simultaneous feeling of accomplishing something), this pattern has been more exposed.

In Why it’s so Hard to Talk to White People About Racism Dr. Robin DiAngelo describes “white fragility” — stress/discomfort experienced by white people as a result of a challenge to the belief structure, cultural norms, expectations, centrality, control, and sense of entitlement that white people have (often unconsciously) as a result of living in a white supremacist society; and a corresponding push back when challenged through withdrawal, defensiveness, crying, argument, minimization, ignoring the challenge, or otherwise seeking to regain “our racial position and equilibrium”. As an antidote to this harmful brittleness Dr. DiAngelo suggests:

  • Being willing to tolerate the discomfort associated with an honest appraisal and discussion of our internalized superiority and racial privilege.
  • Challenging our own racial reality by acknowledging ourselves as racial beings with a particular and limited perspective on race.
  • Attempting to understand the racial realities of people of color through authentic interaction rather than through the media or unequal relationships.
  • Taking action to address our own racism, the racism of other whites, and the racism embedded in our institutions — e.g., get educated and act.

Although the content above is specific to racism, and there are unique features of each type of privilege/oppression that bear examination and consideration, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend similar strategies for cisgender people wondering how to deal with their transphobia, or straight people wanting to work on their homophobia.

And this brings me to the other element that this week’s experience pointed out for me — the importance of real life relationships. It is telling me to me that this week’s fail was during a week where, through my reduction in computer use, I could not do online activism. At this point, having been away from in-person activism for so long, I rely completely on the internet to hear about things that are happening and mostly on the internet to participate. Through Facebook I’m starting to be able to put names/faces to some local activists but do not have actual real life relationships with people who are doing local Indigenous resurgence, anti-colonial, and anti-racism work; although I kinda sorta know what is going on with anti-poverty work through friends who are involved in those movements, it is still not a real personal connection for me — in contrast with earlier decades of my life, none of the people in my life now are struggling with homelessness, addiction, imprisonment, criminalization, or working in the survival sex trade, and there is no immediately visible street community in the suburban neighbourhood that I live in. We’ve lived in this neighbourhood for 8 years and although it is one of the most mixed I’ve experienced in Victoria in relation to language, ethnicity, and culture, I only know my most immediate neighbours by name, and they are white, relatively affluent people. If someone asked me what the immediate survival issues are in our community, other than very general responses like “colonialism”, I honestly wouldn’t know. Showing up for one Community Tool Shed is the first real-life thing I’ve done to connect with local Indigenous survival and resurgence efforts in almost a decade.

So, reality check – I am a total beginner again, and need to continue to press myself (and set up accountability) to actually take the many uncomfortable steps necessary to move forward. And when I get uncomfortable, try to catch it as quickly as possible and do something constructive with it instead of staying stuck.

Looking ahead to the next week

I’ve been sitting here for an hour now staring at this screen, Googling various search terms trying to find local groups doing work on survival issues and figure out what the heck to write here.

Dr. David Leonard offers this pith advice in Challenging Racism and the Problem with White “Allies”:

I focus on words like those articulated @prisonculture, ‘JUST DO THE WORK. Don’t talk about, “reflect” on it, pontificate, Just ACT. That’s it.’ And while doing the work, be accountable.

This is a totally unsatisfying way to end this post. I want to have a plan, or at least a framework for what to do next. But I really am at the starting point, and don’t know what to do other than the very next step. So, my plan is this: reach out to the people who I know locally and have some kind of activist relationship with. Explain where I’m at, where I want to get to, and ask for help. Do some more searching. Be open and see what comes up. Don’t spend all my time on the computer.

And what about you?

I would love to get feedback from you. What do you think of all of this rambling? What resonates with you, and what doesn’t? Are you trying your own sustainability initiatives and if so what are you learning?

Have a great week!

100 Day Sustainability Challenge: Results from Week #6

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

Hello everyone! It’s been an interesting week, transitioning from a mostly opportunistic approach to finding things to do each day, to a much more structured/planned out approach.

Recap: Week #6

I mentioned last week that the theme for this week would be energy conservation and reducing fossil fuel dependence (and related greenhouse gas emissions), and planned the following actions:

  1. Look into LED bulbs to replace regular lightbulbs as they burn out
  2. Look into what kind of system we could use for indoor drying of clothes during rainy/cooler weather
  3. Finish reading The Pet Poo Pocket Guide and sort out what to do with critter poop (other than sending to landfill, which is what we currently do)
  4. Write local government about Bullfrog’s new biofuel option as part of converting to green energy
  5. Do research on how to make one’s home a net zero energy building (including looking into offsetting)
  6. Start compiling list of zero-waste resources and ideas for actions
  7. Check all electrical appliances in house and, where possible, reduce standby power draws (e.g., by setting up power bars or unplugging appliance when not in use)

How did the week actually go? I ended up doing 5 of the actions listed above (did not do #3 or #6), as well as a few actions responding to things that came up as the week went along that were not on the list:

  • contacted the maker and seller of our air purifier system (which helps those in our family with asthma as well as skin allergies) to press them on how to recycle HEPA air filters
  • inspired by a post by the ever-amazing Katie Loncke, co-director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, read more about the recent actions involving Black Lives Matter activists interrupting Bernie Sanders’ speeches to draw attention to racism, anti-black violence, and black liberation, and engaged in discussion with other Buddhist Peace Fellowship members about the tactics and purpose of those actions
  • watched documentaries on addiction & the horrific mess that is the war on (people who use) drugs, and read book on drug war policy, decriminalization, and legalization

This mix of planned actions and room for spontaneity feels great. I like having a plan and not being overly attached to the plan. I was also reminded this week of how my race and class privilege gives me the option to decide if, when, and how I put time and resources into supporting certain survival/liberation movements, and the obscenity of that privilege when so many people are fighting every day for their lives and the survival of their loved ones. So, as part of Week 7 I decided to do a combo action each day – refraining from something that is a waste of time, and using that time to do something that supports survival/liberation movements. Which leads me to…

Looking Ahead: Week #7

Last week I mentioned my intention to use Week 7 to tackle my longstanding and sticky habitual overuse of the computer. I often pat myself on the back for not having an iPhone or even a cell phone, but lately I have been plugged into the laptop most of the day and compulsively checking email, Facebook, and local news. By interrupting this habit pattern I hope to really have a look at how I’m spending my time and using electricity, with the aim of, in the longer term, using the computer only when actually necessary (both to reduce my consumption and also make more time for deliberate and useful activities).

I started by mapping out 6 ways I use the computer, and staggered them throughout the week so each day I add something new to my “I’m not doing this activity this week” list and am thereby cumulatively reducing my computer use. I wanted to start with the ones that are most challenging so I can get more practice days on those activities. What the plan looks like thus far:

  • Saturday > Friday (7 days): No Netflix
  • Sunday > Friday (6 days): No Facebook
  • Monday > Friday (5 days):  No news checking
  • Tuesday > Friday (4 days): No email
  • Wednesday > Friday (3 days): No online entertainment (YouTube, TV shows, etc.)
  • Thursday > Friday (2 days): No internet sleuthing
  • Friday (1 day): Completely unplugged – no computer use at all

To be clear, I don’t think any of these activities are intrinsically bad or wrong; I primarily use Facebook, online news, email, and internet sleuthing to find out what is going on politically, stay connected with loved ones, and achieve other goals that have real meaning and value to me, and most of what I watch on Netflix, YouTube, and online TV has at least some educational value. Personal computers have made many good things possible in my life and in society at large, including mass-scale actions, increased accountability and transparency in corporate and government dealings, democratization of media, increased accessibility of information, improved communication and networking between marginalized communities, crowdfunding, production and sharing of creative arts, health and environmental research, etc.

But even “good” computer use is a form of consumerism with definite environmental and social justice implications. As electronic devices, computers require a wide variety of resources for production and operation (e.g., metals, chemicals used in plastic construction, and electricity), many of which are associated with social and environmental justice concerns. As an example, coltan mining is an unregulated industry and although coltan is found throughout the world, rich countries have primarily supported resource extraction from poor countries with extremely vulnerable populations. Accordingly coltan mining has been implicated in the development of slave labour operations, child labour, financing of dictatorships and military conflicts, destabilization of traditional economies and Indigenous cultures, water pollution, wildlife predation, and a host of other ills. Additionally disposal is a concern as computers contain components that can be toxic to humans and other animals, and the sheer volume of waste from consumer demand for new and improved models is staggering – according to Wikipedia, in the USA alone 30 million computers are discarded annually. There is a huge energy demand for electricity to make, transport, operate, and dispose of computers.

And if I’m being honest, not all of my computer use has any redeeming value. I find it strangely relaxing to watch movies where people blow shit up – arguably an immoral waste of resources, and often accompanied by misogynist, racist, militaristic, and otherwise hugely offensive plotlines, stereotyping of characters, etc. Less offensive but equally wasteful are the many hours I’ve spent watching videos of cute baby animals.

Additionally I’m not sure what computers are doing to our brains and bodies. In my own life, I notice that with my increased reliance on the computer, I have become rusty at old-school skills like having a face-to-face or telephone conversation with someone, looking up information in a book, or figuring stuff out on my own. The computer makes stuff way easier, and that is both a blessing and a curse – the more I opt for the easy path, the more I expect everything to be easy and the more resistant I become to doing something that requires even a little bit of effort, let alone actual struggle. Computer over-use has also been implicated in significant health problems including muscle pain, eyestrain, headache, stress disorders, and changes in how our brains process and respond to stimuli (as a result of the visual and auditory hyperstimulation involved in many forms of on-screen entertainment). Computer use can be highly addictive, with compulsive and excessive fixation on internet interactions, gaming, etc. persisting despite serious negative consequences in a person’s personal, social, or work life.

There is an obvious and urgent need for people like me who use more than a sustainable share of resources to use less – for the planet’s health, social health, and our own personal health. There is also an obvious and urgent need for all of us to use our time wisely, including meaningfully contributing to social and environmental justice.

And so, in Week 7 I’ve decided to do two types of activities each day – (1) refraining from some aspect of computer use, and (2) using that time to do something that contributes to local and global movements for survival and liberation. There is no shortage of things to do given settlers’ attempts to exterminate Indigenous people and cultures; legislated poverty and repression of people who do not have shelter; police brutality, particularly against Indigenous people and black people; deaths resulting from the drug war, criminalization of the sex trade, and the prison industry; refugees forced into dangerous migration attempts and squalid living conditions; communities of colour dying from disproportionately high rates of cancer due to environmental racism; farmworkers subjected to toxic agricultural chemicals; high rates of heart disease among people living in poverty who do not have access to nutritious food; people living in countries torn by conflict and civil war; people living in countries with past conflict where landmines and other unexploded ordnance continue to kill; people dying of treatable illnesses because big pharma will not make affordable medicines available…the extent of death and destruction is overwhelming but also means that there should be no difficulty in finding something useful to do! I have not planned out what each of the day’s “do something useful” activities will be as it has been a long time since I’ve been involved in this kind of work so it might well be that much of this week is just baby steps to find out what is going on, what I can usefully do, etc. Still, I am excited to be taking even these small steps, and curious to see what happens when I move away from the computer and into the world.

And what about you?

I would love to get feedback from you. What do you think of all of this rambling? What resonates with you, and what doesn’t? Are you trying your own sustainability initiatives and if so what are you learning?

Have a great week!