Wow, it’s already been nearly a month since I started this Sustainability Challenge. Cool! Seems like a good time to reflect on the Challenge as a whole, as well as reporting back on lessons learned from week #4.
Week #4: This week it really felt like a lot was about relationships and starting to take some baby steps around connecting with people and building principled community. I know in theory that relationships and community are important for sustainability, health, and creating positive change, but a lot of my experiences of political community have sucked. Rather than working to improve my skills to be in community I have mostly dealt with my disappointments and hurts by holing up at home. So my relationships have dwindled over time and I have become quite rusty at community-building skills. To change this I will need to actually get out there and practice being in community, and developing relationships with people who, however shyly or clumsily, are also interested in the same kind of issues as I am. And on that note, some actions from Week #4:
- Unist’ot’en solidarity. Six years ago Wet’suwet’en people from the Unist’ot’en clan set up a permanent community in their traditional 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 allows Unist’ot’en people and allies to continuously monitor the roads through the area to protect Wet’suwet’en lands from incursion (the road leading into the territory has been closed to all further industry activities and a protocol is in place to ensure that anyone travelling through the territory has consent to be there). In addition to protecting Wet’suwet’en lands there are also efforts to build a healing camp to help extend the leaning, healing, reconnecting with nature, and decolonization work that happens every day at the camp, with Indigenous youth as the main focus. This week I attended a solidarity action (banner hanging from a local highway overpass) and connected with a couple people at that action about ways to provide ongoing support. I was very embarrassed that I have been away from Indigenous solidarity work for so many years but glad to take some small steps towards this again and to meet other people with similar interests.
- Trans community. Since burning out in trans community work many years ago and dealing with a lot of hurtful criticism by other trans people related to the work I was doing, I have for the past 10 years avoided trans community events and now do not have many trans people in my life. Impressed by the Alt Pride parade that we went to a few weeks ago, this week I went to the Alt Pride All Bodies’ Swim and connected with other trans people for the first time in a long time. It was an amazing thing to have my shirt off in a public setting, scars and all, and to be in the presence of other people who have experienced shaming around their bodies but are determined to love themselves and each other, and to build a world where all bodies are valued and seen as beautiful. This week I also connected with trans Buddhists in Vancouver and New York. All of a sudden after many years of hiding from trans people, there are a whole bunch of trans people are coming into my life and I am grateful!
- Housing. There has been heavy local controversy recently about Victoria City Council’s exploration of setting up a tent city, micro-housing village, and other band-aid solutions to homelessness. Many people have pointed out how ineffective these initiatives are in addressing the root causes of homelessness, such as poverty and lack of affordable housing, and have called for the provincial and federal governments to step up around providing housing funding. In response to the proposal of setting up a tent city in a local park there has also been the predictable NIMBY (not in my backyard) poor-bashing, stereotyping and fear-mongering about people who are homeless being a danger to children and home-owners. So, this week I wrote Victoria City Council to express my support for their efforts to improve things for people who are currently sleeping outside and to ask for their input on the idea of a network of safe houses (more on this below), and more generally ways 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, instead of waiting until government provides money to build more housing.
More on the safe house network idea: For some time now I have been thinking that 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. Definitely there are some people who need solo living options as they are currently too traumatized to be able to live with other people, and homeless people should not be forced into housing that is not of their choosing, but for people who are open to sharing space, if everyone who was housed shared their resources with people who do not have housing, there would already be more than enough to go around. (This is like the situation with food. Hunger exists not because there is not enough food, but because there is inequity in food affordability and distribution.) This kind of informal sharing of space already happens, between people who know and trust each other (family, friends, friends of friends, etc.). Sometimes these arrangements are horrible, exploitive, unsafe, and totally substandard; it is not uncomplicated, but sharing bathrooms, kitchens, sleeping space, and storage space is a possibility if there are genuine relationships between people with and without housing.
And that is where I see a big gap. Currently the main ways that housed people get to know people without housing is typically through some kind of formal service relationship – whether as a paid professional or as a volunteer. And in those relationships it is considered unprofessional and unethical to have a real mutual relationship that might include people who are “clients” coming to the house of the person who is the “service provider”.
For some time I have been kicking over the idea of having a voluntary safe house network, where people with housing agree to share what they have with people who need space. That sharing might take the form of having people be able to come have a shower, or share a meal, or stash their stuff, or put up a tent, or stay in a spare room, or use a computer…there are many possibilities.
When I think about the kind of neighbourhood I want to live in, I want my neighbourhood to be very diverse, connected, and caring. I want to live in a neighbourhood where we can not only borrow a cup of sugar, but someone could go to someone else’s door and ask to use the bathroom, or where there could be an open invite to come over and share dinner – that is the way I remember my grandmother approaching the world and I have seen examples of this throughout my life that have really moved me. When our next door neighbour’s bathroom wasn’t working they came over to use our shower, and they let us use their washing machine when ours was busted. How can we extend this concept of “neighbour” to include people who do not have housing but have many other things they can share? This is something that has been restless in me for a while, living in this beautiful house and not having shared it with many people, and is an ongoing conversation with my sweet spousey about how to make sure he gets what he needs in terms of safety and privacy and home as a place of refuge from the world, which is something I value but also have some different feelings about. No doubt this will be an ongoing discussion…I am grateful he is willing to have these conversations! - Learning. This week I completed week 1 of the “Story of Solutions” 4 week Citizen Muscle Boot Camp program. Week 1 is about figuring out your purpose and the course uses short creative exercises to help clarify your skills, interests and passion. I wrote: “My purpose is to use my writing and problem-solving skills to, working with others who are engaged in a contemplative practice, inspire and empower people to challenge and change the ways we think about our relationships to ourselves, each other, and the earth!” The wording is clunky but I found the process of working on this helpful not only in thinking about how to focus my activist efforts but also giving me some ideas of what I want to look for in paid work.
- Visiting family. This week I visited my sister, who is living up-island on K’ómoks traditional territory. It is the first time that I have travelled in over a year and I was pretty nervous about it, so didn’t set any particular sustainability goals, but aimed to travel as lightly as possible. I made the trip by commercial bus, and the bus was not very full, so was likely a heavy fossil fuel use per person – next time I will look into taking a smaller shuttle bus instead. Both going there and returning, I brought healthy home-made food in a reuseable container and a refillable bottle for water, instead of buying unhealthy over-packaged food/drinks. I also continued water conservation practices, not difficult to keep in mind as up-island they are also in a drought, and their local government has, unlike ours, put signage up everywhere and has implemented appropriately stricter restrictions around water wastage. Under the terms of this Challenge actions that I’ve already written about earlier don’t count as actions this week, but I was proud to do them in another location. My sister set up a rain barrel to help collect roof water for her garden and I checked out her setup as part of thinking about how we could set up a rain collection system here to divert water from the storm sewer system and into the ground. We also did some work around garden planning and problem-solving around how to keep her garden soil healthy while minimizing invasive weeds. While at her place we also talked about how to do food and decided to home-cook meals instead of eating out, and then planned and made healthy delicious vegan meals using local produce as much as possible. Yay! It was great to talk with someone else about sustainability and find things that we could do that required a bit of effort but were simple and satisfying.
This week I have also been reflecting on the connection between my mental health recovery and the collective state of deep disturbance that we are in. After two glorious weeks of being free of agoraphobia and not having any panic attacks, this week I had several days of great difficulty (with repeated panic attacks, both out in public and at home). It was deeply upsetting and disappointing and made me question what to do around work, volunteering, and other out in the world stuff – am I doing too much, or am I just having rational and sane feelings arising from breaking out of denial and getting more in touch with the disconnect between my values and the really sick culture that I live in? How does one stay sane in a suicidal culture, and move from shallow level actions into deeply nourishing, transformative work? I don’t know what the answer is but still feel that to recover integrity of self I need to keep going with this path of using my time and energy to work on things that I hope will help create positive change in the world, just keep going and see what happens…
General reflections on the Sustainability Challenge thus far: In this first month I have mostly been opportunistic about ways to do something new around sustainability. I have made lists of ideas for actions to take, but haven’t actually mapped out when I will pursue any of them. And thus far there have been many opportunities to do something each day so it has, for the most part, not been challenging to find things to do. But I would also like to experiment with being more intentional about it and also planning specific actions to take so that the more complicated actions that require a bit of planning do not get forgotten, and I’m not just looking around at the end of the day for simple/easy things I already do, or things that may not be particularly effective, just so I can say I did something. Ideas? Suggestions?
Thanks for reading! I look forward to comments 🙂
stand up eko 
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