sustainability

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 #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 #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 #5

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

Hello everyone!

Last week, reflecting on being close to completing the first month of my 100 day Sustainability Challenge, I mentioned that thus far I had mostly been opportunistic about ways to do something new around sustainability (doing whatever came up in the day, rather than planning my actions ahead of time), and in the upcoming month wanting to experiment with being more intentional about it and also planning specific actions to take. In part this was because I noticed that I kept postponing more complicated actions that require a bit of planning, and often realized late in the day that I hadn’t “done my sustainability” thing yet and made it about checking the tickbox by looking around for simple/easy things I already do, just to be able to say I did something.

This past week I’ve still been quite opportunistic in my daily activities but also have started planning the week ahead, so thought for the next little while I’d use my weekly reflections to both report on the past week as well as sketch out ideas for the upcoming week. That’ll add a smidge of accountability, and also give me something to look back on when I do the weekly recap – what did and didn’t go according to plan, etc.

Recap: Week #5

Although this week continued to be relatively random & opportunistic, there were some definite themes.

  1. Right livelihood: In the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, he articulated a way to live life that would lead to the end of suffering. This framework, the Eightfold Path, includes right (sometimes translated as correct) livelihood. There have been many interpretations of this; the ones that resonate most for me explore what it means to make one’s living in a way that does not cause harm and that is ethically positive. Appreciating that living in a capitalist, colonial society all forms of making a living involve some form of exploitation and it is not possible to have completely pure ethics around any type of job on stolen land, I have been exploring what would be an at least OK job. What keeps coming up is:
    (a) I want to work.
    (b) I want to do work that fulfills a real need, not a need manufactured primarily to perpetuate/sustain the dominant culture.
    (c) I want to do work that actively brings into being the kind of world I want to live in.
    (d) I want to be healthy in my job, with enough time to do the things I need to stay healthy as well as enough energy to actively contribute to my family, sangha, and the community at large.

    So, a few weeks ago I applied for a part-time job (point d) that would be supporting work I believe is valuable and meaningful (points b and c). I didn’t get the job, so this week sleuthed websites that list local job ads as well as websites, and did a daily search. A local environmental group posted a position that seemed like a good fit for my skillset so I did a bit of digging to find out more about the organization, and asked friends for feedback on suitability. It became clear in talking with friends (and especially my very insightful spouse) that although the organization does good work, a full-time job that involves moving paper around – even moving paper for a good cause – is not a good thing for my mental health. Part-time admin work for a good cause is still something I want to consider as a way to use my skills and privilege for maximum benefit, but there is something in me that also wants to do something more hands on and immediate.

    Enter farming.

    As I mentioned in earlier weeks of this Challenge, food is an awesome place to look at sustainability as the agriculture system is linked to so many environmental and social justice issues including water consumption and pollution, fossil fuel and other energy use, deforestation and other destruction of natural habitat, GMOs, farmworker rights, pollinator mass die-offs, exploitation of poor countries by rich countries and big agribusiness, commercial patenting of seeds and traditional knowledge, expropriation and destruction of Indigenous peoples’ lands, and inequities of access to healthy, nutritious, affordable, culturally relevant food. For me it’s also been coming up repeatedly over the years as work that meets a real human need, in striking comparison to much of the paper-pushing I’ve done over the years.

    I’ve worked with my housemates to create food gardens in almost every place I’ve lived for more than a few months in, and for a number of years have been thinking about growing food as a potential vocation. Small-scale farming is a world apart from big agribusiness; locally grown, fairly traded organic food offers significant environmental, social justice, and human health benefits. It is the only viable option for a low carbon world. But there are a lot of questions – am I physically strong enough to do it, can I do it without a car, how would I find land, am I willing to put in the kind of hours required, what would I do in the winter, is it really possible to make a living doing this, etc. The only way to answer these questions is to actually do it but I am too scared to just get out there and start doing it on my own, I want to learn from someone who has made a go of it. Many of the farm internships I’ve looked at in the past are on lands outside the Victoria area and require living on the farm, which isn’t compatible with having responsibilities in my own home. A hefty commute also isn’t sustainable.

    So, this week I did some sleuthing on farm internships in general and scouted farms that are realistically bikeable from where we live. I had a specific farm in mind that is a few blocks from us, but wanted to look at other farms just in case. Happily, things are looking pretty good with the farmer who lives and farms in our neighbourhood. She’s got a great sense of humour, we have shared political values (e.g., she has donated a portion of profits to help cover legal costs for First Nations fighting oil & gas companies seeking to build pipelines without consent on Indigenous lands), and does much of her work by bike. Best of all, she’s open to having someone work with her and pester her with questions! So, this week I made arrangements to meet with her to discuss volunteering on a part-time basis to receive mentorship in how to structure small plot intensive (aka SPIN) urban/suburban farming. Our first meeting is next week and I’m pretty excited! Even if all I learn from this is that farming isn’t right for me, at least I will have tried it, instead of just thinking about it.

    I also (finally) did some work removing invasives from our home garden/mini-farm, and clearing paths to facilitate food harvesting. This year the harvest timing has been really different than past years with the hot and dry weather, and we have a ton of food ready right now, so lots of harvesting quite a bit earlier than usual…

  2. Government lobbying: Even though it’s highly problematic to participate in settler government machinations (which often serve to legitimize colonial BS), as a settler I do feel responsible to challenge and otherwise attempt to rein in my government. So, this week I took part in the current 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 (e.g., the purpose of the economy is to make more money for BC, make more stuff, and create jobs). I also wrote a letter to all Canadian federal party leaders & environment reps/critics, as part of the ClimateFast campaign (writing them on the first day of each month to ask them to make combating climate change their top priority, i.e., put climate change first). This is the 10th month I’ve been doing this and each month I write a new letter identifying something that happened in the past month relating to climate change – it’s a great way for me to keep on top of what is going on in this field.
  3. Assessing & planning: Upon receiving our water bill, I checked our water consumption stats in the most recent quarter compared to previous years – we are using less water than last year despite significantly hotter and drier weather – yay! Not sure how much of that is a measure of our water conservation measures vs. slightly less intensive food gardening this year, but whatever the reason is it going in the right direction.Also, this week I sleuthed ways to reduce fossil fuel dependence and made a list for future actions. As part of my “first month of the Challenge” completion I’ve been thinking a lot about the “do something new every day” structure I built into this Challenge. I set it up that way deliberately to make myself stretch outside of my comfort zone, but now that I’ve done 35+ days can really see that there are different kinds of tasks and some of them are ones that need to be done repeatedly over time to have a cumulative effect (e.g., tending our garden so we can eat 0-mile organic plants) vs. one-offs (e.g., participating in government public consultation re climate change priorities) — and for the ones that come up again and again, I need to decide what to prioritize for my time and energy, as I can’t do all the things all the time. I don’t know how to evaluate effectiveness/impact — whether it is better to spend the time catching and distributing water from doing the dishes and showering, or let that go and ride my bike instead of taking the bus, or…? Even though I am not sure what is the most effective use of my time, I sure do notice how much I try to squeeze into the day and how shortcuts/time-savers often involve some level of irresponsibility/unsustainability. So, some of what I’ve been thinking about this week is how to, in addition to doing something positive, refrain from doing something negative (to free up the time to do things that are more positive). Which leads me to…

Looking ahead: Weeks #6 and #7

In Week #6, I’m going to focus on energy conservation and ways to reduce fossil fuel dependence (and emissions). Planned actions are:

  • Look into LED bulbs to replace regular lightbulbs as they burn out
  • Look into what kind of system we could use for indoor drying of clothes during rainy/cooler weather
  • 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)
  • Write local government about Bullfrog’s new biofuel option as part of converting to green energy
  • Do research on how to make one’s home a net zero energy building (including looking into offsetting)
  • Start compiling list of zero-waste resources and ideas for actions
  • 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)

I don’t want to map things out too far in advance, but there is a longstanding and sticky habit for me that I want to tackle in Week #7 — overuse of the computer. I have already shifted away from the excessive entertainment that I got caught up in earlier in recovery when my cognitive function was so crappy that watching MI-5 on Netflix was about all I could muster, and am not longer playing solitaire online, but am still plugged in most of the day (and still compulsively checking email, Facebook, and local news). In the past I’ve done unplugged days and a “no online entertainment” month, so I know I can do this, and it feels like it’s time. Not entirely sure what form it will take but am thinking at this point no Netflix or Facebook for the week, and also taking some time away from email (probably not the whole week) and from the computer as a whole (definitely not the whole week as I have some volunteer obligations that require computer use). Am hoping this will help kickstart some overall changes in behaviour around when and how I’m using the computer, ideally limiting it to a set number of hours per day (both to reduce electricity use and also to make time for other positive things).

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 #4

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

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 🙂

100 Day Sustainability Challenge: Results from Week #3

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

The previous week was pretty explosive around the questioning of how to live my life with integrity and realizing that I needed to make big changes in every area of my life. After a week of a lot of (good but painful) disillusionment and upheaval, Week #3 involved a lot of “now what” actions — taking the first steps in translating the insights from Week #2 into practical, tangible things to start making the kinds of changes that I want to make. Most of the actions along these lines related to family and home, including:

  • Celebrating my 11th anniversary with my beloved partner and talking about how to intentionally put energy into sustaining our relationship over the long term. This is the longest relationship I’ve ever been and am learning that when things are great over a long period of time it can be easy to take it for granted and not put as much energy in as the parts of my life that are not going as well (so more obviously need attention). In the past few weeks I have been reminded many times how amazing my partner is and am excited to see what comes next for each of us as individuals and together.
  • We have reconfigured our living space at home to reflect other changes happening in our lives. My former agoraphobia hideout/self-imposed prison* cell is now a space for meditation, yoga, and exercise. We also changed the room that had been the space for the street-involved teenagers living with us as part of a community-based care family program, and it is now a general spare room for visitors and also a place for our art supplies and a desk for writing. I was surprised to realize how changing the space helped me let go and say goodbye to the long-held dream of being a care family for street youth, and accept that for now we are not doing that work.
    *Note: There is a huge difference between being imprisoned by someone else, where you do not have choice about leaving or the conditions you are living in, and self-imposed confinement. Partway through agoraphobia treatment I realized that I was not only afraid to leave the house because of other people, I was also keeping myself confined to a space roughly the size of a prison cell as a form of self-abasement/punishment for things I have done in the past that I am ashamed of. From a prison justice perspective, I don’t in any way want to imply that the two things are the same.
  • As part of reconfiguring our space I moved from working on an old, energy-sucking beast of a desktop computer to an energy-efficient laptop and made arrangements to donate our excess computers (including 2 donated by friends to us for the youth to use) to not-for-profit organizations. We also decided to give away some other things that we had been keeping for the youth room and do not need for ourselves.
  • I reconnected with my spiritual home and family, going out to Kokizan-ji (Red Flag Mountain Temple) for the first time in a long time for a Sunday morning sit with my Zen sangha. I was surprised and overwhelmed by the feeling of coming home and am very grateful to my teacher and his family (who live at the temple), sangha members, and donors for all they do to make that space open and available.
  • I made arrangements to go visit my sister’s new digs in Courtenay. This will be my first time sleeping away from home in over a year and I am excited and a bit nervous, but happy to be connecting with family. If it goes well I will go visit my parents at some point in the next month.

Other actions this week:

  • I registered for the “Story of Stuff” project’s Citizen Muscle Boot Camp, a 4-week online program aiming to help build skills for making positive change. “Citizen” language always raises my hackles a bit as I is so tied to the concept of the nation-state, and marginalizes people who do not have citizen status (as well as reinforcing the right of the state to decide who is and isn’t worthy of citizenship), but with the Coursera sustainability course that I’ve been taking wrapping up I’m glad to have another structured opportunity to learn, reflect, and challenge myself both to take action in my own life and also share what I am learning with other people. (Speaking of the Coursera course, this week I posted my reflections on the course here.)
  • I applied for a part-time job that would be supporting work I believe is valuable and meaningful. As I start moving back into the work world it is important to me that I go back part-time so I have enough time to do the things I need to stay healthy. Fingers crossed…
  • Continuing the theme of water sustainability, this week I paid attention to the ways that I have found to reduce water waste/consumption through re-use. For example instead of tissue paper I use cloth hankies and we have cloth wipes for post-urination instead of toilet paper. Paper processing, even for products made from recycled pulp, uses a huge amount of water and energy compared to the amount it takes to periodically wash these small cloth wipes as part of a full load of laundry. I also often re-use dishes multiple times in the day (water glasses, bowls, cutlery, etc.) to try to minimize dish washing. These are all things I was doing prior to this sustainability challenge but I am proud to do them so wanted to include them in the challenge summary.

Thus far this Challenge has been super juicy. I am excited to see what comes next!

Reflections on “Learning for Sustainability: Developing a Personal Ethic”

Posted on by ekojoshuagoldberg

In past posts on this blog I’ve mentioned the Coursera course Learning for Sustainability: Developing a Personal Ethic. We are in the last week of the course and our task for this week is to reflect on what we have learned in the course and consider how our thinking and understanding has developed over the course. These will be marked/graded and there are around 15,000 people taking the course so, understandably, these reflections need to be short (< 400 words). As the course has been quite transformative for me I wanted to have the space to write a longer post here. Some of it will be a repeat of material I posted earlier, but wanted to have a post that summed it up that I could look back on, as well as providing a longer read for anyone in the course who is giving feedback on what I write and is interested in reading more.

My decision to take this course came from the realization that although I think of myself as someone who has a high value for environmental sustainability and social justice, I am not living in a way that is consistent with my values. Although in the past I have been very involved in social justice and environmental movements, and my partner and I live much more simply than most people in North America, over the past few years my life has been very focused on being a breadwinner for my family and I have been working in a job that has little value or meaning to me, coming home exhausted and numbing out with food and TV. After having 3 major surgeries in 6 years, in November 2014 I began experiencing frequent and intense panic attacks and became afraid to leave the house and unable to work. In treatment, an exercise relating to personal values brought into sharp relief the disconnect between what I believe about radical change being needed if we are to continue as a species on this planet and the way I am living, and the impact that has had on my mental and physical health. I am not alone in this; many people are experiencing anxiety about climate change, grief and depression about mass extinctions and biodiversity loss, and other mental health consequences of the harm that we are causing to the planet and each other.

So, from the start this course has been quite personal for me. I hoped it would help me to take a deep and honest look at how to bring my actions into harmony with my belief that we are all responsible to, as I put it in the sustainability definition from Week 1, “live in a way that makes it possible for life to continue — i.e., consuming and creating resources in a balanced way that enables current and future generations (of all species) to get what they need in order to live”. I also hoped that by talking with other people engaged in similar questions I would get some new ideas about things I could do both to change my own life and also work collectively for cultural change. Without diminishing any of the things I do to move towards sustainability, I realized that I have been largely resting on past actions and not continuing to learn or challenge myself. As a result I had become stagnant in the way I was living. My mental health stuckness seemed in some way inextricably tied to this larger stuckness about how to live well and responsibly.

Week 1 – Disruption: Reorienting our Thoughts

With the first Week 1 Assessed Task, “What Did You Have for Breakfast”, as I started writing and doing internet sleuthing about food sustainability I started to feel things unstick. The simple act of writing and discussing with other people was helping get things moving for me. I decided to start this blog to journal about the process of learning to be a stand-up guy again, someone who people can count on to be a force for good.

A few weeks ago I wrote the following about the course: “My favourite part, no surprise, is definitely the discussion forum – anyone who knows me even a teensy bit knows I love to chew things over with other people. And how freakin cool is it to talk about things with people who are literally all over the world. The (voluntarily entered) map of students’ locations shows people from every continent; thus far I have had fascinating conversations with people living in Canada, England, France, Germany, India, Peru, Scotland, South Korea, and USA (and if you take into account where each person came from originally, an even wider range of countries – Brazil, Bulgaria, Liberia, etc.) about food sustainability and what we eat for breakfast, water sustainability, environmental racism, immigration policy and social cohesion with respect to sustainability, re-skilling, and what we each do in our own lives to try to live sustainably. In each of these topic threads there have been many other people chatting, and these are only a few of the several hundred discussions going on between class participants on a very wide range of issues. Pretty cool!” Agoraphobia can be an intensely isolating experience, and to connect with so many people helped me to have more confidence that I could re-engage with the world and have something to offer.

Week 2 – Thinking deeply: Local issues and personal reflections

For the Week 2 Assessed Task, “Identify a Local Sustainability Issue”, I decided to focus on water as although we live in an area that was originally temperate rainforest, deforestation/urbanization, climate change, and other factors are drastically changing the landscape and hence the water cycle and we are currently in a severe drought. As we grow much of our own food the impact of drought is obvious and immediate, and I wanted to use this course as an opportunity to learn more about water sustainability, both on a local level (with changes to our local water supply) and also on a broader scale (with increased interest in exporting local water as a commodity to other areas). I started searching for local people working on water sustainability and started tracking resources to help me find out more about what I can do personally and collectively to work on this issue.

Inspired by the course discussion forum conversations, my partner’s summer photo project, and my partner & a friend’s previous Facebook environmental challenge, I decided to start a “100 Days of Sustainability” project where every day I do something new that is related to sustainability. There can be no repeats, i.e., each day I need to do something that I haven’t already listed as being part of the Sustainability Challenge. I already do a lot of the “50 simple things you can do” type of environmental actions, so in this project I wanted 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 do stretch me a bit. At the end of each week I write a blog post about what I’m learning, high points, and difficulties.

Week 3 – Understanding broadly:  Global issues and wider positioning

For the Week 3 Assessed Task, “Causes and Consequences Tree”, I mapped out the causes and consequences of drought (shortage of useable water). In my past environmental/social justice work I haven’t done work on water sustainability so this was a good stretch for me and a great exercise in starting to see patterns, connections, and interconnections. It also helped me see how many opportunities there are for positive change, and to think about some of the positive changes I could make. As one of my Sustainability Challenge actions this week I did some sleuthing on ways to conserve water and made list of ideas for future actions relating to water sustainability, so I lots of ideas for future weeks of the Challenge. I also signed a petition against my provincial government’s agreement with various commercial water companies, including Nestlé, permitting them to take local groundwater for access rights of $2.25 per million litres and then resell it at a huge profit.

My other Sustainability Challenge actions for this week included:

  • Food: Returned to being vegan after a few months of eating dairy and eggs in large quantities. I also did some work around quantity of food as I tend to overeat and, while not wanting to participate in shaming/fatphobic body image nonsense equating being fat with being greedy, do feel that for me personal honesty around my own over-consumption is an important aspect of considering sustainability.
  • Experimenting with looking at everything from a “I have enough” mentality. I am often anxious and can easily get caught up in feeling 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. I lived on welfare for a number of years so know that truly not having enough is painful, but this is not a real issue in my life now so it is just a mental thing, fuelled largely by mainstream consumerism, including a culture of entitlement and belief in deserving more than what realistically is one’s fair share. It was interesting to see where and how I had a mentality of being scared to miss out, feeling deficient and that I have to take everything I can now or it will be too late.
  • Learning more about the environmental and social justice impacts of mining, as part of thinking about whether “green” technology is actually sustainable and the role that metal plays in my life. This was prompted by a couple discussion forum posts, but coincidentally also read a beautiful novel by Ishmael Beah called “Radiance of Tomorrow” that I didn’t know would include a story line about the impact of foreign-owned mining company on the village in Sierra Leone where the novel is set – powerful and lots to think about. Also a good spark for me around thinking through the difference between harm reduction type activities and truly sustainable/desirable activities, and how high metal “renewable” energy infrastructure like solar panels, wind turbines, etc. fits in my vision of a sustainable future.
  • Did a brief presentation for the board of my neighbourhood association as part of inviting them to sponsor a screening of the film The Good Life, The Green Life as part of an attempt to build connections with other folks in my neighbourhood who are interested in working on sustainability and environmental/social justice.

Week 4 – Implement: How do we take action?

This week the course included a video on the sociology of laundry practices that I found quite thought-provoking, and this sparked some exploration in my Sustainability Challenge about water sustainability and bathing. In addition to turning off the water while lathering and generally trying to have shorter showers, this week I also caught water from warming up a shower and used it to wash dishes, which was a simple action but involved a lot of resistance to carrying a bucket around the house. I also deliberately didn’t shower one day of the week, in part to look a bit deeper at what personal and societal expectations about “cleanliness” are really about (as per the course video). I also learned more from discussion threads this week about environmental issues relating to companion animals and ways to support government initiatives relating to energy efficiency in buildings. We always pick up our own dog’s poop but having learned more about the widespread negative environmental impacts of dog poop on multiple species, on our daily dog walks I started using our dog’s poop bag to pick up as much dog poop as possible, and my partner and I are looking into making food for our cats using local sustainably harvested fish. Other specific Sustainability Challenge actions included cycling instead of taking the bus, finding out more about what I can do to support my municipal government’s food sustainability initiatives, and meeting with a local organization to find people interested in working on climate change at a neighbourhood level.

The course’s task for Week 4, Circles for action, involved drawing a small circle inside a large circle, and in the large circle writing down all the actions that could be done on your chosen topic (mine = drought) and then in the smaller inner circle what you feel you could have influence over. When I went back to my drought diagram from Week 3 to look at all of the identified causes and think about what could be done to impact all of those causes, I could not think of any human-influenced causes that I could have zero influence on. Even big-picture global issues such as climate change, deforestation, and multinational agribusiness, or systemic local issues such as harmful and weak national, provincial, and municipal laws, are things that I feel I can take action on and have some influence over while not having control of the outcome. This sparked an interesting discussion with my partner about the differences between our families of origin and the privileges I have from growing up in a politically active family where from a young age we were taught that we have the power to change things, and also learned skills for how to work for change.

This week there were also seismic shifts relating to the questioning around what I’m doing with my life and clarifying how to live in a way that allows me to most fully offer myself to the world, to make the biggest difference and be of service. I realized that I need to make some big changes at work, at home, in my marriage, with my family and friends, with my spiritual community, really in every area of my life. This is super scary, but after 8 months of being totally ruled by panic and terror, it is scarier to not change than to change.

Up until this point in recovery I thought that with so much going on in my head, the best thing would be to get as much safety/security as possible under my feet by keeping things as much the same as possible and only very cautiously and gradually trying to work in anything new. Taking this approach, my recovery from agoraphobia did not have much forward progress; I remained mostly stuck. But as I started to get clearer on what it would look like for me to feel there is integrity between my values and actions, I started to regain integrity of self. And with that I understood that it’s actually not in my best interests to try to get the old ground under my feet again. Instead, I need to take a leap of faith that if I let go of the things that don’t feel true to my vision of who I want to be in the world, there will be space for something else to emerge and whatever that is will be OK. Since that mental shift, the agoraphobia is completely gone and I have not had any panic attacks.

Change and all the new possibility it brings can be exciting for the person going through it, but pretty hard on everyone else. After 8 months of supporting me through intense mental health stuff, which has not only been my suffering but also very stressful for the people who love me, it is understandably hard to trust that I am in my right mind to be making big life decisions, or that I will be able to sustain the energy to see through making big changes. Ah, there’s that word, sustain…And then of course there is also the aspect of interconnectedness. Me changing my life doesn’t just change my life, it also changes things for my partner, parents, friends, colleagues, and everyone else who’s life is tied up with mine. What is the responsible way to deal with that? None of us can live our lives for other people, but we also can’t disregard the impact we have. And how to explain the changes to people in a way that doesn’t come across as some kind of judgment/shaming about the way other people live their lives, or a rejection of what brings someone else joy?

I have been a practising Zen Buddhist for many years and like all tough life questions this feels like a Zen koan of sorts. I am a total novice with koan practice, but from what I know thus far, koans can’t be solved by thinking intellectually about something — you have to let the question/challenge of the koan really burn within you and then show your understanding/insight through what you do. So, sustainability as a koan. What does it mean to live in a way that is sustainable, that is authentic and that has integrity. Demonstrate!

Week 5 – Learning for sustainability: How can we inform and educate others?

As this course comes to a close I have been thinking about next steps. My 100 day Sustainability Challenge will be continuing until mid-October and to help keep me on track with that I was searching for another structured opportunity to learn, reflect, and challenge myself both to take action in my own life and also share what I am learning with other people. The “Story of Solutions” video that was part of the week 5 curriculum came at just the right time and I am now registered for the filmmakers’ 4-week Citizen Muscle Boot Camp, “designed to get each of us flexing our Citizen Muscles and building the skills we need to make change in our communities”. I have also reconnected with my Zen Buddhist community after a long absence, to provide the spiritual foundation I need to be healthy in doing this work, and will be starting in September a Buddhist course on developing our community’s capacity to effectively engage on climate change and other ecological challenges, both thematically and locally, with courage, compassion and wisdom. The course includes working in small regional groups to collaborate on joint projects and support each other to take action, so will provide many opportunities for informing and educating others. Last but not least, I will not be returning to my job, and with the support of my partner am applying for part-time social justice/environmental jobs to do work that feels more meaningful and also free up time to contribute more to grassroots community efforts for positive change, as well as the ongoing self-care I need to stay healthy.

This course has been richly rewarding for me and I am very grateful to have had the chance to participate and learn from everyone in it. Hopefully it will be offered again so I can recommend it to friends and colleagues interested in these issues!