In 1963 the writer Ken Kesey, with his earnings from his very successful novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, bought a bus. He invited a group of friends (they called themselves “The Merry Pranksters”) to go on a trip to explore the world. But it wasn’t an outer world of land or territory. It was an acid-fueled inner world to explore and share their LSD experiences.
Read MoreSome years ago a woman asked Stephen Leacock, the Canadian writer and humourist, if writing was difficult. Leacock responded, “Madam, writing is not difficult. You simply jot down the ideas that occur to you. The writing is simplicity itself. It is ‘the occurring’ that is difficult.”
I thought at the beginning of this second season of chronicles I would outline the ideas that have occurred to me. This will give you an idea of where I have come from and where we will be going in this coming season.
Last Thursday evening I attended a meeting in Courtenay on sustainability. Its purpose was to help implement the recommendations on sustainability laid down in local government documents a few years ago. There were a number of short presentations on a wide range of topics from a number of groups indicating the services they were providing. It was a well-organized meeting and very impressive.
But, as I was driving home I came away with a sense that the major issue was not dealt with. The key question: “What is sustainability in a climate changing world?” And herein lies a paradox.
If we hope to think realistically about dealing with climate change in a changing world, we have to learn to think in contexts. The word “context” comes from two Latin words: “con” meaning “together” and “textere” meaning “to weave”. So “context” means “to weave together”.
Dealing with climate change is not like dealing with a specific service or discipline—like environment, or medicine, or physics. It is a weaving together of a variety of different elements into a context.
In the previous two chronicles I have used the analogy of the chrysalis experience to describe the need for transitions in dealing with a climate changing world.
Chronicle 38 introduced the three life stages of the chrysalis: the caterpillar cocoon stage, the imaginal cell stage, and the new butterfly stage. The major focus was on the cocoon that I described as a colonial cocoon protecting the economic and sometimes political systems designed to gorge themselves on Earth’s resources.
If Earth is in a transition from the Holocene era to the Anthropocene era, we must transition with it. We must find our place in a new kind of Earth. We are, after all, earthlings. We have come from Earth through an evolutionary process. Our consciousness is part of the consciousness of the living Earth and a conscious universe. We are in the Earth… and Earth and the conscious universe are in us.
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