3a Gathering: Framework & curing anxiety

Script referenced while recording (I sometimes went off script & edited some bits out) including links to sources referenced:

Welcome to a Summer Special edition of Something…  I’m so excited to share this with you! On June 11 I hosted a gathering - this is about that gathering. Which was 2 things: It was a wrap party, thanking some of the people who gave so much to this podcast. And it was a seed party, asking my guests to seed the next season of the show with their ideas and perspectives. We gathered at the newly renovated Lappe Ski Centre chalet as a long June late afternoon moved into evening… We shared a meal catered by Willow Springs Creative, Who also facilitated a collaborative art activity. We filled vision boards with bright post-it notes of ideas. It was great.

I brought my mic - so I can bring you this. 

So who was there: a couple of dozen of us all told. My family - though Arno and Ben listened more than they spoke. But they have all been guests on the podcast, and my guest list started with podcast guests. Each of whom I asked to invite a guest in turn, someone of another generation. The guest list was rounded out with a couple of my most engaged listeners and subscribers to the podcast newsletter. Not everyone invited could make it, but what a wonderful collection of people gathered. After the art making but before the meal,  I asked for introductions. 

—-----------

After the meal we brainstormed under four headings. The first brainstorm I called Courage Connections, because courage loves company, and change takes courage. There we gathered ideas to strengthen our connections to one another. The second was Change From Within - ideas to help us change the systems we are a part of, as citizens and students, teachers and customers, advocates, experts, neighbours, social creatures shaping and shaped by our society.

The third was Creative Disruptions - things we could do to spark and feed imagination, innovation and our pleasure in fixing, solving and improving things. And the final brainstorm title was Tangible Transformations - changes we can imagine seeing in action, visible to a passerby, built or grown changes we could see and touch and easily document.

I took pictures of the vision boards and their crowds of post-its, if I can figure out how to get them all on the website I will.

Between brainstorms we had dessert -  I have to share Summer’s spontaneous review of Willow Springs Catering:

Before people headed home I asked them for one more quick chat on microphone I had visions of people pulling me to a vision board to rave about an idea or two that came up that really struck them, but that didn’t happen or it didn’t happen much

Sam: climbing trees; JoAnne Elder Bus

Most spoke in more general terms:

Paul do this again; Pam connections reverberate; Kathryn hopeful potentials; Betty powerful seed

The theme among the suggestions and conversations that struck me the most was of inclusion, of overcoming our tendency to judge and exclude some neighbours,  to be okay with not everyone having their basic needs met. It came up in the introductions, and kept singing out all evening long

Thora Say Hello, Summer - Veronica a place worth coming home to

The implications of this wished for change is easy to underestimate. Just a smile, eye contact, basic respect and inclusion. But it is a profound shift. One of my newsletter subscribing invitees who couldn’t make it mentioned she had joined a new committee at her work aiming to decolonize their organization, and it was so much bigger a job than they had expected. This is a big job. Making our culture one everyone feels at home in, truly valued and included - it’s hard to own how far we are from that. And more and more I title that which we need to shift away from as colonialism.

So I am going to take a bit of a detour now.

Into the days and weeks since that gathering and me recording this framework for the tape I gathered there. I started the time pretty chuffed and nourished by it. A little tired and deflated with that post-party-partum I often suffer in the wake of something I took a lot of time organizing and looking forward to. But I kind of felt like I had my marching orders: be less colonial, walk my inclusive talk, If only it were that easy. I was quickly humbled.

So - first moment to cut me down to size. I listened to Thunder Bay Anishnabe leader Riley Yesno on the podcast Matriarch Movement and loved hearing her confidence in how things are changing and must change. Just a great conversation - I’ll link you to it in the show notes.

How are Indigenous youth thinking about reconciliation? Ft. Riley Yesno – Matriarch Movement

Then at the end Riley Yesno was asked how she answers when non-Indigenous people ask:

what can I do? My ears perked - I wanted to hear! and what I heard was weary anger. An audible eye roll. An angry list of things that need to be understood before a non-indegenous person could dare to consider herself an ally. 

And I felt my heart curl up and fall to the ground  like one of my monarch caterpillars when they fall from their fat, comfortable milkweed. Like my caterpillars I could do nothing but lie there hurt and scared and stunned, it took a good bit before I could straighten up and start blindly looking for another milkweed to climb up  and get back to my job of eating and growing and working towards my hopes for a butterfly future.

Once I could think again, I thought of something Riley Yesno had said earlier in that same interview, that whenever you start thinking in absolutes, and are tempted to just give up and consider yourself or someone else a loser or a villain or a liability, recognize that as colonialism. 

After all we all grew up saturated with the colonial values that keep people insecure, that make us feel disposable as a worker, as a student, as a spouse or a friend. Vulnerable to rejection, failure, exclusion - all of these absolute, binary, simplistic conclusions to imperfection or conflict.

But that’s not how a community that truly believe in the intrinsic value of each of us works - the value of all of everything, human and non-human. 

And I also realized what I think got her rolling her eyes with impatience. That all that she had said was a call to self empowerment. We can do this, you can do this, I can do this, we can spot the opportunities, figure out what to try and get things done. In my eagerness to hear her answer to the question “what can I do?” In asking that question after receiving that gift of permission to direct your own actions I demonstrated that I had missed the point. I was more comfortable in the the familiar colonial world of leaders and followers I wanted to follow direction rather than owning my own ideas and decisions or at least - that is what I think her reaction can be understood to mean. Once I got over my mortification at being called out and clearly failing a bit of a test. Failure can be our greatest teacher, we learn more from our mistakes. Yada yada yada. So much easier to say than to actually do in the moment. So rarely are the truly mortifying failures within a planned moment, or a foreseen challenge. Life is humbling.

I think of the actor William Shatner of Star Trek who recently actually got to go into space, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/oct/11/it-felt-like-a-funeral-william-shatner-reflects-on-voyage-to-space#:~:text=I%20love%20all%20the%20questions,was%20death%2C%E2%80%9D%20Shatner%20wrote.

Expecting to be inspired by it’s call to explore, Shatner was instead humbled and grieved by his realization of what a finite, precious miracle our home is, our incredible blue planet and its thin skin of interconnected and interdependent life of which we are just one part.

Instrumental break

So -  I picked myself up and carried on. Only to be sideswiped again. On a day when the wildfire smoke hung heavy triggering my asthma so I gardened with a mask on, making me think “the world is burning” and quietly spin with anxiety all day, I read an article in the Globe & Mail

It was an opinion piece titled: 

BC’s drug decriminalization Experiment is off to a Disastrous Start.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-bcs-drug-decriminalization-experiment-is-off-to-disastrous-start/

The author focused on a small town where drug use has become dramatically more visible 

now that BC has made it possible to possess a small amount of certain drugs without risking arrest or having those drugs seized.  In his opinion this was disastrously hurtful to the town. 

But I could not see the hurt. All I could see was less risk of dying because you are alone when your drugs prove more potent or not what you were told you were buying, in this masked and unmanaged supply chain. All I could see was more opportunities to connect and care for one another. And more permission to own the fact that people use drugs. All kinds of people, none of us worth more or less just because of that drug use.

The author said this evidence of drug use hurt the town. And I heard made people ncomfortable.

Uncomfortable with having to know what you could fail to know when laws kept people hiding their drug use that much more.

Most drug use is recreational, occasionally, to unwind and have fun much like people use alcohol or marijuana. I heard a psychologist who specializes in social underpinnings of drug use say that only 10% of those who use drugs become addicted to them, and almost always that addiction is tied to other stressors, like social or financial insecurity or unsupported mental health challenges, more than to the addictive nature of the drugs themselves. I’ll put a link to that conversation in the notes. Psychologist talks about drug use & social stressors: https://shows.acast.com/blindboy/episodes/speaking-to-a-psychologist-about-drug-laws-in-ireland

Technically these illegal drugs are less addictive than caffeine and nicotine, and should be less deadly. Overdoses are about uncontrolled supply chains and the shaming that keeps people using alone, without help if it is needed.

But right now drug use among our friends and neighbours, our family and co-workers, our community, can be easily ignored or minimized. Othered - something that happens to other people, not our concern. So when change allows that many more people to be less private about their drug use, that would be a shock to those who had been able to assume the drug crisis  is not their problem, not really an issue in their lives. And that would be - uncomfortable. But not hurtful. Not a disaster. And in a small town, odds are that much better that you’ll know those people you want to judge harshly for their drug use, which would also be - uncomfortable.

Anyway - I read that article and it got me in a tailspin worrying about how big a change it is to truly set down our habits of judgment and exclusion. Then I thought of Mallory’s parting words from the gathering

5 - Change younger generation

And I felt a little better. Do as I say, not as I fear - I guess.

One of the things that came up in the Creative Disruptions brainstorm was creating art that people will want to watch or read or play just because it is fun  - but giving it a radical setting that slyly introduces these radical changes. Like the beautiful windmills floating over the city 

and the dominance of active and public transit in the movie Big Hero Six. 

Or like Schitt’s Creek. How would the people of Schitt’s Creek respond to drug use 

or homelessness or hunger  in their town?

It took me a while to get that that was the point of Schitt’s Creek. The Rose family, such an extreme portrait of what good looks like in our popular culture:  rich, judgemental, shopaholics - 

are just a foil to let the quiet perfectionism of what actual good looks like demonstrated, personified by the quirky, unpolished, lovely people of Schitt’s Creek. Inclusive, honest, creative, kind.

https://www.gqindia.com/live-well/content/dan-levy-there-is-a-real-sadness-to-hyper-privileged-people

That was my first week after the gathering. In my early mornings before the rest of the family got up and I rolled into my work day and farm chores and all the rest, I’d spend a little time editing tape from the gathering, getting ready for this podcast, and that helped

6 - Eden - radical Change

Then I went into another tailspin. Fell off my milkweed, so to speak. I went to a presentation organized by the Chamber of Commerce. It was titled Economic Reconciliation is our Competitive Edge by JP Gladu.

A former president of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business, and a member of Sand Pond first nation on Lake Nipigon here in Northwestern Ontario. Right up my alley.

https://business.tbchamber.ca/events/details/apex-speaker-series-w-jp-gladu-3466

But as he spoke I fell into that binary thinking of - am I good or am I bad? Right or Wrong?

Ally or Enemy? Of course I did not even read his whole bio before he was introduced, read the title and the first sentence and bought my ticket. If I’d read even a little more I’d have known going in that: J P Gladu is on the board of Suncor, the oil sands refinery co.

(Suncor contribution to climate crisis:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/wildfires-climate-change-carbon-88-1.6852178

https://www.responsible-investor.com/canadas-climate-engagement-initiative-names-40-target-companies/)

Among many other leadership roles over the past thirty years.

A lot of his presentation used the same language and framing that so disturbed me  when I heard Federal Minister Jonathan Wilkensen use it in a recent interview on CBC’s What on Earth, 

and when I read Federal Minister Crystia Freeland quoted using it in a CBC article

 (- I’ll add links to these to the show notes for you.) 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on-earth-carbon-capture-enhanced-oil-recovery-1.5873431

https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/canada-inefficient-fossil-fuel-subsidies-1.6885526

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/chrystia-freeland-duane-bratt-alberta-carbon-capture-1.6001762

The same framing used by those Enbridge Employees with whom I sat at lunch last fall  that prompted my counterspin in my Save the Mothers episode of season two.

In all these case, this framing of Canada’s fossil fuels industry made me think of the collaborative art project we did at the gathering. Oodles of visual art making tools at hand: 

crayons, pastels, magazines to cut and collage with, and a really big piece of paper we all find a place at. We doodle and draw, prompted by words or phrases, and keep changing places until we are squeezing into the few blank spaces, or adding to what someone else did. Step back and the total piece is kind of overwhelming, kind of crazy, kind of beautiful. Then we each get a frame, and go around placing it on the big piece, deciding which small piece of that big picture we personally want to cut out, frame and take home. Which part of the whole most speaks to us.

What some call spin, I call controlling the frame. When someone wants to control a conversation, to ensure they “win” and control the impression the conversation leaves on listeners, they control the framing of the conversation, they control their tone, they control the meaning of key words, they strive for emotional resonant moments that convince the unconvinced or sway the undecided. Framing out manouvers facts, everytime.

A classic example used often in teaching media skills or counterspin (depending which side of the mic you are being trained to speak from), is when President Clinton was asked by a reporter whether he had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/clinton-i-did-not-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman-248273987946

And you can see on camera the little smile he gives, and how his shoulders relax, when the journalist used those words. Because now he got to decide what the meaning of that phrase “sexual relations” means. And with that, he knows, he just “won” this interview. He can deny that charge vehemently and truthfully, because he gets to decide what he means by that phrase.

The moment that bothered me most in JP Gladu’s very polished and confident presentation is when he put up on his powerpoint slide an image of protestors holding up a sign that says: RBC is costing us our future and he talked about how they were posing as allies of first nations people, but in fact were using first nations as pawns and speaking for them. He finds that so offensive he has called out anti oil-production activists from Neil Young to the dude who played the Hulk, and proudly shared the headlines of opinion pieces he had gotten published on that point.

In his opinion, rather than supporting his community by pressuring banks to stop financing the oil industry, he feels opposing oil and forestry industries is working to keep first nations in poverty. And he showed another slide, an ad put out by the Indigenous Resource Network 

based on a survey they conducted in rural first nation communities that said 53% of those polled supported resource industries. And again I thought - the framing. How has the framing of this finding Or the question asked Shaping the impression this fact if giving me?

I took notes, or I would remember very little of this. I was so triggered my brain was shutting down. I was in fallen caterpillar mode, curled up and scared. My mind spinning between am I the bad guy? Is he? Who is the hero here? Who is the villain? Colonial binary thinking shutting me down. I was hoping to find confirmation of my success in understanding his perspective as a First Nation leader and spokesperson, to be affirmed as an ally, and instead I saw condemnation, rejection, failure. 

Binary thinking. Caterpillar fallen from her milkweed.

— something different this way comes —----

I probably don’t need to say this, it is preaching to the choir, but I want to point out how narrowly he framed these facts. Those protesters in that newspaper image outside that RBC meeting, 

they were not just there to speak for first nation communities, they were mostly there because they are scared for our shared future. And they feel we cannot afford to use all the oil products we have already mined, as fast as possible we need to transition to energy production that does not require constant mining and refining and transport and releases climate-crisis-fueling green house gases at every stage of that energy system.

We need to transition away from that energy system to more localized, build once and need no further inputs for decades, releasing no greenhouse gasses once that infrastructure is built 

Energy Systems like wind and geothermal and solar and even some hydro. The current system has excess fossil fuel combustion generation plants idle except when excessive energy demand has them firing up, rather than an actual energy storage system,  and there are many options to build energy storage systems that again, once built will require no further green-house producing inputs. That is the way of the future.

Just because we can’t get there with a snap of our fingers, doesn’t make that any less valid a destination. And if that’s where we’re headed, fossil-fuel infrastructure is going to be a relic of our past, Which does not recommend it as an significant investment anymore. Sunsetting industries we are transitioning away from.

Leveraging Canada’s oil and gas industry’s wealth of skilled engineers and problem solvers, workers from HR to accounting to marketing and more to help us transition from fossil-fuel-founded to cheap, durable renewables and storage  is positioning us for the long-term. Over investing in a sunsetting fossil-fuel extraction and combustion system is unlikely to get us anywhere but behind the eight ball.  

That’s how I frame these facts.

That’s what I think it is important to include in the assessment of financing the oil industry.

The industry frames carefully their replies to challenges on this front by farming the conversation around a focus on the fact that we will still be using some oil products for a long time, as if still using was more significant than using exponentially less and less. And by controlling the definition of Canada’ Fossil Fuel industry as “more responsible” than that of country’s with a less stellar ethical reputation, like China. Or oil sands bitumen as “cleaner” than coal. Or focusing a conversation about methane around the relatively less greenhouse gas emissions when it is burned, rather than including poisonous impact of natural gas in our homes, or the cost of methane released in the extraction and transport phases of its life, or the fact that like all fossil fuels building the plant is only the beginning of the cost of producing energy, because the plants only generate energy as long as it is fed more fossil fuels. More extraction, refining, transport as well as combustion. Whereas once a solar panel is operational, it needs no more inputs. Or a windmill. Or a dam, or a geothermal plant. I’ve seen spin that compares the building of a solar farm to the cost of combustion in a built fossil fuel generation plant. That is not apples to apples. Also excluded from this frame of long-term need recommending current investment for infrastructure to supply that fossil-fuel-based energy over that long-term as an export business, supplying other countries.

Missing from that business plan - is where other countries are in their transition from fossil fuel to greener energy systems. And laying our betting hands on our reputation and track record as a responsible, ethical community - is perhaps unwise. Anyone wanting to frame Canada as less than heroic has plenty to work with. Our home & food affordability criseses, tragic shortcoming in our healthcare, our drug crisis. Our burning forests pouring carbon into our beleaguered atmosphere, First Nation communities without basic first world amenities. 

Nope, building infrastructure on the expectation of profits from international sales of fossil fuels over decades to come, because our reputation and track record recommends us, is a long bet with our rent money. Not advisable. I have to work hard to try and understand how it makes sense to anyone. And yet I keep hearing this explanation of leadership decisions, and it freaks me out.

Thank you for letting me getting that preaching to the choir off my chest. I feel better now.

But as I leaned forward to listen to JP Gladu’s presentation on Economic Reconciliation, I did not see that framework coming. And that spin knocked my listening ears right out of me.

For a while. But luckily I took notes and once I had recovered enough I thought to look at them.

And I found lots of things JP Gladu said that I agree with.

He supports no-money-down financing of First Nation owned industries, he called it a form of consent and had inspiring examples to share from the Meadow Lake Tribal Council’s Bio-energy plant, sawmill and logging operations in SK. To the Geothermal power generation plant of Fort Nelson First Nation. Which is totally in line with the more accessible financing I was imagining in action in my Kindness Economy episode in season Three

And I am happy to report that innovative financing structures is really picking up steam internationally.  I listened to two episodes of the Zero podcast since this luncheon that got me so excited. One on the Bridgetown Initiative and the international gathering just last week to support its proposed changes to help poorer Nations manage this Climate Crisis. The other about the US department of Energy’s Loan Program’s Office incredible expansion of both its financing and its changes to how that financing is secured that is clearing bottlenecks and making good things happen fast. Such good news. Check out those podcasts - I have links in them in the notes.

(Changes in international financing: 

 https://zerocarbon-analytics.org/archives/economics/international-financial-institutions-reform-bridgetown-agenda

https://omny.fm/shows/zero/jigar-shah-lpo-department-of-energy-zero)

Another thing JP Gladu talked about that makes so much sense to me, is how environmental assessments need to start with the first nations who know their environments. Too often a consultation is tacked on as a final rubber stamp, excluding the first nations who have a relationship with the land and ecosystems that would be affected  until a plan has been developed, only then are they brought in to approve or tweak. That is not collaboration or even true consultation. That is a missed opportunity that adds time and cost and undermines respectful relationships.

So once I got through my anxious spinning shut-down, and reviewed all that JP Gladu shared in his presentation, I found a lot we agreed on, a lot that I was glad to learn of and have a chance to consider. But those few things we see very differently, they were a real tripping hazard.

It made me think of Kathryn HayHoe. I went back to the TedTalk that got me to buy her book. 

(Katherine Hayhoe: https://www.ted.com/talks/katharine_hayhoe_the_most_important_thing_you_can_do_to_fight_climate_change_talk_about_it?language=en)

She says the most powerful way we can support effective climate action, is by talking about it. And she spends a lot of time talking about how to manage that, how to engage with people we don’t 100% agree with, how to avoid that colonial tendency to shun or dispose of people for one reason or another, the long-term commitment of building real connections. It’s not as easy as it sounds. It’s not a photo-capture friendly transformation. Not tailor-made for the social-media generation. These are hard-working, kind of scary, uncomfortable conversations. But powerful. So impactful. With the potential to provoke a quiet, profound revolution.

I imagine a short of a Schitt’s Creek revolution. Easily missed if you’re just driving through, or even just new to town. Lived and living. Hard to script or to control. It requires the courage to be humble, adaptable and open to the moment. Good - and messy.

Something Different…

After the gathering I emailed all the guests pictures of our vision boards, and invited them to send me anything they think might inform my research into their ideas - books, articles, videos, documentaries, people… And JoAnne Henderson sent me a video. Another Ted Talk I’ll link in the notes this one by the journalist and author Johan Hari about anxiety.

Johan Hari https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB5IX-np5fE 

 In it he tells a story of a conversation introducing anti-anxiety medication to a culture that did not have those pharmaceuticals. I think the Doctors new to this notion of this medication were Cambonian, and when they heard what it treated they said oh - we already have this treatment. 

And the Western Physicians preparing to introduce them to anti-anxiety drugs were intrigued, thinking they’d learn of an herb or something. Yes, said the Cambonian healthcare providers. 

For example, we had a very depressed and anxious patient, could not function, wouldn’t eat right or practice proper hygiene, or even get out of bed. So we sat down with him and listened to what he was thinking. And learned that he was a rice farmer whose legs got blown off by a landmine. He recovered and got prosthetic legs so he could go back to work, but his prosthetics didn’t work well submerged in water as he needed to be as a rice farmer, and he kept worrying he’d step on another landmine, And his anxiety got worse and worse until he was full on depressed. He couldn’t get out of bed. Once we understood why he was anxious and depressed, we first reassured the patient that he had very good reason for his feelings.

And we talked to his family and community to inform our prescription. Finally we prescribed that he get a cow, and become a cow farmer. No more rice fields for him. This solution he could not see for himself deep in his depression and anxiety, that is why he needed our help, and we needed his family and community’s insight before we could cure his anxiety. That is how you treat depression. 

There you have it - the cow as antidepressant.

Johan Hari says that sometimes anxiety is a signal, better cured by action to address it’s actual cause than by medication to suppress its symptoms. And sometimes you can’t see how a cow can help you get out of bed, have a shower and a healthy meal, until your friends and neighbours see that good reason for your feelings more clearly than you can from deep within your spinning anxiety and prescribe that cow to you.

That video was just the medicine my anxiety needed. Thank you JoAnne.

And those connections that give us clarity and courage, that opportunity to hear and be heard, that was one of the key gifts of our podcast gathering

Clip 7 :Leea generations,  Veronica - problem solving; 

The cows prescribed in our brainstorms are many: from building our connection to all our relations, human and non-human, From gardening or canning buddies to make a chore more social and fun To wilderness adventure club to commit to getting out into the natural world regularly To clean-up  I am still looking for my courage connection commitments. Places to go and people to commit to not because we are perfect, not because we won’t have disagreements or misunderstandings, not because we will achieve some perfect harmony of collaboration and achievements, but because we are inclusion and commitment are worth the work.

They are good, and messy.

8 Hana - spaces grow - Eleanor hands - Stacey welcoming spaces

I think of the Habit, where Ben and his best friend pin up a poster at the end of a table every Tuesday for a couple of hours  and invite people to bring them their tech to repair. Their motto is “no more planned obsolescence” And isn’t that a perfect motto for us all?

One miracle of a planet overwhelmingly alive and interconnected. One impactful species, so powerful when we work together, so adaptive and innovative.

No more planned obsolescence

Judi - free & easy

One last thought.

 I listened to a biologist talk about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park recently (on the podcast Radiolab) and she framed it differently than I’d heard before.  She said that after generations without predation, deer lived without fear in the park, as the top of their food chain. With the return of the wolves, they immediately grew more alert, they stopped overgrazing the banks of the rivers and moved more often, which allowed those banks to grow stronger and indeed the whole region’s biodiversity improved without overgrazing, with the deer now eating and poo-ing a little bit everywhere. And the deer themselves got healthier with their more varied diet, more exercise, more mental stimulation, more incentive to work together as a herd.

Which brings me back to the smell of smoke that triggers my anxiety, gets the thought “the world is burning” looping in my mind and makes it harder for me to think and act and reach out

Inspired by that story of prescribing a cow to cure anxiety, I have decided that our anxiety is less a symptom that needs abatement, than a signal best cured by productive action. Inspired by the fear-as-a-blessing take on the impact of reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone Park I think we can let the smell of smoke trigger our alertness make us more nimble and adaptive, broaden our spheres of activity. Getting more comfortable with the uncomfortable and confident in the impact of our decisions, unremarkable as they might appear to a passer by.

Those forest fires, they are not unrelated to not just the climate extremes Due to the over-saturation of carbon in our atmosphere, but also to our management of our forests as mono-crops, deliberately lessening their diversity in species and in generations. As well as our deferral of natural forest fires, trading in regular smaller fires for later, bigger fires. Our thumb print is all over this pouring of the carbon of burning forests into our atmosphere. But most of all those forest fires are because we keep burning fossil fuels. We can stop doing that, we can do better. Not a snap of the fingers but a journey taken one step at a time.

There is so much to do. Many hands needed. And very little of that work is big and obvious and easily financed or photographed. It can be very simple. But that doesn’t make it very easy.

It is a change in our hearts and our habits and our framework. One decision, one conversation, one relationship at a time.

My name is Heather McLeod. 

This podcast is my own, my opinions, my work, my expenses, my framing of the conversations generously shared with me. Check out my Library of Hope and Menu of episodes at www.SomethingDifferentThisWayComes.ca Contribute to my costs and time through my Go Fund Me campaign and help pay me for this work. You can find the button on the main page of the website

Stay tuned for one more planned Summer Special - with Singer Songerwriter, educator and activist Shy-Anne Hovorka - I will post that in a few weeks. Then join me again for season four this October and November. Have a good summer.

Don’t let the smoke get you down, may it help you find the cow that cures your climate anxiety.