Atlantic Canada: Conversations on an Uncertain Future – May-June 2020
This outcomes report, which captures the Thinkers Lodge Climate Crisis Retreat May-June 2020, will serve as a showcase for thoughtful, compassionate and just community action in highly unstable times. We live almost daily being flooded with reports, recommendations, alternatives, and short-sighted and highly-charged schemes for social, political and economic change. This report is different from most of those. It must be read and acted upon as an expression of the heart. Its recommendations must be felt first and thought about second. This notion might be difficult for many to comprehend because we have been trained to expect experts and people in power to point out the way and our obligation, if you will, is simply to follow. But now, as we find ourselves living on unstable ground, it is time to give up that notion and follow our own noses. This report encourages us to find stability in clean air, local food, sane politics, and fair and just communities. I encourage you to read it, roll it up, put it under your arm, carry it with you to your next community gathering and roll it out for others to share.
It offers up a realistic game plan by demonstrating the real likelihood of immediate positive change for individual lives by directly tying spirituality to the landscapes in which we live. It so clearly demonstrates that ecology is more than just some stand alone science, but rather it points to the fact that ecology is a way of seeing how the earth, the economy, how our models of governance are all interconnected. It gives me reason to believe that a ‘cosmological’ politics is both necessary and possible everywhere – certainly here in Atlantic Canada.
This report details very specific models – and justifications for those models – that encourage a brand of direct social action that melds what is all too often experienced as discordant community diversity into highly charged community cohesion without which positive change is not possible.
It calls for the slow and steady shift to a no-growth economy as ‘the’ way to right the economic wrongs of faceless, and therefore unaccountable, globalism. It lends credence to the notion that we as a culture are obsessed with changing our politics – every four years – when in fact what needs changing is the economy.
Atlantic Canada: Conversations on an Uncertain Future is a call to action, a prayer for what is so urgently needed and a celebration of the fact that action and prayer are integral parts of the human character.
Gregory Heming, Senior Advisor
2020 Thinkers Lodge Retreat: Pandemic, Climate Crisis, and the Uncertain Future of Local Community
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller
During May and June, 2020, the Centre for Local Prosperity conducted its fifth Thinkers Lodge Retreat with 36 international, regional and local invited Thinkers (virtually) on Pandemic, Climate Crisis and the Uncertain Future of Local Community. These discussions generated the report above, as well as short videos on many essential topics. Please visit the Centre’s Youtube channel for all posted videos. The discussions were facilitated by Laureline Simon Krichewsky, One Resilient Earth.
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These Thinkers, from all walks of life, committed themselves to this intensive process in order to explore the preparedness of small, local and rural communities in Atlantic Canada to the many climate, ecosystem and societal changes on the horizon. COVID and the related economic fallout may be a prescient look into our future.
Twelve on-line discussions were held, covering the following range of topics: a common vision, humanity’s relationship to the Earth, a crisis of the spirit, psychological resilience, climate displaced persons, changing the economic paradigm, providing basic needs, community assets as embedded wealth, local governance, and climate justice and environmental racism.
Thinkers Essay Contributions
In-depth essay writings from many of the Thinkers involved in these retreat discussions are being provided below.
Each discussion began with either a prayer or contemplation. We would like to present below a special prayer from Elder Albert Marshall, who participated in these discussions.
Morning Prayer Elder Albert Marshall Creator, I come before you in a humble way. I thank you for this day. I give thanks to the four directions and the four winds. I give thanks for allowing me one more day to walk upon my Mother the Earth. Creator, I give greetings to Mother Earth, I ask her to continue to sustain me and all other life. I tell her that one day my body will return to her. Creator, I thank you and give greetings to Grandfather Sky. I give thanks for the warmth Father Sun brings as he travels from the east to the west. I give thanks for the light that allows me to see the great beauty of Mother Earth. Creator, I give thanks and ask you to watch over my relatives the four legged. I give thanks for what they have given us. Creator, I give thanks for the birds, the winged ones. I give thanks for their beauty and the songs that fill the air. I honour the trees and the healing plants And herbs that hold so much knowledge of life and are our guardians. I give thanks for all they have taught us And still today continue to teach. Creator, for the water, the giver of life, I give great thanks indeed. I give thanks for all that is on, above, below and upon the Mother Earth. Creator, my most humble prayer is for the two legged, the human beings. They are out of balance and need to return to the Old Ways to find love, harmony, peace and spiritual awakening. I ask you Creator to reach down and touch our hearts so that we can all live the good life before the pathway of this life is no more. Creator, accept my love, continue to walk with me upon this pathway and help me in my work. For it is the work of every living being to help and love each other. I give thanks.
