Episode 6 of CommonS Sense

Hosted by Barbara Leckie and Joel Westheimer

​

"Another Way Is Possible"

[Trailer]

 

Joel Westheimer 00:27

When we began this podcast, the smoke from the Los Angeles fires was still in the air.

 

Barbara Leckie 00:32

Now it's the Canadian wildfires. Just the other day when we were recording in the studio, the Ottawa Air Quality Index, or AQI registered 183

 

Joel Westheimer 00:42

Yeah, the wildfires right now are across Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, the western United States. More and more places are burning.

 

Barbara Leckie 00:52

And just in case you're not familiar with the Air Quality Index, zero or low risk is in the zero to 50 range. And at 183, the high end of the unhealthy zone, the recommendation is to stay inside if at all possible.

 

Joel Westheimer 01:05

We were in an air-conditioned studio that day, but others, of course, weren't. And then this past July, deadly flooding took place in the Hill Country region of Texas.

 

Speaker 01:19

The death toll from flooding in Texas has now surpassed 100 people.

 

Speaker 01:22

Police say at least 104 people have died, and that includes 28 children.

 

Speaker 01:27

It’s kind of horrific. It didn't look like Camp Mystic anymore

 

Speaker 01:30

Raging flood waters that rose 30 feet in a single hour.

 

Joel Westheimer 01:40

135 people died, including 37 children.

 

Barbara Leckie 01:44

27 of those were swept away at just one summer camp.

 

Joel Westheimer 01:48

The reason we're saying all this is probably clear to most of you- the climate crisis is not some speculative thing that might happen soon. The climate crisis is here now.

 

Barbara Leckie 01:57

So far, we've talked a lot about common sense and the idea of the commons.

 

Joel Westheimer 02:03

Right. And examples of the commons include shared land, food, education, and media.

 

Barbara Leckie 02:09

But the biggest commons of all might be our planet, the air, the land, the water, the atmosphere, or what some call the planetary commons.

 

Joel Westheimer 02:18

If the commons is a way of thinking about what we share, the climate crisis is a reminder of what we can't afford to lose. So how do we approach the climate crisis together, when current ideas of what counts as common sense tells us to go it alone?

 

Barbara Leckie 02:34

That's what we're about to explore in what follows.

 

Joel Westheimer 02:49

This is Commons Sense. That's Commons with an S. In this series, we ask how common sense and the idea of the commons relate to the climate crisis. I'm Joel Westheimer.

 

Barbara Leckie 03:01

And I'm Barbara Leckie. In this sixth and final episode of the season, we're going to revisit common sense and the commons in the context of climate change.

 

Joel Westheimer 03:09

But before we delve into that, let's review where we've been. We began this podcast by noting that we wanted to tell a story, a story about common sense that would be relatively familiar to people, a story about the commons that would be less familiar, and a story about how these two ideas might relate to climate change today.

 

Barbara Leckie 03:29

In episode one we discussed with our guests the use of the words common sense, as in it's just common sense, and the way that politicians and others employ that phrase to imply that there are no other ways to look at things.

 

Joel Westheimer 03:44

Our guests in that episode also agreed that what counts as common sense today is the idea that unregulated markets and competition can address all problems. Profits are privileged over people and the planet.

 

Barbara Leckie 03:58

In episode two, we discussed how common sense can change.

 

Joel Westheimer 04:03

And it can change, but it's hard.

 

Barbara Leckie 04:05

Then in episodes three, four, and five, we proposed an alternative, a different vision and a new common sense. We called it commons sense

 

Joel Westheimer 04:14

With our guests, for those episodes, we delved into the history of the commons and asked if some components of its practices can offer models for today.

 

Barbara Leckie 04:22

Right. We try to imagine a world where resources are shared.

 

Joel Westheimer 04:26

Where we know that there's enough for everyone, if we only take what we need.

 

Barbara Leckie 04:30

Where markets are regulated or rethought altogether.

 

Joel Westheimer 04:33

Where governance works from the ground up, rather than the top down.

 

Barbara Leckie 04:37

And where an ethic of caring for the land and all beings and relations is paramount.

 

Joel Westheimer 04:42

Stephanie LeMenager calls it a pluralistic sharing of resources.

 

Barbara Leckie 04:47

We also discuss some of the challenges we face.

 

Joel Westheimer 04:50

One of those challenges is a culture that promotes what Bill Ayers calls toxic individualism, the relentless insistence that each of us is responsible for everything that's wrong in our lives, when really, it's systemic. We're also told that we all need to solve our own problems, that we're on our own.

 

Barbara Leckie 05:09

And conversely, that collective action is impossible.

 

Joel Westheimer 05:12

Yeah, in the context of climate change, that view leads to carbon footprint shaming instead of systemic action. But guess what? Foregoing your straw when you buy a soft drink is not going to end the climate crisis.

 

Barbara Leckie 05:26

Another challenge that all of our guests note is the tangled history of the commons, most prominently its origins in Indigenous land theft.

 

Joel Westheimer 05:34

In this episode, Carolyn Lesjak reminds us of Sylvia Federici's point that no commons is possible that is built on the unacknowledged suffering of others. No commons is possible that doesn't recognize racism, stolen indigenous lands, and genocide.

 

Barbara Leckie 05:52

And as Candis Callison said, the challenge is not only to share power and transform the way we live, but also to remain in conversation across differences.

 

Joel Westheimer 06:03

Our vision of the commons, then, it's a work in progress and a springboard for thinking about possibilities.

 

Barbara Leckie 06:09

So, in this episode, we'll ask, what does all this mean for the greatest collective challenge of our time, the climate crisis?

 

Joel Westheimer 06:16

Which brings us to Bill McKibben, journalist, educator, longtime climate activist, and founder of 350.org he's been warning us about the cost of fossil fuels for decades.

 

Barbara Leckie 06:28

In this conversation, he talks about the scale of the crisis, the failure of our political systems to act quickly enough, and what he calls the joy and romance of transitioning to a world where we stop burning things for energy.

 

Joel Westheimer 06:42

Bill reminds us that change, even at the last minute, is still possible.

 

Barbara Leckie 06:47

And one quick point to note, you've met all our guests in previous episodes, and so we'll only be doing brief introductions here, but you can get their full bios on our website.

 

Joel Westheimer 06:58

Our producer, Mary Stinson conducted the interview with Bill. You'll hear her voice first.

 

Mary Stinson 07:03

I'm thinking about how we frame problems affects how we attempt to solve them. I'm thinking about language that we use, such as fighting climate change, which sets the process up as a war, for instance. What language do you think works best, or what metaphor works best when you're constructing an approach to climate change?

 

Bill McKibben 07:27

I confess, I think that there are reasons to think about this as a war. We're literally losing territory now with each passing day. It gets burned over by wildfire or swallowed by a rising sea. That's almost the definition of what happens in a war, when someone comes and takes things from you. And we need to mobilize the way that countries and communities have in wartime. One of the few parallels for the sort of scale of action that we need now to build out renewable energy say, is what the Allies did at the outset of World War Two, when they converted their economies quickly to the production of material to defeat fascism in Europe, the last sort of existential challenge that the west faced. But I've spent my life building large nonviolent campaigns around climate and energy.

 

I think that the place where the metaphor breaks down is, happily, that we don't need to actually go fight anyone. We need to figure out how to cooperate across international borders in order to make change happen very rapidly. And it's in all of our interest to do the right thing at this point. That's the great challenge, how to foster that happening fast enough on a diverse planet. I do think that probably it's key to help people understand that there is joy and romance in this transition. We're on the edge of being able to stop burning things on planet Earth and rely instead on the fact that the good lord was kind enough to hang a large ball of burning gas 93 million miles up in the sky.

 

After hundreds of 1000s of years of relying on combustion, we don't need to anymore. We can catch its rays on our photovoltaic panels and take advantage of the fact that it differentially heats the earth, creating the wind that turns those turbines, we can move from energy from hell to energy from heaven, in short order. And if we did, the results would be not just good for the climate and not just good for the 9 million people a year on this planet, one death in five that result from breathing the particulates that come from fossil fuel combustion. The result would also be good for democracy and for localities everywhere, because only a few places have fossil fuel: Alberta, Saudi Arabia, Putin's Russia, whatever. But every place has sun and wind, and so the possibilities for a world that works in different ways become much, much more appealing.

 

Mary Stinson 10:10

Just thinking about the sun and wind and how reliable those were will be, I'm thinking about your recent essay, “By the Numbers,” where you cite NASA climatologist, Gavin Schmidt, who says that we might actually now be in uncharted territory when it comes to climate change, as in, we can no longer even predict where things might go. The Earth has warmed to the point where its own operating systems have changed. Can you talk a little more about that?

 

Bill McKibben 10:40

I think that's very, very scary. Climate change is a timed test. There are very few timed tests in our political life. This may be the only real example of something that if we don't solve quickly, we can't solve. And there are signs within the last year or two that we're fast approaching that lip of the waterfall there, the rapid and somewhat unexplained rise in sea surface temperature and to some extent, air temperature over the last 18 months, and the intimations that they've begun to do significant damage to core systems like the great ocean currents are very, very sobering. And what they tell us is, if we're going to do anything about this crisis, we got to do it now.

 

The IPCC told us that we needed to cut emissions in half by 2030 to have any hope of sticking on the Paris temperature targets, and by my watch, 2030 is five years and eight months away. That's, you know, it's not like we have any time, without anymore, you know, presidential terms to spare, I mean, there's always something that seems more pressing to our political leaders. Oh, we're going to make Alberta mad. Oh, you know, we're going to lose the vote in Pennsylvania and fracking or something. But the physics doesn't really care about any of that. It's doing what it's doing on its own timetable. It's setting the bar that we have to meet.

 

My hope is, that in my grandson's time, or maybe his grandson's time, human beings will figure out ways to take significant steps back, to make themselves much smaller, so that there's room for the rest of creation to find its place too. And that's one of the things that really appeals to me about solar power and wind power. And there are ways of making ourselves a little smaller in the world. We got too large, you know, we got too large when we figured out how to build atom bombs. It was Oppenheimer looking at the first explosion who said, we are become as gods, destroyers of worlds. Our imagination was large enough to compass the idea that mushroom clouds over cities were bad and so we haven't done it again, yet, knock on wood. But our brains, our hearts, weren't able to conjure up the idea that the explosion of a billion cylinder, billion pistons and a billion cylinders every minute of every hour could do the same amount of damage as those bombs, and that's what we're living through at the moment.

 

And so, figuring out how to take that step back seems to me the paramount human task. We're much better suited to a world in which we are one part of creation, then to the one where we have to be the whole thing.

 

Barbara Leckie 14:06

That was Bill McKibben. He sees this time as a decisive moment in human history.

 

Joel Westheimer 14:12

Hard to argue with that.

 

Barbara Leckie 14:14

And he also knows that we're on the edge of being able to turn things around.

 

Joel Westheimer 14:17

What stayed with me most, was that line about the mismatch between the pace of the climate crisis and the sluggishness of our political systems.

 

Barbara Leckie 14:25

Yeah, we're facing an emergency that demands speed and cooperation, and instead, we get delay, deregulation and disinformation about whether the emergency even exists.

 

Joel Westheimer 14:35

And that delay isn't neutral. It's not just about a slow bureaucracy. It's about powerful interests profiting from the status quo, from fossil fuels, from privatized infrastructure, from pretending we have more time than we do.

 

Barbara Leckie 14:49

Yeah, exactly. And when people feel the consequences: rising costs, failing systems, wildfire smoke in their eyes and lungs, they understandably feel insecure. The question becomes, how do we respond to that insecurity: with solidarity? Or with scapegoating and polarization?

 

Joel Westheimer 15:07

That's the question Astra Taylor takes up. She's a writer, organizer and co-founder of the Debt Collective, and she's been thinking deeply about the intersection of politics, care, and climate.

 

Barbara Leckie 15:19

In this segment, she connects the climate crisis not just to carbon emissions but to the broader social crisis of how we care for one another or fail to.

 

Joel Westheimer 15:29

You’ll hear Barbara's voice first.

 

Barbara Leckie 15:34

As you note in The Age of Insecurity, what you call existential insecurity is a fundamental part of being human. We're all fragile and vulnerable. And I'll quote you here: “How we understand and respond to insecurity is one of the most urgent questions of our moment, for nothing less than the future of our species hangs in the balance.” What do you see as the tensions at the heart of insecurity as it relates to climate change?

 

Astra Taylor 16:02

Yeah, I'm thinking, I'm just contemplating your phrase tensions. I mean, I think there are tensions inherent in the concept of insecurity, which is part of why it's interesting to me. So, one thing I argue in the book is that insecurity is, as you quoted, a sort of fundamental feature of being human, because we are creatures in need of care from cradle to grave. We are necessarily interdependent. No human being is an island, and you know, when you need other people other things, then you're not invulnerable, and that puts you in a state of, I think, insecurity, but in a beautiful way, right? You know, we're not in control of our fates, of our destinies on our own, but that can be a hard thing to face.

 

And I think a lot of the problems we see today in our politics, in our culture, have to do with the fact that people don't want to feel insecure, right? There's something discomforting about it, uncomfortable, and so we pursue security in different ways, in ways that can be very destructive, by trying to shore ourselves up with possessions or with certitude, right, ideologies that are impenetrable, by finding victims to blame by, you know, taking solace in authoritarian leaders, or we can find security in what I think are more constructive, collaborative means, by finding community, by turning our insecurity into solidarity, by seeing that actually it's something that we have in common with each other. You need care, I need care, why don't we build a society that reflects that? And so, tension is there, right? The sort of tension of the fact that we're always changing, our needs are ever evolving, you know, nothing is for sure, right? We live in a state of uncertainty, that's just a fact, and so what are we going to do about that? That's the tension of insecurity.

 

And I think climate change just really compounds that, because a kind of stability that our species knew and evolved in, a stability of this climate that is unique to this period on Earth. The Earth has not always had a climate that is so hospitable to human life and to the lives of all the species that we now share the planet with. This stability is crumbling, and so we see a similar thing happening in response to it. We see a strong reaction of folks who are saying, whoa I can't face that, so I'd rather take solace in climate denialism or even climate fascism, right? Like, well okay, if things are they're going to be floods and fires, well not me, not my family, right? I'm going to build a bunker, I'm going to build a wall, you know, and embrace a kind of ethno-nationalist politics. And then we see other folks going in a different direction and saying, oh, there's a crisis here, let's anticipate it, let's find community together, let's figure out how we can change our modes of production and consumption and build this other kind of security, right? Security in common. And I think it's, I think it's a tension that's really alive right now, really intense.

 

I spend a lot of my time in western North Carolina, where we were just devastated by Hurricane Helen, and what I saw there was evidence that climate change is coming for us no matter where we are. This is a place in North America that has been heralded by many as a climate refuge, a climate haven, which propagates this idea that there are places that will somehow go unscathed, and that is a lie, you know, and it was a deep shock, I think even for me, that climate change came for that part of the world so swiftly and so violently. And we are entering a phase where the deep uncertainty and insecurity of human existence is only amplifying. And so, I think the questions that I pose in the book The Age of Insecurity, you know, are just, it just means that they're all the more urgent, which is, how are we going to respond to this, to this crisis, and can we have the wisdom and the willpower to not let our fears get the best of us, but actually use them to build bridges with other folks? And can we also resist that cadre of people and corporations that actually weaponize our insecurity, weaponize our fears, weaponize our anxieties to deflect and to divide and to ensure that our continued insecurity will be profitable to them?

 

Barbara Leckie 20:26

Yeah, I love your phrase, manufactured insecurity, because it really gets at that other side of how insecurity is used against us. Climate change and the climate crisis is so outside of most North Americans’ experience anyway, that we are kind of making it up as we go. I think the questions you pose in the book are helpful as a prod to imagine other ways of thinking about living and being.

 

Astra Taylor 20:54

One thing I'm trying to get at with The Age of Insecurity is just how important political emotions and political affect is we won't win various political battles, including the fight over climate change, just with facts alone. And it is wonderful that there are armies of scientists, in fact, the vast majority of scientists validate the fact that climate change is real, and we have mounting data now going back millennia about the way the climate and the atmosphere are impacted when its chemical balance shifts right. But ultimately, we don't live our lives just as fact-based beings, we're feeling based beings, and I think insecurity is a huge feeling.

 

I was very struck after Hurricane Helen by some very good polling out of Florida, which was also impacted, that showed that the vast majority of people in the state of Florida believe that climate change is manmade, and they want government intervention. And I'm talking vast majorities, like 90% and 60% in that case, but they're voting for republican politicians who are pursuing a very different path. I think that's because of the emotional framework those folks are offering people, they're superseding the factual awareness of many voters and saying, you know, hey that fear that you're feeling instead of planning long term to address climate change, how about we, you know, again, build the wall on the southern border, or we, you know, beat up some folks who are more vulnerable, and we, you know, at least like, fuel your resentments towards the so called cultural elites.

 

Insecurity also is a powerful concept to me because it conveys both the material and the emotional. You know, we can talk about very concrete things like housing insecurity, food insecurity, job insecurity, climate insecurity, but also, we're talking about people's subjective affective states, and when we're talking about political matters, when we're talking about climate change, we actually have to be at that intersection.

 

Barbara Leckie 23:05

One thing that comes across in our conversations with both Bill and Astra is that we can choose to stay on our current path, or we can go in a different direction that will better ensure a livable future.

 

Joel Westheimer 23:16

And many have already chosen the livable future.

 

Barbara Leckie 23:19

So how do we collectively create the conditions for more people to join them?

 

Joel Westheimer 23:23

Part of creating those conditions is recognizing that how we respond to a crisis is always a political choice. Do we double down on exclusion, fear, and authoritarian control, or do we try to build something different, something rooted in mutual care?

 

Barbara Leckie 23:39

And it's not just a political choice. It's an emotional one too, because crises, especially climate crises, provoke real fear, which leads to feelings of insecurity. And that fear can be weaponized, but it can also be transformed.

 

Joel Westheimer 23:52

Exactly. And transforming it means turning to each other, not away. That's something that Rita Wong speaks to so powerfully. She's a poet, a water protector, and a longtime advocate for environmental justice.

 

Barbara Leckie 24:06

In this segment, she talks about the emotions that often get pushed aside in climate conversations, grief, anger, joy, and how they can be part of building something new.

 

Joel Westheimer 24:17

She also reminds us that resistance is not abstract. It's cultural, it's relational, i's already happening. Especially in Indigenous communities that have long understood the earth not as a resource, but as a relative.

 

Barbara Leckie 24:31

This interview is also conducted by our producer, Mary Stinson. You'll hear her voice first.

 

Mary Stinson 24:38

You use the term mutual care when you've talked about your experience. And I wonder if mutual care and the climate crisis, how they overlap or complement each other.

 

Rita Wong 24:52

Yeah, I think mutual care becomes more and more important. There's sort of two, well more than two, but at least two ways of navigating the crisis we're in: one is outlined by Naomi Klein and The Shock Doctrine, where we just become, you know, where predators just come in and basically take advantage of people's vulnerability in times of crisis. The other alternative, which I believe we need to make necessary, not an alternative, but like a path forward, is outlined by Rebecca Solnit in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, I think it's called, and it looks at examples where in times of crisis, people come together, you know, spontaneously, for the most part, and help each other out in that spirit of mutual care. We're going to need that more than ever, we have always needed that, and we still need that, and I think collectively, we need to build that.

 

Mary Stinson 25:47

Are you satisfied with the language that's used around discussion of the climate crisis at the moment?

 

Rita Wong 25:59

That's a hard question, in the sense that it depends who's speaking and how it's mobilizing, but I would say there's this tendency to say it's in the future when it's not, it's already here. So, there's a timing issue that I think we need to work on in terms of the languaging of it. And that sense of putting things off into the future is partly, I think, a denial mechanism, but I think it's also partly in response to the scale, like, if we think about geological time versus human time as we live it, right, things that seem very slow to us are actually happening very fast, and I think we feel that speed more and more each year, actually. So, I wouldn't say that I'm satisfied with it, but I would say that there's a challenge in terms of how the climate is really everything. I think Naomi Klein writes about this very well, in This Changes Everything, how the climate could be an impetus for how we change everything, but it needs to be understood as something that we're already in and that is integrated into every single thing.

 

There's something abstract about the word climate, potentially in some ways, it's, I guess, that link between the weather and the climate. I don't think it's a word we can give up on, but I do think that it's partly that scale issue, the long-term scale versus the short-term, but also the size of the spaces that we're talking about. And I think climate is a word that can be used to help us transition from sort of the individual scale to the larger collective scale. I think the other thing in terms of how the languaging is going, it's easy to shut down when one feels that things are always bad, bad news, bad climate, etc., and there are a lot of really terrible things that are happening.

 

But there are also good things happening, and the question of where to spend your energy on strengthening the things that we want to see happen, I think, is really important. So, I think, for example, of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, I think it's Dr Melissa Lem did a really interesting project, like basically giving out prescriptions to spend time in nature, PaRx I think it's called. Like things like that that are engaging and fun and kind of immediate in terms of our health, I think are really important to do. It's a balancing act between acknowledging the very scary times that we're in with finding joyful ways to build the kinds of changes that we all need.

 

Mary Stinson 28:41

It’s nice to hear you say joyful because a lot of talk around climate action that can be taken to help the climate change problem and the things that we do don't always incorporate joy, and sometimes you want a carrot rather than a stick.

 

Rita Wong 29:00

Absolutely. And actually, one thing I forget to say, or I don't say enough, I think, is some of the people that I met up at Burnaby Mountain opposing the pipeline, I mean, we had really amazing times. We were singing, we were like, you know, there were people up in the trees, there were people bird watching, they managed to stop the logging of trees for four months because of nesting hummingbirds. Like there's a lot of joyfulness that we build in our relationships with each other that keep us going, actually. There's, you know, creative, spiritual, many ways of engaging, but it's way more satisfying or fulfilling to show up honestly, than to be in denial or fear or avoidance of things.

 

Mary Stinson 29:48

Most people are caught up in their immediate lives and all of the daily preoccupations that includes, and we do small things like recycling our bottles or taking shorter showers or riding our bikes or walking instead of driving and so on. But I wonder if these well intended actions have any significant benefits for the climate. And it seems to me that it's policy that's required to drive change.

 

Rita Wong 30:19

Well, I would absolutely agree that we need to focus on system change. You know, Sandra Steinberg talks about, this in one of her books, how it's not about shopping differently. The individual actions may be important for us in our own lives, but by themselves, they're never going to be enough. We need policy change, but not just policy change, but like system change.

 

Mary Stinson 30:43

I'm wondering about the frustration and perhaps anger that you might feel. And you were talking about what a difficult year, this one in particular has been, in reference to the late Indigenous Writer Lee Maracle, you've said that anger can be powerful, but it also has its limits. How much does anger figure in your own activism?

 

Rita Wong 31:08

I think anger is a healthy sign. There's absolutely logical reasons to be angry. Audre Lorde also writes a beautiful essay about the uses of anger, like anger is just one of the many emotions, or, you know, experiences, that we hold as people. And it's interesting who feels valid in being able to express their anger and who feels like they have to suppress it, for instance. That has a lot to do with power. And so, there is something very powerful about owning your anger, but I also believe for myself, at least not only speak for myself here, anger, by itself, is really important, but not enough. There's so many other things going on in our lives. Grief is another one. Love, joy, you know, many, many ways of feeling and navigating the world that we're in.

 

So, I think it's important not to suppress our feelings, whatever they may be, including anger, to just express it and feel it and let it go. I think that when we don't do that, sometimes it can get stuck in our body and become kind of toxic or give rise to illness. And so, I think that it's also part of just good self-care and health to acknowledge whatever the feelings are. For me, I think the important thing is just to be honest about what we're feeling and processing it, both on our own but also with other people.

 

And it's funny, there was an obituary for Lee, I think, in The New York Times, and it described Lee Maracle as combative. But I was like, she wasn't like this, like, combative in what context? And she was in a system that was out to eradicate her. Like, of course, you have to stand up for yourself, that doesn't make you combative, although you could be like, that's irrelevant, in other words, you know, you have a spine, you have to speak up. I've always really, really respected her for that.

 

Mary Stinson 33:06

That makes me think back to when you were talking earlier about hope, and that even if one doesn't have hope, you still have to take a step. You still have to keep doing things. And it made me think of the closing line in your poem, “Excerpts From a Diary of Resistance.” I'm just going to read the end of it there: “November is when I yearn for where sand meets ocean but can only see alleyways. When the act of imagination is all that keeps the soul from collapsing into itself,” and I loved that idea of the imagination. And sometimes when I am not feeling hope, I am thinking, maybe imagination is something that would be more useful.

 

Rita Wong 34:00

That's funny you say that. I've been reading a book by Ruha Benjamin called Imagination: A Manifesto. She makes a really good point about how important imagination is and how we're here because our ancestors imagined a future for us, and they did their utmost to help make that happen. She's speaking about it from an African American perspective, you know, where slavery was meant to objectify and commodify and basically dehumanize a whole set of people who refused that toxic and violent imagination, and met it with their own really powerful imagination in their full humanity and depth and creativity. And so just learning from that example of that particular community, but also thinking about how we have so much in common with each other, back to your sense of the commons, and how our differences are really important to learn from, not to obliterate them, but to like seriously, sit down and learn from them and coordinate together, because those differences can be a strength. They don't have to be silenced or excluded or devalued.

 

So, for me to return to that question of hope, I remember being on this panel with Peter Culley and Joanna Arnault, and I think maybe a couple of other people. It was about eco-poetics, and Peter Culley, he's passed away now– rest in peace, Peter– but he was like, I don't have any hope, you know, and it doesn't matter, you still have to do what you have to do, whether you have hope or not. And you know, on the on the flip side of that, the last book that Lee Maracle wrote with her two daughters is called Hope Matters. And so, whether hope matters to you or not, I personally think it has a use. But I don't think it's good for us to put all our eggs in any single basket. You know, if hope works for you, great, keep doing it. And I think also that idea that hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up, that hope isn't just kind of sitting around hoping to be rescued. Hope means you get in there and you do the hard work. Yeah, you make hope by acting basically. I think Rebecca Solnit’s right about that as well. So yeah, hope may be a luxury, as Leanne Simpson puts it, but it is also something that is in the toolbox of what we have.

 

Mary Stinson 36:35

Yes, and I guess in that image that you gave there of hope, you know, with sleeves rolled up, if you've rolled up your sleeves I guess it implies that you have a vision, and then that gives you something to work towards. You take your first step or your next step towards that.

 

Barbara Leckie 36:53

Rita's words remind us that grief and joy aren't opposites. They're both part of how we navigate the world we're in and how we begin to imagine the one we want.

 

Joel Westheimer 37:02

Yes, and that shift she makes from individual action to collective responsibility is central. Addressing the climate crisis requires building different relationships, with each other and with the land.

 

Barbara Leckie 37:15

That's a nice segue to our next guest, Candis Callison, who also talks about relationships, but in a very specific way. Different communities have different ways of talking about climate change.

 

Joel Westheimer 37:26

People, in other words, enter climate conversations from different places. What makes climate change legible? What makes it matter isn't the same for everyone.

 

Barbara Leckie 37:36

Candis's work also insists that climate change is more than facts. It's also a public conversation shaped by culture, by history, by whose voices are heard, and whose are not.

 

Joel Westheimer 37:47

Candis is an environmental journalist and professor at the University of British Columbia.

 

Barbara Leckie 37:53

I thought I'd start with the title of one of your books, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. And so, I'll start with the question of, could you describe what you mean by communal?

 

Candis Callison 38:06

Yes, so the book really emerges out of a particular time in conversations about the climate, and out of the American context in particular, so in the early to mid 2000s there was enormous outcry, certainly from scientists and science policy people, about how the media was reporting on climate change and that they weren't bringing the public along to care about it. And so that was really the core of how the book project started. But in the course of sort of tracking those conversations as they were emerging, I also saw really interesting social groups that were also trying to move the needle of the public conversation. So, the Inuit Circumpolar Council, who at that time, Sheila Watt-Cloutier was the international chair, and she was bringing the human rights claim before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and so, you know, there was, there was a lot of really interesting conversations going on about that, led by Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who was intent on putting a human face on climate change. So really, you know, a different way of talking about it than scientists and science policy people. At the same time, there was a group of evangelicals in the U.S., the same people who had done, "What Would Jesus Drive?" – that ad campaign and transportation is a moral issue, is the tagline. They were trying to get evangelicals to really pay attention to climate. They had done the Evangelical Climate Initiative. They were actively working with their community, right, and changing the way it was talked about. One of the leaders of that group actually described how you needed someone to bless the facts right. The facts weren't enough on their own. And the third group that was really active at that time was am and they still are, actually the Corporate Social Responsibility Group Series, who changed how climate change was talked about on Wall Street for the markets, right? They made it climate risk instead of just climate change. So, you had to account for the risk that your businesses, you know were, could experience as a result of climate change. So, these are three really different ways of talking about climate change, and I came to see that as kind of different vernaculars, right? And that climate change was like, it was its own form of life, right? That the rules and grammars that we had to talk about what it was, what it meant, and whether or not there was ethics or morality that should call us to action, right, whether or not there was a rationale to act. And so that really is how I came to think about communality, right, as having those conversations, but also whether or not there was embedded moral and ethical codes that called us to act. And, you know, I concluded that climate change needed to become much more than a scientific fact. Yes, the science is absolutely important. We need, you know, fidelity to scientific facts, but it also has to become much more than that, for publics to care about it, for, you know, communities to come alongside with their own language, their own ways of making sense of the world. And so, you know, science is one part of that, but it isn't the whole rationale to act.

 

Barbara Leckie 41:32

So, you've stressed the importance of noting the linked histories of colonialism and capitalism and their relevance to climate change, and I really agree with you there. Have you seen changes in the media's treatment of climate change, especially in this context, since you began writing about it?

 

Candis Callison 41:50

Well, I started writing about it at a time when there was still debates about whether or not climate change was human caused, whether or not it was anthropogenic, right? That was the word that was up for a lot of debate. So yes, I have seen things change. I think there's much more awareness of it as a reality we're all going to live with. In other words, it's not just, you know, low lying island nations in the South Pacific and the Arctic who are going to suffer there. There's now really visceral examples and experiences of climate change that we can all point to. Most places in North America have been inundated with wildfire smoke at one time or another. You know, for us on the West Coast, I still have vivid memories of putting on my covid mask, not for covid, but for smoke so I could go out and walk my dog, of course, didn't have a mask for my dog, which was another kind of problem. But, you know, I think this is something now that we can all recognize that we're living with it, and media is doing a better job of connecting events to climate change, but I think there's still lots of room for improvement, and I think there's lots of room to think about events as giving us an opportunity to shed light on larger problems with social systems and approaches to climate change.

 

Joel Westheimer 43:41

Fires, smoke, and masks. These are part of everyday conversations across North America now, in a way that did not used to be the case.

 

Barbara Leckie 43:49

And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, as we're in studio today recording this episode, the air quality is, once again, over 100 and rated as unhealthy.

 

Joel Westheimer 43:59

It's another indication that what used to count as common sense is no longer working.

 

Barbara Leckie 44:05

Carolyn Lesjak, professor of English at Simon Fraser University, makes that point in the following segment by returning us to the commons, or what she calls a reinvented commons. She's making the point that common sense is no longer working.

 

Joel Westheimer 44:19

You'll hear Barbara's voice first asking Carolyn a question, and then Carolyn, let's listen.

 

Barbara Leckie 44:27

You also discussed the privatization and commodification of everyday life that we see today under neoliberalism, that it's an infringement of the commons, and you gesture toward a quote “renewed or reinvented global commons.” Can you tell me a bit more about your thinking on this idea?

 

Carolyn Lesjak 44:48

First, I would say it can, especially given the dominance of neoliberal thinking about everything today, it can feel impossible, and it is monumental. So, I just want that out there. But I think one of the things the commons and a notion of a reinvented commons does is, one, it avoids a lot of the baggage of other political labels, so communism, for instance, or socialism, or any of the terms that have gone along with political parties and political movements that, for many, have been judged failures or worse and always sort of raised as horrible specters of what could come if we had a more equitable, more commune or communally based world and economy. So, I think it's very useful, in that sense, just as a term, and as something that keeps people, that people can relate to, even if they don't know the history of the commons, they can relate to that notion. And I think that it carries with it, in its economic sense, this idea, and this comes from Sylvia Federici, who is someone that has also been very influential for me, she writes: “No common is possible unless we refuse to base our life and our reproduction on the suffering of others, unless we refuse to see ourselves as separate from them.” And I think this is just a very clear way of suggesting how a global, or we might say a planetary commons these days, has to have that entire picture in mind in order to think about the kind of equity that would be a real commons, realized commons.

 

Barbara Leckie 46:46

Yeah, yeah. I like the way Federici also refers to commoning, as a verb, that practice, and commoning that's happening all around us.

 

Carolyn Lesjak 46:56

And I mean, just to follow up on that, I think that, especially given how dire things can seem, that recognizing those smaller acts or those everyday interactions or exchanges that are, whether it's sharing childcare with someone or you know, she has many examples of women in particular and practicing feminist commons in terms of food distribution and caretaking and health care and so on. And I do think it's very important to remember that those are happening, and that that dominant narrative about everybody out for themselves is countered by all of those smaller, sometimes very every day, intimate exchanges that people engage in, and the kind of generosity and care that people show each other.

 

Barbara Leckie 47:56

I wanted to ask you also about the relationship between the planetary commons and the climate crisis. I know this is a gigantic question, but I appreciated how you turn, you gesture toward the climate crisis in the end of your book and we're thinking about the climate crisis in the context of commons. So, I thought it might be useful for us to hear a bit about how those two ideas are connected.

 

Carolyn Lesjak 48:20

Well, in some ways, I think the climate crisis has brought to the fore the necessity of a planetary commons, the connections that are now not only about geopolitical forces and relations, but literally about our air, our water, the biosphere, etc., it’s impossible to not see everything, everything, being connected and that unless the structures within which we live are changed and the crisis is confronted on multiple levels, we're looking at the destruction of the planet. But I do appreciate the distinctions that, you know, can, some theorists have made more recently, I'm thinking like Dipesh Chakrabarty, right about the difference between a kind of, the global commons as human centric, and the planetary commons as decentering the human. And that's really interesting to me, because I think that's also what in the book, I argue, types, decentering the sort of superiority of the human and so on, is what's happening in these realist novels as well. So, my I'm very, very interested in thinking about how we can push the idea that it's fine to be middling, to use Elliot's phrase, or right, to be part of a whole and part of a collective. And you know that that, I think that decentering, that seems to be more linked with a planetary commons, and especially in terms of the forces, geological forces, produced by us, but also acting on us, that that does that work is very important to help us think through this present moment.

 

Barbara Leckie 50:20

Yeah, you're yeah, I think you're totally right. It's interesting too, because it's again of question of noticing, like, we think of ourselves as isolated or potentially isolated, autonomous, but all you need to do is, like, look around you to see how you rely so much on every–everything, even if you're all alone, you rely on the planet. All right, my last question: is the common still a salient term for today's challenges? And I'm thinking of the intersecting crises, the climate change, the decline in democracy, racism, economic inequality, these crises that define the period in which we live.

 

Carolyn Lesjak 50:58

Yes, I do. I do think so. I think that, as our conversation already has made clear, I think it remains a salient term precisely because it touches directly on the list of intersecting crises you have just named. I think it has the capacity to address the twin nature of the crises we currently face, and I think of these as global capitalism and climate change. And I don't think you can have, again, echoing what we've talked about before, you can't have a genuine planetary commons without economic equality and a profound transformation in how we relate to the environment. And again, I think it's a kind of language that can be taken up, that has its feet on the ground, that is, has a lot of potential to draw people in with its appeal. And again, I think there are problems with other leftist categories and labels, now. I think in some ways, many of the different labels are all trying to capture a notion of the collective, but those you know, you take up new ones as the moments arise when we need new language. And I think we do need new language. And then again, just because of the critiques of the language of the commons specifically, I think there is work to be done to think about the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinking around some idea of a planet or planetary something, because I think that the land back movements, the particular struggles, specifically in Canada, that relate to all of these issues around the commons, but would not, which are not, struggles not being mobilized around that language. It's very important to take seriously those critiques and think that land question somewhat differently. And think, think about Tuck and Yang, use this notion of the ethic of incommensurability, and I think that's an important thing for us to grapple with, and think about forms of solidarity that acknowledge that incommensurability without saying it has to be one or the other.

 

Barbara Leckie 53:48

Yeah, yeah. I think whether we need something large enough to accommodate contradictions, intentions, and yeah, often, I think the problem with the version of collectivity you already pointed to on the right is that it narrows thinking to like just this, and so anything that's other different or unfamiliar is put on that outside and vilified accordingly.

 

Carolyn Lesjak 54:11

That is where it's interesting to keep land at the center, because some of that contradictory, those contradictory relations only appear, or seemingly only appear when land is in the mix. Because the idea then of saying, right, like the Occupy movement, we are the 90% except We're wanting to take over the land that is also other people's land, right? And that comes to the fore in a moment like that, whereas in previous iterations of political and social justice movements and so on, that wouldn't have necessarily become a sort of visible contradiction.

 

Joel Westheimer 55:00

Carolyn brings us back to the commons here and reminds us that no new social organization will be viable if it's built on the suffering of others.

 

Barbara Leckie 55:10

And that's been a point that's come up often. Solidarity of any kind has to grapple with that suffering, and sometimes it means holding together two things that really can't be reconciled. I find Candis Callison's point about staying in conversation across difference really helpful here.

 

Joel Westheimer 55:25

Carolyn also opens the commons up in a way that allows us to think about it in planetary terms.

 

Barbara Leckie 55:32

That last point that's important to bear in mind is that these acts of commoning are already happening.

 

Joel Westheimer 55:39

Right, and she also has that wonderful phrase the commons is a language with its feet on the ground.

 

Barbara Leckie 55:44

And that it's one way to move toward what she calls a new language of the collective.

 

Joel Westheimer 55:50

And that's a point our last guest, Stephanie LeMenager, stresses.

 

Barbara Leckie 55:54

She too, talks about fires, and like many other guests in this episode, she's also alert to the role of feelings. We've discussed, insecurity, joy, anger, and grief so far. But there's also loss.

 

Joel Westheimer 56:07

And there's gain, because as people become more and more aware that the old version of common sense no longer works for them, they'll be more receptive to other possibilities.

 

Barbara Leckie 56:16

And that's where Stephanie's call for imagining a new language of the collective comes in. It shaped a lot of our thinking in these conversations.

 

Joel Westheimer 56:25

Stephanie is an English and environmental studies professor at the University of Oregon, and in this, our last segment for the season, she helps us to create the conditions for change so necessary today. Here's Barbara's conversation with Stephanie.

 

Barbara Leckie 56:41

You've discussed the affective and emotional registers of climate change a lot. Where do you see common sense fitting into feelings?

 

Stephanie LeMenager 56:51

I don't think I would necessarily place common sense as a framework for feelings, but I certainly observe modes of grief and anger, something like what Cate Sandilands, and others have talked about in terms of an ecological melancholia, a kind of mourning for that, which we don't really still have social registers of mourning. I see more connection, especially with my students, among my students, to the mourning of non-human, or more-than-human beings and systems. I think even those who are not self-declared environmentalists feel losses. I know a few years ago, when so many hundreds of millions of non-human animals died in the fires in Australia, even as far away as we are here in the Western U.S., there was a sense amongst many of my students and myself of devastation. I think that if there ever has been a biophilia as common sense, which is questionable, my apologies to EO Wilson, but if there has been, or to the degree there is such a thing, I think it's now often felt at the edges of loss, the loss of life, of non-human life. And it's, you know, often the case, wrong, wrongly so I think, in some ways, but maybe predictably so, that mourning of non-human animals can be more readily accessed by people, some people, than the mourning of other humans. So, I see grief, I see this kind of mourning without end, going back to that idea of ecological melancholia, and I also see resentment and rage, something like my own term, petro-melancholia, on the part of some who are angry that the worlds of speed and hypermobility that modernity has made seem to be no longer widely accessible to everyone, and that if you are a young person in particular, you may not have inherited that world, but its ruins and the collateral damage of its selfishness.

 

Barbara Leckie 59:20

We have feelings of grief in response to the devastations wrought by climate change, but I also wonder if we can, if there's a way to cultivate feeling toward actions that will improve where we are now. You ask a question somewhere that's, can there be an affect, affective intensity linked to low or no growth. And I love that question, because so often we feel excited about growth and progress and so on. But could we get excited like, feel like, feel the desire for low or no growth? That seems like an important idea to me. And Naomi Klein did a webinar recently, which was called Feelings Don't Care About Your Facts, and I thought that nicely captured the role of feelings, you know, in in the certain like polarization and climate debates now.

 

Stephanie LeMenager 1:00:10

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I have to say honestly that on the verge of Trump's inauguration, my sort of ability to imagine affects that kind of lead to effective resistance is down a bit, you know, but that doesn't mean it is entirely gone. And I, I will say, I think years ago, I was watching a lecture by Kate Soper, and I remember her saying something like, you know, we need an erotics of sustainability. And I thought, yeah, I mean, that's right, and to some degree, that has been a part of various counter cultural movements that call themselves either environmentalist movements or green movements or social justice movements. I think excitement about living small you know, which isn't new and can be traced back to the 1970s or earlier, is still with us. Every year, I teach a course on the literature of the Northwest, and we read Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, and that's a very flawed book, and like many environmentalist efforts, it has a strange kind of racial politics, where African Americans live in a separate country from Ecotopia, because integration isn't imaginable. To Callenbach in part because of the damage that white Americans have done to black Americans. It's not an entirely retrograde belief that makes that the case. But nonetheless, besides those significant flaws, the book offers a whole vision of living within technological limits, with so called appropriate technology, using only public transportation, not living as hyper consumers, finding ways to express eroticism and love and communalism that have to do with art and joy and sexuality that are really appealing. And every year, my students and I read it, and we get so happy and at the same time so sad, because it is actually a vision from so long ago, the 1970s, 1975 to be exact, of a life that could be that, besides the crazy racist parts, is in some ways, a really beautiful life. So, I don't think that that vision is entirely lost. I think there are, people, sometimes simply by virtue of being dispossessed and being completely outside of the system of ownership, either by choice or maybe not by choice, who have created communalist lifestyles, who have become very adept at sort of the sharing of resources, who are not very interested in the modes of transport that are so fossil fuel heavy from our 20th century past. I guess public transportation is one of the only public things that really excites people in the United States still, and is always a winner in terms of politics, or almost always so. So, I do feel like another way is possible, and I think, deeply desired. I really do. I don't think people want to live within the remnants of injustices and systemic violence, for the most part, if they begin to see where those systems are, what the parameters are, and how they affect their current lives, they can begin to think and act otherwise. And there certainly are people already doing that, and these kind of climate counter cultures are, I think, real.

 

Barbara Leckie 1:03:52

Yeah, you've done such a great job of illustrating how fiction is good at sort of multiplying possibilities alternative ways of living, and giving us a kind of vision of it, of an otherwise. And I think that's such a good point, and I see that in my students too, that they really love getting examples to use in their lives. But I'm also wondering if you think fiction still has that same power to, I guess, inspire some form of climate action or climate thinking. I mean, do you think it's still the case that that fiction and literature are powerful in this respect, or has that diminished with the rise of social media?

 

Stephanie LeMenager 1:04:36

I don't know that. I that I've ever believed, and I may have said this, but I don't know that I've ever believed that fiction moves anyone to transformative action. I think about Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s work on the sociology of climate fiction and how what seems to have resulted, and he looks at, he does surveys on this, our people become more libertarian in their orientation rather than more cooperative when they read about, you know, when they read apocalyptic fiction of various kinds. I don't know that that's always the case, and I'm just obviously drawing from one scholar there, but, but what I do think fiction does and why I think it's still really important to me and to others, I think it gives us a space in which to think. And I'm a big proponent of slow thinking, social media is much better at grabbing our attention than literary fiction is, but it doesn't really hold us, and it doesn't allow us rumination and you go inside of even a short story, but certainly a novel, and you're kind of playing your own thoughts, your own memory, your own experience, against an immersive other world. And it's an important exercise in sharing attention with others, which is the basic, you know, I'm going back to the very old arguments for literary study, but it's sharing attention with others in a way that is very basic to civic life. But it's also a chance to just sort of slow down and allow yourself to think. And I realize that we're in a time of emergency, but I think thinking is still absolutely necessary, and any kind of technology that can produce enough quiet and time for complex thought is a technology that I tend to find exciting, and I do think that literature does just that. Now they're all different kinds of fictions. Some of them are complex and in demand, much more of us, in terms of thought, than others. I don't think that every fiction is equal, but I think in a time when so much of media is about kind of grabbing us, pulling us in, pressing our most primal buttons in terms of our physiology and neurology, an older technology, an analog technology, if you will, even if you read on digital screen, it gives us time for thought, and that's something that can't be sacrificed to this moment. In fact, it's what is needed more than ever.

 

Barbara Leckie 1:07:18

Yeah, I so agree with you, but I'm wondering if, if this is a place where people still go for rumination, like if there, if there's that desire for rumination, or if that's being eroded, I guess, by new forms of technology that, that yeah, do grab attention, but also give a story without providing a space for thought or the same sort of space or encouragement for thinking.

 

Stephanie LeMenager 1:07:44

Yeah. And, you know, I think I'll give a couple of answers, but I'll preface them with, you know, one reality, which is, I'm a 20th century human. So, am I the best person to answer that question? No, I am not. But I can tell you from working with students, which is my, you know, primary interface with these questions on a practical level, that I think there are forms of media other than the literary, and I think about Alenda Chang's work on video games, for example, that can create narrative intelligence in a variety of ways. And as Chang suggests, you know, possibly even give people a sense of good worlding as well as bad worlding, of course, you know, depending on what the game is, I'm not a game player myself. So, for me, that's just, you know, reading, talking to others. I see a lot of students come in and find themselves and kind of express to me that they're deeply involved with graphic novels or anime. There's a great deal of intelligence in those forms, and I, myself, now teach graphic fiction of various kinds. I don't think there's anything at all dumb or noncomplex, or productive of anything but thought and sort of deep shared attention that that kind of work produces. So, I do feel like there's, that the future of the book may very well be graphic fiction of one kind or another, or graphic memoir, but I also find many students who go to literary reading, novels and short fiction and even poetry, almost as they would go to journaling. I mean, I do think they understand it as a form of collective self-creation. And by collective self-creation, I mean, there is a collectivity within fictional worlds. There are other minds, and there sometimes are, you know, ways of living and being that are quite distinct from our own, that people are still interested in and curious about. I don't have any lack of interest in my classroom. The number of English majors has diminished, but actual students showing up, at least for certain classes, come with, for the most part, real interest, you know, in my experience, which is only my experience. So, I, I don't think that literary fiction is dead. I, you know, I think the novel's been declared dead many times, and it's still not the case. But I also think there are modes of media that I don't really practice myself that probably do similar things with different prompts to help people think, to help people imagine, and potentially even simulate, creating worlds, and that some of that can be really fantastic.

 

Barbara Leckie 1:10:38

So, I'm going back to common sense, again, for many people, common sense is what everybody knows. I think it's likely that everybody knows there's something amiss in our weather systems, even if they don't call it climate change. And for almost every interview we've done for this podcast, there has been a climate event coinciding with it, that is described as unprecedented. The L.A. fires may only just be the most extreme and vivid, or maybe it's just they're the most recent for me, now. I'm wondering what you make of this conundrum of knowing there's a problem but also not talking about it or addressing it.

 

Stephanie LeMenager 1:11:19

Yeah, I don't quite know how the politicization of climate change has been as successful as it has, because absolutely everyone knows it's a problem. I'm heartbroken, by the way, by the L.A. fires and what's happened in Altadena and the likelihood that many of the working-class homeowners in that community will not be able to rebuild or return. But, of course, I'm heartbroken for everybody who's lost their homes. But yeah, I mean, you know, I, one of the projects I've worked on is going out to rural eastern Oregon and talking with people who are generally quite republican, or even beyond republican, libertarian right-wing folks, and they're all dealing all the time with climate and weather events because they work the land. They absolutely know things have changed, but you can't use words like climate change, even as they work together, sometimes quite beautifully in solidarity, to address drought and fire. But the term climate change has been associated with democratic or left-wing politics. It's been made very effectively, almost a kind of taboo word for many people. And of course, that only serves, again, sort of the super wealthy people holding on to certain notions of property, real estate, even as insurers and reinsurers are no longer working under the assumption that climate change is, is not real. And in fact, a lot of properties in very wealthy areas are no longer insurable. So, the political damage that's been done by the spread of disinformation about climate change and what causes it is profound, and it is hard to reconcile with people's actual on the ground knowledge and belief. I think that what my colleague Kari Norgaard long ago called a kind of ontological insecurity and existential terror is part of the problem. So much has to change. So much has to change, not just technologically, as we know, but socially as well. There have to be so many reckonings with what the aspects of both colonialism and capitalism that have brought us to where we are to really move forward that I think many, many people would prefer to put their head in the sand or to kind of scoot a little bit away from the full reality and find more localized modes of coping.

 

Barbara Leckie 1:14:07

Yeah. I mean, I guess it goes back to our conversation at the beginning about the vulnerability of people and that sense of it's hard to recognize our interdependence, not just with others, but with the land. Yeah, that's part of the confrontation.

 

Stephanie LeMenager 1:14:21

Yeah. And I think also for some of us, maybe a bit of a sense of culpability, even if it's not individual culpability, culpability for inheriting a way of life that inadvertently, in many respects, but also to some degree deliberately, brought this all about, and that's almost unbearable.

 

Barbara Leckie 1:14:41

Yeah, I mean, as you discuss in Living Oil, it's also like a really comfortable way of life. So, the idea of letting it go is, is a hard one.

 

Stephanie LeMenager 1:14:47

Absolutely. And there certainly are aspects of modernity that have great optimistic energy attached to it, to maybe pun a little bit with the word energy, and also, you know, even creativity, beauty, joy, you know, and some of our most progressive movements were sort of sustained on some level by what we now understand are unsustainable and even injurious systems. So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot to be lost. There's a lot that's being lost. There's also the opening up of historical knowledges, I think that are unbearable for some. And then there are those who have recognized, to go to Naomi Klein, that disasters can be a great opportunity to accumulate wealth. And so, we have, you know, oligarchs really coming to the fore in terms of governmental leadership worldwide in a way that we've always had oligarchs the United States, but certainly we're seeing them now in a much more central and terrifying set of roles.

 

Barbara Leckie 1:15:54

Okay, so a last question that hopefully will be optimistic. You often note that things can be different, that they can change. And you've written a lot about fantasy and science fiction. So, can you briefly paint me a picture of a different, changed world you'd like to see by, say, around 2035, so in the relatively near term.

 

Stephanie LeMenager 1:16:18

Well, I'd like to think that what looks rather grim socio-politically right now may be the last gasp of a dying hegemony, and that there may be profound failures which will, yes, take casualties with them. I mean, there's going to be damage with the current order of things politically as I, as I experienced and understand it, but maybe also a final turn away from the worship of individualism, of a certain kind of authoritarian masculinity, of a kind of fantasy that unsustainable systems can be nostalgically recouped. It might be that we're seeing not the beginning, but the end of all of those tendencies towards destruction, and that, as again, casualties pile up, because it's not going to be a good moment, a new way of thinking that's already present in the world will really start to come to the fore. And I do feel, even at the level of our federal government, here in the U.S., which has all sorts of issues and problems, I do feel like some of the work of our more progressive climate politicians like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and others, some of the work of the Green New Deal actually was implemented by the Biden administration. There were certainly mistakes made, the implementation wasn't perfect, but I think that that other world that's possible even with the damaged and damaging systems that we inherit from the histories of liberalism is already work that's underway, and I'd like to see a world where we really are coming together in a more confident version of pluralism to keep one another safe and to recognize that keeping one another safe is not a symptom of weakness, but it's an interdependency that means strength.

 

Joel Westheimer 1:18:38

What Stephanie notes here is that another way is possible, the title of this episode, and that's something we've been trying to emphasize throughout this season.

 

Barbara Leckie 1:18:47

Over the course of this series, we've been talking about common sense, not as something neutral, but as one narrative, a narrative that pretends that other ways of saying things don't make sense or are not possible. And it's a political story.

 

Joel Westheimer 1:19:02

The dominant story we've inherited says that markets and competition are the only way to solve problems, even problems as complex and urgent as the climate crisis. That story tells us we're on our own, that the best we can do is to compete harder, buy greener, and hope the invisible hand of unregulated markets will solve everything.

 

Barbara Leckie 1:19:23

We suggested a different narrative, one based on the idea of the commons, the shared resources, institutions, and relationships that connect us, that make collective life possible. It's a story about valuing people over profit, care over competition, solidarity over insecurity.

 

Joel Westheimer 1:19:42

And it's not a utopian fantasy. Examples of the commons exist all around us, in libraries, public schools, in clean air and water, community gardens, in Indigenous Land Stewardship, in the mutual aid networks that spring up during disasters. These are real and functioning alternatives to the market first story.

 

Barbara Leckie 1:20:04

The thing about stories is that they shape what we believe is possible. And once we start to see how common sense is used to shut down alternatives, we can start to change it. We can imagine and then act on a different version of common sense when grounded in an adapted version of the commons.

 

Joel Westheimer 1:20:22

Because climate change isn't just an environmental problem, it's a crisis of imagination, a crisis of political will, a crisis of how we decide what's possible and what's not. If we can change the story, we can change what's possible.

 

Barbara Leckie 1:20:37

That's the work ahead. The idea of the commons gives us a way to tell that story and to live it.

 

Joel Westheimer 1:20:44

But you're a part of this too, so let's together ask ourselves what we do now to bring these ideas to action, because a livable future depends on it.

 

Joel Westheimer 1:21:02

I want to remind our listeners that bios of the people we interview are on our website, commonspodcast.com and you can also find information on any people referenced in the interviews. Again, that's commonspodcast.com

 

Barbara Leckie 1:21:18

Support for CommonS Sense comes from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the shared online projects initiative at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. And from Re.Climate, Canada's National Center for Climate Communication and Public Engagement. Special, thanks to our producer Mary Stinson, our sound producer Rhianna Philip, and to CKCU 93.1 FM.