Finding balance. Or not.

I find myself pondering how to balance two things:  1) The pull of staying in the moment and practicing gratitude, as Buddhist practice encourages, and which I’m sure is good for my mental health and 2) the imperative to take action to try and make the future better by creating change now.

The present moment is just fine for me, thank you.  I’m sheltered, well fed, in good health, and I can rest in the observation that as a society, we’ve made some very good progress over the last decades on a number of fronts.  I have the good fortune to live in a great part of the world and have access to a lot of interesting information about the environment and the living things that share the planet with me.  I am grateful for all of this. 

It often seems that if I stay in the moment, I don’t have to worry about the future, don’t have to care about the suffering that we are creating for people both now and in the future. There is no need to be uncertain about how the future will be played out, whilst also figuring out out what I should be doing. Being in the present moment and being grateful for all I have, could be a good way to escape from having to act, or worry. However, I doubt this is wise or ethical.  I’m left, then trying to negotiate a set of balances – enjoying the life I have whilst also trying to save the world! 

Taking action, however, is not a comfortable path.  I am doing things differently to others around me.  My income has dropped significantly. I’d like to see more of my family and friends.  My garden is a jungle and my house needs maintenance.  I live with a lot of uncertainty about whether I’m doing the right thing or making a difference. I also know that my efforts are never going to cut it, so its easy to want to give up now, or to work myself to a grumpy frazzle.

I have recently begun to think that balance is a fallacy and a goal one can never really attain.  The tightrope we all walk means that we will be constantly off balance and trying to regain it.    Maybe it is so with acting for the future and enjoying the now.  Walking this winding, inconsistent path successfully, probably means finding a way to hold all of it - the gratitude, curiosity, love, fear, anger, frustration, the future focus, AND the unkempt garden - in the present moment.  

The environmental crisis and short showers

Derrick Jensen writes in this article  http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/forget-shorter-showers-why-personal-change-does-not-equal-political-change/ that individual action around climate change is woefully short of what is needed.   

This might be a reason to give up on consuming less because his exhortations to become a ‘real activist’ who subverts the system might seem just too much.  

I agree with quite a lot of what he says, although I also find myself disagreeing with his title – forget shorter showers.  Actually, I think. remember them and also consider how you might do them using less energy and less water!  

It takes a lot of mindfulness and learning to really step lightly on the earth, whilst also living in today’s developed world, and I when individuals work to achieve this, they act as models for what is possible.  I, for example, was inspired by a story in the Guardian, years ago about a retired academic living in London who had worked to minimise her personal energy use.   

She walked everywhere, seldom cooked and didn’t have the hot water on.  Her area of research as an academic had been around energy and she decided that she should learn to put her knowledge into practice. 

After reading that article, I spent some time looking at my lifestyle and tracking my energy use and managed to cut it down considerably from what it had been.  I now drive my power company mad because I use about 4 -5 units of power per day summer and winter (and I work at home!).  My consumption, however is not as low as a good friend of mine who has his down to about 1 unit per day.  I do still own a car but just recently invested in an electric bike which has had no discernable effect on my power bill and which as halved my already low car running. Most of the car running I do is to carry large items needed for the community work I do.  

I don't think these things are a waste of time and I do talk about them with people as much as I am comfortable with.   I suppose an additional step would be to talk about it more and perhaps to write about it (which I've just done).  


Derek Jensen is right, though.  it is probably not enough just to do this and my reflections on some of the things I think we need to be doing will populate later posts.

Activism and power poles

I’m an activist because I want tomorrows world to be a better place than it otherwise might be.  Climate change, and the way we are making our planet increasingly hostile to human beings is of real concern along with many other trends that I have been seeing for some time now.  I’m aware however that when I work from fear and anger,  I turn people off, which I suspect derails my intention to change things for the better of our future. 

I've come to see this as being a bit like the driver in a skid who focuses on the only power pole or tree for 100m and then crashes into it.  By letting fear drive me, I’m setting myself up to go exactly where I don’t want to. 

After thinking about this, I realise that my fear stems from the fact that I care a whole, awful lot (as Dr Seuss put it):  I care about the earth and it beauty, the forests. grasslands, trees mountains rivers and lakes I visit and I want to see all of it survive and thrive.  I want to see the people around me be happy and well. I want the children I know to have happy, healthy futures (as well as being happy now).  I want to live in a strong community that works well because of generosity and reciprocity, and where people like each other and help each other out.  I want my friends family and community to have the resilience to weather any storms or difficult events that we may experience.  I do care a whole lot! In fact, is there anyone out there who doesn't want this, I wonder and who doesn't care about these things.  

The trouble is that at this point in our history, we can't have this in our future and sustain the lifestyles we have now.  We need to  change, and we need to do it soon. 

Change is easier if it is voluntary and there is some time to make the change.  It feels difficult if it is forced on us and has to be done quickly.  How can we make our future better?  What is the best things we can do now to ensure our lovely children are healthy and happy both now and into the future?  How do we learn to be resilient in the face of adversity?  And how might we work for the sort of future that most of us want?

Droughts and Demands for Irrigation water

I noticed an article in the Press yesterday saying that we need to develop more irrigation through storing alpine water. 

Having looked a little at some of the history of irrigation projects in Canterbury, I can say that the author is one in a long line of Cantabrians who have called for more irrigation during droughts.  Droughts are things we have regularly in Canterbury, and like this one, they can come on the tail of wetter years where production has been higher. They are hard on farmers and those who service the agricultural sector.  No question.

However, it seems to me that irrigation does not even out variations in income that comes with droughts and other weather events.  Even with irrigation, Canterbury farmers have to farm to the season’s conditions.  Irrigation water costs.  It requires an increase in production during BOTH dry and "wet" years to pay for it.  No matter how you look at it, droughts hurt farming pockets and they always will.  It is not easy, but farming requires farmers to manage the natural systems and take the good with the bad.  Most do.  Check out Andrew Hoggards article today.   [I must point out here that I don't agree with all he says].

Many farmers still farm successfully without irrigation.  They farm conservatively and learn to manage to the season’s conditions.  Most don’t go out of business. Some excel in this environment: Examples include Doug Avery , and Mike Brosnan .    Interestingly Mike told me he didn't want to work more than 4 days per week or to take on staff,  and he wanted to double the size of his sheep flock.  He achieved both, farming organically and moving away from grass as the main green feed and using deep rooted lucerne, salt bush, shelter and different grazing management to improve production. 

Looked at this way, droughts cause farmers to push for more irrigation but the evidence suggests tha all the irrigation in the world will not stop droughts.  Calling for more irrigation in drought years is simply a call for being able to get more irrigation to increase production in any year.  The rhythms of drought and flood will continue, regardless, along with their effect on our income as a country.  If primary production is a mainstay of our economy, this fluctuation in fortune in relation to the weather is something we just have to accept, if not now then when we have have passed the limits of our water use and degraded all our water.   

Inequality is reflected in being a victim of crime too.

I am on jury duty this week - and it has got me reflecting that inequality is not just about income and property - it is also about your likelihood of being the victim of crime.
I didn't get picked today, but I did get through the first ballot.  It was my first time inside a courtroom and my first time inside the court building with all its security.  I found it a foreign space.  It is a place of extremes: well dressed, well educated and well paid judges and court staff, and many less well dressed, mostly less well paid and probably less well educated people who are clearly "in the system".

I ended up in a courtroom where a couple were being tried for rape and unlawful sexual connection amongst a range of similar charges.  I can make no judgement on this case, but I was reminded of a conversation I had in 2009 with a woman working for Corrections  who had been involved with this piece of research looking at who the victims of crimes are.  It turns out that there are enormous inequalities in our likelihood of becoming victims.

Most people (64%) experience no crime ever, while a mere six percent of people experience 54% of crimes. Some victims experience crimes against them time after time after time.  I remember going to a play at Christchurch Women's Prison where the women told there stories and I have to say that they were harrowing.  Every single one of the women in the play had also been victims of appalling crimes of violence over and over and over again.

The research also found that those most likely to experience crime were younger, from Mäori or ‘other’ ethnic groups, unmarried, more economically vulnerable, living in rented accommodation, in more economically deprived areas, in sole parent households or households comprised of flatmates or ‘other’ family combinations, in metropolitan cities (excluding Auckland), and in the upper half of the North Island.

In other words, these are people with few resources - financial, educational or social - which might allow them to escape the experience of ongoing crime.   And at the time the government cynically covered the release of this report by releasing some other document at the same time so that the media nevery picked this up.   Of course our government's refusal to spend money on poverty or address housing needs or even to feed hungry kids in decile 1 and 2 schools all serve nicely to maintain the status quo or even make it worse.

And I tell you what - my observations today really tell me that it really would be cheaper to spend the money helping kids in poverty, ensuring they have access to good schooling and to decent living conditions rather than spending it on the punitive police car at the bottom of the cliff. 

Is busyness closing us down to life?

I was intrigued the other day to read that the word “busy” written in Chinese uses the characters killing and heart.  This really made me sit up and stop, because it connected with something that I’ve been grappling with for some time. 

Back in the early 1990s, I remember writing about a phenomenon that some researchers were calling time deepening.  As part of my Masters research, I interviewed mountain bikers who told me that mountain biking was a concentrated, intense experience that meant a day could feel like a weekend away and it allowed them to spend the other day of their weekend doing something else.  Some bikers connected this with consuming more stuff (bikes, kayaks, gear of various types, for example). 

This is a first world problem!  People with good incomes most often talk about time being their limiting factor, rather than money.  Over the last 20 years, this problem has worsened, and it seems to me that we mindlessly run to consume more experiences and stuff and to earn the money that we ostensibly need to do these things.  Worse still, the amazing array of opportunities that we have doesn’t make us happy – rather we feel that we are missing out on the things that we don’t have time for.  Furthermore, we have stopped noticing the wonders of our life – we no longer have time to take in the view or smell the flowers or soak up the pleasure of being with our friends or in nature.

The Chinese had something.  Busyness really is killing our hearts – closing us down and making us less able to deal with both the pleasure and the pain that life throws our way. 

My path in recent years has been one of trying to slow down and do and consume less and most recently I’ve been working on being happier.  I’m amazed at how easy it is to be happy and mostly, I find that that means finding space to tend to the heart that I had been squeezing out of existence. 

I am happier, I earn a lot less money than I did, and because of that there are some things that I cannot do.  However I can enjoy the everyday, the amazing array of sights, sounds and experiences that are always available and enjoyable.  I find I don’t need a great deal to be happy and I have time for the things that matter.

The caveat for all this pleasure is that in some ways, I’m also sadder.  To be happy my heart has to be open and spacious, but an open and spacious heart notices the sadness too.  I find that I really care that we are destroying the beautiful planet that supports this wondrous thing called life.  I care for all the people out there rushing from pillar to post trying to fit more and more into their lives and feeling stressed and unhappy.  I care about those living in poverty when there is really no need for it to be this way,  and I fear for the gorgeous children that I know who are born into a world that seems to be rushing headlong into a very difficult future – a future made more difficult because so many have shut down their hearts  and don’t want to feel the pain of what is happening. 

Still, I find I’m prepared to feel sad because being with that sadness is the only way that I know what needs to be changed and it is the only way I know to really be open to the pure joy that there is in life too.

Happy new year .... may we all have a good future.

Well happy new year.
Ah, yes that time of year ... where we all wish each other a great year ahead!

While I generally am feeling quite positive, I find myself noting with some sense of irony that here we are wishing each other better and better new years whilst going about our lives in ways that pretty much ensure life is going to get tougher for us all.  We are definitely not wishing our kids a happy future!

Like many people, this summer, I got into my car and drove a few hundred kilometres using up fossil fuels and putting more carbon into our atmosphere. Travel is one of the biggest part of western carbon footprints as you can see from this breakdown of US carbon consumption. I note also that New Zealand's emissions per person were one of the highest in the world according to the Ministry for the Environment.

In the meantime, over the same period, news pours in from weather pundits about how things have been over the last year.  One of the hottest on record in Australia and in the USA and other places in the northern hemisphere, we hear that things have been rather more cold than usual because the polar vortex is changing  as a result of climate change.  High force hurricanes like Typhoon Haiyan continue and that across the world, 2013 was one of the hottest on record.  A report has been released about my home town (Christchurch) highlighting which parts of our city will go under water as sea levels continue to rise (and of course given sea level rise the City will also become much more prone to flooding which already happens periodically).  Not only that, it is clear that the oceans will be affected by acidification, changes to currents and by heating up (which is one of the reasons why hurricanes are becoming more forceful).

So my holiday and the holidays of many who travelled around the country or across the world have continued to contribute to the changes in our climate, which are already wreaking havoc across the world.  AND this is really only the beginning.

The arguments that NZ can do little to cut carbon emissions are clearly untrue, particularly on an individual basis.  There ARE things that we as individuals can do.  I was intrigued by this TED talk that highlights some work which shows that changing people's behaviour in ways that are not difficult can really make a difference to our carbon footprint and to things like the need for new power stations.  In 2009 I spent some time looking at my energy consumption and found it was quite easy to minimise with a bit of attention.

These days I use about 4-5 kw-hrs (or $NZ1.25) per day for all my cooking, water heating, and computing (and I work at home).  This drops a little in the winter when I use about a cubic metre of wood to heat my house and do some cooking/ water heating.  I used about 500 l of petrol which is about 35 litres about 14 times over the year. This amounts to $3.05 per day. This included all my business trips away and car running around town (I do most of my running around town on my bike).  I'm probably pretty inefficient as someone who lives alone rather than with other people.  Families and couples can almost certainly do a lot better per capita than this.

Food is the next thing to look at in terms of food miles, water consumption, fuel and methane emissions used to produce and transport it. This is a biggy and even more complex.  Watch this space!  

So I wish you a happy new year and hope that we might all wish the next generation the same thing - enough to take some individual action to lessen our energy consumption now.  It's no use waiting for our government to do anything  ...and why would they?  There is little to show them that anyone really cares.