Dear all,
After a busy holiday season and a busy stretch at work (while dealing with a nasty cold) I feel like I’m finally rested and well and ready to face a new year. What an interesting and challenging year it’s shaping up to be! I wish us all the best as we reach for a relaxed sense of power and possibility, and confidence that what we do can make a difference.
Love,
Pamela
Inclusion
Who are “we”? And how does that sense of identification affect our world view? When we ask who is inside and who is outside of our circle, of course there are many answers that are accurate, depending on the context. But the question of who gets included or excluded, and on what basis, is worth considering.
Sometimes the narrowness of a “we” is quite circumstantial. We just haven’t been exposed to others in a way that makes them real, but if we met them we might feel an immediate sense of connection and easily include them in a larger “we”. Sometimes there is a thin layer of difference over an easily-recognizable commonality—a distinctiveness of culture or style that is interesting and enriching to explore. At other times, circumstance joins with systemic ways we have been divided from each other, to make that sense of commonality harder to see or claim. And other times, we may think we’ve included everybody, but just haven’t looked closely enough.
I thought about this question a lot on our recent trip to Uganda. Africa is a continent that is not included in many people’s “we”. In it are a lot of countries that few of us know anything about. Some can name Uganda, some may even place it in East Africa, and a few may have heard of the airport at Entebbe. But who can picture the town of Gulu far in the north, almost up to South Sudan?
This is already an enormous stretch, yet there is more. If we picture a bustling primary school in Gulu, the teachers and administrators are likely to be the easiest to include in our circle of “we”. They are responsible adults, doing work that many can recognize and value. In this case, they are an articulate, generally passionate, accessible and likeable group. But what if we zoom in a little farther?
The teachers have been invited to a two-day training on global citizenship, and are working in groups on how to translate UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into projects that students can take on as a part of their education. Also invited—in a momentous first—have been other members of the school community. At one table, an old man who works as a guard at the school shares materials with a tiny 11-year old girl as they and several teachers prepare to explain one of the SDGs to the larger group. A young man who works on maintenance, the man who is in charge of sanitation, and the students are all eloquent in their presentations on possible projects they could take on.
The old man struggles to complete a written assessment at the end of the training. I listen and offer encouragement, then ask what he would like to contribute to enrich the curriculum of the school. He says that he’d love to teach the children Swahili—the trade language of East Africa that few people in this part of the country know. I had no idea. This training would have been great with just the teachers; he and the others could easily have remained invisible. But if all we see is a guard, and he’s left out of the circle, who knows what riches we will miss?
Later, in an animated discussion among a group of deeply committed and articulate leaders from the board and PTA of the school, the men dominate. I have to assert to create space for the one other woman in the room. A sturdy quiet farmer, she is not likely to push her way into a conversation. Yet she was the founder of a local women’s dairy cooperative and has run it for years; her business sense and practical experience are as valuable as gold.
Many people are trying conscientiously to expand their “we”. Yet there can be traps, even in our most virtuous intentions. I think of a warning that has stuck with me: “We are not a homogeneous community struggling to become diverse; we are an incomplete community struggling to become whole.”
As I spend time in this community I have grown to know and love in Northern Uganda, I am acutely aware of my incompleteness, and of the blessing of having this opportunity to try to become more whole.
A world awry
We tramp around his little farm
millet, ground nuts, cassava, maize.
In our eyes all is new
to him the yield just disappoints.
Too much rain, he says.
The talk is all of rain.
It has outstayed its welcome.
The dry season is long overdue
and yet the clouds keep
opening, day after day.
We cannot will the rain away.
It cools, but all is wrong.
We come to where his sim-sim—
sesame—is stacked in racks to dry.
He pulls a sheaf to show the grain
Instead of clean white seeds,
there’s mildew. All the crop is lost.
One good man who works the land,
one mildewed sheaf of grain,
and the weight of what we’ve done
to sky and sea, to this good earth,
to all who tend the soil
is more than I know how to bear.
Dare to imagine—a new economy is possible!
An alternative to the GDP
Created in 2008, the Happy Planet Index examines sustainable happiness on a national level, ranking 143 countries according to three measurements: how happy its citizens are, how long they live, and how much of the planet’s resources they each consume. The HPI multiplies years of life expectancy by life satisfaction (as measured by the Gallup Poll and the World Values Survey), to obtain “Happy Life Years,” which are then divided by pressure on ecosystems, as measured by the ecological footprint. (The ecological footprint, in turn, measures how much land and water it takes to provide for each person.)
The Happy Planet Index,” says New Economics Foundation researcher Saamah Abdallah, “measures what goes in, in terms of resource use, and the outcomes that are important, which are happy and healthy lives for us all. In this way, it reminds us that the economy is there for a purpose—and that is to improve our lives.”
https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/climate-action/why-costa-rica-tops-the-happiness-index-20190131
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
Over 160 cities in the Ukraine have signed up to make the transition to 100% renewable energy, and the momentum is growing.
https://gofossilfree.org/a-huge-win-in-ukraine/?akid=109855.1048214.j88VgK&rd=1&t=3
Ducks are being used in rice paddies to keep them clean, eliminating the need for artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/food/the-plate/2016/09/want-cleaner-rice-paddies--consider-ducks/
When Pacific Gas and Power in California cut off power in Humboldt County to reduce the risk of wildfire last fall, the Blue Lake Rancheria tribe’s solar micro-grid not only met their own needs but also served more than 10,000 people in Humboldt during the outage — including some who were critically ill.
https://microgridknowledge.com/blue-lake-rancheria-microgrid-outages/
Scientists have created an edible honey bee vaccine to protect them from deadly diseases.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/scientists-create-edible-honey-bee-vaccine-to-protect-them-from-deadly-diseases
Resources
Money and Soul
My new book (based on a pamphlet of the same name) available via QuakerBooks or other on-line distributors.
("If money troubles your soul, try this down-to-earth Quaker perspective on economies large and small.")
Money, Debt and Liberation
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
A book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
www.findingsteadyground.com
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: New link: https://www.peaceworkersus.org/docs/muscle_building_for_peace_and_justice.pdf (or just google the title)
