Wake Up Calls
The role of the Bodhisattva in 2022
Opening my email, the first message to greet me is from one of several environmental activist group newsletters I subscribe to. These subscriptions are a way for me to be informed without relying on newsmedia conglomerates. They tell me about what’s going on with pipeline blockades, government policies, and the over-all growing movement to address the alarming impact of global warming we have been facing since before I was born.
“The heat waves are a wake up call” reads the subject line.
Take this subject and swap out ‘heat waves’ with: ‘forest fires’, ‘flooding’, ‘melting glaciers’, ‘dying bees’, ‘warming ocean’, ‘rising ocean’, ‘dying coral reefs’, ‘drought’, ‘clear cutting’, ‘oil spill’ or ‘climate refugee crisis,’ and the reality that we are at a crisis point is obvious.
And yet, it’s also somehow not.
When the temperature hit a record-breaking high of 41 degrees celsius and then, a new record breaking high of 43 the very next day, I did not wake up to anything new. I watched the plants in our garden wilt in the intensity, despite days of heavy watering in preparation. I sat inside, grateful for the air-conditioning we have and acutely aware of both housed and unhoused neighbours with no such relief from a heat so intense it made me dizzy to be outside for more than ten minutes. I harvested raspberries in the days to come, half of them sunburned and small, inedible after the intense heat, and thought of the drought and subsequent famine that has forced too many people to leave their homes, that is actively threatening where I live now too.
Between June 25th and July 1st 2021, more people in Canada died due to high temperatures than died of Covid1 , and yet we do not see the same urgency in eliminating fossil fuel consumption as we saw (early) in the pandemic to eliminating physical contact. The number of climate refugees continues to grow2 as the impact of over-consumption of finite resources takes its toll. The choices of individual consumers struggling to survive under capitalism and the countries most exploited and damaged by colonialism are scapegoated3 as the “problem”, while the owning class continues to compete over who has the most money4 at the expense of our shared home.
I am absolutely awake to it and despite these regular, consistent, ever-increasing “wake-up calls”, the kind of radical change we need to ensure this planet remains habitable even a decade from now is not happening. At this late, hot, unstable, volatile date, we need radical social change in the next year or my niblings can expect to be coming of age in a dystopian setting akin to something written by Octavia Butler.
In Buddhism, ‘waking up’ is the path. There is no end to the capacity for us to grow our awareness until Enlightenment, which is not so much a goal as it is an aspiration. To be fully, entirely awake is to see the infinite relativity of our interconnected universe.
A theme in my writing and practice (as if they can be separated) is how I, as one person, can actually make a difference. Much of the hopelessness felt about climate catastrophe, and the way folks contort themselves to stay ignorant of reality, is that individual choices don’t matter; one person doing something different is a drop in an already too hot ocean. Of course, the follow-on to this reasoning is: So what’s the point in even trying?
No, obviously individual consumer choices are not the largest contributing factor to the climate crisis5 we are all facing whether we want to ‘believe’ in it or not. But that doesn’t mean that individual consumer choices don’t matter, and that other choices we make aren’t going to have an over-all impact on the radical cultural and social change required to ensure our shared home remains habitable for all living things.
I say ‘radical’, because it’s not like there hasn’t been incremental changes over the years. As a young kid I got my family to start recycling before it was cool. Recycling was incredibly arduous in the nineties—food cans needed to be cleaned, labels removed, and then crushed in a particular way, and the lids, crushed cans and crumpled paper labels sorted out separately and hand delivered to a recycling centre. I remember, in my early teens, when the city offered vouchers for people to get discounted compost bins and suddenly everyone was composting. And then, about a decade ago, recycling bins got added alongside garbage bins in the alley or on the front curb, and we no longer had to drop off recycling ourselves.
I also attended what was known as a “Green School.” In fact, it was the first ever Green School in my city, which meant that the curriculum and the school culture was focused on environmentalism. We planted trees in a reclaimed wild space that had once housed an oil refinery. We had an environmental elf teach us about recycling during assemblies (It was me, I was the elf. I had many costumes and I loved doing it). We even had a school song that was all about ecosystems and where we as human beings fit within it.
In my lifetime I have witnessed a general cultural shift in environmental awareness, and this is worth celebrating even knowing it’s not enough. These changes matter and they remain baby steps compared the the leaps we need to make.
The leaps we require are radical because they involve dismantling capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and nationalism—massive beasts of systems built to make the owning class as wealthy as possible and secure their social power over the majority of us.
Interdependence is understanding that because of this, that is, and without that, this can not exist and so on. Global colonialism and industrialization, white supremacy and capitalism, patriarchy and ableism—they all feed one another and off of one another in perpetuity. I’d say it’s a chicken and egg conversation, except obviously the egg came first, laid by something very nearly a chicken. The point is, quibbling about which oppressive system ‘started it all’ is yet another distraction from realizing radical change if we are to survive as a species.
Perhaps it is due to the particulars of my childhood6, but the fact that one cannot enter into environmentalism without also cultivating a practice of anti-racism, decolonialism, and anti-capitalism seems obvious to me.
When I challenge white supremacist messages I’ve internalized as a white person living in a white supremacist society, I am contributing to a future of environmental justice. When I challenge the scarcity mind-set and “starvation is a motivator” messaging of capitalism, I’m contributing to the future of environmental justice. When I challenge the concept of landownership by entering into a relationship of land stewardship, I am contributing to the future of environmental justice. Addressing white supremacy is addressing colonialism is addressing patriarchy is addressing capitalism is addressing how we live in relationship to the land as part of nature, not separate from it.
Seeing the way these systems function together—how they feed off of one another and perpetuate the very messages that ensure the owning class continues to free themselves of accountability—these are my wake-up calls.
I do not have the financial means for radical solutions like the wealth hoarding billionaires who not only choose not to finance meaningful change, but are actively contributing to further environmental destruction.7 My consumer choices help to a degree, but collectively we could all stop using plastic bags and we’d still be on the same trajectory because it’s actually the fossil fuel industry and it’s apologists causing the greatest harm. I carry the grief and dread of knowing that it is not far-fetched nor catastrophizing to look at a kid aged five, ten, even fifteen and not be able to imagine the world they will live in come the inevitable social collapse we are headed for in the next ten, five, two years.
I am awake to the reality we are all facing.
My work is to wake up to the work we need to do collectively, and how I can embody that everyday. How do I cultivate my relationships so they are built on reciprocity and collective care, rather than a transactional mind-set? I choose not to use chemicals anywhere on the land I live and pay rent to the Duwamish Nation as an act of land acknowledgement. I plant wildflowers and let flowers grow in the lawn, encouraging pollinators. I focus watering on the growth of food, rather than on keeping grass green, and share the abundance of the harvest with people in my life.
I also dream of possibility. Of a world that centres care and community, instead of consumption and capital.
I dream of communities built on care and accessibility, on sharing resources and seeing that abundance arises when we view one another as kin rather than competition. I dream of living on the land with friends, sharing in the labour of growing our own food and caring for chickens, ducks, goats. I dream of sustainable, non-extractive sources of energy and Indigenous models of architecture for homes that will be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I dream of a time when most of us no longer see nature as ‘out there’ or ‘other’ to the bodies we are in right now, but absolutely interconnected with and defined as part of what it is to be human.
May it be so.
According to Statistics Canada, the number of Covid deaths the week of June 20th, 2021 was 303, and June 27th was 106, for a total of 409. The confirmed number of deaths caused by excess heat between June 25th and July 1st across Canada was over 1000, according to coroner reports from across the country, with most deaths in B.C. It was reported as the “Deadliest Weather Event” in recorded Canadian history.
As reported by Aljazeera in 2020, and based on data collected by the Migration Data Portal and the World Economic Forum.
Althor, G., Watson, J. & Fuller, R. Global mismatch between greenhouse gas emissions and the burden of climate change. Sci Rep 6, 20281 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep20281
https://ips-dc.org/u-s-billionaires-62-percent-richer-during-pandemic/
CDP report states that over 70% of emissions can be directly attributed to fossil fuel companies. The Harvard Political View and Time Magazine have both reported on the limited impact of individual consumer choices on climate change, versus the significant impact of the fossil fuel industry.
Along with attending a Green School, my mother also passed along many values from Métis culture given to her by her grandmother.