Sustaining Shared Futures: Insights from ESAC and Common Earth
The Environmental Studies Association of Canada (ESAC) is Canada’s leading scholarly community of environmental researchers and educators. For over 30 years, ESAC has collaborated with members from the academic communities, government, non-government, and NGO sectors to enhance prospects towards collective and long-term flourishing. Each year, ESAC participates in the Congress of the Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences. Congress is the largest academic gathering in Canada and one of the largest gathering of academics in the world. This year’s theme — Sustaining Shared Futures — addresses the critical need to recognise and respond to the interconnected social, economic, environmental, and technological threats of our time.
So, as you can imagine, I was thrilled to be asked to participate and deliver a talk last week on behalf of Common Earth. As I mused over what to talk about, I decided to try to synthesize the 64 hours of our Insights course into a coherent 40-minute talk. This was no small undertaking given that most of us engaged at Common Earth still struggle with explaining who we are and what we do in some form of an elevator pitch – it is complex and difficult to capture in a pithy and accessible way.
The central idea is that we are living out a story that dictates who we are and how we behave that is leading us down our current path of injustice and unsustainability. The solution to the meta-crisis that we really need is a new story. One that focuses on abundance and joy rather than loss and scarcity. One that focuses on interconnection rather than individualism. I invite you to listen to that story here:
I will also share that the keynote speaker at the conference this year was Nate Hagens, a man who has helped shape some of my own understanding as it pertains to our predicament. His talk is about twice as long as mine but well worth the listen if you can eke out the time.
He gave the following inspiring invitation to his audience:
A Systems Approach Towards a (More) Sustainable Future: A Message to Academia by Nate Hagens.
I’m often asked to give presentations and usually do 30-40 per year, mostly online. But almost always the hosting organization asks for a time limit – typically 45 minutes. As those of you deeply versed in the human predicament know, it is VERY hard to describe what is happening in our world AND offer some direction for response and personal agency, all in 45 minutes or even an hour. As followers of The Great Simplification are aware, I increasingly want to discuss and work on ‘responses’ but there are still vast sections of society – academia being one – that don’t yet integrate the magnitude and urgency of our systemic predicament.
So when Kira Cooper, of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada, invited me to do a talk ‘with no time constraint’, for 10,000 professors across Canada, I put something together that was reasonably comprehensive – and it ended up being about 1 hour and 45 minutes.
The talk is in four parts: 1) an explanation of the core drivers of the human ecosystem 2) a synthesis of how the emergent property of these is a (mindless) energy/material hungry economic superorganism 3) scenarios and implications for the future 4) suggested interventions and responses at various scales (global, community, academia and personal).
There are over 200 million college students in the world. What are we teaching them and what curriculum will be more appropriate for the world we’re heading into? It is my hope that many professors, post-docs and university affiliates around the world experience this synthesis. And even if they may not fully agree (or if they fully agree!), that it may act as an Overton Window of expanding the conversations, research, curriculums and actions of the good people at universities around Canada, and the world.
You can hear this fabulous talk below. Happy listening!