People’s Climate: Di-vestment and Re-vestment

“The People’s Climate” Blog Series, Part 4

When the great Crash, ecologic or economic, comes, Heather Menzies’ brilliant critique will provide an understanding of why it came about, and a path towards a truly sustainable way for humanity to live on the planet.

– David Suzuki

By Heather Menzies, Author of Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good

Divestment is part of the shift, but only the moving-away-from-the problem part. Moving toward the positive vision I outlined, of a society and global economy operating within the carrying capacity of the earth and its atmosphere, requires a partner line of action: what I call re-vestment.

The root word, to vest, means to clothe, to place in the possession of a person things like power and legal authority. It’s generally understood in the passive sense, as in someone vesting this authority in me, with me waiting ’til it happens, if it ever does. But this is a time of taking possession, as in the Occupy Movement blowing the whistle on a dysfunctional global economy. There’s also an array of DIY initiatives filling the gap left by the retreat of governments looking after the common good. So I invoke the word this way: taking back our power and authority. In fact, that’s the energy behind both sides of this coin: divesting ourselves as in withdrawing support for and compliance with the status quo, plus vesting ourselves in creating a new one.

This two-fold dynamic of change must operate in a lot of areas, including in ways of thinking and knowing. Consider this: The process of change is not something out there that we are trying to influence, at the UN Climate Conference and elsewhere, at least that’s only part of it. We are the process of change ourselves, individually as micro-agents of change participating in street actions, but also through the changes we make locally, re-purposing buildings into shared space and community, reviving old institutions like commons and community gardens, cooperatives and village/farmers’ markets operating on the priorities of right relations and fair trade, not profit.

The more people re-possess their voice, their power to enact a vision of an economy accountable to the sustainability needs of the earth and its inhabitants – even at the level of composting and local food cooperatives – and the more they own the experience they gain as relevant policy-related knowledge, the more the di-vestment/re-vestment process will bring this alternative vision to life. (I’ll come back to knowledge and experts in a later blog posting.)

In this first blog entry on this subject, I just want to say a couple more preliminary things; then perhaps some of you will take it further with your responses.

One of these is that the divestment/re-vestment involves changing the scale and pace of things in many areas of life, not just in industrial development. It’s important to focus on one dramatic thing, such as the accelerating extraction rate in current oil and gas development and the lethal link between this and carbon emissions. That has galvanized attention, and people have taken action!

But curtailing the rate of extraction is not a stand-alone event. To contribute to the larger shift – a lowering of demand as well as of supply, and of all development being regulated and limited by the realities of what this planet and its inhabitants can sustain – this larger, multi-faceted shift must be happening as well. (Happily, it is!). The larger agenda therefore involves scaling down, from machine scale (the global investment market is the largest machine of all!) more to a human and habitat scale, and moderating the pace of life (and the rising expectations of life the market constantly feeds us with) to something more conducive to fully experiencing life instead of simply consuming it. This doesn’t mean eliminating the global scale in everything, nor slowing everything down to a walk in the park – just a shift toward a healthy mix.

In my book, Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good, I talk about this as both structural change and a personal and shared, social one of healing. How can we reconnect with the earth and be governed by its needs and limitations if we aren’t connected to ourselves and attentive to our own needs and limitations? We need to heal the disconnects within ourselves and the lives we live, as members of families and communities if we are to succeed in healing the earth.

For me, therefore, change must operate simultaneously on three levels:

1) the personal level of our daily lives;

2) the local and ‘mezzo’ level of pilot projects, institutional change, NGO actions and other sustained change generally at a local level and grounded in making a difference in real life; and,

3), the meta level of larger movements, solidarity building (especially with Aboriginal people whose often unextinguished treaty rights keep alive this other vision, of the earth as shared habitat, not real estate and extractable resources), and sharing the evolving vision, the many stories of turning it into the new common sense.

Moreover, these three levels are linked, and need to be intentionally linked so that communication can flow between them, generating dialogue and consolidating alternative-informing knowledge. Change will emerge through iterative evolution, with meta-level organizations with strong social-media networks helping to facilitate this evolution through the linkages, dialogue and policy discussion general assemblies that they create. (Besides 350.org, I think of Friends of the Earth and, in Canada, the Suzuki Foundation and the Council of Canadians.) Besides identifying emergent strategies and championing meta-level actions, they can plug donors and would-be volunteers into local projects and institutions making meaningful change in the here and now.

I’m trying to live these three levels of change myself: coming home to myself by scaling and pacing my life within the carrying capacity of my (aging!) body and peace of mind, including through spiritual practices and gardening; coming home to my local community, through commitments to actual projects and institutions there (The West End Well Food Cooperative in Ottawa and the Gabriola Commons in BC), and coming home to the earth through both the gestalt effect of all that personal and local connection plus reaching deeper into the wisdom of the past and of contemporary thinkers, schemers and dreamers, and networking about this with others, including through this blog.

As I do, I identify myself less completely as a citizen of a nation state, and more as a commoner: an implicated participant in shared habitat, with both a right and a responsibility to be involved in its well being.