nrdc: I’ve spent a lot of time this week hearing about how bad…
nrdc:
I’ve spent a lot of time this week hearing about how bad the problem of climate change is. And that’s true and important. But it’s hard on a body. The inspiration for today’s Perrin’s Paris Journal is a workshop I attended earlier this week that was really refreshing, because it presented an alternative vision for a really beautiful future. We heard from Naomi Klein and her crew from This Changes Everything; Crystal Lameman, representing the Beaver Lake Cree Nation; Hassan Yussuff, President of the Canadian Labour Congress; one of my new sheroes, Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians; and Christian Poll, a member of the Danish Parliament for The Alternative. The group presented lessons learned on their collaborative journey to create the Leap Manifesto, a plan for Canada to tackle the climate crisis. But as Klein said, we can’t address climate change until we address gender, class, and geographic inequities. So the plan is a re-envisioning of society and economics. It’s designed to be an opportunity to mobilize around saying “yes” to a future that works for all of us.
Leap Day, for which the Leap Manifesto is named, was created because Julius Caesar realized that the seasons were shifting out of sync with the human-created calendar year. He changed the human calendar, a malleable constriction, to drop a day in February every four years. Klein points out that this is the kind of humility we need in the face of climate change. Human-created systems emit carbon and perpetuate injustice, and they are not more real or powerful than nature. In fact, its the laws of nature, and the wellbeing of all people, that should guide our way of living.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1IuZH9S.
