Season 1, Episode 6: Choose Your Own Crisis

Part 1

The Gravity Well podcast delves into the complexities of global crises, emphasizing the importance of understanding and addressing ecological, social, and economic challenges. In this episode, Jenny holds an in-person interview with Ruben Nelson, alongside Jim Campbell, to discuss the concept of a “poly crisis” and the need for a collective approach to problem-solving. Nelson highlights the historical context of modernity, the limitations of current leadership, and the necessity of deep, relational thinking to navigate the impending collapse of modern industrial society. The conversation underscores the urgency of fostering humility, deep learning, and innovative strategies to mitigate the impacts of these crises and lay the groundwork for a sustainable future.

Welcome and Recap

Jenny:

Welcome to The Gravity Well, where we break down heavy ideas into small buckets that anyone can handle in our work and at play, we seek the wisdom of elders, individuals, and communities that share their knowledge to care for our water, air, land, life and resource needs. Caring for our homeland is our guide. I have Ruben Nelson with me and Jim Campbell, courtesy of Jim Campbell,

A friend of mine from the AWA that I’m really grateful to have. We’re chatting with Ruben today about, this week’s topic is “Choose your own crisis”. We’re trying to make sure we make space for people to, in whatever place they are in their understanding of the crisis that we face in the world, we’re allowing people to bring forward, how do they see the crisis and how do they define it? That’s really the focus of these conversations today. I’m hoping that we have an opportunity to meet with Ruben in an official capacity at another time where it’s not so noisy, but we’re going to try this out and see how it goes. Really appreciate you making time for me. Let’s start with some introductions. Ruben, would you mind just introducing yourself for the audience?

Ruben:

I’m Ruben Nelson. I was born in Calgary in 1939. Calgary was an overgrown agricultural service center. The oil and gas business wasn’t, it was here, but not important enough to make a difference. Grew up in Calgary as a straight arrow. The United Church of Canada, the 18th Scout troop. For those who know scouting, that means something. They’re an exceptional group and they kept lots of virgins like myself off the streets and out of trouble. Ran off to Queens because I wanted to go to university where nobody knew me, and in those days, nobody from Calgary, almost nobody from Calgary went. There were nine of us on the campus in all faculties in all years from Calgary. I succeeded in that sense, got my foot caught in the door, spent 10 of 11 years there, and I got an education that wasn’t advertised in the calendar.

I’ll make this very quick and then I’ll stop because it set up my life that was nothing in the calendar. That said, if you come to Queens and if you hang around long enough, and if you’re just bright enough to attract a little bit of attention from some of the better faculty, which of course all faculty give brighter students more time and attention, perfectly normal human response, then we will give you the kind of education that you’ll be able to understand human history in new ways, including the crises of our modern industrial culture. That wasn’t in the calendar, but it’s what happened to me. I went and did an undergraduate degree in philosophy and political theory, an honours degree, and then I worked on a master’s degree in philosophy and a theology degree at the same time because the college, the theological college and the university were then legally separate institutions, both had charters from Queen Victoria and since everybody on campus knew me, including the principals of both places, they agreed to just ignore the fact I was registered in the other institution.

Jenny:

Amazing. Cool.

Ruben:

It gave me ocular vision as an undergraduate, thinking about big picture issues, thinking about the future. I organized what may have been the first form of futures conference in Canada in 1960. Eisenhower was still president, Diefenbaker was prime minister here. That got me thinking about the future, and I’ve just stayed in that. I mean, I’ve tried to design my life so that intellectually and emotionally I could have all the comforts that I had at Queens with people to talk to who are interested in doing serious work.

Jenny:

Amazing. Wow. Yeah. It sounds like you’ve been a systems thinker from a very young age. I feel you. I also consider myself to be one who’s a big picture thinker and it is a bit of a play as well. Jim, do you mind taking a moment just in detail for us?

Jim:

Sure. I’m Jim Campbell. I’ve been here in Alberta since 1977, came out here to work with young offenders and have had what I call a checkered career since then. But the common theme for me has been community, whether it’s been the arts, environment, or education, and what I like to think I specialize in is making connections between different kinds of people and bringing.

Jenny:

Case and point today.

Jim:

Yes, and moving it all forward. Yeah.

What is the crisis we face?

Jenny:

Awesome. Okay. Thank you so much. And yeah, we’re going to get you to chime in as we go here this week. As I say, we want to help people explain how they see the crisis. I like to model things. I’m going to offer you my thoughts on the crisis we’re facing and then we’ll let you offer yours and Jim as well if you’d like. I see a polycrisis. We went just a couple of weeks ago through the nine planetary boundaries with my good friend Colin Smith, and talking about how we have crossed at least six of those boundaries in terms of beer stability. One of the reasons why I’m in the world I am today is because I was in the oil and gas industry and looking at the cleanup and reclamation efforts needed, and this is one thing that Jim and I are quite aligned with is land use and making sure that we’re honouring human impact, cumulative impact on our landscape and not just talking about emissions.

Jenny:

My view is we have an ecological crisis and we need to recenter our economies around the ecological system and social equity. And those things come with clear ways of conflict resolution. This is one of the reasons why I’m doing these conversations is because there’s a lack of discourse, if you will, the lack of the left and right speaking to each other. This is one of the opportunities we see. I guess going back to my comment about how I see this crisis, I see it as a nine facet crisis. That crisis is centered around the ecology of our opponent, making sure that we’re honouring it. That’s a rough view of how I see it, but I’m here to ask you how you see it. Please give us your take on the crisis work case.

Ruben:

Well, let me build on what you’ve said. Most people don’t understand that we face an ecological. Most people think the ecology is robust enough that no matter what we do with it, I’ve just driven down. I live west of Calgary, I drove around the new ring road on the west side of Calgary, which caught me here sooner. The road did what it was supposed to do, but it also shows our normal attitude to the land in Alberta that we’ve got so much of it, we can be profligate with it. One of the people who has become a dear friend and I have a huge respect for is Bill Reese. You probably know that name out at UBC, who invented the concept of the ecological footprint.

Work that was developed with a graduate student, but Bill is the one who conceived it. Bill is clear that while most people today talk about climate change and they blather about that and lots of money is being spent, I mean money that cannot be spent on other things. As a culture, we’re making a bet that climate change is the biggest issue we face because if it isn’t, we don’t have the money to deal with the second issue. It’s not clear we have the money to deal with climate change, but we certainly don’t have enough money left over if it turns out that oops, Bill Reese and others like him are right when they say that climate change is a symptom of ecological overshoot.

And that by that phrase of overshoot, they simply mean that we are consuming more of the earth’s renewable resources at a faster rate than the earth can renew them. And if you think of a bank account, let’s assume you’ve got left a lot of money and money in the bank will have interest so that money will grow. But if you’re spending at a rate that’s faster than the interest, then bit by bit you’re eating into the capital and eventually the banker says, I’m sorry, you have to stop because you’re bankrupt. No more money. And that’s the way we are with ecological overshoot. We are now destroying the ecology that we depend on. Most people, for example, don’t understand that Canada is an oxygen importing country. This doesn’t show up in the trade statistics that we have. There’s no place you would learn about this.

Probably not even Environment Canada, but the calculations have been done some years ago that given the oxygen that’s created by the vegetation in Canada, and there’s a lot of it we actually use more than the Canadian landscape creates. We depend on the Pacific Ocean primarily simply because the Atlantic Ocean, the wind’s blowing the other way. But if you stop about that and you’re concerned about your grandchildren, it’s a genuine question. Most grandparents aren’t worried yet that their grandchildren will die just by being asphyxiated and not having enough to breathe. It’s one of the possibilities is out there that we don’t even think about, that we don’t even know enough to, and that we who don’t know enough includes most deputy ministers, most CEOs, most Anglican bishops shouldn’t just pick on the Anglicans, can pick on moderators of the United Church or Catholic bishops or your favorite.

One of the biggest changes in my lifetime is that the world I grew up in, if you drew it as a bar graph, let’s assume you’ve got a bar graph and the Y axis goes from one to a hundred. And one of the towers is the difficulty and complexity of the problems that are being faced. And let’s say that they’re at 47, you’ve got a bar that’s up to 47. The next bar beside it is going to measure the capacity of the normal leadership of our major institutions to handle issues there at 62. I grew up in a world where most university presidents, Anglican bishops, high school presidents, ordinary leaders, but the ones who make our institutions work, CEOs actually understood enough about their world that they could handle the issues they’re against those leaders now, even if they’re at 87, the issues have blown the top off a hundred.

It doesn’t matter how far off the scale they are, but they’re off the scale. There isn’t a major institution in Canada of any kind that understands that and will admit it. There’s no national church, there’s no university, there is no think tank, there’s no government department, there’s no major corporation. There is literally no institution that matters. Where the leadership understands that we’re facing crises, we are not intelligent enough to understand and that we need help to do that from the world’s best. I mean, not even Bill Gates. Bill Gates had enough money. He could have said to people, we want to build the foundation, but we want to do it in the most interesting and extraordinary ways. We’re going to spend five years finding the most interesting people in the world to advise us what a foundation needs to be in the 21st century, he didn’t spend a nickel on that.

It’s embarrassing to be a male today because as our half of the species has screwed up so badly and with virtually no acknowledgement that that’s the case, if grandchildren hate their grandparents, direct it to your grandfather. Ecological overshoot is a far more pressing problem, far more fundamental problem, and one that’s not yet on the agenda because you can’t get at ecological overshoot by thinking the way you would get at urban renewal in Calgary. If you have 10 blocks in Calgary that need to be done, you could do it a block at a time bit by bit, and it adds up to ecologies don’t work that way. If you don’t understand it, then you can’t cope with it. That’s bad enough. I want to pile one more layer on top of that because you see the language of a poly crisis can account for ecological overshoot that we’ve got because you think ecologically you’ve got many facets and they’re all happening at the same time, knocking into each other, exacerbating each other. You would expect that in a complex dynamic system. And the folks who talk about poly crisis know all of that. In that sense, they’re far more up to date than most of our institutions. But you can’t get, in a sense, poly crisis is the best they can do to account for what we’re up against.

And a language that’s emerging is a meta crisis and a polycrisis is a different kind of thing. Meta in Greek means simply beside it can mean above. I mean it can be a side in any direction as long as it’s beside physically or above. Aristotle’s book of metaphysics might have literally just been the writing he was done that he sat on his shelf beside physics. It’s beside physics. I mean nobody knows.

Metaphysics now has a reputation of not just being beside physics. It gets into other kinds of stuff, including some of the stuff some physicists get into. But a meta crisis is the kind of crisis that Indigenous people know about, that women know about, that the global self know about. That’s a crisis where the fundamental, the message that is being given most often is shut up and listen. You don’t understand me. You don’t understand us. You’re doing all kinds of things that will fix us and help us. But since you don’t understand, then you’re dangerous to us. Your help is not helping. What you’ve got in a medical crisis is what Old Testament prophets said, or in the Psalms that Israel, god’s chosen people, Israel has ears but cannot hear, have eyes and cannot see. They are blind to what it is Yahweh is asking of them.

You get the same thing from Jesus that you can read the signs of the times to get the weather right, but beyond that, you haven’t got a clue what’s going on. In Metris is in my view, is a deeper and wider and more profound crisis. It’s the container of the ecological overshoot crisis. But if it is the case that we face a meta crisis, then we can’t deal with ecological overshoot without dealing with the meta crisis. And that sentence is not understood by most of the people who understand ecological overshoot. And I don’t mean that nastily, these are among the best people. I’m honoured that many of them are friends and colleagues that I’m in touch with. But the phenomenon of a meta crisis that we face today is literally unique in human history. No people in human history have ever been faced not as a species issue.

There are people who as small groups have faced the challenge that if in some way you do not reconceive your world, you will die. But in a sense, if a group of people died, even when I was growing up, if a bus went off the road in Chile, all it got was three weeks later in the Calgary Herald, one column wide, an inch and a half long that a bus has gone off the cliff. Now of course we’ve got evening news and other things, we get it 20 minutes after the Chileans get it. We’re flooding with stuff, but without any help in sorting out what’s the structure of the noise and the information that we’re hearing and the decisions we’re making as a modern techno industrial culture is that the bet we’re making is that the model of information that’s understood by technical scientists and therefore by technical people, engineers particularly of any kind and scientists who deal with hard data.

I mean they are convinced. They have convinced themselves that information is one of the constituents of reality, but they know nothing about the soft side of processing information. Wilfred Cantwell Smith as a Canadian historian of religion devoted most of his life to thinking about how do we as human animals process information about the sacred or Northrop fry? At one point, the third most quoted academic in the world after Jesus and Karl Marx Fry spent his life thinking about the human imagination and human consciousness and the way we process information. And he would argue if he was here today that thinking that information is something that physicists can define and is a nice hard product and it’s the same everywhere through all time and eternity is just silly. It’s an undergraduate mistake. And if you had a decent education, but of course a decent education, their terms is an education that’s deeply in the humanities and in my lifetime it’s the humanities that we’re abandoning.

Jenny:

Yeah, a hundred per cent.

Ruben:

We have been closing liberal arts colleges and humanities faculties left, right and centre. And the Alberta government even says to universities that we will pay you per student based on how many students want to take that course. If eight students want to take a philosophy course and 180 want to take an engineering course, the University of Calgary or Alberta get more money for the engineering course than a philosophy so that even systemically we’re building this into what we’re up against is a metric. And this is not understood. No institution in the world has a staff of even a hundred professionals that says the premise of this institution is that we face a metris and our job is to understand it and unpack it the way there are people now doing at least poly crisis and using complexity theory. They’re still a minority, but there are some of them around. In that sense, the crisis we face is not yet well-named named pathetically understood. And it means the danger we face is far greater than grandparents understand.

Jenny:

I’m going to pair it back a few things that I heard in there and then Jim, you’re welcome to do the same. One thing you said that struck me and something I realized when I was in the industry is this problem is bigger than the oil and gas industry. We’ve talked about emissions. A lot of people like to say, oh, this is just an energy transition. We’re just going to fix that. I realized this is a government problem, this is a regulator problem, this is an everyone problem. That was the thing that sort of hit me. One thing I just actually read this morning is there’s an argument that only 20% of the population can understand complex system thinking. We have a population and 80% of the population isn’t even capable of understanding what we’re facing.

This is an evolution of thinking that is required. The other thing you talked a little bit I heard is and I agree, I look at this when I state the crisis, I say it’s a social, economic and environmental crisis. I’ve said poly crisis, but I agree with you in terms of the 99%, 1% problem. That’s not your words, but my words unfortunately, we have to let some men take the backseat and let some women, and especially indigenous, take the lead, right? We need to be open to learning here. We need to be taking the backseat and supporting people with the knowledge to bring solutions forward. That’s a big part of this that I heard from you. The next question, and before I get into it, maybe I’ll just let you offer a couple comments, Jim, if you have any to add.

Jim:

From an Indigenous ecological perspective, I think about the arrogance we have in thinking that we are an indispensable species on this planet as that great philosopher Ricky Erve says, if we disappeared, the world would return to a natural wonderland in a few generations, and that’s part of the arrogance we have to overcome. We are indispensable,

Ruben:

And that’s good news because fundamentally this earth is green for the next billion years no matter what we as a species do. We don’t know how this will play out in the 21st century and into the 22nd, but by the end of this century, people then still alive. We’ll have a good bead on whether as a species we have any future at all. If we do, it will be a more humble species because the experience will have humbled us. If what people are worried about is the planet it’s green for the next billion years because there isn’t a ghost of a chance that the sun has enough hydrogen and it’s got enough fuel that it’s not going to begin to die in a way that will affect us for at least a billion years. People argue about that. Well, some say it’s actually 4 billion. I don’t care if it’s a billion or four because that’s way beyond my caring capacity.

But it does mean that there’s a sense in which with a long-term view, that the earth is saying to us, you should be making me an offer that you can live with. I can live literally as an earth with any offer you make me including the fact that you may kill off most of the birds and flora and fauna that have emerged in the last 600 million years, but if I got a billion years, the next evolution won’t be the same because the conditions are different. But if I can do all of this in 600 million years, I figure I can do something interesting in another billion. The earth in that sense is fine. We don’t need to be crying at night long-term about the earth. We need to be understanding that what we’re changing are the conditions of the earth that we can live with, which is not trying to say we’re so special, but we are the only species that can have this conversation.

And therefore we have obligations that right whales and squirrels and grizzly bears don’t have, and that’s not to put them down, but it is to say, stand up for them that we are this extraordinary species that in some way people who say we’re just an animal I think are empirically wrong. We are an animal. No quite, we got to come to terms of that, but we are an animal as, to use a different metaphor, we’re a horse of a different colour and that needs to be understood, and that’s part of our learning. Our modern culture doesn’t do deep learning in this part of the world where there used to be winter, if you’re skating on a slew outside town, you would learn that if you move fast enough when the ice was not quite thick enough to hold, you didn’t get wet. That’s one of my images of our modern culture. We’re trying to move faster and faster and faster, and the faster we move, the thinner our understanding gets where what the strategy we need is to actually slow down and deepen our understanding. But you can’t sell that. I mean there are some university presidents who say, if you fund that, we’ll do it. But they know no government in Canada’s interested in funding.

Who Should You Consider to Solve This Crisis?

Jenny:

That. Right. Okay. That gets into our next area. Who should we be considering when we’re talking about these benefits, if we need a group of people who are going to bring in different perspectives, passionate about deep learning and letting go of ego and understand that we are representing not just human interests but life on our interests. There’s not a group that’s understanding this. For example, when we talk about politicians, this is a big piece of the problem that we have these election cycles which serve short-term thinking, short-term interests, and we somehow need to get between that and change. 80% of the population doesn’t understand this problem, really hard to get people to be popular who have a deep compassion, a deep understanding of this challenge. Let’s just expand on that a little bit. Who needs to be in this conversation? I’ve heard indigenous, I’ve heard women. What other people?

Ruben:

Well, it’s a conversation for everybody, but that means that the tone of voice will be different and some of the content will be different, even though it’s part of the same conversation. We can’t have a culture in which 20% say, we’re so bright, we can understand this. We’re going to govern you and you just sit there and we’ll fix you. This sounds like the male model that I was taught and grew up with. Now, not every male was that way. There were males at Queens who modelled humility and deep learning. Queens remain a small college that it was when I was there. It hasn’t become like the University of Calgary, which is kind of Ohio State North at this point. There’s no established way that the conversation that you are interested in is being supported officially.

Humanities and Social Science Research Council, chirk has had a program for some years now about thinking about the future, and it’s mostly a failure because they weren’t humble enough to say to the few people who understood how to do that work, none of whom are university faculty to say, come and teach our university faculty how to do this. Proposals are made that claim to be thinking about the future, and Shirk ends up funding them, although they know that much of it is schlock. We need people who have done their own homework enough that they understand these things, that they have a depth of understanding, and they’ve also been observant enough to understand something about human psychology and what is needed to, in a sense, jolly some of us along enough that we’ll do things that are right. And we’ve had some prime ministers like this in Canada.

My hero is Mike Pearson. Mike didn’t run on a platform of the kinds of things that basically said, I’ve been around politics and the world enough to understand that the Canada I was born into is an early 20th century Canada and that world is dying in my own lifetime and Canada needs to become at least a late 20th century culture. He didn’t say that to anybody other than a few people where the room was closed, but in fact, he’d figured out the kinds of things that needed to be done, including things like a new flag where the response of most Canadians was, what the hell is that about? We’ve got a flag. It’s the red enzyme and we used it during the war in one way or another. What? What’s the matter with it? Pearson had the capacity to understand what needed to be done.

The B & B commission, bilingualism and Biculturalism. Note: the title was Bilingualism and Biculturalism leaving all the rest of us who have some Ukrainian or German or Italian or whatever background he said to Lauren Doe and Dutton, the two co-chairs, you will do everything that it says in the act that you can do as a royal commission. You got money for it all, go do it and you will do it all and you will meet the terms of the commission. Note that you’ve got more money for research than is normal. I want you to work with people that you find who have some intuition that what we’re dealing with, in this case, it’s about Quebec and the fact that British Canada, because it wasn’t English Canada in those days, it was British Canada, that British Canada didn’t have much sympathy and had a tin ear when it came to hearing Quebecers.

He saw that if that continued, we might well lose the country. He said to them, you will also deliver, although it’s not explicit, part of your mandate, a critical mass and a critical mass, wonderful concept because if you’ve got a critical mass of something, it means that at least the agenda of that critical mass becomes a part of the public agenda. It doesn’t necessarily dominate it. It’s not the biggest one, but it’s part of the public agenda. The conversation we’re having isn’t even part of the public agenda. There are lots of people who will say, we are in deep trouble. Canada is broken and I can fix it.

Okay? These people are so superficial that they scare the hell out of me because some of them will wheel power the premier of Alberta, big one. I mean that’s a degree of superficialness that they don’t understand themselves. They have no idea of how far they’re over their depth. They think they’re in a swimming pool that’s four feet, and if they just stop swimming and put their feet down, they’ll touch bottom. What we need are strategies that create islands of sanity of Elliot Ton from the Fox fire books, the first I heard to use that back in the seventies and has been picked up today by, what’s her name that I’m embarrassed, that I’ve forgotten her name. The strategy is have those who understand this begin to find each other and work on it and then build networks. We do that kind of strategy with other things. I mean the government of Canada funds, national and international networks and a whole series of fields. It would be easy for a prime minister. Let’s assume that what you need to do this, well, I’m making a number out of the error is 37 million a year, but 37 million isn’t even a rounding error today.

37 million gets hidden in a budget of more than a hundred billion. That’s easy to hide and therefore you can do this in a way that is not secretive in the sense you don’t want people to know. It’s just not well advertised. You’re just doing it quietly. There are lots of things that could be done by somebody in power who understood that there’s serious work to do and they understand enough about power and how it works that they can survive that. Mike Pearson couldn’t ever convince Canadians he needed that. They should give him a majority government. He became one of the most significant prime ministers in our history, never having a majority having an NDP to work with God bless them at the time, and having Ellen McKen to handle the finesse of parliamentary rules and all of that. And without both of those conditions, he would’ve failed. But he also understood what needed to be done and that’s what’s lacking. If you ask, I’m going to make a statement now that I wish I didn’t have to make. I’m not convinced there are three university presidents in Canada that you could give this kind of money to who wouldn’t waste it. I’m confident that the majority of them would waste it because university presidents have had to become fundraisers at a time when being anti-intellectual is fashionable among politicians.

Jenny:

A hundred percent. Yeah. This is the challenge. Do you have anything to add there, Jim, before we move on, just in terms of who’s who in the zoo, who do you think is critical in terms of moving us forward?

Jim:

You and I had this conversation we were saying about groundswell critical mass, and I think that your comment about leadership, there aren’t the leaders that are out there to understand it. It’s going to be some kind of collective group, everybody coming on board realizing it. I mean, in the next few months we’re going to be facing a massive drought, which if there’s any silver lining to it, it’s going to bring this forward is there are limits. There are limits

Jim:

And we have to deal with it. It’s very much in front of us. You can’t deny that there’s no water.

Jenny:

That’s right. Yeah. You can’t fake water.

Ruben:

You can’t fake water. Fish died in Canmore this winter when it was cold for the first time because there wasn’t enough water in Policeman’s Creek for them to not be frozen. The pools of water they’re in are isolated. There was no longer a stream so they couldn’t get out of the pool they were in. And it’s small enough that it was cold enough that it froze to the bottom. You’re quite right, and we will all be horrified at the number of people in Alberta who say, “I have these water rights. They are historic, and if you touch them, I’ll sue you” no government in Alberta has had the courage to touch that kind of thing. It’s a third rail in politics even in southern Alberta. If you’re thinking that just because there’s a drought next summer that magically we will come together and deal with it. The track record in Alberta is the closer we get to crises, the more people with the power elbow, the other folks out of the room, that’s our actual track record.

Don’t expect that to change until the suffering is far wider and far deeper than it is now. You have to remember that Take Back Alberta is busy running around Alberta saying in rural Alberta that they have been so badly treated that they’re already in a state where they should rebel. And it’s the case that urban Alberta has neglected the countryside. They have some basis, but it just means that you’ve already got conditions that set us up for something closer to the Civil War that’s emerging in the US rather than joining hands and working together.

Jenny:

And I definitely feel you. There’s more resistance, more turmoil, more angst, more corners right now than what I’ve seen in my lifetime. Where are we going? I’m going to offer a few things on this because Jim and I spoke about your knowledge in the public Rome, and I was recently reading that article, which is quite frankly why I ran in the election is because I can see limits, right? If you used one of your analogies, I’ll use mine. If we have a plate of food and you think about the oil sounds in terms of this plate of food, we had steak, we ate it, we had some veggies, we ate it, and now we’re down to rice. And that rice is really hard to get at. My view and my concern in terms of where we’re headed is we are headed for collapse.

Where Are We Going, What Do You Do About Limits to Growth?

Jenny:

We’re headed for an energy drought, not just a water drought, but an energy drought, a resource drought. I have friends who have talked about the quality of the pipeline that they’re using in the industry right now, and they used to have a failure rate of 3%. Now they’re seeing a failure rate of 30%. Ouch. These are massive and just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the issues that we’re going to see I think this year. I guess I’m going to stop there and ask, do you agree or how do you see it in terms of where we’re headed? Do you think that where will business as usual start to see its first cracks or

Ruben:

Business as usual is already stressed but not enough to challenge business as usual as a mindset? Because business as usual isn’t just about business. It’s about a culture that for 250 years to 300 years, you can parse that any number between those two numbers you want. But essentially for the last almost three centuries because of high carbon energy as a species, we have had the luxury of being able to turn high carbon energy into use Andrew Fork’s phrase. We have the energy of slaves, and he starts his book talking about why slavery is so common in human experience. Once you get agriculture, it’s less common among indigenous, not unheard of, but less common among indigenous people. But once you’ve got agriculture, you need in effect horsepower and you can have horses, but you need lots of it. And therefore having some people as slaves makes a lot of sense, just quite apart from the human dignity of it.

It makes a lot of sense that you need more energy to keep your way of life going. And we’ve had the luxury of having, each of us now have several thousands slaves in the form of, I use some of it in the form of gasoline in my car to come here a hundred kilometers west of Calgary. Business as usual in the sense that part of the modern mythology is that we expect progress. That progress is, it used to be a slogan. What was the company progress is our most important product was major national international corporation. We expect progress. People expect a wage increment every year regardless of what the economy’s doing. When I grew up, a wage increment came in four or five year times and you had beg for it and perform really well, but the thought that you would get a wage increase every year wasn’t even a thought, let alone a reality.

What we’ve done is talk ourselves into that We have a right to the way of life. We have that’s been said by American presidents that our way of life is non-negotiable. Canadians would say much the same thing. This is not about the business community. The business community are simply the people who hold themselves up that we’re the engine of this that makes it work well, they actually don’t understand the game any better than anybody else does. The deep issue is that our economy is based and our money and the value of it is based on energy. We have been in an exponential growth of energy.

Ruben:

So in the last 35 years, we have used as much energy on this planet as was used because it’s the nature of exponential growth in all of human history going back 300,000 years. And that just seems, well, how could we do that? But you see, if it’s exponential growth, we have to now in the next 35 years, not just have as much as we’ve had in this 35 years, we have to do as much as this 35 years plus all the backstop, it’s cumulative. Well, there isn’t a ghost of a chance that that’s, well, shouldn’t say that. There may be a chance. Let’s assume that somebody actually achieves the fantasy of cheap energy and we’ve got it all. What does that mean? It means we’re saved except all that means is we have a capacity to destroy the biosphere of the planet faster, right? We face, we’re on the horns of a dilemma.

Ruben:

We have an economy that is destroying the biosphere, and if that continues, it destroys the conditions that allow us to live and a whole bunch of other species. If we keep this economy going and we have the energy for it, which looks like which every chamber of commerce is arguing for, and the energy transition is arguing for, all it means is we’re headed for where we started with Bill Reese and ecological overshoot. If we don’t do that and we actually begin to pick up the theme of Degrowth that we have to learn to live with less. And the world’s first major conference on Degrowth was held in Strasbourg in Europe sponsored by the European Parliament last year. Degrowth is beginning to be talked about in some official circles. Let’s assume that we get into degrowth. The trouble is we’ve built an economy that also is the basis for social peace that depends on economic growth every year.

Ruben:

And if we stop that, then we face social collapse, not through biological collapse. We face social collapse through social collapse that was pointed out by John Calhoun, who famously worked, to build a heaven for rats in the sixties at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Washington and Bethesda. What he discovered is that when rats had absolutely everything that they would ask for they got to the point where they turned on each other and killed each other. If they got stressed too much, they turned on each other and killed each other. In the early days when some environmentalists were saying, if we keep doing this to the environment, we’re going to kill each other or the environment will kill us. And he wrote this little piece saying, you don’t worry about dying from the environment. It’s not going to happen. My rat research suggests that once it is absolutely clear that we’re actually into ecological overshoot and death is guaranteed for us, we will kill each other.

Jim:

At some subconscious level. We look at the United States right now with the highest standard of living anywhere in the world and they’re turning on each other. Why should a society that has such a high standard of living have such conflict?

Ruben:

And take back? Alberta is nurturing that here, and they weren’t the first. There’s a strand that goes back to the Reform Party. We in Alberta have been teaching ourselves that we’re hard done by and should complain for more than 40 years, and we don’t even recognize that in ourselves as potentially an issue, let alone is not all that admirable or mature.

What Are the Alternatives?

Jenny:

I’m an optimist as Jim knows. And next question is about alternatives. You can either grow and make money through growth or you can make money by saving money at the same time. For example, we have, I don’t know, is it 20 ministries right now in Alberta all working on 20 different things. I pictured we need to zipper our economies. Any one person’s garbage is another person’s gold, and we need to make sure that each of these ministries is working together and eliminating the waste that’s happening between them. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about recently is we have a bunch of garbage that we’re not tapping into in terms of power back to the future. That was one of the obvious choices is that we have this opportunity that we’re not talking about. To your point about degrowth is my favorite.

Jenny:

When I think about where we need to go, I used to call it “undevelopment”. That was my term for it before I heard of deep growth. I see this opportunity to like you said, all of us to be okay with less to share. We think of how many of us have lawnmowers, we need one lawnmower per community and maybe we don’t even mow lawns anymore. There are many things maybe we don’t have lawns. There are many ways together. I guess we’ve talked about the tendency of people to be combative and my view is that’s around this individualistic model that you said has been embedded in us for 250 years or more. And the opportunity I see is this collectivism model where we’re looking out for the greater good rather than the individual. That’s one alternative. From your view, what’s a way to avoid the civil disruption or at least soften the blow or find, like you said, these islands of sanity? How do we help the islands of sanity gain strength?

Ruben:

Well, back to Mike Pearson. Let’s assume that NCI runs for the NDP leadership. He wins. Oh, he’s created a new political party name, not known. I don’t know what colour you get when you merge purple and orange.

Jenny:

Hey, it’s pretty representative.

Ruben:

Anyway, except for the brown shirts. Historically, were not people that you wanted to hang out with,

Jim:

Right?

Ruben:

Right. Let’s assume it is possible to mitigate some of the worst kinds of things that are happening. And it is not possible to avoid the end of our modern industrial society. It’s already collapsing. The trouble with the language of collapse is people think of what Ralph Klein did to the general hospital that one minute it’s there and three minutes later the whole place has been blown up on its rubble.

Ruben:

That’s not how societies collapse. Societies collapse over generations. They collapse in much the same way that that deep friendships collapse through a certain kind of neglect and you’re just not in touch with each other as much or as deeply. And then somebody says, have you seen Robin lately? And I said, guess it’s been a while since I’ve seen her. And my view is that we are already past peak modernity and into the collapse of our modern culture and there’s not a thing we can do to redeem it and keep it going. The thing we can do is come to terms with that and within limits, manage the collapse, manage the downside, knowing that as happens today, there are people today dying of things that in a sense are so simple. We knew about them hundreds of years ago. There are people dying today of thirst, just lack of water, let alone things that are more complex where you need better technology and better care. I don’t know of any place, but don’t Tencent prediction from a futurist. Somebody will have the imagination to create a website that then documents globally how many people are dying each second, each minute, each hour each day, each week, each year needlessly on this planet. And they’ll be running a bedding pool on the side of how big does this number be before we begin to pay attention.

And if you ask most people, we’re in a restaurant and if we said to them, we’ll buy you lunch if you give us 20 minutes of your time and talk to us and talk to us about how many people do you think are dying on the planet now needlessly, I expect the guesses would be all over the map and there wouldn’t be one in a thousand that would have more than a vague idea. Say, I’ve never thought of that before. Well, the fact is we don’t know. It’s not the kind of statistic we know, but it is the kind of statistic that once kind of catches your attention and takes your breath away, particularly if that number is increasing rather than decreasing. Because in a modern progressive world where things are getting better, it should decrease. In a world where we’re past peak modernity, it should increase. And the question is, can we slow down the rate of increase? Can’t avoid it.

Too much has already happened. There’s lots of stuff. I mean in the same way too late for me to learn another language. I’ve been in English all my life. I’ve got an ear for languages. And no matter you’ll have to have the angel Gabriel give me another 50 years to teach me another language. Just too much has already happened. Some things could be done if a 10-cent piece of advice for Naheed Nenshi is to put together a little group of people whose job it is to think about the steps we could take in Alberta that are below the radar. They’re not secretive enough, happily in the sense that talk about them. But most people will look at them and either say, what the hell is that? And think it’s not important enough to worry about what would you begin to do now in your first term that would help set us up over ten years. What are the things up your sleeve that then 40 years later people would look at and say, over this period, look at the number of things that we now take for granted? None of which existed before became Prime Minister. And people who work on political platforms today don’t tend to think about those things. They think about the 80% who can’t think and therefore what do they want? Because democracy has become the people know what they want and you must give them what they ask for,

Which is so crass that it makes your skin crawl, which isn’t to disown them. We, the upper classes in our culture and the people who have been to Queens, God bless us and other places have abandoned most Albertans, the 80% who can’t, which is why take back Alberta has people to talk to who are by and large who have suffered, who are not well enough educated to make sense out the world they’re in. And that’s not their fault. They didn’t set school leaving age at grade 10. And we’ve allowed people all my life to leave school at grade 10 on the assumption that grade 10 was enough to make sense of an increasingly complex world. And we weren’t even bright enough to have that conversation and say, no, we got to go. That’s got just not up to high school. It’s got to be some after high school stuff and therefore that has to be high school, that it’s done on a taxpayer’s basis rather than by tuition fees. But that sounds too collectivists if you just do it hand fist, there’s a range of things that could be done, but many of them are more profound than the kinds of things people are now talking about because what isn’t understood, here’s where gently, I want to punk your balloon. I think I understand why you say I’m an optimist, okay?

Because people want to be with people who in their view have good energy and they say they’re good to be around. They don’t want to be with people which time after time after time is just so bloody depressing that had dinner with him before he just spoils dinner. And I understand that. Let’s change optimism to we want to be people who help create synergies and create human energy. It’s one of the things we’re, I shouldn’t say we’re the only species, but we’re a species that can actually counter entropy. And that is by being together in ways that if you put Jenny and Jim and I together, it’s not arithmetically, which is one plus one less is three. The relationship is either less than three that we have in some way harmed each other and have left each other diminished. Or it’s more than three because we’ve left each other in some way with things to think on and chew on.

And there’s more of me as I leave. That’s interesting. How would you do social policy as if human relationships are the key to human synergy and wellbeing? That means you need a social policy that is not collectivist. We’re not going to use that language, but it is relational. That maps on to a bunch of physicists who are discovering the relational nature of reality maps on to some people doing agriculture learning much the same thing that you can’t do permaculture without understanding relationships. There’s a whole set of people who in their own way are on a journey from taking life as piecemeal in different silos to it being relational, which also means it’s contextual because you don’t have to understand the context of a silo. It’s just there by itself. Whereas if life is relational, you have to ask about the history and the context.

It also means that life is inherently social. It means that it’s inherently historical. We shouldn’t have done what we did in Alberta. And that was create a culture that looked as if it was anxious to abandon the countryside and move into urban centres where you could have all the good stuff because frankly, people in Calgary didn’t give a rat’s ass what happened to Vulcan or Chinook. Now chinook’s a place that doesn’t even exist anymore. And if you don’t know where Chinook was, I can guarantee you you can’t find it because there isn’t even a foundation there. There is no indication in Chinook that there was ever a small town here. It was a watering place on the CNR West, east of Hanna on the line that went from Calgary to Saskatoon. The people who are preaching the take back Alberta stuff have some basis of complaint that we who now own the damn place have been negligent and cocky.

By and large. We still are because we talk about smart cities and those kinds of things. We’ve made sure that the economy in Alberta was such that the oil and gas economy, as you know, you were in it, spills out into the countryside to fill their restaurants and fill their motels because a lot of the work is done there. They got that, but we did not care that the kids left school and that eventually the school had to close. We did not care that at one point they had a hospital and yeah, it’s old and had to be replaced, but it wasn’t replaced with a hospital. It was replaced by a place that was open eight hours a day, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday for a little bit of healthcare. And if you wanted anything else, you had to drive to the big city. The deep learning we have to do.

So we need a degree of humility and honesty from our politicians. And you’re hard pressed to say, well, who might that be? The depth that we have to go? We have to realize that this is back to my queen’s education. You couldn’t do political theory without understanding something of foundations of political theory because Alec Cory and Ted Hodges wouldn’t let you do that. And you couldn’t do philosophy with Sandy Duncan without understanding some of those things. The intellectual foundations of modernity are simply empirically wrong. Reality is not what who became modern think. There were some serious mistakes made in the 17th century when the Royal Society was formed and we were all gaga about science and we’re still reinforcing a lot of that. There’s work to do to say that the modern dream, if you hear it from everybody, we have to improve what we’ve got.

We care about each other. But essentially the project of every political party is to keep and improve the modern project and keep it going. What I’m saying is we’re past peak modernity. The modern project cannot be saved. It cannot be kept going. The only question is the nature of its collapse and whether that we learn enough through that to actually shift to foundations that turn out to be the foundations of the next forum of civilization, human beings. We have invented three forms of civilization over 300,000 years. We’ve learned to live as indigenous people and as any indigenous elder will tell you that is so different from being modern that you moderns can’t even begin to understand that we don’t live that it looks as if we live in the same world, but the world is not the same world. It took the warming of the earth 11,000 years ago for agriculture to be possible.

And eventually over what was literally several thousand years, some of the people who had been indigenous looked at each other and said, my God, we’re farmers, but this is a different form of civilization. So much for the farmers didn’t even recognize the indigenous people as their cousins. Now it’s also true of us who are modern. It took us 300,000 years to do one took us in the last 11,000 years, we’ve done two more up to a thousand years ago, we’d only done one of those. There’s no modernity a thousand years ago. Modernity doesn’t exist in any imagination in any form. Little bits of roots in some Greek thought, but not enough to where it really begins to take off in terms of song and poetry and architecture and art and human imagination is about a thousand years ago. Dating the roots of the industrial Revolution with James Watt and the steam engine is what engineers do.

I understand why they do it because they don’t understand all the stuff that softer than hard data. And it’s the stuff that softer, it’s the soft stuff that says to us, you can’t save modernity. And that’s not a conversation that most universities are even equipped to handle today. They’re as committed to keeping modernity going. Queens takes pride in being the best university in Canada by international standards of being committed to the UN strategic development goals, except the UN strategic development goals are designed to make a better modernity for everybody on the planet. And the UN doesn’t get it. And they’re not about to say, we can’t do that and Queens doesn’t get it. God bless them, they’re good people and they’re doing it well. Would I rather have them do that as a better job than some of the crass things that other universities are doing? Of course. But is it enough for the sake of children and grandchildren? Of course. No.

The game that needs to be played is well understood. Even most of the people who talk about ecological overshoot are clear enough, and I haven’t written enough and other people who are in this space I’m in have not been clear or written enough to help them understand. Some of them, God bless them, are happy to be in conversation with me and they’re remarkably patient. But if there’s anything in this, then we’re up against, I mean, this is then at the heart of a meta crisis. The meta is saying, this crisis goes all the way down to the foundations and we are now discovering that they cannot be redeemed. On the other hand, they can be people. We together can support each other in ways that even though they were built into us in all kinds of ways and into our language and street patterns and clothing patterns and God knows what else, we’re not so stuck with them that we can’t evolve from them because human history is a testimony that new forms of civilization do emerge. If it is empirically, if something has happened, then in principle it can happen.

In that sense, I’m not an optimist that will it happen, but I have enough understanding to have a deep hope that there are strategies we could use that can avoid a whole bunch of tragedy. I don’t think so. But can that tragedy be more than just wasted? It’s tragic. When tragedy is wasted, if nothing good comes out of, as opposed to saying, look, we set ourselves up for tragedy. We were able to mitigate some of it. It was less than it could have been. We’re going to go to our death being accountable for, but in the process we help identify and lay the foundations for the next form of civilization that can sound like just modern male talk. And then you’re into what Quakers know. Because what Quakers know is that authority is found in the tone of voice. If you don’t know what that means, Quakers just smile and say you haven’t been to enough meetings because it can’t be explained to you.

You just keep going to Quaker meetings until you get it about who has the right to speak when not the right as a legal right or as rules set out, but paying attention to the energy of the room and what’s next and when there is silence and when there is not. And eventually, you get that yes authority is found in the tone of voice. Indigenous people are the same. Not all elders are old. Elders is a turn of mind of people who have a tone of voice that understands. Not all elders are old, and not all old people are elders, but you look for the people who have the kind of understanding that the tone of voice is such. Now that’s interesting. It’s deputy ministers rather than ministers who are the key to that. I’m going to do that and we’re going to change that because I as a premier get to sit in on any meeting of deputy ministers that I want to, if you begin to think about it in these terms, then it just invites people to sit around and have one of those popcorn meetings where ideas emerge.

Let’s capture that. And we end up with 37 different things, only four of which are actually worth pursuing. But the others are still exercises and stretching our mind and in helping us believe that this is serious work for the sake of the future of the earth and humanity and living species. I mean at one sense this van creates energy. It meets some of the criteria of optimism except it’s clear about, I’m sorry, you’re actually going to have to put up with more death and destruction and lots than you’d like, but that ship has sailed. What we can work at, to what degree can we mitigate that? And the honest answer is we have no idea. There are lots of people in the world, 8 billion people, there’ve got to be 10 million people on the planet who would understand this conversation, but we’re not in the same networks.

We don’t know each other. They’re scattered. 10 million people are not a critical mass of 8 billion. They are so marginal that they make no difference anywhere for all practical purposes, whether it’s helping Albertans with the tar sand or whatever. The work and there are lots of people trying to put together networks to do the great work that they talk about. And for me, most of the part of the tragedy is that if you scratch under the paint deep enough, most of them are quite understandably better efforts than most go on, but they’re still trying to salvage and save modernity and improve it.

Takeaways

Jenny:

Yeah, this has been phenomenal, Ruben. Thank you so much. The last thing we do here is just do some takeaways. I’m just going to offer some things I heard from you, which I think are just so key. Relational efforts I think are something to look at. This is something that Jim and I sort of were talking about last week in terms of coalescing these efforts from like you said, these people that are otherwise isolated and you don’t even know they exist. Like you said, this conversation I suspect is not happening at other tables. Compartmentalization is something that you sort of mentioned to me. It’s trying to break those barriers and making sure that we are talking across boundaries that we wouldn’t normally do. I love this concept of throwing out half the caucus and replacing it with some different thinkers and allowing this space for creative thinking.

The last thing I’ll say about this is just that being an optimist is not necessarily out of ignorance. Do you know what I mean? I agree with you. I think our goal is to save half of humanity right now. Not all of it. To me, it’s either it’s an all-or-nothing kind of exercise. It’s a matter of where we’re going to land together at the end. But I do see this dire need to come together. I guess, is there anything I can offer you, Jim, if there are any takeaways you wanted to suggest and then I’ll let you.

Jim:

A lot of my background comes from individual psychology work and by very nature of people we change when we go through a crisis, whether it’s individually or collectively, as I said to so many people, I think of myself as a short-term pessimist, long-term optimist is that if you look at the curve, yes, we’re in the collapse and we’re dirty, but we’re also, there will be an upswing and we’ll be into a new form of civilization is what we’re moving towards. And we may not live to see that, but that will be the long term that we will see a different way of being among each other.

Jenny:

Anything that you wish I asked or anything you wanted to add?

Ruben:

No, I want to reinforce that my experience in talking with people about these things is that if the conversation is small enough and intimate enough I’ve yet to find anybody who is not touched by it to some extent. In other words, the irony is in that sense there’s no them out there who are. Now, that doesn’t mean that the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, what they’re advocating for should just be followed. But it does mean that in some sense there are even voices in some of those guys and gals whose normal patterns of life don’t allow them to have a conversation that would tap into this in a way that sounds like a useful use of time when they’re at work because of the mythologies we’ve got. I want to be clear that this is not about separating us from them.

This is about the reframing that is so fundamental that there’s a sense in which at that level there’s no them. On the other hand, what there is is one of the things that Jesus said from the cross, and that is to forgive them. They know not what they do and that we who are modern in that sense, have even most of our people who are leading our institutions have no idea of how they, or products of modernity that their style of living, that style of organization, the number of people who have a serious capacity to in that sense be a Mike Pearson are precious few. One hand is a high enough percentage. It’s probably not even 5%. It may be one and a half. And I don’t mean that pridefully, but it speaks about the danger that we’re in. And it speaks about that we have to be far more intelligent s about what we’re doing.

One of the phrases I fear most is when I hear well-meaning intellectuals who’ve read a lot of the same things we’ve all read, basically say we know what we’re doing. We have the technology, we just lack the will and the money and permission to do it. And that’s a belief that the modern world wants to believe. It needs to believe that that’s the case. We need people who are strong enough not to collapse when they work through that. I’m sorry, that’s not the situation we’re in. We’re in a far more perilous situation. In that kind of situation, we can be far more courageous than might otherwise be called for. And here you can read military or other history, not in every case, but lots of cases where people have basically said, what the hell? There’s nothing to lose. We’re kind of dumb for anyway. We’ve got nothing to lose. Let’s try this. And this has turned out to be an extraordinary effort that have allowed them to stay in the game. And it’s that sense of being willing. It’s a degree of entrepreneurship that most of the awards for entrepreneurship don’t even understand. This is about deep, deep civilizational pioneering.

Jenny:

Yeah. I’m just going to close with the quote that I was using of yours before as we were talking, which is now is not the time to be sowing seeds of distrust and incoherence. We don’t have the solutions, like you said, instead, we need to appreciate that we’re all in this together and that we need to be open and humble to accepting that we are heading into unknown territories. Thank you so much, Ruben. This has been incredible.

Jim:

I appreciate meeting you and you doing this. Thank you.