Season 1, Round 6: Highlights

How to Create Positive Change

In this last round (6) of season 1, you hear about the dangers of greenwashing and the false solutions it presents to the climate crisis, delaying necessary climate action. Various speakers highlight the manipulation of public perception by corporations and the influence of industry on government policies. The conversations touch on the challenges faced by indigenous communities, the impact of colonization, and the need for decolonization and cultural restoration. Additionally, the speakers reflect on personal experiences, the importance of inner work, and the role of music in inspiring change and hope. The discussion emphasizes the interconnectedness of environmental, social, and cultural issues and the collective effort required to address them.

Misrepresentation is dangerous because in greenwashing we have messaging that promotes false solutions to the climate crisis and delays the kind of climate action that we really need to be taking. The corporation is reassuring us that they’re already doing the things that need to happen and they have the plan. The Pathways Alliance is all about presenting this kind of plan for net zero that is deeply, basically just one example, local to Canada, but this is happening around the world.

Jenny Yeremiy — Co-Host | Geophysicist | Liability Expert | Public Activist

To me, the cycle that we’re in here is that we have this false solution being presented to industry, so then we have the public relying on people that are in the industry to say, no, no, no, we’ve got this right? So I’m telling my friends, oh yeah, yeah, we’re doing CCS, and then what happens is the government officials, so these politicians then feel obligated to support the public because they’re angry and they want to make sure that our industry is being looked after. They go as far as to, there was an excellent article that the Norwell did have recordings of TC energy executives talking about their relationship with the US government and how they are driving these messages through to policy. I can say this, I was a lobbyist. I didn’t appreciate that I was a lobbyist, but I was writing letters to the government. Now, from my point of view, I can be confident that I was writing letters about site restoration. The message that I was making to the government is if we want indigenous participation, it needs to be in site cleanup. It cannot be in carbon capture and storage, and who better to lead that. This was my messaging to the government than indigenous communities that have faced this issue for decades.

JP Sapinski — Associate Professor of Environmental Studies | University of Moncton

I read a different section of bill for C 59 and in that section what they talk about is a tax credit on carbon capture utilisation and storage. That’s a kind of vulnerable bill. So there’s a whole bunch of things in the bill including that pardon, grid washing, different stuff on unemployment insurance and so on, and it touches on everything that’s in the budget. Kind of an example of greenwashing. On the one hand you have a law against greenwashing that also includes provisions that support continued use of, well production of and use of fossil fuels. And there’s also another part, another tax credit on clean industry investments, which is very interesting. Tax credit on renewable solar wind, which also includes nuclear. So there’s tax credit for nuclear power plants, specifically targeted at small nuclear reactors, small module nuclear reactors, which the oil industry is looking to use in decarbonizing its production.

D.A. Sarah Stogner — Texas 143rd Judicial District Attorney

It’s not a new problem in West Texas. It’s the tragedy of the commons and where I am, everyone’s like, oh, it’s just mesquite scrub brush and you can see here, okay, well a hundred years ago it was all beautiful grasslands and we overgrazed it and then after we overgrazed it, we started punching holes in it and we’re abusing it. I think that we just need to be having discussions about what the future looks like for our grandchildren and we’re injecting CO2 into the ground, which is the dumbest thing ever because all we know is we’re going to create carbonic acid when that CO2 mixes with the water and carbonic acid is highly corrosive and eats through the steel and the cement even more, and oxy’s spending billions of dollars a few miles away from me with these direct air capture, big old fans in the middle of the desert and they’re going to suck the CO2 out and inject it into the St. Andrew’s formation, which is the same formation that is feeding this water right here in the picture.

Justin Mikulka — Research, Analysis and Communications for Oilfield Witness

In California, you have a company called CRC. It hasn’t existed for very long. It’s really the old assets of Oxy Shell and Exxon. They own more wells than anyone else in California. They do not have the money to pay for the cleanup. They actually went bankrupt shortly after they were spun off from Oxy. So they recently, with California’s new regulatory structure, agreed to merge with another large oil company with a lot of Exxon’s old assets. These two companies merged and all the activists were like, this is going to be great. The new law says they owe us a billion dollars to cover these assets, but as I like to say, the oil and gas industry, lawyers and lobbyists are some of the best and normally wrote the laws. What happened was they said, oh no, this is a merger in California. If you do a merger, you don’t have to pony up that billion dollars. Here we have Colorado. They’re doing worse than when they started the process. California just handed a gift to a company, and the additional part of this Ponzi scheme, this is what the US shale industry has been on several levels. Now what CRC is saying is we’re a carbon capture company.

Mark Dorin – Polluter Pay Federation Board Member | Land Owner | Former Oil and Gas Operator

In the 1990s to about the year 2000, the regulator and government of the day in Alberta started to notice that there was some risk and there was some risk of bankruptcies, and the regulator also was concerned with the number of transfers of wells from the big companies that originally drilled these wells to mom and pop operations, et cetera. So they wanted to start imposing security deposits against these closure costs and they wanted to start regulating monitoring these transfers and the industry said, “No, don’t do that to us. Let us transfer our licences to whomever we want and don’t make us put up security deposits to cover end of life obligations, and in return we will insure against bankruptcy of our members.” We got something. It’s unique. I think it’s probably the envy of the world. It’s called the Orphan Fund. It’s legislated under part 11 of the Oil and Gas Conservation Act. So there’s a yearly levy that’s supposed to occur. They’re trying to renege on their deal. They’re trying to say, well, now that it’s time for us to pay, we don’t want to keep the promise we made.

KJ (Jules) McCusker – Creative Director | Writer | Indigenous Educator

I hear the concept of love brought up a great deal, and it’s one that I don’t think a lot of people are truly listening to. What is decolonization? I just kind of threw these elements on the table, but I didn’t give you my real opinion about it, but we’re not going to be able to move forward without some violence. It’s just going to happen. It’s happening whenever is a perfect example of that violence. What happened with the Woodland Cree just recently on their lands trying to get an injunction to put the chief in jail. It’s never been done. It’s unprecedented, but yet they’re doing it. That’s a violence. That’s what we’re up against. That’s the reality. That’s not nicey nicey come to the table, have earnest no. It’s like we want that and we’re going to take it regardless and we’re going to arrest you and throw you in jail or shoot you in the process.

I find that there’s a massive difference between indigenizing and colonising and some things just cannot be indigenized, and that’s just a simple fact. Yet indigenizing in most cases is more or less to do with colonial systems that it has to do with deconstructing education, for example, which is what I’m trying to do for me when we work to indigenize our home territories. How does the rest of the population gain insight from that? Well, I’m not quite sure the ready because just like you were pointing out earlier about this, the reality is that we as a culture, as peoples, our peoples have been trying to educate about our worldview since contact, and it’s not registering and it’s just not, and that’s a lot of years to be going to school for people who’ve been here that long who have ancestors that arrived here in those early days and are still here, they’ve had an education from us and still not taking any cues.

Lizabeth Fox – Digital Creator and Blackfoot Leader

There isn’t going to be any peace without some violence of some sort. To us violence is standing up using our voices and saying, no, we’re not going to take this anymore and pushing back. And I don’t think that a lot of the European world or the colonised world understands that we weren’t violent unless we had to be violent, unless it was pushed upon us and then we were violent in return. So in that sense, I do believe that what he’s saying is a thousand percent true, and a lot of people my age, the Blet language wasn’t spoken in our home. It wasn’t taught to us because our parents wanted us to be colonised. Our parents wanted us to fit in the white world, and so, oh no, don’t do that, because they themselves were part of residential schools and so they were punished for it.

They didn’t want the same things to happen to us. When you think of home, you think of what you think of Chief Mountain, you think of there’s landmarks that we identify with, and so I think that if we find those commonalities and we start to work together, that’s how decolonization actually happens. But as far as what I’m working on, I’m working on a lot of little things, but it’s crazy because the film that we’re premiering actually talks about the work that my, well, he’s my cousin, but we’re six months apart, so we’re kind of trying to bring culture back to the Blackfeet. He’s trying to do that and the resistance that he’s meeting head on is giving me a bird’s eye view of what could actually happen if we start to lose those things. And there’s a lot of things that have we as awa have lost over time, and that’s where colonisation just never stops.

We want to fit in. We want to be the cool rappers and we don’t want to be the cool educational people or the elders. We don’t look to our elders or our youth don’t look to our elders the way that they look to famous people now. And so I think a lot of that needs to be taken apart and put back together so that they understand that our future generations do rely on them just like it relies on us. And there’s something that Tyson says a lot that I, I’ve kind of adopted too is, well, if I don’t do it, then who’s going to, if not me, then who? If I don’t, who’s going to? That’s kind of what I’m doing.

Gabrielle Weasel Head — Professor MRU Indigenous Studies | Kainai First Nation

Yes, I need clarity and to make some sense about exactly what has been going on in not just my life, but the lives of so many people, like all of us. It’s like why is it that when I was a kid, I grew up and I went through the social studies curriculum and the closest thing I could find about native people was that we were part of the local wildlife that I grew up on a reserve and I grew up on a reserve and it was okay, and you know what? Wild animals are in Africa and they’re on wild animal reserves and nobody questioned it like, okay, so everybody is okay that I’m on a reserve, a little kid on a reserve. I don’t get to learn anything about anything. My parents talk in Blackfoot in the next room. They whisper about it, but they don’t talk to me in Blackfoot unless I’m in trouble.

Dirty involves sense making and meaning making. Does it make sense if I flip it? And all of a sudden, Liz, Tara, kj, we get together and we develop our white awareness training and we give that to indigenous people. It’s absurd. It’s absolutely absurd. So why do we accept it? And we say, oh, okay, professional development training. Let’s do some indigenous awareness training. Oh, that’s cool. You know what my parents got for white awareness training, the Indian residential schools, that’s what we got. We still live in this existence. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. And our first teachers, the land, the animal nations, we’ve completely disregarded them completely. They’re totally out of the, and then so we get into questions about how are we going to manage the land, and it doesn’t even make any sense to me. It’s still okay, I’m going to go to Liz and say, how am I going to manage Liz? Like the land is living, it’s alive. Why do we need to manage it?

Tara-Weaselhead Running Crane — Behavioral Health, Healthy Relationships, and Culture Expert and MSc Student

Colonization is violent against us every single day now that we’re speaking up and saying, enough is enough, as Liz said, enough is enough. I’m not dealing with this no more. We’re the ones that are looked at as violent. If that’s the case, if me using my voice and standing my ground and standing in my knowledge ways and in my heart work is violent to somebody, then so be it. Because that’s how I know that I’m going to make sure my son doesn’t inherit all this hurt. Going back to, I mentioned earlier that I’ve worked in behavioral health for many years now. A lot of it’s been youth focused. What I always heard growing up was, you’re the future. You’re the one that makes those changes. But I’m realizing now, no, that’s a cop out. We are the ones that make those changes because our kids inherit the choices we make today.

We are their future. We’re the ones that make those choices to help guide them. We’re the ones that really do make the decision of what tomorrow is going to be like for them. And so I’m always challenging that now anytime I hear it, because the truth is colonization is even violent against our generations and our community. We have so many people not even making it to elderhood. I don’t even have family reunions anymore. We just have funerals. Going back to that, like I said, my “heart work” is showing up every day and just being brave enough to live in this world to continue on and still trying to live in love could probably go out there and just be colonized and try to turn a blind eye and life would probably be easier for me. I could do these terrible things and try to get ahead, but the truth is my heart would never allow it.

I’d be just as miserable. And so anytime I come up in this space where I have to be strong and keep moving forward, I always ask myself, “Could you live with this? Not doing anything moving forward, could you live your life and ignore something that you know is an injustice or that isn’t the right thing? And if so, sometimes I can, but sometimes I know I couldn’t live with myself. I’m showing up in these spaces and I’m telling my story, but more importantly, I’m listening and I’m learning and I’m making sure that whenever I transfer this knowledge to somebody else, especially our youth, that I’m doing it in a good way. The way that we make sure tomorrow is healed is that we heal today. We don’t save it for tomorrow any more. We don’t have time. We’re running out of time.

Alex:

The algorithm is cherry picking information for you, and we’re not seeing a whole bunch of other stuff that might be contrary. So a confirmation bias that’s digitally created is creating a social cohesion that actually needs to be somehow repaired or rectified. I’m not going to pretend to know I know how to do that, but I’ve gotten to the truth, to the level of where I know that’s exactly what needs to be done. And I think that is sociologically, culturally and societally and spiritually one of the biggest challenges that we’re facing today. And that’s part of the reasons why I’m just not quitting.

Jenny:

I want to feel that I have tried to bring people together in ways that serve all of us and so that I feel good when I go to sleep at night. I can go to sleep and know I tried my best for not only my family, but for Alex’s and for you. And that’s the great thing about knowing this. Once you know that you don’t need to worry about if this is good for my son, then somebody’s going to lose. No. When you think in this way that serves others, it’s very satisfying work to do, but it’s hard work to do. It’s something like he described. It’s something that we don’t necessarily get to enjoy. My friend Elise says it’s type two fun. Type two fun translates into type three fun and type four fun and type on and on and on. And I think that’s the benefit of the work we’ve now done. And I’m hopeful that we’re in a place now where we can just enjoy the benefits of what we’ve worked towards and get into a bit of a rhythm and have some fun.

Angie Alexander – Engineer | Positive Intelligence Coach

You have to do the inner work, and you started off with that, the devil within the saboteurs, whatever it is, it’s the most effective that we can be in changing others, is by doing the inner work, right? Doing the inner work, really understanding where we are, and then that ripples out. It becomes less about trying to force, and you said easy Jenny, and that’s ease and flow is very much a sage principle, and that starts from within. If I have that ease within myself and I have that sense of who I am and why I’m here, then it just becomes an easier path. And then you can be more intentional around where you’re headed because you’re grounded in yourself. The future is bright.

Jenny:

Music can inspire meaningful change. So my song, and I grew up listening to a variety of things, but The Guess Who was one of my favorite bands when I was in high school, I chose Do You Miss Me, Darling. We have a lot of learning to do and a lot of things to come together on that isn’t easy, and if we try and walk it along, we’re not going to get anywhere. We need to actually rush. So I think music is the best way for us to do that.

Beau Shaw – Federal NDP Candidate | Independent Jewish Voices | Queer Citizens United

I think my favorite song to make me feel hopeful about the future or even just my day to day, just to put me in a good mindset is this is the day by the, and the majority of the song is that this is the day that your life will surely change. And it’s true for everyone that your life changes every day. And if you’re not striving for change in your life, then what are you really doing?

Muriel Wynnobel – Big Hills Springs Resident | Preservation Advocate

We’re still fighting the gravel pit that we figure is going to ruin both our water and the water and the whole atmosphere for the Big Hill Springs Provincial Park. I’ve got a real song, it just popped into my head just because of the continual fight, and I think it’s called High Hopes, and I don’t have a clue. I’ve got high hopes and it goes on and on about all the things that people try to do. Well, people, animals, anything, and never give up. They just keep at it.

Alex:

My song is Adagio of Strings. On my third near death experience, that was the first song that popped into my head. When you go through some stuff that really hits you and you are given an option or choose to live or choose to die, and then a song comes in, not of your own choice, it just stays with you. It focuses on one rose in a row of rose bushes, and it helps you to come to the understanding that you are that rose amidst a row of others, right? You’re all part of the same bush.

Janet Pennington – Environmental Scientist | Agriculture Expert | Activist

My song is an oldie but a goodie, but not that old, but it’s from our Canadian singer, songwriter, activist, performer extraordinaire, Sarah Harmer. And the song is called Loeb Star Out on the night out on the water, we pull the boat back to shore, breathe in the air, and the stillness of the bay, intensity of stars reflected in the water, silently ignite the ore, dips in to oil like water, and we are away. And I just love that with the strings. And then just the tempo of the song builds into crescendo, and then she brings it back in into this really intimate, you’re alone in the world on a beach with someone you love, and it’s a great song.

Gabrielle:

One of the songs that I picked is a famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen. It’s about what’s taken. It’s what’s taken from us, but what are we taking? It’s what are we trying to keep? And so Jane is the focus of this song, and when I think about what everybody’s talking about here, about our water, about, it’s not even our water. It’s like we belong to the water and we belong to the land. I think when we reframe things, and who is Jane? She’s the focus of this song, but who is she? Jane represents that which sustains us, which is our earth, the earth that we belong to. That’s what she symbolizes.

Colin Smith – Cooperative Solar Developer | Land Lover | Bioregional Organizer

My song is a Neil Young song called Spirit Road, “A Speck of Dust. In a Giant’s world, there’s a spirit road that you must find a long highway in your mind. Don’t feed the snake, it’ll turn on you. You starve it out. That’s what you do, and it makes you lie. It makes you cheat, steals your shoes, and it cuts your feet.” That I think is referring to, or at least how I interpret it, is modernity and society and ego telling you one story, but your soul or your spirit has a deeper story that I want you to come back to it. And then in that you have gifts to offer to your friends and your neighbours to the land and to the water. And that deeper story is what I hope more of us can find in that long highway. In our minds,

Tom Prilesky – Polluter Pay Federation Member | Communications Specialist | Singer and Song Writer

This is really timely because the song that you’re going to hear is being released in 11 days. The way I write music is I create spaces that I want to feel things in, if that makes any sense. So this is coming from a perspective of how am I going to, what is my perspective going to be on my life after I die a place I like to think in and feel in just to kind of think about how am I living, what’s happened, what am I happy with, not happy with? And I don’t really like to just grab random lines from songs. I think they all matter, but I think probably the most poignant line is we are never the person we are aching to be. Songs called Glad, sad, mad Rad,

KJ (Jules):

Rating a playlist. I think of something that’s, I guess it hearkens back to being of grand importance in a weird way. The two musicians that probably had the greatest impact on me, aside from American ones, was Fela Kuti when I was 18, discovering Fela Kuti was groundbreaking. And of course you could go through his works and stuff and there’s just endless material, but no agreement is probably a masterclass of African Funk. And I guess the reprisal against colonialism and the system suppression and just the need for creativity and self-empowerment and everything else that comes with that.