The Gravity Well Podcast

Round 1: Guest Summary

Season 1, Round 1: Highlights

This conversation explores the importance of community collaboration, diverse perspectives, and proactive planning in addressing societal and environmental challenges. Jenny emphasizes the need for collective efforts and learning from past experiences, such as the Apollo missions, to anticipate and mitigate potential issues. Alex highlights the significance of understanding multiple viewpoints and bridging gaps to foster cooperation. Other speakers discuss the impact of stress and burnout, the necessity of good faith in media, and the critical role of emergency response systems. The dialogue also touches on the interconnectedness of human health, environmental sustainability, and the need for systemic change to address crises effectively. Overall, the discussion underscores the value of empathy, honesty, and shared responsibility in creating resilient communities and a sustainable future.

Guests (Episode #): Angie Alexander, Melanie Richards (1), Brad Chapin, Michele Thomson (2), Regan Boychuk (3), Colin Smith (4), Chris Yeremiy, Mike Westwick (5), Janet Pennington, Kristy Jackson, Melanie Hoffman, Mark Dorin (6), Ruben Nelson, Jim Campbell (Bonus), Walter Hossil (7, clip only), and Dixon Hammond (8).

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

Alex and I had met at the doors, I’ll be clear. “The doors” means when I ran in the election this year, last year, I guess I door knocked. I had the opportunity to knock on Alex’s door, and I had been messaging consistently before and leading up to it that we were in the Apollo 13 moment that this province just really needs to put all of our resources on the table and have a discussion about how we’re going to do all the things we want to do. That was sort of my messaging, like I said, for months. And people would hear it and say something interesting about it. But it wasn’t until I started talking to Alex that he said, yeah, but why Apollo 13 was successful? It was because of Apollo 11. I said, go on. Alex said that it’s like if you follow Michael Phelps, they anticipated negative outcomes and made plans to adjust based on those potential outcomes.

For example, if we ran out of oxygen, what would we do? We’re feeling a pressure change. How would we adjust if we were off trajectory, how would we fix direction? And because they took the time to do that because they took the time to learn what-if scenarios, they were ready when Apollo 13, they were faced with the Apollo 13 moment. That’s the opportunity I saw when I first met Alex. It was, “Wow, this is someone that just added a whole new dimension to my thinking. And it’s just sort of been like that ever since. I would say that it’s just the way Alex is. He has, he operates with a really good heart, he has a good intention. When he challenges me on something, we’re able to work through it because we both are operating from that place of best intention.

That’s why we’re working together. And then what the purpose of this conversation is to we want to rebuild a community. We have what I feel is a big gap in society where we are expected to take positions or be in camps and work potentially on the opposite sides of the table. All of these things that we sort of say, and it’s expected that we’re in opposition against each other, and that’s not where we need to be. We need to think in terms of we’re all in this together type of thinking. Please go ahead, Alex, and add to that. Thank you.

Alexander MacGillivray – Co-Host | Fine Arts Major | Jack-of-All-Trades

Alex: Thank you. Essentially there’s a common saying when people want to deflect. They say, “There are two sides to every coin, black and white, zero in one, these binary systems of thinking. But what they’re forgetting is there are three sides to a coin. There’s the edge, and that edge is crucial. The edge is what holds the coin together. Amid these dichotomies.

Jenny: We’re all in this together.

Alex: What we’re seeking to do is learn from other people who have varying views and who normally would be dichotomized in terms of opposing sides and just kind of maybe make an attempt to bridge some gaps and creatively find a way to compete with each other rather than in competition solely so that we can make a difference over the long term. I mean, it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s worth a shot.

Jenny: Yeah, actually I like the idea of winning with each other. This concept is that we’re stronger together.

Angie Alexander – Engineer | Positive Intelligence Coach

We’re stronger together, the difference between perspective and perception. Some of you’ve probably heard the parable about the elephant and the blind men. It depends a bit on where you’re standing and what you’re looking at. That would be I guess, your perspective. I can be standing on one side and I see it a certain way, and I’m looking at the same thing as you are, but you’re on a different side of it. Your perspective is going to be different where you’re standing and looking at it. Perception could be coloured by my experience, but maybe I’ve never seen an elephant before. I’ve never seen a sculpture like this before. My description and what I perceive it to be might be different. It’s really about curiosity and being open to say, well, this is what I see and I know that that’s what I’m seeing and explaining even where I’m coming from.

My background is this. I think it’s important when we know in some of the other rooms that I do around with the PQ coaches helping, where are you calling in from and where are you on the PQ journey helps us understand a little bit of the perspective that they might be bringing from that. The more that you know about, “Well, I live in Calgary, I have an engineering background, I’m a coach.” “This is how I know Jenny” or how I know people. All of that helps other people understand where I might be coming from. I think having that openness to share without judgement of myself or other people, is what that might look like. And then to your point, I’m describing what I’m seeing, feeling, and perceiving from this experience, and then be open to understanding that someone else is seeing it differently, and how can I start piecing those together?

The elephant in the blind man is someone over here talking about, “Well, it looks and feels like this”, and someone over here is, “It looks and feels like that”, and none of them is fully correct. We don’t have the full picture. Being able to start piecing that all together, and I think especially as moderators being able to be listening to that and creating that picture for others in terms of, okay, I’m hearing this from all of these different perspectives and I’m creating a picture for myself. Let me test it out. Let me see if this is resonating and being open to that.

Melanie Richards – BVisible Positive Intelligence Coach | Trainer | Speaker

From a moderation perspective, maybe consider setting up a community agreement. There’s a positive intelligence community of practice that I’m in. And one day something subtle happened that made a couple of first-time guests, including myself, a little creeped out. I’m the type of person, I’m going to go back and see if it clears. And then somebody went to social media without maybe they were overly stimulated, so to speak. In response, a bunch of discussions happened and there is now a community agreement. The community agreement is shared at the top of every meeting. It could be a link that you pin at the top of the room, it’s there for people to view, and it’s shared for general knowledge. It talks about how complex conversations may happen there with respect for privacy. And it kind of frames what the standard of conduct is. I haven’t seen this anywhere else before, and it’s quite the same way. And it was something that they created in response to somebody’s creepy comments on social media. It might be a suggestion if you’re expecting difficult conversations.

Michele Thomson – RN | Leadership | Workplace Safety | Culture Specialist

As a nurse, I think that what I’ve seen exacerbated by the pandemic and the scenario that you spoke about earlier around people working a lot of long hours, often we’re seeing a lot more compassion fatigue, caregiver burnout and moral injury. And what I’m seeing is a little surprising to me that people seem to be more apathetic, which I think is giving maybe the impression that they’re emotionally regulated when in fact people are tired and burnt out that they just kind of feel don’t have it in me. I am wondering potentially if you have any thoughts about what the long-term consequences of that would be in terms of not displaying any external capacity to show that someone is in distress. An employer may not know what to look for to support an individual, and employees might not know how to support their colleagues. I’m just curious if you have any thoughts about that.

Brad Chapin – Self-Regulation Developer | Director of Clinical Services

Oh, Michelle, I have a lot of thoughts about it, thank you so much for that question. I was waiting for you to give me a good one there. This is an area near and dear to my heart. I said there is fight or flight. There are also other options here. An organism does when it’s experiencing threats. What Michelle’s describing there is what we consider toxic stress. Because this fight or flight system originally was designed, and I’m talking like I’m the creator of this, but I’m not. But it was originally designed as an acute response. I see a bear, the system kicks in, I resolve, I either get away or I fight the bear, whatever happens, and then my system returns to baseline. And that all happens within a matter of minutes or at most a few hours. What we’re seeing with a pandemic, which is a physical threat, it’s a physical threat and it brings a lot of social emotional threats too.

We have a loss, we have unpredictability everywhere. There wasn’t a script for this, especially in healthcare or education. I mean there were scripts, but they weren’t near what we needed to have for this. What we have are people who are experiencing this level of my fight or flight system has been activated since March 2020. You can fight for a while, you can “flight” for a while. And the last option when an organism is tired of fighting, not able to fight or can’t get away, is this sort of shutting down mechanism. Organisms will shut down, try to conserve energy. And I think you brought up just such an interesting dichotomy with healthcare professionals. It’s the same way for therapists. I spend most of my time supervising therapists these days, and it’s like, how can I as a therapist or as a healthcare provider stay compassionate enough to where I can stay in touch with all this suffering around me and not have so much get on me that I’m constantly in fight or flight mode.

Regan Boychuk – Independent Researcher | Polluter Pay Federation Board Member | Roofer

Regan: I think I’ve recently come to a realization that’s simple. It seems ridiculous, but I think there’s something to it. And I think it’s reflected in the media and how reliable it is or used to be or some kinds of, it can still be, but new media isn’t. And it all relates to what I think is the absolute essence and prerequisite, the foundation of society, civil society, decent society is good faith and it’s a pretty foreign concept these days, but there’s good faith and bad faith, and the law assumes that citizens operate in good faith, in honest, in their dealings. They’re not trying to screw everybody all the time. Nothing would work if everybody was always doing that. And that sort of accountability was reflected in the media through libel law. There are editors, there are serious institutions, and there are serious checks on the accuracy of information in newspapers, there’s always bias, sometimes horrifically, but those standards are useful over time. It’s a filter for the good.

And something big happened in 1996. The law was changed where two times, one of the Fox News cases was about lying in the media and they challenged it in court and one that, yes, it’s okay to lie now. You used to have to give a fair response equal time to somebody to reply if you said something about them and Ronald Reagan removed that didn’t have the right to reply in the media anymore, but after 1996, there were no liable controls for new media that would eventually become social media. Everything online websites. Now there’s no liable. Now there are no consequences to lying about people. Now you’re allowed to lie and you’re allowed to lie about people. And that’s why there’s no good faith in the media, in the new media. That’s the missing piece.

Alex: That’s the section two 30 provision where as long as you’re not officially a publisher, then you’re protected under those lines.

Regan: And that’s the kernel that gives us, that allows Musk to turn Twitter into a shit hole with $60 billion worth of borrowed money that it’s a cesspool now, and much of the media is like that. That’s because there’s no more space for institutions’ enforcement of good faith.

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

Humans are pretty nearsighted. It’s hard for us to think well in advance. Politics is even structured in a way that creates even more short-term thinking. And we should severely really question politicians that say that they have the answers to all of our issues because these are complex issues that nobody knows the answer to. The only way we’re going to figure it out is if we take the blinders off and have hard conversations about how this, our lifestyles are essentially contributing to the problem as well as contributing to us not being able to address it. We need more than a wartime movement to reframe our societies and our modern lives in a way that prepares for the dire consequences that are essentially knocking at our back door right now. Mother Nature’s ready to come in with a pitchfork and huck us out on the back of the compost pile so she can start over again.

It all comes down to the story of modernity and essentially we all believe in an unlimited growth potential. That’s why we have to sell our oil and gas to China and the states. If we looked at our oil and gas endowment as a legacy to honour and cherish from a territorial perspective, we could be the most utopian place on earth. It’s important that we try very hard, despite how uncomfortable it might be to make unexpected alliances. These are issues that cross all political boundaries and those in power many times try to divide and conquer only to gain more power, but we need to realize that the power lies with the people. You look at a natural ecosystem. It’s not just one kind of thing. It’s many diverse people, and that’s what makes it work.

Mike Westwick – Strategic | Crisis | Risk Communications Professional

Step one is availability. You need to be available if people are counting on you in a crisis. Step two is recognizing that people are undergoing trauma when they’re facing an emergency like this in a crisis, in the context of communicating to the public and communities. That means making sure that you’re following trauma-informed practice. In this case, it means making sure that you understand that people can only take in so much information at once. It’s about distilling in all that incident information that may be complex and distilling it down to the things that are most important to people while still ensuring that you’re getting the message across and building trust in folks that you’re doing everything you can as an organization to keep those folks safe. And the next step is to be responsive. People are going to be looking for information all the time.

They’re going to be reaching out to you and they’re going to be having a hard time processing information. Making sure that you’re making every effort to play your part and be responsive to people and beyond just sticking to the facts, you need to recognize that empathy is a critical piece to every bit of for your communication and response in a crisis to be effective. Or the last piece that I had put there in terms of what a good emergency response in crisis communications looks like is following it through to the end, even after the immediate risk or crisis begins to subside, you’ve got, oftentimes you have people moving into recovery and you’re going to want to need to continue to be with them all the way through, making sure that you’re continuing to follow through even after the biggest crises subside. A lot of times people can take their eye off the ball during recovery, I think, and you want to avoid that every step of the way.

And of course, foundational to every bit of this, you need to be honest and you need to build credibility, and that means being honest about the good, the bad, and the ugly sometimes. That’s something that I think in the government communications world that you have to push back against. Sometimes when you’re doing crisis communications, you are not doing public relations, you’re doing public information and people are going to trust you more, even if people are going to trust you, if you’re honest about the fact that you might’ve screwed up or something might’ve gone wrong or something could have went better than if you’re covering it up, so to speak or trying to talk around it. There were certainly a couple of instances this summer where we did make mistakes and we had to be honest about it.

Chris Yeremiy – City Firefighter | Former Wildland Firefighter | Environmental Scientist

A command system that we all use in North America now is based on the US Forest Service, and that’s been integrated into a disaster management system for many different types of incidents. It’s well known over North America, I could take someone from a fire crew in Idaho and bring them up here and they would know who they’re reporting to and what their tasks were kind of thing. That’s super important that we have people that understand the system, who they report to as well as span of control. You’re looking after a certain amount of people or a certain amount of crews. That’s usually three to seven is the optimum. And once you get past that seven, that causes a lot of chaos because you can’t keep track of everyone. That’s the number one thing is having a proper system in place that people understand and they understand who their supervisor is, what the roles and responsibilities are, and ensuring that supervisors aren’t overwhelmed with all these resources that are placed on them because once they’re overwhelmed, good decisions aren’t being made.

Then number two is having some form of pre-suppression I call it. And just because that’s my background is being in the fire, but I’ll say pre-planning of resources. In many cases, and I keep bringing up, let’s say floods or wildfires, wildfires. We know when it’s hot and dry when lightning’s coming, and we can have resources in place prior to when some of these fires start. The crux is if we don’t get lightning and we get rain, then you possibly could have wasted money on pre-suppressing an area like having all these resources in place before the accident. But the fact is it’s insurance, and I think people have to understand that having these resources before the fires get there and getting them when they’re small is the number one most important thing to do. The expertise of people that are junior to you, they have different experiences, they have a different background, and just because they’ve been on a couple of years, they could be way more valuable on a certain call than you are with 20 or 30 years on.

And I would ask those incident commanders out there if we’ve hired people that have gone through so much to get on, let’s say a structural fire environment in a big city. Yet once they get on, they’re back to zero. Like I’ve told Jen in the past, it’s taken me, I’m 19-years on the department I’m on now, and it’s taken me 17 years to get back to where I was after my last year, and in terms of my expertise and intuition and judgement and all that stuff, while I was a wildland firefighter because I started on the bottom of another organization, I would ask the next generation of people in the professional departments who have full-time jobs to take a look at those junior people.

Ruben Nelson – Explorer | Enabler of the Post-Industrial Society | Economy

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 special, but we are the only species that can have this conversation. Therefore we have obligations that right whales, squirrels, and grizzly bears don’t have, and that’s not to put them down. 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 slough outside town, you would learn that if you move fast enough when the ice is 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. 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.

Jim Campbell – Social and Environmental Strategic Designer | Organizer | Developer | Community Investment Advisor

Jim: And we were saying about groundswell critical mass is, and I think that your comment about leadership, there isn’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 is it’s going to bring this forward, is there are limits, and we have to deal with it. It’s very much in front of us. You can’t deny that there’s no water. That’s …

Jenny: Right. Yeah. Can’t fake water. I see the crisis as a social, environmental and economic crisis.

Melanie Hoffman – PhD Chemist | Organizer for Intergenerational Justice

This is a crisis of relationship that shows itself at all these different levels. It is a crisis rooted in arrogance, in the lack of humility and supremacy thinking. And it’s deeply tied to colonization, colonialism extraction, and that human-nature binary that sets the human apart from nature and seeks to pretend that we are above and we are not in “good” relationship. And that translates down to we are not in a good relationship with ourselves internally. We have lost the ability to grow up and be in good relationships with ourselves with one another and not fall into different variations of supremacy thinking. For me, that’s the root of the crisis.

Janet Pennington – Environmental Scientist | Agriculture Expert | Activist

Janet: I look at the environment and our crisis as we live in a terrarium. We cannot tackle these crises that are multiplying as we get closer to elections and we cannot disconnect our health, the community’s health from the ecosystem.

Alex: Then I got covid, and then I got covid again and my leg stopped working. I had suffered full-body muscle atrophy, but I didn’t have a GP. It fundamentally changed my perspective on things and the social and psychological ramifications that are a direct result of what’s happened in the past four years economically, culturally, politically, and environmentally. They need to be looked at. And frankly, it’s a terrifying prospect to look at it in the face.

Kristy Jackson – Environmental Advocate | Food Inspector & Advisor

I do see it basically as a crisis of division and distraction of the masses and a real lack of accountability that’s allowed basically. Humans have gotten to this point through science and all of the technological innovations, and yet we’re willing and able to just completely forget the fact that science is very clearly telling us now that CO2 in the atmosphere is at a tipping point. We are the last hope.

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

I believe that the crisis is a deviation from the rule of law. And I believe that one of the main solutions is a return to the rule of law. And lately, there’s been some real key players in the country that have just thumbed their nose at administrative law, Danielle Smith, is one of them.

Walter Hossli – Change Maker in Residence | Community Prosperity | Social Work

The specifics on the relationship with the land related to how it hits us in the face now with climate change is obvious now that we’re facing this water shortage in Southern Alberta, that we have not listened, we’ve not, we’ve separated ourselves from nature.

Dixon Hammond – Rancher | Beaver Creek Watershed Group Leader

When we walked up the creek bed, we found dead fish, beaver houses that were abandoned, and empty beaver dams. And it hit home to me that there’s got to be something that we can do to make this better. A long story short, in the fall of 1999, we got together with a few of my neighbours who shared similar concerns about the water. And we met in my folks’ basement and we just talked about memories and how we remembered it and how the creek used to flow. And you could lie on your back in the water and pick saskatoons off the overhanging bushes and how they used to be mink and pheasants around. And those were all gone. And we ended up deciding that we needed to do something as a collaborative group and things work better together than they do singly.

We formed a Beaver Creek Watershed Group, and the biggest thing is that the people that have these water courses running through their land, they’re probably the most passionate people on the planet when it comes to taking care of what’s in front of them. Whether it be animals, families, community, or ultimately, water is one thing that drives this world, both economically and physically. We need water to survive. Water is life. As producers, we have to feed the continually growing 8 billion people population. The best way to get forward with it is to talk to the stakeholders that are out there, be it community groups, organisations, or whatever they are. They’re doing good work. The government of Canada has a hydrometric survey station on Beaver Creek right next to my place. It’s easy for me to monitor. The provincial bodies don’t have any flow data of their own that’s been developed or looked at in the length of the creek. We have one flow monitoring station that’s monitored by a Canadian government that’s in the last third of the length of the creek. It doesn’t give a full scope of what’s going on in the whole watershed. I think the biggest process is to get these three governing bodies that revolve around water licencing to sit at the same table, and not necessarily just around licencing, but around water and creek health and all the things.