In today’s TYEE National Headlines go.thetyee.ca/dm?id=E976D597FEC21CD6A50A70B9406AC5D667ADE39EE60F83FA

Jacob Boon examines the truckers’ convoy currently heading to Ottawa.  Boon’s superficial, dismissive view clothes an unwillingness to ask the very question he points to in his third sentence.  Why?    For starters, crowds react to obvious threats, but crowd mentality doesn’t necessarily reveal underlying motivations.   This convoy isn’t a frivolous little event. 

Let’s take a step back.  Why the Arab Spring?  Why Trump?  One must dig a little deeper than a reaction to covid mandates and anything associated to that, but not very deep to see why.  What are people reacting to?  A little deeper we find climate change, but slightly deeper than that, the word depletions is one we may start seeing more if we actually seek causes to growing chaos in our world.  

Resource depletions.  It’s not that hard to see.   Modern life is as dependent on resources as we are developed.  We used resources, energy and materials to develop a world that now depends on a lot of energy and materials to maintain.  But we didn’t think ahead.   We didn’t develop our world in a way that is sustainable, in other words that works the same way nature works, constantly recycling energy and materials.    Climate change is prime evidence of how our use of resources resulting in toxic waste is now coming back to bite us.   Most of our society is built on carbon-based energy.   We know that solar and wind etc. can probably only substitute for 10 or 15% of what carbon fuels give us today.  But to reduce our needs down to that level of consumption?   How is that conceivable?    

The greater the level of our consumption, i.e., the wealthier we are, the more vulnerable, and therefore the more prone to denial, and flight from that first question Boon points to but doesn’t ask; why?   We do not want to know why.   We just want it fixed, or we just want to hide our heads.   Make it go away.    

But the evidence of people starting to get it that we need to change is growing, and that is coming up like weeds in the spring; a groundswell, a convoy, what else, perhaps not as obvious as a convoy?   It’s happening in small groups in our communities.  Groups coming together socially to support each other in small locally organized ways.   Not publicized.  Community networked instead.    It’s widespread.  Planting gardens instead of trusting faltering industrial agriculture.  Fixing things instead of buying new stuff, people supporting each other.   Not reported in MSM, the main vessel of status quo-maintaining denial. 

People object to mandates and why not?  They’re getting in the way, and though it’s as good as we’ve got, our science is actually questionable.  We know it takes longer than we’ve had to give us certainty even about covid vaccines, that now they seem to be losing effectiveness.   Yes, they’re probably still effective, but not the magic pill hoped for.     We’ve believed our science and technology can solve any problem, but the looming catastrophe of our application of that science and technology is now undeniable.  It is failing.   What do we do? 

We can act together, locally, and apparently we have some deep life changes to consider, profound reductions in consumption.   We can do it, and those of us who consume less possibly have something to teach those who consume more.    What a reversal.    Perhaps it’s just the beginning of a whole new way of being in place here on mother Earth.   There is promise for us being a part of our ecosystem, and thriving in a new way, like nature.