Coaltiions

Lack and Plenty

I grew up in the American South but was born in the plain states, near the Yanktoni reservation in South Dakota. We visited our grandparents every summer, giving us a respite from the Memphis heat and providing us a small dive into the world of crop farming and small town rural life. Post retirement, my grandparents were leaning into being farmers and I learned a lot about how important things like soil quality and water access could be key for survival.

The thing is that the American South is fertile land and flush with water. I had never before considered what it was like for the LACK of water to be the problem. Floods and rising waters like creeks that washed out roads and bridges were the dangers around water at home. Well, that and the Cottonmouths, sneaky river snakes.

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Now I live in the American Mountain West, and our relationship here with water is much different from both the agricultural plains or the river rich South. Here, fire can consume 150,000 acres in an afternoon and there isn’t enough water anywhere to put it out. On the edge  of the Continental Divide, we are very conscious of water. We know that what falls on our western slope flows into the Pacific, and is “owned” by many communities along that route. Water that falls on our Eastern side feeds into the plains rivers and eventually reaches the Atlantic.

And so water reclamation is the name of the game. How can we capture and re-use water? How can we stop its use by the extraction industries? How can we close some of our water systems and not be so wasteful? How do we shift our relationship with water from one of commodification and control to one of respect and asset-based building?

As long as our stance is one of lack, we will choose poorly. Lack is blinding, and creates looping dark holes in our minds that fulfill all their own expectations. There are also dangers to being in a context of plenty without awareness, as this leads to complacency and an assumption of abundance when in fact, control is being seeped away. This very nearly happened recently in Memphis, TN, when the now canceled Byhalia Pipeline threatened the integrity of the Memphis Sands, a huge aquifer that supplies clean water to the region.

We don’t balance lack and plenty well. We tend to live wholly in one or the other. This isn’t a simple matter of whether one sees a glass with water in it as half full or half empty. This isn’t about pessimism or optimism, although their shadows of cynicism and naïveté do reflect this conflict between lack and plenty, this tension.

This week I am preparing for a Seminar Series I am doing on Scarcity & Abundance. And I’m wrestling with the various ways in which we smack right into both these things. The more subtle bits will make themselves known.

And so water again bubbles up. It’s fundamental, as we ourselves are mostly made of it, the planet is mostly water, and we require it to remain alive. And yet for much of our lives, many of us have never considered water -where it comes from, how it gets to us, where it all goes. We turn the tap and it flows. Usually. But even if you live in Flint, MI, or along one of the compromised fracking field routes, your toilet flushes and your laundry works. You can get water FREE at most restaurants. (Remember that one. It won’t last if we don’t change.)

One of the many ironies of this situation is that right now, very few of us actually drink enough water. I know I don’t and I even like water! (I’m told by many friends the reason they don’t drink enough water is that they hate the taste. I don’t get that. Even hard water is interesting.)

“Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.” -Joni Mitchell

We bounce between lack and plenty, and it may be true that we often don’t realize it. I used to be a youth minister and had a special affinity for Middle Schoolers. One of my favorite games to play with them is something called “I Want, I Need, I Have” -swiped 100% in name, if not totally in content, from The Journey to Adulthood curriculum, a progressive Protestant course that attempts to equip young people with what they need to be functional adults.

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This game invites a deep inventories not only of items but of attitudes. We catalogue belongings each young person may ‘own’ or have access to, what they don’t or can’t get, what they believe they need to be certain things or claim certain identities. The game invites an exploration of the balance between want and need, something I wish more adults had a handle on.

For all of our own human issues with this tension, and we have wrestled with lack and plenty for a great deal of our history, the last 100 years have had the added layer of mass media advertising. And that industry has been all about perverted images of both Lack and Plenty. Perhaps a piece of the whole conversation must include some deconstruction of messaging techniques themselves.

Fear is also deeply entwined with Lack and Plenty. I can hear blues notes behind me as I think on this, and am struck by how familiar a story it is, the embracing of the fear and then its alchemy into empowerment and fuel for action. And I wish I couldn’t, but I also hear the screeching riffs of angry mutterings as fear hardens hearts and closes borders.

We live in a time of Plenty. We have all we need, yet all we see around us is Lack. And Lack is there -a lack of justice, a dearth of compassion, an abyss of accountability. But within each of these struggles is also Plenty, for when they are based out of love, our actions are generative.

“I have come that you might have life more abundant.” -Jesus

Why Just Transition Matters, Part I

Last week I wrote a little bit about the political scene where I live, about the interesting coalitions and fluid communities of those affecting change in their worlds. The post wasn’t mostly about that, just a wee bit, but I have been thinking deeply about it since. In light of the current Presidential race, I have also been musing on deep entrenchments, on divides that seem insurmountable, and whose interests are really served by these systems. I’ve been pondering the damage of purity tests and conformity covenants and how they are affecting our political discourse, our search for a common civic life.

I live near the state Capitol and we have a part time legislature here in Colorado. The lawmakers are only in session from early January to early May. So a lot needs to occur quickly while it’s all happening concurrently. This timing makes the Fall an interesting period of coalition building and information gathering. The flurry they are immersed in now is palpable in my neighborhood; the atmospheric political speech isn’t all NOV2020. Or even mostly.

I took a sabbatical in January, and am not yet back to work full time. I have been catching up of what’s going on with the crafting of laws and the volleying of influence, and noting where the quiet and effective work is being done.  I have been eyeing the committee schedule for likely testimony opportunities, and reflecting back on my impressions and insights from previous years’ experience.

I am feeling grateful for testimony from those on the opposing side from me. Generally, I have been for things, and these other folks against them. Occasionally that is reversed. Regardless, it is from these opposing witnesses, from those folks begging the legislature to keep the status quo just a little bit longer, that I learn the most.

It was from them that I learned farmers lease their water rights to oil and gas interests in order to pay their mortgages, thus remaining farmers. No one else is offering. It was from them that I learned the fossil fuel industry has fed its workforce a diet of persecution stories and anger sprinkled liberally through with denial. I learned that this denial isn’t real, and fear and anxiety crept into most testimonials. It was nearly tangible. It was from them that I learned they already know their industry is dying, and that some of them are fine with that, but that they are all uncertain what the future holds.

And it was from them that I learned about the vast diversity of industries and workforces that anticipate major shifts in their near futures due to both climate change in fact and climate regulation in action. Coalition members, testimony givers, and lobbyists all shared some knowledge that change is imminent, and represented a broad spectrum: railroad unions and trucking interests, farmers and ranchers, faith-based organizations, and indigenous and native communities were all speaking out in new ways.

One of the unmentioned truths of life in Colorado is that we are an oil and gas state, regardless of the image we like project of being environmentally aware. Significant changes to the fossil fuel industry WILL ripple impacts throughout the state. That is no hyperbole. Truckers who haul gas, rail workers moving coal, field workers tending pipelines and wells –all will experience loss as their jobs disappear. Entire towns’ economies will falter if dependent on oil and gas for survival. But all of it WILL disappear –all these jobs will shift by necessity. As well they must, for our (ab)use of fossil fuels is why the world is on fire.

The oil and gas industry likes to say that they built the Denver skyline. And in part, that is true.  But thousands were displaced by this development. The oil and gas industry likes to say it employs a significant part of the state’s workforce, but these are the men who die in refinery fires and the women who daily breathe toxic fumes in extraction fields. And yet… even the oil and gas industry is a part of the picture. I am planning on at least a couple of these companies to be around to clean up the messes and manage the ongoing waste issues. As we move towards hemp fuel and plastics, wind and solar power generation, and geothermal heating –all possible here as WELL as the fossil based production –everything will change.

As things have been going, the backlash against these changes could be huge, the propaganda virulent and fear based, the divisions fed by those who intend to fight the movement towards fossil independence. We intend to change how we power our lives, for what we have been doing is toxic, unsustainable, exploitative and has in truth only benefited few. Fossil fuel industry subsidies and profits reveal a picture I won’t paint here, but one I find obscene. We intend to be a place of generative, sustainable work, a region that builds industries to support Earth and all beings.

By deeply listening to each other, we learn. We grow. We adapt. By being present and remaining around the table, by building bigger and different tables, more are heard. HOW to do that? And where is this working? Happening now? My initial responses to those questions are for next week. Tune in. The answers are intimately entangled with the building of these tables, with the coalitions and alliances.