3.1: Living Between Worlds—Ladders of Change

Welcome everybody, to the third year of this webinar series. Delighted to have you here. Old friends and new. I began this series in early 2020, as Covid was starting to wrap its furry arms around us. I began a series of conversations looking at Covid and climate and the relationship between them and the other big messes that we're in the midst. I called it the Only Way Out Is through. In early 2021, as we realized that we were in the midst of what Fernando Flores calls the pandemic era that was not going to release a script anytime soon, I offered the provocation that we were living between worlds, between an old world that is dying and a new world waiting or threatening to be born, depending on how you look at it, in this interstitial space, like the jelly that's in the chrysalis between caterpillar and butterfly. And asking the question of how do we live in this? How do we live with grace and with dignity and with power in this space between worlds? And here we are again. We'll continue on that theme. My purpose in these calls is to provoke a rich conversation among us, to explore that, let that ripple through our lives. It's not to create an organization, it's not to create a project together. I know those of you who I know have your hands full with existing projects. But it's to enrich what we do and how we do it and how we stand in these times. So let me start by reading a poem. Or actually, I'll do a bad thing. I'm going to read a part of a poem, to read the beginning and the end of a poem by the wondrous Mary Oliver. And I'll later, I'll give you the link where you can find the whole thing, but I'll start with the first and the last couple of stanzas and see where that takes us. This is called to begin with the sweet grass. Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat of the sweet grass? Will the owl bite off its own wings? Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or forget to sing? Will the rivers run upstream? Behold, I say, Behold the reliability and the finery and the teachings of this gritty earth gift. And I'm scrolling over some richness and to the end of the poem, let me ask you this. Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason? And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure, your life, what would do for you? What I loved in the beginning, I think was mostly myself. Never mind that I had to because somebody had to. That was many years ago. Since then, I have gone out from my confinement. So with difficulty. I mean, the ones that thought to rule my heart, I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile. They will be nourishment somehow. Everything is nourishment somehow or another. And I have become the child of the clouds and of hope. I've become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is. I have become older. And cherishing what I have learned, I have become younger. And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know? Love yourself, then forget it. Then love the world. So let me ask those of you who can share by way of starting, what's your mood these days or in this moment? One or two words and we'll take a few of your ease, few of you, and then we'll proceed. What's your mood? Unmute yourself and have at it. As if my want and privilege. If I don't see hands raised, I might just call on people. Gabriel Grant. Busy mood of busy. Okay. And some of you are posting in the chat, which is fine. Also. Shel.

Oh, I am unmuted. Okay. I'm feeling rather thrilled and validated based on a lot of readings that the Pachamama alliance put up on optimism last week.

Good. Thank you. Kevin.

Yeah. Bubbling up about the connections that we're having with our invite only conference and the two marketplaces we're building.

We'll come back to you later to talk more about what that is. Dawn.

I do feel like those of us who are here, we're born for these times. And I keep getting reinforcement and reinforcement of that is so and finding my place within the larger community. So it's heartwarming and great. Thank you.

Thank you. David Morse, what's your mood?

Somewhat encouraged.

Okay, good.

Thank you.

Kimberly Schroeder.

Rewilding and learning how to be in loving relationship with land.

Mm.

Great.

Thank you.

So I often start with mood, something I've learned from my friend Chauncey Bell, who's on the call with us here in Fernando Flores. Because that's sort of the context that we live in. That's the background that colors, shapes, filters, what we're able to see, what we're able, how we listen, what assessments we make of the world that we're encountering. In fact, one might say there's always an assessment behind the mood. There's always some kind of evaluation and judgment and hypothesis that shapes the mood. And looking into that can open up some degrees of freedom.

That can be.

Very rich and powerful. So what I'd like to do today is start with talking about the climate crisis and what I'm thinking of lately as the latter of change. How we engage with people who are on different rungs on the process of change and how we engage with our judgments about them. I'm going to talk about climate crisis, but I think this is true about any of the issues or messes that we find ourselves enmeshed in. And I start there both because it's a big deal and it's because where I've spent most of my life and work, you know, there's, you've seen, if you're following any of the news at all, there's a growing amount of action and concern about this. There's companies that are stepping up and declaring bold climate goals. Niches 0 by 2050 or by 2040 or by 2030. Report just came out this last week looking at the largest companies in the world and their climate commitments and highlighted the top 25 who have impressive declarations they've made. But they found, excuse me, that.

For.

The most part companies didn't have the companies that had plans of how to meet those goals, had plans that were inadequate, that would not meet the goals that they had declared. But it was worse than that because most of the companies didn't have plans at all. They had bold statements that had good PR value and good recognition for the ESG investors who are playing superficially, but the guts weren't there. If you zoom out to a larger view, there's 100 companies in the world that are responsible for about 70% of global emissions. So are they the enemy.

Or is.

The enemy those of us who are the customers, you know, is the enemy the deniers? Is it the laggards?

Is that the leaders who are inadequate?

A friend of mine, a very well respected sustainability and regeneration consultant, says his guns are aimed much more at the people who are making statements and are not following through than they are aimed at the heavy polluters and deniers. Interesting perspective. Is their enemy in the middle of the pack? How do we do with this? You can't cut off the bottom of the ladder. The ladder has to stand somewhere. The great late Rabbi Oliver Stacks reminded us that really important what wall the ladder is leaned up against. So there's that question, you know, I think about my own evolution and there were, there was a, there were periods in my life when I would, I would look back at me and now say I was at a lower rung of the ladder. I had not developed. My reflection, my insight, my commitments in the ways that I have them today changed. And certainly change is one of the processes we're looking for here. If we damn the people on the bottom of the ladder, we're basically saying we don't expect change. And we're basically surrendering the whole project because the project Capital P and the projects that we're all in depend on have faith in the process of change in the world, that people will evolve, people will. Will interact with each other, learn different perspectives, find different ways of interpreting and orienting to the world. And so, you know, these echoes are two questions that I find myself embedded in these days. How do we. How do we learn to live together despite all of our differences and differences in interpretation, in a pluralistic and unsettled world? What kind of conversations do we have with whom that contribute something into that conundrum? And the background question I'm finding in all my work is how do we learn or relearn how to belong to the living world in the context of climate and sustainability? It's not how do we be less harmful to nature? It's not how do we treat nature nicer, it's how do we, how might we do business? What would it look like if we did business as though we belonged to the living world? So I live in those questions and in the larger question of what kind of conversations do I have with whom, who do I engage with? How do I speak, most particularly, how do I listen so that something can emerge from this that's productive and generative. So with that, what I'd like to do is just open it up for a conversation among us all together for about a half hour. Then we'll have a poll and I'm going to break out for that 15 minutes to give people who may not have a chance on the big screen chance to share and talk and hear. And then we'll come back for some more conversation together and then we'll wrap as usual. By what for me is 1:30 Pacific Time, the bottom half of the second hour. Okay, dawn, and just the protocol for folks that haven't been here before, please use the Zoom feature under Reactions to raise your hand. I'll call people more or less in order that you raise your hand. Use the chat, Run parallel conversations with each other. Introduce yourselves if you care to. If you want to make connections with other people, that's the way to do it. We will not share out the chat, but you're welcome to save it using the three dots below the right corner. Of your screen. Don't go ahead, please.

And then, David Schomburn, I participate in two, what we call Earth listening zooms twice a week. And it's not. We really do take a meditation. Someone leads it to be so that we are placed in nature and obviously within our own meditation. We go to our favorite spots and we listen, maybe not through our ears, but through our feet and through our feeling what the earth is speaking to us. I think that there's something very valuable for all of us in making that a presencing practice.

David.

I want to speak to what.

I believe is an extremely important.

Event.

Happening in world history right now, and that is the trucker convoy in Canada.

And the government pushback that has resulted.

In the declaration of martial law.

And to me, this is the becoming manifest, the hidden element that was behind the government's pandemic response. It always had a totalitarian flair to it, I believe. David, I'm going to interrupt you and ask you not for a speech about that, but for your reactions to the questions that I asked.

Well, I just wanted to point out.

To everybody the significance of this event.

And that I believe this is pointing.

Out the future of whether we will have democracy that allows difference of opinions or not.

Given that, how do you speak with other people in a way that engages them and moves things forward?

Well, I'll tell you the first thing.

Is that I have found that.

Contrary.

To everything that I have been acculturated.

I am finding really valuable insights on Fox Television as regards this.

I am with people of a right.

Wing persuasion that share a common understanding.

About what is called freedom and that.

I find that really valuable.

It transcends politics.

Okay, thank you. Next. And by the way, please lower your hands after you've spoken so I can keep track of the queue. Jean, your hands up. Go ahead.

I started a group at the beginning of the pandemic called Hunker down but keep your heart open. And we're meeting for 81st week, week every two weeks now in Zoom and around some subject or article that I choose to kind of highlight it. This week we're doing present day slavery, which is an extraordinary issue. The other thing is I'm starting a Bohmian dialogue group using Bohmian dialogue, which is very respectful and confined speaking and listening. I'm going to run a test of that and then I'm considering doing public dialogue. In other words, just putting an ad in the paper and inviting people to come in and using Bohmian dialogue as a way of communicating.

So how's that been for you? What's happened, what's happened to you in those conversations?

Well, it allows me to make sense of the world by hearing how other people see things. And it assures me. It gives me a wealth of other perspectives. And that has my perspective be more nuanced by listening to other people's perspectives. And it creates a sense of empathy and connection because we actually share what's going on in our lives, good, bad and different. So it's, it's a feeling of love and belonging with each other. Connection.

Someone saying, I'm in. I'm in this camp. That empathy and connection are really critical parts of the kinds of conversations that we need to have, particularly across the difference, particularly across the polarity. I don't know about the rest of you. I live in a bubble. I'm in California, in the Bay Area, in Berkeley. The people I have contact with in my regular life are fairly narrow spectrum. The people I have contact with, my zoom life is still pretty narrow, though. I try to broaden it. But I've made a point and had some opportunity to get to know some folks who I would have thought of as the other supply side economist, Trump voter who have become dear friends.

Still.

With differences, with surprising commonalities and something out of that empathy and respect. It's opened up a hole in the world, frankly, for both of us. We've both been surprised in that conversation. Stephanie Hill, please. Floor is yours.

Yeah. Hey, everybody. I'm new. I'm participating. I too am in a bubble, Gil. I live in Tiburon in the Bay Area, very much a bubble. But I lead teams across the country, have a lot of different perspectives and worldviews and political bents and whatnot. So we're trying a lot of different techniques within the organization. So appreciative inquiry, really examining vertical development, taking our leaders through leadership maturity framework and vertical development, facilitating what we call brave spaces. Create forums in which they can sit in some of the discomfort and share opposing perspectives and views, but still come at it from a learning and development angle and more. So there are various techniques that we're trying inside of an organization to see if we can help create those conditions.

What's been your most interesting failure in doing that?

That's a great question. I'll share two. So one on the.

I don't mean yours personally, but where has that process really failed?

Yeah, two fronts. One, every so many topics have become very intentionally been politicized. So it's very difficult to cut through that to get to the discourse and the dialogue. So the politicization. Politicization has been a very difficult barrier to overcome. And then I think the other is just natural human tendencies and behaviors to want predictability and certainty and just this idea of living in uncertainty and complexity and finding new ways to. To behave and to operate and to plan and to forecast lots of implications to a business context that are a big shift for people, leaders especially, who are used to believing that they can plan for some certain future state.

Yeah.

How do you plan when you can't plan? Thanks, David. David morse.

Yeah, I think starting the new year, I guess I kind of always like.

Benchmarks.

I had a meeting with my local Pachamama group. Now I'm outside the bubble.

I'm in southern Oregon, and we go.

Kind of both directions. But we, our Pachamama group this past week had, I think, one of our.

Certainly one of our best meetings since.

We'Ve been on Zoom.

We haven't met in person for.

For the long time. And it was, I think people have.

Learned in the isolation they've gotten a hold of themselves because everybody participated. Everybody participated deeply when normally people have.

Kind of gone off on their own, their own thing.

So again, I think, just very encouraging.

David, was that the product of some kind of insightful facilitation or did it just emerge over time and how the group worked together?

Just emerged. Yeah.

We have a leader, but she doesn't.

Generally, she doesn't have her own agenda.

I mean, I think that's what made it so good.

And we even talked about it, is.

That, gee, we're really getting some ideas here.

And I left the meeting with some.

Things I'd had in my mind and.

Wrote a couple pages about it.

And oftentimes it's kind of, well, okay, that meeting's over.

And see lots of interesting things, but.

It was really palpable this time.

Encouraging.

Next, I'm hearing from some of you that my mic is muffled. I've changed mics.

Is it better now?

Oh, yes, your close, Gil.

That's that.

That's helping. Try it again. You need to talk. I'll talk some more. Is the mic better now? I'm seeing several enthusiastic nods, so I'm gonna go with that one. Okay, thank you. All right. Gabriel, was that your hand up.

The.

Thumbs up on the mic.

He does. I passed the ball, but he doesn't volley it.

Okay.

Carolyn Raffensperger.

Hi, I'm Carolyn Raffensperger and I live in a popped bubble. I live in formerly blue state of Iowa, and we are being torn Apart by conflicts over schools, over everything, everything. And what I'm finding is that the only places that we have places of grace are where we're just meeting basic physical needs. My community, 10 of us have been preparing meals for a family that we never met. They're brand new to our neighborhood, they live in the biggest house in the neighborhood and the mother had surgery and 10 different families have been bringing in meals for that family. It's been this exchange of things when we don't know each other. The second is that with the healthcare industry utterly destroyed by Covid, there's no home health care available. I'm a caretaker for two people who are terribly disabled. One is my 87 year old husband who had a stroke, multiple strokes, cancer. And a very dear colleague who has a cancer and she's dying. There is no home health care. And so all of these people are pitching in to do the care. And it's clumsy and exhausting and all we have is each other, but it's cutting across the kinds of lines that normally would divide us.

Thank you for that. What strikes me about that, Carolyn, is that just the gritty reality, to take that phrase from Mary Oliver of basic care for each other call something different from us. I mean, if I'm sitting here watching TV and watching whether it's Fox or MSNBC and yelling at the screen at my abstraction of a person based on the thing they said, that's very different than being in the room with them with food and feces and pain and just the things that have to be done that there's no question about that have to be done. It allows a different kind of relationship and it maybe blocks a certain kind of pseudo relationship. I realized listening to you that a lot of what passed for relationships or encounters with people in my life are very abstracted from actually knowing each other and knowing what each other cares about.

Changing somebody's diapers or giving them a shower when you're not in an intimate relationship with them changes everything. Level of trust that.

Yeah. Robert Blythe, the poet, used to say that nothing grows up, grows a man up so much as baby shit under the fingernails. And you know this all the more so. Thank you. T.R. duncan. Hi there.

Hi, Carolyn. Thank you. That is so beautiful to hear that transformation that's happening, the coming together. I grew up in that kind of environment of country, people who had huge different perspectives, but all they really had to survive was each other. And so my vision of the world has been that we make it through and we respect differences and we do what needs to get done. So as Covid hit and I'm sitting in downtown Calgary where the oil business was struggling before COVID and the players are all very used to getting their way and Covid has changed everything. And so the trucker convoy is causing this incredible shift as we find arms at the border to Coutts, which is stopping $43 million with the trade every day. It's a fascinating like during COVID I just pretty much pulled in and said the only place I can do work is on myself right now is loving and respecting everyone else and finding my dark spots. And I feel like I'm excited today because something's about to change. So Carolyn, thank you. You give me hope that we can finish this circle off in my life, that we to caring for each other.

Thanks, Tier. These are tough questions and the. And the quiet I think is an important part of the conversation. Kimberly.

Hi. Thank you everyone for this conversation and this opportunity to be in complexity. I'm noticing one thing that's repeating in my life is the importance of getting to know my neighbors. And that can be saying hi to people and learning their names. I have a little note in my phone of oh, this person lives at the corner. And writing down their names when I see them again, I can reference and learn. Also groups like the local buy nothing group where we can exchange things that people don't need anymore. Maybe we do need and meet people that way. And we have an abundance of spring onions growing in our yard. They're not native, but they're very naturalized and abundant and everywhere we have so many of them. So I put that on the buy nothing group. Hey, would anyone like to come harvest some spring onions? And now we have people, adults and bringing their kids to come help harvest. Right. And we're getting to know more of our neighbors. And it's this really beautiful offering to literally nourish from the land and that power of eating food that is grown on this land that we're on. I hope that getting to know my neighbors can help strengthen that fabric of community and help us all feel more connected to the world around us and not just so isolated in our own little bubbles of our houses.

Right.

Like that we're actually part of this fabric and we feel that more as we live and move and walk around our communities.

Thank you. Kimberly. Do you find that folks are more likely or less likely to have difficult conversations with each other or the topics that you just choose to avoid and focus on spring onions? Um.

Well, with people that I've just met in my neighborhood. I've not had super difficult conversations yet. I have had difficult conversations with strangers recently around word usage. Someone I just met that we had a good conversation and then they used the word gypped. Oh, we got gypped. And I said, oh. Actually, that refers to the gypsy people and can be offensive. But I said it in a way that was disconnecting. And I didn't use an I statement. So in hindsight, I realized I could have said, oh, I used to use that word and then I learned the history and now I try and use a different word. Right. And so I could have. I'm proud of myself that I said something and it was disconnecting. And I'm learning how I can say it more in I statements and connection with people. So some difficult conversations that we're learning through.

Thank you. John Duvall.

Just a thumbs up to what Kimberly just said.

Kevin Jones, I saw your hand go up a moment ago and then go back down. You want to say something? Sure.

I mean, I would just talk about the marketplaces we're building, if this is a good time for that.

Well, if you put it in the context of how you are bringing together people across apparent differences. Yeah. Let's not get into the nuts and bolts of the marketplace just now.

We'll do that a little later in the call.

Okay. Well, let's see. We are creating community design capital in a neighborhood that was displaced by our leading tourist industry icon, the Biltmore Mansion, which was the Vanderbilt's biggest house in the country. It's in Asheville, North Carolina, and it's the largest house in the country. And everybody has to go because you've never seen anything on this scale. They wanted to show 19th century industrial might exhibited in a house. So, you know, rail lines, into the kitchen, you know, those sorts of things. And. But to build it, they displaced a black neighborhood, Shiloh. And so they bring in hundreds of millions and the Shiloh gets nothing. So we're setting up a repair fund where they want to get out in front of it. Once we're highlighting it, we're in one of those places where they're saying, we want to do reparations, which means they want to pay some consultants for three years to build a report and have academics fight at city Hall. And they're also founding in the county. And so all the tourist folks want to say, no, we're out in front of it. And so we're building in local crowdfunding equity marketplaces and a catalytic venture philanthropy marketplace that will have the repair fund front and center. And the tourist folks want to say we're doing something now. So it's, it's pretty cool. It's coming together. And the key person to pull it together really came out of a recent listserv that Gil and I are both on where it really erupted. And we realized, oh, I want to talk more with you and not with that guy.

So.

A crazy bully made a great partnership happen.

So, Kevin, you've done things like this before where you've brought together unusual combinations of people to do something economically rooted that people thought possible. What's the secret sauce for you?

Well, so it's really pretty simple. You know, finding valuable strangers who don't recognize each other and setting up intersections where they can become unlikely allies. And then some of that, some of the times you need to do that over time as they get to know each other and figure out where they can align. You know, there's, so it's helping them guide to the point of one off partnerships and then coordination is a further step where they can take it themselves. And you know, coordination is where markets and train tracks are and you know, the connections get automated. We introduce the right people and they do the next thing. We have that little, little place where we do it and we gather folks together. We're going to have like 150 people, you know, at an event which could be in eight bubbles if we have to do it in, in May. But two parts, valuable strangers, unlikely allies. Those, you know, start with one, get the other.

Something else you haven't said which I think is there, which is these, these valuable strangers and unlucky allies share some kind of concern. May not be the flag they're carrying or the thing that they like to talk about most or the thing they identify themselves with, but there's something in common that they can do something together about. Right.

You know, and what I'm finding in the best places this has happened, they're starting to use this donut economics is it's a way to also link the climate folks with the economic justice folks without either of them kind of having too much friction in the fragile white climate folks. Not, not getting scared is the key thing you have to work on. You know, you can't use words like environmental justice with a lot of these folks, but the donut gives you some way to slide it in there and they don't get afraid.

You know, there was a great thread on Twitter the other day. Find it real quick here, Kevin.

I'm not sure if it was with.

You already, but I've lost it.

Here.

We go. Eliana woods did a post on TikTok and communicating with young people and you know the bubble that white climate advocates like me live in. I've never been on TikTok. I think it's a different world, but that's where, you know, that's where a lot of folks live. She did a beautiful thread. I'll put it in the chat about what she's observed from that. She has 300,000 followers on TikTok and one of the things she observed is that doom doesn't work. That's not what's engaging people. Look at how much of the official climate dialogue is about doom and about how fucked we are and how bad things are going to be by a certain time, as though that would motivate people. The traditional climate dialogue brings out charts and facts and data to try to convince people that things are the way they are. But data doesn't. Something else does. And so have a look at this when you get a chance. One of the things it said to me is that the leadership on this stuff isn't coming from my generation, it's coming from youngsters. And maybe I can be helpful as somebody can share a lot of experience that can help inform younger folks and give them a sense of mistakes not to make or things they weren't factoring in yet. But the dynamism there is quite stunning and I'm largely blind to it. Michelle, what's this provoking for you?

I'm sorry, Gil, that was hard to hear. Could you repeat the question?

The question was simple. What's this conversation provoking for you so far?

Well, truth be told, I'm not feeling great today and I'm finding it a little hard to concentrate on it. But I think the issue of left right dialogue is really important and I have done a couple things in my life to try to foster that. It's not always easy to find people on the other side who are willing to actually have a dialogue and not just scream ugly names at you. So I am in a Better Angels group and I do have open dialogue within reason, on my Facebook group page, and we have some very good conversations on that page. But people kept saying to me, why don't you throw that guy off? And like he's staying in the role. So I'm not going to throw him off. And I think it's important that we hear from other perspectives.

Thanks, Dwight Collins. Do you mind if I call on you? You spend a lot of time with people much younger than yourself and than me who are committed on these issues. What are you observing? What does this conversation illuminate, if anything, vice versa.

Sure, it's very rich. I'm getting a lot out of it. I'm personally frustrated that I feel that I don't have the opportunity to get with people who think differently as much and for others. I'm just spent teaching, have been teaching at Presidio Graduate school, you know, MBA sustainable management for 17 years, recently stepped down from that and I'm working now with other colleagues to try to spread the notion of the way we teach triple bottom line and in terms of sustainable management to other MBA programs who might be interested in transformation in our direction. And so I'm in a big bubble no matter where I look that you know, people who think sustainability the other, the other. But indeed I'm grateful that if there's to be sort of part of what I think of as the solution, if it could ever to gain traction to transform business and because Presidio does have 2,000 graduates who are doing wonderful things relative to sustainable business. But it's not anywhere near critical mass. Of course, the other thing that closer to the notion of crossing boundaries is that I worked at Exxon, believe it or not, well, 40 years ago when we didn't, we barely knew what greenhouse gases were. And a couple few months ago I was invited by a close friend who I've stayed in touch with from that group that I worked in, the Operations Research Group, who invited me to give a talk to a group of 50 Exxon annuitants on sustainable what is sustainable business. And I was very conflicted in deciding whether to respond to accept the invitation because I'm so ashamed of the company for all the reasons we know. And I ended up accepting it. And I had a lot of good things to say, of course, because of my experience school working with many different companies who are all doing striving to be more sustainable. So that's again the big bubble that I'm trying to expand and with some, some success over the years. But I felt I had to say something about them and their industry. And so I had help from a colleague at Presidio who happens to come out of the oil and gas industry as sustainable, a sustainability person. And so I could help get my facts right. So in a few words I ended up going to the Exxon's website and putting in a few charts their story about what they have been doing and what they plan to do, of course, and what they have been Doing in terms of greenhouse gases is nothing. And what they plan to do, they say they have plans to do something more substantive, which isn't very credible. The other thing I did was I did go to four or five more rating organizations that are rating the oil majors. And what they're trying to do is there's success in, quote, being part of a low carbon solution, how successful or not successful they've been. And of course, Exxon was near the bottom of the pack in all cases last year. Their operations have put out as much greenhouse gas as the entire country of Canada. So I got through that and I urged them to. The key point was how to say something that wouldn't drive them all away and have it be a constructive conversation. And these are engineers and finance people who are retired. And basically I urged them all to tell their company to get it together and do something substantive. I mean, and that's what I did. And I had no negative feedback from my audience, which I felt good about. I wish I could have been more effective somehow, but indeed, I felt like it was the most I could do. And they seem to find my facts interesting. And I'm just sure there's a number of them who feel that their company needs to be doing more. So there you go.

Well, to my mind, their company needs to be doing not just more, but needs to be doing completely different. And this is one of the biggest challenges of change of what do you do when your identity is bound up.

With the way that you've been doing.

Things, in this case, psychologically, but also identity financially. We have a colleague who has moved to Houston and has taken on as her mission the oil and gas industry. And a few months ago had the first gathering, invitational gathering of all the sustainability officers from, I think it was about 30 or 40 companies who has taken on as her mission the oil and gas industry. And a few months ago had the first gathering, an invitational gathering of all the sustainability officers from. I think it was about 30 or 40 companies who came and were enthusiastic at the chance to talk with each other. People in a strange position, advocates from within in a very difficult time. So what do we do? Do we shut them down? If you shut them down, how fast do you shut them down? How do you transition out of it? Yeah, their game, as I see it, is to profit as long as possible from the reserves they have in the ground. And just from an economic perspective, is to stretch the transition out as long as possible. Other perspective, from a living systems perspective, says do the transition as quickly as possible in between that, there's this worldwide conversation going on, hundreds of trillions of dollars being moved around, lots of pronouncements, lots of posturing, some incredible innovation and progress and you know, and obviously a very superficial version of it on the, on the cable news.

The smallest. Just another quick word. The company, the oil company that was at the top of most of those ratings was a small Finnish company, one tenth the size of Exxon. Finnish company, right. From Finland, the best company in the world doing something about greenhouse gases. And they were at the top because they have managed to convert 35% of their capacity to biofuels. Okay. And so, and going back to your original point, Gil, and asking me the question we continue to have, our students are continuing to come at our school. I wish the classes were growing in size, but they're not. But they're, they're values based students and I just wish them. They're in such a minority, but they're steadfast to their values and our program is giving them a skill set to do something in terms of changing business. And I just am so. I don't envy their situations, what they got stacked against them, but it's not stopping them. It's inspirational to me that they're still coming to the school and they're still slammed into the. Going at it to make it, make some, make the world a different place.

I do envy their conversations, so I thank you for helping those things happen. I envy that they have the opportunity to have this kind of conversation with people who may not be thinking about these things, at least not in the same way that they are. So it's rich territory. I've got Shel and Dawn and then they want to take us into breakouts. Shel, please unmute.

It's weird. I was not muted before when I thought I was, and now I was muted when I thought I wasn't. I am pasting a link in the chat to a Boston Globe article and they have very annoying firewalls, so you might not be able to read it, but this was about an environmental activist pair that went after a utility to cooperate with them. And they now go around to utilities in Massachusetts helping them convert people to heat pumps and other green technologies, recognizing that they're going to make a profit on it, but that the question of whether we attack the utilities or partner with them is, I think, very situational. But since they do have skin in the game and they want to make a profit and they are going to continue pushing fossil fuels as long as they see that as the Only way to profit. I think it's worth exploring, so. So I'm going to hit send on that and you can all have it.

Thank you, Dawn.

I want to offer for those of you in university settings and other kinds of settings to perhaps consider having grief forums for the executives of the oil and fossil fuel companies because they're in denial. It's not that they don't know, but they don't have the emotional capacity to recognize if someone's done their whole career in a certain way. To find out that it was damaging and suddenly give them a place to have that emotional response and declare them to do no harm would be a great service.

Dawn, do you know anywhere where that's been done?

No, I know where grief circles are done. There are people who are holding grief circles, but not necessarily in institutions or corporations.

Do you have a sense of how you might invite a fossil fuel CEO.

Into one of those?

Well, that you have some kind of, you know, collaborative meeting in some form or fashion, or maybe it just has to be internal. The top executives in a, in an organization. I think it, I think it could be framed in somehow, like to meet today's needs or, you know, they hear, they, they're hearing, they're not, you know, they don't have their heads in the ground. There are tools in the ground, but, you know, they, they, they know what's going on. They're just caught in a system and they're just as caught as all of us looking at the system. And I just think that there would be a way to start doing, to use the framework of do no harm in your everyday living. Things will shift. You know, it's like living into the question, how do I do no harm? There's a great example. Ray Anderson of Interface Carpet Company that was international. He turned his entire organization around. Manufacturing carpet, uses so many resources, and he just inspired all of his employees to see how can we do no waste. Now he has since passed away. I hope the company is continuing on that path. But there are examples out there, companies doing interesting work.

Ray interestingly started by declaring himself to be a criminal, realized that his grandchildren would likely hate him for what he had done, confessed he's a criminal and committed to turning that around. And spent most of the last 15 years of his life talking with other CEOs. And that may be where the invitation comes from. The valuable strangers that Kevin has talked about, Felix and Kevin.

The conversation about how to reach people who are bad actors. Really interesting. About 10 years ago, I wrote an article in the Houston Chronicle that appeared one Sunday morning saying what would happen if oil executives came down to breakfast one morning and their families said to them, you're destroying our world, their spouse and their kids. And I've been thinking a lot about that recently and even more. And actually Kimberly and I are working on a project that is kind of a last chance idea of reaching three retiring Republican senators to think about their legacy and cross over the line and support a carve out for voting rights. And we're looking at organizing their communities, their hometowns, maybe the high schools where they're connected. And so I think that I have a little hope that somehow the personal connection can reach people to find their soul somewhere in them.

Yeah, I think of Lysistrata from time to time. And one of my favorite environmental change stories in business from a friend of mine who knew the gentleman, the CEO came to visit his grandchildren one weekend, as he often did, and came in happy with presents. And the grandkids just stayed on the other side of the room, didn't come over and hug him like they usually did. And he sat down and patted his lap, said, come sit in grandpa's lap. And they said no. And he was heartbroken. And he asked them why. And it's because they had learned about what his company was doing to the living world they cared about. And it broke his heart. And he opened to something that he never had opened to before. It wasn't a matter of financial projections or strategic documents. He was just, you know, Don, you talked about grief. That man was just thrust into grief. And all of a sudden was a guy, a grandfather with some significant power saying, what can I do to repair this relationship with my grandchildren and repair the world that they are entering into something much more powerful than, you know, consultants like me or MBA students like trains do in the normal way that we operate. So, Felix, thank you, Kevin.

Two things since you brought that up. One is that we find in family offices, which is like, you know, multi generational family wealth. The granddaughter to the grandfather is what causes the big money to move because she doesn't think his idea of the legacy leaves behind is what, what the world needs. So he is willing to be led to this other world. And you see a whole lot of that, you know, pritzkers, et cetera. But you know, I was also saying, you know, one time I had breakfast with the CEO of Monsanto, just kind of the two of us, oddly enough, at an hour at this Google event and you know, I came in with all my half baked facts about, you know, Bad things, farmers, seeds, lawsuits, you know, and then I said, well, you know, I talked to him about it, you know, when I had a business that when I sold it ended up doing really bad things, it became the number one pre employment screening thing because I had access to all these databases for folks who were hiring people at the bottom, which was commercial office cleaners and truck drivers, places where there's 110% turnover. And I happened to have built a product that made it really possible to apply the screws to those people better than anybody else. It's the national leader in oppressing the poor hourly wage folks. And I built it and they found the diabolical use for it. I just connecting data, seeing what might happen and stuff. And so I told him about that and I was stuck with it. And that we enabled polluters to.

Figure.

Out the historical fines with each kind of regulation and each kind in context or combination rather so that they could figure out which laws were worth breaking because you could combine the fines and compared to the cost of disruption of business and which laws you should actually break. And so I helped them become smarter lawbreakers by finding the little bitty law that would take a long time to litigate it. And then, so anyway, I helped them really become more effective and smarter criminals. And it was just, I wasn't really evolved enough to think about it, except that this was the highest and best use of this information. And each time I would come up with a better combination, they would be really happier. And so we did this whole regression analysis of pollution versus time to capital. And so he said, yeah, you know what it's like to be stuck in something and you can't get out and that's the system you're engaged in. And I said, yeah, it was terrible. I didn't realize all the bad I was doing. And then the folks who bought it made it even worse and took it national. And so we were really like two humans that got stuck somewhere. And he was, he was, you know, you know, he was deeply aware and he was deeply aware of what everybody thought about him. And he was immersed in a bad system and couldn't get out. You know, he just paid huge amounts of money and was really good at it.

So there's a question for us. Let's go into breakouts for a few minutes and kind of taking off from where Kevin just led us. How just take a minute to introduce yourselves to each other and then take a couple of minutes each to talk about how do you communicate about climate or whatever is your Difficult issue of concern with other people to have a different perspective than you. What do you do? How do you do that? Maybe you don't do that. That could be an answer, too. And what you know, based on your own experience and what you've heard here today, what kind of practices might you.

Explain experiment with going forward? So I'll put that in the chat.

Gillian, can you break people up into groups of three? Any questions about that?

While we're getting logistics together, we'll do.

10 minutes of this and then come back and do a little bit of sharing out from the groups and then some closing conversation together. But I just really want to give all of you a chance to speak, which isn't always possible.

It's an art for.

Welcome back, everybody. So let's just hear from each of you. One person from each group share something that was notable, distinctive, provocative, moving, unexpected in your group. Briefly, a minute or so each.

Yeah, I'll share.

I thought it was just wonderful.

TR said that what she does in.

Talking to people is try to keep.

Her space very clean and clear so.

That there's not any pushback generated. And that has the impact or effect of having people look at their own.

Stuff if they've been resistant or climate deniers. I think that's real important and engaging in this field.

Thank you. Which number group are you?

Number three.

Okay. But number four. Or number two. Or anyone moved to speak. Okay. Yeah. David, please. David Morse.

I'm group number one.

Yeah.

Really good input. I can't remember where exactly my notes from.

One left off and the other one. But the big thing is looking at the other views based on many times.

Predispositions of one sort or another. And occupations was mentioned as a big one. Generations using personal connections, interviewing those who.

Are not normally in the.

In the. In group, let's say. Yep. Interviewing for what? To see.

To get them involved. To get them involved actually in.

In.

In this case, this was. I think this was Alan that talked about.

In a community situation.

Bring in the.

People who have been left out so that we get the perspective that may.

Go back way longer than some of us.

Think about.

Yeah, yeah. There's an important shift there which I have learned really slowly and imperfectly over my life from bringing in these other folks to bring them into the conversation and share my ideas with them to bringing them into the conversation so I can listen to them and hear what I haven't heard before and learn what they care about and then see where there's some common ground or unfamiliar strangers who could Become friends, at least on certain things. Thank you, David. David Grossoff, were you reaching for a mute button there? No. Okay. I popped in and out of some of the rooms and didn't hear continuity, but I heard something that TR said in that group that she listened on the theme of listening. She listens for the base values of the core values that people are holding, really listens for that. And then from there builds trust over time. Recognizing it does take time to build trust. It takes relationship to build trust. And for me, what's one of the huge challenges that we live in right now is with a shredded social fabric and with an atomized world and worse, with the pandemic isolation, we're starved for those kind of interactions. Building trust over time in daily life and sharing the green onions and doing the care for the infirm neighbors or the things that are just part of traditional ancient humanity that sometimes feel very far away from us. Jane Byrd said something on another call we were on this morning.

I could find it here.

Jane, are you there? Do you want to say that thing about Neville and self knowledge or should I find my notes and read it? I'm not, I'm not mastering my technology here.

Can you remind me more what it was?

It was about Neville Goddard and self knowledge and, and how that affects the Golden Rule. Well, here you go. I got, I got self acceptance.

Self acceptance is at the core of the moral challenge of existence. And he was, he was talking about we have to grow our ability to know ourselves, To know the tangle of conversations that occur in us that are virtually subconscious, what we would call subconscious. If I don't know what's in me, It's all too easy to project onto another person what I can't find in myself, what I can't see in myself, what I cannot accept in myself. So projecting that onto other people produces a lot of dilemmas in the world.

And the way that I heard that is that it makes a mess of Golden Rule. Because if I'm going to do unto you what I would have you do unto me, and I don't know me and I don't know this tangle of who is me, what is it that I'm asking of you and what parts of me and what parts of me am I projecting on you and assuming that I know about you without getting to know you.

Thank you, Gil. That finished the thought.

Yes, thank you. Thank you for that. We're just about a time, George. Is it brief?

The projection will be the shadow. Right, so that's, that's what you don't acknowledge is. Is what can kill you. And so you project that up on.

On to somebody else.

So it's the worst part of yourself that you project upon it others.

Yeah. And I think, you know, the only. The only way through that is to accept that we don't know ourselves and we don't know the others and be curious and be open and listen again. For me, the context for this conversation, really, for everything that I'm in these days, is how do we learn to live together in an unsettled, pluralistic world with very different people, with very different stories, but just maybe shared concerns? And how do we learn or relearn to belong to a living world? Which is my sustainability question these days. Let me finish with one other great woman poet and then we'll close the call. Do take this moment to save the chat. If you want to have any of it, we'll send you a link to the recording and a survey in pretty short order. This is from the great Patty Smith. I believe that we. This planet hasn't seen its golden age. Everybody says it's finished, art's finished, rock and roll is dead. God is dead. Fuck that. This is my chance in the world. I didn't live back in Mesopotamia. I wasn't there in the Garden of Eden. I wasn't there with Emperor Han. I'm here right now, and I want now to be the golden age. If only each generation would realize that the time for greatness is right now. When they're alive, the time to flower is now. Thank you all for being with us today. I appreciate your friendship and participation and the work you do in the world very much. I'll see you next month.

Bye bye.