Our Collective Future
This is a letter to the closest children in my life who live in the developed world and are coming of age during a time of historic climate disruption. This is not a letter for their parents, uncles, aunts or guardians. This reflection is directly for you, the children, coming from me, Joshua Fernandes, so that I might frame my adult life and my actions in our relationship accordingly. I will share it with your folks so they know and understand my intentions but more importantly will share with you when you’re older.
This if for you:
Atlas, Arjun, Lilianna, Asa, Avery, Shems, Ronan, Lucia, Millie, Shane, Layla, Tor, Parker, Kayden, Ari, Xavier
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A few years ago I published this reflection on Navigating the Climate Crisis through Love that argues that we, as folks living in the so called ‘developed world’ have an ethical, moral and spiritual obligation to demand climate action from our governments for your generation and those that follow. I argued that it is particularly important for my generation living in the global north, because we are disproportionately responsible for the state of the world’s climate crisis. I argued that we must be accountable to the members of our human family in the global south who will likely face far more severe effects of climate change while having far fewer resources to exercise resilience in the face of such changes. A less prominent perspective in mainstream news is that richer nations are failing to meet commitments to help poorer countries adapt to a rapidly changing climate.
I received various responses to the article but the one that stuck out most was from my friend Mark, who challenged me around the impracticality of asking people to love those they’ve never met in such a personal way. He reminded me of how much we struggle to truly and fully love many aspects of ourselves, let alone our families and those nearby. The kind of Agape, transcendent love that I was calling for was not a useful framing for rallying people into collective action around climate change. Particularly since we are all caught on the treadmill of capitalism, trying to subsist as best we can without becoming overwhelmed by the systemic issues we are embedded in. I’ve marinated in Mark’s thoughtful critique for the past few years, as well as the multitude of scientific studies that have come out and have shifted my perspective substantially. I have, however, remained focused on my accountability to you, the children in my life, and the unborn who will inherit this world. As it stands, many respectable scientists conclude that for the rest of our foreseeable lives, each year we live on planet earth may very likely be the warmest year we’ve recorded on the planet.
I’m writing this in February of 2021 as the Corona 19 pandemic chronically persists in Ontario and around the world, shuttering entire industries and stretching economies and governments while claiming thousands of lives each day. Amidst all the chaos, navigating how we might rethink our climate priorities is far from top of mind for many folks experiencing far more acute crises. I believe that how we build back from this fallout has the potential to poise us for a new way of being in relation to the earth and to each other, by creating transformative policies that usher in more sustainable energy systems that your generation will inherit. This will of course take deep personal reflection, courage and willingness to engage in hard work for a sustained period of time. I seek to do this by accurately locating myself along the long moral arc of history (that ultimately bends toward justice) and to share the journey with you as we travel it together. I want to let you know where I’m coming from before I share how I intend to live, using you as a grounding reference point for how I conduct my life.
From a labour and class perspective, the vast majority of my family and friends are working from home or retired with savings or pensions and are able to navigate this period without having to risk contracting the virus at the workplace and bringing it home to their families. Amidst this, the premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, refuses to mandate a measly ten paid sick days to those who we now dub as ‘essential’ workers. These workers are disproportionately immigrants and lower income folks who despite the prestigious but fairly hollow title of ‘essential,’ apparently don’t warrant the respectability that comes with such a title, such as paid sick days. It is this class-privilege and lack of responsibility for children or aging parents of my own, that allows me the space and freedom to think about larger-scale problems such as climate change. Rather than being concerned with scraping enough together for dinner or next month’s rent or caring for the immediate physical, emotional and psychological needs of others.
Taking in nearly a year’s worth of global suffering while largely stuck at home has prompted many folks to be more financially generous. There has been an outpouring of financial support for organizations ranging from those serving people living on the streets to women’s shelters to international aid. This is great because there are immediate needs that need to be met. On a more macro scale, cross-class solidarity is an oxymoron, which might more accurately be called charity. Cross-class solidarity is not often critiqued because it allows the ‘haves’ to maintain the illusion that what they have is rightfully theirs to distribute as they please, without problematizing the unjust methods by which their wealth that was created; on stolen land and through extractive land and labour practices. Immigrants who have ‘made it’ on Turtle Island can be reluctant to question the myth of meritocracy as the slog to pull yourself up by one’s bootstraps is indeed difficult, though it need not negate multiple coexisting truths. Leaning into these coexisting truths in the more recent years in my life, I will teach you to embrace paradox rather than upholding a singular(and often colonial) truth.
My folks, along with most of my aunts and uncles who did the trans-Pacific journey, immigrated from India to canada in the early 80’s under Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s multicultural immigration policy. Like most immigrants, they were willing to do the hard work that most born-and-raised middle-class canadian citizens weren’t (and still aren’t) and eventually secured professional roles in a variety of fields ranging from engineering to management. In climbing the class ladder, in many ways they embodied the model minority narrative; not rocking the boat in any ways deemed socially unacceptable. They worked hard to achieve financial security and provide opportunities for my generation.
Growing up as the kid of Indian immigrants in Toronto during the ’90s, I gobbled up the nationalism of canada because my folks were (rightfully) grateful for the incredible opportunities this land gave them. That pride and sense of belonging came at the cost of being uncritical and largely unaware of the ongoing land occupation and resource theft from Indigenous nations, let alone the sovereignty of canada itself being based on cultural genocide. Shree Pradakar, The Toronto Star’s Race and Gender columnist puts great language to my journey now speaking to what it means to be a settler in what is now known as canada, during the RCMP invasion into Wet’su’weten territory last year. She writes that ‘Immigrants may come here from lands impoverished by European colonizers, drawn to the riches of the West. Once here and settled, we have a responsibility to not simply preen and simper to please the white gaze but to seek accountability for the source of that wealth.’
I am acutely aware how closely removed I am from having to compete in a labour market of over a billion people. My parents are humble and wonderful people who worked hard for my sisters and I to start off higher up on Maslow’s hierarchy than they did, and encouraged us to pursue any career path we found fulfilling and meaningful. I experienced the opposite of what the children of many immigrants encounter from their parents; implicit or explicit pressure to become a high-achieving and earning professional, typically a lawyer or doctor. Ronny Cheing insightfully and comically comments on the stereotype of Asian parents wanting their kids to be doctors in order to flip the script of the immigrant clan narrative in one generation. Cheing says that for new immigrants, having a doctor in the family would mean instant credibility and respectability, something society offers more freely to those who can code to middle-class whiteness in speech and action, beyond reach for most non-white new immigrants.
I am grateful my parents immigrated to canada, that they achieved a comfortable life and are so incredibly supportive of my sisters and myself. I’m grateful they gave us the means and encouragement to travel and pursue career paths of our own choice. I work as a community organizer in the field of social innovation, my middle sister works in the arts as an actor and artistic director with an independent theatre company and my youngest sister teaches at colleges throughout Toronto. Most of my cousins whose parents are immigrants also work in the non-profit field doing value-aligned work and are generally less concerned with the need to grind to get our slice of the so-called canadian pie.
Being so closely removed from a life in India, I often think of the cataclysmic shocks Indian society is going to face in the coming decades with increasing temperatures and water shortages compounding the already intense hustle for livelihood and dignity. My ancestral homeland is on track to suffer far worse calamity due to climate change than myself as a first-generation settler in canada, just one generation removed. As Pradakar usefully pointed out, immigrants and their lineages who are lured to the west by its riches must also own our responsibility as settlers on the lands of the people who have been deliberately and systemically displaced. I would add, that as a citizen of an industrialized western country that is disproportionately responsible for changes in the climate, I ought to have a role in educating and radicalizing your generation toward meaningful climate action. Perhaps the best way to love those far from us is to realize that they are a part of us, being diaspora ourselves, connecting our lives on Turtle Island more closely to our ancestry.
All this responsibility can all seem overwhelming when we are indeed stuck on the treadmill of capitalism trying to ‘get ahead’ while neoliberalism has indoctrinated us to function as individuals, with our attention on our own success and well-being. It convinces us that we are, or should be, totally independent, and in doing so, that our actions don’t have very real and dire consequences for those far from us. The level of labour standards we implicitly accept in the global south in order to enjoy our falsely inexpensive standard of life is a testament to our out-of-sight out-of-mind psychology at work. Even during this pandemic several reports have come out condemning the atrocious labour conditions of personal protective equipment manufacturing facilities in Southeast Asia that provide our canadian hospitals. Yet, rest assured when we can travel again, entitled white 20 somethings will flock to Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam to sip cheap beers on beaches, practice the rite of debauchery at Full Moon festivals and generally procrastinate growing up.
I feel comfortable making this critique because I’m willing to own my own complicity. I am coded to whiteness by class and largely grew up doing what middle class white canada did. My folks are boomers and played within the rules they were handed and did well enough to allow me to be one of those kids I’d just condemned traveling Southeast Asia in my youth. And I’d do it again, with more respect for the culture than I was capable of in my early twenties, and with likely 30–50% less drugs and alcohol consumption, were it not for the state of our climate. Knowing what I know about climate change and owning my own complicity in the situation is the caveat that tips me over the edge to not being able to endorse such frivolous travel for you. Although it may seem like an unfair personal responsibility or being gaslit by neoliberal thought, I can’t in good conscious endorse you living the way I have. I will spend the rest of my life learning to live into better relationship with the land I am on, its original peoples, and to building a society of love and dignity where everyone has enough. Rather than one we currently have that distributes goods and services and a dignified standard of living to some, at the cost of others. This first and foremost begins with taking stock of where I’m consuming more than my fair share, despite our modern western society placing highest importance on individualism and accumulation. From that place of integrity, we push back on the notion that it is solely up to the individual to create structural change and demand governments and institutions make serious structural changes in policy around energy production, consumption and social change.
In the context of my relationship with you, this will mean radicalizing you around certain worldviews and politics that I have to constantly work to learn and unlearn. If you grow up questioning the sovereignty of the state of canada, you won’t have to unlearn the pride that I’d walked on this land with for decades before learning more of its real history. I want you to grow up knowing a more true and accurate history of this land and of our true place in the fight for climate justice so that you don’t have to spend as much time unlearning the entitlement of falsely inexpensive travel, goods and services that my generation desperately needs to.
Since I don’t have kids myself, I see my investment in the next generation primarily through you, and it is hard to examine what kind of life I’ll encourage you to lead. Of course I’ll encourage you to be kind and compassionate to those you encounter but I’m really grappling with how I’ll encourage you to know and honour the science of climate change, particularly given the psychological toll it will likely take when you come to understand the world you are living into. All my friends, including your parents, believe in science and honour it, but are stuck in a system that forces us to engage in harmful practices day to day. As a society, we are addicted to oil and gas and have to move beyond this addiction into a state of recovery so that we don’t pass that addiction on to you.
As a species we deeply struggle to relinquish our addiction to exponential growth, domination over the non-human world and each other via racial and economic supremacy, even in the face of an existential threat to our existence on this planet. Given this, something useful I might offer you as a principle to govern your life by might be harm-reduction. In doing so, I will commit myself to living that out and modeling it with integrity.
What might this look like for us as I will be an elder to your young lives and we seek to grow into good relationships with each other, the land and Spirit?
I will practice contemplative action as modeled through the generations of mystics that have come before me and teach you, as best I can, to find the stillness within you in the whirlwind of the world’s drama and violence. I will strive to root myself in a Love that is deeper than our physical world, A divine love intermediated through community, compassion and creativity, which I will teach you to value and embody. I will teach you to pop your head out of the turtle shell of safety and comfort, and take risks to support the liberation of others, whose liberation is inextricably bound up with your own. I will send you subversive critiques to mainstream media analysis, take you to demonstrations and encourage you to be critical about things you think you need to do, own and achieve.
I will practice pleasure in all its forms as what adrienne marie brown calls, pleasure activism. To me this entails a full and deep embrace of my evolving sexuality, sensuality and connection to the erotic…the source from which the thirst for life dwells. I will strive to practice radical self-love and liberation and teach you bodily autonomy, safer sex and sex positivity rather than shame, abstinence and patriarchal control and dominance. I will teach you to dance with and respect the sacred plants of Cannabis and Psyllicibin mushrooms as gateways to spiritual work and as sources of wisdom to call upon rather than substances to simply numb or consume for entertainment.
I will co-create and exist within Community in healthy interdependence, rather than succumb to the illusion of individualism, sculpted by capitalism. I will teach you that you don’t need to own or accumulate things, but should rather aspire to share as much as you can and even source joy and connection in this practice.
Most importantly, I will live to be as true to my journey as I can be, and in doing so, model that authenticity for you, so that you can choose who you wish to be as freely as possible without being gaslit by dominant discourses of patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism and the many isms that live both structurally and within each of us.
I too will learn from you and am grateful to be companions with you as we travel together along the long moral arc of history, that eventually bends toward justice.
