January 30th 2022

Feature story

Thich Nhat Hanh, gentle warrior

It feels like we’ve lost a whole garden of giants recently. Delgamuukw, the Gitxsan chief of the eponymous Supreme Court ruling. Edward O. Wilson, the father of “biodiversity.” Desmond Tutu, legendary anti-apartheid activist and fossil fuel divestment advocate.

Maybe you have your own list of recently-departed exemplars of the human spirit? My own would include bell hooks and Joan Didion, worlds apart as writers but just six days in death. And then, last weekend, Thich Nhat Hanh died.

That’s not really the right way to put it. “A cloud never dies” was one of his famous sayings and he literally wrote the book No Death, No Fear. Thich Nhat Hanh had a real knack for ear worms: “No mud, no lotus,” “Kiss the Earth with your feet.”

Affectionately known as “Thay” to his students, Thich Nhat Hanh was a pre-eminent example of peace in action, a living embodiment of interconnectedness or, as he would more poetically phrase it, “interbeing.”

To call Thich Nhat Hanh an “environmentalist” is to expose how ludicrously inadequate that word really is. But his most recent book is playfully titled Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, the latest in a long life of writings about the need to recognize interbeing.

“When you wake up and you see that the Earth is not just the environment, the Earth is us, you touch the nature of interbeing,” he writes. As always with the Buddhists, it’s an invitation to test the statement for ourselves, to find out whether happiness, peace and interbeing are on life’s menu, if we choose to practice them.

His life served as an example that those options are available. And in that way, he demonstrated one potential in the astonishing spectrum of human lives. Some of us make a living stealing laptops from cancer patients. Some order mass rape as a strategy of war. Many of us are fuming with anger at our neighbours and fellow citizens. But, also, there are examples like Thich Nhat Hanh.

Interbeing may be a plausible way of life in the world, but it does beg the question of whether it’s a viable strategy for stopping climate breakdown. Thich Nhat Hanh went all in:

“We have to wake up together. And if we wake up together, then we have a chance. Our way of living our life and planning our future has led us into this situation. And now we need to look deeply to find a way out, not only as individuals, but as a collective, a species.”

As attractive a vision as that may be, I won’t be the first to point out that Thay’s own root teacher lived over 2,500 years ago. We don’t seem to have woken up together yet — what are the odds in the remaining eight years of this decisive decade?

Much more certain is that Thich Nhat Hanh’s example and teachings have been incredibly helpful to a great many people around the world. And they provide a practical antidote to being overwhelmed by climate despair — a set of practices that provide climate activists with the mental stability to carry on.

There’s an interesting side note here for readers of Canada’s National Observer: one of the first features ever published about Thay’s community of Plum Village was written by an aspiring young journalist named Linda Solomon. Her piece was republished in an anthology by Parallax Press. Decades later, Linda founded Canada’s National Observer and she’s still editor-in-chief. I’m afraid I can’t link to the article (it predates the digital revolution).

Those early residents of Plum Village were learning Thich Nhat Hanh’s deceptively simple approach to mindfulness. It’s become a lifeline for many wracked by climate despair today: Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.

You can keep it that simple but Thay added twists. Most famously: Breathing out, I smile.

But Thich Nhat Hanh always taught that it takes practice. And he urged us not to wait until the fires and floods feel overwhelming. If you’re interested in a taste of Thay’s approach to dealing with strong emotions, Plum Village has a “Survival Kit” and here’s one video

The Roundup

Next global climate strike: March 25

The youth climate strikers at Fridays for Future have declared March 25 will be the next global climate strike.

Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan ‘will make your brain dissolve’

Jordan Peterson went on a half-hour diatribe about climate change in the latest episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast. Scientists call it a “word salad of nonsense.” It made Gizmodo’s Molly Taft “want to self-immolate.”

“There's no such thing as climate. Right?” claims Peterson by way of kicking off their rambling, bong water babble. “Climate” and “everything” are the same word, and that’s what bothers me about the climate change types.”

Apparently, 11 million people listen to the average Rogan podcast on Spotify. Neil Young just had his songs removed from the platform rather than share it with the notorious anti-vaxxer.

Banking on the public

Is the connection between banks and climate change too complex for the public to understand? The banks don’t seem to think so. Check out this ad campaign running in the United States:

Cooking with gas

The last few years have produced study after study, each showing that so-called “natural gas” is worse than we’d realized both for the climate and our health.

The latest is a Stanford University study that shows gas stoves leak methane into your home even when they’re turned off.

“It didn't matter if the stove was old or new or what brand it was — the presence of leaks was consistent. There were 18 brands of stoves and cooktops in the study, and they ranged from three to 30 years old,” according to NPR’s report.

Canadian doctors and nurses are banding together to launch a campaign called Unnatural Gas to highlight the health impacts of all the methane floating around Canadian homes.

A sampling from Canada’s National Observer

Cloe Logan spoke with a Canadian researcher from a research base in Antarctica where he’s studying the Thwaites Glacier, dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier.” He explains why we should care about a disintegrating ice shelf at the bottom of the world.

John Woodside showed how greenhouse gas emissions from aviation are flying under the radar.

“Toronto’s Pearson International was the heaviest-polluting airport and is a clear example of how the full scope of emissions can be hidden. In 2019, it reported just over 66,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions to Ottawa. However, when departing fights are added into the equation, the airport’s emissions leap to 6.8 million tonnes. That would rank it as the fifth-largest emitter in the country.”

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson wrote this week about veggies and plants under attack.

“Plants are essential to most aspects of life. As the climate changes and global trade accelerates, they're being exposed to more extreme weather, new diseases, and fast-moving pests that threaten entire ecosystems… Canada's patchwork approach to protecting plants is inadequate to tackle the threat.”

Max Fawcett dove into the energy hog that is cryptocurrency mining: Crypto is a climate disaster, but that won't stop Alberta.

And Seth Klein got outraged gas companies like Fortis are doubling down on nefarious efforts to block electrification, with promises about 100 per cent “renewable gas.”

$1 billion for orphan well cleanup a ‘massive underestimate’

The feds’ Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates the price tag for cleaning up orphan wells in Alberta and Saskatchewan is over $1 billion (by 2025), while industry has paid only $237 in security deposits.

But analysts say that’s a “massive underestimate” since the report doesn’t include the oilsands or pipelines and other infrastructure. It also doesn’t include about 7,400 wells that are abandoned but not yet officially “orphaned.”

The $1 billion is “just a teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny fraction,” says University of Calgary energy economist Lucija Muehlenbachs.

“In 2020, Ottawa gave $1.7 billion to the Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia governments to clean up orphaned wells,” reports John Woodside. “Nearly half the funding in Alberta has been given to firms that are not financially at risk — flying in the face of the polluter pays principle that says those responsible for pollution should pay its cost.”

Offshore wind

Bloomberg: China Sets Offshore Wind Record Amid Clean Energy Surge

Last year, China installed more offshore wind power than the rest of the world had managed in the last five years. That’s roughly one big (10MW) turbine every five hours. China now accounts for half the world’s capacity, although 2021’s rate of growth isn’t likely to be repeated since there was a race to meet a subsidy deadline.

The U.K. was the previous record-holder for most offshore wind power and Scotland just green-lit 17 more projects. You might be wondering how much offshore wind we’ve built given Canada’s fantastic offshore potential and the purported problems in Atlantic Canada finding alternatives to coal? The answer remains zero.

Chart by Simon Evans, Carbon Brief

U.S. oil drilling scuttled

The Biden administration had argued it had no choice but to go ahead with the largest sale of oil and gas leases in its history. But a federal judge just cancelled the leases covering more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico because the government hadn’t adequately considered their climate impacts.

Alberta oil town takes a shine to solar

When Calmar, Alberta makes national news, it’s usually as a cautionary tale about abandoned oil wells and overdependence on oil and gas. Now, the town is harnessing the sun to cool its rink. It has put 464 solar panels on its arena, enough to power about 98 per cent of its energy consumption and save money.

"As we look toward the future, we think it's really important to take advantage of some of these new technologies and ways to see both cost savings for our residents, to update our facilities, and also to do some environmental changes," councillor and deputy mayor Krista Gardner told CTV News Edmonton.

To close out the week, let me point you to a piece about Kim Stanley Robinson, known to fans as KSR. Robinson will be known to many of you as the author of Ministry for the Future but he’s been honing storytelling about climate for decades.

Joshua Rodman reached out to KSR for a New Yorker article and the lucky bastard got invited along on a multi-day backpacking trip in the Sierras. You can read (or listen) all about it in Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Our Climate Reality?

Robinson’s books are “simultaneously heartening and harrowing,” writes Rodman about KSR’s mission to write “anti-anti-utopianism.”

“Like glaciers, structures of feeling shift with time—that’s how we so readily distinguish between the 1960s and now.”

That’s all for this week. Thank you for reading Zero Carbon. You can always write with feedback or suggestions to [email protected].

Support for this issue of Zero Carbon came from The Trottier Foundation and I-SEA.