Walter TED Talk 2013

7/28/2019 Walter TED Talk 2013

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Slide 1: Taking care of our global community

We know we live in special times. We also know we live in distressing

times.

As David Suzuki once said: “Never in the history of the world have so many

of us known so little about so much”.

Slide 2: Nuclear Plant picture

As you watched the recent nuclear crisis unfold, in a country with both the

discipline and means to apply the highest levels of knowledge wasn’t it

painful to watch firetrucks spray water on exposed spent nuclear fuel rods?

So where do we begin?

I feel pretty overwhelmed by how many world events we’ve seen recently.

How about you?

The worst flooding in Australia’s history following droughts; massive social

unrest leading to the toppling of governments in north Africa; a 40%

reduction of the ozone layer over the arctic, a problem we thought we had

addressed.

A 25% increase in the price of fuel, and an unprecedented increase in the

US money supply leading to rapid devaluation of the world currency.



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Slide 3: Distraught Faces of Traders

All of this right after the biggest story of the last decades, the economic

collapse in 2008. Seen by many as a massive fraud that was committed by

global bankers.

Who was defrauded? All of us, it seems. Will anyone be held accountable?

It seems not. Turns out, there were no rules.

Where do we go to make sense of all of this? We feel stuck trying to

grapple with any single event adequately. Many of us feel numb, helpless.

So we tune out, or search for some good news. Some offer simple

answers. Others distract themselves, change the subject. Too depressing,

they say.

What I’ve noticed is that the line between natural and human caused

disasters is blurring. Maybe if the Fukishima nuclear plant wasn’t built 50

metres from the sea shore, a nuclear melt-down could have been avoided.

If our thinking was longer term, slower, smaller and perhaps more global -

would the results be different? Would the lines be less blurry?

It seems to me that at the human level, it doesn’t matter what the cause of

the calamity was, we somehow, as a human family, need to respond. How

do we respond?



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In order to suggest a possible way forward I’m first going to go back in

history.

SLIDE 4: French words on a façade.

220 years ago in the French revolution the people overthrew the

aristocracy. Their vision was liberty, equality and brotherhood. In today’s

terms we would call brotherhood: Community. Community is the feeling of

“kinship with” and “closeness to” a group of people around us.

Today one only has to look to the uprising of the communities of citizens in

North Africa and the Middle East to see the struggle for liberty and equality

played out again.

SLIDE 5: Farm in the countryside

My sense of community started when I was a child. I grew up on a little

farm in Switzerland. The farm had about 20 cows for milking, a few

hundred orchard trees, and grain, potatoes and strawberries -- a little bit of

everything. I learned that to live and work is to live in harmony with those

around me and with nature. A farming family with a small piece of land

totally depends on nature and each other. For all the work to get done in

time, we all had to help. It wasn’t always the perfect picture of unity in my

family, but we all knew that it took all of us to get the job done – we had to

rely on each other, our community.

Slide 6: Momentum staff with banner and balloons



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In 1991, 15 years after coming to Canada, I was asked to consider starting

a new initiative in Calgary, one that would try to make a difference in the

lives of low income people. Over the years, we developed training

programs for immigrants, micro business start-up and loan programs and in

2000 we added financial literacy and savings programs.

Today we work with over 4000 citizens per year.

As we began to tell the story of Momentum, what struck me is how often,

people would say: “what you are doing is great, it’s just what we need

here”.

I would ask: so what do you like about it? Almost always the answer would

be: “that these people will become independent ”. That answer always left

me feeling a bit deflated.

Why? Because independence is an illusion.

Slide 7: Momentum Participants throwing colored balls

You see, I believe, and our work has proven – just as I had learned on the

farm, we can only succeed if we do things together. Fifteen years later we

have enough experience and patterns to know that what our participants

are taking away from Momentum is inter-dependence not independence.

Ultimately we build community -- meaningful connections between people

built on equality and interdependence.



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What does all of that have to do with what’s going on in the world today?

Part of the answer comes from an economist who published a classic in

1973: E.F. Schumacher in “Small is Beautiful”. His ideas are far more

inspiring to me than the conventional economic wisdom of “bigger is better”

which is measured in large part by how much we buy as shown in GDP

growth. Schumacher became intimately acquainted with problems of

energy supply and environmental sustainability (well before the Green

movement). Meanwhile, his interests in gardening, Buddhism, and Gandhi,

pushed him to expand his economic thinking.

SLIDE 8: Workers erecting wall

Not many economists question economic growth these days in fact most

count on it. But Schumacher did just that. He questioned economic growth

and proposed a radically different relationship between human beings and

technology in order to bring about more fulfilling working lives. The purpose

of technology up until this point, has been to produce as much output per

labor input as possible. All the machines invented for this purpose,

however, have not only served the dubious end of making many workers

redundant, but their prohibitively high cost discourages self-employment.

As a solution, Schumacher proposes an “intermediate technology,” one

which requires more workers and can easily be purchased and used by

poor people.

In his model, more people have satisfying work within their existing

communities.



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So how does all this fit together? What do the disasters we’re seeing today

have to do with economic growth? Let me try to explain:

The lack of community is connected with an economic system that has

become completely dependent on growth and thereby on consumerism. It

is fair to say that as long as we simply buy more and more, we will not

succeed in building community. Individualism and this illusion of

independence have led to the “every person for themselves mentality”.

Growth and consumerism rely on cheap sources of energy and an earth

that doesn’t ask to be paid for the resources it provides us.

How can we stop this cycle?

SLIDE 9: Broccoli in the garden

Gardening is one of my passions. It gives me great satisfaction both as an

outlet for my creative side as well as a concrete step toward growing more

food locally. One thing I have learned from gardening is: I can’t make

plants grow: I can water, give them the best soil, fertilize, it helps, but grow

- they must do on their own.

I have learned: all I can do is create the conditions for plants to flourish –

through good care.

And so it is with community: we can’t create community, but we can create

the conditions that help communities flourish.



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Here are 3 things each of us can do toward that end:

SLIDE 10: Three bullets: Question economic growth and consumerism;

Live with a global code of ethics; Take the time to ask questions, see

the bigger picture, look for the patterns:

Question growth: I am sure if there is an economist in the room, the

question I would get it is: do you know what you’re talking about

questioning growth? If we don’t have growth we will have massive

unemployment.

I recognize this is not simple, but I want to encourage all of us to think more

radically. Think longer term, deeper and smaller but not shorter.

PAUSE

Develop Ethics: We need to define a global moral compass. A compass

where true north points in the direction of social, economic and

environmental justice. Those are big words. No matter which definition one

uses, justice always builds on a sense of equality. We need to define a

global constitution, based on the reality of global economic ties that have

bound us all together in the last couple of decades. However, this code of

ethics needs to treat the earth as an equal partner in the quest for global

stability and survival.

PAUSE

Ask questions: Many of us have lost sight of the big picture. For example:

many citizens in western societies are deeply and rightfully concerned

about government spending as debt is piling up. Yet, very few of us



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understand with any sense of proportionality where the money goes. Some

of the largest budget line items are never challenged. For example, in

2010, the US spent close to 50% of tax revenues on the military. On top of

it, the Department of Defense is deemed un-auditable. The auditors

conclude that there are '”material internal control weaknesses”. Sounds like

a mess to me.

I believe, we have lost our ability to truly analyze, because we have lost

any useful sense of proportions. Instead of genuine information we get a

news story or spin, a sound bite. And we don’t question.

We need to dig deeper, look for and demand better information.

SLIDE 11: Garden landscape

Some of us say rather flippantly as we depart from one another “Take

Care”.

I think this captures the essence of what our task is as human beings: to

take good care. It’s important work to take care of ourselves of course, of

those around us, of our communities, our city, our country and our global

family. Today, more than ever this means to take care of the earth, of

nature, of all that sustains life. Use all resources as though they were

precious, they are.

Thank you and more importantly take care!

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Walter TED Talk 2013