We have been struggling with deadlines and it has been four weeks since our last update. This is the reality of balancing priorities. I have been speaking with David Lloyd Jones about the challenge of keeping up with something like a climate crisis when you also have to deal with the practicalities of keeping an office running and making sure everyone can pay their rent. We use the term “war footing.” What we are dealing with is an urgent and existential crisis, but although it needs to be tackled immediately, it will not be solved in a day. Perhaps the metaphor of 5 or 6 years of World War II is closer than that of a house that is on fire right now. The trick is to keep up the constant effort and feeling of urgency while managing the pace and staying in it for the medium-term.
We are missing Monika, who was a good leader on climate change for us and has finished her summer stint and now left us to continue with her office. Monika is probably the most active and outspoken person that we have worked with. She is constantly sharing her philosophy with us–how she buys clothing, what products she uses, what she thinks can make the most difference. It is inspiring and pulls us to more active engagement with issues. We need to pick up the baton from her and do justice to this work. Josef made a little laser-cut tableau to include with the potted plant we gave her on her leaving day. On reflection, we should have made two sets, to have one that would also remind us of all of her contributions!
The checklists tend to stay fixed when the projects are not advancing quickly. For now we are going to take them out of these posts to avoid too much repetition, and return to them when we have substantive work we are doing. But it would be great in the future to develop a simple layout mechanism of a collapsible toggle to have these in each post without muddying the layout. It’s just a bit of effort to get that to work without bloating our website.
Weronika mentions that it would be good to share this with people and also understand how many people read it and get feedback from them. Good idea.
