Another ground rule was that respectful conflict is healthy and a necessary part of getting to new territory. Arguments mean it’s working!
Many of the groups and people in the room talked about how, while they had formed coalitions before, most had been coalitions of “no”—no to a lousy pro-corporate trade deal, no to a punishing austerity agenda, no to a particularly egregious politician, no to oil pipelines or fracking. But we realized that it had been a long time since the progressive side of the political spectrum had assembled to say yes, let alone yes to a sweeping vision for the next economy. So conflicts were inevitable, especially since, like all gatherings, ours was imperfect, with people missing from the room who should have been there.
There were moments of ease and joy too, where ideas for a “just transition” flowed fast and furious. Whiteboards grew crowded with suggestions and questions:
? Free high-quality child care.
? Less driving.
? Less work, more music and gardens and family.
? Super-fast trains. Solar roads.
We also heard challenges we knew we couldn’t resolve in two days but would continue puzzling over for years:
? If we don’t address ownership, how can we move toward equitable justice?
? How do we move beyond the idea that what we own is what protects us? Security comes from community, from solidarity. Security is based on how solid my ties are, not how much I own.
? How do we build the public sector so we, the public, feel part of it? We should all feel ownership over public housing, public resources.
? How can we ensure that informal and unpaid work around caregiving, domestic work, and land care is recognized and valued in a just transition?
? What should a guaranteed basic income look like?
? Climate justice is indivisible from decolonization. How do we imagine reparations to the people most impacted by extractive industries and climate change?
And on all our minds as so many thousands of refugees continued to flee their homes in search of safety:
? Migrants are not looking at the climate crisis. They are in the climate crisis.
Lead with Values, Not Policies
My role in all this was to listen closely to the two days of conversations, notice common themes, and come up with a rough first draft, which everyone would have an opportunity to revise. It was the most challenging assignment of my writing life (I struggle to cowrite with one other person, let alone sixty). And yet some very clear common themes emerged that made a synthesis possible.
One such theme was that we have a system based on limitless taking and extracting, on maximum grabbing. Our economy takes endlessly from workers, asking more and more from them in ever-tighter time frames, even as employers offer less and less security and lower wages in return. Many of our communities are being pushed to a similar breaking point: schools, parks, transit, and other services have had resources clawed back from them over many decades, even as residents have less time to fill in the gaps. And of course we are all part of a system that takes endlessly from the earth’s natural bounty, without protecting cycles of regeneration, and while paying dangerously little attention to where we are offloading pollution, whether it be into the water systems that sustain life or the atmosphere that keeps our climate system in balance.
Listening to the stories—workers being laid off after a lifetime of service, immigrants facing indefinite detention under deplorable conditions, Indigenous knowledge and culture ignored and attacked—it was clear to all of us that this is what a system addicted to short-term profits and wealth is structurally required to do: it treats people and the earth either like resources to be mined to their limits or as garbage to be disposed of far out of sight, whether deep in the ocean or deep in a prison cell.
In sharp contrast, when people spoke about the world they wanted, the words care and caretaking came up again and again—care for the land, for the planet’s living systems, and for one another. As we talked, that became a frame within which everything seemed to fit: the need for a shift from a system based on endless taking—from the earth and from one another—to a culture based on caretaking, the principle that when we take, we also take care and give back. A system in which everyone is valued, and we don’t treat people or the natural world as if they were disposable.
Acting with care and consent, rather than extractively and through force, became the idea binding the whole draft together, starting with respect for the knowledge and inherent rights of Indigenous peoples, the original caretakers of the land, water, and air. Though many of us (including me) had originally thought we were convening to draft a list of policy goals, we realized that this shift in values, and indeed in morality, was at the core of what we were trying to map.
The specifics of policy all flowed from that shift. For example, when we talk about “green jobs,” we usually picture a guy in a hard hat putting up a solar array. And that is one kind of green job, and an important one. But it’s not the only one. Looking after elderly and sick people doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Making art doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Teaching is low-carbon. Day care is low-carbon. And yet this work, overwhelmingly done by women, tends to be undervalued and underpaid, and is frequently the target of government cutbacks. So we decided to deliberately extend the traditional definition of a green job to anything useful and enriching to our communities that doesn’t burn a lot of fossil fuels. As one participant said: “Nursing is renewable energy. Education is renewable energy.” It was an attempt, in short, to show how to replace an economy built on destruction with an economy built on love.
Red Lines
We tried to touch on as many issues as possible that reflected the values shift people were calling for (from welcoming many more migrants to putting an end to trade deals that force us to choose between “growth” on the one hand and protecting the environment and creating local jobs on the other). But we also decided to resist the temptation to make laundry lists that would cover every conceivable demand. Instead, we emphasized the frame that showed how so many of our challenges—and solutions—are interconnected, because the frame could then be expanded in whatever place or community the vision was applied.