 Recording to the cloud. Hey everybody, this is the A-Rex pop-up call on Friday, June 29th, 2018. We are going to have a lovely conversation. Our guest is Paul Baines, but as usual with our calls, we will open with a poem and then I'll hand it off to Todd who has brought Paul to us and will help introduce Paul and bring him into our conversation. But the poem I found that's feeling kind of interesting for the moment is titled Around Us by Marvin Bell and goes as follows. We need some pines to assuage the darkness when it blankets the mind. We need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly as a plane's wing and a worn bed of needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind and the blur or two of a wild thing that sees and is not seen. We need these things between appointments after work and if we keep them, then someone someday lying down after a walk in supper with the fire hole wet down, the whole night sky set at a particular time without numbers or hours will cause a little sound of thanks, a zipper or a snap to close around the moment and the thought of whatever good we did. Let me read it again. Paul, I think there's some ambient noise coming from New York or maybe it's Todd, but I'm getting a little bit of squeaks and stuff from somewhere. Squeaks are now gone. Might have been Todd. Now I have squeaks again. Huh, let me read it again. Around Us by Marvin Bell. We need some pines to assuage the darkness when it blankets the mind. We need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly as a plane's wing and a worn bed of needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind and a blur or two of a wild thing that sees and is not seen. We need these things between appointments after work and if we keep them, then someone someday lying down after a walk in supper with the fire hole wet down, the whole night sky set at a particular time without numbers or hours will cause a little sound of thanks, a zipper or a snap to close around the moment and the thought of whatever good we did. It's a complicated read, but I really love the spirit of the poem. So welcome, everybody. Todd, will you take us in? Yes. Thank you, Jerry, for that poem. Some of you know that I have grown up around the Great Lakes, mostly Lake Michigan with a little bit of Lake Erie. Having lived in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, the lakes have a very special significance to me. And yeah, so I did spend a little bit of time on the West Coast too, but came back home here to this bio region that feels like home. I currently live a half mile away from Lake Michigan. It moderates all these temperatures. It's present in our lives every day. And I think it was about three, maybe four years ago, that via Twitter I came across something called the Great Lakes Commons Charter. And it was signing a declaration that I was going to care for these great freshwater bodies. And I was very moved by the language in it and became curious about the organization, the Great Lakes Commons. Having been involved in commenting in Commoner, I was fascinated that we're building in Commons around freshwater. And so I learned more about the organization, eventually met Paul. Pia and I have had drinks with him in Milwaukee. We've had the chance to work together. And the last conversation we had was around activism and how to activate this movement around caring for freshwater, not just the Great Lakes, but freshwater as a whole. And the conversation had this certain quality to it that I thought would have been, we would be an excellent opportunity to bring to this group. And that is, there's a lot of things that are amiss right now in our world. And there's a lot of fighting and battles that we're trying to, many of us are trying to win or not lose. And the question that Paul has posed to me in different forms is, how do we weave together these movements in a way that is sustainable, both energetically and builds upon itself and is not just the energy of fighting against, but is the gathering for. And this to me exemplifies Paul and his work, a man with a big heart who's capable of anger, but is also trying to spread love, not just in the various communities is what he works, the academic community, the artist community, the activist community, indigenous communities, but taking the spirit of the water itself and embodying that in a human form and with all the generosity he had. So he's invited onto this call to talk to us about his work and the state of activism in the world today. Is that my cue? That's your cue. Okay, well, I don't really know much about this group or where everyone's coming from. I mean, Jerry just mentioned this forum about trust and everything and Todd's given a bit of information there. I'm gonna bet most people on this call haven't heard of Relics Commons and I don't know how much of this talk is really about Relics Commons, but it's more about the idea or I suppose the sort of the forum in which I work and the processes in which I work and some of the questions that perhaps we're all sort of asking. And so there's a couple of different threads to pick up on from Todd's introduction. I'm not sure if you have questions as well or but what I can add right now is, you know, actually I'm sort of, I grew up on Lake Ontario and I'm actually standing next to Lake Ontario right now. I'm actually just doing a short-term residency on Toronto Island. If anybody here has been to Toronto, you may know that there's an island with an airport and lots of parks, a little theme park and also a couple of little neighborhood. And so I'm also an art center. So I'm actually here at the art center and I'm just by the fairy docks. And so I'm actually right on Lake Ontario as we speak and so I guess that's sort of sets the backdrop literally that this idea of belonging. And I feel like a lot of social movements are using that thread of what is it you are belonging to? What is the moment or the movement or the community you're belonging to? And what I've been a part of for the past six years and what I've been trying to support is this idea of belonging to the Great Lakes, regardless if you're American or Canadian or indigenous or settler, Ontario, Chicago, whatever, Boater, Fisher. So oftentimes the language of stakeholder or citizenship or other forms of identity divide us. And so I just felt like the Great Lakes Commons identity, commoner identity belonging to the lakes was something that was refreshing, was inclusive. And at the end of the day, transformative, really sort of thinking about that sort of bioregional awareness, that bioregional connection and that water being one of those elements which helps us break down our common understanding around us and the environment or us and water because so much of us are made of water. So I'm mostly, you know, I'm mostly Lake Ontario right now. A couple of years ago when I was traveling the Great Lakes for six months, I was probably a little bit of all five. And so I'll start off with that, to the group, putting back to the group around maybe this theme of belonging, what does it mean to you or what are some examples? And if you have any more questions to me about belonging or we can pick up a different thread, various ways in which Great Lakes Commons, we've been trying to spur that idea of belonging is with a united vision around a Commons charter. We have a collaborative knowledge map where people can add their text photos and videos on a map of the Great Lakes with the idea of belonging. And we've done a bunch of events around journeying and people cycling, walking, boating, performing, cycling in different parts of the Great Lakes within their own issue, but connecting to the larger whole. So that idea of belonging has been a thread through some of our projects. And most recently, some of the work that Todd's done with us is this idea of a more critical connection sort of like within our leadership team or some of our closest supporters, how do we nurture and advance this idea of a Commons leadership or internal Commons so that our external ideals around how to belong to the Great Lakes can also show up and be mirrored in our sort of micro or inner circle as well. And so that's an ongoing challenge of how to do that with everyone's, with the culture of busy, with the culture of fighting against various issues, with seeing issues in terms of like nuclear power waste or pipelines or water shutoffs. There's all these issues that can easily divide social movement where the greater sense of belonging or the greater cause of action is this idea of reconnection to the Great Lakes. And so I'll end this first little section on a little bit more of an introduction and this theme of belonging and how it's manifested in some of our work. Love that. So I'm curious about one of my beliefs is that people have forgotten what Commons even are. And every now and then when I have a workshop or a talk, I'll be like, all right, so who knows what a Commons is? And there'll be like 15 seconds of bare silence. And then somebody will say, well, that's like forests, right? And I'll be like, good, good, good, keep going, right? And then we explore the notion of Commons a little bit. But what reactions do you get as you talk about Commons just in general? Because I think this is weirdly a very fundamental notion to human society and also something that we have squished out of our present lives. Yeah, I would say there's a real range. There's everything from total, to never thought of it, to misinterpretation in terms of the tragedy of the Commons. Oh God, that paper. Over simplification around everything that we share. So the idea of communal, this being a fill-in for things that are shared or commonly or common concern or common, yeah, common things that were common being almost overly, overly biased. And then lastly, even the idea of suspicion that I wrote a blog post based on a book a few months ago now called Unsettling the Commons, which was looking at where we claim the streets and looking at even the Occupy movement as a form of settler moves to innocence and ways in which we can flatten and erase the colonial conversations and re-indigenizing our presence here on Turtle Island and how Commons can with the language of the Commons and sometimes the practice be a part of that erasure. And so I'd say that that spectrum of ways in which people aren't really thinking about Commons thoroughly or critically or even in a way for me, I'm conscious that it could be misinterpreted or it might even sometimes be another form of erasure of power. And so I use it very contextually and so I usually don't talk about reclaiming the Commons depends on who the audience is. And so the sort of general one-on-one with all the things that we inherit, share and pass on but really focusing in on the verb of the practice of combining as more important because just declaring a Commons or thinking that a Commons exists outside of human organization is somewhat essentializing this idea and romanticizing this idea that a Commons just exists because it's all there and we all just need to take care of it. Well, there actually needs to be the common name, the rules, the practices, be they formal or informal and actually the consequences when those things are not followed. I think we can see, take climate change as a perfect example of a tragedy of the Commons, not because we don't have a Commons but because we don't have the governance mechanisms to actually govern the climate as a Commons. And so we get a lot of misinterpretation, we get a lot of inflating ideas like, well, if it's everyone's, right? And I think, again, when we're looking at issues of settler colonialism, considering something everyone's equally is problematic just like the idea of the 99% and the book goes into further detail and I would encourage you if you want to think about more about Commons and Unsettling is to read the blog post on the Great Lakes Commons website. And so for me, Commons is a way into a conversation that in some ways at our current moment allows us to get beyond public and private. So I think that's a transformative and a way of emerging ways forward. So getting outside that deadlock of public or private. It also for me brings in the idea of reciprocity and that is that we are embedded in these systems be they social or ecological but that there is a sort of a greater reciprocal of dependency reciprocity of give and take of Commons which again, property doesn't quite do and nature doesn't quite do it. Commons has a level of participation and a level of intimacy and responsibility that I think other forms of stewardship just don't quite hold up. And lastly, I think Commons can include an awareness around intergenerational equity. Sorry, I fell off the other way. Not just this generation, so our water and we need water for today and this generation but Commons really brings into the question our ancestry and future generations of again what are we leaving behind? How are we becoming a good ancestor? What kind of a guardian are we? And so really thinking about ourselves is more than just again those identity categories I mentioned earlier but also getting outside of this short one generation timeframe which not only do our political systems only work in four year cycles but we only work in a certain usually sort of egocentric cycle. And so looking at the water cycle as the sort of timeframe, it takes over 300 years for all of the water in the Great Lakes to theoretically flush completely through the system. And so I think that Commons challenges us to think about what are we leaving behind and what have we inherited much more closely than other forms of environmental management or social discourses or let's say management frameworks usually allow for it. So those are some of my thoughts on the word Commons and Common Ink that I have found useful or productive or having to sort of figure this out as we go because I never studied Commons in school even though I was practicing Common Ink in so many different ways. And again, I do think this is really a largely a product of recovery, not so much of an invention. And so it's really just thinking about those microwaves in which we are Common Ink and how can we sort of scale that up and then recognizing some of those larger values of water as life that it's tapping into these ideas that have always sort of been there but have been drowned out by advertising and been drowned out by nationalistic ideas around our water. And so I find it a very useful and emergent sort of discourse around Commons even though it does have some ways in which it can be misinterpreted or even it should be made suspicious of when not used properly. Love that. Not properly, but using ways in which again aren't sensitive to settler colonialism. And everything you've said can take me off in like a half hour worth of conversation. Like you hit like 20 different wonderful launch points but I just want to go quiet for a second to find out everybody else on the call. Where would you like to dive into these issues to play a little bit on the water metaphor? Everybody else? Jermaine, David? I was curious, Paul, in our interactions this week and we were talking about belonging that you had hyphenated the word instead of belonging it was be hyphen longing. Can you share your reason for doing that? Sure, I'm also a cultural studies person so I'm always interested in language and deconstructing ideas. And so I think part of this recovery is a longing. Is a longing for connection, a longing for community, a longing for a different world. And so I think being in that state of longing is one that again is outside of fighting against this issue, us and them. It's really an affirmation that not knowing the full picture but coming from a sense of desire and a sense of belonging is cuts across so many other divisions. And so I think it's a human trait that is you could say probably squashed by discourses of control, of happiness and of never having enough. And so yeah, I just think the idea of desire and longing for place. I mean another part of this is a lot of stuff around commons is the social commons be it online digital commons or social students or public education. I think what makes some of this work unique is it's very land-based, it's a watershed base. And that was a saying or an elder I heard when talking about environmental ethics and his line was live as if you're gonna be living here for a long time. Live as if you're not gonna be going somewhere else. And so I think that sort of staying put and that sense of belonging to place can go a long way when we think about that again the idea of guardianship and being a good ancestor. If we consider that whatever we put down the drain or whatever we put in the air or whatever we put down to the trash we are still gonna have to live with and we are still belonging to that regardless if it's out of our periphery. And so I think that sense of place-based belonging is also a positive environmental ethic that again goes beyond reducing waste goes beyond mitigating harm or it goes beyond again so the technological fixes around decarbonization or water quality technologies. It's really again it's a kinship based approach not only to a social kinship but an ecological one as well. And so I think it's a powerful, for me it works it motivates me for the work, it motivates others. And I think it not only does it fit well within an indigenous worldview it's also something drastically lacking from individualized society which we feel like we could go anywhere do anything be with anyone at any given time. This idea of belonging to a particular place yeah it just helps reconnect. I love that. Paul my own journey to the similar sets of issues you just presented starts roughly with the word consumer 20 years ago where I realized I didn't like the word at the time I was a tech industry analyst and partly consumerism hijacked our desires. It basically depends on manipulating our desires so we will consume more because as good consumers our job is to buy a lot of shit and not worry so much about where it goes and what happens to it and it consumerism sort of played out requires us to not be mindful of that comments and yet the funny thing is that when we consume a lot of stuff and acts as good consumers we end up longing for a sense of community a sense of connectedness all the kinds of things that are snipped away when the focus is really individualism. So that's a little piece of my narrative for how we got to this spot. One of the things I found really interesting is that on the far right they're achieving a sense of belonging by being outsiders and undermining the status quo and there's sort of this insurrectionist feeling that causes bonding, teamwork, camaraderie, what have you around destructionism let's call it nor nihilism of some certain sort where it's like screw it the system's broken we don't like how the system works and I think we all could have a really interesting critique of the system and why it's broken but there's a bunch of people sort of on the opposite side of the issue and I don't know if opposite's the right word there who are bonding and finding a sense of connectedness that's very different from the kind of thing we're talking about. So I love your emphasis on not just mitigating harm but rather just doing the positive things that need to be done I was awakened a lot by like the books 1491 and 1493 by Charles Mann where in 1491 he says look two thirds of the land mass of North and South America were under active human management before Columbus hits land it just doesn't look like picket fences and monocrops it looks like forest gardens it looks like controlled prairie burns it looks like living with the land beautifully another book that just that I read more recently that really affected me was is Against the Grain by James Scott who is brilliant on this if you haven't read any James Scott I highly recommend him and he's basically undermining this idea that civilization coincides with the domestication of grains and what's a good thing for us he basically it's like no, no, no we resisted civilization of that kind for a long time so I think what's interesting about this very moment that we're in is that we're duking this out like the issues that we're talking about here we're going deeper than your average conversation certainly deeper than the news media gets to go but this is a live conversation in the moment and we have access to media where the marginal cost of publishing ideas and holding this conversation has fallen to zero and where notions like commoning can get some traction and some air so I'm wondering what are the points of leverage that you're most excited about in this messy mix like where are you putting your energy these days to really, to maybe, and I'm assuming to cause the most positive change Hey Paul, I would love to hear about the results and this would be new to me too of your currency project last year and how the circulation of the currency contributed to the commoning Yeah, I will a couple, yeah I mean, we've done several projects usually sort of prototypes things or again, we have limited financial capacity but as ways to animate that commoning and yeah, we are interested in transformative change there are lots of groups working on a water justice or water governance that make a difference but they are working usually against or within the system we really as commons is working with those groups but we feel like we have the privilege of operating in the space also of trying to work beyond the current system and so what is that current system? My background also as well was in sort of critiquing consumer culture I sort of grew up in the 90s with adbusters and this I think with some of my ideas and commons are influenced by that I didn't even have a language of commons I wish I did, I just knew what I was against I was against consumerism I didn't really have the language for what would be its replacement the, but I think years later really as commons has given me the opportunity to practice some of these theories and one of them is around value and so a year and a bit ago we got a small seed branch from Cosmos Journal to think about value and think about exchange and think about money that had to do with the watershed and so we printed 5,000 notes not calling them bills, but notes that were all of the same value each had their own unique share number on them and we encourage people to give them away as a please or a thank you here I was tapping into the language of nonviolent communication language that all human communication can be reduced according to Marshall Rosenberg down to a please or a thank you and so thinking about the sort of supply and demand side of thank you and please using these notes as a way to exchange acknowledgments between people in the Great Lakes so if you had taken some form of action to protect the Great Lakes or protect water you would be getting one of these notes as a thank you and if you wanted somebody to take an action in any sort of way again the user defines, the giver defines the value not me or really comments if I would like you to engage in some kind of action then my exchange would be based on a please and so we distributed 5,000 of those notes across the Great Lakes I'm still in the process of writing it up I got distracted from other prototype projects but we literally, this is so many online engagement tactics these days we just mailed stuff out so we mailed several hundred packages out with 10 notes in each with instructions on how to use them and to our charter supporters and also various events that we were at so these were in some ways really it's common calling cards but also a way for us to start thinking about well what is money based on and what is value based on because it seems like so much of the industrial non-profit model is from foundations or from tax bases that have gathered that money through exploitation and extraction of wealth and what we're working with in the environmental movement are crumbs the only way we're gonna get more money for charity is to dig up more to burn more, to rob more and so if money, I'm also a fan of Charles Eisenstein's work around sacred economics if money really is one of those things that does not rot that basically enables greed and enables limitless accumulation for no reason other than more accumulation then what kind of incentives or what kinds of tools are we making to sort of balance that or to question that and so having a currency of care so care being the economy the economy is based on care not on a wage or not based on hours you may be familiar with other community currency projects that are based on hours or some sort of dollar equivalent this exchange value is based on just caring for water and the giver determining that value and ultimately connecting that care back to the waters with the understanding that if we take care of the waters then we will be wealthy for as long as forever and that is the water is the reason why we're here and the water is not only the source of all of life but also the economy as well and so we had lots of feedback on that we had a webinar I presented the findings, some findings at an ecological economics conference this past year in Montreal and there's information about it on our website and we've even got some stories on our commons map which is a sort of collaborative storytelling map I mentioned earlier where people could put in like who they gave it to and why on a map of the Great Lakes and so that was a form of not only engagement in Great Lakes but also again a transformational way of engaging in these questions around value and economics and environmental responsibility in something that people can actually do face to face with something material and also feeling like you're part of a larger project so that's an outline of some of the intentions of that currency of care project as another expression of again creating a sense of belonging around the Great Lakes regardless of your other kind of identities And they expired Oh yeah, yeah, yeah so you're picking up on that idea that money doesn't rot where everything else in nature does rot this idea of that at the end of the year this could have been a design flaw as well, who knows but was that these notes would all so-called expire by the end of the year as a way of encouraging people to use them money is only money should only be as useful as it is when it's exchanged not just having value sitting on the shelf as we really wanted to encourage people to use these notes that their value is through their use not through their simple accumulation which is also again the opposite of what our current economy is like and so we literally put an expiration date on this as a way to sort of prototype this project to see how it went and then to consider how we would reboot it for another round later so yeah, the end of the year 2017 officially you can't use them anymore but I do have a couple left if anybody wants I can mail you some as a memento two of us just typed into the chat about demerge currencies which have basically negative interest rates so they don't die at one moment but they actually depreciate over time and you can set how much in order to encourage people to put them into use I remember years ago I had a consulting engagement in Buenos Aires, Argentina when they were undergoing pretty close to hyperinflation and I was getting a per diem of X thousand pesos every 10 days or so and I got mine once before a five day holiday and I was like, oh crap I kind of need to spend a lot of this right now or it's not going to be worth very much after five days of not, you know everything kind of being shut it was kind of, it was a frightening realization that that was happening and that was real world money water is a weird asset in that it's at least in Western society completely undervalued and also we don't necessarily want to put a dollar value on it that we have made water artificially cheap through large hydro projects and it could be like desert, for example it's a bit of a mind blower about the economics of water and how stupid that is and how we were racist to create ever less economical projects to get farmers and others that really kind of warped a lot of things also our appreciation of water seems kind of low a friend of mine took me on a tour of Beijing once long ago her name is Betsy Damon she's the keeper of the waters and she's had several projects in the US but she created a park on a river on a city of China I don't remember which city anymore it wasn't one of the major ones we know and it was a fish shaped park where water came off the river into the mouth of the fish went through settlement aeration kind of a whole series of natural processes to clean the water in a way that you could walk on top of because there were stones and platforms and whatever you could see what was happening and then the tail of the fish basically put the water back into the river cleaner it was a beautifully thought of project and I have no idea if it's still going but how water is like insanely complicated that there's the battle over water rights in Bolivia the revolution will not be televised is a good documentary about that how did water get so complicated? no idea it is there's a horrible messy subject yeah I mean for me I love to hear from the group but I mean I think water is a pretty good teacher I think we've spent a long time trying to learn about water and I think it's going to be time that we learned from water and I think water can show us really how to be together it can really show us how to cooperate and how to how all these things are interconnected water does a pretty good job of balancing those things out and so I'm I you know these are complex systems and there's lots I deal mostly with the water ethics and of it as you can tell not so much with the water management but I think you know to go we did another project called water friendship that was looking at indicators relational indicators rather than looking at water quality indicators we were looking at the question like what is our how good is our relationship with what we're doing and from that we used so much of Anna Macy's work around change that's where I got the holding action harm reduction language from shocks about starting you know creating new social institutions but without the third piece to that sort of TP of of change we got to shift the consciousness and so I think you know there's lots of consciousness shifting movements out there and I and you know not all of them are the same or coming from the same political place but I think part of the work we're doing is reexamining what is the economy what is the nation states what is where are we going with this and again we've learned all we can about water and maybe there's some some things to learn from water because the the management of it is I think for me my background is once we get the ethics straight then the management becomes much simpler but if we're if we're constantly trying to manage something out of the utility or as a resource or as an asset we're going to just get highly highly more highly complex systems to manage it and most likely manage it poorly so we are building in these what's the difference you know the sort of the the safe we rather than doing safe fails we're doing fail safes and I think we are seeing those complex systems why doesn't the ass as we see Lake Erie dying as we see pipelines approved every day you know the state of Michigan they just approved another well for Nestle the same time that people are getting their water shut off in Detroit and people are being asked people are forced to pay for poisoned water in Flint we just line three get approved in Wisconsin against all common sense and back to the Michigan they had 80,000 people submit declarations against that Nestle application and it was still approved and so we're we're seeing these these so-called democratic or the civil society processes break down fail all the logic around keeping stuff in the ground and who is the government actually working for we could see that completely falling apart no one because we could pick one of a thousand examples and so I think it's that new story that we are all sort of trying to understand we're in that space between stories perhaps and I think if we get the ethic right and we get the relationships right we can figure out the rights part but I think you know we've we've we've had 200 years of water rights and sort of consumer culture and we're just starting to hear more and more again thanks to our indigenous leaders but water responsibilities and we're talking about a shift here and I think water is part of it and water for me is as a leading part of that but it's certainly interconnected with all the other social movements that we are all aware of and care about love that um Dave Whitzel's been hip deep maybe nostril deep in the regenerative economy and a lot of issues around this and I think you were about to jump in so I'm preempting your job go for it ah well actually I guess I have two questions because one is I'd love to just go back one step around the currency I know you said you were writing it up but I'd be curious if you got any kind of like what are you gonna write I mean what how did it work what kind of reaction did you get from folks with the with the gift currency yeah we got a lot we got a real mixed bag we got people who a few a few people who really got it I did my best to explain it as best that I could but again I was influenced by a variety of sources and I think most people don't think about money they don't think about the economy even though they make care about water and so our audience is people who care about water but many of them in terms of economics they don't really know and so we a lot of confusion a lot of having to explain and really sort of try to in the one I keep it simple but the please or thank you but on the other hand it is rather different and people like well wait I you know how does this work again like I just give it somebody and so it was it was a it was an intervention as much as anything it was a way of of disrupting and starting hopefully starting a conversation so I think the the success or the the outcome was partially the stories we got on the map and that I heard through email or or you know through the conference I went to but I think a lot of it won't be measured in terms of people's confusion and people's having to sort of think about I don't know what to do with this I do think there is some transformative juice to confusion to disruption to even not knowing but wanting to understand wanting to learn wanting to get these things in the mail wanting to participate even though there was maybe some confusion around how does this work and why are we doing this exactly and so as you could as I explained like there are several layers to that that was questioning value and exchange and even like expiration dates but that was that was the prototype and so we just did it for for eight months and you know the there's more information on our website about that and it was again trying to blend together various other critiques and examples of currency projects the best way I I could figure out how much of that answers your question and I empathize because I know like Jerry's had you know Art Brock come and talk with us a couple of times and and I get like a 20% of what it is he's explaining it's like the currency stuff is just totally baffling to so and it's you know it's funny to think that I don't know somehow Calry Shell's worked at one point I don't understand why well partly partly early currencies worked around intangibles or or incommensurate things like Graber says and you know it was like you buy a bride and it's like you know how many how many Calry Shells is a bride worth well about this many so so it was it was kind of the a different conversation it wasn't it wasn't pricing in markets like we have well I was just to add in to the mind there was also an article a report that was edited by David Bollier who writes about comments he's written a few books and he was part of a conversation about two years ago that was written up and it was looking at care and and trying to form an economy around around the the service of care and the expression of care and there was about 15 different you know thought leaders and I think that also influenced my my thinking around care being a form of value that is again is is infinite and yet also really needed right now because right now we have a lot we have money not going to where it's needed I mean a lot of need with no with without any resources financial resources to get that care animated and so I think that report with quite hosted by David Bollier influence his idea of care as a as a as a value as an as an exchange value his work is pretty central in this area he's done he's done lots of stuff Dave did you want to go deeper into other issues well you know I was just going to ask you like about the the water examples you use you know Detroit and Flint and and and I'd love to tease that out because I kind of I call with some of this stuff and I but I don't have the data it seems to seems me water is one of the areas at least in the U.S. where we have made dramatic improvements over the last third year 40 years I mean I don't and I don't know the status of Yuri but I don't think it catches on fire you know it's not the Ohio game and I saw you know the recent report that that Chesapeake has actually improved over the last a couple of years fine it is it I mean how do we kind of realistically understand the status that I mean Flint isn't a water problem it's a pipe problem right well both I mean the water the river that I took the water out of was polluted so I thought water I thought river wasn't as polluted where it was more polluted than than Lake Huron where the water was coming from before so there was a source issue there source water but it's it it was also mismanagement it was also it was also old pipes yep yes I'm just there seems to be a lot of things that we activists talk about and then you know the neoliberals I guess I'm probably a neoliberal it's a little point and say look you know it's not it's not as bad as it was 40 years ago we've had dramatic improvement using some of yeah but my thing is okay but this is the thing sorry to cut you off but I just go passionate about this stuff so much yes I've heard that one oh it's better than was in the 70s in the 70s nobody even came down here this was all industry you know now it's people are kayaking you know in Cleveland and all the rest of it but why we pick that as our why we pick 40 years and why why not pick 100 years as our as our comparison and and we're still dealing with the legacies of all those brown fields and toxic hot spots there's a lot of cancer clusters that aren't being reported and again the most people's water literacy my own self included that if we think the water is clear it's somehow less polluted however that's just that's the zebra muscles eating all of the eating all the stuff in it you know all of the all the biological matter and so there's a lot of persistent toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes right now more so than there ever has been because it doesn't go anywhere have certain things like lead or you know those things being reduced for sure they have those different can actually test for for proprietary reasons that no one's tracking like we're doing in a massive experiment on ourselves and I'm not just talking about you know fluoridation here we're talking about a massive experiment which chemicals didn't exist in the 70s and so the microplastics just being the latest example in which we are putting things out into the environment without any sort of precautionary principle of having to prove that we can figure out how to deal with these things before they hit the market so now after 10 years of having microplastics in our cosmetics and things in the Great Lakes we're slowly getting rid of them this year 2018 in Canada and the States but these things are going to be around for another generation and so you know and so the the water quality debate can be can be cherry picked to find examples of greater fish stocks here or cleaner water than in the 70s but that's using the sort of one of the historical lows and it's also forgetting about the thousands of chemicals which don't show up as easily or that we don't even test for I mean I'm right here by a beach in Toronto and they test for one the beaches here and probably where you are too they test for one thing once a day and that's E. coli for public health and why is that right there's a lot of reasons and so we are not even paying attention to the host of other things that are showing up in our bodies and as we have one of our resources on our toolkit is looking at water bodies and plastics so much of the micro plastics issue is about consumerism and about cosmetics and about it being in the water and maybe if we're at best it's about it showing up in fish but it's not talking about what our resource tried to do was thinking about ourselves our bodies as water bodies and how issues of reproductive justice are part of this conversation around petrochemicals in the environment and we have a community near Sarnia on the on the Detroit River which they have a male-female birth ratio of two to one and so they are surrounded by petrochemical industries producing plastic and many other sort of things never mind the micro plastics and so we're thinking about polluting water with petrochemical and hormone disrupting substances depending on where you go and the whole you know the maps of environmental justice will show that these can the most directly impacted communities are marginalized communities and we're not just talking about water bodies and lakes and aquifers we're talking about for the most part women's bodies being polluted in which their own breast milk couldn't be sold on the shelf because of its contamination and so that may be better than the 70s for some that certainly isn't a marker for me on where where we're going as a society when people's bodies are too polluted to to feed the young well and I don't want to my point is not that there are no problems my point is that the reason you choose the 70s is because the trend has been a trend of improvement since the 70s so if you were to to graph it you would see it collapsing and you would see it improving now you can argue that the improvements not fast enough I think but I guess the problem I have is with uh I feel like we do ourselves a disservice when we don't acknowledge kind of progress and we don't acknowledge the fact that there are people who have been working on this issue that there's you know a grand conspiracy to destroy the world and and you know we I think we I don't know it just feels to me you know we're not looking at the data in some sense you know that's like yeah I would love to look at the best example in the Great Lakes of stewardship or conservation and look and see how see what worked about it and see what that was for the focusing in on and the kinds of resources it took to get that change happening over a generation and there are some examples and then to see how what are all the cascading ways that are undermining that very same that very same action and so you know here we we would need more of a biological science perspective for fishery management or we could look at the issue itself but and or looking at human health sort of graphs but from my experience after six years of Great Lakes stuff directly the number of issues and the the complex systems including climate change and fossil fuel transportation consumer culture waste and again crumbling so the crumbling infrastructure the infrastructure gap is in the trillions United States and so I think Flint in Detroit or just tip of the iceberg I mean Milwaukee's not too far behind I mean we have we have a water infrastructure that is failing and it's polluting and that was put in and that we there is no political or financial will beyond privatization to upgrade those systems and so my my thing is like okay so if you have clean water so Toronto or behind me whenever it rains heavily here in Toronto we get millions of leaders of raw sewage going into Lake Ontario this is one of the richest countries one of the richest cities and we can't afford to put in basic technology that you know wasn't around or it wasn't thought about a hundred years ago we're not doing it we're not doing it because we don't know we're just not doing it because there's not enough there's not enough outrage the norm is that that's just you know that's just what's going to happen and so that's only going to get worse with climate change and with more austerity across the world where is the those trillions of dollars of waterworks money going to come from and unless there is a thorough publicly supported a long-term vision I can tell you it's going to be it's going to be private corporations who are going to be selling water just like they're selling Coca-Cola or beer and we've seen how that results in terms of equity and inequity when it comes to water as a human right and so I don't see I mean so water quality aside the people in Detroit are right next to the largest fresh water system in the world yet they cannot access it so even if what even if we were to get the Great Lakes were to be 100% purely drinkable you could just go take a teacup and drink the Great Lakes even if that were true I wish I wish it was we are moving into a system in which the water work systems that surround the Great Lakes will shut off the taps for people to be able to access water as a human right so the comments part also dovetails into obviously water privatization as well as the sort of water quality aspects the messy issue was merely foreshadowing kind of the later parts of our conversation around the Great Lakes what are the hot spots of good activity of communities that are actually engaged I assume there's multiple because it's a really large area especially if you go all the way out the headwaters near the Atlantic near Nova Scotia and all that it's a very large water system where are can you just tell us share a couple stories of groups that are doing great work somewhere in the broad territory yeah wonderful I mean I don't have I'm sorry I don't have too much hope about the water itself but I have lots of hope about the people who are working for that sense of belonging and guardianship I mean I could I could go on all day but I'll mention a couple very quickly there are the Anishinaabe water walkers sacred water walkers who have traveled and walked part of the Great Lakes here we're talking about a ceremony indigenous women-led ceremony that is really living the phrase water is life water is sacred they're doing this for about 15 years and wherever they go they raise awareness around that interconnectedness that idea of responsibility I spoke of earlier and as you're on these walks and they're open to everyone by being with the water for the hour for that day or for that week one does gain a closer connection sense of responsibility and belonging to that waterway so sacred water walkers are doing amazing work that's connecting people across place and culture there's a group called Milwaukee Water Commons which at a at a city level I would love to see mirrored in every every city in the world in which they have been trying to connect water walkers with water workers thinking about intergenerational ways of giving kids and people and multicultural society involve issues of bald water water recreation water decision making and getting people having sort of art of hosting conversations where people are actually having their own forums designing the kind of water futures people would like to see versus leading it into the hands of lawyers and engineers and scientists only and so really sort of trying to democratize the idea of water governance I would point to and Milwaukee Water Commons also does bring in the sort of the arts and culture into that as well so it's a much richer form of of human communication when it comes to why this issue is important often if the issue is presented as an issue of parts per million or around legal rights your likelihood of getting people involved is pretty low most people involved it's pretty low you know in Detroit I you know there's an amazing host of groups I was just in Detroit three weeks ago and you know there's having they're having weekly rallies they are connecting across they are connecting with issues of poverty issues of human rights issues of urbanization and urban renewal to find solutions to these problems because the politicians are just not doing it at all we've seen people in Windsor physically bring clean tap water over to Detroit organized a couple of years ago with these with these shutoffs so here we're seeing sort of a cross cross border solidarity work and so those are three examples like I could go on all day but I'm seeing a lot of people that's kind of the focus of my work actually is supporting and integrating and connecting the various types of kinship that are going on to really focus in on that water relationship which is the core of that commenting and the sort of Great Lakes belonging work to begin with and because whatever the local issue is that of contamination or shutoff that's the one thing that everyone can do so those are some examples do you find that these convenings are trans or cross political or are they mostly progressives showing up with you know indigenous Americans or like what's what's the mix is this an issue that lots and lots of people are happy to engage in across the spectrum the reach difference so I would say though the sacred water walks are women's women centered usually women over 50 and usually sort of 50-50 native non-native women and so you wouldn't see that kind of crowd at a bicycle rights kind of rally in my opinion Detroit it's an inner city mostly racialized mostly poor sort of civil rights struggle for the most part in terms of who shows up for that and Milwaukee water commons I would say is representative of Milwaukee itself I can't say the same is true for Toronto based water activism Toronto based water activism is very white even though we're half the city is of color and it's the Toronto water activism however it does great work is mostly focused on recreational water issues and not so much because of a political context too not so much water privatization water access in terms of the water inequities partially because those inequities aren't as dire as they are in Detroit but partially that's also the focus of the leaders of those groups who themselves are also more privileged white people and so I would say my three examples are those random three examples compared to reclaimed the streets party or I mean I'm not sure what we're comparing it to but to use a bicycle rights sort of generalization I would say it's pretty diverse and not necessarily your average what do we want whatever fight back stand up whatever it's not that kind of thing I mean sacred water walks are explicitly not a political rally they are not a protest they are their ceremony and so I think that for me already speaks volumes around the kind of consciousness the kind of ethic the kind of belonging that we're sort of working toward in many ways that it's this is not just about fighting back which needs to be done I mean Detroit is very much the fighting back sort of thing and so part of the work I do is working with groups that are doing again the working within against and beyond work and so it's different people in different ones but I would say a healthy a healthy diversity of of society involved with these things that are important to them yeah thank you Mark for me do you have any questions for Paul do you want to anything good I could I could keep talking about water for a really long time unfortunately and but I'm very aware that you're standing under scaffolding near a ferry and you've been really generous with your time is there anything that we can answer for you or is there some way we can be helpful to you maybe just a quick line on what you guys need about on a regular basis and I'd like yeah I'd love to um I mean it was maybe it was in the notes that Todd I would just love to know a bit more on the sort of on what brings this group together and then I would may have a question I would love to ask a question if I knew a bit more context cool um so uh the relationship economy expedition is Rex and the relationship economy is an idea that showed up in my head 1012 something like that years ago when I started realizing that consumer mass market capitalism had eaten our brains and our lifestyles and what we think of ourselves that basically ate everything and that there were lots and lots of groups around the world that were rediscovering trust relationships society community connectedness all the kinds of things that used to matter long ago sometimes naively rediscovering them sometimes like you know actually saying hey wait we have to go back to these principles and most of these movements don't know about each other so you know open source software doesn't know much about traffic calming doesn't know much about uh you know open democracy or or other sorts of things and so uh rex is basically it's kind of like a mastermind group or a salon-like affair where change agents in lots of different walks of life with many different purposes and sometimes with cats come together and we talk about what these principles mean who's applying them what can we learn from them how do we apply them in our own spheres of activity how do we accelerate this shift into a relationship economy and for me personally I discovered recently that so much of this is really about trust that you know a year ago if you had asked me what I did you know so Jerry what do you do at a cocktail party I'd be like oh I'm a guide to the relationship economy which mostly provokes the kind of response like you know a dog with a cock deer like I know you said words but I'm not sure what you said and and these days I say like I'm a guide to trust I work on trust not not the not the financial instrument but rather the thing between humans and between humans and companies and countries and all that the thing that seems to be pretty screwed up that some people are working really hard to figure out how to fix so that's kind of the background on it and we I formed Rex in 2010 and then in 2017 kind of turned it inside out a bit more so at this point I'm recruiting more people who are who are examples of the relationship economy at work in the world to come in and join us as fellows for example that sounds awesome it's kind of cool is yeah I mean works all right I mean and when you use the word economy you don't it's you mean like just the exchange of trust so actually when I say relationship economy when I named it that it was intentionally an oxymoron or some kind of weird mishmash because you don't buy and sell actual relationships in an economy right so maybe it's gift exchange maybe it's something else but the name was meant to open up that can of worms that there you go you're clearly aware of yeah and I I should get off the phone here soon and later it is Friday afternoon and but I but I I guess I'd love to hear from you or anybody else around the one thread around place that I feel like that relationship to place what are some other examples where you see it alive and well or at least emerging because I love and support the other examples you used as well the comments map actually uses open source software called Ushahidi crisis mapping software and so the comments of software and so but I'm really curious on anybody else's thoughts on on the relationship to place and how how we are nurturing that economy I'm happy to jump in with a couple ideas and then if anybody else wants to riff on it that'd be great one of my kind of early mentors was a professor at Penn named Russell Acoff who was one of the inventions of systems thinking and he did a lot of work in West Philly with what became known as a young great society and they did a lot of good for West Philly which is not the not the best place on earth then it turned out that when those people sort of graduated on and moved out of town and went into their own things and each of you headed to some place that West Philly went back downhill so that that raised an early question for me about do you are you developing people or place and how does that work the second thought is mobility is what's really screwed this up because up until around 1850 or whatever most people didn't move more than three kilometers from home their whole lives like we were local we were really local and transportation you know the cars trains you know planes all that kind of stuff inexpensive transportation shifted that dramatically now a bunch of us move around all the time and and then somewhere in the last 30 years corporations stopped thinking the place mattered and they started thinking that only economics mattered so they felt less responsibility for people or place and unfortunately they have a really huge impact on place because when when a factory that's employed a third of the town moves out of town or shuts down entirely the town is devastated and we've just we've just seen that all you know all around the U.S. and in different ways so and then across all of that is the background radiation of this word consumer and the consumerization of society that happened for the last 50 to 100 years which has separated us actively from a sense of place and a sense of community really foregrounding the individual and our own happiness and fulfillment through the acquisition of stuff so that that mix is like a vile brew for thinking about our relationship or our responsibility to place and to one another which is the thing that I think is super simple that is how society used to be and what I love is hearing about any kind of movement like yours that is actually foregrounding this and saying hey this is actually important and it ain't that hard and here's some ways to experience it and here are some groups that are doing it and come on in the water's fine right anybody else want to take a swing at the notion of place I mean the other I don't I think I'm not sure it's exactly the same thing you mean but in a lot of the stuff that I've been looking at recently it's you've been with a landscape focused and then you know you actually have a multitude of issues you'd like to deal with so it's you know water and food and you know healthy kids and good education in there but but we try to deal with them in a piecemeal way and it you know you fix want to break another kind of so the the solution has been a little bit to try to take that whole list of a landscape based perspective and say look we're going to intervene in a systemic way in this landscape and I don't know I found it's been really helpful to kind of think critically about the kind of opportunities for improvement by having that geographic focus so and I think it is a place and I don't really understand kind of the you know the importance of you know I think the defined ownership of the place and the defining of the place must be really critical too but but for me it's been more of this analytic level and then you know I just take a link to the to the Lowe's Plateau Regeneration effort is you know kind of a fun example of you know something that's been happening in a place where they've done kind of remarkable transformations of the land this is the Lowe's Plateau in China that's the size of Belgium basically they got reclaimed in many ways and ironically a World Bank project right yeah and Dave what you just said rang for me you know in a curious way which is there are groups that think that if we just focus on soil health soil fertility everything else good kind of tumbles out of that if we pay attention to soil so it's the opposite of let's mind all the different systems in the landscape and I don't know which which which way I lean but but I know that like focusing on so like if you ask Joel Salaton the farmer in West Virginia what he does he says I raise grass and it turns out that he sells beef and chickens and what not off his farm but but if you know I raise grass because what he's what he's paying attention to is how does the grass get healthier after every cycle of animals feeding off it kind of thing so this is all about what do you pay attention to and what I think also what is simple enough that it gets people's imagination so that they get involved I think that's a huge thing here because because ecology economy pollutants all that stuff it's a hyper object it's a wicked problem it's a thing too big to grasp and too big to feel like we can have an effect on it so things like hey you know do you have healthy soil or not do you even know what healthy soil smells like that's a very palpable physical thing that can connect people and it's you know what once you've once you've felt healthy soil and then you go back and see what yours is doing and then start to fix that's a very direct thing you can do Mark you've got lots of exposure to lots of these things I'd love to just be able to monitor all the different you've put a couple things in our chat but what are you thinking well I think locality or localism is really important and in some ways it seems to be the you know one of the most promising ways forward so to speak and I think another line of thought I've had is that it's not just in terms of economy and tribal on that aspect but even in terms of our basic sanity there's some kind of relationship we have as human beings to the land and to you know the whole biology in that which I think we're just beginning to discover how important that is for us and I think we're discovered maybe negatively through the counter example of you know what our tool systems you know like Facebook and so on are doing to our state of mind so so that's kind of one line of thought around there but I what I think the main one is kind of working locally there was this line of children's stories called the dynautopia series which talked about notion of habitat partners where you know this was this kind of fantasy where there were dinosaurs and people but the idea was that you had a partnership of a person and a dinosaur and they would take care of a local region and I love that idea that you have this kind of sense of responsibility and it's interspecies which I think we've lost in a very real way and I think going forward would be pretty significant so that's cool that's interesting that would be a good one a good series to send to evangelical communities since they seem to think that humans and dinosaurs coexisted what the heck let's see if we can harness that energy any closing thoughts otherwise I'll pass the floor back to Paul and back to Todd just one something really quick just what what Mark was saying is reminded me of this had a conversation with science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson a couple years ago and we were talking about the idea of colonizing other planets and Stan Robinson is best known for his Mars trilogy red Mars green Mars blue Mars which is all about colonizing Mars obviously and he was arguing kind of persuasively I think that it's going to be very difficult for humans to live on other worlds not because of radiation or anything like that but because of microbes that we are intimately tied to not just to our gut microbes but to the soil microbes our bugosphere to the yeah well microbiome all around us and moving to some place with no microbiome to speak of is going to be very very difficult so when we when we decide to live elsewhere because we you know we will at some point if we make it we're not just talking about importing our foodstuffs importing our technologies we have to import our land we have to to have to take our place with us that's very cool it's like in 1493 man talks about how the Americas had no earthworms before Columbus so the understory was completely different in the Americas than in Europe and so in the ballast because you pile dirt in the bottom of ships dirt and rocks to make ballast in that ballast of some ships that break up on the shore are earthworms and boom all of a sudden they spread across the Americas and they eat the leaves and mulch the leaves differently than it than happened before and change the structure of the forests in America etc etc etc it's like holy crap who thought of that like how that happened so so all this stuff happens all the time so what's going to happen when we inhabit other planets there's a slide I've been using in my last couple of speeches you'll see it briefly if you look at the personal democracy form talk I did where I'm like some people just want to get us off this rock I'm thinking here of Bezos and Musk et al who have a lot of funds and are doing private space travel and what I say is unless we figure out this trust thing you do not want to be on the first thousand spaceships off this rock and there I point to Aurora which is one of Robinson's books and also Seven Eves and there's a bunch of other good you know dystopian sci-fi on what happens to you know to those travelers never mind looking at the biosphere or the Mauna Kea camp experiment or a bunch of other fail the tents to get just a small group of people to survive for a while in some kind of isolation so that's another piece of it Paul and Todd the last word goes to you guys I defer to the Canuck okay well I'm on my phone here and so I would love if somebody could save the chat and I would love to get an email of that I know because I missed out on seeing those and also I there's probably some good resources for me to take a look at that's easy to do consider that done if you've got any other things added before we sign off today please the dinosaur things sounded really interesting that sort of workshop like the idea so yeah just wanted to I mean I don't really know anybody here but Todd but you guys sound like fascinating group and this whole I never heard the phrase religious economy before and so thank you for all the introductions and your attention and your questions and did the best I could that's what I do every day I just do the best I can is what I got and yeah I think you know here we are ourselves staying an hour and a half on some religious economy right here so I just wanted to say very privileged to feel invited here today and share what I share what I do with you and we share everybody well and until next time I guess thank you very much we really appreciate your time Todd thank you very much for for connecting us with Paul this has been super interesting and useful and we will see where it goes thanks so much Paul really appreciate all your work thanks everybody thank you everyone okay