"Eating beef without care for its effects on the environment in [North America] in 2025 is functionally climate denialism." (source)

I've long been fascinated with the tension that can exist between someone's belief or ideology and their actions. You could call it hypocrisy but I don't think that's exactly right. Hypocrisy is more explicit, saying you believe something that you actually don't. This is more subtle, closer to cognitive dissonance. Perhaps even bordering on ignorance. People can absolutely believe, whole-heartedly, in something and yet act in ways that entirely undermine those beliefs. Most often I think this is because individual actions are not seen as a part of a larger whole. They are framed in a self-contained vacuum and rarely given any deeper consideration.

For example, I could hold a belief that sharing what I have with someone who is in need is the right thing to do. Practically, if I ordered a whole pizza and ate that pizza in front of my kids who have had nothing to eat, that would be a clear contradiction and I think most people would choose to share. However, the systems have been setup so as to cut us off from seeing how our individual patterns of consumption are depriving others of having their fair share. Plus we ourselves are often geographically removed from those who have less than us so it's not as blatant. Add in all our notions of hard work and deservedness and that tension gap just keeps getting wider and more murky.

I guess my point is that there are a lot of different shades in this and each one is a different opportunity for learning and self-reflection. We all contain these tensions within us and the only way forward is to be open to learning more about how our own lives may contain functional denial of some the beliefs we hold and a willingness to change once we know.

Reading an article this morning that talks about how turning the struggle for safe streets into a culture war is a lose-lose situation. The author's point is that you won't get anywhere by demonizing the large majority of people who drive. He instead argues that the goal should be drawing the circle of empathy big enough for as many people as possible.

"Every parent has fear that their teenage kids won't make it home alive. Every parent fears putting their baby into the car seat in the back of the car. Everyone with elderly parents fears finding out that they have been involved in some kind of traumatic crash while behind the wheel...

Everyone wants the street in front of their own home to be safe. Start with that. Here are all the ways your street is designed to kill people. When you show people, they get it—and they get their part in it."

I remember reading a similar idea around activism that suggested drawing your 'line of division' in such a way that gives you the most allies as possible. This is something that progressive causes just do not seem to understand, often pushing for full agreement on an issue before collaboration. We need to draw a larger circle.

This seems especially true when dealing with multisolving opportunities in which we are trying to rally multiple issues around a shared solution. Not everyone is going to be aligned on every aspect of all of those issues, rather we must paint a picture of a better future that the most amount of people can agree with. Embracing a new spirit of collaboration across our differences will be the defining value of the coming decades.

I hope.

Reading an article on the role of civil disobedience as a form of activism and why it's not as counterintuitive as the moderates would have you believe. The article cites a social psychologist named Colin Davis, who noted,

"The existence of a radical flank... seems to increase support for more moderate factions of a social movement, by making these factions appear less radical."

This is then backed up with studies done on other social movements, including both the women's movement and the civil rights movement in the twentieth century. The general point seems to be that acts of civil disobedience have a long and necessary history in advancing causes that seem more obvious today.

I think the key takeaway here is a reminder that centrism alone cannot make progressive change. It requires the existence of a more extreme version in order to help shake it out of complacency. So while many — in fact the vast majority — will denounce acts of civil disobedience as damaging the cause or targeting the wrong people, the opposite is actually true.

Going through an interview this morning with Stephanie Ross, the associate professor in McMaster’s School of Labour Studies. In it she makes some interesting comments about the way support for labour unions is the highest it's been in decades. Her point is that strikes are capturing the general mood of people in response to concerns such as inflation.

She also references the pandemic as a significant turning point in this new labour movement.

"The experience of the pandemic has made people really rethink how much they’re willing to sacrifice for jobs and their employers. Workers are much less likely to put up with bad working conditions, and there’s a generational component to that as well."

This seems to square with other things I've been reading over the last little while that suggest seem to suggest our relationship to work is changing significantly. I think there are a lot of factors at play here -- remote work, safe working conditions, the looming threat of AI, to name a few -- but it all adds up to the way the promises of capitalism are falling out from under us and people are becoming increasingly disillusioned to it. As the labour movement increasingly pushes its way into the forefront of these issues, it's important we find ways to build bridges with our other social concerns as well.

"The labour movement is leading conversations about what kind of society we want to have in a very public way, not just in negotiating rooms where nobody can see."

Time to rebuild in a way that works for everyone, not just a few.

Jason Hickel, author of Less Is More, wrote a great article advocating for universal public services as a way forward for a just transition. His underlying point is that when we privatize these essential services and goods, people need more money in order to afford them. This keeps them in jobs creating even more things that puts extra strain on our natural resources. His solution is to ‘decommodify’ these essential goods - to which he includes healthcare, education, housing, transit, nutritious food, energy, water, and communications — and eliminating artificial scarcity.

“Right now it is impossible to take even obvious steps toward climate mitigation (such as scaling down fossil fuel production or other destructive sectors), because people in affected industries would lose access to wages, housing, healthcare, etc. No one should accept such an outcome. With universal services and an emancipatory job guarantee, we can protect against any economic insecurity and guarantee a just transition. There is no necessary contradiction between ecological and social objectives. The two can and must be pursued together."

His ideas are worth engaging with, mainly because we need to take seriously the limits of something like green capitalism as a solution. This is a compelling vision of a society that seeks the welfare of all alongside the welfare of the planet. He ends by suggesting that these demands should be part of a united climate and labour movement.

I agree.