Author Archives: Rosaliene Bacchus

Climate Chaos: “Shifts in Doing”

22 Sunday May 2022

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

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EcoVillage – Ithaca – New York – USA
Photo Credit: EcoVillage Ithaca

This is Part III and final overview of the book, Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, editors Jem Bendell & Rupert Read (UK/USA 2021). Part III explores some of the ‘shifts in doing’ that occur when people anticipate societal collapse. Here are the links to Part I: “Climate Chaos: Humanity’s Predicament” and Part II: Climate Chaos: “Shifts in Being.”

In his article “Leadership and Management in a Context of Deep Adaptation,” British leadership scholar Professor Jonathan Gosling observes that leadership in periods of collapsing social structures requires maturity to tolerate, contain, and transform anxiety in constructive ways. Leadership of adaptation helps us to reconcile with the situation, evaluate the risks, grieve when we suffer loss, weigh our shrinking options, and choose pragmatic and courageous change. Success relies upon collaboration, partnerships, sharing, and organization. Political, media, and business leaders must also play their part in facilitating the policies and strategies to support deep adaptation.

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“Ex(ile)” – Poem by Trinidadian-born Poet Desiree C. Bailey

15 Sunday May 2022

Posted by in Poetry

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Trinidadian-American Poet Desiree C. Bailey
Photo Credit: Wilton Schereka on Poet’s Website

My Poetry Corner May 2022 features the poem “Ex(ile)” from the debut poetry collection What Noise Against the Cane by Desiree C. Bailey that won the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Born in the Caribbean island-nation of Trinidad & Tobago, she was nine years old when she migrated with her family to the USA where she grew up in Queens, New York.

Bailey earned a BA from Georgetown University (Washington DC), an MFA in Fiction from Brown University (Rhode Island), and an MFA in Poetry from New York University. In Fall 2022, she will be the Writer-in-Residence at Clemson University (South Carolina).

In her interview with Corrine Collins for Air Light Magazine in September 2021, Bailey described her poetry collection What Noise Against the Cane as “a praise song to the ocean, Black people, Black women, the Caribbean, and struggles for liberation.” The first half of the collection is a long narrative poem titled “Chant for the Waters and Dirt and Blade,” written from the imagined perspective of a young, enslaved husk of girl orphaned   at the ocean’s distant edge / before ship   before humid choke of hull / before trade winds splintering [her] off into the world’s directions. With dreams of freedom, the girl joins other slaves in their fight for liberation during what became known as the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804): freedom: ruthless siren   hurl and shriek / louder   than a dream.

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Mother’s Day: When all life is sacred

08 Sunday May 2022

Posted by in Human Behavior, Social Injustice

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Pregnant woman and baby die after Russian bombing in Mariupol – Ukraine – March 14, 2022
Photo Credit: AP News

We raise our fists in protest to the heavens and pass laws in defense of life flowering in the womb yet think nothing of sacrificing that life to the gods of war.

Only when all life is sacred will we enjoy peace on Earth.

This Mother’s Day, I pay tribute to mothers worldwide who have fled violence and war-torn zones to save their children.

Mother and children flee war-torn Ukraine
Photo Credit: NDTV
Syrian mother with five children in refugee camp in Iraq
Photo Credit: UNHCR/Andrew McConnell
Mother and children in war-torn Yemen
Photo Credit: Oxfam/Sami M Jassar
Mother with child in war-torn region of Ethiopia
Photo Credit: CNS/Reuters/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah
Somali mother and children arrive in refugee camp in Kenya
Photo Credit: UNICEF/Riccardo Gangale
Mothers from Central America arrive at US/Mexico border
Photo Credit: Time/John Moore
Myanmar Rohingya Muslim Mother & Child in Bangladesh refugee camp
Photo Credit: World Vision

Guest Post: “The State of the Earth 2022” by Pam Lazos

24 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by in Nature and the Environment, United States

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An Inconvenient Truth – Documentary Film
Photo Credit: Green Life Blue Water Blog

In her article “The State of the Earth 2022,” published on her blog Green Life Blue Water, American environment lawyer and author Pam Lazos provides an unsettling critique of where humanity stands when it comes to dealing with the inconvenient truth of our climate crisis and the threat to life as we know it on Planet Earth.

Not your typical Earth Day post

There are only two roads in life, growing and dying. Tolbert McCarroll, Notes from the Song of Life

Earth Day 2022.  If you want to know how it all started, you can read last year’s post on the first Earth Day.  If you want to know how we’re doing (così così — so so in Italian), you can read Jeff Goodell’s article in Rolling Stone this week entitled, The Climate Fight Isn’t Lost. Here are 10 Ways to Win.  And if you want to know where to hide until it’s all over, read Paul Greenberg’s Is Anywhere Safe From Climate Change which is a solution for maybe less than one half of one percent of us, but I totally get the sentiment.  The real truth is,  Environmental Justice is critical as Adele Costa tells us in her article Hog Waste Plastic Petals, and Cancer in the Air:  The Intersection Between Environmental Justice and Women’s Health, and if we don’t take care of the most vulnerable among us, it will be lights out for all of us.

Read the complete article by Pam Lazos published on her blog Green Life Blue Water, April 22, 2022.

“March is March” by American Poet Emily Skaja

17 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by in Poetry

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American Poet Emily Skaja (Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)
Book Cover Art: Walton Ford, Gleipnir

My Poetry Corner April 2022 features the poem “March is March” from the debut poetry collection Brute (Graywolf Press, 2019) by American poet Emily Skaja. Born and raised next to a cemetery in rural Illinois, Skaja earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Purdue University (Indiana) and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Cincinnati (Ohio) where she also earned a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at the University of Memphis, Tennessee, where she resides.

Winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Brute is largely autobiographical and took five years to write, beginning in 2012. The poems deal with grief, partner violence, transformation, break-ups, and voicelessness. The poet also examines her role in a situation of abuse, control, and obsession.

The book’s title is “used pejoratively to describe the abusive behavior of the men in the book,” Skaja told Ross Nervig during their 2019 conversation for The Adroit Journal, “but it is also a word the speaker uses critically against herself, in examining the way she responded to violence with violence.” She added that the book explores “the way that women are set up to be victims of patriarchal, violent behavior while at the same time using those same tactics to defend themselves.”

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Climate Chaos: “Shifts in Being”

10 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

This is the second of a three-part series of overviews of the book, Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, Edited by Jem Bendell & Rupert Read (UK/USA 2021). Here’s the link to Part I: “Climate Chaos: Humanity’s Predicament.”

Part II (chapters 4 to 8) of the book explores the ‘shifts in being’ that can occur and be supported in the event of a societal collapse due to the planetary climate and ecological crises. In Chapter 4, psychologist and co-founder of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) Dr. Adrian Tait describes the ways in which psychotherapists are beginning to change in response to growing public distress, giving rise to the terms ‘climate-distress’ or ‘eco-distress.’

The CPA came into being in the United Kingdom during 2009-2012 following the mobilization of psychotherapists and academics in the field concerned about increasing evidence of climate and ecological destabilization due to human activities. The alliance has two main objectives:

  1. To promote understanding of the way our minds work in preventing us from acting in the face of climate chaos, and
  2. To develop support systems for those of us who are committed to persistent engagement in dealing with humanity’s predicament.

“Support is essential,” Dr. Tait notes. “If we have not been racked by grief over what is happening, then we are shutting its meaning out of our hearts and bodies. But if we remained immersed in grief alone, we would become part of the wreckage. The loss is continuous and mounting, which prevents us from moving on as in normal mourning. We need relief from the pain” (p.106).

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Thought for Today: The Irony of Being a Woman

03 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by in Economy and Finance, Human Behavior

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Front Cover: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez (Paperback Edition, 2021)
Photo Credit: Abrams Books

Women are doing far and away more than our fair share of [unpaid care work] – this necessary work without which our lives would all fall apart. And, as with male violence against women, female biology is not the reason women are the bum-wiping class. But recognizing a child as female is the reason she will be brought up to expect and accept that as her role. Recognizing a woman as female is the reason she will be seen as the appropriate person to clear up after everyone in the office. To write the Christmas and birthday cards to her husband’s family – and look after them when they get sick. To be paid less. To go part-time when they have kids.

Failing to collect data on women and their lives means that we continue to naturalize sex and gender discrimination – while at the same time somehow not seeing any of this discrimination. Or really, we don’t see it because we naturalize it – it is too obvious, too commonplace, too much just the way things are to bother commenting on. It’s the irony of being a woman: at once hyper-visible when it comes to being treated as the subservient sex class, and invisible when it counts – when it comes to being counted.

Excerpt from Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez, Abrams Press, New York, Paperback Edition 2021 (pp. 313-314).
[Original Hardcover Edition, published by Chatto & Windus (UK) and Abrams (USA), 2019.]

CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ is a best-selling and award-winning writer, broadcaster, and award-winning feminist campaigner. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men is the winner of the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize and the 2019 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. She lives in London (UK) where she also writes a weekly newsletter keeping up with the latest data on the gender data gap.

Reflections: My Evolving Identity

27 Sunday Mar 2022

Posted by in About Me, Human Behavior

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The Human Family (Photo compliments of Pixabay)

Our identity is such an integral part of who we are as individuals that we can take it for granted, without question. As a female of the primate species homo sapiens (wise man), I share the same identity with an estimated 3.905 billion female humans, representing 49.58 percent of the total human population on Planet Earth in 2021 (UN World Population Prospect 2019). The similarity of our identities end there. They are as diverse and complex as the technologically advanced societies we humans have created on Earth.

My identity was forged during a period of great geopolitical upheaval. The economic power of the British Empire had taken a direct hit during World War II, bringing my small world in then British Guiana under the control of the emergent dominance of the United States of America. Descendants of African slaves and indentured laborers from China, Madrid (Portugal), and India, we were inferior beings in the eyes of the dominant white male governing class. My skin color and social status as a member of the working-class became defining elements of my identity.

Following the birth of our independent nation of Guyana in 1966, we forged a new identity as a multiracial, multiethnic country of six peoples—African, Indian, Chinese, European, and Amerindian—united under the motto of “One People, One Nation, One Destiny.” Breaking free from old ways of being does not come easy. Just look at what is happening today to the members of our human family in Ukraine, a former Soviet Socialist Republic, as they seek to forge a new identity as a democratic nation, realigned to Western Europe.

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“Identity” – Poem by Afro-Brazilian Poet Ryane Leão

20 Sunday Mar 2022

Posted by in Brazil, Poetry

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Afro-Brazilian Poet Ryane Leão
Photo Credit: Poet’s Facebook Page

My Poetry Corner March 2022 features the poem “Identity” (Identidade) from the 2017 debut poetry collection Everything in Her Shines and Burns: Poems of Struggle and Love (Tudo Nela Brilha e Queima: Poemas de Luta e Amor) by Afro-Brazilian poet Ryane Leão. A lesbian and English language teacher, born in 1989 in Cuiabá, capital of the Center-West State of Mato Grosso, Ryane moved to São Paulo where she studied literature at the Federal University of São Paulo. Considered one of the most representative militants of Brazilian poetry today, Ryane’s poems speak mainly about female empowerment, social inequality, and the struggle against racism.

Influenced by her poetry-loving parents, Ryane grew up with a fascination for literature and began writing as a child. But she never saw herself in the stories of Brazil’s famous poets, mostly white males. That changed when she moved to São Paulo. With exposure to poetry by black women, she discovered another type of poetry that spoke to her life experience.

Her journey to penning her own stories were strewn with shards of glass, as shared in the following autobiographical poem:

how many times my mother sat on the edge of the bed
and helped me remove the shards of glass from my feet
and said few would deserve my love
that the world would hurt me because I was born
with too much heart
that I had to stop being so good
or I would have nothing left
beyond the shards
that she pulled out
with care and patience
planting flowers
in their place
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Climate Chaos: Humanity’s Predicament

06 Sunday Mar 2022

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

≈ 51 Comments

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NOAA Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory 1960-2020
Source Credit: NOAA

We the inhabitants of Earth are in trouble. Serious trouble. Our failure, so far, to end our addiction to fossil fuels and change our consumption habits may well lead to societal collapse within our own lifetime. Such is humanity’s predicament.

In their book, Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos (UK & USA 2021), Editors Jem Bendell and Rupert Read present “an agenda and framework for responding to the potential, probable or inevitable collapse of industrial consumer societies, due to the direct and indirect impacts of human-caused climate change and environmental degradation.” (Introduction, p.2)

By ‘societal collapse’ they refer to an uneven ending of the consumer systems that make our lifestyles possible. These are systems that we take for granted: sustenance, shelter, health, security, pleasure, identity, and meaning. The term ‘collapse’ implies a permanent and total breakdown of these systems. There is no going back to the way things were before the breakdown. The word ‘deep’ takes us deeper into the causes and numerous ways in which we respond to catastrophe as individuals, organizations, and societies.

The Covid-19 global pandemic provided a preview of the vulnerability of our normal ways of life. Beyond the initial health crises, the pandemic triggered an ongoing series of cascading effects on our local and national economies—increasing joblessness, homelessness, and food insecurity. The domestic political upheaval continues to divide us. The disruption in our consumer and industrial supply chains plague us still.

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