No matter what propels us to become activists in the first place, it is love that sustains and nurtures us over the long term. Hatred burns too hot to last, and fear has an insidious way of burrowing into our hearts and souls and stealing from us our ability to act out of courage. Only our love for the places we are trying to protect, our love from one another, can provide the fuel to sustain a lifetime of effective activism.

Jonathan Star translates the third treasure of The Tao te Ching as love. According to Star, many Ancient Chinese characters have multiple meanings. In his Definitive Edition of the Tao te Ching he translates the character for “tz’u” found in verse sixty seven as being “loving/affectionate/compassionate/merciful.”

These are difficult times to allow love to guide our work as activists. In Canada the environmental movement is under assault from our own government. It has been this way in the United States for many years. So much of what we love is disappearing. But fear, which is the root of anger, cannot save us. Only love can.

“To meet hatred and force with love and yielding

This is the way of the Tao

(Tao, 40)

To read more about Carry Tiger to Mountain: The Tao of Activism and Leadership please click here.

I’m posting regular(ish) thoughts from this book on Twitter at #carrytiger. You can follow me @stephenlegault.

LETTER TO THE PREMIER FROM THE PINCHER CREEK JAIL February 1, 2012

Mike Judd, one of four authors of this Letter from Jail, speaking to a rally of 150 people in the Castle Special Place

Dear Premier Redford;

Around the World people have been fined and imprisoned for rejecting industrial clear-cut logging and the ecological devastation that it eventually brings to a nation. Here are a few examples: 1200 arrested at Reedy Creek, Australia; 800 at Clayaquot in B.C.; over 100 in Chital, Pakistan; 22 women at Grant’s Pass in Oregon; and over 60 First Nations People in the Great Bear Forest in B.C.; and today, four in Pincher Creek, Alberta.

In his book Collapse, Jerad Diamond delineates how deforestation is one of the major factors that lead to the disappearance of many past civilizations, and Global Forest Watch reports that 13,000,000 hectares of forest disappear annually around the World. Do you need to add this thin belt along the Eastern Slopes of Alberta to that statistic?

We’ve already seen over four decades of industrial logging in the Oldman Watershed and particularly in the headwaters of the Castle-Carbondale part of that drainage. We’ve seen the miles of stumps, windrows of waste wood, eroded skid roads, collapsing stream banks, weeds, escalating off-road vehicle abuse, and of course the 22,000 hectare fire that took place in all of that.

Now you’ve sanctioned removing most of the last small piece of intact forest left in this corner of the province. The place where the Grizzly, the Westslope Cutthroat Trout, Limber Pine and so many unique plants are listed by law, federally and provincially, as endangered. This area is also the study area for Grizzly Bear DNA research to establish how many or how few are left. It is classified as “critical winter ungulate range” where industrial activity is not allowed, by regulation. How have you justified removing those rules?

As you know, 75% of Southern Albertans do not want the Castle logged anymore. You have heard from many thousands via email and telephone messages to your office. Your response to date is to maintain the status quo, which is business as usual. Where is the change in that?

So here we sit today, four old men who have joined the thousands of voices in Alberta and around the World, the voices for wilderness, wildlife, water conservation, forest integrity, sustainability, healthy recreation, and everything that is good and beautiful in the Southern Alberta Eastern Slopes.

Why don’t you make the real change you promised, and that you have the authority to make, and stop this betrayal of the public trust?

Beaver Mines Lake Campground in the Castle Special Place: the new view for campers will be of clear cuts. Welcome to Alberta.

Mike Judd

Jim Palmer

Reynold Reimer

Richard Collier

(If you want to get involved, please call Premier Redford at 310-0000 or from outside Alberta 780-427-2251 and ask that logging be halted and that the Castle be made a Wildland Park.)

It is the second treasure of the Tao te Ching’s three treasures: restraint, compassion and love.

It is easy for us to feel compassion with those we are closest too: our partners, family, children, friends, and close colleagues.

And while they need and deserve it, if we wish to make the world a better place, not just in the short term, but for the long journey of humanity, then we must practice compassion with those who oppose us. His Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama says that we must “remove negative feelings towards our enemies.”

I believe that we must stop thinking about people as our enemies. Simply put, we oppose other people’s actions. We oppose what they do, and sometimes, their world view. But they are not our enemy. We do not wish them harm; we want to stop what they are doing that is harming the world and its creatures.

Always remember that your opponent is human

Like you

Treat her with love and compassion

(Tao, 31)

Those we oppose are human, and humanity is all interconnected. Even those who we most vehemently oppose are capable of loving their children. Our most ardent opponents have fears that drive them to make wrong-headed decisions that harm the earth and make other people’s lives very difficult. Treating them with compassion will unlock the possibility for long term solutions to the problems that vex our society and our planet.

What do we do when compassion doesn’t feel like it’s enough? How do we respond when it feels as if the world is on a collision course with doomsday and people are suffering and dying?

We meet anger and fear with love. Next week, the third treasure: L.O.V.E.

There is a whole chapter on the Three Treasures: restraint, compassion and love in Carry Tiger to Mountain, The Tao of Activism and Leadership. You can read more about the book here.

The book was published by Arsenal Pulp Press and is available by ordering it directly from the Press, or by asking for it in your local bookstore or library. If all else fails, you can always buy it online.

Follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault as I post stanzas from the Tao te Ching all week related to compassion.

It’s been a while since anybody called me a name while in a debate over an environmental issue; longer still since that person was a Minister of the Crown. I think the last one was Ralph Klein or Ty Lund.

But truth be told, the Honourable Minister was right. I am a radical.

I want to get to the root of this and other challenges that face Canada, and the world.

And that’s what a radical is: someone or something that “goes to the root or origin.” Mr. Oliver was likely thinking about a couple of the word’s other meanings when he made his pronouncement: “going to the extreme, especially as regards to change from accepted or traditional forms” or “favouring drastic political, economic, or social reforms.”

I’m okay with being labelled with both of those definitions too.

The fact of the matter is simple: radical change is needed in Canada, and around the world, to create a society that doesn’t destroy its life support system while going about its day to day business. That doesn’t mean we have to conjure an unsavoury images of hooded trouble-makers burning cars in the street. The most radical people I know are everyday, average citizens who work hard, pay their taxes, love their children and are trying to make a difference not only with their actions, but also with their hearts.

We don’t just need to stop a pipeline from being built across some of the most amazing landscapes in North America to belch bitumen into tankers that could foul some of the most pristine waters in the world; we need to address the underlying reason why humanity feels the need for the products that this filthy oil produces.

If that makes me a radical, fine. If that makes the vast majority of First Nations in BC, along with the diverse coalition of activists and community members who oppose the Northern Gateway project radicals, so be it. My fellow radicals and I are in good company. Ghandi was a radical for wanting to peacefully harmonize post-English India; Martin Luther King Junior was a radical for working for civil rights. Jesus Christ was a radical for teaching peace, and that the one true way to know God was through direct communication through prayer; Lord Buddha was a radical for teaching us that there is an end to suffering.

I am a radical because:

• I think that Canada’s natural resource wealth, and in particular our tar sands, shouldn’t be liquidated so that wealthy corporations based in the US, Europe and China, can get even richer;
• I believe that if we’re going to use tar sands oil, it should fuel a transition from a petroleum based economy to one that is sustained by sun, wind, tides and most importantly based on conservation, and
• I believe we need to address what underlies our insatiable thirst for the dirtiest energy on earth. I think we need to address the very root of this problem.

I know: radical.

I believe that the root of this challenge is that humanity is destroying the earth’s precious life support system to fuel a pell-mell consumerism in a vain effort to placate basic human suffering. It’s not the sort of suffering that can be cured with a trip to the doctor; it’s a spiritual hole that exists in every human being that we mistakenly try to fill with things.

Until we address this underlying issue we will continue to fight pipelines, tar sands projects, fracking, clear cutting, strip mining, damn building, and the inevitable degradation of natural ecosystems and creation of green house gasses that result.

Maybe the most radical idea is that every single one of us suffers, feels alone, fears death, is afraid of the unknown, mistakes the basic reality of human existence and has desires that can’t possibly be fulfilled with a bigger house or SUV or a new iPhone 4S. Instead of wondering why, we just keep on gobbling up the earth’s natural capital, hoping to ease our pain, necessitating the building of pipelines to pump more and more filthy oil to more and more hungry, unquenchable markets.

If wanting to put a stop to that makes me a radical, then I wear the moniker with pride.

Further reading:

The real foreign interests in the oilsands, Terry Glavin, The Ottawa Citizen.

Cozy Ties: Astroturf ‘Ethical Oil’ and Conservative Alliance to Promote Tar Sands Expansion, Emma Pullman, the DeSmog Blog

An open reply to Joe Oliver’s Propaganda for the Petro State, Andrew Nikiforuk, the Tyee

For updates follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault.

Restraint is sometimes know as “daring not to be first,” in various translations of the Tao te Ching. Ostensibly, it requires us to control our own ego, to step aside while allowing others to step forward. The Tao te Ching says:

Our finest effort will flow like a river

Rocks, boulders, even a dam, in time, will succumb

to the current

We can learn to act with such patience and perseverance

In doing so, be like the Tao

Tao, 8

Together, patience and perseverance form a yin-yang equilibrium. Patience is the yin side of the equation – the light, the yielding part – while the yang, or assertive part, is the perseverance. Yin and Yang do not work against one another; they are not opposites: they are two parts of the same whole, working in harmony. Knowing when to step back, and when to step forward and provide a needed injection of energy and enthusiasm is one of the hardest challenges facing leaders, in both business and in non-profits.

Restraint does not come naturally to those of us working to protect what we love, either through non-profit organizations or by running ethically driven businesses. We’re afraid that if we step back, more of what we hold dear will disappear. But sometimes, practicing restraint is what we need to do to advance our efforts. Lao Tzu says:

When you speak, do so clearly

And then remain quiet

Be like nature

A tempest doesn’t last all day

Afternoon heat is followed by a thundershower

Tao, 23

One of the themes I’ve explored in Carry Tiger is ego. Ego can be very helpful; it propels us forward, it provides us with “appropriate self worth.” But for an activist working to create a better world, it can be very harmful. Ego can keep us from allowing others to step forward and share the burden of leadership; ego can keep us too long in the spotlight, casting long shadows on others. Practicing restraint allows us to step aside and let others step forward.

One final thought on restraint: the most important time to exercise it is with those we oppose. When we win, do not be boastful; simply “step back and be watchful.” When mired in conflict, retrain from inflammatory accusations. These only harden our opposition, and prevent us from long term progress.

There is much more about this theme throughout Carry Tiger to Mountain. And in the coming weeks and months, I will explore this further through Twitter (@stephenlegault) and through this blog.

Next week: the second of the Three Treasures: compassion.

I’m going to share bits and pieces of my interpretation of the Tao with friends on Twitter using #carrytiger as a hashtag. Please follow me @stephenlegault and retweet when you can.

You can read more about the book here.

Carry Tiger to Mountain was published by Arsenal Pulp Press and is available by ordering it directly from the Press, or by asking for it in your local bookstore or library. If all else fails, you can always buy it online.

Join the conversation: tell me about your experiences exercising restraint, or when in retrospect it might have been a good idea:

This is an extraordinary time to be alive. It is, arguably, the most important period in the history of humanity. We face the most astonishing challenges. The twin apocalyptic horseman of climate change and the loss of biological diversity are laying waste to so many of the world’s ecosystems. Global economic systems are failing. War and conflict plague us on nearly every continent.

And now, we see that these three monumental challenges have a common source: borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today. We have failed to respect the natural limits of our life-support systems, and in doing so, have amassed a staggering ecological and economic debt. The scarcity that this had created has lead Dennis C. Blair, the head of US Intelligence — the umbrella organization that overseas the FBI, the CIA and the NSA — to site the global economic crisis as his number one concern for global security.

While the world faces nearly unprecedented threats, I believe we have both the skill and the opportunity to meet them. And so we have a choice to make: What do we want to be doing during this most important time in the course of human kind? What do we want to be doing as individuals, and what do we want to do collectively, as a community, as a society, as a species?

The choices that we make now, today, will carry us as individuals and as a species into the next perihelion shift.

The perihelion is the point at which a celestial body, such as a planet or comet, is in its closest orbit to its star. In the case of Earth, the perihelion orbit takes place roughly every 23,500 years. That’s the point at which the Earth’s orbit is closest to the Sun. This perihelion is influenced by all of the other celestial bodies in the solar system. Other planets, moons, comets, and even factors like gasses and dust can influence the perihelion. If none of these other factors were involved, then the earth’s orbit around the Sun, for example, would always be exactly the same. But the gravitational forces of all the other objects spinning through space play a role in determining our trajectory.

People have been observing this for more than a hundred and fifty years. And during that time, they have noted anomalies in their calculations of the parabolic orbits that celestial bodies make around the Sun. In short, sometimes planets and other bits of rock and ice, hurtling through space, don’t do what we expect them to: they experience a perihelion shift. Their orbits change unexpectedly.

Astronomers guess that these shifts are the result of unforeseen forces: a moon or an asteroid, or even a dust cloud, that they can’t see which influences the gravity of the orbiting body.

We as a species are drawing near to the metaphorical sun. Who among us will be that gravitational pull that creates the desperately needed perihelion shift that sets us on a new trajectory? What will your part be in that shift? Your relative gravity need not be immense. Small things can create great change. A meteor can change the parabolic orbit of a planet.

But we must choose. Now is not the time to be passive. Decide: what do you want to be doing during this most important time in the history of humanity. And then do it: joyfully, passionately, intelligently, and above all else, with love.

The premise of Carry Tiger to Mountain is that we, as people who are trying to make the world a better place, might experience more success if we use the three treasures of Taoism as talismans: restraint, compassion and love. The centrepiece of Carry Tiger is an interpretation of the 81 stanzas of the Tao te Ching specifically for activists and leaders in the social profit, and socially-minded business world.

There are also chapters on strategy, collaboration, conflict, leadership, fundraising and self-care.

I’ve been surprised, and pleased, by the resilience of Carry Tiger to Mountain. People still contact me to tell me how much this book has meant to them, and how it has helped them improve their own lives, and the world around them. Over the next while, I’m going to share bits and pieces of my interpretation of the Tao with friends on Twitter using #carrytiger as a hashtag. Please follow me @stephenlegault and retweet when you can.

It’s important to remember this about the Tao te Ching: its an enigma. Its paradox wrapped up in contradiction. The first thing Lao Tzu wrote was “The Way that can be spoken is not the only way.” I was conscious in penning Carry Tiger to Mountain that everything I said could be wrong. Or then again, it might not be. It’s up to each of us to determine the Way and its Virtue for ourselves.

You can read more about the book here.

The book was published by Arsenal Pulp Press and is available by ordering it directly from the Press, or by asking for it in your local bookstore or library. If all else fails, you can always buy it online.

When Jack Layton died yesterday morning he left a gaping hole in Canadian politics. Soon there will be the predicable questions about whether the NDP and the Official Opposition can survive without him. That’s not what I am asking: What I want to know is who will step up and remind us through his or her every action, every word, that “love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair?”

The space left behind by Jack Layton is simply one of kindness, and of love. One of the quotes in the sound montage used by the CBC yesterday had Jack proclaiming that there were so many familiar faces in the room that he just wanted to wade in and hug everybody.

Really? Is it possible to imagine another Leader of the Official Opposition speaking like that? Maybe in time Jack’s true legacy will be that our leaders will see that if we’re trying to build a country, we can’t tear each other down in the process.

This morning my heart goes out to those who truly knew and loved Jack. His partner Olivia, his children Mike and Sarah and grandchildren who didn’t yet have the opportunity, but will in time know of his legend; and his colleagues in parliament and his myriad friends. Nothing ever really ends; nobody really dies: we just change. And maybe from this change, inspired by his final words to Canadians – “So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world” – we can learn that by wielding lightness, not the dark, will allow us to build a better word.

There has never been a time when thinking creatively, and acting with courage, was more important. And despite moving Canada back into the dark ages of climate-denial and finding ourselves at the back of the bus when it comes to global diplomacy, the Harper Conservatives have provided some important leadership on issues such a National Parks. There’s a small opening there – a chink in the armor maybe – where we can work to advance progressive issues.

The Conservative government of the last five years, as someone recently told me, doesn’t like to be criticized. Who does? We can make the mistake of trying to teach them a lesson about democracy and being “grown up” about it, but look what happens when you spend your time trying to teach Canadians a lesson about democracy: You end up losing your seat and your party.

Instead, people across Canada who want to make this country a better place, and restore its standing as a leader among nations on issues like climate change and poverty reduction, should take a lesson from Loa Tzu: “This is the universal truth; the soft shall overcome the hard.”

There’s no arguing with the fact that the Conservative majority will pose a hard obstacle to progress in Canada. We can spend our next four years battering ourselves against it, or we can find a way to move slowly around it, over it, under it, through it. In Taoism this is called Wu Wei, which means “not forcing.” Nobody is going to force Prime Minister Stephen Harper to do anything. We’re going to have to, as Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, suggests: “capture our opponent whole.” That means moving carefully to make it so our values, our vision, our passion, slowly becomes their own. We must find what they respond to – be it positive reinforcement or public accolades, as difficult as that may be to stomach – and exploit them as an opportunity to advance a progressive vision for Canada.

If we do not, we’ll find ourselves on the outside looking in, and watching all that we cherish about this beautiful nation slipping from our grasp. And we will only have ourselves to blame for its loss. Every moment in life is a choice. This choice is clear: accepting the reality of a polarized politic and gaining what we can, or raging against it, and losing it. It’s that stark a dichotomy.

And while we do this, organize for the future. The political environment across Canada has been dramatically recalibrated. Michael Ignatieff has resigned. And the BLOC Quebececios has been reduced to a fringe movement; this is maybe the best of all the outcomes from the May 2^nd vote. And though separatism is by no means dead, at the very least one of the key factors keeping the centre-left from uniting and moving forward together has been eliminated.

While we work to find ways to advance our goals under a Conservative majority, we must do exactly what Stephen Harper did to capture it: unite. It’s time to put ego and hubris and the fallacy of worn-out political history aside and come together under a single banner. It’s time to find common ground, and learn to live with our differences, and embrace the future as a united positive alternative. I simply can’t listen to people complain that with only 40% of the vote the Conservatives formed a majority any longer without demanding that the progressive voices in Canadian democracy join together to form an united, positive alternative.

And within that the Green Party will finally find its place in our House of Commons. Next to the defeat of the BLOC, the election of Elizabeth May in Saanich-Gulf Islands is the single greatest thing that has happened for Canadian democracy in many, many years. She will make Canadians proud.

I hope that people who want a better Canada won’t spend too much time moaning about what may happen now under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. We may not like it much, but it’s what we’ve got; the sooner we make a choice to move forward, smartly, carefully, like water slowly but patiently wearing away at that which stands between us and our vision of Canada, the better. Our future is at stake; we are the ones who must make the choice about how we advance towards it.

In the 1990s I learned that to influence  policies and decisions about the environment, I had to learn to influence decision makers. In doing so, got to know many of them. At the same time I volunteered for a number of campaigns, including Liberal Stephen Owen, and New Democrats Denise Savoir, David Cubberley and Gregor Robertson, and for the late Andre Gareau, who was a dear friend and who served as a Town Councilor in Canmore for many years until his sudden death this past year.

Despite my propensity for supporting the NDP, I’ve only had the chance to vote for them sporadically. When I lived in David’s riding in Saanich, BC, I voted for him, and in later in Victoria I voted for Denise, but these have been exceptions rather than the rule.

For most of the elections of my adult life I’ve lived in Alberta’s Wildrose riding. It’s a peculiar riding that includes most of Banff National Park, Canmore and the rest of the Bow Valley, a huge swath of the forested foothills that edge the Rocky Mountains, and then cups around Calgary to include the commuter towns of Cochrane and Airdrie.

A lot of people think that because the mountainous Bow Valley attracts a lot of well educated, liberal minded sorts, that somehow this would be a close race between the right-wing parties and the left. But that’s never been the case. (The last time the Bow Valley had a left leading MP was in 1930 when Edward Joseph Garland beat the Conservative candidate on behalf of the United Farmers in the riding of Bow River. This organization, incidentally, still exists as a representative of feed stores and card-lock gas station operator.) When Myron Thompson was the Reform/Alliance and then Conservative MP here, he won with landslides: 63% in 1997; and then 70, 71, and 72% in subsequent elections. Myron – who I knew and respected and liked, through disagreed with on just about everything – had quadruple by-pass surgery and had to sit out the first two weeks of the 2000 election campaign out. He still won by a landslide.

And every single one of the 200+ polls in Wild Rose voted for Myron. Now Blake Richards, Myron’s former communications assistant, follows in his footsteps. Mr. Richards won the last election 73% of the vote. The Greens came in second, with12.6%, their strongest showing across the country. It was a safe place to park your vote.

I’m a strategic voter. I make no qualms about this. I want a government that will reflect my values, but I also want to defeat governments that stand in diametrical opposition to the things I believe in. And while I might have respected the hard working Myron Thompson, I did not want to see his party in government, and once they were elected, wanted them out. So, ironically, I voted for the Progressive Conservatives under Joe Clark in 2000, and then, because all hope was lost in Wildrose after the amalgamation of the Alliance and the PC’s, I too voted Green.

But something has happened in 2011 that allows me to vote with my heart, not my head. And I think many people across Canada have come to the same conclusion. I think a lot of Canadians, like myself, are coming out of the NDP closet this election; it’s a hypothesis that still has to be proven at the polls.

Staring on April 8^th, and beginning in Quebec, the NDP started an almost unbroken surge in the overnight tracking polls conducted by Nanos Research. They’ve gone from about 14% in the national polls to 31.6% as of yesterday, leapfrogging the floundering Liberal’s on April 26^th and closing the gap with the Harper Conservatives to just 6 points (just outside the margin of error). It makes you wonder what might happen if the election was to go on for another week or ten days.

A lot remains to be seen for this surge in support. Suddenly ridings with almost no NDP infrastructure are in play. In these ridings the all-important work of identifying, through weeks and weeks of phone calls and house-to-house visits, and then mobilizing the vote has not been done. Voters are left to their own devises to find their way to the polling stations.

As one NDP volunteer and former candidate recently told me, “they can get themselves to the voting booth” doesn’t always work out. People are forgetful, and distracted, and sometimes a little lazy or uninspired. If things are going well for their party, they think: “What does it matter if I vote?” If things are going poorly, they think: “My vote won’t make a difference.”

In 2006 I volunteered as a riding captain for David Cubberley in the provincial BC riding of South Sannich. I had a team of half a dozen volunteers and we spent twelve hours making phone calls to “pull the vote.” We had another two volunteers who, all day long, took calls from us directing them to pick up voters and get them to the polling stations. We had a dozen volunteers inside those polling stations “marking the vote.” Every time someone on our identified supporter list cast a ballot, we marketed it down, and once an hour we updated all of our call lists. Some people got three or four calls from us until they voted. In the end we estimated we got 70% of our identified voters to the poll, and we won, but not by a landslide.

Organization makes a difference in an election.

But so does hope. And so does passion. And I think what we’re seeing in Canada right now is a whole segment of our society who have come out of the closet and realized that it’s OK to identify with the left-of-centre NDP. In the past they’ve parked their support elsewhere – Conservative, Green, Liberal or BLOC – but this year, this time, it’s OK to say, “I’m voting NDP.”

This year, I am too.

If I was still living in the federal riding of Saanich Gulf Islands I’d be voting for my old friend and colleague, and current Green Party leader, Elizabeth May. Canada needs her in Parliament. Her election to the House could be the single greatest outcome of this election. If I was living in Victoria still, I’d be out pounding on doors and making phone calls and pulling vote until the very last moment of this election night.

Instead, I’ve used “Vote Pair” to make sure that my ballot counts twice. I’m voting for the NDP, and specifically for Jack Layton’s leadership, in Wildrose; and a new friend in Kitchener Centre, in Ontario, is voting Liberal, where the Conservative incumbent is in a tight race with former Liberal Whip Karen Redman (300 votes separated them in 2008).

Between us, we’re hoping to change Canada for the better.