The Covid 19 crisis has changed the role of many of the players in our globalized economy. Government has become the source of resources to sustain countries as the financial crisis remakes our employment status.
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| Employment changes |
Change in the attitude we have to kinship was being advocated by people working for social, economic, and environmental justice before the coronavirus pandemic. A kinship model to our care of the pollution, climate change, water resources, and loss of biodiversity is proposed by Pope Francis in his 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si Care of Our Common Home”.
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| Appeal from Laudato Si |
Naomi Klein in 2014 did not see the climate crisis as being separable from economic and racial justice. We are now collectively dealing with the impacts of an industrial model that always had sacrificial places and sacrificial people. There was this Faustian bargain at the center of the fossil fuel economy from the very start—the sacrifice of coal miners’ lungs and of coal mining communities—and it was accompanied by a deepening of theories of racial and class superiority. Because you can’t have a system built on sacrificial places and sacrificial people unless you have a theory that justifies their sacrifice.
The promise of climate justice—as opposed to just climate action—is that, in changing our economy to respond to climate change, we can do more than move away from fossil fuels. We can heal the centuries-old wounds that were intrinsic to an extractivist economy and an extractivist worldview. We can get at the root of the problem.1
In Nova Scotia, many residents of Scottish descent are interested in the history of Hogmanay. Ben Johnson comments many of the traditional Hogmanay celebrations were originally brought to Scotland by the invading Vikings in the early 8th and 9th centuries.
“First footing” (or the “first foot” in the house after midnight) is still common across Scotland. To ensure good luck for the house the first foot should be a dark-haired male, and he should bring with him symbolic pieces of coal, shortbread, salt, black bun and a wee dram of whisky. The dark-haired male bit is believed to be a throwback to the Viking days, when a big blonde stranger arriving on your doorstep with a big axe meant big trouble, and probably not a very happy New Year!2
My Gaelic grandmother, Christina Campbell, from the area of Cape Breton that is the headwater of the Margaree River was very concerned about the “First footing” on New Year’s Day at her home in Sydney when my dark eyed brother and my blue eyed self would rush in to visit our grandparents. I learned early that her preference was to have my brother come through the door first. This Gaelic understanding of kinship, limited to one’s family or clan, has outlived its usefulness.
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| City and kinship |
Achieving justice for all involves expanding the notion of kinship to all. Economic and social justice activity in some areas of Nova Scotia with a diverse economic base and resources in people, land, and sea can move forward by encouraging greater kinship, literally greater “family emphasis, among “clans” that have lived mostly separately, on the farm, at the wharf, on the reservation, in the suburbs, in supply towns, and the mining camps.
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| Resources and kinship |
Projects in food production without scarcity, alternate energy generation, urban design for climate change, protection of water resources, indigenous land use rights, and action to maintain biodiversity are realizable in small districts and municipalities as “pilots” for implementation on a larger scale in other jurisdictions.
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| "family" resource projects |
Fr. Daniel P. Horan, OFM introduces viewers to the three models or approaches to creation that have arisen over the course of Christian history.
These different ways of interpreting sacred scripture and theology will help set the context for how we can approach and understand Pope Francis's teaching in his encyclical letter. Pope Francis uses words of a Kinship and Stewardship Model3
Our traditional sense of “clan” in Nova Scotia is not an impediment to more cooperation. It is a model of cooperation that we can extend to all people as the beginning of an attitude of building sustainable communities where scarcity, greed, individual privilege, and entitlement are less operative because we are doing it for the well being of “family”.
References
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