cocogitation

Sébastien Aubin:
I think that’s what we lack in academia. We always go back to reading and writing and talking among our peers. I like it, but sometimes you have to go outside yourself, make a fire and drink some tea and see what happens.

Patrizio McLelland:
And again, we’re coming back to language. As [Sébastien] had said earlier, a source of sharing and, Ursula, I think you said a source of power.  Maddy, a sort of source of wayfinding.

[laughing and unease]

Patrizio McLelland:
30 seconds. Did you say ridiculous? No. 30 seconds. Three, 3 seconds would be ridiculous. Yeah. Okay, 30 seconds. Let’s go.

Gabriel Townsend Darriau:
I don’t know much about where divest Concordia, that whole movement is at these days. I’ve heard a lot about it, but to me, it’s major, because we can really focus our energies efficiently by attacking really big… I don’t know how to say it, like capital. The amount of money, the amount of power that’s behind Concordia University [five seconds] that if we take the reins of that? Huge impact.

Patrizio McLelland:
Okay. Also, just want to say, I’m focusing on this, not as a means to discount anyone else’s big sustainable goal, but maybe this is one where there’s a lot to unpack here right now. Okay, let’s move forward. You’re on.

Madelyn Capozzi:
Same deal, I’m not super up to date on where either of those movements are at. But I agree, especially with [Divest Concordia], I have a little bit more knowledge on that, that it is potentially such a powerful leverage point. There’s a ripple effect that comes from that, and it really is the only way for you to take on an entity as large/entities that large [five seconds] and I would second connect it to Quitting RBC and similar campaigns to just pull the rug out from underneath them.

Patrizio McLelland:
Okay. Is this a good exercise? [laughing] I don’t really know what we’re doing here… 30 seconds. I always feel like having these exercises where, you know…  sometimes if something’s really wrong with me, I need to talk to someone else about it before I can move through it. Because when I talk to someone else, what I’m doing, what my mind is doing, is distilling a problem that might be very complex ,into a very simple way. And maybe this again comes back to language, right? So if you only have 30 seconds to talk about divestment and what that would look like, we would love to hear it. I’ll also give people the chance to opt out if they want, but we’d love to hear from you.

Maia Jain:
…Ready?

Patrizio McLelland:
…Yes.

Maia Jain:
I think I’m going to take an approach, where I’m just going to say what comes to mind. I think a lot of people probably are familiar with what divest is, as well as carbon neutrality. But my mind first goes to corporate power, and everything that that represents. And how our economy broadly is kind of centering that power and supporting it through lots of means, including violence against specific communities and [five seconds] so it is also very important, and speaks to the power of money, speaks the power of our—

[I’m past the time aren’t I?]

[You’re way, way past]

Patrizio McLelland:
I thought maybe I should have a buzzer or something. Okay, now let’s move on.

Sébastien Aubin:

[we’re ready when you are]

[you still have fourteen seconds]

[eight seconds]

Bring change. Don’t be scared. Ask questions.

Dr. Ursula Eicker:
All right. I think it’s totally complimentary. So divesting for me means not putting your money into dirty fossil fuels, for example, amongst others. And carbon neutrality is something you need to do on site, and that requires a lot of money. We’re talking about hundreds… 100 to 200 million to get Concordia really zero carbon, and not just greenwashing. [you‘ve got five seconds] So the money needs to be redirected, to get things right on our own place, and that’s complimentary.

Patrizio McLelland:
Thank you, everyone, for embarking on this exercise with me. We’re going to hear from the people online. Actually, we can hear from [Dr. Keroles Riad] right now. Kero, you’ve only got 30 seconds. Are you ready?

Dr. Keroles Riad:
So I mean, one of the things that I think most people know about Concordia, they did make the divestment commitment a few years ago, saying that they’re going to go to 0%; 0% of their investment is going to be in fossil fuels, and things like that. The other metric was the impact investment, which is essentially putting money or investing money in companies that make a positive impact. Concordia does give a few updates every once in a while, to talk about everything but those two metrics. And so I think I would like to wait to hear somebody actually give where we’re at, like where, how much Concordia actually invested in fossil fuels at the time they made the commitment, how much they do right now, and so it’s [way past thirty seconds]

Patrizio McLelland:
I should have done it with a buzzer, but I don’t want to be a buzzer person. I’d rather just kind of let it run.

Cassandra Lamontagne:
As [Dr. Keroles Riad] said, Concordia has committed to full divestment of its endowment funds from fossil fuels, oil, and gas by 2025, as part of the climate plan. I think Ursula was very right, too, in saying that we need to think about reducing our emissions. If we’re going to become neutral, do that in a meaningful way, that doesn’t involve just buying offsets in the current, but also seeks to reduce our emissions from our operations as much as possible by 2040 before taking that carbon neutrality option.

Donna Legault:
Yeah, it’s really the redirection of funds. My biggest concern about that is in unproven offsets for carbon offsets. So that’s something that, when you’re redirecting money into something that’s really going to make a difference, and carbon offsets have been shown to sometimes cause problems as well. [we’re over time, Donna] So they have to be really well understood and supported by the institutions, if they’re going to invest in them.

Patrizio McLelland:
I’m such a lenient moderator now.

Thomas Heinrich:
I’m going to save you some time. I don’t know enough about the subject, so I’m going to pass it on.

Patrizio McLelland:
Actually that was the shortest we’ve had so far. So thank you for helping to even the keel of this. Okay. Rebecca, are you ready?

Dr. Rebecca Tittler:
Yeah, I’m ready.

Dr. Rebecca Tittler:
Okay, so first point: not just carbon, right? That’s not the only reason we’re here. It’s not just carbon. Donna, I have to support your point about the potential dangers of offsets. We have to look seriously at who is bearing the burden of our offsets, and make sure that we are not just continuing to emit at the cost of somebody else’s lifestyle, life choices, and options.

Patrizio McLelland:
Great. And you know what? That was only 26 seconds. [laughing]. With that being said. Thanks, everyone, for coming along here, for the ride and all those in the audience. This felt really special, it was really nice to listen in, and just be.

Cassandra Lamontagne:
I mean in my role it’s something I do say or write a thousand times a day, and it of course becomes difficult to to maintain the same and assign the same meaning to it consistently.

Cassandra Lamontagne:
But it’s difficult in a university environment. We tend to be a little bit of an echo chamber

Cassandra Lamontagne:
So I don’t think it’s so much about the word, but about the changes that we try to enact in the service of sustainability.

Gabriel Townsend Darriau:
Words like sustainability get co-opted
by capitalism (to name a big word),
by consumption culture,
by the market economy,
by branding and advertising.

Sébastien Aubin:
Not to confront, not to be liable for the confrontation, but to bring on the conversation.

Sébastien Aubin:
I’m Cree, and I speak in a very Cree perspective…very matriarchal, and we have this term called ‘we‘ which is like some people ask, you know, what’s your pronoun? I say ‘we‘, because in Cree Culture we have a very undefined non-binary cosmology; everything is either open or very closed.

Patrizio McLelland:
So for you, the repetition is almost like a source of power for the message.

Madelyn Capozzi:
I think it can actually be a good thing to move away from tired language. That’s something that I try to do a lot in my practice, as a form of culture change. But, at the same time, I think that there’s a dark side to that, in the sense that people can lose focus, and maybe it is easier to get co-opted… I don’t really know if one way is better than the other.

Dr. Keroles Riad:
At Concordia, it took five years to come up with a five year action plan for sustainability. And I remember being involved from the beginning, we spent about a year or two just coming up with a definition for sustainability. And if you read it, it’s a couple pages long. Outside of people working with [Cassandra Lamontagne], not a lot of people actually know the definition.

Dr. Rebecca Tittler:
And I equally get frustrated sometimes with how the extent to which the Academy can spend forever discussing the definition of a single word and that that can hold us up in action. And I think that there is a role for the Academy, though, to discuss the words and to be involved in the semantics.

Patrizio McLelland:
Do you think that’s something prevalent in academia? Because I feel the more I move through my time at Concordia and kind of expand what I’m doing in Concordia, I feel that there’s there’s a culture of extreme performativity that exists. And I think that I, I let it get the best of me sometimes.

Dr. Ursula Eicker:
I would say the metrics of the whole academic system don’t lend themselves to unlearning.

Donna Legault:
Working in engineering lab, bioengineering lab, and a biology lab where, you know, I spend every day sort of working with the processes for myself of unlearning systemic, systemically exploitive and extractive ways of thinking about the organisms and materials that I’m working with.

Cassandra Lamontagne:
So you shouldn’t come up with such good questions.

Cassandra Lamontagne:
And that might really change the way we approach things at the university if we if we really connect what we think of sustainability to values as humans, as caring humans who have a responsibility, we want to be able to act in a reciprocal way and tend to act as stewards in a way.

Dr. Rebecca Tittler:
So we are teaching, you know, we are teaching the institution.

Madelyn Capozzi:
Everybody agrees, and then suddenly we’ve gone however far in the complete wrong direction and it’s like, whoa, all right. Whatever we do now, we’d better get it right. Because, you know, the clock is ticking to demise. it’s scary.

Sébastien Aubin:
So, I did traditional; I was taught traditionally for like four or five years with medicine men. So I learn from these people, how to cure, how to defend myself, how to sustain myself, how to sustain my community. As long as, on the immediate, not through conversations, not through panels— not saying that these are not good, because I did say at the beginning that these conversations need to be had.

Sébastien Aubin:
And what I really like about that is that it’s always in practice; it’s in motion. I’m there to make a mistake. I have no idea what I’m doing, and that’s what I like. So, I mean, how do I deal with them? In the past experience, I just like trial and error over and over again. That’s it.

Sébastien Aubin:
…more things with [Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer]. I mean, it’s an amazing book. What’s really great about it is she’s, you know, she’s, she’s in the academic, but it’s also trying to speak to her community at the same time. And I mean, there’s a book by [Margaret Kovach] called Indigenous Research and Methodologies that invite everybody to read at least once.

Patrizio McLelland:
Not in the idyllic nature, but to be a dreamer almost. Are you saying that that is a blindspot— do you know what I mean? Like, if you have a very idyllic outlook on how things could go and I mean, this is in direct contrast to our culture of climate anxiety and climate gloom. You know, concepts like solar punk, where it’s just brimming with optimism that we have the is that a blind spot?

Dr. Keroles Riad:
And then the other points about that, I want to talk about is when it comes to as a wellness and mental health, part of stuff we’re all kind of pressured to this is an expression called toxic positivity, where there’s a bit of pressure where you have to kind of say that you’re okay when you may not be.

Dr. Keroles Riad:
And so I’m just an engineer, so and it’s very easy for all kind of engineers to have one blind spot, which is like technological fixes where we think technology is going to fix everything.

Patrizio McLelland:
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I don’t mind being criticized. Probably. I probably wouldn’t be here if I was afraid of being criticized.

Dr. Rebecca Tittler:
But I have to say, I… I am so privileged to be in the learning community and the students challenge us all the time.

Thomas Heinrich:
there are enough students, there are enough people to have a diversity of opinions. Um, what I think is that there is a risk of of having a single way of, of knowing.

Madelyn Capozzi:
Be able to feel okay in doing that, then do it like, I don’t know, step outside. Like step outside of your normal frame. Make the effort. Like let other people change you.