Actor Ethan Hawke recently went viral for his take on life: “The one who’s in love always wins.” The older I get, the more I realize how foundational love is to addressing the collective challenges we face.
I recently returned from performing the play What You Won’t Do for Love in 15 cities with the love of my life, my wife Tara Cullis. It celebrates love for families, each other and the planet, and how these tangle together as we yearn for the rhythm of healthy oceans, rivers and forests to beat within the hearts of our grandchildren, while so many systems teeter on collapse.
When I travel within Canada and around the world, I’m struck by the indefatigable presence of grassroots organizations, fuelled by people who take collective action to protect and defend what, and who, they love — from people and places to creatures and plants.
Worldwide, in places where people often struggle to meet basic needs, roadside bike repair shops exist, borne of a love of cycling. Local conservation initiatives thrive, championed by bird and wildlife lovers. Gardens and honey-collecting programs foster food security, rooted in the pleasures of working with our hands and watching living things flourish.
As Tara and I travelled to perform our play, we met with local activists who, rather than responding to current crises by taking flight or freezing (or staring at their phones), choose the third F: to fight for the things they care about. Collectively we shared ideas and visions, fostering community-building, which in turn fosters resilience.
As climate scientist and activist Susanne Moser says, these activists are not only taking action to care for the worlds they love; they are also facilitating survival: “We keep talking about the three Fs: fight, flight, or freeze, but there is a fourth one, and that’s the one that actually helped us survive. The forming of bonds, or the be-friending. That’s the piece that got us to cooperate as a species and recognize that we have greater advantage when we work together as opposed to everyone for themselves. This is biology. It is in the genetic history of our species. We are here because we cooperated. It’s part of us.”
At the January World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke about a rupture in the global order. What better time to connect with each other and rebuild systems that are more ecologically and socially just? Turning Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalism” on its head, writer Rebecca Solnit calls this “disaster collectivism” — “the sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life, an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive.” For systemic changes to stick, they must be supported by people on the ground.
Policy changes have a critical role to play, too. While local toxics campaigns reach neighbours and maybe even municipalities, provincial bans upheld by law significantly multiply the impact. But those laws can be overturned. If there isn’t sufficient public outcry, policy accomplishments that took years to achieve can be erased.
Indigenous land defenders, carrying multi-generational relationships with the land, disproportionately put their bodies on the line to protect nature when other advocacy methods fail to yield results.
Extraction and development activities that harm nature are often less visible to most people in Canada — city-dwellers. It isn’t fair to place the burden of defending Northern Canada on the shoulders of Indigenous Peoples. Policies, laws and regulations are required to limit and reverse the ecological impacts from these activities.
Besides love, almost all the activist initiatives I heard about were informed by science, whether social, Western or Indigenous. After all, what is science but a means of testing hypotheses to understand how the world is held together, and the repairs that are needed when our actions fray the mechanisms binding natural and social systems?
Love is relational. It brings about the desire to nurture and give of ourselves. As Winston Churchill said, “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” People define “winning” in different ways. The U.S president has a twisted notion of it. But I agree with Ethan Hawke. Being sustained by love, returning it and acting upon it is truly winning.
David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Boreal Project Manager Rachel Plotkin.
