How has your year been?  Shirley Freed began the 2008 Roundtable asking us that question.  It’s true that statistically speaking (especially for those of us who attended the all-day Stats class), it would not be inconsistent to have serious pain and loss among us.  We gather together from our different paths and with our different challenges to move together as a stronger unit.  

The one constant in each of our lives is change.  My life is a testimony to that truth.  In the last two weeks my wife and I have travelled to her native country, St. Lucia, to adopt her seven year-old orphaned nephew.  In the next couple of months we will give birth to our first child.  There will be excitement, and there will be new challenges, as I seek to complete the expectations this degree has. 

We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know the One who holds it.  As we begin this Roundtable, and a new year, as great knights we create a legend that will endure for all time.

If we allow the environmental destruction around us to continue it will lead to a crisis of faith?

Everything around us is centred on us. We worship at the shopping mall.

We need to ask the question: How does my spiritual life connect with my ecological life?

The story of Job is a compelling and enduring one – it seeks to implant a new perspective into the mind of those who hear or read it. The received story is: Peoplle who suffer do so because they’ve been bad. The new story is: When good people suffer, God remains good.

We are brought into the events of Job’s life with vivid language, interpersonal drama, compelling scenery… leading to the “Hmmmm!” effect (maybe you’ve heard something and you’ve never forgotten it)

Howard Gardner (multiple intelligences) – “Leading Minds: an Anatomy of Leadership”

• Leaders achieve their effectiveness chiefly through the stories they relate.
• In addition to the stories they tell, leaders embody those stories… without necessarily relating their stories in so many words, leaders convey their stories by the kinds of lives they themselves lead, and through example, seek to inspire in their followers.”
• Read MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
• He lived within the cruelty of the competing story, learned its arguments, and loved those who embodied it
• He lived his alternative story: led the marches

The “Received” Ecological Story

- our planet is resilient – it’ll bounce back: take what you need
- don’t slow down progres
- environmentalists are way too paranoid – a little pollution is no big deal
- all the tree-huggers do is slow down the workforce

“Tell Me a Story… the Life-Shaping Power of Stories” (Daniel Taylor)
- people live by stories that cannot sustain them
- broken stories can be healed
- seeing ourselves as active characters in new and healthy stories carries the power to transform lives

An Alternative Story
- the work of the ecologically concerned leader is to develop an compelling alternative story, to embody it personally, and figure out the best ways to communicate it to the right people

Slideshow: art by Andy Goldsworthy

This is a challenge to us – to live differently and to communicate differently a better way, a better story, a better alternative
- creating this kind of art takes great difficulty and patience
- Homework: consider what aspect of your organization’s story is broken or diseased in regard to ecologicial concerns? What is the hope, challenge, inspiration, or paradigm shift that would be needed in an alternative story to make a compelling case for change?
- begin to live it out

The need for boundary cross storytellers: Sir Albert Howard, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Barbara Kingslover, Aldo Leopold, Wes Jackson, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Wendell Barry

Lady Bird Johnson: an unassuming revolutionary; the first conservation since Teddy Roosevelt in the White House

Get it done, everybody!

During Roundtable, Paul Kaak, is giving inspirational talks based on the book The Comforting Whirlwind.

Paul started by saying that he is a philosopher, so he cannot necessarily evaluate the science behind environmental issues. However, he is interested in what is right and wrong.

Paul said not to take notes, but maybe reflective notes. So these are my reflective notes.

Consider: In what way do you currently interface with ecological realities? For me personally, I’m really interested in toxins and pollutions and how they affect people’s functioning and health.

Hopefully we’ll be able to see some innovative connections between the book, the book of Job, and leadership.

Job is the quintessential sufferer. He is the archetypal righteous, innocent one, who has been tormented, it seems unjustly. Job’s friends give three rounds of speeches that weren’t proper assessments nor appropriate solutions to Job’s problems.

Our society tells us that economic and material growth is good. However, “the amazing expansion of material possessions and consumer convenience may not actually be making us as happy as the advertisers and economists say.”

Consider: Of what are you morally convinced, in light of the ecological concern? What confuses you in terms of mankind’s ecological well being? For me personally, I’m morally convinced that we should be using resources slower! My confusion is around how in the world we can actually make the changes required. It doesn’t seem possible.

We are all ignorant at a certain level. We don’t have all the answers.

Job – even in the burden of his experience, he lived with integrity. Hmm. Must think about this idea more.

Robert Greenleaf. Servant Leadership p. 15 and 25. Read that!

Leaders are historian, contemporary analyst, and prophet. It takes faith to live this way.

Job had foresight. He could see, though he could not explain. Job’s friends did not have foresight. They could explain but they could not see. Too much talk; not enough listening. If you see it, you should say something about it.

A prudent leader notices the evil afar off and does something about it.

Three other cardinal virtues: Justice - committed to the good of the other – earth’s vulnerable people, places, living things; to future generations. Fortitude - the courage to act, even at great personal loss. Temperance – A commitment to tend to the integrity of myself, the condition of my life. To consider the links between my espoused values and my lived values.

Able leaders are usually sharply awake and reasonably disturbed. p. 27-28. Greenleaf.

Ecology – the study of households, dwelling places, habitats. So a prudent ecology starts with YOUR habitat.

Consider. What is reality in and around your life? What should the ideal be? What must be done? What is the household work that you and your family need in order to practice a prudent ecology? Read some of my previous thoughts here.

Wendell Berry is a recommended author. What are you a citizen of? It starts at home. I must care as much for the world as for my household.” Berry. The Long Legged House. p. 76-77. How do I care for the land entrusted to me? Another book by Berry is The Gift of Good Land. Did you know that some of our professors garden? See The Reactor and the Garden. chapter 12 in The Gift of Good Land.

As we prepare for Roundtable next week, I’m sure we’re all reviewing the schedule to see what we will learn. One of the items I’m excited about is the daily inspiration by Paul Kaak. I read The Comforting Whirlwind in April and was challenged by the concepts presented. It’s intriguing to think about the book of Job as a foundation for our responsibility to the environment. Here are a couple quotes from the book to whet your appetite:

The secret weapon of environmental change and of social justice must be this — living with simple elegance is more pleasurable than living caught in the middle of our consumer culture (McKibben, 68).

Of these gifts [joy, home, service, etc], the most unique and the most paradoxical is the ability to restrain ourselves. Conscious self-restraint belongs to no other creature, and for us it is the hardest of all tasks, both as individuals and as societies (McKibben, 69).

This idea of simplicity and restraint fits well into the strong message of integrated life and balance that we received in Orientation yesterday. I look forward to learning more & exploring the concepts with Leadership colleagues!