By Aaron Fairchild

Green Canopy’s Mission:
Building relationships, businesses, and homes that help regenerate communities and environments.

Last year for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, I wrote that I hoped that observing Earth Day during a time of historic global crisis would perhaps draw greater attention to the need for society to transform to be more just, equitable and resilient. It was an observation that the purpose of Earth Day needs to expand to include justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.

Today, as the dawn broke on the shoreline of spring in America, accountability for the injustice of George Floyd’s murder was served. It reminds me what can be accomplished when a large collective comes to agreement that justice can be achieved, justice in voting and representation, housing, education, policing, health care and the environment. When we come together and demonstrate compassion through accountability for injustice, we create the conditions required for justice in all its forms to emerge into the radiance of our collective demonstration, and we are blessed.

When we collectively exercise restraint of our worst and consumptive impulses, our better versions have more space to emerge throughout our lives.

This ongoing social justice movement offers an opportunity to deepen and expand the original purpose of Earth Day. Created in 1970, “Earth Day is an event to increase public awareness of the world’s environmental problems.”

I believe that examples of aligning environmental and social issues point the way to reconsider what Earth Day should be about. Environmental organizations run the risk of being seen to appropriate social justice issues as merely a means of advancing environmental agendas. Their approach must be grounded in genuine partnership and compassion and focused on the equitable and just behavior of humans in all the environments we occupy.

 Can we adjust the aperture of Earth Day’s intent to be more wholistic and inclusive of social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion?

Throughout the pandemic I have felt hope when seeing several social and environmental impact organizations and projects outwardly share the observation that the environmental movement can and must be more inclusive. Perhaps when looking back fifty years from the future, we will be able to point to this moment of enhanced social justice awareness as the catalyst of greater societal unity and positive transformation across the planet.

Below are data points of hope from many different organizations that highlight positive alignment at the intersection of social and environmental issues.

I look forward to attending both the Nobel Prize, Theater of War production as well as the MoMA exploration!

• Nobel Prize Summit: Our Planet our Future
  Theater of War productions presents at the Summit: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King on Zoom as a catalyst for powerful, constructive, global conversations about climate change, ecological disaster, and environmental justice.

• MoMA Event, 4/22 2:30pm PST: Black Reconstructions: Environmental Justice
  Architecture and community development that explores liberating possibilities for Black communities and how architecture can nurture people and communities.

• Zero Hour: Youth led intersectional solutions to climate change

• Climate Justice Alliance

• Sierra Club: Growing Stronger Together

• LEEP: Building equity from the ground up!

 
Locally:

• Carbon Leadership Forum has written several pieces highlighting the need to focus on the intersection of social justice and regenerative community development and climate change.

• Climate Solutions has been realigning their approach for a number of years now and should be acknowledge as leading many within the environmental movement toward positive social justice and equity outcomes.

  • Climate justice and the movement to end police brutality

  • Black Lives Matter

  • Why solving the climate crisis is more urgent than ever

• Washington Environmental Council should also be highlighted and acknowledge for their broadened awareness

• Washington Nature Conservancy: We're Here For A Resilient Future

• Ecotrust: Forward Progress

• Forterra

• Seattle Foundation

• Social Justice Fund

Natural Flow
af
 
Sit just above a stream, and
Listen to water flow.
Wind dances on your skin, and
Gently tickles tremoring licorice ferns
Up the spine of a mossy maple tree.
Sound, feeling, and movement harmonize
With birdsong blessings
Sprinkled into the air.
Feel this wilderness
Within you
To carry you
Throughout the day.

By Aaron Fairchild

The combination of Dr. Martin Luther King Day and the Presidential Inauguration happening this week, just after crossing the threshold into a new year, offers plenty for reflection.  

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As we embark into 2021, our anticipation is fueled by all that has come to pass over the last year. 2020, at least in part, lived up to its promise of improved vision. Last year revealed with clarity an inequitable and unjust racial caste system at work throughout America. We watch as the physical, financial and emotional suffering brought on by COVID-19, and the outgoing Administration, disproportionately impact some Americans more others.

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Kahlil Gibran  

Where do you find joy?

Leading up to this Presidential Inauguration I have watched the replay of violent scenes at the Nation’s Capital disheartened, aghast and yet hopeful – I am sure this is an emotional mixture many of you share in degrees. To remain hopeful and perhaps even positive while feeling aghast and disheartened is to achieve a certain symmetry; balance and wholeness come to mind. The hard work of holding competing forces simultaneously becomes even harder given the uncertainty our Nation is experiencing.

How do we hold our collective need for accountability for violence and violent rhetoric, with love and empathy at the same time? What will you say to your friends and family that support(ed) Donald Trump the next time you see them?

Dr. Cornel West offers some hope.

“We come from a people who have been terrorized for four hundred years. And we’ve learned a lot from being terrorized. We’ve learned a lot from being invisible, spit on, dishonored, and devalued. One thing we’ve learned is that when you have been terrorized, it is spiritually empty to terrorize others back. We need to take it to a higher moral and spiritual level … In the age of terrorism, you can learn a whole lot from people who’ve been terrorized for four hundred years but who have taught the world so much about freedom; from people who’ve been hated for four hundred years but who still teach the world so much about love.” (The Quote is from an interview with Dr. West, Prisoner of Hope, in the Sun Magazine)

This quote calls me to look for role models in Dr. Martin Luther King and other peace activists of the civil rights era and their commitment to hold to love and peace in the face of violence. It asks me to follow the current agents of change within the African American community as examples of the possibility of holding empathy and love simultaneously with the need for accountability and justice. Black voices matter now as much as ever. Black safe spaces matter now as much as ever. Black lives matter now more than ever if we have any hope of coming together in harmony.

Listening to Black voices, for me, means I must be in listening proximity. Join me and Green Canopy in 2021 as we attempt greater proximity so we can better listen and continue learning the many ways real estate, the development of real estate, the financing of real estate, the construction of real estate and the ownership of real estate are being utilized as a massive turbine for African American community empowerment and positive environmental outcomes. Partnering in right relationship with and supporting Black owned, and/or Black led organizations, creates a force multiplier of positive social outcomes for everyone. When aligning issues of equity and justice with green real estate development methods and materials, greater social balance, sustainability and perhaps symmetry can be achieved.

Green Canopy looks forward to partnering with all of you and its many stakeholders throughout the region and ecosystem of real estate to advance its mission and Theory of Change in 2021.

Lastly, I leave you with a list a friend shared with me last week of 10-positive things of 2020. This list calls me to imagine even more positivity. It anchors me in considering how we show our love for each other. 

May the American community we inherited be blessed, and may we continue the hard work of bringing this community together in wholeness and with our love.