Episode Details

Welcome to “The Gravity Well,” where you break down complex ideas into manageable insights. Your mission is to seek wisdom from elders, individuals, and communities who care for our natural resources. In this episode, you hear about the importance of community, the role of leadership, and the need for grassroots activism in addressing social, environmental, and economic crises. Key topics include the failure of current leadership to engage with the public, the necessity of returning to the rule of law, and the potential of models like Donut Economics to guide us towards a sustainable future. Join us as we explore how to foster humility, accountability, and community care in our efforts to create positive change.

Recap and Welcome to Janet, Kristy and Melanie (and later, Mark)

Alex:

Welcome to The Gravity Well, where we break down heavy ideas into small buckets anyone can handle in our work and at play, we seek wisdom and elder well. We seek the wisdom of elders, excuse me, individuals and communities that share their knowledge and care for our water, air, land, life and resource needs. Caring for our homeland is our guide.

Jenny:

Thank you, Alex. Welcome Melanie. Welcome, Janet. This is a really exciting day for me to have. As I’ve told Melanie, when we first met back in March of last year, really felt at home when I met Melanie and was introduced to the Alberta Talks and AEN team. Janet is someone that I’ve had the opportunity to volunteer with a few, oh geez, at least a handful of times now. And always grateful to hear your insights and see your support in social media and in that space of trying to, as Melanie highlighted, address the concerns that our government is not sharing with the public and potentially some barriers as well. That is what we want to do, make sure that we are touching on the real world, things that are happening, excuse me, right here in Alberta where we live.

But I’m going to back up the bus a little bit and give you two, a little bit of insights as to where we’ve gone over the last five weeks. And then I’ll let Alex do the same, and then we’ll go ahead and do our round table of questions with you, and allow you an opportunity to introduce yourselves Properly as well. Just quickly, I’ve attached a file at the top of this meeting, and that is sort of the running tally of what we’re learning as we go. In our first week, we discussed why we are doing the gravity well, that we want to rebuild community and bring people together in crisis and do that in little buckets at a time. We understand that we have heavy issues that people are facing, and we want to make sure that we have fit-in “bite-sized pieces that anyone can manage” as the goal.

That’s our goal. And then we talked about our agreement. We spoke with our positive intelligence coaches. I meet weekly with some coaches. Thursday morning, which is nice leading into these conversations to be kind of grounded in that. They helped us come to we need a community agreement. We ask that this is a space for respectful listening and exchange of ideas in the best interest of the public and our planet. And that’s of everyone involved. Anyone in the chat or on the stage, the tools of this room, there is an opportunity, if you hold down your phone, you can do some emojis. It helps the conversation move along if somebody, perhaps we can’t hear each other, whatever, something, if something’s running too long, you can do a little gif and offer a funny way of just helping us come back together.

We think this is a call to action. That’s one thing. Melanie’s asked some amazing questions as we’ve gone along through this process, rooting us in what are we trying to do. For us, the big thing that we see this room being is a space to help people take responsibility for themselves. We’re not here to hold responsibility for the issue. Let me give an example. We had a conversation recently with a friend, Bra