An Interview with John Vaillant, Zoe Grams, and Ian Gill
What exactly is a Climate Readers Retreat? At first, I thought is was a Climate Writers’ Retreat, and even though I’m a neophyte I was intrigued that the writer Hollyhock was featuring was John Vaillant – the author of The Golden Spruce, which I had just read, and Fire Weather, which I hadn’t. I decided I would like to go to this retreat so I hightailed it to the Campbell River library and Fire Weather was on the shelf. It must be a sign! The second sign was that Hollyhock has scholarships that I could apply for. This would make attending more feasible. I pled my case and received a generous scholarship. Then I proceeded to do my homework and read Fire Weather. This non-fiction book full of disturbing information focused on the Fort McMurray fire in 2016 gallops like a wild fire at a towering pace. I had been living in north-west Alberta at the time of the fire and the realities of the oil patch economy were a determining social and economic factor in Grande Prairie on the other side of the province.
But back to my question: what is a climate readers retreat? The Hollyhock website description included:
Our world needs scalable, systemic change, and now. But most of us don’t have the time and space in our daily lives to deeply reflect on what our contribution to solving the climate crisis might be.
This is an opportunity to explore how to move from despair or mourning into organizing; to discuss tough questions about action and complicity; to discover and share techniques for renewing your energy for change; to find out how we can talk about the current political
reality in order to galvanize people to action; and to create a plan to transform how you contribute to our shared futures.
If you’re seeking inspiration to stoke your work in the months ahead, to find tools for deepening your work, use this time for reflection, relationship building and giving yourself the tools and space to build a plan for the future.
It wasn’t about writing about climate change; it was an opportunity to reset, recharge, and refocus my energy to address climate change on the ground. After the recent federal election, and the ‘tri-fecta’ reality of living in Campbell River (conservative City Council, Conservative MLA, Conservative MP) I needed some R & R & R. Add in relaxation and respite and it was a winning combination. I was also mindful of the Indigenous 5 Rs Education Model which I adhere to as a teacher and researcher: Relationship, Respect, Relevance, Responsibility, Reciprocity. Reciprocity – I could write a piece for Cortes Currents about the retreat. Even better – I could interview the retreat leaders Ian Gill and Zoe Grams of Upstart and Crow, and John Vaillant, the celebrated writer of Fire Weather. Ian Gill writes for the Tyee and he is a co-founder of Salmon Nation. I had attended a couple of on-line conferences with Salmon Nation during the COVID 19 lockdowns. Zoe Grams is a communications strategist. I asked, and Ian, Zoe, and John agreed to recording a conversation on my cell phone that is now here for you to read.
Before we get to that conversation, I need to tell you a bit about the Climate Readers Retreat. We began in the evening, May 21, with an introduction circle. We were twelve participants ranging in age from 15 to 85. Most of us were from the islands and the lower mainland, with one doctor who came from Kamloops. The rest of us had backgrounds in education, forestry, government, non-profits, journalism, writing. Zoe’s role was to facilitate the sessions, which she did with attentiveness and grace. We had two sessions every day and a closing session on Sunday morning, May 26. We often divided into small discussion groups as well as sitting together in circle. We discussed hope, building connections, listening, storytelling, moral ambition and moral imagination, finding our leverage, visioning, what we were bringing away from the retreat and what resources we needed for the work we were imagining. One morning we had a Zoom presentation with Jess Housty, the Heiltsuk writer and community organizer from Bella Bella. She focused on the need for right relationships and made me think about the colonial structures of philanthropy.
All three of our leaders wove stories from their lives throughout the retreat. As well as holding space for us to listen to each other, Zoe curated a library of books we could borrow and buy if we desired. I didn’t have a lot of time for reading but I did come away with three books I would never have found on my own. A highlight, as we neared the end of the retreat, was John Vaillant’s public presentation on Saturday evening, which many Cortes Islanders attended. Though I had just read Fire Weather, John still made shivers run up my spine as he recounted stories from people who had experienced the Fort McMurray fire.
But, as was the hope and intention of our retreat leaders, the greatest learning came from listening to each other’s stories, attending to the diversity of experience, and hopes and dreams we each hold; the questions, uncertainties, and fears that shadow our lives. As I sat listening to the wisdom coming from this diversity of people I thought of Margaret Wheatley’s book, turning to one another. The very first assurance Wheatley gives us, in her Welcome is:
“I believe we can change the world if we start listening to one another again. Simple, honest, human conversation. Not mediation, negotiation, problem-solving, debate, or public meetings. Simple, truthful conversation where we each have a chance to speak, we each feel heard, and we each listen well.”
The Interview
In this spirit, here is my conversation with Ian Gill, Zoe Grams, and John Vaillant, focused around six questions that I hope bring us closer to learning who these people are and what is important to them in the work they do in our world.
Annie: Please tell me about yourself and what you are doing right now.
Ian: I do a few things. Zoe, my wife and I, founded the Upstart and Crow Literary Arts Studio, in Covid, in 2020. This is our 5th year. I’m also a former Vancouver Sun editor and reporter, a former CBC television documentary reporter, I also was, for many years, a founding director of Ecotrust Canada. We worked extensively in coastal communities, predominantly all up and down BC, doing mapping and community development work. We had a revolving loan fund for a while where we did small and medium enterprise loans to try to get conservation-based businesses off the ground. Later I formed Salmon Nation with Spencer Beebee. I’m involved in forming my own studio called the Nature-State Studio. The idea behind that is simply that nation states are failing; we need to work on a different scale. We need to work at the scale and pace and the direction of Nature. We need an answer to terminal-stage capitalism. We need an answer to the warrior classes who think it’s okay to conduct themselves the way they are now. We need an answer to the fact that the institutions that we’ve relied upon, that were formed out of the carnage of the second World War, those institutions are failing us now. They’re not agile enough, they’re not smart enough, frankly, to deal with the poly-crises that are afflicting the world pretty much everywhere you look. So the idea behind a Nature State is to find ways in which we can find things that work so that communities can fend for themselves because we can’t rely on centralized governments to do that anymore. And that involves governance, capital, production, health and human services, education – going back, in a sense to some of the better things bio-regionalism brought to the world starting about 50 years ago and that got marginalized by the consumer economy. There’s a lot of bio-regionalism1 that we can adopt and adapt on a larger scale. We have to, if we’re going to survive.
Zoe: I wear a few different hats. I’m founder of two communications agencies, one working on impact communications with municipalities, Indigenous Nations, non-profits; one working in the literary sector. I’m co-founder of Upstart and Crow Literary Arts Studio: a non-profit dedicated to thinking about different ways of telling stories and the roles they play in our lives. My primary role is as Executive Director of Climate Caucus: a national non-profit dedicated to supporting local government leaders enact climate policy for and in their communities. And so I see my role—overall—as finding different ways of conceiving of and sharing stories that accelerate positive, tangible change at a time we need rapid, systemic progress.
John: I’m a journalist and author. Fire Weather: the Making of a Beast, came out in May of 2023, exactly 2 years ago. And that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing since then. This is my first workshop of this kind but I’ve given a lot of lectures and interviews pretty much continually for the past two years. It’s become my day job in a way that no other book has. My movements are determined by the next Fire Weather event and because we’re coming into a flammable part of the year, and frankly, North America’s been burning all year. It’s not unexpected but it’s intense to see it happening. Because this is so pressing and present I don’t feel the need to move past it because it’s so urgent and it’s lethally important.
Annie: What event in your life called you to become a climate activist? How have you done this in your life so far?
Ian: If Tzeporah Berman2 was here or a lot of people who are activists, they’d laugh and they’d say, “He’s not really an activist.” I’ve never been arrested, never done hard time for being an activist. I’ve never really showed up as an activist per se as I’m a journalist and my training in journalism was that you didn’t cross that line. I tried to get arrested during Fairy Creek. I came up one day and there were no cops there so I kind of missed my mark. But I think if you talked to my journalistic colleagues, they would say absolutely I’m a climate activist because they think I’ve long since crossed the river through writing and showing up around issues in a way that an objective journalist would never do. I think it just naturally flows out of the fact that I’m interested in social justice, that I’m interested in social change. I don’t know how I got interested in that except that I witnessed social injustice.
It wasn’t until I came to Canada that I looked at land use issues as land rights issues. My training as an agricultural reporter conditioned me to always be looking at what was going on with the land, but only from the point of view of farmers and producers. I looked at what was going on with the resources of BC and was pretty appalled, frankly. When it became possible at CBC to start working on environmental issues as a reporter – the job opened up and no-one else wanted it so I took it – that gave me the ability to travel all over BC. Whenever I saw an issue like a mine or a pipeline, or a dam, or a clearcut, or whatever else, I made it a point of going and talking to the Indigenous people who lived near there to find out what they thought. Why wouldn’t you go and talk to the people who are most directly affected and least rewarded by this. It was just so obvious and yet no-one wrote about that. So is that activism?
I don’t consider myself a climate writer at all. I don’t write about climate science and the business of the fossil oil companies or the massive subsidies. What I’m interested in is the end of the pipe that involves real communities and what happens to them and what happens to the natural systems that are impacted by this.
Zoe: I’m going to challenge the premise of the question and say that I don’t think there’s one thing in my life! And I wouldn’t necessarily classify myself as a climate activist! I would say that I have been very lucky in life; helping others in their own lives is what you do as a decent human being. Climate, to me, is a larger term which encompasses fairness, and safety, and opportunity, and people having the rights to many things that we often take for granted. So I think, like a lot of people, this sense of awareness, and duty, sort of seeps in… it’s not necessarily one big event that led me here.
John: As a journalist, you’re really just responding to what’s going on around you. I think it’s more recognizing factors and causes of our current precarity and then, because I’m a writer – it’s more about how a particular story is going to refract and reflect those issues organically. The Fort McMurray fire was a colossal, devastating catastrophy, and yet it came with a history; it came with predictions; it’s a chain of events that precedes the 2016 ignition by months, years, and decades. So, for someone with my turn of mind, interested in history, interested in how historic events and attitudes and culture impact the current moment, it’s a perfect vehicle for exploring all of that. And it’s not theoretical. These events kill people en mass; they’re super dangerous, and there are definitely going to be more of them.
Annie: So was the Fort Mac fire the event that made you go, “Whoa! I need to do something here!”?
John: Yeah. We’ve all been aware of climate change at different levels for a long time. . . . As the science came in and the data hardened, it got more pointed. The extraordinary events of the Fort McMurray fire, the way the fire behaved, its unstoppability, its unfightability, made me realize, late in the game, we’ve turned a corner. And our relationship to fire has fundamentally changed with it: fire now behaves differently than it used to. Homo sapiens have never lived in a time like this before – never in 250,000 years. There have been all kinds of individual calamities, but there hasn’t been a trend that is going to make fires rage unstoppably around the world. And it’s happening now in real time, year over year. And you can see the change. It’s an amazing time to be alive.
Annie: What is foremost for you that you want people to understand right now?
John: We need to renegotiate our relationship to the earth and to the systems that govern it. All our activities need to become earth-centred. All our decisions and ambitions and appetites and extractions need to take the limitations of the earth into consideration. That includes the atmosphere. And our failure to do that, our sense that nature is the cookie jar here for us to raid and whoever can come out with the biggest handful is getting away with something, has got us into this situation. We can back out of it up to a point – the longer we wait the less opportunity we’ve got to back out. Nature will stop making the cookies – that’s already happening. Nature will take the cookies away from us. Nature took away a lot of cookies from the people in Fort McMurray. Nature took a whole lot of cookies away from people in Los Angeles. It’s super basic and it’s the way fossil fuel powered capitalism currently functions. It’s a story of national importance: what do you do after your city’s burned down, after your kids are traumatized? There’s so much more PTSD in Canada now than there was 10 years ago, and it’s almost all climate driven.
Zoe: I would like more people to understand that while we need to renegotiate our relationship with nature, as John said, so much of what’s being discussed around climate policy is about renegotiating our relationship with each other. It’s about putting back on the table basic principles that we would have taken for granted. What are the basic rights we need to underscore and protect? Should people know that if their town is burnt to the ground that there will be enough support that it can be rebuilt, that they can restart their lives? Should people be able to grow into old age and have healthy air in their lungs and not be hospitalized every summer? Should people have the right to affordable housing that keeps them warm in the winter and cool in the summer? I’d argue yes, as a minimum. Some suggest that those of us who care deeply about climate are thinking about environment more than we’re thinking about humans. That’s a false binary. So when we’re renegotiating our relationship with nature we’re also renegotiating very important terms of what it means to be human to and with one another and what it means to be in community with one another. I don’t think we’re reckoning with it at that level and I really think we need to.
Ian: There’s so much unsaid in the world right now. Partly because of polarization and partly because of the way digital media works. There are so many voices unheard and so many impacts unreported. There’s an endless font of things to write about. There is a lot to do. There’s a thirst for conversation and a thirst to be heard – not just to have your own ideas validated but a thirst to be challenged – to have a real conversation face to face. It’s almost impossible in the modern world to do that now; people are just herded into one algorithmic channel or another. They just bury themselves there and don’t come out. There’s a huge amount of work to do.
John: In Fort McMurray, everyone knows which side their bread is buttered on. You cannot criticize the petroleum industry and not bite the hand that’s feeding you. They’ve made that compromise. Not many people get out of there unscathed. Petroleum is a tough business. It’s tough on the environment, and it’s tough on the people who work in it. It’s hard on your body and it’s hard on your soul. You have to really numb out to be around that kind of destruction on a daily basis. A lot of men, in particular feel that’s the price of doing business, that’s the price of what they’ve got to do.
Annie: What strategies do you see as most useful in reaching people right now?
Zoe: I think there is such huge potential in people engaging in local governance and supporting their local governments who are working on policies that support community and long-term sustainability. Focusing on community-driven change, municipal politics, and getting comfortable with what asking for change and advocating for change and creating change looks like at that level, is very important politically. For example: Canada’s municipalities are responsible for more than 1/2 of all emissions in our country. There’s a lot of despair and ennui from folks as we watch this larger geo-political project unfold—something we’re part of it without feeling able to touch it or affect it—and I think that’s deeply demoralizing. Focusing on local and how much can happen through local politics and then building outwards: it’s an incredible opportunity for real impact.
Ian: What I found gratifying about coming here [to Hollyhock] is that I think we’ve unlocked something. Dialogue like this is absolutely critical (and dialogue that’s potentially a lot more fractious), what we’ve witnessed and what we’ve offered, narratives around grief and narratives around observations and some narratives around solutions. But we haven’t even touched the edge of what’s going on. I think so many people are desperate to have a conversation where they’re not demonized or ostracized by their views, but they’re listened to and heard. These are two very different things. Our systems aren’t set up for that.
We’re missing something in the narrative environment; it is exclusionary to a lot of people. The scientists talk in their bubble and no-one understands them. The environmentalists have done a very poor job of communicating what’s going on in the environment, generally, and around climate in particular. Industry have their own narratives; they tend to be louder and they’re certainly better funded. And government seems to be largely unaccountable for any policy that is going to do anything. So somewhere in there we need to find a different way and different channels to uncover the more silent voices, the quieter voices, and to articulate a vision of what we want from the world and where the world is headed. Zoe mentioned a couple of days ago that the world thinks visionaries are not relevant. But if all we’re doing is hammering away at what we’ve got when we know what the effect of that is, that’s not visionary, that’s Pavlovian. We don’t need gurus; we need people who can really work hard at hearing what people are experiencing, hearing what their aspirations are, hearing what their vision is, and coming up with ways in which we can create a world that works for people and for the planet.
I think that’s the work. Some of what I’ve been trying to do is to promote what works. The media is for what doesn’t work – disasters end up on page one for a reason. But we’ve got a flood of what’s wrong coming at us all the time which is disabling and disempowering. I think people all over the place are saying they’re seeing these effects – the weather changing – and the more we can find people who are coming up with novel solutions and innovations and doing the “right thing”, and doing the “right thing”, and amplify those stories, then other people will think, “Well, I could do that. That doesn’t seem so hard. I’m going to go do that.”
John: What I’m doing has variable impact. There is a change in consciousness required. That’s a really big ask for anybody at any time. It feels good to be providing one of those experiences that I hope is intense enough that people will factor it into their future decision making. It may not influence it but it will be a consideration. At the most primitive level, they may start to recognize the importance of having a second exit route out of the new housing development. Better yet, maybe we build that development a whole different way or maybe we listen to that person on city council who is nattering on and on about underbrush and Fire Smart because they were dialed in 20 years ago to the increased fire risk, and now, maybe there’s something to it. Basically, I’m reinforcing what lots of people have already said. James Hansen said it in no uncertain terms before Congress in 1988: fossil fueled climate change is going to change weather in the following ways . . . It was in the future then and now it’s horribly in the present.
The power of the community, like in Campbell River, or Vancouver Island – is that you can be nodes and wellsprings of thinking > progress > action. There’s a great example from nature: the beautiful thing about beaver meadows and beaver dams is, they drown a section of forest and turn it into beaver meadow, flood it and create a mini-pond ecosystem. They capture a bunch of water and they manage the water in a way that farmers and residents and loggers don’t always like but it has a role, especially after a really bad fire. Everything burns and then there’s this funny little green thing in the middle full of water. And that’s the beaver meadow. It becomes this place where recovery can grow begin. That captured water could actually help firefighters put out fires in that area. There might not have been a pond there before and now, with the beaver, we may never have realized how important that particular beaver meadow was that saved that farm or that development. We don’t know how important Campbell River is, but if Campbell River becomes the place that a progressive city council develops a different building code, develops a different energy code, that enables roof top solar, that is able to disconnect from the gas grid, that could be incredibly powerful internationally. We don’t know but it’s a bet worth taking. With important changes it is really useful to start small. You can have leadership that goes big on a national scale in China – China is leading the world by leaps and bounds in the energy transition. They have installed more wind and solar than the rest of the world combined – by multitudes. It’s a dictatorship; they can do whatever they want, but they’ve made this choice that is a war-effort mode into a new energy regime. Canada could do that, too. The US could do it, too. What we’re seeing is how important it is to not follow the nearest hegemon.
Following the US right now is a path to destruction. They’re on a suicidal path; they’re melting down and Canada has to disassociate from that country despite all the very important entanglements that have been very mutually beneficial. We’re having to walk that back and find other allies and other ways of being. Canada has an opportunity now to discover a new side of itself, a bolder, more independent leadership role. There have been moments in the past where it has done that, and this is another one of those moments, another one of those tests.
Annie: What brought you together to collaborate on creating and facilitating the Climate Readers Retreat?
Ian: Meg, one of the people who [does programming] here at Hollyhock worked for us briefly in the studio in Vancouver when we started Upstart and Crow. She called up and said she’d love to think of something we could do [together]. At Upstart and Crow we have a mission to promote reading, writing, and dialogue around climate change. So we said, “What if we do a Climate Readers’ Retreat?” to appeal to people who are reading about climate and suffering some of the confusion and alienation that goes along with that. And anger and fear and how do you process that? I’ve known John for twenty-five years and we thought wouldn’t it be good if John got involved as he’s written the “book of the ages” right now. And he said, “Yes.” So we’re pretty lucky.
Annie: What is next for you?
Zoe: What I hope is next is for more spaces for conversations like the ones we’ve been over the last few days. And more opportunities for people to be in rigorous but kind, intergenerational conversations about what matters most to us. It’s so easy to be cynical or ironic because it’s really scary to sit with what’s happening and our complicity with it or what we could be doing more of. I think these spaces are deeply valuable. What I hope next, on a larger scale, is that people start to see how many of these false narratives—the idea that we can build a strong economy without prioritizing climate; or the idea that local climate policies are about control rather than helping folks; or the idea that we can defer this work—are actively harming their lives, and the lives of their children, and start to use that frustration to conceive a different future.
John: You wonder when the penny’s going to drop for people. Just watching what’s happening in the US – you would have thought four years of Trump would have been enough to break the fever. There is a very powerful counter-narrative that is designed to keep us captive to petroleum and consumption and self-destruction, that wants to keep us asleep; and there’s a part of us that wants to stay asleep. This captivity was working for a lot of us. Those of us for whom it’s still working may think, “Maybe it’s not going to work much longer so I’m going to get as much as I can”; “It’s my turn”, “I finally got my kick at the can and I can have the stuff I’ve seen all these other people get.”
As far as what’s next for me, I feel like I’m doing something that goes to the limits of my ability, and that plays to my strengths. I feel like I’ve found a sort of frequency that enables me to communicate something that feels desperately urgent to me to a growing variety of people. So that’s really exciting and challenging. And figuring out ways to hone the message, to connect with a bank or an insurance agent or connect with a politician, to connect with somebody in the energy business who is studiously pretending this isn’t happening, that feels like the next hurdle. And I’ve broken into that realm so I want to keep exploring that. I want to have conversations that acknowledge the fact of the matter is that petroleum and fossil fuels have given us so much – they got us here; they’re why we’re here, why the four of us are having this conversation right now is thanks to petroleum. So how do we show our gratitude for that and, at the same time, say, “Okay, this is also now clearly maladaptive.”
Ian: The climate issue isn’t going to go away; it’s going to become more acute. The questions and answers will be different. The books will be different. The policies will be different, one hopes. We’re in for a roiling, unmanageable few years trying to find where the bubble in the level comes back into the glass. We can’t even find the bubble in the level. It’s going to take a lot of very diverse exchanges and dialogues and narratives to even begin to cohere into something that will feel safer and better for many many more people than it does now. Those conversations are happening every day. If we can inspire a few deeper and more profound ones through the work we’re doing that seems like a good use of our time.
Annie: Thank you John, Zoe, and Ian, for this conversation, for sharing your fears, frustration, hope and vision for what we need to do to protect the world we depend on for life. You held space for us in the Climate Readers Retreat, to listen and speak, to discover insights, challenges, encouragement, and hope. I offer heartfelt appreciation to the Hollyhock community who, in this special place on earth, nourished our bodies, minds, hearts and spirits.
Footnotes
- “Bioregionalism was an attempt to return to return to what human life had been for most of history, . . ., that it was the only viable future. Though you don’t hear much about bioregionalism anymore, its ideals are present in the slow food movement, the farmers’ markets springing up everywhere … the emphases on eating locally and seasonally, environmentally sound building practices, sustainable urban designs and systems for garbage, water, and power, and in the revivals that celebrate and maintain local culture and memory amid the homogenization that is corporate globalizations’ cultural impact.” Rebecca Solnit. Hope in the Dark, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2016. p. 98.
- International Program Director of Stand Earth