By Dr. John Hollins, past Chair Board of Directors.
A reflection
CACOR has had some one hundred members ever since I have known it. The membership spans a wide range of disciplines and experience. It subscribes to the fundamental tenets and the approach adopted by the Club of Rome when it was created. We seek to understand global issues — ecological, social, and physical — by considering and seeking to understand the systems in which we find them.
Some members have expressed frustration in recent years that CACOR as an organization has limited itself to talking and discussions. Nevertheless, our programs have engaged our members, a valuable function for the members themselves, and they have results in our many networks that are not known.
After several decades of being simply a think tank, the membership decided at the 2018 Annual General Meeting that it is willing to advocate. As we prepare to advocate, we may wonder what can a club of one hundred Canadian citizens actually do.
For every member of CACOR, there are 370,000 other Canadians. For every Canadian, there are 200 other citizens on our planet. We are a small tail. But there are many small tails in Canada and around the world. Challenges for small tails are to be patient, to seek opportunities, and to be satisfied with whatever we can do. And the scientists and engineers who studied Physics 101 may remember that a first approximation is all that is needed to understand and to address many questions. We don’t need the ultimate in precision and accept the likely as a foundation for progress.
So let me offer a couple of quotations, trusting that they are not just wishful thinking; firstly from Howard Zinn, an American historian, playwright, and social activist (1922 – 2010):
I would encourage people to look around them in their community and find an organization that is doing something that they believe in, even if that organization has only five people, or ten people, or twenty people, or a hundred people. And to look at history and understand that when change takes place it takes place as a result of large, large numbers of people doing little things unbeknownst to one another. And that history is very important for people to not get discouraged. …
History is instructive. And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper. Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place.
And continue with the American cultural anthropologist, Margaret Mead, 1901-1978:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
So, friends and colleagues in CACOR, let’s constructively strike out in the direction adopted by the Annual General Meeting as committed citizens of the world. As Past Chair Bill Pugsley, with origins in North Devon, likes to write, even though we don’t approve of fox hunting: Tally Ho!
John Hollins
2018 September 13
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