Sustainable Diversity?

Today at work we had a lunch and learn on sustainable diversity. Basically it was about how we can have real dialogue with different groups (ethnic or otherwise). I just wrote this message to the facilitator:

I had one thought that I’m always loath to share in big groups (I don’t want to come across as a downer, though I would just call myself a realist). I know that the subject of your talk was sustainable diversity but I don’t actually see diversity (not that we have it) as sustainable. Of course this means big trouble for visible minorities. Let me explain myself.

We’re heading for a period of declining energy (peak oil). This is a well documented fact though the date of the peak is debatable. This is going to impact lots of things but most importantly food, home energy consumption and mobility (it already is, especially two years ago with food prices spiking and the current recession is intimately connected to high oil prices).

Now for the past 60 years (and maybe a bit longer) we have had abundant energy so much so that we wasted it all the time. We could heat our homes excessively, drive and take airplanes anywhere we wanted at the drop of the hat, and we could throw away food no problem. But now this accepted fact of life is starting to change.

How has this over abundance of energy affected diversity? I would argue that the “comfort” that the middle and upper classes received from cheap energy enabled them to “tolerate” visible minorities or otherwise. So Martin Luther King Jr. could get some of the things he asked for (not all mind, he was still black after all) and Harper would say sorry for residential schools and gays and lesbians could get married and women could make (almost) as much money as men and immigrants could move here from other countries thanks to Pierre Trudeau.

“Why not?” the white, heterosexual, relatively wealthy middle and upper classes would say. “I’m comfortable enough to be magnanimous. Throw these poor people a bone.”

But what happens when their comfort is challenged? When resources are less abundant or they finally feel a rumble in their empty stomachs, something they have never known their whole lives? Are they going to come together to build resilient communities with people they “tolerate” but who look different and eat different food and speak a different language? I doubt it. In fact, I could see them casting blame on the “immigrants and gays and lesbians and other minorities.” They'll be angry and resentful that they have lost so much (stuff).

So not that I’m a downer I’m a realist. And there is some good news. The solution is so difficult but is the subject that you spoke on today. Making space for dialogue and getting people together for frank and difficult conversations. I’m so happy that you are taking this work on and I know lots of other folks are too. This is so difficult though, a real uphill struggle, much like my work asking people to question their fundamental beliefs about consumption, civilization, our species self-assigned exceptionalism and what makes a happy life (here's a hint, it's not more stuff and having less contact with other humans). Dialogue is so important giving the changes we are going to experience in the next 20 years.