What would happen if I asked a group of adults in their twenties and thirties, “What do you want to change when you grow up?”

“This week, I asked that by email of listserv that I am part of. I wrote:

“What would you like the world to look like when you’re 90 years old? Think big! Take off your grad student hat and put on your dreamer tiara!”

The responses I got back showed a lot about how people see the future , their own versions of heaven or hell.

An English literature researcher wrote about language in the future. He forecasts that “[t]he world will be standardized on a few object-oriented computer languages updated at regular intervals.  These will be taught to infants alongside a basic spoken English derived from Internet-speak.” Notably, he also forecasts the death of the blog in the not too distant future.

Others kept really practical and proposed amendments to existing institutions and problems:
“By 2100AD the gap between rich and poor has declined precipitously, and the international banking establishment is managed democratically by the UN council, which has been stripped of the prior veto system,” said one friend.

Our energy problems will be solved because “by 2040 humanity begins mass production of clean cheap and plentiful energy via controlled fusion ,” according to a science type.

Maybe , “[p]eople [will] drink less, fight less, [and] produce more art and music than ever before. Maybe we will have devised a way for the weather to be “sunny everyday, with abundant sources of food in nature, and no…greedy people to ruin it all,” said others.

Maybe we’ll just be old , another friend wrote, always the practical one:

“In my dream world, I am 90 and I can hold onto my own glass of water as I swallow my vitamins. Also, I don’t need a powerful telescope in order to see my vitamins. I wouldn’t say no to a few hairs left on my had and a couple of teeth here and there to keep my smile in place – but let’s not get too picky.”

My own utopia for age 90 looks most like this version imagined by a friend:

“When I’m 90 years old, I’d like to see smaller disparities between the world’s rich and poor.  I want human lives to be richer in community and simpler in material desires. I hope for a 35 hour or less work week so people could spend more time with family and friends.  Working less would allow more time for creative endeavors, civic engagement, and fun.  Health care and education should be universal rights.  I want more fish in the sea and bigger forests. My vision is for an economy powered by sunlight, not fossil fuels. When I’m close to a century in age, I hope to see more people gardening, enjoying time in nature, and taking the time to keep old people company.”

A few years ago, someone condescendingly told me that it was okay to be overly idealistic at my age. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it only wanes as you get older.”

I hope he’s wrong. So far, I’m just getting better at imagining a better future.

Two weeks ago, a group of First Nations chiefs rode on horseback to Washington D.C. to get the President-Elect’s attention. They want a pledge from the American government to stop their complicity in developing Alberta’s tar sands oil, most of which is exported to the USA.

Tar sands development is hurting First Nations communities like Fort Chipewyan, downriver from the tar sands where cancers that shouldn’t be are cropping up, and traditional hunting and fishing practices are becoming hazardous due to toxins in the environment. So chiefs from across the country took to horseback to get Obama’s attention.

What a beautiful image full of symbolism. It harkens back to the days when chiefs from this region used to ride on horseback to see the “Great White Father,” the American president, to stimulate trade. It connotes a partnership.

But, things have changed.

This time they traveled to say we need a slowdown on tar sands development and our own “Great White Father” domestically is someone we don’t trust to represent our interests to the USA. What a sad image full of a history of disrespect and good reasons to distrust Ottawa. Of course, we don’t need reminding that for the first time, the American Great White Father is not white.

The chiefs have it right: the world is changing and Canada, especially Alberta, is setting itself up to be left behind in the dark ages of dirty oil and coal power. Our government embarrassed us at the world climate change conference in Poland in early December by standing in the way of international climate change policy.

This is not to say that there isn’t going to be money to be made in developing one of the most resource-intensive oil deposits in the world again if the market comes around. This is to say that the realities of climate change demand that Canada keep up with the push for clean energy and the imperative to stop burning carbon.

Interesting then that a tradition, riding horseback to meet the President, can be both a reference to the past and a call for a different future.

Has anything changed at all? Haven’t we always had lots to learn from First Nations leadership about environmental change and just never been listening?

To many of the places I’ve travelled over the years, my name has been something I’ve had to repeat, explain, and even spell, my finger tracing the J-O-D… onto an imaginary piece of paper in the air.

In France, I could say Jodie, like Jodie Foster. In Mexico, I was told that my name sounded like a Spanish bad word.

I was just recently in Gulu, Northern Uganda for a project I’m working on. Northern Uganda is home to the Acholi people. One day, riding on a motorcycle taxi, the driver asked me my name. When I told him, he was indignant.

“Acholi?” he said. “Your name is Acholi?”

Great, I thought. Now, not only is my name hard to pronounce and remember in most countries, it sounds like an ethnic group here.

For a day or so I tried this out for laughs. Every time I was asked my name, I’d say “Acholi.”
“You’re stubborn,” was the common laughing response.

By the end of the day I was confused. In Canada, I explained, stubbornness is seen as a negative trait. I came to understand that in Acholiland it means mischievous, teasing, and outgoing. So stubbornness can be a good thing. I got called it so many times, I’d like to believe it’s a compliment!

When I think about my heroes, I often think it is stubbornness in a positive sense, in the sense of perseverance , that they had in common. Stop to think about the people who have changed the world. They didn’t always get it right, and they weren’t always polite. In fact, they were often unaccommodating. Surely they all had days of bad moods, some had bad tempers. But all clung steadfastedly to an idea of a better world—they were stubborn about that.

Jim Wallis, an American reverend wrote, “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, then watching the evidence change.” If you get stubborn about the future and stay that way no matter how irrational it may seem, you begin to change the world.

Of course, one can be stubborn about any worldview he or she chooses. Skilled leaders have an infinite ability to convince others to get stubborn about their worldview and to march, protest, vote, even kill in efforts to bring their utopia to fruition.

The obvious comparisons could be made: skilled leaders that history has judged both good and bad were stubborn in their views of the world and able to convince millions to come along.

Each of us contains infinite capacities for good and infinite capacities for bad. If we get stubborn and nudge the pendulum of how the world works a little that way, history will be the judge.

In subtle ways in the day to day, we do our best to create our worlds and live our lives according to a world view and the degree of stubbornness with which we cling to it. So we really ought to put some thought into what our own utopia look like. Otherwise you are at risk to be washed along in a tidal wave of someone else’s utopia.

On the night before I left Uganda, we visited a friend. Lucky outsiders get given an Acholi name by their friends in Northern Uganda. That night I was given mine. Can you guess?

Stubborn.

Collecting bottles along her regular route, Sibyl Whalley, age 84, has raised over $100,000 for charity, one five-cent bottle return at a time. She’s committed. She hasn’t missed more than 10 days of walking her route in the past twenty years, she says.

Change has been on my mind. Obama got elected on it, the climate is doing it, and the economy is flopping into a fundamentally different kind from that I have grown up with.

The changes in the world demand changes in us: those of us in rich countries need to rethink our place in their world right alongside Obama’s America, the evidence of climate change compels us to claw our way into a carbon-free future, and maybe it’s time to change our expectations of the economic system from one that exasperates socio- and eco-injustice to one that works better for the poor and the natural world.

Yeah, right. Keep dreaming idealist.

Several years ago I saw a documentary that has stuck with me ever since. “The Chances of the World Changing” followed an author through the loss of his New Jersey penthouse, bankruptcy, the loss of his career, and some would argue even his marbles as he fights to save turtle species from extinction.

He buys into the documentary being made about his struggle because he believes it is about turtle conservation. Really, the documentary is about him and all of those who campaign in their own small ways for the world to change despite the odds.

Who are they? What keeps them going? Are they fundamentally different than the rest of us who are just trying to make a buck? Or do we all, in our own ways, take our chances to change the world?

When I talk to Sybil, that’s what I’m trying to understand.

“Where do you send the money you raise?”

“Oh,” she says. “To about thirty-eight different charities. And I started sending money for cancer research before I got breast cancer, you know.”

True altruism, I think. No matter how I prod, I can’t find a selfish motivation besides that it makes her feel good to help people.

“I’m just out spreading sunshine,” she adds. “I walk very closely with God.”

When Sibyl went into the hospital to have her breast removed on a Tuesday, she had told Ray, a shopkeeper on her bottle collecting route, that she would be “off for a few days.”

When he asked why and she told him, he said she would be, or at least should be, gone for six weeks.
By Friday, three days later, Sibyl age 78 at the time, was back making change.

“She’s back!” the shopkeeper exclaimed as she bumbled her way in through the door with her bottle cart.

“Told you, Ray,” Sibyl shot back.