Gary Whiteley, Ed.D.
Writing about climate change, community, and our ability to work together.
Climate adaptation is often discussed as a problem of engineering, funding, policy, and planning. Those things matter. But communities facing difficult change also have to listen to one another, work through differences, make difficult decisions, and find ways to move forward together.
Gary Whiteley’s books explore the human side of change through stories of people learning, listening, collaborating, and navigating uncertainty.
Sailing Toward a
HOPEFUL FUTURE
CANADIANS LEADING THE WAY
Seven colleagues travel the coast of British Columbia and encounter communities confronting sea-level rise and an uncertain climate future. Their journey explores trust, local knowledge, collaboration, disagreement, and hope.
At the heart of the book is a simple question:
What if one of the hardest climate-adaptation challenges is our ability to work together?
NEW RELEASE
Sailing Toward
HORIZON
A LEADERSHIP VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
Gary’s earlier sailing voyage explores the habits of mind and dispositions that help people lead, learn, communicate, and work alongside others during periods of significant change.
My first writing assignment in high school freshman English was to select a flower and describe in detail what it would be like from root to petal to be a plant. I selected and described being a dandelion. I thought I was being clever, while Sister Anne was unimpressed. She rejected the idea that a dandelion is a flower. “It’s a weed, and that’s why you earned an “F” on the assignment,” she stated indignantly. Obviously, Sister Anne was an English teacher and not a botanist. And I was undoubtedly, at times, an insufferable adolescent male. The penance for being a weed-loving apostate was to diagram sentences for the first quarter of school and learn “proper” English.
If I had known then what I learned about orchids in my sixties, I might have abandoned the idea of writing about dandelions. Orchids are one of the most successful plant species on our planet. They form symbiotic relationships with large underground fungal networks to share and borrow minerals and nutrients. An orchid could be called promiscuous since it can form multiple symbiotic relationships. I suspect describing orchid behavior in detail, especially any whiff of promiscuity, would have been one of Sister Anne’s taboo topics. On the other hand, dandelions are a prolific invasive species, their seeds thriving almost anywhere they land. A dandelion is a perennial broad-leafed “weed” that lies dormant during winter. The seeds of its “flower” form ring-shaped “bubbles” that can carry them vast distances on the wind.
Should I describe being a weed or a flower was a dilemma for a ninth-grade writing assignment, or so I thought. I never contemplated, nor did Sister Anne, that I could imagine and describe being a weed and a flower.
When faced with the challenges caused by climate change, we will need to consider many approaches to address climigration—forced migration due to climate change—and explore many options, even unprecedented ones.
We must rethink and reimagine how we live on our ever-changing planet because the existential crisis of our time is climate change. This will require flexible and creative thinking supported by innovative and adaptive leadership.