Showing all posts tagged trust

In Culture, Environment, Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Politics, Relationships

A Renewable Human Future

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

I dream of a future that uses renewable energy and focuses on the needs of human beings. For a long time now, I’ve been searching for a way to state this dream in a simple, straightforward sentence. Finally, at long last, I think I’ve found it in this phrase: A renewable human future.

My heart pounds with excitement to realise that loads of other people are coming to the same dream, at the same time. For decades, so many of us have been disheartened and then outright enraged by the technofascist push toward generative AI with no regard for the cost to humanity through lost jobs and the deliberate destruction of the environment.

It’s easy to be pissed and hard to know where to start to fight back with something like this. Climate change is the key existential threat of our lifetime, as our planet is heating up and the oceans are boiling, but the elected leaders in charge of these regulations have caved to billionaire pressure and rolled back so many environmental protections.

So we despair and recycle and do what we can in our small corners of influence, while the only planet we have to live on falls apart around us due to greed and stupid decisions. But then came the data centre construction, and now it seems we’ve got a physical enemy to focus on. I can feel the uniting hatred for the billions of dollars being spent on these abhorrent and destructive buildings around the world, and I think it’s finally bringing us together.

In Canada, where I live, our Prime Minister Mark Carney made a big announcement on June 4th called AI for All. The outcry on Bluesky was swift and immediate. Canadians like me who loathe AI and want zero investment in it. CBC followed up with a story about how public trust in Canada is among the lowest in the world for AI and the companies who provide it.

Trust should be low when the product fucking sucks. Canadians are smart in this area. It’s enraging that our elected leaders are so out of touch when it comes to announcing this strategy for AI as though Canadian citizens will embrace this awful tech with open arms. Data centres use a shitload of water and electricity. They are loud and damaging to the earth. No one wants a data centre built near them. I don’t want them built at all.

My response to Mark Carney’s excited announcement on Bluesky read “I dream of elected leaders who actually listen to what the people who elected them want. NO AI. Please, don’t think about money for just a moment. How about human jobs for human beings. Renewable energy. A future where we can breathe and drink water and grow food in our soil. Please. NO AI.“

I followed that post up with a longer letter to the Prime Minister, the AI Minister, my local MP, and the Premier of my province. I was going to write twice, once to express my disdain for the AI for All policy, and once to express my opposition to the way the Liberal Government is quietly dismantling our environmental laws and protections, but then I realised these two issues are really one issue.

The fight to stop any more data centres from being built is the fight to save our environment, and do away with this chokehold the tech oligarchs have placed on society with forced use of AI. This fight is one of the biggest issues of our time, and it’s happening right now. We cannot wait. Our planet is in peril, and it’s the only place we have to live. Please, join us in this fight.

Get loud. Write to the officials in charge to say NO AI DATA CENTRES. Sign every petition you can find, like this one to halt the proposed Vancouver data centres, and this one to pause AI in BC schools. Wherever you live, search for petitions on data centres and sign them to send a message to elected officials. In Vancouver, people are taking to the streets to protest loudly, and I plan to join them.

It’s healthy not to trust those who lie to us. The technofascists have lied, again and again and again, so I will not trust them when they promise that these new data centres will be different. We don’t need AI. What we need is renewable energy to heal our ravaged planet, and a future that centres human beings and not company profits or chatbots. We need to prioritise our human lives over money and computers.

To me, the environment matters more than anything else. If my kids and their future kids cannot breathe clean air or drink clean water or grow food to eat in the soil, and if they have no access to inspiring work that celebrates humanity instead of robots, then they have no liveable future. It’s up to us, right now, to imagine and then build a future that we can be excited about.

One that is renewable and human. The time is now, and this work is urgent.

In Culture, Identity, Politics, Relationships

Elbows Up

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

The world feels like a total shit show right now. Since January 2025, when leadership (I’m using that word generously here) changed hands in the US, neighbourly relations between our two countries have sharply deteriorated.

We are known the world over for being polite. But being nice has its limits, and most Canadians have reached those limits by now.

My initial reaction to the tariffs and the threats of annexation was dismay. Then deep sadness and frustration. Now I’ve moved through those stages and into pure rage. I’m angry in my very bones. I feel offended and enraged that we have been targeted and provoked. And I know I’m not alone in this reaction.

This is our country, and we take our sovereignty seriously. When we travel internationally, we wear Canadian flags because we never want to be mistaken for Americans. We love being Canadian, and I take the actions of the current US administration to be acts of war. To me, this is serious business.

I have a lot of friends who live in the US, and I’ve reached out to several of them to tell them how I’m feeling. It helped me to talk it through with them. To hear their dismay and sadness and then anger. To know that on a personal level, we are not enemies, even while their political landscape attempts to turn us into adversaries.

As Mike Meyers said so well on SNL, for Canadians it’s time for “Elbows Up.” We live and breathe hockey since the time we are born, and elbows up means to protect yourself and be ready to fight back when your opponent throws down their gloves and readies for a brawl.

As a nation, we are ready. We will fight. We are angry now. Canadians have a long history of courage on the battlefield. We show up, we don’t back down, and we will fight to keep what’s ours and to not be pushed around.

There’s no sense wishing this wasn’t happening. It’s already underway. Pretending it’s a joke isn’t helpful. Along with many other Canadians, we are buying local and refusing to support the US in any way through travel or commerce. We are committed to growing our economy and sending the message that we will not be bullied, bought, or threatened.

The sense of betrayal we feel from America right now cannot be understated. I find it impossible to understand a majority of the country voting for this chaos, stress, horror, and hatred toward individuals and nations. The long term damage of what is happening here will have ripple effects for generations. When trust is broken, it takes a long time to repair, and it will never be the same.

As a country, our elbows are firmly up. Picking a fight with polite people doesn’t get you kindness in return. In this case, it gets you a show of strength.

Canada didn’t initiate this fight, but it sure as hell plans to finish it.

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Learning to Receive

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Every year, I pick 3 words to focus on. For 2024, those words are savour, intentional, and receive. When I picked these words in January, I had a sense that receive would be the hardest challenge for me. And it has been.

But I’m getting there. I’m learning, ever so slowly, that giving and receiving is a dance. For so many years, I was spinning in circles on the dance floor of my relationships, giving and giving and giving and not believing that I deserved to receive from those who loved me.

It’s different now. And better. More balanced and fair. When Jason and I were going to marriage counselling last spring for the first time in our nearly 27-year-relationship, I said to him, “I want a wife to care for me the way I look after you.”

At first, he had no idea what I was saying. It took us both a long time to figure out that I had been so skilled at nurturing him, while simultaneously blocking any attempt he made to be loving and caring back to me. I created a pattern in our marriage where I gave and he received. Over time, this centred his needs and interests over mine.

I was resentful about this. And angry. Our relationship felt lopsided and unfair, and the worst thing was that Jason couldn’t understand why I would be feeling unhappy.

So much of our lives is invisible to us, because we create habits around our patterns. Then we behave instinctively around those patterns, until the inner workings of the relationship dynamics are mysterious to us, even though we were the ones who set those patterns up in the first place.

But 27 years is a long time. He couldn’t see that he was the centre of our relationship, and I couldn’t see that I had been the one to put him there. We were both so lost in trying to reach each other during that painful and isolating time in our marriage.

Until we took a road trip last spring from BC to Alberta, and talked with no distractions for hours on end. Suddenly, we both found clarity on a few of these key issues. He began to understand what I was asking for from him, and I could finally glimpse the inner workings of my inability to receive the care and nurture he had been offering to me.

We both started to change on that trip last June. And now, it’s more than a year later, and I’ve been learning how to receive the care I’ve been longing for. From Jason, from my grown kids, from my close friends. Even from my beloved cat, Teddy. I opened the door that I had closed in order to protect myself from being hurt or let down by others. I started to trust again, and it’s been a beautiful thing.

In my monthly zoom nurture sessions for writers, I’m amazed at how often this issue of giving vs. receiving is coming up. So many women are conditioned to give and not to receive. Sometimes it’s an issue of self-worth and protection, like it was for me, and other times it’s tied to a feeling of obligation, like nurture is a debt we owe to someone else.

I know there is a lot more to discover on this topic. I’m just scratching the surface of understanding how complex and nuanced giving and receiving can be, especially between women and men. I’m so grateful that Jason and I can both see the inner workings a little bit clearer within our marriage, which means we can talk about it openly and make small changes to be sure we are both feeling loved and loving within our relationship.

It’s been a revelation to me, how much stronger and more generous I feel when I practice receiving that love and care from others.