Leadership and Hope

Nigel Atkin

Empowered with advancing communication technology, individuals often seek context and understanding of events unfolding in their daily news that in turn shape their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours.

Today, two of the greatest issues faced by the world are climate change and how globalization treats indigenous people. As in most things, those issues interconnect and demand both leadership and hope.

In the turmoil of a consistent rise in global temperatures, resultant fires, floods, along with pandemics, fear, and the constant threat of war, countries in the world try to keep up to the never-ending effects of accelerating change. Brexit in Context Britain has finally opted out of the European Union’s hierarchical bureaucracy and gained control over its own migration policy. That means Britain can control migration not only from within the EU but from the rest of the world, as well.

Britain can now move toward welcoming more skilled and entrepreneurial migrants, modern automated production, and toward not being driven by migrant labour, or the predicted tens of millions fleeing the consequences of climate change to Europe’s south and southeast.

While Britain will remain a strong ally to Europe, tied to it in terms of geography, history, culture, commerce, and even outlook, migration and international trade can now be renegotiated with Europe and with many other countries.

The Commonwealth of Nations The Commonwealth, founded by the United Kingdom Parliament in 1931, is a volunteer political association of some 54 member states—most former territories of the former British Empire, many populated with indigenous people.

Countries in this association range from what we commonly know as our Canada, New Zealand, and Australia but more than 50 others exist, most with their own native people, history, political, and social goals.

©iStockphoto.com/amesy

With Britain renegotiating mutually beneficial futures with the EU, it is now also enabled to further reinforce historical relations with its long-term Commonwealth friends. That is true in terms of trade and immigration but also in terms of reconciling an economically and politically exploitive colonial past.

The Commonwealth Charter is a relatively modern and evolving document of core values uniting member nations that aspire to the following values. • Democracy • Human Rights • International Peace and Security • Tolerance, Respect and

Understanding • Freedom of Expression • Separation of Powers • Rule of Law • Good Governance • Sustainable Development • Protecting the Environment • Access to Health, Education,

Food, and Shelter • Gender Equality • Importance of Young People in the Commonwealth • Recognition of the Needs of Small States • Recognition of the Needs of Vulnerable States • The Role of Civil Society

As dramatic change engulfs the world, it is time to understand and possibly embrace indigenous ways and wisdom. Theirs are the experiences that can help everyone find the solutions to wildfires and floods, find the antidotes perhaps to shoreline disaster, to minimally develop preparedness, contingency plans for the storms and rising waters that threaten so many of our collective Commonwealth Islands and homelands.

Whether in Oceania, West Indies, Eurasia, or Asia, indeed all the land we inhabit, including Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Britain itself, we collectively face these imminent challenges.

The world needs strong leadership in that regard. Leadership This new attitude toward the land and native people, in many cases led by Indigenous people themselves, supported and understood by British and Commonwealth leaders, would be a far greater sea change in attitude from the previous “criminal indifference” shown toward those colonized by dominant European cultures.

Leadership is a process of social influence that maximizes the efforts of others toward the achievement of a goal.

Some say effective leaders are individuals with passion for a cause that is larger than they are, people with a dream and a vision for a better society.

There are many definitions of leadership; some have nothing to do with seniority or a position in hierarchy or with titles or with certain personal attributes. Some leaders are unaware they lead. Some are just intuitive, not intentional in their actions, but they lead anyway. Leaders happen.

When I was growing up, my mother told me about my contemporary, His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of Wales, and his time with the Bushmen of the Kalahari, his respect for the environment, his warnings to nurture and not exploit the earth we call home, and even the architecture in which we reside.

I learned of his time spent with Indigenous people generally, of quietly supporting their right to hunt on their historic lands, and many other good works in the community. His leadership was and is inspirational.

For instance, I have quoted HRH as he praised non-Western principles regarding the environment, his words in 2010: “The Islamic world is the custodian of one of the greatest treasures of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity.”

To paraphrase, he said Muslims consider themselves more with nature, as God wills, and less in dominance and control of the environment in which we live.

In 2010, in a speech titled Islam and the Environment, HRH wrote,

“Reverence is not sciencebased knowledge. It is an experience always mediated by love, sometimes induced by it; and love comes from relationship. If you take away reverence and reduce our spiritual relationship with life, then you open yourself up to the idea that we can be little more than a chance group of isolated, selfobsessed individuals, disconnected from life’s innate presence and un-anchored by any sense of duty to the rest of the world. We are free to act without responsibility. Thus we turn a blind eye to those islands of plastic in the sea or to the treatment meted out to animals in factory farms.”

I have always sensed in world leaders that they emit hope in their words and in most cases in their motivating actions.

Today, as climate crisis more seriously manifests in our global communities I remember the birth of the modern environmental movement, the first Earth Day in late April 1970, (and how 1 week later in May students were gunned down at Kent State and other campuses). I fear similar events as youth rightfully draw climate crisis to corporate, government, and civil society attention.

We witness the youth of today break what to us seem traditional patterns, that to them no longer work.

Some actions mirror our human nature, but through new and evolving communication technology, what some experienced decades ago in the anti war, environmental action, the women’s movement and ongoing quests for human and gender rights, today the youth newly confront and wake us up in evolved ways.

And Hope

In that there is always hope, that feeling of expectation and desire for certain things to happen in the future. Our children often champion some of their parents’ greatest attributes and move goodness forward.

As the Duke and Duchess of Sussex grow in their human journeys, they too might take further the aspirations of those before them in seeking Indigenous wisdom, practical solutions in tangible ways of serving the land, its environment, and the people on it.

Brexit connotes massive changes, as does Harry and Meghan giving up their royal titles and apparently moving to Canada, where it is hoped they will become more familiar with its original people.

The issues we face—climate change, how the world understands and respects Indigenous people and the members of the Commonwealth— all need their leadership, as does Britain herself. s Nigel Atkin teaches the Evolution of Public Relations course online at UVic. He offers onsite communication workshops to leverage human capital and exploit the multiplier effect of becoming better communicators.