This Geographical Life

Of pipelines and men

2012-01-15T05:42:00.003-11:00

My paternal grandfather (actually, my father’s step-father, but we made no distinction) died a few years ago, having lived into his nineties. The life he lived is familiar to many Canadians of that generation. His childhood was spent on a Saskatchewan farm, attending a one-room schoolhouse. His family fled Saskatchewan during a severe drought in the late 1920s and resettled on a small, subsistence farm near Prince Rupert, British Columbia. I don’t think he finished high school. He did an apprenticeship and became a tradesman, working as a pipefitter and industrial plumber. He went wherever there was work, ending up on industrial sites all over BC and Alberta. He continued to work into his eighties, doing small jobs, one of the last being a large water-powered clock in a shopping mall in Nanaimo. He kept a small boat in his retirement, fishing for enough salmon to pot and freeze for his own use. He never had much money, but always lived within his means. He was a kind and gentle man, always thoughtful and never with a harsh word for anyone, the type of person we all want for our neighbour.

In the 1950s, he worked in what is now Kitimat, BC, where he and thousands of other workers helped build a hydroelectric dam and large aluminum smelter. Workers came from all over to work on the Kitimat project, which was carved out of the forest. I remember him showing me photos he took while hiking and fishing with an Australian co-worker on his days off. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he moved to Alberta and worked on the first tar sands development, the Syncrude facility. I deliberately use the term “tar sands” because that was what it was called, neither my grandfather nor anyone else called it anything different. “Oil sands” is a propaganda word, which was later created for the same reason those who spread waste-water treatment sludge on farmland call it “biosolids”, so that you get the impression it is something other than what it is.

Kitimat and the tar sands have consequently always had for me a connection through the memory of my grandfather. Recently, the energy company Enbridge has proposed to create a physical connection by building a pipeline between them, called the Northern Gateway. Tar sands companies would like to expand exports to the US and to Asia. A proposal to build a new pipeline from Alberta to refineries in the southern US, referred to as the Keystone XL project, is in limbo at the moment. There is considerable opposition to new pipelines in the US, especially among people living along the route who enjoy few economic benefits but must accept the risk of potential accidents. The state of Nebraska, where residents are heavily dependent on underground aquifers for water, had led opposition to Keystone XL. The US State Department, which must approve international pipelines, has required that TransCanada pipelines, the company that would build Keystone XL, provide alternative routing options. The proposal is a political hot potato. Despite a very undiplomatic amount of lobbying and pressure applied by the Canadian federal government,* the outcome remains uncertain.

The uncertainty over Keystone has the federal government and the tar sands producers eager to get working on the Northern Gateway project. Construction is not going to happen anytime soon; the proposal must first go through public consultations organized by the National Energy Board. These started last week, and approximately 4,000 people and organizations have asked to speak. Most are opposed to the project, as are most First Nations along the proposed pipeline route. In response, the federal Minister of Natural Resources, Joe Oliver, has engaged in name-calling and sowing conspiracy theories, publicly accused those opposing the pipeline of being radicals, and suggesting that wealthy Americans are behind the opposition. The heavy foreign ownership of tar sands producers or his own government’s deliberate meddling in US politics appears to have been lost on the minister. His rant caught me by surprise, and seems a bit beneath a bright, well-educated (McGill & Harvard) former investment banker like Mr Oliver.

I’d like to ignore the name-calling and look at some of the facts. Having access to Asian markets would be economically advantageous to the tar sands producers, and these companies create tens of thousands of jobs directly and indirectly in Alberta. The pension funds of many Canadians hold shares in tar sands companies, and governments receive royalties, so directly or indirectly, the economic benefits of the tar sands extend well beyond northern Alberta. Construction of the pipeline would create a large number of construction jobs in the short term, a smaller number of maintenance jobs over the longer term, and royalty payments for those along its route. Kitimat has received large, ocean-going freighters for decades, coming and going from the aluminum plant. The port already has a license to tranship liquid natural gas. Creating new port facilities to connect ocean-going oil tankers with the proposed pipeline would create additional jobs and income there.

Just as the economic benefits of the tar sands are well-known, so, too, are the environmental costs in terms of land degradation, water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions (click here and here for links to two of many peer-reviewed scientific studies). New pipelines to Kitimat and/or the US would expand tar sands production and the consequent environmental impacts. The pipeline will have environmental impacts for residents of BC; anyone who argues otherwise is selling something. The proposed Northern Gateway route is approximately the shortest distance from the tar sands to a deep-water port on the Pacific. There are other port options (e.g. Prince Rupert, Vancouver), but these would require a much longer pipeline. As it is, the proposed pipeline would need to traverse mountains, forests, and thousands of watercourses large and small to reach Kitimat. Pipelines can and do spring leaks; there is no such thing as a leak-proof or leak-free one. Materials fails, human error in construction or maintenance can occur, and natural events that can damage pipelines, like floods and landslides, happen. The impacts of pipeline failures depend on what’s being transported; natural gas and oil leaks present different risks, the latter being of greater concern. In the case of the northern gateway, the pipeline would be transporting bitumen – an oily sludge – to Kitimat, and returning chemical thinners that are imported and used to make tar sands material more viscous. Neither would be welcome in a salmon stream.

There will be an increase in the amount of hydrocarbons spilled into the ocean waters off Kitimat if this pipeline goes through; that is not a risk but an inevitability, as shown by established research. The loading and transporting of hydrocarbons to ocean-going vessels invariably leads to spills. A 2003 study by the US National Research Council states that in the decade of the 1990s, there were 48 oil spills into US coastal waters from pipelines and 335 from marine terminals, releasing a combined volume of over 3 million gallons of oil. Even without any catastrophic spills, an oil pipeline terminal to Kitimat will release oil into the environment cumulatively through small, multiple spills on an ongoing basis. I have no way of forecasting how much will be spilled and what harm it would cause; only that it won’t be zero.

The greatest concern expressed by residents of the BC coast so far is the increased possibility of a catastrophic tanker spill, like that of the Exxon Valdez, which spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. Kitimat’s coastal environment is similar to that of Prince William Sound in terms of wildlife, but different in its morphology; ships must follow the long, narrow Wright Sound for over 30km before reaching open ocean. The ratio of open water to coastline means that any spill from a tanker would quickly reach shore, which is where it poses the greatest harm to wildlife. Post-Exxon Valdez studies show that animal populations can eventually recover from even large oil spills in this type of environment, but the long term ecosystem impacts persist for many, many years. This is particularly worrying for people whose diets, livelihoods and incomes depend on foods harvested from coastal areas, and there are many such families, First Nations and otherwise, along the BC coast.

There are technical requirements that can be implemented to reduce the risk of accidental spills from tankers – insisting on double-hulled tanker construction, restricting movements of ships during heavy weather, and so forth. But accidents still happen. Yesterday, a popular cruise ship struck rocks off the coast of Tuscany, along a route it has been following regularly for years, during calm weather. The BC Ferries corporation’s flagship ferry Queen of the North ran aground in 2006 along the BC coast; last year a different BC ferry crashed against the pier in Nanaimo. These are crashes involving vessels that routinely ply the same waters on an ongoing basis. The large oil tankers that would be coming to Kitimat would include vessels captained and crewed by people much less familiar with BC coastal waters. Those responsible for accidents – and the companies that employ them – always trot out a list of excuses after the fact why such events are exceptional; reality is that the risk of a shipping accident is never, ever zero. More ship traffic, more risk, it’s as simple as that.

In summary, the facts are fairly straightforward. If built, the Northern Gateway pipeline would result in greater development of the tar sands, higher levels of exports, and a corresponding increase in revenues to the oil and pipeline companies involved, to their shareholders, and to those owed royalties. There will be an increase in employment in BC and Alberta over the short and longer term. Economists will argue over exactly how much these benefits would amount to; they will be significant in any event. The costs and impacts are also significant. There will be increased extraction of oil sands, increasing the regional load of air and water pollution and land degradation, and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. There will be oil spilled into Kitimat’s Wright Sound and along the pipeline route from time-to-time on an ongoing basis. With luck and very careful construction and management, these spills will be small in volume, infrequent, and have relatively small long-term impacts on wildlife and critical resources. There already exists the chance of large oil spills in Wright Sound given the existing ship traffic; the chances of occurrence and scale of the potential impacts will be increased many-fold if Northern Gateway goes through. The pipeline creates a new risk of environmental contamination to lands and rivers of the BC interior that have not previously been traversed by pipelines. If luck and/or management practices fail, the worst-case scenario is many times worse than what happened with Exxon Valdez.

For residents along the pipeline route and in Kitimat, the decision of whether to support the Northern Gateway is a tremendously difficult one. The jobs and added income would be most welcome, even if the lion’s share of the new wealth created goes to the oil companies. However, this new revenue stream comes with a potentially very nasty downside, a risk residents would be accepting for themselves and for their children and their children. Once built, you can’t go back. My grandfather, who helped build the first tar sands project and the first industrial facility at Kitimat with, literally, his own two hands, would have understood the dilemma BC residents face, and would have respected their opinions, whatever those may be. Although his upbringing was as far from Harvard and Bay Street as one can get, he would never, ever, have called people names if they didn’t agree with him, especially when their families’ livelihoods and well-being were at stake. My grandfather was a man.

*Were the American government to pull the same stunt up here, the screams of self-righteous indignation would be deafening. The extent of the lobbying is quite astounding. For example, last year officials at Canadian consulates in the US were ordered to collect names of businesses that might benefit directly or indirectly from tar sands projects, exports, or the Keystone project, and transmit these names to a database created at the Canadian Embassy in Washington. Canadian officials would then contact these people and pressure them to pressure their own elected officials to support Keystone XL. I hear these things from living in Ottawa; here's Jeffrey Simpson's more detailed commentary on it.

The geography of Tebow

2011-12-23T07:43:00.003-11:00

There's a lot of things in the news lately about which I've been meaning to blog: the Keystone XL pipeline project, Encana accused by the US EPA of having contaminated people's wells in Wyoming whilst fracking, Canadian & US airlines going to court to prevent the EU from charging a GHG emissions tax on flights in and out of Europe, PM Harper's long-standing dream of dismantling the Wheat Board finally coming true...

But instead I'll blog about a phenomenon that's been on a lot of minds lately: Tebowmania. If you haven't heard of Tim Tebow, you probably don't follow either sports media or US media generally. He's the quarterback of the resurgent Denver Broncos, and one of the most recognizable names in American sports, in part because of his strong religious beliefs. Tebow also has a knack for rallying his team in the final minutes of games, and has brought his team back from dead last in October to having the inside chance of winning its division in the NFL and earning a playoff home game.

His story is unusual. He was born to American missionary parents in the Philippines. Serious complications occurred prior to birth, and her doctors recommended she undergo an abortion to protect her own life. She refused, and both she and Tim survived, safe and sound. He grew up to be a star athlete at the University of Florida, QBing his team to a national championship. He has also been very public about his religious beliefs, praying often before, during and after games, and speaking publicly on behalf of the pro-life/anti-abortion movement. He is very giving of his time to charity, and appears to have a sound appreciation of the fact that, at the end of the days, sports are sports and there are more important things.

He was drafted in the first round by a Broncos coach who would be fired not long after, the popular belief being that Tebow was too unorthodox to be a professional quarterback. The template for an NFL QB is New England's Tom Brady: tall, handsome, a strong arm, able to scan the opposing defence quickly, stand firm as defenders rush at him, and launch a perfectly spiralling pass over the shoulders and into the arms of a receiver sprinting downfield. Tebow is in many ways the opposite: he is a runner first, willing to dive head-first into the line of scrimmage for three yards and a cloud of dust, or to run along the line of scrimmage, drawing the defenders toward him and then pitch a short "option" pass to one of his running backs. When Tebow does throw downfield, he rarely tosses a perfect spiral, often fails to spot a wide open receiver, and at the first sign of trouble he'll scramble for whatever yards he can get.

I got to see the beginning of Tebow-mania first-hand. I was on my way to a workshop at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and decided to pop in at Mile High Stadium in Denver to see if I could get a ticket for that day's home game against the San Diego Chargers, a big divisional rivalry. The fact I could walk up to the ticket booth and buy a great seat for 1/2 price tells a lot about the state of the Denver economy. But that's another story. The Broncos had gotten off to a poor start this season under starting QB Kyle Orton, who is a more traditional drop-back QB type. Orton was unpopular with the fans, and was booed resoundingly during the first quarter of the game. His receivers dropped some easy passes, his offensive line was doing a poor job of blocking for him, and Orton's body language showed he was defeated. San Diego got out to an early lead, and things were looking bleak.

The coach eventually put Tim Tebow into the game and the crowd went absolutely nuts. Seriously, you could hardly hear yourself think. And he immediately proceeded to play the worst football you could ever imagine. He fumbled snaps, he ran around looking lost, his passes clanged to the ground yards short of his receivers. It was painful to watch. He completely stunk, no way around it. And yet, something happened. His receivers continued to try hard to get open; his offensive linemen held their blocks as long as humanly possible, and the crowd continued to roar and cheer, and no one left. On the sidelines, every Bronco save Orton was visibly inflated with extra energy.

And then in the last few minutes of the game, Tebow finally made things happen. He started connecting on long passes, he made some nice runs, and the Broncos began a furious comeback. At one point in the 4th quarter, Tebow rallied them to within a missed 2-point conversion of tying the game. San Diego ended up kicking another field goal, so when the last possession of the game wound up in Tebow's hands, he had to try and get a touchdown to win it. He moved his team within striking distance, but a hail mary pass to the end zone as time ran out failed, and Denver lost. But the myth was born. Since then, Denver's won more games than they've lost, often in the final minutes, and they sure are fun to watch.

Why is Tebow so successful? Part of it is, in my view, geographical. With a traditional NFL QB like Orton or Brady, much of the action takes place near the line of scrimmage or around the pocket (where the QB stands and throws). The defensive players (with the exception of those covering receivers) are continually moving forward, typically covering short distances in straight lines. Meanwhile, the offensive linemen are spending half their time (which is the typical frequency of passing plays) moving backwards, trying to protect the QB. Over the course of the game, if the offence fails to connect on its passes, the advantage goes to the defence. In Tebow's style of game, the offensive players are the ones moving forward in straight lines most of the time, the defenders are the ones doing more of the chasing and getting back on their heals. Even if Tebow is only grinding out a few yards at a time for most of the game, it must wear down the defenders. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that if you asked defensive players after a game against Denver, they would say they're more tired than they are after playing other teams. Tired defences have trouble covering ground as the game goes on.

Of course, this advantage only goes so far, and if the opposing team is able to score lots of points (as Brady's Patriots did last weekend), it's hard for Denver to keep pace given Tebow's time consuming, grinding style of offence. As for Tebow's religion, I think it's great that he has strong beliefs and isn't embarrassed to be public about them, even if they aren't always my own. Too many pro athletes believe in nothing more than accumulating money and fame, and care little about anyone or anything beyond themselves. I doubt very much God pays attention to football, or that He takes much of an interest in how Tebow's team does. Faith probably isn't as great a factor in his success on the field as we might like to think. Just the same, it is nice to see a clean-living, God-fearing athlete becoming notorious; it's a pleasant change from the low standards we've become used to in superstar athletes of recent years.

Looking for a roadmap in Durban

2011-11-30T15:18:00.005-11:00

It's that time of year again where the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change meet, this time in Durban, South Africa. Mother Nature provided delegates with an appropriate welcome, striking the Durban area with severe storms and floods that killed 8 people on the eve of the conference. There are two main issues on the table this year: what to do when the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of next year, and what to do about a promise made in Copenhagen two years ago to create a Green Climate Fund of US$100 billion by 2020, which developing countries could access to finance clean energy projects and adaptation initiatives. Both promise to be contentious.

First to the topic of what follows Kyoto. The answer is, probably nothing for the time being. There are essentially two blocs of countries on this issue. One includes the states most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (e.g. small island states like the Maldives) plus European nations who are sympathetic and likely to meet their existing Kyoto targets (like Germany, Sweden and the UK (although Scottish emissions are up, English not)). The Europeans account for less than 15% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions last time I checked, the most vulnerable states an even tinier fraction. This bloc is ready to go ahead with a new round of emisisons reductions targets, with the vulnerable states pushing for heavy reductions ASAP. The other bloc consists of the big developed country emitters, like Canada, the US, Japan, plus Russia and several large emitters who have no Kyoto targets, such as India and Brazil. This much larger bloc would prefer to wait before until at elast 2020 to start a new Kyoto, and would be happy to wait until 2015 before even discussing what 2020 targets might look like. I don't see much happening on this front as a result. There's been some talk of Durban producing a "road map" to the next Kyoto; this is possible, these COPs always result in some face-saving document of one sort of another.

The Green Climate Fund is going to be interesting. At this point in time, it's not clear where the money would come from, how it would be administered, etc. If the delegates expect that it will be funded as direct transfers from rich governments to some central administrator like the Global Environment Facility or the World Bank itself, I don't see it getting off the ground. Since the onset of the current European and US economic problems, deep-pocketed nations have become scarce. If there's room for private sector involvement in the proposed fund, I think we will see more progress, since the US and others are likely to hop on board. The devil is, of course, always in the details, so I wouldn't bet my mortgage on seeing the $100 billion in place on 1 January 2020.

Where does Canada fit into Durban? We're about as welcome as bedbugs. It's not enough that our government signed Kyoto but did little to actually try and meet our targets; now a rumour is circulating Ottawa that our government will announce it is formally withdrawing from it. I hope this is just someone in the PMO floating a trial balloon to gauge where the Canadian public stands on the issue, and is not actually being seriously considered. It's one thing to leave a restaurant without paying your share of the check, another to flip the finger to the other people at your table as you walk out the door. Because really, that's the symbolic equivalent of it. Wiser minds will hopefully prevail.

China has scolded the Canadian government over it's anti-Kyoto stance (can you blame them - we're telling them they should have targets when we refuse to meet our own). China seems to me to be the real wildcard in international climate politics these days. On one hand, it's one of the biggest emitters of GHGs, although China is making better efforts to control emissions and invest in cleaner technologies than many give them credit for doing. On the other hand, China is rapidly becoming a major player on the alternative energy technology scene, and stand to be key beneficiaries of any global push for GHG emissions reduction and clean energy. So it will be interesting to see what they end up doing.

All this to say, I'm glad that these annual meetings still take place, even if it is more an exercise in political science than environmental science. After all, there are many other environmental issues that receive little international attention, much less a high-profile annual conference with particular objectives being negotiated. But, at the same time, I sometimes worry that enthusiasm and momentum may eventually become lost if roadmaps and not results are all we can expect.

UPDATE: The Durban talks concluded Sunday. The Europeans have agreed to continue with emissions targets for the period between the end of Kyoto next year and 2020. The US, India and China, among others, have agreed to ongoing negotiations towards an emissions-reduction agreement by 2020 that would include all countries. A little progress was made on the Green Climate Fund to be set up in 2020, but it still remains to be seen where the money will come from. Click here for a useful summary of what transpired. The Canadian delegation was described as irrelevant or irritating, depending on which media you read.

The best defence is a good offence

2011-10-31T13:59:00.002-11:00

It’s not often that the discipline of geography gets significant attention in the nation’s newspaper op-ed pages. A recent opinion column by Globe and Mail writer Margaret Wente ruffled the feathers of quite a number of geographers. Wente, who is the Globe’s answer to Don Cherry, never lets the facts stand in her way. The column in question takes issue with a couple of fairly well-known geographers who edited a book entitled “Rethinking the Great White North: Race, Nature, and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canada”. I am quite confident UBC Press was pleased – any popular media coverage of an edited volume of scholarly essays is good for sales, even when the book is being slammed.

Wente’s issue seems to be that she is described somewhere in the book as being racist. This gets her started on a critique of the humanities generally, and geography, specifically, arguing that too many geographers spend too much time on theory, discourse analysis, and similar activities. Her conclusion is that the quality of undergraduate education suffers as a result.

One letter Wente received in response summarized her argument along the lines of (1) people in the humanities use technical language (2) I don’t understand it (3) therefore they must be wasting our tax dollars. This is certainly an element of Ms Wente’s argument, although it does leave out the stimulus for it, namely that Ms Wente’s doesn’t like being considered to be a racist.

I haven’t read the book in question, nor am I likely to. It’s not my cup of tea. I’m a Globe subscriber, and I’m also not sure I would label Wente’s writings as being either overtly or subtly racist. There’s a formula to them – find someone’s sacred cow, and take some potshots at it using what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness” (i.e. statements that sound like they could be fact-based, but are not necessarily so). Wente’s schtick is taking opinions you’re more likely to find in the tabloid newspapers and tailoring them to be read by and rile the Globe’s readership.

The Canadian Association of Geographers’ listserve just about melted down from the indignant discussions about Wente’s column. Many writers seemed very upset, obviously taking her column very seriously. Others entered into long reflections about the role of canoes in Canadian culture (apparently canoes were the subject of a Wente column mentioned in the UBC volume), and so forth. My own feeling on the subject is this: Wente has a point, albeit an inadvertent one. She openly challenges geographers to make a greater difference beyond the academy. I think this is a wonderful challenge. She challenges us to ensure we give good value for money in terms of undergraduate education. Again, I think this is a great challenge. She questions the need for yet another edited volumes of essays written primarily for other academics. I think such books are still needed, but she’s right, we also need to be generating knowledge in formats more likely to be consumed by a broader audience.

There are many geographers doing fantastic research out there, but are we doing a fantastic job of disseminating it widely? I don’t think so. We have entered a period where funding for post secondary research and teaching will be more and more constrained. Scholars in all disciplines are going to be expected to demonstrate explicitly the broader relevance of their work. The traditional metrics of academic performance – scholarly journal articles and book chapters – will still be relevant for getting grants and promotions, but broader, less easily quantified public perceptions of relevance will grow in importance. Scholars whose work has credibility with (or is at least vaguely familiar to) elected officials, newspaper readers, radio listeners, and on-line communities are the ones who will succeed in this new era. So rather than wasting time complaining on listserves or writing letters to the editor in response to Margaret, I would encourage my fellow geographers to write their own op-eds about the issues they study. Or write an article for a popular magazine, or start a blog or a website. Do one extra thing to communicate and connect your ideas and research to the broader public. Don't be defensive - go out and play on the forward line.

Boulder envy

2011-10-11T15:52:00.004-11:00

Students at the University of Colorado campus in Boulder face challenges students at many other universities do not, including my own. For example, last week a mountain lion was found on campus, forcing students to stand at some distance and snap cell-phone pictures until state wildlife officers could tranquilize it, put a tracking collar on it, and relocate it to the mountains. The problem is, you can walk to the mountains from campus, and so inevitably another lion will wander down. Indeed, a CU prof told me that they've got GPS collars on a number of mountain lions that frequent the edge of Boulder.

The mountains must themselves be a serious distraction for students. I was giving a graduate seminar today* in a room with a panormaic view of the Flatirons, and even though I was doing most of the talking, it was at times hard not to let my eyes drift off to the peaks. When my day was done, it was a quick walk along Boulder Creek to Settler's Park, past a sign warning about bears and lions, and on to trails that climb up over the city.

If easy access to trails isn't your thing, there are bicylce lanes and paths everywhere in this city - I can't imagine there is any other North American city with so many cyclists per capita. Boulder was rated the number one sports town in the US (that's participating in sports, not watching them), America's fittest city, one of the best cities for singles... it makes you wonder how anyone would have the time to do any studying here when they're having so much fun.

Boulder has a lot going for it in terms of its natural setting, but you have to give credit to the city planners as well. Beyond the bike paths, the city has given a lot of thought to quality of life issues. A long pedestrian-only stretch of Pearl Street is a central focus of the city, and it is lively, welcoming, and always busy. Ottawa's city planners should visit Pearl Street and reflect on our own city's sorry attempt at a pedestrian mall - the soulless and windy concrete canyon called Sparks Street. There is greenspace all over Boulder, with the banks of Boulder Creek having cycleways and paths. There are even ponds along Boulder Creek stocked with rainbow trout so that kids under 13 can practice fishing - talk about making sure there's something for everyone to do.

In all, it's no surprise that Boulder has also been ranked as America's happiest city. It's not all due to environment and planning - Boulder also happens to be a very wealthy and well-educated community, the university being the biggest employer. Just the same, I've visited a number of university towns that are unattractive and unappealing (no need to name them). All this to say, Boulder serves as an interesting model of the possibilities of what a well-planned city could be like. Urban planning students from other cities would be well-counselled to make a trip here and see for themselves.

*Many thanks to CU's Institute for Behavioral Studies for making my visit to Boulder possible.

On mountain towns

2011-10-08T14:49:00.005-11:00

I’ve been spending a few days in the town of Salida, in Central Colorado’s Arkansas River valley. There are mountains in every direction, some rising above 14,000 feet. When I arrived on Monday, the valley was sweltering in 90 degree heat. Today it’s a snowstorm. Such is October in the mountains.

The mountains I’m looking at as I type this attract tens of thousands of people each year to Salida and its neighbour to the north, Buena Vista. These are not plastic resort towns like Aspen or Vail, which have been carbon-copied by Whistler, Mont Tremblant, Lake Placid and their ilk. Salida is a much more earthbound place, where people who were born in the mountains still live, drive their pick-ups to the Safeway, and work at agricultural or blue collar jobs. Those who visit come not for the après-ski (there is none), but to whitewater kayak and raft, to go rock climibing, to mountain bike, to fish for trout, or to hike the countless trails.

The mountains have also inspired a disproportionate number of artists to settle here, the consignment shops of the old town centres joined by a growing number of eclectic galleries, craft-jewellers and pottery shops. Even for non-artists like me, it is hard not to be inspired by this valley, its wet western slopes green and yellow with conifers and aspens, its arid-brown eastern slopes peppered with a few pines and a lot of sage, mesquite and low-growing cacti. It’s also hard not to love the mountain towns. Deer wander down the middle of the main streets of Salida and Buena Vista in broad daylight. The town parks have first-rate climbing walls for practicing bouldering, and there are boat launches and trailheads accessible right off the main street. It lacks the glamour of Aspen, but for the visitor, life in Salida or Buena Vista is a joy.

The original non-native settlers of Salida were also drawn here by the mountains, but for very different reasons. There are veins of minerals and semi-precious gems in the high country, and an amazing amount of energy and investment went into attacking those veins. I was out inspecting some abandoned mining towns this past week, following up on research I published recently on the process of modern settlement abandonment. A particularly neat ghost town is St Elmo, a town 10,000 feet up on the flanks of Mount Princeton that a century ago had 2,000+ inhabitants. It once had a railroad, a school, a church, a main street with shops, saloons and wooden sidewalks. But the quantity and value of the ore coming out of the mountain declined, the cost of maintaining the rails became too great, and the town lost its purpose. Many of the buildings have been nicely preserved, perhaps too nicely, making it seem a bit tacky and museum-like. It is only one of dozens of such mountain towns, villages and hamlets that have been abandoned in Colorado since the late 19th century.

Salida was more fortunate than St Elmo. It’s on the main valley floor, situated where the main rail line and the Arkansas River come together. Ore from the mountain towns was brought here to be smelted, and a large relict smokestack still stands to the north of town. Jobs in mining and smelting are largely gone now from this region. These were dirty industries, and the valley’s air and water quality are much better now that they’re gone. But, though dirty, they also brought a lot of wealth and jobs into this valley. Tourism is today the fastest growing sector of the valley’s economy, but the types of jobs it creates tend to be low-paying, unskilled and seasonal. Until the US economy tanked in 2008, the valley was attracting its fair share of relatively well-off retirees. The money they brought with them helped generate additional jobs in construction and services, and contributed greatly to the modern hospital facility. However, they also helped drive up property prices, creating a dynamic common to tourist destinations, whereby people from elsewhere end up owning the nicest places in town.

Tourist visits are still strong during the summer, but the pre-recession mountain tourism gold rush may be ebbing. Home-building has slowed to a crawl, fewer wealthy retirees are investing here now. It’s far from the crisis situation that many towns and cities in the eastern US find themselves in, and I’m in no way forecasting that Salida or Buena Vista are destined to become ghost towns in the foreseeable future. What I can say with some confidence is that, while it’s drop-dead beautiful, this is a hard place to live and to make a living, and it’s not going to get any easier any time soon.

September 13th, 2001

2011-09-07T13:06:00.005-11:00

It's coming up to the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, and the media are running all kinds of retrospective stories about that day. I was in Vienna at the time, where I was serving as Canada's Immigration Control Officer (ICO) for Central Europe and the Balkans. It was afternoon in Vienna when I joined several of the Embassy officers in a board room to watch the live images on CNN, rooted to the spot and stunned, as were most TV watchers around the world, as the 2nd plane was shown crashing into the World Trade Center.

The ICO was at that time the gatekeeper of Canada's overseas immigration program, as opposed to the much more numerous visa officers whose job it is to facilitate the movement to Canada of immigrants, visitors, international students and temporary workers. I use the past tense with respect to the term ICO, as things have changed since I left the foreign service, and there are now new and different positions overseas today. The ICO's responsibilities varied according to the posting and region. All ICOs typically performed interdiction work - that is, working with airlines to prevent improperly documented passengers from boarding flights to Canada. In some places, the interdiction work was primarily to train airline staff, but in others the ICO might be at the airport monitoring flights on a regular basis. In some locations, ICOs might also liaise with local law enforcement officials on movements of organized crime. In countries with active terrorist groups ICOs might also be involved in security screening in some way; similarly, if there were war criminals in the area, the ICO might be involved in preventing their movement to Canada. In still other regions, the ICO might work on countering the trafficking of women and children. In Central Europe and the Balkans at that time, the ICO portfolio included all of these.

On September 11th 2001, North American airspace was closed immediately after the attacks. Vienna Schwechat airport was a significant hub for passengers traveling from the Middle East to North America, with daily flights coming in from places like Beirut and Tehran. Many of these transit passengers found themselves stuck in the airport because they lacked visas to enter Austria, and had to sleep on the floor for a couple days. Also stuck in Vienna was Al Gore, who had been in Europe given public lectures. There was great interest in getting him back stateside ASAP, so it was decided that one of the first international flights to be allowed to enter North American airspace would be Austrian Airlines' Vienna-Toronto flight, with Mr Gore among the passengers. Once on the ground in Toronto, he'd travel by ground to Buffalo, New York.

One of my tasks that day was to oversee the security screening of that flight. As you might expect, it was pretty chaotic at the airport generally, and the Toronto flight was a particular headache. A large chunk of the passengers were in transit from the Middle East, and their luggage was being searched with a fine-toothed comb. There was also a large group of Austrian hunters on the flight, their luggage including a fair number of firearms. Fortunately, ground security was being handled by a truly first rate airline security contractor, and was going along as smoothly as possible under the circumstances - I mostly had to stand back and offer advice and guidance.

I never met Mr Gore, and he isn't what I remember most from that day. Instead, it was one female passenger who sticks in my mind, who uttered words airline security staff don't want to hear at the best of times, and certainly not from a transit passenger who was en route from Beirut to Toronto on September 11th. When asked if she packed her luggage herself, she said 'no'. She said that just before she left Beirut, her brother-in-law had given her an extra suitcase to check in, saying it contained gifts. She had not opened the bag, and could not say what it contained. She was travelling alone with her three kids, they'd been stuck for a couple days, were exhausted, scared, and just wanted to get back to Ontario, where they were permanent residents.

Airport security did not know what to do with her. An x-ray was not sufficient under the circumstances to determine if the bag was safe, and staff could not open the bag to do a hand search for the obvious reason that if its contents were dangerous, their safety was at risk. They obviously could not put the bag on an airplane, nor under travel regulations could the woman be allowed to travel and leave her bag behind. What to do? The answer was actually straightforward. I asked the woman for her permission to destroy the bag and its contents, which she immediately granted, so long as it would enable her to get home to Canada. I then asked the airport police to treat the bag as if it contained explosives, and take it to the bomb disposal facility to be destroyed. So they did, and the woman and her kids joined Mr Gore on the plane to Toronto. So did the hunters, once we were assured their weapons were properly packed and stowed. Actually, for sake of clarity I should say that Mr Gore joined them on the plane. He was being kept out of sight in a private waiting area until the aircraft had pushed back from the gate and was out on the tarmac. At that point it paused, the front steps were suddenly lowered, and Mr Gore was hustled on board. The aircraft then resumed taxiing.

Why write this all down now? In the coming week Canadians will watch on TV reminiscences of how the people of Halifax, Gander and other cities hosted so graciously passengers whose aircraft en route to the US had to be diverted. Less likely to be recalled by the media are the many more people who spent the following few days sleeping on airport floors all over the world in their sweaty clothes, not entirely sure what was going on, desperate to get to their homes, but at the same time worried that the plane they'd be boarding might also be used as a weapon by some crazed lunatic. While it obviously pales in comparison with experience the victims of the attacks, their families, and of New Yorkers generally, I suspect there's a lot of people out there who will be glad to forget their air journey of a decade ago.

The wrong tool

2011-08-19T14:40:00.004-11:00

The other day I pulled up the old carpeting on the staircase, to replace it with a new runner. I was faced with the unpleasant task of removing a couple hundred carpet staples that had been firmly anchored for many years. After 90 minutes using a pair of needle-nosed pliers I'd succeeded in clearing 3 of the 15 steps. My back was sore, my hand was raw through the glove, and my spirit was low. I packed it in for the night. I was clearly using the wrong tool. The next day I went to the hardware store and got myself a tack puller. It's a simple tool that looks like a bent, flat-headed screwdriver with a notch cut in the blade. I cleared the remaining 12 steps in less time than it took me to do the first three.

Any good tradesman knows and uses the right tool for each job. I'm not a tradesman, just a somewhat handy do-it-yourselfer, so it takes me a bit longer to figure out when I'm not using the right tool. Some of us never learn, and seem to insist on using the wrong tools time and time again. Take the pick-up truck, for example. If you live on a farm, it's a pretty indispensable tool, something you may use every day for weeks on end. It's hard to imagine farm life without one. Pick-up trucks are also handy for a lot of other applications. But off the farm, they're a bit like a pair of pliers: they can be used for a variety of purposes, but more often than not, they're not the best vehicle for the task at hand. Some tradespeople need and use a pick-up truck everyday, but a lot of them seem to drive one for show, or because it's habitus (a fancy way of saying it's something you're expected to do if you run in certain circles). The of course, there's some who drive gleaming Rams and Chevys with chrome wheels and a bed without a scratch on it, all hat and no cattle.

For suburbanites, there's the SUV. Few people ever use one for the purpose it was designed, and I've only ever met one or two who I could truly say actually needed one. When I lived in Seattle I had a friend who was the most outdoorsy person I ever met. He had once hitched a cargo flight to the highlands of New Guinea, bought a dugout canoe and paddled himself over the course of many days to the ocean. He designed "challenge walls" for a living - i.e. giant walls with ropes and climbing routes meant to challenge would-be climbers of all abilities. He drove a diesel Jetta, and argued there were few trailheads in Washington state he couldn't reach in it. If he didn't see the need for one... you get the picture.

When making decisions about going someplace, the best option if distance allows is by foot or by bike. It's cheap, it has minimal environmental impact and, most importantly, you are healthier for having done so (assuming you haven't been hit by an SUV). Where self-propelled doesn't suit, public transport is next best. If a personal motor vehicle is essential, small and fuel efficient suffices for most of us - our bodies won't be any fitter, but our pocketbooks will. Tradesmen often rent or share expensive, infrequently-used tools, and that's how the rest of us should treat trucks and SUVs - if you really need one, rent it, don't own it. The right tool for the right task.

Academic institutions also have a tendency to use poor tools for the job at hand. I could list many examples, but here's one: teaching support software. uOttawa uses something called Blackboard Vista, which seems to have a monopoly on the market, despite having a circa 2001 feel to it. With it, as a teacher I can create course specific intra-net websites, and there's a set of basic tools I can use to post lecture notes, create discussion boards and so on. For most professors, it probably does most of the basic things they need to do (and there's still profs out there who still don't use it at all, and they drive their students batty (and I don't blame the students)). But Blackboard Vista is like a pair of pliers (an old one at that), and when there's something more specialized you need to do, it's often not the best tool. For example, when my colleague and I decided to go to electronic submissions for our large first-year classes, we simply bypassed Blackboard altogether, and had students e-mail us their work. We then used iPads loaded with a $10 app called iAnnotate to mark and return their assignments. Had we used Blackboard Vista with Microsoft Word, I'd still be reading papers from April.

The wrong tool, whether it's a pair of pliers, an SUV, or a teaching support software, is inefficient, costly, and wasteful. The difference is that when I use pliers instead of a tack puller, I'm the one who suffers.

Learning to teach (continued)

2011-08-02T15:32:00.005-11:00

I'm finally learning how to design a university course. It sounds kind of funny and a bit embarrassing to write this; I'm entering my 6th year of teaching at Ottawa U, and I taught a couple courses during my PhD/post doc years at Guelph as well. But until this summer, I'd never sat down and systematically designed a course curriculum the way the teacher education textbooks would have you do it.

The reality is, few professors outside the faculty of education, myself included, are ever taught how to teach. More often, when we get hired we're assigned a list of courses for which we'll be responsible (hopefully on topics within our area of expertise, but not necessarily) and, if lucky, get a copy of the previous year's syllabus. If you're really lucky, you'll get the teaching materials used by the previous prof. Universities typically have an office designed to support teaching and teachers (e.g. uOttawa's is called Teaching and Learning Support Services) that are usually staffed with people who are really keen to help. They'll offer workshops, crash courses, and so forth. All are useful but none are mandatory. The onus is on the prof to seek out their services. Some profs may not really need the help, others desperately do, but no one is forcing either to learn to be a better teacher.

When I was first starting out, I took a number of these types of workshops and learned a raft of practical skills, like how to use teaching-support software. With research and graduate supervision taking up more of my time with each passing year, I've stopped enrolling in these workshops, and instead consulted our teaching support service on an as-needed/problem-solving basis. This has worked well. Even so, the reality is that, even though teaching is one of my core job duties, my teacher training has been acquired on an ad hoc basis.

Somewhere along the line in this ad hoc training program, I missed the workshop on developing a new course (assuming there was one; there probably was). Fortunately for my students, I recently volunteered to develop an online version of our big first-year environmental studies course, Global Environmental Challenges. By doing so, I also unwittingly volunteered myself for one-on-one tutoring from someone whose job it is to train people like me how to develop a course properly. My tutor is very nice and patient with me, even though some of the things I say in response to her questions must make her wince.

Previously when I was setting up a course, I'd put together a 2-3 page syllabus, create a course schedule, devise a reading list, plan for a couple exams/assignments, create a rubric for each. I'd have these things in place before the course started, save for the exam questions. The first few weeks of the semester were fairly tightly planned; subsequent weeks were more loosely planned, so that adjustments could be made as necessary. If I started out a semester with all my courses organized in such a fashion, and I usually did, I felt on top of things and ready to go.

With the help of my tutor (I think her title is teaching & leaning consultant, but really, she's tutoring me) I'm learning I could be a whole lot better prepared and organized. For example, I'm being asked to put into writing such things as my learning objectives for the students not simply for the course, but for each week of the course, and in considerable detail. I am also required to write down how I am going to reinforce the student's attainment of each of the learning objectives through a range of possible activities, how each objective will be evaluated, what resources I will provide to supplement the course text, etc, etc. Even though I've taught this course five times already, I'm finding it a lot of (useful) work to make explicit what was often until now implicit.

An example; for the second objective of the fifth module of the course, which deals with the connection between soils and food production systems, I told my tutor I wanted students to "understand the importance of good quality soil to agriculture". As any experienced learning consultant no doubt knows, and which I now appreciate, the term "understand" is vague and not assessable. Instead, I may want the students to achieve some reproducible level of competence, such as be able to explain the importance of good quality soil to someone else, or show they are to analyze how good soil contributes to productive agriculture, or so forth. And if they can do some of these things, they probably understand the concept.

When describing this process over the supper table to my spouse, who is a trained educator, she looked at me and asked, "Sounds like pretty basic curriculum development. Don't you guys have standardized curriculum for all your introductory courses?" Um, well, no. When you think about it, we should, shouldn't we? Of course, if we did, I probably never would have had this opportunity to develop one. And I think that by developing the curriculum myself, properly, I'll actually be a better teacher for it. After all, having a good curriculum in hand and executing it are two different things.

Rocket stoves: a better burn

2011-07-09T04:29:00.007-11:00

Last night I made a pot of tea for my guests. To boil the water, I burned a handful of twigs and small sticks I gathered from under the trees at the back of my small urban backyard. It took less than ten minutes to bring the water to a rolling boil.

Something might strike you as odd in the preceding paragraph (I mean, besides the fact that I would be using a fire to boil water for guests - like most people, I do have a kettle at my house). The odd thing is how little fuel and how little time I needed to boil enough water for four cups of tea. If you've ever tried to boil a pot of water over a campfire, you'll know you can't do it with kindling alone, and certainly not so quickly. I was able to do so using my new toy, a rocket stove.

The rocket stove uses a simple design principle to channel large amounts of heat from small amounts of fuel. You take a vertical, metal cylinder (like a piece of stove pipe or an empty paint can with the lid off) and insulate it (e.g. by surrounding it with bricks, or a clay-straw mix, or even another, larger diameter steel tube with the gap between them sealed to make an air chamber). The vertical tube is the fire chamber. You then make a vertical hole into the side of the fire chamber and insert another metal tube (like a soup can with the end cut off). You need to divide this horizontal tube into an upper and lower half, such as by making slits in the side and inserting a sardine tin lid. The top half is the fuel chute, the lower half the air intake.

Voila, you've got a rocket stove. Light a piece of paper, drop it down the top of the fire chamber, and stick some dried grass or twigs into the fuel chute. You'll quickly see flames come shooting out the top of the fire chamber. Set a pot on top of the cans and off you go (first put a metal fork or something across the top so that the pot doesn't smother the fire). Insert more stick and grass as needed. Rocket stoves come in various shapes and sizes; click here to see more. All of them produce the same effect: the fuel burns hot and efficiently, and the heat is channeled directly to the base of the pot or pan. Compare this with campfire cooking, where you need to burn several pieces of firewood and get a good bed of coals before you're ready to cook.

Rocket stoves are spreading across developing countries, especially in dryland regions where wood fuel is scarce. The reality is that the world's poorest typically can not afford electricity or fossil fuels, and so they must rely on biomass-based fuels (i.e. wood, charcoal, dried animal dung) for cooking and heating. This places tremendous pressure on forests in many countries. It also places tremendous pressure on families to gather fuel, especially women, to whom this task most often falls. As easily accessible biomass fuel sources become scarcer around settlements, women must travel ever farther and be away from home for longer, which consumes time that could be better spent doing other tasks. In some situations, such as for women living in refugee camps, traveling to gather fuel puts their personal security at risk. By adopting a simple and easily made cooking implement like the rocket stove that uses so little fuel, the lives of the poorest of the poor are made a little less difficult.

Here in North America, not many people have heard about rocket stoves, and fewer still own one. Those who do consist primarily of campers and survivalists. You'll find many internet testimonials to rocket stoves along the lines of, "when the s*** hits the fan, you'll want to own this stove". I'm not a survivalist, and if it really did hit the fan, I probably wouldn't last too long. But I suppose I would last longer than before I bought the stove, because the half-dozen Manitoba maples at the back of my yard provide enough fallen twigs and branches to keep that stove cooking meals on an indefinite basis. In case you're interested, here's the one I bought, and I assure you, it works exactly as advertised.

Canadians don't worry much about where our cooking fuel comes from, we flick a switch or push a button to start our electric or natural gas stoves/ovens, slow cookers, kettles and the like. When we do cook outside, it's most often on a propane grill (a relatively small % of the population uses charcoal grills). In other words, 99% of the meals cooked in Canada are powered by fossil fuels or electricity (here in Ontario, more than half our electricity is generated by nuclear and coal, not exactly the most environmentally benign sources).

In a country where there's so much biomass, moving surface water, wind and sunshine, it's a shame we rely so heavily on fossil and nuclear to make a simple cup of tea. In Ontario and other provinces, there are initiatives to increase the amount of energy supplied to the electrical grid by alternative sources. There are a variety of challenges, from the up-front costs to the need to persuade an odd but vocal portion of the population who try to block wind turbine installations because they are unsightly.* In the meantime, energy demands keep going up, up, up.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not now about to conclude that every Canadian household should get or make a rocket stove and cook all its meals on it (although you'd have a lot of fun if you did). The rocket stove is simply a reminder of how an ounce of innovation is worth a pound of fuel. Through smart design, the amount of energy needed to cook a meal is shrunk to a tiny fraction of other options, and the cost of cooking is shrunk to virtually zero in dollar terms and environmental terms. How many other smart, sustainable technologies are we not adopting as we cling to old, wasteful habits?

*For the life of me, I've never understood this. I've never met anyone who would say the following, much more ubiquitous examples of built infrastructure to be attractive: telephone poles, traffic lights, highway billboards, high-voltage transmission towers, apartment blocks, divided highways, off-ramps, fast-food outlets, strip malls, warehouses... And yet people get worked up about the sight of a wind turbine on the horizon? It's beyond me.

The Big Man passes

2011-06-21T13:01:00.005-11:00

Clarence Clemons, the long-time saxophone player for the E Street Band passed away this weekend. Lots of rock and roll bands have had sax players, but few had one more memorable than 'the Big Man'. If you have never listened to the album Born to Run, you should; it is a masterpiece, and the Big Man's solos are among its highlights. The painter Jackson Pollock once said that he painted to express his thoughts, not illustrate them; Clemons's sax solos were the perfect expression of Springsteen's lyrics on that album. The first song on the album, Thunder Road,* ends with a Clemons sax solo that seals the deal offered in the final words of the song: Mary hops in the car and you peel away from a town full of losers.

*Check out this amazing 1978 concert footage of Thunder Road.

When John Lennon was murdered, I was an adolescent, and I couldn't understood why so many baby boomers were so upset. Sure, my early days of listening to music included heavy doses of Beatles songs, as is the case with many kids when they first get a taste for popular music. And I certainly recognized the brilliance of all those Lennon and McCarthy tunes that are still captivating today. Buy by the time I was actively listening to Top 40 radio, Lennon songs like 'Woman' and 'Watching the Wheels' were tired and treacly offerings from a spent force. Fact was, I was simply too young to have appreciated the social significance of Lennon's early solo works, especially the song 'Imagine'. Having not lived through the 1960s, I had no appreciation of the cultural revolution for which Beatles songs and Imagine were anthemic. When Lennon died, my parents' generation were suddenly confronted with the fact that they were middle aged, their cultural revolution was old news, and the hero they had forgotten about was dead.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are rock icons of the post-cultural revolution era, when the dismal economics of the 1970s trumped 1960s idealism. The geography in their classic albums is one of shattered post-industrial cities, populated by unemployed young people, pregnant teenagers, emotionless factory workers, and desperate young men. When he records with the E-Street band in the 1970s, Springsteen's narrators seek and sometimes achieve small slivers of hope, often expressed with a sax solo by the Big Man. When Springsteen's solo album Nebraska appears in 1982, all hope is gone, only desperation and violence remain, and there is no need for a sax. Some of that hope returns in Born in the USA, as does the Big Man.

I discovered the E Street Band albums during a period when, like many teenagers past and present, I was trying to figure out how and where I fit in to teenage society. In retrospect, it wasn't such a hard time; there was really not much going on in my life, I wasn't having to overcome any real challenges, I was simply physically and socially awkward - traits no teenager desires. I spent a lot of time listening to music, but especially The River, Nebraska, Born to Run, and Darkness on the Edge of Town. The songs on those albums introduced me to people and places I could never encounter (nor want to) in my real existence, their problems so much worse than my own teenage anxsts. Listening to their woes chased away my own. When at 16 I started working summer jobs and weekend in factories, I got a taste for how hard Springsteen's blue collar characters worked, how they felt when they came home grimey and exhausted, and learned how I did not want to grow up to be dependent on the whims of the faceless factory owner for my livelihood. At 17, my best friend and I drove to Toronto, twice, to see the E Street Band at the old Exhibition Stadium, driving way too fast down the 401 in my silver Dodge (christened the Ramrod, after the song from The River), a homemade sign reading "Boss Bound" in the rear window, a case of beer stashed in the trunk. Some moments are golden.

The E Street Band remain great entertainers, but their larger relevance in/to popular cultural has long faded. Their half-time appearance in the 2009 Super Bowl reminded me of great albums and concerts of years past, but I suspect many people younger than me groaned "Oh lord, not another bunch of old fogies" (the Super Bowl halftime has also had The Who, the Stones, Tom Petty, Paul McCartney and Sting in recent years). And so it was, I suppose, my personal John Lennon moment when I learned yesterday that Clemons had died, of natural causes. Not to be too melodramatic, but there will be no more E Street music featuring his hopeful sax, and that leaves us all in a town full of losers.

I get all the news I need from the business report*

2011-06-05T12:51:00.011-11:00

*Not entirely true, just a bad play on a line from the Simon & Garfunkel song "The Only Living Boy in New York"

Newspaper readership is on the decline. I still subscribe to one even though I probably shouldn't, given the environmental costs of cutting softwood trees, making the pulp, mixing it with recycled pulp, pressing it, printing it and then having it driven and delivered to my doorstep at 4am. There are three main reasons why I don't cancel my subscription. One is that newspapers still make a disproportionate share of their revenues from the print run, and I feel it's important to maintain a healthy and viable newspaper sector of the media. Newspaper reporters are still the most capable members of the media when it comes to identifying, describing and interpreting what's going on in the world, and I'd hate for us to lose them. So, buying a subscription is a more effective way of supporting newspapers than reading their online content.

A second reason is that, even though I could read most of the same content in the online version of the newspaper, the reality is that I won't take the time to do so, and as a consequence, I'll be less informed of current events. As a teacher, it's as important that I be up to date on current events as I am on the latest research in my field. And so the third reason, which is related to reason number two, is that the print version of the newspaper I subscribe to, the Globe, has an excellent business section.

If you want to know what's going on with respect to global environmental issues, you'll find that many significant events appear in the business section days or weeks (sometimes months) before they make it to the main news sections. Worried about oil spills or tar sands issues or aboriginal views on pipelines? You'll learn first and most in the business section. What mining companies are up to in developing nations? Ditto. Food security issues? Water issues? Likely government policy directions with respect to resources, air pollution or forestry? Ditto, ditto, ditto.

Yes, it's true the business section also contains reams of useless advice on stock trading that only a rube would follow, and treacly material recycled from press releases and publicists' pitches saying what a great company Acme Widgets is. But there's much to be learned directly and indirectly. For example, Canada's cultural diversity is apparent in every other section of the paper, from front page to sports to the food section, but in the business section, the mug shots of Canada's high flying lawyers, accounting executives and board appointees show a Canada that is lily-white, mostly male, and graying. Sure, there's regularly a feature story on some hip entrepreneurial person with a different background, but the majority of the corporate herd is much the same culturally and demographically as it was fifty years ago. So it's not altogether surprising getting them to tread lightly on the environment as they make their millions is an uphill struggle.

One of the leaders of the herd is a guy named Gwyn Morgan. He writes the occasional op-ed piece for page 2 of the business section, and the tone of his column suggests he's always irritated about someone or something. He's a very thoughtful and forceful writer, and articulates hard core, small-c conservative values with precision and clarity. He's a retired pipeline executive, and it's pretty clear he sees the world in terms of things that are good for building pipelines and corporate wealth (inherently good) and everything else (inherently questionable). I enjoy reading well-reasoned writing that challenges my own values and presumptions of how the world works; there's nothing worse for the gray matter (brains, not hair) than reading the same old stuff that tells you what you already think you know. Morgan is a tonic.

But the main reason why the business section is so helpful for staying abreast about environmental issues is that it's written for people whose income depends on knowing the quality, quantity and accessibility of those aspects of the environment that are treated as commodities. That's why information on forests and food gets reported there first, why it's a great place to learn how environmental policies work or don't work, and see what risks loom over the horizon. For example, yesterday's business headline reports that the US economy is faltering, joblessness is rising, and home prices are sliding. What it does not say, but which can be inferred, is his that greenhouse gas emissions in the US are for the moment not growing as fast as they were a year ago, and that demand for Canadian lumber will remain lower than it was a few years ago (the US homebuilding market is a big destination for Canadian conifers).

Interested in global forest issues? Yesterday's feature story is about a run on the stocks of a company called Sino-Forest Corporation, one of the biggest forest companies traded on a Canadian stock exchange. The company's main business is the management of commercial forest plantations in China (plus one in New Zealand), the buying and selling of logs harvested elsewhere, and making plywood and flooring products. Accusations have been made that it has been fibbing in its corporate reporting, and that its forest plantations are actually not as significant as claimed. Yet, the company has still been ringing up operating profits. If true - and I should take great pains to point out this these are only accusations, made by a Toronto-based investment research firm that specializes in studying China-based companies - the question becomes one of where the logs used by Sino-Forest originate. If I ever do find out, I suspect the first place I'll read about it is in the business section, on newsprint made from the fibres of dead Canadian trees.

In praise of blackflies

2011-05-22T13:11:00.005-11:00

One of my favourite pieces of writing about the environment is a 1999 essay by Bill McKibben entitled "Consuming Nature". In it, McKibben talks at length about the blackflies that plague his Adirondack home each spring, and how newcomers to the valley try to rally support for treating area stream and rivers with larvicides to reduce the blackfly population. McKibben's not a big fan of the idea, and sees it as just one more way how many people say they like nature, but only certain aspects of it. Like poison ivy, skunks and lightning strikes, blackflies are a part of nature most of us would happily do without. But instead of fly-free springtime, McKibben says he's willing to consume nature just as it is, and put up with a couple weeks of bites and bugnets.

It's the May long weekend here in Canada. The TV beer ads celebrate it as the first holiday weekend of the summer, but in practice, it's the peak of blackfly season. Not that so many Canadians actually notice anymore. Despite the popular mythology of pond hockey and beavers peddled by the makers of fizzy beer and doughnuts, most Canadians live in cities and suburbs. And relatively few participate in outdoor recreation activities beyond the city limits for any length of time.

The blackfly is not an urban creature. Blackflies reproduce in cold, clear running water. Sediment-laden streams, stormwater retention ponds. clogged eavestroughs and other common urban water bodies make ideal mosquito habitat, but not for blackflies. Blackflies also don't like hot weather; the first good hot spell in late May ends their reproductive cycle for another year. Urban areas with their minimal forest canopies and extensive blacktop roads and tar-shingle roofs heat up quickly in the spring, further turning cities into blackfly deserts. There are many advantages to urban living; freedom from blackflies is one we tend not to be conscious of, but it's certainly one.

I'm scratching a blackfly bite on my ankle as I write this. I don't take much inspirational value from blackflies the way McKibben does, but I do see the blackfly's practicalities. We went out for a hike yesterday in Gatineau Park. One of the joys of living in downtown Ottawa is to have such a beautiful forest park minutes from home. When we arrived at the trailhead, we were welcomed by a joyous, buzzing crowd of little biters. We were prepared for them physically, having liberally doused ourselves in citronella. Even so, it takes a few minutes of walking to settle in psychologically: you can't help but wave your hands at them and slap at them as they seek out the inevitable creases in your citronella armour. But after a couple bites, you settle into your gait, and turn your attention to the white of the trilliums, the red columbines, and the translucent emerald of the early-season leaves. You also get the trail and the view from the lookout pretty much to yourself (or at least, free from other humans), something you don't get once the blackflies have retired for the summer.

So, while this holiday weekend was officially created to celebrate Queen Victoria (in Quebec they celebrate patriotes), I'm celebrating the humble, hungry blackfly (and the fact that when I next go out in the woods, it'll be gone). Happy long weekend!

On Canada's Green Party

2011-05-04T14:48:00.005-11:00

A few years ago, a friend decided he wanted to run for the Green Party in the federal election. Up to that point, the riding we lived in had never had anyone run federally for the Greens (one person had tried at the provincial level). There was no party organization, no instructions on how to do it, no one to look to for guidance. My friend figured out on-line how to register as the Green candidate and how to establish an Electoral District Association (EDA), an entity that needs to be registered with Elections Canada. He set up a very professional-looking website. He did all this at his own expense.

The first meeting of the EDA consisted of him, me, and his secretary (he operates his own business), and took place in a restaurant. We decided that if we wanted to be taken seriously, we needed to act seriously. So, we put an announcement in the community newspaper, rented a room in a community centre, and hoped someone would show up for our next meeting. A couple people did, including a really nice retired fellow who became the treasurer (not that we had any money, but an EDA needs one). With word of mouth, a few other people started to come out to meetings. One sunny Saturday, we organized a river cleanup, some people with canoes showed up to help, we hauled several bags of trash out of the river, and got our picture in the paper.

We also hauled a bicycle out of the river. A friend who is a bike mechanic offered to fix it up so that we could raffle it off to raise a few dollars for the EDA. This turned out to be a no-no; city hall told us we could not have a raffle license, because EDAs do not qualify as charities, and only charities can hold raffles for fundraising. This has always struck me as amusing: the person at city hall warned us she would call the police if we raffled off a salvaged bicycle without a permit, while at the same time the party in government was handing out millions in sponsorship money to party cronies.

In any event, bit by bit, a team slowly coalesced, and in that year’s election my friend got over 2,000 votes. It made enough of an impression in the community that Green Party meetings thereafter attracted a regular turnout. An online newsletter was started, and members showed up at community events wearing Green Party t-shirts. We hosted the provincial Green Party annual general meeting, which brought a couple hundred visitors to our community’s historic downtown, and got us some more media attention. The next federal election (they started coming fast and furious at this point, for there were minority governments) my friend received over 4,000 votes. We were disappointed by this; we were hoping (perhaps naively) for closer to 8,000, and to knock off at least one of the bigger party candidates. Still, when I look back I am impressed this was accomplished in a community with no natural Green Party constituency: no university, no yoga studios, no bookshops selling fair trade coffee, no hemp clothing stores: just your average Tim Hortons-swilling southern Ontario city where everyone drives to work.

It’s been a few years now since I moved away, and my friend no longer stands for elections. I am not active in politics nor a member of any political party, Green or otherwise. My core interest is in seeing that environmental issues receive an appropriate amount of attention by policymakers, regardless of political stripe. Needless to say, I was a bit dismayed by the federal election campaign that ended Monday, during which hardly a word was spoken by any party about the environment. The Conservative party under Brian Mulroney used to be progressive on environmental issues, but now avoids them as much as possible. The Liberal Party, having run on the “GreenShift” platform last time and lost, this election breathed not a word about the environment and got clobbered. Suddenly Stephane Dion doesn’t look so bad after all (Dion won his seat, the man who replaced him as party leader did not). Jack Layton spoke a few times here and there about a cap-and-trade system for managing greenhouse gas emissions, but mostly stuck to other topics. Who knows or cares what the BQ had to say about any issues, environmental or otherwise - certainly Quebeckers didn't.

To the advantage of all three big federal parties, Green Party leader Elizabeth May was excluded from the televised debates. Which is a shame, because it’s pretty clear from voter turnout and the results that a lot of people were looking for alternatives to the same-old, same-old. Then again, her performance on the French-language debate last time was excruciatingly bad, and probably did the party more harm than good in Quebec. Even so, she finally won a seat for herself in the House of Commons, third time around, and in doing so knocked out the former Minister for Natural Resources. Ms May had to win, or else she was pretty much finished as party leader. The Green Party HQ spent a lot of resources getting the leader in the House, something they felt is essential to being taken seriously, and that may be true.

Meanwhile across the rest of the country, the number of votes for other Green Party candidates fell precipitously. Where my friend was disappointed with only 4,000 votes, the candidate didn’t reach 3,000 this time. Same thing in other ridings. This costs the party money ($1.75/vote from federal subsidies last time I checked) but, more importantly, it troubles me that the grassroots work done in ridings across the country is withering. It’s an expensive gamble to hope that the presence of Ms May in Parliament will get actions on environmental issues in Ottawa and win broader support for the party, especially when it's unlikely the media will treat her as anything more than a curiosity to be interviewed only on slow news days.

David Suzuki argued a while back that having the Green Party as a viable political choice would allow the other parties to ignore environmental issues, and was therefore maybe a bad idea. I questioned this logic, figuring we were going to be locked into minority governments for a long while, where every party would be willing to hog-trade for a Green MP’s vote. After Monday, I’m thinking maybe Suzuki was right.

More on young voters

2011-04-19T07:29:00.004-11:00

A couple weeks ago I blogged on the question of why younger voters may choose not to vote. Here's an even better commentary on the subject, by someone who falls into that "young voter" category (unlike me, who, given my present age, could not be considered "young" unless I happen to live to 120).

Guest post: Sustainable buildings & health

2011-04-07T04:00:00.004-11:00

Today I get to shake things up a little on this blog by posting a guest article by Krista Peterson about the linkages between personal health and our built environment. Krista is recent graduate of the University of Central Florida (go Knights!), writer, and health & safety advocate. She's keen on encouraging others to recognize that pursuing an eco-friendly lifestyle is not just good for the environment, its good for our own health and well-being. And thanks to her providing today's post, I have some extra time for a bike ride this sunny spring day. R.

The most immediate benefits of sustainable, or green, buildings are undeniably obvious- it is better for the environment than previous building methods. Sustainable buildings generally reduce three types of waste that seriously contribute to our planets environmental woes, building waste, emissions waste, and water waste. But sustainable building is not only better for the environment, it’s also often is far safer for the inhabitants.

Unbeknownst to most of their inhabitants many buildings are built with materials that not only are not sustainable but also can contain environmental toxins. One of the most common examples is lead-based paint. As recently as the early 1990’s it was common in Canada for the outside of residential homes, as well as most businesses, to be painted with lead-based paint, even though it was known to be extremely damaging to the environment. The lead in the paint however, can also cause serious harm to people and still is one of the leading sources of lead poisoning. With sustainable building, rather than using harmful lead-based paint, most developers use a type of non-toxic paint made from natural mineral compounds called Silacote.

Many homes have been built using urea-formaldehyde foam insulation (UFFI) that creates a relatively high indoor concentration of formaldehyde. And in fact, some houses built before the 1980’s might also be insulated with asbestos, a material known to cause mesothelioma cancer. Instead, green building construction workers have pioneered the use of soy bean-based foam as insulation because soy-based materials release no volatile chemicals or toxic emissions when used as insulation and are resistant to mold and mildew. Soy-based foams also significantly reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, because they are able to be filled into the wall using pressurized water alone and offer such good quality insulation.

Ultimately, sustainable buildings immediate benefits of helping to save our planet are clearly not the only benefits associated with sustainability. In fact, sustainable building might end up being nearly as important to improving our health as yearly check-ups to the doctor, or a healthy diet!

Krista Peterson

Cherry blossoms and spring votes

2011-03-28T12:51:00.003-11:00

In comparison with the bulk of humanity, Canadians have things pretty good. And I am inclined to think that in late March, few have it as good as those Canadians who live in Vancouver. Saturday morning a Prius taxi took me quietly from my hotel room, with its view of the Coast mountains and Burrard Inlet, along streets lined with green lawns and blossoming cherries, to the airport, where my flight home to Ottawa’s backyard snowpiles and minus-8 degree temperatures. The snowcap of Mount Baker, which once inspired me to write a short story about escaping to its forests, gleamed in the sun.

It has been over a decade since I lived in the Pacific Northwest, and my visit rekindled many fond memories and, I must confess, more than a little envy of those who still live there. Don’t get me wrong; despite its mindless urban sprawl and residents’ bizarre obsession with waiting in long lines to swill low-quality coffee, I am fond of my cold and stuffy old province of Ontario. Sure, it will be cold and muddy for a few more weeks in Ottawa, and I’ll miss the sight of the ocean, and the mountains on my horizon. But soon enough I will be bobbing on the Ottawa River in my kayak, or just watching the kids play at the neighbourhood park, and thinking to myself how I have things pretty good.

Unfortunately, the next six weeks will see four grey-haired nincompoops named Stephen, Michael, Jack and Gilles bombarding us with messages of how life isn’t so good in Canada, how messed-up things are, and how only they and their power-hungry followers can set things right. The mere thought of our new federal election campaign makes me feel queasier than did the rough landing at Ottawa airport. Federal politics in Canada has devolved to a very unfunny joke. There are no issues of any importance being discussed by the campaigners, only a childish sniping and bickering among people who are capable of better, but have forgotten why they entered politics in the first place. For I believe that most people who become politicians do so with good intentions, with ideas that they sincerely believe might improve things, and with way more energy than most of us could ever muster. But like a basket of live crabs that needs no lid, politicians who can see the blue sky seem inevitably to get pulled down by the clutching ones.

While none of the parties have any particular causes or programs to tell us about, that could turn out to be a good thing. In fact, it’s a great opportunity. If the politicians have no good ideas, I know lots of us non-politicians who do. So instead of them telling us all the great things they’re going to do for us, as is usually the case, we have a chance to tell them what we want done. It’s going to be a close vote in many ridings, and they’re going to be scrambling for every single vote. And every one of us who is not wedded to any particular party needs to be saying loudly, clearly, and daily over the next six weeks: If you want my vote, here’s what you’re going to need to do to get it [insert your best idea here]. And if you, the candidate, promise to do what I ask, I promise to come out and vote for you, and I promise to badger my friends and family members to vote, too. And I also promise to remember your promise, and to send you packing for good next time if you fail to keep your promise.

My own idea for making life in Canada even better is to get more Canadians under the age of 25 to vote, starting with the 300 students I teach. I can’t say I blame them for their apathy and low turnout at the polls. My students come from all different walks of life and many cultural backgrounds. Half are women. They are thoughtful, compassionate, concerned, and owned by no one. They have big ideas. In other words, they have little in common with Stephen, Michael, Jack and Gilles. My students also have little interest in what is said in the mainstream media, which does not speak their language nor discuss things about which they care. My students can, however, be rapidly roused to action when an issue takes their interest, and they use their own social networks, communications and media to mobilize. Political parties delude themselves if they think to influence my students by issuing press releases on Twitter and counting friends on Facebook; uncool and out-of-touch in real life is not made cool and hip by getting LinkedIn. However, social media is a 2-way street, and if my students do take it upon themselves to act, the politicians can expect some very pointed tags on their Facebook walls.

Life is good in Canada this spring. Not only is spring bringing cherry blossoms and better weather, it’s bringing us a chance to do some serious cleaning of the People’s house in Ottawa. My election promise is to badger my students to vote on May 2, and to mobilize their friends to do the same. I also promise not to try and sway them to vote for any particular party or candidate. They ultimately need to be the ones to generate the ideas they want advanced at the federal level, and to decide for themselves which politicians might actually deliver. I trust their judgement on this.

Bring on the laptops

2011-03-12T03:58:00.004-11:00

The majority of the 230 students in my first-year Global Environmental Challenges course bring laptops to class. When I look up into the rows, often the first thing to catch my fleeting eye is a glowing Apple logo or the brushed-aluminum back of a fancy Windows-machine. When my eye lifts to the students' faces, sometimes they are looking back at me, sometimes not. Nearer the back rows, I can't tell one way or another, they're too far away for me to see their eyes.

I don't mind if students bring laptops. The one rule I have is that they can't be used for gaming, watching movies or other purposes that might distract the students sitting around them. If a student wants to poke someone on Facebook while I'm babbling on about whether additional atmospheric carbon dioxide might have a fertilizing effect on C3 plants, that's fine with me. When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s I was probably not devoting 100% of my attention to the prof either, only my distractions would have been a magazine, textbook or study notes for another course, or a doodle of some sort. Professors with the most engaging teaching methods would gain more of my attention than would the others; I'd skip classes of the (thankfully few) truly atrocious ones.

As with every large organization, there's a wide range of talents and skills among the professors at any given university. There seems to be no pattern. Some are keen, prepared and love to teach, and it shows. Some profs who have been at it for decades drag out the same faded transparencies for the overhead projector year after year; others are as enthusiastic about their subjects as the were when they were grad students. Some young profs are energetic and innovative and super-sharp; others lack common sense to the extent you wonder how they find their way to the grocery store without a map.

There are some courses, and some topics within courses, that are really difficult to make exciting (advanced methods courses, or photosynthesis, for example). But a decent and well-prepared prof can guide students through dense and complex material efficiently and effectively. The students may still not like the course, or the prof by extension, but such is life. An uninterested or poorly prepared prof can make even the most interesting subjects painful and boring. I once took a 1st-year archaeology course as an elective, thinking about how exciting it would be to learn each week about digging up Australopithecus bones or Mayan pottery and such. Instead, the overwhelmed PhD student who had been assigned to teach the course read aloud from his heavily highlighted teacher's edition of the textbook. I skipped every class after the first one, memorized the text, got my 'A+' grade and learned nothing about archaeology.

I also remember very clearly being required to take first-year honours geology. I went into it expecting to be bored to tears as I learned to distinguish cherts from feldspars. I did have to spend time in the lab memorizing my rocks and minerals, but the lectures were a pleasant surprise. The prof was the head of the geology department and a good, enthusiastic teacher. I came out of lectures feeling like I was smarter person than when I had gone in. Which is the most basic purpose of university, is it not? Because of that professor, I ended up taking additional higher-level geology courses as options, and even briefly considered switching majors (thank goodness I didn't; "This Geological Life" sounds slow-paced). Such is the effect a good professor can have on junior undergraduate students still trying to figure out what it is they want to do.

Undergraduate students today pay a lot more toward their education today than I did 20+ years ago. I'm told that here in Ontario, tuition fees now represent roughly 1/2 of the overall cost of a bachelor degree, and that proportion will continue to rise. Although students have always been entitled to good-quality teaching and a positive classroom environment, it seems to me that that entitlement grows in importance as tuitions grow. This does not mean students are entitled to receive good grades (these must still be earned through work and demonstrated knowledge), but they do have the right to expect me and all their other instructors to come to class prepared and ready to go. Sure, there are days when I've got a cold, or have dashed from a meeting straight to the lecture hall, or have other reasons why a lecture doesn't go as well as it might have. But the students should never leave the lecture hall thinking their time and tuition fees have been wasted.

I have heard other professors grumble that laptops should be banned from the classroom,* and seen others include lengthy and descriptions in the course syllabus detailing what types of uses are permissible or not. This seems to me unnecessary. If my lecture material or presentation is so terrible that the students stop paying attention and focus exclusively on their laptop screens, that's my problem. If I'm explaining a complex but important problem at length and some easily-distracted student misses it because s/he is looking at photos from last night's party, that's their problem. So long as they're not distracting other students, they can do what they like. And having laptops in the class can be an asset for teaching. Sometimes a student will ask a question to which I don't know the answer, or there might be a statistic or figure I'd like to have at my fingertips, but don't. I ask a group of students to Google the information for me and report back later in the lecture. Many laptops make light work. And in the end, I would rather have a student sitting in my class sending e-mails and giving me 25% or even 10% of their attention, rather than having them skip. I'm hopeful (and vain) enough to think that even 1/10 of what I'm saying might be of some use to that student down the road, even if they're not aware of it today.

*Margaret Wente's column in the Globe and Mail today makes reference to one of her professor friends who thinks laptops should be banned, which was the stimulus for this post. Thanks, Margaret.

On a fine morning the lake plays Pearl Jam

2011-02-23T15:05:00.007-11:00

An hour before daylight is the best time to head west out of Ottawa in winter. Blue-ink sky ahead, warming glow in the rear-view, and between Carleton Place and Perth the birch stems burst out of the charcoal backdrop of the conifers. If you're lucky, as I was today, the rental car has satellite radio and you can tune in to the new all-Pearl Jam channel on Sirius. A quick stop for coffee at Fall River, westward until Kaladar and then north into the Mazinaw country the Group of Seven almost did justice to.

Just south of the Bon Echo Park boundary there's a large male coyote on the road. It's very large for a coyote, too small for a wolf. The locals up here call them "brush wolves", some mixing of wolf and coyote bloodlines may have taken place (out west wolves tend to kill coyotes; eastern ones must be more sociable). I slow, roll down the window and pull up alongside. He's not afraid, but distracted. His mate is walking parallel to him through the trees a few meters back from the road. He's torn between checking me out more closely or following her into the forest; in the end he decides on the latter.

I'm the first to reach the landing at Tapping's Bay, and am out on the ice, admiring the cliffs across the Mazinaw when the others show up. A colleague from Queen's University is here with three graduate students to take sediment cores from the lake bed, with which they plan to piece together the environmental history of the region going back to the pre-contact days. Mazinaw is deep (over 140m in the upper basin), and so it's easier to core through a hole in the ice than from a boat. A school bus arrives. We've arranged for students from the local high school to join us and try their hand at coring. It's not too high-tech a process: a plastic tube is lowered to the lakebed, then a weight is dropped which seals the top and pounds the bottom into the sediments.

There's no wind and the sun is warm. The students compete with one another to see who can auger out a hole the fastest. They lower tubes and haul them back up. We will take the cores back to the high school lab in the afternoon and my colleague will show the students what to look for in them. By letting them try their hand at this, we're hoping more of them will be inspired to go on to college or university. Each year I seem to have one student from this area in my first-year environmental studies class. I would like to see more. Kids from up here are less likely to go on to post-secondary than urban and suburban kids, especially the boys. Today is just one small bit of a larger & longer research collaboration with my colleague from Queen's and others at uOttawa and Guelph, but it's been one of the best bits so far.

The school bus is honking back at the landing; the high school students trudge back. They genuinely seem to have enjoyed themselves. Why wouldn't they on such a day? The Queen's crowd and I are left on the ice, gathering up the equipment. Small pressure cracks have been forming beneath our feet. Nothing dangerous - the ice is continuous and more than 25cm thick - but the lake is reminding us she is there, and of all the water that lies beneath our feet. At the same moment we all stop moving and talking, and listen to the lake. Together, the thousands (millions?) of ongoing cracking sounds join to create a hum which the cliffs catch, reflect. It sounds to me not unlike the humming resonance that starts the Pearl Jam song "Corduroy", only it doesn't amplify.

It has been a fine morning.

A forest farewell

2011-01-30T15:41:00.004-11:00

I went to say goodbye to a forest today. These are odd words to write, but they are appropriate ones. Barring an eleventh-hour decision of some sort, tomorrow a large and relatively old mixed forest in Ottawa’s west end will be cut and give way to subdivision homes. The forest is alternately called the South March Road forest or the Beaver Pond Forest, and is found in the suburb of Kanata. A good chunk of it has long been owned by private developers. Not every tree will be cut, but once the homes are completed, what remains of the forest will be small remnants of what it is today.

Those who plan to develop it have followed all the rules. They obtained all the necessary permits, and conducted the necessary environmental assessments. Species identified under Canada’s Species at Risk Act have been observed in the area; the regulatory requirements have been met to address these concerns. During last year’s municipal elections it was debated whether the city might carry out a land-swap, and give the developers a different site in exchange for sparing this forest. Statements of good intention were made by various candidates, and promises to take such ideas into consideration were made.

Notwithstanding good intentions and regulatory procedures, tomorrow the felling may legally begin. The forest has been surveyed, the flourescent stakes are in the ground, the plastic net-fencing winds through the woods. Having never been there before, I decided I had best grab my snowshoes and have a good look around before it’s too late.

It is a pretty forest. It is not truly old-growth, at least, not in the parts I walked through over the course of an hour and a half. From what I saw, I suspect it must have been cut once, back in the mid-nineteenth century, with many stands having not been cut again. In some places there are century-old white pines with rusted barbed wire embedded in their bark. There is a rich mix of tree species of varying ages and sizes, a sign of a healthy forest. There are many deer trails. Despite being very close to the city, it is exceedingly quiet in there. I can see why many residents are upset it is being cleared.

The forest was brought to my attention by a former student, who has been helping a local group that’s trying to block the development. Today, this group and a number of other concerned residents were joined by leaders of several Algonquin First Nations in a day of prayer for the forest, with ceremonies held at the trailhead off fittingly named Walden Road. It was a nice ceremony, with about 80 people attending when I arrived to start my hike, and another 60-80 people when I returned. I was very pleased to see one of my ENV1101 students there, helping to organize. The Algonquins are concerned that the required archaeologist’s report, that was commissioned for the site as part of the planning process and paid for by the developer, is flawed. They argue that the city should halt the development until a new study can be done. Even were this to be done – and I doubt it will – I suspect it would do no more than delay the bulldozers.

I think cutting trees is a good thing. We need to cut more trees, not less. We need more products made of wood, less of plastic and metal. But the cutting I'm talking about maintains forests, it does not remove them. A well-managed eastern Ontario forest can provide a tremendous amount of material for human use, can provide good jobs, and can regenerate itself quickly, all the while providing habitat for wild things and absorbing carbon from the air. I have visited many such forests, and each is beautiful. It would have been nice if this forest in Kanata could have been put to such a use.

Perhaps if residents of Ottawa (myself included) had taken an interest years ago, things might have turned out differently. We take for granted the wilderness at our doorstep. This is Canada, we assume we have regulations and laws that protect forests and wild places. Surely developers can’t purchase the last big old forest in Ottawa and convert it to snouthouses – our laws don’t permit that sort of thing anymore, right? We can turn our attention to clearcutting in Amazonia and southeast Asia, where indiscriminate and often illegal logging runs amok, safe in the knowledge that our favourite place to walk the dog is safe. Like many, I never gave the South March forest much thought until it was too late.

Peace, love and migration

2011-01-19T14:24:00.005-11:00

Crossing the St. Patrick Street bridge on my walk home tonight, I saw that someone had stomped out a giant peace sign on the snow-covered ice below. They had done a nice job of it, very symmetrical, and it glowed nicely in the light of the rising moon. For added effect, the word "peace" had been neatly stomped out underneath. Such things make me smile, especially because they are so transient. By tomorrow evening others will have ventured onto the ice to stomp out their own (probably vulgar) graffiti alongside or on top of the peacenik message. That's just the way it goes.

You encounter the word 'peace' and its companion 'love' quite regularly in popular environmental writing, especially with respect to why people like to hike, paddle, camp or just go for a walk in the woods: "It's so peaceful, I just love it" or "I love the peace and quiet" or "I get a peaceful, easy feeling.." - oops, that last one is a lyric from an Eagles song. But you get my point.

And yet, peace and love are words that scholars seem remarkably hesitant to use, certainly in scholarly research and writing. Yes, they are difficult concepts to test or measure empirically. And yet when you think about it, the desire for peace and/or love motivates a lot of what we do. Take migration, for example. It is something few people enter into lightly; it's a big commitment to pack up one's things and leave home for an indeterminate period of time. Last week I was putting together a presentation on climate migration and wanted to include a slide summarizing the various reasons why people migrate. It was for a scholarly audience, so I started listing bullets of the most common reasons as identified by other scholars: economic motivations, household risk management strategies, global systems, social capital, forced migration... and so on.

Admiring my beautiful Powerpoint slide, I wondered if I should add love and peace to the list. It was not a trivial question. As I said, the purpose of the slide was to summarize scholarly literature for a scholarly audience, but there is exceedingly little scholarly literature in the migration field that explicitly addresses either peace or love as a motivation. A bit surprising, because which one of us does not know someone who has migrated (or selected a migration destination once the decision is made) for reasons of love, whether it be love for a spouse or someone we are courting, or love for a parent or a child? Certainly I have. On my way to the airport to give the presentation in question, I was driven by the iconic foreign-PhD-holder-turned-taxi driver. He had been an electrical engineer in his home country, had a comfortable and challenging job there, and yet there he was driving me to the Ottawa airport, unable to find a job better suited to his training and experience. Why did he migrate here? Out of love for his daughters, with the conviction that their future prospects would be better in Canada.

Of course, your objective scholarly researcher, influenced by years of classical economic scholarship, would tell you that what the taxi driver actually meant was that he had made an implicit cost-benefit analysis and decided the long-turn financial returns to the households as a whole outweighed the short term benefits of not migrating. Or something along those lines, and the scholar might illustrate his/her analysis with an equation derived from econometric modeling. But really, the economics are secondary: the guy just loves his kids that much. But you can't go writing something like that in a scholarly paper, it just won't get published.

If you do a Google Scholar search using the terms "love" and "migration" you really have to scour the results to find an article that discusses the role of love in migration behaviour. One of the few you find in the first few pages of results is Everett Lee's classic 1966 article "A Theory of Migration" (cited >1300 times as I now write). In it, Lee states that migration is not always undertaken for rational reasons and that, after accounting for transience and mental disorders, is often involuntary: for example, "Children are carried along by their parents, willy-nilly, and wives accompany their husbands though it tears them away from environments they love". Google Scholar picks up this article not because of women accompanying their husbands in migration for reasons of love, but rather that women get dragged along by their husbands and being forced leave behind the places they love. Hmmm, I agree that love is not always rational, but that's not really what I had in mind.

The few scholarly articles I was able to quickly turn up that explicitly refer to migration for reasons of love are infrequently cited (i.e. single-digit citations) and/or deal with situations that represent tiny fractions of global migrant numbers (e.g. "mail-order" brides). I suppose the migration scholarship that looks at family networks is implicitly talking about love in many instances, but the authors of such articles are pretty judicious in avoiding the l-word.

In any event, I went ahead and stuck "love" in my list of bullets and mentioned it aloud in my presentation, even though I didn't have any empirical evidence to do so (I skipped mentioning peace - didn't want to take too many risks). The audience didn't seem to mind my doing so, even though I couldn't tell if they loved my presentation.

On rural class structures and pheasant poaching

2011-01-02T13:47:00.005-11:00

One of the many joys of being a parent is getting to read lots of Roald Dahl books. If you try to explain to an adult who has never read Dahl the subjects of his stories, that person might be horrified to think they were written for children. Blowpipe-toting giants, crocodiles that debate how good children taste, teachers that regularly cane their students or might even be witches: not the most common characters found on children's bookshelves. And yet, as soon as children are old enough to sit still long enough to listen to a good story, they adore Dahl. In his storybook world you see all sides of human nature, unvarnished: the good and the bad, the serious and the silly, the kind and the sadistic, all told in easily accessible language. But like all good children's storytellers, Dahl ensures that while life may not always be fair, kids are smarter and braver than adults think, and the underdog (or the underclass) usually triumphs over the privileged. The meek may not inherit the Earth in real life, but at least in Dahl's world they inherit a chocolate factory.

One of my favourite Dahl books is The Enormous Crocodile. No anthropomorphizing nature here: the world's biggest croc hunts kids. Fortunately, though, his "secret plans and clever tricks" (which really are quite clever) are betrayed by the other wild animals that have larger brains and no patience for predators. Children who've never heard it before are mesmerized by the croc's boasts of his past child-eating and howl at the conclusion; those who've read or heard it a dozen times are still fanatical about it (me included).

I have blogged previously about how good historical fiction is often many times more useful as a learning tool than a dull geography text on the same topic. Dahl is no exception. If I were teaching a course on the social geography of rural England, I would have my students read Danny, The Champion of the World. Nowhere will you find a more real or engaging tale of the class structure, economy and nature of post-WWII rural England than in this story of a poor boy and his father waging war with the biggest landowner in the county, Mr Hazell. Hazell is downright nasty to those poorer than him (i.e. most people, including Danny) and obsequious to the nobility whose hereditary title he lacks. Hazell stocks his private forest with lots of pheasants and then sucks up to the lords and ladies of the country by inviting them to his annual shooting party. The local residents despise Hazell, and comfort themselves by poaching the odd pheasant from Hazell's land. When Danny comes up with the most brilliant plan to thwart Hazell's next shooting party... I'll stop there, I don't want to ruin a great story.

The plot parallels The Fantastic Mr. Fox, but Danny provides a host of subtle details about daily life of humans in rural England that don't make it into the shorter, more action-oriented Fox's tale. For example, Dahl's description of Danny's village school and the motley assortment of teachers working there is a wonderful distillation of modern life. Danny's teacher, the dull-witted and brutal Captain Lancaster, insists that everyone address him by the military rank he held during the war, and Dahl does not need to explicitly say it for you to realize Lancaster served in the commissary or in some other capacity that ensured he never saw any combat. And you are reminded there are unfortunately too many Lancasters as compared with true heroes out there in this world; real heroes (wartime or otherwise) are humble about their deeds, require no title to prove their worth, and never pick on the helpless. Miss Birdseye, the kindergarten teacher and only woman on the teaching staff, is pleasant and humane. You get the suspicion she will never become head of the school, but will have to put up with the daily leering of soppy old Mr Corrado until she gets married and moves on. And then there's the headmaster, Mr Snoddy, who drinks gin all day because his wife is a witch... OK, allow Dahl a bit of creative license, it is after all an entertainment for children...

I could go on about Dahl's true-to-life descriptions of the forests, fields, hedgerows and the wildlife they contain, how he captures the importance of social capital in maintaining rural communities, or how Danny and his father are there to tell us that living simply and sustainably is possible and pleasant so long as we love one another (and make time to poach the odd pheasant). But I won't go on, I think I'll instead go read the book again. Happy New Year to you and yours. R.

On environmental migration research

2010-12-15T14:32:00.005-11:00

The jet lag has worn off from my trip last week to participate in a European Science Foundation-sponsored conference on environment and (human*) migration. It's a subject that European scholars and policymakers have been paying a fair bit of attention to in recent years, far more than on this side of the Atlantic. It was a fascinating conference, appealing to the true academic nerd in me. The conference covered a wide range of topics, from regional climate modeling to Foucault-inspired deconstructions of the hidden meanings that might be embedded in the term "environmental migration".

I was fascinated by the many presentations by scholars from developing nations (who must have made up at least 1/3 of those in attendance) describing empirical research into how adverse environmental events and conditions affect mobility, population displacements and migration patterns in their home countries. A lot of this research never makes it to scholarly journals (at least, not ones easily accessible here in North America), which is a real shame. The study of environmental migration, although it has been around for a while, is still relatively underdeveloped as compared with other areas of migration and mobility research. While it has been known by scholars since the days of Herodotus (if not earlier) that changing environmental conditions affect population movements, scholars are still trying to work out all the various potential linkages between ecological and socio-economic systems that influence migration. The more case studies we can assemble from different places, the better.

It was also really nice to be among scholars with expertise and interest in this field. There aren't a whole lot of people in North America doing research on environment and migration, even fewer on climate-related migration, a subject that interests me particularly. When you work on your own a lot, you can't help but start to wonder if the subject you're studying is as relevant as you think it is. In Canada, for example, each year there are all kinds of well-attended conferences and workshops on subjects such as how newcomers integrate when they arrive in Canadian cities, on the meaning of citizenship, on how certain social groups use and interpret urban space, and so on. Environmental themes tend not to crop up. And of course, there is an enormous amount of research being done on vulnerability and adaptation to climate change, but not many of us work at that interface between climate and migration research.

People in the security policy field show an interest in climate change and migration from time to time, often with the goal of trying to foresee how many people might be involuntarily displaced in the future and where they might end up going. While I am generally interested in such questions and have written about them, the research questions that most appeal to me are what others have described as socio-ecological ones. As a simple example, when you have a drought, why is it that the farm family on one side of the road quits farming and moves on while the family on other side of the road stays on? Is it because of some difference in the configuration of the family? Their farming skills? Access to credit? The amount of clay in their soil or the quality of the well water? Luck? Some farming choice made years previously that has come back to pay dividends or cause trouble? The possibilities are not necessarily endless, but they are many and are fascinating in their complexity. And gaining more insights into them is, in my view, an essential component in understanding what our world will look like in coming years. Happily, it seems a good number of researchers in Europe, Asia and Africa share my interests.

*I add the term "human" simply because there is a much larger body of research out there on the migration of organisms other than humans in response to environmental change.

Snow in the classroom

2010-11-20T01:30:00.008-11:00

Snow fell in the high country the previous night. It was a perfect first snow; fine and light, straight out of a child's picture book or a Norman Rockwell painting. It made just the right sound underfoot. It penetrated to the forest floor, even under the conifers, and in it every detail of a mouse's track was perfectly preserved. The small eastern gray squirrels chattered indignantly as I walked past, one glaring at me from a branch at eye level as it inspected a nut. I made my way out to the small, elevated point and stood for a long time looking across the lake at the peaks to the southeast. A group of six wild turkeys emerged from a stand to take a long, close look at me. Once they were gone I picked up my laptop and bookbag and walked back across campus to the library.

The campus I am describing is Paul Smith's College of the Adirondacks. While I have seen many a fine campus with ivy walls and tree-lined walks, ocean views and arboretums (arboreta?), Paul Smith's is special. Situated on 12,000 acres in the northern Adirondacks, the main campus arcs along the shore of Lower St Regis Lake, on the site of a former tourist lodge. Every detail of the campus says "stop here and understand nature". Trees are everywhere; the college has its own working sugarbush. A large campfire pit surrounded by benches and a boat launch with racks of kayaks and canoes form the central focal point of the main commons. Swishy restaurants at Whistler or Mt Tremblant have nothing on the student cafeteria where I ate my pasta with grilled vegetables from real china and silverware, looking out through the picture windows at the lake.

The library is mostly wood and windows. The periodical shelves are loaded with titles like Sustainable Forestry and the Small Farmers Journal. Two students sit on a leather couch and prepare for a test by showing one another homemade flashcards of insects. Outside, teams of students with yellow tripods complete their surveying class project before leaving for the Thanksgiving holiday. Their cars in the tucked-away lot are already loaded, several with boats on the roofrack.

I am envious of the professors who work here. How could one not teach or learn well in such a place? Where the lecture halls have natural light and the students come in with lungs fully loaded with forest air?

Like many Canadian universities, my own, Ottawa U, grew up in an era of cheap concrete and architects who admired shoebox-shapes. The Rideau Canal, a UNESCO world heritage site, is a stone's throw from my office, but you would never guess it. Campus is cut off from it by a wall of noise from not one but two parallel roadways. Too many of our lecture halls would make Franz Kafka proud: crowded grey, windowless and airless spaces where time seems to stand still (as it must surely do for many bored undergrads).

I do all my classroom teaching in the January semester, when campus is at its greyest and most crowded and salt-stained. I have to teach 200 first-year students the basic fundamentals of environmental studies, from photosynthesis to what makes a good agricultural soil to why poor nations tend to have high population growth. Powerpoint slides, music, video clips, an occasional poetry reading and lame jokes are the only tools I have to somehow transform the flourescent-lit lecture hall netherworld into a learning environment. Pictures of trees projected against a snow-white lecture screen are a poor substitute for the real thing.

Wendell Berry, processed foods and flatulent cattle

2010-11-10T13:35:00.006-11:00

The American farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry observed in The Unsettling of America that the person who buys basic food staples at the grocery store and uses them to prepare their own meals has an entirely different effect on the agricultural production system than the person who buys processed food. He wrote this 35 years ago, before anthropogenic climate change was recognized as being an important environmental issue.

In processed food, the raw materials can be sourced from just about anywhere; the processor's main goal is to obtain them as cheaply as possible so as to maximize the value from processing. The meat ingredients in a heat-and-serve dinner are more likely to come from Brazil or Thailand or Kansas than a farm near you, the vegetables from China, the "cheese" from modified milk products rather than milk... you get the picture. And cheaply produced food ingredients are rarely good for the farms or the land on which they are produced. If you have ever stood downwind from a factory hog operation or an industrial slaughterhouse, or seen the soil-laden rivers downstream from a scorching hot, bare-sloped palm plantation, you know what I mean.

Make a meal from scratch and you will invariably select better quality ingredients than go into the ready-made version. It does not mean to say there will be no environmental impacts on the farms and land where your ingredients are produced, but chances are they will be less so. Choosing your own ingredients also means you can choose where they are produced and how, if you care to do so. The chicken I roasted for dinner on Sunday came from western Quebec, the potatoes, too. The carrots came from southern Ontario, so did the onions. If I wanted to, I could go look at the farms they came from (perhaps I have driven past one of them before and simply did not notice). I have an idea of what that chicken ate when it was alive and what was not sprayed on the veggies. The money I spent on that meal employed people in my home province and region, and cost less than what I would have spent to buy a ready-made chicken dinner. It tasted superior and was healthier, too.

A while back I was contacted by a Calgary-based reporter for Macleans magazine about a story he was writing on greenhouse gas emissions from industrial feedlot cattle. He was skeptical about environmentalists' claims that feedlot cattle produce more methane (a greenhouse gas) than grass-fed cattle. The environmentalists are right; scientific studies have shown that grass-fed cattle are less flatulent than grain-fed feedlot ones. He then went on to ask that if we were going to keep food affordable, weren't industrial feedlots a necessary evil? I replied that the ground beef in my freezer came from animals raised in Fitzroy, Ontario, not far from Ottawa, and had never been on a feedlot. Moreover, I bought it at the Ottawa's farmer's market for the exact same price per pound as what the supermarket charges for feedlot beef. The reporter, still unconvinced, then said that while it might be fine for feeding Ontarians, we can't feed the whole world farming that way.

This last question made me pause. I lived for a number of years in Asia, and traveled around there quite a bit, and can't say I ever saw a piece of Canadian beef for sale. I lived in Europe and never saw any there, either. I said "I don't know... I suppose not..." and the reporter accepted this answer. What I was thinking as I was saying this was "I don't know that we are feeding the world with Canadian feedlot beef. Most of it probably feeds the fast-food-hamburger processing plants. Could we sell $3.99 value meals if the cattle were all raised without feedlots? I suppose not..." But I didn't bother sharing all these thoughts with the reporter. All he wanted to do was write a story linking cattle farts and global warming, and needed a couple quick quotes. I decided not to go all Wendell-Berry on him. Maybe I should have told him that if you just buy your meat from a local farmer and make the patties yourself, you needn't worry about cattle flatulence-induced climate change as you enjoy your burger. But that probably wouldn't have made the story as interesting.

Rural connectivity, or lack thereof

2010-11-02T04:29:00.003-11:00

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is this week holding hearings in Ottawa to discuss the lack of broadband internet access across Canada's rural and remote areas. The big telecom companies like to say that they provide broadband service to up to 90% of Canadians who want it. I find these numbers fishy, but so far I am not aware of anyone who has checked; such claims are certainly not consistent with Statistics Canada reports of recent years on rural internet use. In any event, across large regions of Canada, you can't get so much as a cellphone signal, let alone find a house with broadband internet access. Indeed, an hour's drive west of Ottawa is Eastern Ontario's telecommunications black hole - a large triangular-shaped region north of highway 7 where cellphones don't work (you can see it here on this map of Bell wireless coverage).

The telecom companies have no intention of expanding their services into Canada's rural and remote areas. The reason is simple: there's more money to be made offering additional and enhanced services to urban Canadians than in signing up the rest of the country to basic services. The CRTC is right to look into this, but to my mind what is really needed is for the federal government to step up and ensure all Canadians have access to broadband. The Australians, Brits and Americans are all doing so. But unfortunately, our federal government saw it as being more important to use stimulus spending to repave existing roads and fix up hockey rinks than than to build a national digital infrastructure. The feds did earlier this year launch Industry Canada-led national consultations on the digital economy, and hopefully next year some sort of national strategy will emerge.

In the meantime, what about the millions of Canadians who can't use a Blackberry on their main street or don't bother using the internet because most content these days too big to squeeze through a 56k dial-up modem? Or who are told "congratulations, you have access" when internet computers are installed at the library 45 minutes drive from their home, which is open Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays? What do we do about them? There's a number of possibilities, and I will blog more about these later this month when I've finished up a study on rural connectivity for SSHRC. Until then, here's a few thoughts in today's Globe and Mail technology section.

Hope on our hill

2010-10-19T02:18:00.007-11:00

In his classic book Social Justice and the City, geographer David Harvey observed that, to understand where people tend to live within a city, you need to bear in mind a simple rule of thumb: rich people don't like to live near poor people. What you will also often find is that pre-existing geographical features within the city, like hills, streams, wetlands and so forth, often become important factors in shaping the invisible boundaries that separate rich from poor.

The neighbourhood where I live in Ottawa is a textbook example of the geographical distribution of urban wealth and social well-being. It's an older neighbourhood, with an average household income higher than the city, provincial and national averages. A busy avenue lined with businesses forms the southernmost boundary of our neighbourhood. Travel north from it on a main residential street and you quickly start to go uphill. You'll notice the number of trees lining the streets rises quickly, too. At first you will pass many low-rise brick apartment buildings, built 50-75 years ago, and generally well-kept. The people coming out of these rental units each morning tend to be in their 20s and 30s, dressed for white-collar jobs. Proceed farther up the hill and the apartment buildings transition to semi-detached/duplex homes owned by young families. When you reach the top of the hill the buildings become single-family detached homes, again brick, older and well-kept. Continue north to the bluffs overlooking the Ottawa River, and you find the toniest houses in the city, a good number of which are official residences for foreign ambassadors. Stormont, the home of the leader of the official opposition in Parliament, is here, across the street from the Iranian ambassador's house.

The homes up top are big and expensive; $1 million will not get you one. The housing stock is a mix. Some are old, drafty brick and stone homes that may have been in the same family for a couple generations. Those who live in them tend to be older, with grown children. Their occupants work or have worked in the upper echelons of government, mange(d) old-economy businesses and institutions, or are/were highly paid professionals (doctors, lawyers and the like). When not being used for bridge games or ballet classes, famous Canadians drop by the community centre to give intimate talks; this month a former ambassador to the UN and a prominent historian are on the schedule. At the same time, many older houses are being bought, knocked down and replaced by conspicuously larger ones, by people with new-economy wealth: software, high-end food stores and the like.

Four schools serve the neighbourhood, two of them private and expensive. One of the private schools is exclusively for girls; the other has recently become co-ed, but its musty halls are still lined with photos of all-male cricket and footballs teams from a century ago. Both schools guarantee your kid will go to university upon graduation. Students in the English-language public school get no such guarantees, but they tend to score well on standardized tests just the same. The sure sign of a good school and an affluent neighbourhood is when real estate agents state the school name in listings of homes for sale, as happens here (Sample description: "Great family home needing just a little TLC, your kids will go to school X". Translation: You're going to pay a lot for the privilege of owning this dump).

In short, my neighbourhood's geography mirrors the socio-economic stratifications of the city. At the bottom of the hill are the early career urban professionals hoping to work their way up through the urban economy. Midway up you get the young families like mine, with modest homes and neighbours who all know one another, and their kids walk each day to a good publicly funded school. At the very top of the hill the older, well-off pillars of urban society occupy impresisve homes, ones that sometimes come with actual pillars. And as David Harvey accurately observed, those who fall off the socio-economic ladder, or because of circumstance or choice never began to climb it in the first place, are never found living at the top of the hill.

Now I must confess that I am generalizing heavily here to make a point; with the exception of the very top of the hill, the neighbourhood as a whole is more heterogeneous than I've described (but still far less socially or economically diverse than most suburban neighbourhoods in the Ottawa area). And although my neighbourhood's geography and dynamics tend to reinforce the social and economic divisions of our city, there are exceptions, and I would like to end this long posting with one such exception that warms my heart.

In one of those well-kept apartment buildings near the bottom of the hill lives the superintendent and his family. They immigrated to Canada several years ago, from a Muslim community on the Mediterranean. Their daughter, who is about 7 or 8, goes to the public school and speaks English fluently. Dad has learned English well enough to get by. Since he arrived on the scene, the exterior of that apartment complex has never looked tidier, and I expect the units inside are equally well-maintained. They don't seem to have a lot of money; building superintendent is not the highest paying job in town. His daughter's bicycle has been ridden by dozens of children previously, but Dad has fixed it up nicely, and it runs well despite being old and second-hand. Dad's job allows him the flexibility to walk his kid to school and take her to the playground in the evenings.

Whenever I encounter them, I just want to hug them (although I don't, that would be weird. Instead we say a polite 'hello'). It makes me feel so very good to have them living in our neighbourhood. I imagine the little girl growing up to become a doctor, a lawyer or a civil-service mandarin, and in the space of a single generation that family moving from the bottom of the hill to the top. In Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose William of Baskerville wisely observes that hope is the most important thing, more important than faith. That little family gives me hope. Not necessarily the hope that David Harvey will one day be proven wrong - the rich will always build social mountains from which to look down upon the poor. My hope is that our fine hill, which no person built but which has been appropriated by people as a base for their social mountains, might still be lived upon any fine family such as the one I just described.

Wild Kingdom and citizen science

2010-09-29T13:46:00.007-11:00

When I was a kid, I was captivated by the TV show Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. Marlin Perkins was the host and narrator, but much of the work tracking, capturing and studying the animals seemed to be done by a guy named Jim. I was so captivated, in fact, that my grandparents, who probably didn't have two nickels to rub together, bought me the complete Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom, which I read from aardvark to zebra. Other kids wanted to be doctors or fire fighters when they grew up, but I wanted to be a zoologist. As it turned out, my younger brother, who wanted to be a police officer, actually ended up studying zoology; I changed aspirations in grade 5 when Mr. Johnston had us draw detailed maps of the world.

In any event, thoughts of Wild Kingdom faded until 1995, when I visited the Serengeti. The sound of the savannah - the snorting, grunting, bellowing of the herd animals, the spraying and splashing of the hippos in the Mara River - brought back memories of my favourite episodes. If only my safari guide had been Jim, and not a German botanist named Wolfgang, my childhood dream would have been realized. If I had only arrived a week earlier, I would have shared a camp with David Suzuki, who was also there for a holiday with his family.

In hindsight, having stood and admired the animals on the Serengeti was not much far removed from watching them on TV. I hadn't really been like Jim from Wild Kingdom; he did things to help wildlife, while I simply looked at wildlife. Had my childhood dream really been to merely observe wild things? I don't think so.

Recently I've been given a chance to do more than watch. Two weeks ago I found myself at the National Wildlife Research Centre in Ottawa, meeting with Environment Canada (EC) staff and representatives of Nature Canada (NC) about how to advance and rejuvenate citizen science in Canada. EC and NC together operate a number of Nature Watch programs, whereby anyone can become an amateur science by entering observations of frogs, plants, worms and lake ice conditions in Canada. The aggregated data can be analyzed for trends in species distribution and climatic conditions. My colleague Andre Viau and I are hoping to lend our skills, experience & resources at UO to shore up their existing programs and eventually expand them. The citizen scientist is an old idea, one that has enormous popularity in Europe, with tens of thousands of citizen-led environmental monitoring programs going on there right now. In North America, especially in Canada, participation has waned. Maybe we've been watching too much of the wild kingdom on TV, and not spent enough time getting our boots dirty. With the rapid global and regional environmental changes presently taking place, we need as many eyes as we can get on real wildlife, we can no longer rely solely on professional scientists like good old Jim.

In the tent

2010-09-07T13:59:00.002-11:00

The first week of the fall semester is a bit overwhelming for students and professors alike, but I think I may get more overwhelmed than many. The week before semester starts I take the 4th-year honours environmental studies students on a field course in the Addington Highlands/North Frontenac region. It's the most isolated and remote area in southern Ontario, and contains the only part of the province with paved roads to score a zero on Statistics Canada's Metropolitan Influence Zone rankings. This is a measure of the extent to which a non-urban population is influenced on a daily basis by goings-on in urban areas, as indicated by the number of people who commute daily to an urban centre. In the central part of our study region, nobody ever travels to an urban centre on a daily basis. We're talking back roads, a few modest homes, no cell-phone reception and long stretches without a gas station or coffee shop.

One of the benefits of experiencing no urban influence is that, well, there's no urban influence. The air is crisp and clear, there's no dull buzz of road traffic to mask the sounds of crickets, and there's no light pollution to obscure the falling stars in the night sky, of which there were many last week. No one is in a particular hurry to get anywhere, and the few people you do meet give you a nod or wave at the very minimum.

The students sleep in comfortable, un-fancy cabins at the Loon's Call on Marble Lake but I prefer to sleep in my tent in the adjacent family campground. It's hardly the deep wilderness thrill of Algonquin Park, but nonetheless my night's sleep is inevitably interrupted by loons, startled red squirrels, mice rustling the edge of the tent or the unmistakable who-cooks-for-you of the resident barred owl. In the morning I like to spend a few minutes watching the harvestmen (daddy-long-legs) prowl the outside of the tent's mesh before I unzip and go search for coffee...

So it was a real shock to the system today as I walked to campus past the snarls of traffic, breathing in the ozone-laden air, shaking my head at the frustrated and impatient drivers cutting one another off, pedestrians oblivious to one another's presence, and the ungodly noise of it all. Sure, I realize there are classes to teach, work to be done and it's time to get on with it - but it sure would be nice to be back in the tent tonight.

On killing monarch butterflies

2010-08-17T13:49:00.005-11:00

I killed two monarch butterflies last week. I certainly didn't mean to, and felt bad the moment I did. Fortunately my daughter, who has several children's books describing the wonder that is the monarch's unusual life cycle and epic migrations, did not notice or she would have been horrified. For those who did not learn and internalize their monarch butterfly facts as children, here are some salient points about their remarkable lives:

- the monarch lays its eggs on milkweed plants, which can be toxic to many animals. The caterpillars accumulate the toxins in their tissues, rendering the insect unpalatable to birds. The caterpillars and the butterflies advertise this fact through bright coloration.
- monarch butterflies born east of the Rocky Mountains undertake an annual north-south migration between southern Canada and an upland region in Central Mexico
- the migration takes longer than the lifespan of any individual butterfly. The adult butterflies lay eggs as they go along, with each successive generation of butterflies continuing onward to the correct destination (how each butterfly knows where to go is not known)
- in their Mexican wintering grounds the monarchs congregate in enormous numbers on coniferous trees, much the way bats cluster in huge numbers in many caves (click here to see an image)

It's consequently not surprising that many people young and old feel much more passionately about monarch butterflies than they do about most other insect species. It is also therefore not surprising that the monarch's geographically confined Mexican wintering grounds were made a biosphere reserve so as to protect that important habitat from forest clearance. Nonetheless, illegal logging does take place in and around the reserve, something conservationist groups have for several years been pressuring the Mexican government to control, with some success. Even so, the number of monarchs in Mexico in recent winters has been falling.

In Ontario and Quebec, monarch habitat is largely dictated by the availability and distribution of milkweed, a field/meadow plant. And in those two provinces (and Manitoba as well), milkweed plants have long been listed as noxious weeds to be controlled. As mentioned above, many species of milkweed plants (genus Asclepias) are toxic, and so domesticated grazing animals that consume them in large quantities, especially sheep, can become sick or even die. Of course, grazing animals can ordinarily recognize common toxic plants and therefore avoid them, as they do with milkweeds, unless there is nothing else available to eat. So it is that to protect sheep milkweed is officially designated a noxious weed which, if it is found present on your property, you are supposed to destroy pursuant to Ontario's Weed Control Act. It does not matter whether you or your neighbours actually have any starving sheep on your land - you're supposed to get rid of milkweed.

Fortunately for monarchs, most people don't recognize milkweed plants let alone know they have a duty to destroy them, and even those who are aware of these facts and have milkweed on their land usually don't actively target them. However, common farming practices used to produce corn and soybeans - the most common field crops in Ontario - and many other crops involve the application of herbicides that control all weeds, including milkweed. Moreover, milkweed also tends not to grow in well-grazed pastures. The result is that in Ontario's countryside you're most likely to find milkweed plants congregated along roadside ditches and other areas around the margins of farmland.

And that's how the two monarchs I mentioned earlier met their end on my car windshield as I drove along a country road in Prince Edward County. The reality is that southern Ontario's best monarch habitat coincides with Ontario's road network. Who knows how many monarchs die in collisions with cars in Ontario each year; I'm willing to bet in Prince Edward County alone several hundred die this way each day in August. Funny how the children's books don't mention this fact.

Drought and Mexican migration

2010-07-29T12:46:00.005-11:00

National Geographic News contacted me last week to ask for comments on a new study that suggests Mexican migration to the US rises whenever there's a drought in Mexico. It's an interesting study; the first of its kind so far as I'm aware. The authors based their findings on a statistical analysis of Mexico-US migration from 1995-2005 and compared it with climatic trends and crop yields in Mexico over the same time. The study's authors found that whenever crop yields went down significantly, migration to the US rose. The authors then go on to use their findings to predict how climate change might affect future Mexico-US migration. Taking model projections of future climate in Mexico, the authors suggest that an extra 1.4-6.7 million Mexicans might migrate to the US by 2080 because of climate-related crop losses. Here's the link to the original study, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This study is one of the first I've seen that uses known migration and climate data to try and estimate the effect climatic events have on ongoing migration movements. There are studies that have estimated the number of people displaced by famines in East Africa, but that's a different scenario: in a famine, where you have people streaming out of the countryside to relief centres, it's relatively straightforward to make estimates of the number of people affected. But there was no famine in Mexico in the past 15 years; the countryside remained populated, relief centres were not established. Rather, what the authors were able to do was show that the regular and ongoing flow of cross-border migration responds to climate-related changes in crop yields.

This is rather important. Until now, most climate migration literature has focused on the 'environmental refugee' scenario of starving or flooded out millions fleeing areas rendered uninhabitable by extreme weather events, rising sea levels and the like. Many estimates are bandied about regarding how many climate change refugees we might expect in coming decades. The numbers range from tens of millions to a billion depending on the study you read. But most of those studies are back-of-the-envelope/best guess calculations.

Most migration worldwide does not occur as distress migration. People's motives for migrating vary considerably from one place to the next and from one household to the next. Climatic variables can and sometimes do play a role in household decision-making, but typically in concert with other social, economic and cultural influences. As a result, the greatest effects of climate change on human migration patterns are likely to be seen not in terms of the number of environmental refugees but on voluntary migration flows. Yes, environmental displacements will continue to occur; a surge in illegal migration by Hondurans to the US occurred in the months following 1999's Hurricane Mitch, for example. But the bigger numbers will be experienced as an increase in rates of rural-to-urban migration in developing nations - something that's very difficult to tease out empirically, since there are a lot of other factors also driving rural-to-urban migration.

A final observation is that while I'm pleased the authors were able to detect an association between crop failures and Mexico-US migration, I wish they had left it at that. There is so much inherent uncertainty in future climate models and in current migration data, when you add to it our complete inability to know future political, social and economic conditions in Mexico and the US, trying to predict climate-related migration over the next 70 years is a bit of a folly. Especially when the results come with falsely precise numbers like 1.4 and 6.7. Why not at least follow convention and round them, or simply state an order of magnitude (e.g. the extra migration is likely to number in the millions over coming decades)? Making predictions like this simply provides fuel to those who simply refuse to believe the science (see some of the comments on the National Geographic story to see what I mean) .

No climate conspiracy after all

2010-07-07T13:10:00.009-11:00

Two days ago I posted that we should expect an increase in climate change reporting because of the extreme heat in Ontario and the soggy summer out west. Today's CBC Radio program The Current takes up this very point, asking if this is the "Pearl Harbour" moment that mobilizes action on climate change. I'll say no more on the that subject.

Climate change is also in the media today for another reason - the report of an official inquiry into the so-called "Climategate" in the UK, where e-mails had been stolen from a server used by climate scientists at the UK's University of East Anglia and selectively released on the internet in a way that made it seem the scientists had been faking their results (see my posting 19 December 2009). There's nothing the media loves more than a good conspiracy story, even if it is far-fetched and even if the so-called "evidence" consisted of internet postings supposedly revealing the contents of stolen e-mails. Honourable but anonymous thieves thieves uncover a Norwich-based conspiracy to deceive the world about a phantom menace despicably named "climate change" - how could that not raise global alarm bells? If only Peter Sellers were still alive, we could have sent Inspector Clouseau to get to the bottom of it!

But alas, in the absence of the late, great detective who stopped deranged Inspector Dreyfus from destroying the world, it was decided to instead establish an independent panel of inquiry to look into the matter. The findings were released today. And unsurprisingly, the inquiry found the British climate scientists guilty of no more than being overly prickly when questioned about their results. No surprise there: if you have ever dealt with academics, most are swell people, but there does remain a residual population of thin-skinned types who long for the good old Oxbridge/Ivy League days when professors were never questioned by anybody, and apparently the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia has its own fair share. But no scientific fraud nor conspiracy nor attempts to destroy civilization took place. It turns out the menace to global peace and stability is not a gaggle of rogue scientists, but that thing they were studying.

Get ready for more climate change in the Canadian media

2010-07-05T12:15:00.005-11:00

Temperatures hit the mid-30s Celsius across much of southern Ontario and Quebec today, and are expected to do so for several more days before returning to more seasonal norms of the high 20s. Combined with an unusually wet summer on the Canadian Prairies, some heavy rainfall events and even a recent earthquake in Ottawa, expect any day now to see an upswing in reporting on climate change/global warming in the Canadian media.

Yes, I know, earthquakes are not climate-related, but the media doesn't mind - it all relates to the environment somehow, right? Summer is always a slow season for the news networks and papers, and especially now that the dust has settled on the G8/G20 circus and the gulf oil spill has become old news, there's nothing papers find easier to run than stories about the weather.

Which is what the current hot temperatures in Ontario and soggy conditions in Saskatchewan amount to - just the weather. They're not evidence of anything more than the fact that our daily livelihoods and activities are vulnerable to being disrupted by naturally-occurring events, just as they've always been. If we think the impacts of climate change aren't worth worrying about, consider the heat and rain a wake-up call. Or a reminder, if you're one of the majority of people who think, with good common sense, that it's unwise (and terribly wasteful) to transform the composition of the atmosphere as we're presently engaged in doing, and wonder about the negative impacts. And so they look to the media for stories about climate change and what can/ought to be done...

hmmm. An awkward full circle is reached. This week's weather has little to do with climate change (just as the home run hit yesterday by the Jays' Vernon Wells will have little impact on the outcome of their season) but at the same time it might stimulate the media to publish more climate change stories, which people might then read/listen to and thereby (perhaps) take a greater interest in doing something about it. The realpolitik of climate change would seem to dictate, then, that those hoping for action to mitigate global greenhouse gas emissions should hope for hot weather in the media capitals and extreme weather events across the nation. But it works the other way as well: last summer (which was cool and wet across much of eastern Canada, and followed on the heels of a snowy winter) saw a swelling of smarmy "so whatever happened to global warming?" columns by the dullards of the op-ed sections and news network gab shows.

So to wrap up then: if the weather makes you think about climate change, good for you. But hopefully you also give it some thought even when there's something else newsworthy besides the weather.

Summits and the height of foolishness

2010-06-20T08:41:00.001-11:00

As my train pulled into Toronto’s Union Station today, the VIA Rail staff announced that trains would be diverted to suburban stations during the upcoming G20 leaders’ summit. This is just one more undesirable outcome of the foolish decision to host the G8/G20 summits in Muskoka and Toronto, a decision that has become increasingly unpopular as Canadians learn more about the scale of the disruptions it will cause and the price tag (currently estimated at $1 billion, and governments tend to deliberately understate the likely costs of expensive boondoggles).

It’s worth reflecting on what these summits entail and how this one came to be held in Toronto in the first place. Summits are little more than expensive press conferences featuring select groups of political leaders. Little is actually done at summits; 99% of the work is performed by government functionaries over the year leading up to the event. In their current form they trace their origins to the meetings of the leaders of the Great Powers during the Second World War, although no one would confuse the cast of mostly unknowns descending on Toronto with Roosevelt and Churchill (although Stalin may be called to mind by at least one of the attendees; I’ll let you guess which one).

The G20 is the offspring of the G8, which in turn contracts to the G7 and then G5 as you work back in time. Notwithstanding press releases issued by our last several prime ministers, Canada is a real minnow at these meetings, our presence at the table more a product of Cold War-era geopolitics than any real economic might on Canada’s part. Canada’s economy is about the same size as that of California, and in practical terms Governor Schwarzenegger has more global political influence than does our PM. Few if any of the other countries at the summit table really care two hoots about Canada’s interests or ideas, and I say this not to be snide but to be factual. Former Prime Minister Paul Martin was influential in getting the G8 to add an expanded G20 meeting (not exactly a Nobel-prize worthy achievement, but it’s something), and one of the key topics of this year’s summits – the troubled banking sector in some parts of the world – is a problem Canadian banks dodged because of tighter regulations than those in place elsewhere. This fact (plus the one that we’re hosting the meetings) gives Canada a slightly higher profile than we have had at most summits, but after the formalities of the summits don’t expect foreign leaders to be burning up the phone lines to 24 Sussex Drive for follow up advice on bank regulations.

It is valid to question what purpose is actually served by these summits. One rationale is that regular face-to-face meetings of the world’s most powerful leaders is a good thing in its own right, and likely serves to foster greater international cooperation generally and iron out misunderstandings before they happen. There is little evidence to support such a theory, and in any event, if this were the true purpose Canada and Italy would be tossed from the G8 in favour of Brazil, China and India. Another rationale is that these summits focus leaders’ attention on the pressing economic issues of the day and facilitate coordinated responses. Again, there’s not much evidence based on the outcomes of past summits. The reality is that an institution already exists to address such goals, and it’s the United Nations, which already has in place the programs and agencies capable of working on the issues discussed at summits. Take for example Prime Minister Harper’s announcement that he’d like to use this summit to encourage world leaders to spend more on women’s health in developing nations. I’m all for that, and so is the UN, which already has small armies of staff in its various agencies working on this very issue. So why not cut a check for a billion dollars to the UN Development Program, earmark it for women’s issues, and move the G20 summit to UN HQ in New York, for which we’ve already paid and which already has in place the necessary infrastructure for large gatherings of world leaders?

Why is it that Canadians will be paying over a billion dollars to host a sampling of the world’s politicians? To begin with, this year was Canada’s turn to host the G8 leaders, and no leader ever turns down the chance to host this party and get his picture taken with the US president, whatever the costs. A summit invariably requires an army of security, and one school of thought suggests it is therefore desirable to host it in a relatively out-of-the way place (although the US chose to hold it in Pittsburgh last time, not exactly a hunting camp in the woods). The Canadian government went the backwoods route, and conveniently found a location in the riding of cabinet minister Tony Clement, a riding where the election outcome is not always certain (Clement once won it by a couple-dozen votes). It was only after this decision was made that it was decided (it’s a little unclear if Canada was pressured into it or if the PM’s office gaily volunteered) Canada should also host the G20 leaders summit immediately after the G8 summit: two summits instead of one. A problem of scale suddenly ensued: it’s possible to host seven leaders and their entourages at a cottage country resort, but no way could the G20 circus be accommodated there. And because a substantial chunk of Canada’s security and law enforcement infrastructure would already be concentrated two hours north of Toronto, one of the few logistical options remaining was to have the G20 crowd meet there. In other words, one poor decision pushed the government into an even poorer one.

Notwithstanding the media delight over follies like the fake lake and model wooden lighthouses, the lion’s share of G8/G20 spending will pay for security. The billion dollar price tag is four times the amount of money the Canadian government says it will spend annually on international women’s health issues in coming years. It is hard to see any great value stemming from these summits at the international level generally or for the citizens of host nations who get stuck with the ever-increasing price tags and inconveniences. Let’s face it: the only summit series that ever mattered to Canadians ended in 1972 when Paul Henderson scored, so maybe we should politely decline any future invitations to host summits.

Oak trees, oil spills and what lies beneath

2010-05-23T12:50:00.004-11:00

This afternoon I attended an outdoor performance of the Cambridge Girls Choir in a park alongside Dow's Lake in Ottawa. It was a hot and steamy day for May, but no one was uncomfortable except, perhaps, for the performers themselves. That's because the stage had wisely been placed facing two large trees, one a silver maple, the other a red oak. From the shade of the silver maple I counted at least fifty people seated on lawn chairs or on the grass beneath the oak, with plenty of room to spare. With its classically-shaped canopy, the oak was not particularly large or mighty as far as oaks go, but like all oaks is nonetheless a structural miracle: a single column arising from the ground supporting an array of branches and stems, some perfectly horizontal, each one in turn bearing hundreds of increasingly smaller branches terminating in tonnes of leaves. The finest human architects using the most sophisticated materials could not begin to replicate the superstructure of that one unremarkable oak tree.

I doubt that those seated underneath that oak were marvelling at the silver maple above me; most seemed to be listening carefully to the choir (it was a good performance, I should add). They were probably even less likely aware that beneath their feet spread a root mass as large and impressive as the canopy shading them. And that would be no surprise: we humans are a species whose senses are generally dull in comparison with other animals, and one which relies disproportionately on the single sense of eyesight. We consequently show little interest in things we can not see. Moreover, as a species with few natural predators beyond other humans, our gaze tends to be disproportionately drawn to other other humans and the works of humans. Staple an ad for student painters on a tree alongside the sidewalk and we invariably notice the ad but not the tree. The phrase "out of sight, out of mind" is not merely an old adage; that really is the way most of us think and operate most of the time. Few if any people today took much notice of the tree they sat beneath at the choir performance; probably none but me gave any thought to the parts of the tree not immediately visible.

Unless you live in a complete media vacuum, you've likely heard or read about the recent oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico and the oil that has been rushing steadily for weeks now into the deep waters of the Gulf. Out of sight, out of mind was no doubt what British Petroleum, the operators of the rig, were hoping would work in their favour while they slap-stickishly attempted to plug the gusher. Until this past week the public was not allowed to see video footage of the broken well-pipe, and until then BP issued a steady stream of reports vastly understating the true amount of oil being spilled. They were able to get away with this because most oil spills occur at the ocean surface, where the oil you see floating represents virtually all that there is - there's nothing hiding below the surface.

But a spill that emerges at the sea floor is a different situation: until the broken well is successfully shut off, the vast majority of the oil spilled and yet to be spilled remains out of sight. Although it has been weeks since the spill began, only this weekend have large sheets of gooey black oil washed up on Louisiana's shorelines and provided the news media with the images we typically associate with oil spills. But what currently appears on the surface is just a taste of that which is yet to come. Imagine again that oak tree large enough to shelter 50 people with ease, only half of it visible above the ground. Now imagine burying that oak tree even further below the soil (moving the 50 people away first, of course) until nothing but a few twigs and leaves poke out of the ground. That's what the oil spill in the Gulf is actually like, only it won't remain below the surface forever.

A tale of two pubs

2010-05-01T12:05:00.005-11:00

In the southwest London neighbourhood of Pimlico you'll find two pubs that are geographically not more than a short walk apart, but occupy different social worlds.

The picture-perfect White Swan is found on the Vauxhall Bridge Road, a few steps from the Tate Britain Gallery and the River Thames, and six or seven minute walk from Parliament. At 6pm on the last Friday of April, a pay day for many and the start of a long weekend for most, the White Swan was mobbed. The majority of the patrons were under 35, well dressed in office attire, single, and well-educated. Many no doubt work for parliamentary offices or the law courts or other promising careers in public administration. There were a few tables of older men in suits sharing pints, but these were outnumbered by tables of young women having after-work cocktails and glasses of wine. The conversations were loud and boisterous, and all seemed to be having great fun.

The barmen at the White Swan are young, handsome men, wearing tasteful open-neck shirts. On the bar gleams tap after brass tap of stouts and lagers, and the back wall is cluttered with many bottles of alcohol. On the wall is a sign advertising the night’s meat pie specials: Steak & Stilton cheese and Chicken & chorizo sausage on this night. A long queue of people awaited service, most paying with plastic cards. I stood in the middle of it all for several minutes, taking it in, deciding whether to order a pie and a pint at the bar and then try to find a place to sit. No one paid me any heed, pushing past me. I might have stood there for longer if I liked, but decided it was too noisy for me, and went for a walk.

I passed through a nearby public housing estate, its residents a miscellany of recent migrants from the four corners of the Earth. An odd place to find social housing, I thought, wedged between the lovely and dear brick flats east of Vauxhall and the ornately columned rowhouses lining Belgrave Road. But there it was, children bicycling in the street, yelling at one another, laundry hanging outside, people yelling over at the neighbours in Spanish and Bengali. At the far side of the estate I found another pub, the Pride of Pimlico, and made my way inside.

Unlike the estate's residents, all the patrons were white, as they were for the most part at the White Swan, but that was about all the two pubs had in common. The Pride was reasonably busy, but I was still able to quickly find a stool at the bar, taking care to ask those in the immediate vicinity if I was taking someone else’s spot. The lone barman, a fellow in his twenties with a soft rural accent (from Wales maybe?) was soon over to pour me a bitter, cracking a mild joke to put me at ease as I tried to identify the right coins with which to pay him. As a stranger, I was immediately aware that most in the pub had taken a short, discrete look at me when I came in before returning to their own affairs.

The clientele at the Pride was a mixture of ages. At my side of the bar sat a number of married couples in their fifties, who all knew one another. As the women chatted, one fellow read the paper while another went back and forth to fill in race sheets. Another man joined them and his wife gave him forty pounds from her wallet, likely his pocket money for the weekend. A group of younger, single men and women were at the back of the pub shooting pool, while at booths along the far wall sat smaller groups of women, some middle aged and older, some younger. All in the bar were dressed in casual clothes, and paid cash to our barman, who sported a golf shirt and jeans.

Behind the bar all is orderly and spartan as compared with the Swan. The Guinness tap takes front and centre, flanked by a single bitter tap, a single lager tap, and so forth. The number of bottles of alcohol to the rear of the bar is also modest. Below these sit plastic bottles of mix, one of the younger patrons requesting a splash of Schweppes lemonade in her lager. Above the bottles, not far from a letter from a local charity thanking the patrons of the pub for raising 84 pounds on its behalf, is a row of souvenir buttons bearing the names of the counties in the Republic of Ireland. Seeing these I realized the origins of the odd name, The Pride of Pimlico. It is an Irish pub. By this I do not mean the phony replicas of Irish pubs you’ll find in every city on every continent, from Hong Kong to Ottawa. When this pub had been established decades previously, the residents of the public housing estate had been Irish migrants, and the Pride had been their meeting place.

While pondering the types of jobs the Irish labourers would have performed (delivering coal to Parliament? Unloading boats on the Thames?), two women in their twenties came in from outside and stood next to me at the bar to order their drinks. Both were thin, and while neatly dressed, their clothes were considerably less expensive than those worn by the women their age at the Swan. The barman recognized them, and made no attempt as he greeted them to hide his fondness for the brown-haired woman. If she shared his feelings, she did not let on. She ordered a bottle of Beck’s for herself and a glass of white wine for a friend who would be joining them shortly. Her blonde-haired companion ordered a Corona with lime, hesitantly. When the barman told them the price, I learned why she hesitated. In a quiet voice equal parts embarrassment and sadness, she said she was a little short, aware that others, including me, the stranger, could hear. Her friend gave her the extra twenty pence needed, and they took themselves off to a booth in the corner to wait for their friend. I finished my pint, and retraced my steps to my hotel, happy shouts and laughs serenading me as I passed the White Swan.

on coffee cup litter and a new Canadian symbol

2010-03-18T02:25:00.004-11:00

I'm feeling pretty Canadian this morning. I've got leftover chili for lunch today, made from moose meat shared with me by one of my grad students who's an aboriginal and a hunter. My wife and I chatted hockey over breakfast (Her view: It's a shame Sidney Crosby get's so much credit for scoring the overtime goal when it was other teammates who carried the load most of the tournament. My view: That's the way it goes. Would anyone know who Paul Henderson was if not for his goal in 1972?*). On getting to the main door of my office building on campus I was greeted by a large, red, discarded roll-up-the-rim-to-win coffee cup from Tim Horton's. Now what gets more Canadian than that?

Our national symbol is a stylized red sugar maple leaf, something you actually see in nature for only a few weeks each fall, and then only in eastern Canada. I'm thinking we should replace it with the red contest Tim Horton's cup, which appears each March for several weeks right across the country, on sidewalks, roadsides, front gardens, schoolyards, and virtually any place you can imagine one being tossed. Once while walking the Bruce Trail from the Niagara River to St Catharines I counted more than a hundred discarded Tim Horton's cups alongside a stretch of secondary road that connects to sections of the trail.

Last year my daughter and I were kayaking on the Rideau River; she called out she spotted a beaver, our other national symbol. But when we paddled closer we were instead greeted by a brown Tim Horton's coffee cup with the lid still attached floating on its side. Reminiscing about that uniquely Canadian moment is inspiring me with new ideas: We can replace the leaf on the flag with the red cup and the beaver on the nickel and souvenir t-shirts with the brown one.

Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I like this idea. It's geographically more representative of Canada, and culturally, too. While Canadians like to claim maple syrup and canoeing through hardwood forests as our national icons, reality is that we consume far more artificially maple-flavoured corn syrup than the real thing, and you'll find orders of magnitude more Canadians shopping at US-owned chain big box stores on a sunny autumn Saturday than you will paddling under a red-orange canopy of leaves. For much of it's history, Tim's has been a division of a US-based corporation. Like other corporations that want to sell junk food to Canadians, Tim Horton's sponsors sports events and hockey games, but unlike McDonald's, Arby's, Wendy's and others, Tim Horton's does not need to replace the apostrophe in its name with a little maple leaf to pander to our frosty northern pride. Canadians recognize with pride the name on the paper cup containing their favourite cheap coffee is that of a hockey player and not that of a cartoon clown or a nondescript person whose geographical affiliations are unclear.

I'd like to go on, but it's time to stop for a coffee. And no, it won't be purchased in a red paper cup;** guess I'll have to find other ways to show my patriotism.

*Etched into my childhood memories is how all the kids in our school were led to the gym to squint at a 24" TV set up on the stage so we could all watch the Canada-Russia games from Moscow. The significance of the moment was lost on me; the reason I still remember it is because it was such an unusual disruption from our kindergarten routine. More memorable for me was learning of Tim Horton's death. I had watched him on TV play the night before for the Sabres against the Leafs in Toronto. He crashed his car on the Queen Elizabeth Way after the game.

**This past weekend, for the first time in I-can't-remember-how-long, I bought a cup of coffee in a disposable cup. I have four coffee mugs of various description around my office and several travel mugs at home, so am never without. And yet, last Saturday I wandered over to a sit-down cafe near campus sans-travel-mug only to find it was closed. Nonetheless in urgent need of caffeine, I went to a nearby fast-food coffee seller. Much to my humiliation, the cheerful person behind the counter handed my my paper cup of coffee and said "Hey! You were my 1st year environmental studies prof!". Talk about being caught not practicing what you preach! I am humbled, and lesson learned.

On the meaning of space and masking tape as a teaching tool

2010-03-03T13:34:00.005-11:00

Canadians have a national myth of being a people shaped by vast, majestic open spaces - a myth that is played upon/perpetuated by TV commercials for some fairly awful tasting beer. Reality is that the majority of Canadians live in cities and suburbs, and see wide open space as something to be driven across as quickly as possible to get to the next city or suburb. Most Canadians are barely more familiar with vast tundra or endless moose-filled woods than are teens living in Vienna or Hong Kong. Nonetheless, Canadians do have a very different sense of space than do people elsewhere I've lived or visited. We expect to have lots of personal space wherever we are, and to have a fair bit of quiet, too. It may be because of the myth, but I suspect it's more because the average Canadian kid increasingly grows up in a detached, 4-bedroom suburban home with two-car garage and a yard. At least, that seems to be the experience of the majority of students in my classes.

I teach a 3-hour evening course called Environment and Urbanization in Developing Countries. Although it's a 4th year class, and one I'd like to run as a seminar, I can't - there are 80 students in it. 3 hours is much too long to stand and lecture at them, so it's necessary to have some form of interaction and discussion. But being interactive and engaging with 80 students is difficult to do without considerable noise and occasional near-chaos erupting. So to introduce a recent unit on housing challenges in developing-country cities, I decided to use the noise and chaos to my advantage.

We were to discuss in class an assigned reading on the Baan Mankong program, one where the urban poor in Thaliand are encouraged to form cooperative associations to acquire and develop proper housing. As in many developing countries, Thai cities host large numbers of very poor people living in makeshift homes on hazardous land without any legal tenure, and consequently have few if any basic services like running water or sanitation. But how can I expect a suburbanite Canadian student, whose only housing experience is a comfortable detached home, to appreciate the reality of living conditions in a Bangkok slum and therefore appreciate the significance of programs like Baan Mankong?

I used masking tape. I told the students to get out of their chairs and form "families" of four. I then walked around the class and gave each family a roll of masking tape and told them to claim their living space within the lecture hall, the only requirement being their space must touch an outside wall (so they could exit the space). Once they claimed their space, they were to decide where they would sleep and cook (no need for toilet space, they could use the public washroom down the hall). No other instructions were given, and no attempt was made to give them all a roll of tape at exactly the same time.

The noise and confusion was fantastic, and so was the mess. There was masking tape draped every which way. Adding to the fun was the irregular shape of the lecture hall. After twenty minutes, we stopped, quietened down and took stock. What we found was that some groups, particularly those who got their tape first, had claimed very large spaces (as compared with the others), often with creative shapes. No space went unclaimed. One group taped the ceiling and declared they were going to add a second story to their rather small space (why not? No one said they couldn't). We took some measurements; I guesstimate the average size of the space claimed was 150 square feet - about the size of a child's bedroom in a suburban Canadian house. The smallest space claimed was roughly half that. Most had decided to put their cooking areas toward the centre of the lecture hall, which we quickly recognized would become a heat and fire hazard (a very real phenomenon in informal settlements).

The discussion that followed was fantastic - the students virtually taught themselves everything I hoped they'd gain from the unit. We also found something quite remarkable: the plan view of our taped up classroom looked remarkably similar to the plan view of an informal settlement shown on this Baan Mankong website (see example 3 - land sharing). It wasn't a perfect lecture, and next time I'll use string instead (the wads of discarded tape did take up space in the garbage cans). But hopefully when we all returned to our respective homes that night, and took a last look around their rooms before drifting off to sleep, we were all a bit more appreciative of the space and quiet we enjoy.

Snow, mud, ice houses and the Vancouver Winter Olympics

2010-02-16T03:41:00.006-11:00

There's much talk in Vancouver these days about the weather. Actually, people in the Pacific Northwest are almost always talking about the weather, which is highly variable, but with the hordes of visitors and media pouring into the city for the winter Olympics, the chatter is louder than ever. It's somewhat amusing when you think about it - the Canadian city with the mildest winter climate was the one selected to hold the world's biggest outdoor winter sports competition. Next they'll try to bring the summer Olympics to Iqaluit.

I used to live in the Pacific Northwest, learned to ride a snowboard there, at one time harboured dreams of owning a place in Pemberton. The weather they're getting in Vancouver right now is nothing particularly out of the ordinary - lots of precipitation in the form of snow at altitude and rain down below, with mild temperatures in the city.

The games are coming off very well so far, the competitors seem happy, the scenery is drop-dead gorgeous, and the opening ceremony (especially the giant orcas swimming across the stadium floor) was well worth watching. But what's painful to watch is the sight of the organizers struggling heroically to get the outdoor events going "in spite of the weather" and the apologies and excuses being offered. Exactly what kind of weather did they expect? Why did they make things so hard for themselves?

Take for example the decision to stage the freestyle skiing competition at Cypress Mountain. Cypress is the classic low elevation Coast mountain: it can have a tonne of snow dumped on it one week and be brown and green the next. The organizers no doubt had their reasons for wanting to stage the freestyle skiing there in spite of the very real possibility of there being no snow. Their underlying logic was no doubt that in the worst case scenario, technology allows you to make enough snow to ski on even if there's not a flake on the mountain. You see it often in Europe at World Cup ski events: racers hurtling down a white course on an otherwise brown mountainside, spectators wearing light jackets.

Nonetheless, the site at Cypress is inherently flawed for freestyle. Low-lying clouds, fog, mist and precipitation regularly make visibility poor - not a good risk to take when you're on a tight schedule. And rain - which lower Cypress is bound to get in any two week span in winter - is much faster at dissolving snow than mild temperatures. Another problem is the crowds: yes, you can make a skiing surface for the competitors, but the spectators may be left wallowing like pigs in a mud pit. The media's reporting today that organizers may have to cancel some spectators tickets at Cypress for this very reason.

Another puzzling problem they had at Cypress was that the snow ramps the competitors jump off kept melting in the days before the games opened. The organizers were scrambling to find a way to overcome this. They finally found one - plastic drainage pipes packed with dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) embedded in the ramps seem to be working. Carbon dioxide-stuffed plastic tubes seem a poor symbol for a games which says it hopes to be more environmentally friendly than those that preceded it (it's all relative, but you'd have to bribe me with gold medal game hockey tickets before I'd say these games are more environmentally benign than either of the Lake Placid games).

The poor individual responsible for constructing these ski ramps is reported to have said he wished he'd studied physics. Actually, he should have studied environmental history. In the days before electricity, rural people regularly stored winter ice well into the height of summer in ice houses, which were often simple wooden structures built above ground. How did they keep their ice from melting? After cutting the blocks from lakes, the individual blocks were then rolled in sawdust to insulate them. A ski ramp constructed out of sawdust-packed ice blocks and covered with plastic sheeting when not in use to keep the rain off should have been fine. Simple, old technologies that have been refined over generations of trial and error are often the best ones.

On anything-but-green cars

2010-01-26T11:44:00.002-11:00

I don't use the word "green" in any context other than when I'm referring to something that's actually that particular colour. Leaves are green. So are leprechauns. People are not. Organizations are not. Cars are not, except when painted British racing green.

My reason for this is simple - governments and the general public have through careless use rendered largely meaningless the use of the word "green" as an intended synonym for the phrase "being beneficial to ecological integrity, or at the very least being useful without causing any detrimental effects on ecosystems". Many marketers and the pedlars and cheapjacks they work for go the additional step of deliberately using the term in misleading fashion to sell extra widgets. I also don't use the term "greenwashing". We don't need a special word for people who fib about the environmental benefits of something: fraud is just plain old fraud, however you lie or mislead people.

And so in this frame of mind I learned today that a California-built electric motor sports car has been approved for sale in Canada. The car's maker boasts it can accelerate from 0-100km/h in the preposterously precise time of 3.7 seconds. With a price tag of $125k, it's not a meaningful transportation option - just another toy for the wealthier members of the Viagra crowd. None of this troubles me much.

I'm somewhat troubled by the crowing in the business sections (which these days are little more than a space for reformatted corporate press releases, so lacking are they in attempts at journalism) about the approval of a "green roadster" (add this one to the list of new oxymorons for 2010). Obviously an electric motor produces no tailpipe emissions, unlike gasoline powered fuels, but unless this car/toy is made of recycled pop bottles and tin cans and is being plugged directly into a wind turbine at night, I'm trying hard to figure out how it can be considered "green" (oops, - just broke my own policy and used the "G" word).

I'm mostly troubled by the fact that this vehicle (whose name I will not write; I will not give its makers a single extra word of publicity) has been approved for use in Canada, but the Zenn compact electric vehicle has not been approved for use outside Quebec. The sports car makes little practical purpose in terms of transportation (seriously - who would park a $125K car in the office lot downtown?) and is deliberately designed to be driven at dangerous and illegal speeds. It's not even made here. What exactly are the benefits for Canadians. The Zenn car, meanwhile, is built here in Canada (hint for federal government: opportunity for long term job creation) and is specifically designed for everyday use in crowded large cities where congestion and air quality are concerns. The Zenn is neither a gold cart nor a rich-man's toy; it's a very practical vehicle that's far superior in terms of energy efficiency than other cars.

Actually, it's the difference in design that allows the useless sports car to be approved and the intelligently conceived Zenn car to be kept of most Canadian roads. the Zenn car is small and doesn't travel at unnecessarily high speeds. It's not intended to scream down the freeway, nor will it. You won't find yourself loading up the Zenn with camping gear and driving the kids to Florida; you won't be staring down the Honda Civic-driving teenager at the traffic light, challenging him to a drag race. It won't happen. But Canadian motor vehicle regulations require that a vehicle be capable of doing such things in the interest of road safety. Divided expressways have minimum speed limits; the Zenn can't exceed them, and so it isn't approved for use. Never mind that only a lunatic would drive one on the freeway, or that if you're really worried it might happen, that you could simply amend highway rules to make it illegal to do so. After all, the provinces already place restrictions on where/when/how newly licensed drivers are able to drive; it would be simple to do the same for vehicles like the Zenn.

But unfortunately, bureaucracy and logical, innovative thinking does not go together, especially here in Canada. And so while the Zenn car remains illegal to license and operate here in Ottawa, I am legally able to live out my inner Burt Reynolds and still boast how green I am.

On "climate-gate" and Tiger Woods

2009-12-19T06:51:00.008-11:00

The Copenhagen talks on climate change concluded with the predictable outcome: a vaguely worded non-specific, non-binding document promising that all countries will do something to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions, plus a promise that funds will be transferred to vulnerable countries to help them adapt. I'm oversimplifying things a little here, but for the most part the outcome of Copenhagen was similar to most annual climate talks of the past decade. It differed from previous years in that it received far more media attention, and likely had the greatest built-up anticipation, given that this was the first time Obama participated.

The talks were also to some extent overshadowed by what the media has dubbed "climate-gate" (must every controversial issue have the word "gate" added as a suffix? After all, the original Watergate had nothing to do with water). The essence of climate-gate is that someone is supposed to have hacked into the personal e-mail accounts of a number of climate scientists working at the University of East Anglia, home of a very large and important climate change research institute. A number of such messages were then released via the internet. Their contents suggest that some researchers may have engaged in unscholarly activities such as suppressing views that were in conflict with their own, manipulating climate data to achieve particular future projections and threatening to destroy data rather than share it publicly.

Climate science-bashing had previously been a sport practiced most enthusiastically on mid-day AM talk-radio shows and late-night FoxNews shows, in business-section op-ed pieces written by retired oil company executives and their admirers, and here in Canada by the lovably bizarre pundit Rex Murphy. Not only did "climate-gate" give these folks spasms of angry joy, it gave the mainstream media a scandal almost as juicy as a philandering Tiger Woods being supposedly clubbed by his wife. My favourite moment came during a prime-time debate on CNN between children's TV show host Bill Nye the Science Guy and Patrick Michaels (the latter fellow known for writing shrill op-ed pieces downplaying the risks of climate change while receiving funds from fossil fuel industry groups, and for calling himself the "state climatologist of Virginia" when no such position actually existed). The irony of a children's TV personality lecturing grown-up host Campbell Brown on her irresponsible presentation of the science was the type of TV magic only CNN can generate (the video is posted on Bill Nye's website as I write).

While I'm having some fun in the preceding paragraph, it is an important matter that the general public and the policymakers representing them have an accurate understanding of the scientific understanding of human impacts on environmental systems like climate and the feedback effects on human wellbeing. Important policy decisions with far-reaching economic and social impacts need to be made, and CNN info-tainment does not help.

I have a couple underlying concerns about "climate-gate", the first being the origins of the e-mails in question. Computer hackers are not always the most reliable sources of information. Many tend to be vandals, mischiefs or people with axes to grind; for others, the hacking is done for the purpose of committing fraud. Was the East Anglia hacker an exception - someone on a crusade for truth and justice? If I stole your iPod and claimed I did so because I wanted to see if you were illegally downloading songs, even if it turns out you did does that make me a credible crusader for justice?

But let's assume that whoever accessed these messages was in fact an ethical hacker with good intentions. It begs the further question of whether all the stolen messages were released unedited and in their entirety, or if they had been sorted and edited. Imagine the following e-mail exchange between a scientist communicating with a journal editor as they prepare a manuscript for publication after it has successfully cleared peer-review:

Scientist: What do you suggest I do about the problems with the data in section 3?

Editor: The reviewers and I all believe that section is too jargonistic and overwhelming for our readership, which is primarily non-specialists. There's so much raw data presented within the paragraphs it makes it less readable. I suggest you collapse the various data sets into one or two tables, and then put the tables in an appendix. This will streamline things considerably.

Scientist: That makes sense. I'll strip out the data as you've suggested and simplify the writing. That way readers who don't know the subject will focus on the things I want them to see.

Obviously, if you only had access to the e-mails written by the scientist, and knew only that s/he was communicating with another scientist, you might well believe the two were conspiring to alter the substantive findings of a study, and not simply to make editorial changes to the report. Tweak a couple simple words and it looks even darker.

But let's go the final step and assume that the e-mails circulating on the internet really are the unvarnished writings of several scientists working in the East Anglia centre. What does this tell us? Foremost, it's a commentary on just how important climate science has become. Risks that necessitate important public policy choices inevitably become highly politicized. The whole Tiger Woods affair will inevitably fade away because, at the end of the day, no matter how much the media likes to hype it, it doesn't matter much. The debate over what to do about climate change will not go away so easily.

Second, it shows that as much as scientists like to pretend they're objective, unbiased actors who let the results of their work speak for itself, every scientist takes his or her own work very seriously and hopes that others will act upon their findings. Most scientific research (social or natural science) goes unnoticed by all but a few interested peers, notwithstanding the inevitable statement that "these findings have implications for policymakers and other researchers" one finds in the conclusions section of so many academic journal articles. Climate scientists have found an attentive audience in (and in many ways been actively encouraged by) policy makers and politicians; once they're caught up in such a politically heated public debate (as it is in the UK, much more so than here in North America), it's not surprising they should take sides or become partisans.

But partisanship is one thing; deviously manipulating findings or deliberately scuppering evidence that contradicts one's own work is academic fraud. There are few things that will cost a tenured professor his/her job (and poor teaching is not one of them), but academic fraud is one. The light of day is now being brought to bear on these researchers, rightly or wrongly, and if they have indeed committed such acts, they will be found out and punished. And yes, the hacker will have hastened that process, but such things are difficult to conceal indefinitely.

Most importantly, wrong science gets found out, even if it takes time. And that is the real problem facing the Rex Murphy's and other mud-throwers out there. Climate-gate does not prove that the basic physical science underpinning our understanding of climate change is wrong, just as Tiger Woods is not proof that all golfers deserve a good thrashing for cheating on their wives. The fundamentals of climate science are continually poked and prodded, and our understanding of them continually improved by thousands of scientists at hundreds of institutions. The interactions of greenhouse gases with radiation and the origins of atmospheric greenhouse gases are not "paradigms" of science as some Popper-quoting pundits have suggested. They are observable, measurable phenomena, not political positions taken by scientists.

On the national security implications of climate change

2009-12-02T13:28:00.004-11:00

Over the next few weeks there will be a greater-than-usual amount of attention in the media to climate change issues as a result of the big "climate summit" meeting in Copenhagen this month (the meeting is more properly known as the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC COP, but that's quite the acronym - no wonder the media prefers climate summit). The Copenhagen COP has been on the radar of the climate change research and policymaking communities for a couple years now, because it represents the first one in almost a decade where the US is not represented by the Bush administration. And when Obama was elected and embraced Al Gore's "climate crisis" message, the excitement about Copenhagen ramped up considerably.

Expectations became lowered over recent months as the Obama administration proceeded cautiously on climate policy, but there's still some optimism that some progress will be made toward establishing worldwide, binding emission reduction targets for greenhouse gases (GHGs). I am not terribly optimistic that (a) agreement will be reached or, if it is, that (b) the global community will act on it. The Kyoto Protocol contained very modest emissions reduction targets, but few countries are on track to meet them. Some countries have made an effort to meet them but are falling short; others, particularly Canada, simply reneged on their Kyoto signatures.

For a number of years now I've been studying and considering the implications of anthropogenic climate change and natural climate variability on people's livelihoods and well-being. Most of my empirical research these days focuses on local- or regional-scale problems, and I am especially interested in understanding how households and communities adapt to climate-related stresses. I also do studies from time to time on the implications of climate change in terms of national security, a habit that holds over from my days in the foreign service, I guess.

There are many bogeyman scenarios about climate change floating around out there, some people suggesting that climate change will stimulate famines, conflict, pestilence and global wars - Old Testament meets Thomas Malthus kind of stuff. While such outcomes are possible, it does not mean they are plausible, let alone likely, and so I tend to steer away from such thinking (but if you're interested, check out Gwynn Dyer's latest book "Climate Wars", whose title pretty much says it all). That said, there are some very real implications for international security if nothing is done to change the present course we're on in terms of GHG emissions. Here's an op-ed that ran in today's Ottawa Citizen that summarizes my views on the security implications for Canada, should you be interested. Something useful to come out of Copenhagen would be a nice Christmas gift for us all this year.

A matter of inches

2009-10-29T13:25:00.002-11:00

The first game of the World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Yankees was played last night at Yankee stadium. The game was a gem, especially if you hate the Yankees, which most right-minded people living outside the Bronx do. Phillies starter Cliff Lee had complete command over his pitches and lasted the whole nine innings to get the win. The Yankees ace did not have his best stuff, giving up two home runs to Chase Utley.

For the first seven innings, the home plate umpire had been calling pitches exactly as the rule book describes. This is atypical; major league umpires are notorious for having their own personal strike zones that may or may not correspond with the rule book. Last night’s ump was insisting that at least part of the ball cross home plate.

Something changed in the eighth inning, when Utley came up to bat again with men on base and the score still 2-0. Another hit by Utley – let alone a home run – would pretty much put the game out of reach for the Yankees. On this at-bat the umpire’s strike zone spontaneously became wider. Utley was called out on three pitches that he didn’t swing at. Only the second of the three was a quality pitch that appeared to cross the strike zone. The first called strike was a good four inches outside the strike zone; the third strike was closer, but still a good couple inches wider than any strike the umpire had called on previous at-bats.

There are many possible explanations why the strike zone suddenly changed for Utley, and we can’t be certain why. Perhaps it was because a new pitcher was in the game, whose release point and ball flight made pitches outside the strike zone appear to pass over home plate. Perhaps the umpire was unknowingly standing in a slightly different spot than before, meaning that the angle at which he was now looking at pitches was slightly changed. Perhaps the umpire’s contact lens had become fuzzy. Perhaps Utley had changed his stance in the batter’s box, maybe crowding the plate. Commentator Tim McCarver suggested that maybe the umpire got tired of calling ‘ball’. Perhaps. The timing sure was unusual, though.

My point in relating this story is that sometimes a couple inches make a world of difference. Home plate is 17 inches wide. Put the ball in that 17-inch zone and Utley smashes it out of the park, twice. Put the ball just two inches outside that zone and he heads meekly back to the dugout, the bat never leaving his shoulder.

It’s often like that in nature, too. Take climate change for example, which is expected to affect precipitation patterns in many regions. Say average summer rainfall changes by an inch or two inch over a given region. Does it matter? It depends. In southern Saskatchewan, where average summer rainfall is probably about 17 inches or so, it matters a great deal. Lose an inch or two of rainfall and the crops grown there become stressed, leading to lower yields unless the farmer irrigates like crazy. Add an inch or two to that 17-inch average and yields go up sharply, and farmers can get away with considerably less irrigation.

It’s a similar thing with temperature. Does a change in temperature of one degree Celsius mean much? Again, it depends where you are. In Singapore, where temperatures are in the mid-twenties or higher throughout the year, no one’s going to notice much a one-degree change. But in places with winters, one degree is a big deal, because twice in the calendar average temperatures will approach zero degrees Celsius, the point where water freezes or ice melts, depending on the direction of the trend. When average temperatures go up by one degree, here in Ontario spring comes a week or two earlier and autumn ends a week or two later. That may sound great: longer summers and shorter, milder winters – who could complain, right?

Shorter, milder winters place a significant burden on built structures like roads, bridges, culverts and buildings. Milder winters tend to be accompanied by more days where temperatures fluctuate, moving above zero in daytime and below zero at night. Built structures get wet during the day and freeze again at night. The freezing water molecules expand and contract, causing tiny surface fractures to form and expand, which over the long term weakens the structure and shortens its life. In the case of roads, milder winters require frequent applications of salt or other traction agents that cost money and, in the case of salt, cause metal structures and vehicles to rust and have adverse impacts on microfauna in the water bodies to which the roadmelt drains. These things have costs, and someone pays.

So the next time you hear that global warming has raised average temperatures by a degree or two, picture the umpire changing the strike zone on Chase Utley. Because that’s our situation right now, and we’re going to strike out if we’re not watching.

P.S. The next couple batters adapted to the umpire’s new strike zone, and the Phillies scored more runs. There’s a message in that, too.

On Thanksgiving and the first frost of the fall

2009-10-11T03:28:00.004-11:00

It seems fitting that in our area the first frost of the fall will occur tonight, on Thanksgiving weekend. My family and I love this time of year, we love visiting the local farmers markets and walking around our neighbourhood, which has an abundance of red and sugar maples. And we love eating homemade pumpkin soup on getting home from those walks. And lots of other fall activities that seem to usually involve being outdoors followed by eating heavily.

Of course, the first frost means the end of field tomatoes, a small reason for sadness, for it will be another nine months before we taste another fresh one. Like Guinness, the taste of a tomato declines with every mile it travels from its source. That's why in our own backyard garden, which began its first season of production this year, we had a virtual monoculture of tomato plants. We picked a bad year to specialize in tomatoes. The summer was generally cool and damp, exactly the wrong conditions for a plant better suited to mediterranean climates. We grew enormous, lush green vines, but they were late to flower and only a small percentage of fruits actually ripened. The weather conditions also didn't help my experiment with whippoorwill peas, a drought-tolerant cowpea that fed many hungry people during the Great Depression. The seeds germinated but never got the heat they needed to thrive.

We also had to contend with an explosion in the population of black squirrels this year. Last fall must have produced a good crop of acorns in the neighbourhood, because our yard was overrun by these critters. I was typically ambivalent about their presence in past years, but when they took up the habit of taking a single bite out of every other tomato, I began to loathe the sight of them. Then again, it may not have been only squirrels causing the damage; there's a family of three raccoons on our block who seem entirely indifferent to their human neighbours' gardening efforts.

So this Thanksgiving we are truly thankful that the farmers in our region had a better year than we did in our backyard. It's remarkable how even the short growing season that we have here in the Ottawa valley is sufficient to fill our market stalls. This year we even came across a local farmer who is successfully growing wine grapes, and makes a passable red wine (surprisingly, his white wines - which tend to be better suited to Canadian conditions - need work). We'll have a glass of it this weekend with our Thanksgiving bird (locally raised, of course) and toast our neighbours - the farming ones, that is, not the squirrels.

On the continuing need for agricultural geography

2009-10-01T06:04:00.003-11:00

Much of what we read in both the media and academic scholarship about agriculture focuses on the trend toward larger farmers, fewer farmers, monoculture production and the environmental impacts that result. Documentary films regularly remind us how large hog barns and cattle feedlots produce as much sewage as small cities, and how our food supply increasingly depends on an ever smaller number of companies and food types; research in a variety of fields suggests water resources in many regions are diminishing due to diversions of surface water and over-pumping of groundwater irrigating farmland. We're warned that our food supply is becoming more homogeneous, that rural livelihoods are under threat, and that agricultural technologies controlled by a few large multinational corporations threaten the very fabric of ecosystems.

These are very real concerns that demand greater attention and scholarly research. There once was a time when geographers made great contributions to research on topics such as these, but I fear our capacity to do so is declining. Every geography department in North America used to contain geographers whose expertise included agricultural geography, rural geography and related topics. Not anymore. When professors with that expertise retire, they don't get replaced. In my department, an undergraduate student in Geography may complete his or her entire program without once getting a substantive lecture on soils or exploring why crop choices in a certain place in Canada may not reflect the actual productive capacity of that land unit. I suspect it may be the same at other universities. When rural or agricultural issues or topics actually make it into the discussion, they are often lumped into such themes as "natural resource management" or "rural-urban linkages". Depending on their study interests, students may actually learn more about agricultural practices in other countries countries without knowing much about how such things work here at home. It's increasingly rare that Canadian agriculture or rural livelihoods ever get separate billing in their own right in geography courses.

This is not to say that my colleagues are deficient in their teaching, nor that the things students are being taught instead are not important. The vast majority of our students come from urban or suburban communities, and so it may be that geography departments and curriculum, which include strong representation of urban geography and urban geographers, simply reflect the interests and background of our clientele and Canadian society at large. Perhaps. But while the majority of the population may live in urban/suburban settings, the majority of our land and the resources on which those urban populations depend is rural. A generation or two ago, it could be safely assumed that people had at least a rudimentary understanding of agriculture, of only because their parents or grandparents had been born on one. Today, I regularly encounter students who have never been to a farm. So it seems to me that as our general, latent knowledge of rural life and economy fades it becomes more important to have that expertise in our geography departments, not less.

These thoughts came to me as I listened to a podcasted interview one of my graduate students recently did with a geographer at a well-known university about the importance of local agriculture. The geographer in question (their identity does not matter, I'm not using this blog to call out people) was advocating the idea grounded in 1980s neo-classical macro-economics that food should be produced wherever local conditions provide a "natural advantage" to doing so. In other words, if an Ottawa supermarket can sell a carrot grown in California more cheaply than one grown in the Ottawa area, then California must have a "natural advantage, and maybe Ottawa-area farmers shouldn't be growing carrots in the first place. I'm all for using economic theories to explain agricultural markets, but the longer I listened to the interview, the more it became apparent that the interviewee had never been to the agricultural regions s/he used as examples, and had little knowledge of agricultural production systems. The geographer's basic assumptions about farming, about agricultural policies and about energy use in agricultural systems were flawed on many levels, and would have been pointed out a long time ago over coffee by the agricultural geographer with the office down the hall from the interviewee - were such a person to exist, that is.

on Thoreau and gabled ends

2009-08-29T14:09:00.005-11:00

"Everyone must believe in something; I believe I'll go canoeing". So goes the quotation attributed to Henry David Thoreau on the back of t-shirts sold by this paddling shop in Saranac Lake, in New York's Adirondacks. As well as contributing any number of popular quotations, Thoreau's writings have also had a significant influence on modern North American environmental thought, and as someone who teaches university-level environmental studies courses, I've felt it important to read some of his works over the years. Walden; or, Life in the Woods is the best known of these. Published in the 1850s following two years pursuing a mostly-subsistence lifestyle on the shore of a small Massachusetts pond, this somewhat rambling book contains sections that are stunningly boring and some that are stunningly insightful. I read some of the latter aloud to my first-year students in introductory lectures on the subject of modern environmental thought; I'm not sure what the students make of it. Perhaps they're inspired, but probably not.

More interesting than Walden for me is Thoreau's book The Maine Woods, first published in 1864, in which he recounts travels made in the 1840s and 1850s through a Maine backcountry that had still been relatively unexploited by settlers of European origin. The allure of The Maine Woods is the wildness of both the landscape and the people Thoreau encounters there. Thoreau must have seemed a strange duck to the aboriginals, loggers and moose hunters who encountered him, but if his writing is factually accurate, they likely forgave him his oddities given his willingness to work hard in the boat and in the camp at the end of the day. Thoreau lived far rougher while traveling through Maine than he ever did at Walden Pond.

As is often the case with his writing, The Maine Woods sometimes gets carried away with unnecessarily flowery prose laden with references to Greek and Roman classics, but for the most part the book provides a thoughtful and engaging account of the last days of the New England frontier. It also contains some more philosophical observations that are still challenging today. For example, in the chapter written about his 1853 trip to Chesuncook Lake, Thoreau provides a lengthy description of a settler's house on the edge of the forest, contrasting its sturdy log construction and rough appearance with the lavish classical architecture popular with the rich and powerful in New England cities. He observes approvingly that the house's fitted-log exterior has "none of your frilled or fluted columns, which have cut such a false swell, and which support nothing but a gabled end and its owners' pretensions". I like this passage a lot, because the university at which I teach has as its symbol a stylized rendition of the columns and gable end of one of its oldest buildings, Tabaret Hall, built in the early 1900s and very much of the style Thoreau mocked. It's mildly ironic that Thoreau's thoughts on nature are today described to students who labour under those gabled ends.

On Parliament and its groundhogs

2009-08-03T09:09:00.007-11:00

In April a beaver was walking down Sparks Street in Ottawa, only a couple blocks from Parliament. Two passing Members of Parliament took it upon themselves to herd our national symbol down a cross street, past the Supreme Court and into to the Ottawa River. When I heard of this, it got me watching for other signs of wildlife living within steps of the politically powerful. On a side lawn between the Centre and East blocks of Parliament, under some shrubs near a statue of Queen Elizabeth on horseback, lives a large and very friendly groundhog that gladly accepts handouts from tourists. Around the back of the Centre block lives a colony of feral cats (here's their blog).

Walk down Sussex Drive and you'll see the usual urban critters - squirrels, sparrows and so forth - but it's a bit of an intermission from the nature tour until you reach the Pearson Building (HQ of Foreign Affairs). There, just upstream where the Rideau River falls into the Ottawa River, I've seen find beavers working on a lodge, cormorants drying their wings, raccoons fishing in the water, and a good variety of waterfowl - not just the ubiquitous Canada geese and mallards, but goldeneyes, wood ducks and even the odd heron.

A short distance farther east, past the gates of the Prime Minister's house and Rideau Hall (the Governor General's swell pad), Sussex Drive gives way to the Rockcliffe Parkway. On the south side of the road are large woodlots and arboretum-style parks, and here is where nature re-stakes her claim to the capital. White-tailed deer visit from time-to-time, but red foxes are permanent residents, as is a growing population of wild turkeys (I saw one with three young earlier today, prompting me to make this posting). My daughter and I like to turn over logs in the woodlot adjacent to the GG's house because you're sure to find red-backed salamanders to admire.

I am not a fan of governments building architectural monuments to themselves, and unfortunately Ottawa has more than its share of such trappings. Better to leave your legacy via wise actions and policies than hollow buildings and forgettable statues. Our city makes a far greater statement both symbolically and tangibly to rest of the country and the rest of the world by the fact that many species of wild creatures that were here before there was such a thing as Canada are still able to make their homes in its capital. Now that is a seat of power worth its salt.

On dead log drivers and the meaning of place

2009-07-18T13:20:00.007-11:00

I had heard rumours of a place in the forest where rocks bear the names of dead men, and mentioned it to an old hunter. He told me his father's brother was one of those dead, and that as a boy he had been taken there. The next day we found that place.

It is along the south shore of the Madawaska River in Eastern Ontario, near a set of steep, cascading rapids called the Slate Falls. The dead are men who worked as log drivers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, steering large booms of white pine cut from the highlands near today's Algonquin Park down river to the mills below Ottawa, hundreds of miles away. At Slate Falls the Madawaska's flow is compressed and accelerated before dropping into a wide and still bend that is almost a small lake. The logs rafts would regularly get stuck as they entered the compression, and dozens of men over the years were sucked into the cauldron as they tried to force the logs through. Their comrades would chisel their names into nearby rocks, a tradition I am told was practiced at several such spots along the rivers of eastern Ontario.

Although there is a Slate Falls Road, it will not take you to the falls; you must go by trail or come down the river by canoe. The hunter led me to the falls one November afternoon, and over the roar of the water we scoured the outcrops he remembered from his childhood. The names were not there. The only trace of the log drivers was a rusted two-foot spike of the type used to build log rafts a century ago. The hunter told me each spring the river washes up such things, and handed it to me.

The rusted spike worked like a divining rod, for as we hiked away from the falls back through the woods the name Pell soon appeared on a sunlit rock. We began brushing away the fallen leaves and found more rocks with more names and the years they died. The earliest death was recorded in 1884; the most recent in 1926. The names were French and English, some carved in wavy script, others in Roman font. As I stepped back to photograph the site, it struck me that the log drivers had deliberately selected a spot that was shaped like a chapel for memorializing their comrades. The outcrops bearing the names were aligned roughly parallel and facing one another, and to read them you descend into a slight depression that is overhung and shaded by conifers. Light enters the chapel from an opening at the south end. The portage cuts across the entry to the site, and on some rocks I found red and green paint scraped from low-carried canoes. As the names face downstream at this spot, I suspect many canoeists have passed by unaware.

We did not find the hunter's uncle's name. Before leaving I made a short, silent prayer and I suspect my friend did, too, as we returned the piles of leaves we had earlier brushed aside.

Geographers are often engaged in research that concerns untangling the meaning of place, how particular landforms or landscapes can take on significance to people, and how people reshape the land and in doing so give it new meaning. I have had the good fortune of visiting many locations where human modification of the land has improved upon the original beauty of nature (unfortunately people too often accomplish the opposite). But offhand I can think of none better than the log drivers memorial.

On fleeing a drought

2009-07-02T16:50:00.002-11:00

In the morning I will drive the east out of Swift Current and leave the drought behind. Since the spring thaw it has only rained about an inch and a half or so in this region. Even in the week that I have been here the hills around the city have become noticeably browner as the grasses dry up and go dormant. Normally at this time of year the farmers would be out cutting the hay to be stockpiled for winter livestock feed. But this year the only place where you find grass long enough to cut for hay is in the roadside drainage ditches (and I have seen farmers out cutting it).

So what will happen is that the cattle will be put onto the pasture to graze, and the farmers will have to buy hay this winter. And because no one in this region will have hay to sell, it will have to be shipped in from the east at a premium price. The grain crops are not doing well either, except where they have been irrigated. The wheat plants are barely a foot tall, if that, and have started to form small seed heads very low to the ground, which will make them hard to harvest. All this spells trouble for farmers in this area. Some counties to the west of here, in eastern Alberta, have already declared a farm emergency, resigning themselves to the fact there will be little if any harvest this year.

It is somewhat fitting that I find myself here at this time. I'm in the midst of researching the impacts of historical droughts on rural communities in this part of Saskatchewan. During the 1930s, this region was hit by terrible droughts, and many farmers gave up the land and moved elsewhere. Massive dust storms swept across the prairies, caused by the combination of hot & dry conditions with agricultural practices that left soils exposed to the elements. As one old farmer told me, if they still farmed today the way they did back then, there would be a big dust-up right about now. But farmers are much more careful about disturbing the soil today. Instead of plowing and turning over the soil, they use pressurized air to drill seeds just under the soil surface, barely disturbing the top layer. Today's farmers also leave stubble on top of the land after the harvest to act as both a shade and a wind barrier to prevent erosion. These tactics enable farmers to squeeze out a grain crop even in the driest conditions. However, to do so also requires pounding a good deal of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers into the land, as well as spraying a good deal of chemical pesticides to hold back the weeds.

Back in the 1930s, there used to be a family on every half section of land (that is, you could not go more than a half-mile without seeing at least one farmhouse). Nowadays you can drive for mile after mile and not see a living soul. The only way to make a decent profit now from growing wheat or raising cattle is to get bigger, and to get bigger means fewer farms and fewer farmers on the land. In the 1930s, 640 acres was considered to be a big farm. Today, you can find single fields that are two or three times that size. Farmers increasingly use tractors that are guided by GPS systems and use infrared sensors to detect how much fertilizer each square foot of land needs. Of course, that kind of equipment costs millions of dollars, so a feedback loop emerges: you need ever more capital to farm, and the only way of getting that capital is to grow the size of your farm, which in turn requires ever more sophisticated equipment and greater capital. But let's face it: in order for all of us to enjoy $3.99 value meals at fast food restaurants, it means the farmers must be getting tiny profit margins, and to make money form tiny margins necessitates producing large volumes of food at minimal cost.

Farming is a hard way to make a living, and so I doubt very few people would be interested in doing it, even if it were not so expensive to get into. Still, as I head east tomorrow with the brown hills in my rearview mirror, I suspect I will still feel a sort of detached melancholia for the communties I leave behind. This drought will have its impacts. There will be fewer dollars spent in local stores, because those who remain in agriculture will have fewer dollars in their wallets. For some farmers, particularly those getting older, this drought will be the signal for them to pack it in and sell or lease their land to others. The scale of the impacts will be nothing near those of the 1930s, but it will be a hard winter just the same. I hope I'm wrong; I hope a timely rain will show up tomorrow or the day after and break this drought, but the forecast does not look good. It's supposed to be bright and sunny for the next couple days: good weather for driving.

A quick follow up note: An overnight change in the forecast: possibility of extreme thunderstorms today, only a millimetre or so of overall precipitation, but some spots to be locally heavy. Not a great outlook either: sounds like a greater chance of being destructive than beneficial, although I guess farmers would take that chance in exchange for the possibility of even a little more moisture.

Onto the Plains

2009-06-18T01:11:00.006-11:00

It's 7 am and there's not a cloud in the sky over Winnipeg. Today's the day. I drive west out of town and onto the Great Plains for a month of field work for my research project on drought-related human migration on the Canadian Prairies. My first destination is Melita, Manitoba, a small town nestled ninto the southwestern corner of the province. With the help of a group of GIS whiz kids at UO I've been creating maps that show where historical drought conditions appear to be associated with rural population decline. One of the spots turned up in the maps is the Melita area. During the 1930s a large swath of the Prairies suffered through some terrible drought conditions, and many areas experienced population decline, but the level of decline was unusually severe around Melita. I'd like to find out why.

This is really the crux of this project: to find out why it is that during a period of harsh climatic conditions some households migrate out of the affected area, while others stay put and adapt in other ways. What distinguishes migrant from non-migrant households? The aim is to document the social, economic and cultural differences between migrant and non-migrant groups and look for patterns. And should patterns emerge, these will hopefully shed some light on the process of adaptation and migration decision-making more generally, information that may still be of use today as rural communities struggle with current and future climatic variability and change.

One of my MA students recently completed her thesis, her research having looked at historical drought-migration from the Drumheller/Hanna area in southeastern Alberta to the Peace River Country in the northwest part of the province. She found that the families that managed to stay on their land and ride out the drought tended to have particular types of farming experience and depended heavily on extended family networks and strong local community networks for support. A range of other factors also contributed to their being able to stay put. Families who migrated tended to be missing one or more of the key adaptation ingredients possessed by non-migrants. It was a very interesting MA project, and provides a number of useful findings to suggest how governments might help build capacity in rural areas to reduce the impacts of climate-related stresses on households, such as maintaining decent access to schools and social services. What's perhaps most telling is that most of what her study says we should be doing to reduce the impacts of droughts on rural communities is stuff we should probably be doing anyhow in order to maintain a good quality of life in rural Canada.

Well, enough blogging. Time to pack the tent into the rental car and be off.

On the perks of the auto sector crisis

2009-06-10T02:24:00.002-11:00

On my bike ride to work today I saw a late model Dodge Charger with the province of Ontario government logo stenciled on the doors, being driven by someone who could not have been much more than twenty years old. Government fleet vehicles sure have changed over the years. And what I wouldn't have given to be cruising around town in a government muscle car when I was an undergrad (instead of sweating it out making parts for them, as I posted below). But of course, back in the 1980s I was not especially worried about things like greenhouse gas emissions. The current Charger gets about 26mpg on the highway, which is not especially good. Most Chrysler products, and certainly those assembled in Canada, are gas guzzlers.

I did a quick check, and the Charger is assembled in Brampton, Ontario, so at least the provincial government is spending money at home. It's one small symptom of a conundrum we face at the moment: do we buy fuel-inefficient vehicles assembled in Canada so as to keep our fellow citizens employed at a struggling company, or do we buy the most fuel efficient vehicles for government fleets, regardless of where they are made? Hopefully it will be a temporary situation, and that the provincial and federal governments will insist that in exchange for all the free cash they've been pouring into Chrysler and GM those companies stop assembling dopey niche-vehicles like the Charger and Camaro in Canada and start assembling affordable, fuel efficient sedans here (as does Ford, which hasn't been begging for handouts). Because there is no way on Earth those car companies will pay back those "loans" they're being given (just check their track records on repaying previous government "loans" they've been, like the one GM received from the Quebec government for its plant in Ste-Therese).

On empirical field research and the auto sector

2009-06-04T02:09:00.004-11:00

One of the things I love best about geography as a discipline is its emphasis on empirical field research. It's not the only such discipline, and if compared with some hard core anthropologists, for example, geographers might be said to spend too much time behind a desk. But for the most part, academic geographers (and certainly the ones I admire most) spend as much time in the field as their teaching schedules, research grant budgets and personal lives permit.

I have an inherent distrust of the opinions of social scientists who spend their lives behind a desk. You read them often in the newspapers, pontificating about the situation in Afghanistan, how some particular innovation or regulatory change will save the planet from global warming (or vice versa, will bankrupt the country), or what the compensation package should be for a worker in an auto factory. When I read such opinions, my first thought is "Really? And how would you know that to be the case? Have you done your field research?" If the writer does not offer so much as a sentence about their methods, or does not state explicitly something to the effect of "I believe this because I was there", my skepticism rises. If it's opinion I think I might want to rely on, I do a Google search for their bio. And if it looks like they spend all their time behind a desk, I discount their opinion accordingly.

For example, I am convinced that the majority of "informed commentary" offered by scholars in the press or on TV on the subject of auto industry restructuring is made by people who have spent little or no time inside an auto plant. In my teenage years and through undergrad, I worked each summer in auto parts factories in Waterloo Region. Some plants were unionized, some weren't. Some were well-run, some weren't. Each had a fairly complicated set of social relations among those employed on the shop floor, in the office, and between the shop floor workers, the office staff, the on-site managers and the invisible owners who were always elsewhere, issuing dictates about how the work should be done. Each plant had its own particular physical infrastructure that was the accumulation of historical modifications and production decisions, and which affected performance of the employees.

If you don't air condition them, auto plants get scaldingly hot in the summer, especially if they operate 24 hour shifts. In one plant where I worked, from June through the end of August the temperature inside was routinely near 90F (Fahrenheit's how we measured it then/there) during the day time. The temperature was written on a chalk board at the start of each shift, and if it went over 100F during the shift the unionized workers could go home without penalty (non-unionized students like me stayed - if we left, we wouldn't get paid). What often happened is that on days when the temperature at the start of the shift was in the mid-90s, productivity slowed not only beacuse of the physical discomfort, but because some workers were watching the thermometer, taking long breaks and/or going down the road to the pub at lunch to chug a couple beers. But not all the workers. Others were paid on a per-piece basis, and they worked like demons regardless of the temperature. Whenever I was assigned to a piece-work assembly line I would cut short my breaks, not stop to wash my hands before eating lunch, and take other small steps to keep up with the experienced workers. I would come home at the end of a shift sweat-soaked, black with grease, and with a pay stub saying I had earned 4 or 5 times the adult minimum wage. (You won't find those piece-work demons any more, they were later replaced with robots).

Another summer I worked in a different parts plant that was attempting to get its "Q1". Twenty years ago, Ford had this slogan that "Quality was Job 1". It instituted a system whereby all its suppliers had to meet particular standards with respect to quality, and began frequent inspections of their suppliers' facilities to enforce compliance. If a company routinely passed its inspections with flying colours, the Ford people would give the company Q1 certification, and Q1 suppliers had a better chance of getting their supply contracts renewed when the time came. The plant where I was working had its problems. It was not unionized, and wages were considerably lower than a unionized plant. It had a much more ethnically diverse workforce than the CAW plant I described above, and a higher percentage of women on the shop floor. One corner of the plant had furnaces where molten lead was used; three or four women who worked near that end of the plant had had miscarriages in recent years. While there was no "proof" the higher-than-average miscarriage rate was tied to the lead furnaces, it was viewed by workers as highly suspicious. The lead furnaces were operated by recent immigrants to Canada who had no previous skills (it was a hellish job no one else would take) and were brow-beaten by their foremen, and I suspect that may have contributed to the quality problems. The most experienced staff performed easier tasks situated well away from the furnaces.

The management at that plant wasn't interested in anything but getting the Q1. They insisted on having all workers attend weekly production meetings held in the airconditioned offices at the front of the plant. We were lectured by overweight white men in cheap neckties about the importance of quality, then given a pep talk and sent back to the shop floor. The badgering must have worked; the company eventually got its Q1 rating (or perhaps it was because I went back to school in September). About 18 months after that they shipped the machinery to a new plant in Mexico and closed the Canadian plant, laying off all the workers.

These are but two small examples that help me make my simple point: the auto industry, its companies and its employees are as heterogenous as the rest of society. And yet, rarely does a day go by when I read some economist, political scientist or other social scientist giving simplistic diagnoses of what ails the auto sector and prescribing one-size-fits-all remedies. If you've never been inside the walls of an auto plant for any length of time, how do you know what you're talking about?

Don't misundestand me: secondary research of information gained from others is of key importance in any research project, and just because you've been somewhere does not necessarily mean you will understand all there is to know about how things work there. But to my mind there is no substitute for shutting off your computer, putting on your boots and going to take a closehand look at any phenomenon you seek to understand before you describe it to others.

In praise of Manitoba maples

2009-05-25T09:17:00.008-11:00

The Manitoba Maple (Acer negundo) is not an especially well-loved tree. It is often disparaged by those who know something about trees, as well as by those who aren't able to name it on sight but who don't like the looks of it just the same. It is far from majestic. It is fast growing, short lived, and does not reach impressive heights. You're more often to find them growing crooked than straight, often in clumps. While it's part of the same family of trees as the sugar maples and red maples Canadians adore and whose leaves grace our money and airplanes, the Manitoba maple's leaves are unremarkable jagged little clusters that turn a flat yellow in autumn, falling to the ground in a heap as opposed to the graceful fluttering arc of its showier cousins' leaves.

The first house I ever owned (in Hespeler) had an unusually large and perfectly formed Manitoba maple in an unusual location - in the center of the back yard. The home inspector took one look and said "You'll want to take that down, it's a weed". Needless to say I did not. In a city with hot, steamy summers and poor summertime air quality, the last thing I was going to do was remove its dense canopy and deep shade - I stuck a bench under it instead, and sat under it often.

The Manitoba Maple is in many ways the perfect urban tree. It will grow just about anywhere, on the most degraded excuse for soil, and is tolerant to heat, drought, road salt and just about any other stress city life can place on it. I inherited a half-dozen growing out of an old rock wall that separates my downtown Ottawa home's back yard from an apartment building parking lot; there are a few more shading my front yard from the noise of a busy street. They form a solid green wall all summer long, giving me far more privacy than any fence could. Unlike the ubiquitous Norway maples that municipalities and developers plant along the sidewalk, the Manitoba maple is a native to Canada, and wildlife prefers the Manitobas. There are always birds in them - chickadees, cardinals, summertime sparrows, even the odd woodpecker. I have a tall Norway maple in my yard that turns a brilliant orange-red in autumn and casts a lot of shade, but except for the odd squirrel using it as a highway, I rarely see animals in it.

I have also read that Manitoba maples make good table syrup. Because the sugar content of their sap is lower than that of the appropriately-named sugar maple, people in eastern Canada never used the Manitoba for this purpose. But out west where there are no sugar maples, the early settlers made do with Manitoba maple syrup. I'm tempted to try tapping my own Manitobas one of these springs and see for myself.

If you wanted Manitobas of your own, you would be hard pressed to find someone to sell you one. In most of the places you find them, they're there because they planted themselves (or had help from an obliging squirrel or bird). If you are going down a street and see an oasis of scrappy trees growing in an abandoned industrial lot or lining a bleak-looking alley, chances are there are Manitobas among them. They're the advance members of Nature's reclamation team, delivering shade and creating organic material so that other organisms might recolonize what we humans have trashed. So if you've got a sun-parched patch of land on your property where nothing seems to grow, sneak down that back alley with a small shovel and an empty flower pot, and bring yourself home a small Manitoba maple start. If it can thrive in an alley, imagine how well it will do for you in a place where it is wanted.

On symbolism and political pinheads

2009-04-28T02:16:00.007-11:00

For people who ought to understand the importance of symbolism better than most, politicians certainly can be pinheaded at times. Sure, they grasp the simple stuff: when you hold a press conference, be sure there are lots of flags visible in the background; when giving a speech in the house of commons, make sure the seats surrounding you are filled elbow-to-elbow with dutifully smiling subordinate MPs; be sure to show up at the Calgary Stampede in a cowboy hat (even if you look preposterous in it) but never allow yourself to be photographed in a hair net inside a food processing factory, and so forth.

But when it comes to a more sophisticated understanding of the power of symbolism, two events of the past week demonstrate how lacking elected officials can be, and highlight for me some sublime reasons why polls routinely show that most voters have minimal respect and considerable contempt for politics and politicians. The first was a decision made by the administration of Barack Obama, someone that I certainly thought would have had more sense. On April 27, in an ill-conceived publicity stunt the President's plane (the famous Air Force One) buzzed Manhattan, escorted by military jets. Apparently it was done to provide somebody with a photo opportunity, but the White House forgot to inform New York City officials in advance. Unsurprisingly, when New Yorkers saw a large passenger aircraft escorted by fighters flying low toward the city's skyscrapers, panic ensued and people began fleeing office towers. Red-faced White House officials had to quickly offer an apology; the mayor of New York was understandably furious. For an administration that prides itself on getting 'optics' just right, it's hard to imagine a stupider blunder.

Canada's government would not allow itself to be outdone. Yesterday it was revealed that the small, plastic Canadian flag pins that adorn every federalist politician's lapel, and which every MP's office doles out by the bucketload, have lately been made in China. With behavior that has become tiresomely regular in Canadian politics, Heritage Minister James Moore* responded with half-truths, obfuscations and fibs. With the cameras on him in the House of Commons, Moore proclaimed with faked pride that the latest government contract for these pins was proudly awarded to a Canadian company based in Quebec. And this was true - the government did indeed pay nearly a quarter million dollars to a Quebec firm, which promptly subcontracted the actual making of the pins to a company in China. When pressed, Moore then concocted a story that it was the parliamentary gift shop that was getting its pins from China.

There are a several layers of irony to flag-pin fiasco. The first is that the current federal government never misses an opportunity to drape itself in patriotism (you lose count of the number of maple leaf flags behind the Prime Minister when he does a staged press conference (hopefully the flags are still made in Canada)). Second, I find it hard to imagine that the American administration - even one capable of panicking New Yorkers into thinking that another 9/11-type attack was under way - would be so idiotic as to allow official US government star-spangled-banner flag pins to be outsourced to a foreign country. Further still, the Canadian-based manufacturer that actually makes these pins for the parliamentary gift shop, and that would like to sell them to the government as well, is located in Pickering, Ontario. Pickering is a community where employment is closely to the failing auto sector and where many are already out of work; it also happens to be a few minutes drive from the office of Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty. I suspect Flaherty isn't pleased by the symbolism.

I won't belabour my point any further, except to say God help the government should Don Cherry get wind of this one.

*Where else on the internet will find Moore and Obama mentioned in the same blog? Yet another reason to continue reading This Geographical Life!

On alchemy and sustainability

2009-04-07T10:06:00.010-11:00

The end of the winter semester is at hand; only one more lecture to go with my first-year Environmental Studies course, which is entitled "Global Environmental Challenges". I used to find the final couple weeks of this course a challenge to teach (it's my third consecutive year teaching it) over nagging concerns that I was encouraging my students to practice alchemy.

As with many first year courses, the goals include introducing the students to a broad range of important issues, encouraging them to think critically about the processes and interactions that give rise to these challenges, and reviewing some of the possible range of responses that may be undertaken. It is the latter subject - the "what to about it" part of the course that we cover in the final classes - that has troubled me in the past. The course textbook we're using (I didn't select it, but it is as good as any other and is kept up to date by the author/publisher) says essentially that sustainability/sustainable development is the answer to global environmental challenges.

In the past I've done a fair amount of research on sustainable development (SD) in terms of what people say it means, how in it should be undertaken and so forth, but until recently I had never thought critically about whether SD is even conceptually or theoretically possible. Having done my undergrad degree in the late 1980s, the then-recent report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the 'Brundtland Report' or Our Common Future), which has become a de facto scripture of the SD world, was mandatory cover-to-cover reading in a couple of my courses. So perhaps I internalized its messages only too well.

SD has become one of those motherhood and apple pie statements. Few people say "I try to live my life as unsustainably as possible". Politicians have long known the importance of using the word "sustainable" whenever they roll out a policy or initiative - you would be hard-pressed to find a piece of economic policy these days that does not include the phrase "sustainable economy". I have been guilty of this myself, having written for example about the linkages between sustainable development and refugee protection, blithely treating both as equally desirable and equally possible. And yet are they? (We seem to do a poor job of both).

The old practice of alchemy - attempting to transform lead or similar materials into precious metals - must have made perfect sense to its practitioners. After all, who wouldn't want to turn lead into gold? For supporters of alchemy, even if short-term results were elusive, the potential for success and the continued practice of alchemy toward that end must have itself seemed a worthwhile endeavour. With the benefit of hindsight we now recognize its impossibility, alchemy seems rather quaint, and the word now serves as a useful metaphor (academics love it - try a Google Scholar search of the word and see for yourself).

So is SD a new alchemy? No doubt those who work in the field of SD have already been through the sort of internal debate about its merits and possibility that I had until recently avoided, and so would find this blog posting quaint (or tedious). But in any event, here's how I worked it through to my own satisfaction.

I compared SD's key tenets to Paul Ehrlich's ImPACT theory. Ehrlich and those who share similar views suggest that the scale of human impacts on the environment (I) is related to the size of a human population (P), the level of affluence of that population (A) and the level of technology used to extract resources (T). Sometimes consumption (C) gets substituted for affluence depending on the the author or work. So you get formulations such as this: I = P x A (or C) x T. According to this logic, a small and technologically advanced population (like that of Canada) with a high degree of consumption can have a greater an impact on the environment than a larger population (e.g. Bangladesh) where consumption and technology is much lower. And indeed, this makes intuitive sense when one thinks of such things as greenhouse gas emissions or generation of solid waste, where Canadians are far and away more villainous than Bangladeshis.

But increasing levels of wealth do not always result in negative environmental outcomes. Some things, like levels of airborne particulate in urban areas or sulphur dioxide emissions, tend to fall as a society becomes more affluent and implements or regulates greater controls on pollution. Not all technologies are necessarily consumptive or environmentally detrimental; some facilitate conservation and/or may be environmentally beneficial.

Another important phenomenon is that as per capita incomes rise average family size tends to fall. In this respect, per capita income is likely an indicator of affluence, with the actual determinants of affluence in this context being access to sanitation, good primary medical care (especially for women and children), greater valuation of women's roles in society, destigmatization of contraception and so forth. In other words, depending on how we define and pursue affluence we can actually reduce or offset the net effects of the other two variables of technology and population in the Ehrlich impact model.

This is where SD comes in. SD provides the blueprint for how to redefine affluence in a way that it reduces the net impacts of population growth, consumption and technology on the environment. Critical tenets of SD include equity (for those now alive and for those yet to be born) and the need for policy- and decision-making to take into account economic, social, cultural and environmental factors on an ongoing/continual basis. It makes increasingly clear sense to me. In hindsight, I now see that SD is not an alchemy - at least in theory. It is not an impossibility, and therefore we should be practicing it (and teaching it to first year students) even if the results so far have been less than optimal. There's still too much lead and not enough gold in our current trajectory of socio-economic development. But we should still keep trying.

There is, of course, the other question of whether Ehrlich's impact model makes any sense. But that's for another posting.

On where the backcountry begins

2009-03-04T04:21:00.006-11:00

In the past week in Canada, newspapers have carried the story of a married couple who skied out of bounds at a resort in the Rockies, quickly got lost and were on their own for 10 days in the backcountry. The woman died; the man was eventually spotted by a passing helicopter and is now being treated for frostbite. It is currently being asked in the media is why no one came to their rescue. The man tramped "SOS" in the snow in various places, and this was spotted on at least a couple occasions by passing aircraft. No search was undertaken because no one had reported the couple missing. In hindsight, the local RCMP detachment now wishes that it had sent someone out to look. But does the presence of the letters SOS in the snow in the backcountry, with no visible presence nearby, create an obligation for the authorities to organize a search-and-rescue mission? To what extent should the survivor's evidently foolhardy, spontaneous decision to ski into the backcountry without the slightest preparations influence our interpretation of this event? What was he thinking in the first place?

There is something undeniably alluring about the "backcountry". There are few things I personally enjoy more than to stand at that spot where the pavement ends, where the last visible evidence of human modification of the landscape disappears, where every step takes you farther and farther away from the invisible support network that surrounds human society. Whenever I enter the backcountry I feel I am somehow reconnecting with the aboriginal. William Cronon in his essay The Trouble with Wilderness suggests that many others are spiritually transported even farther back in time, to the garden of Eden - a place and time that predates the aboriginal. I tend not to go quite so far back, but to each his/her own.

Of course, though my spirit may seek communion with the aboriginal (or perhaps it's the ancestral - I can't quite find the right word) in the backcountry, in reality I rarely enter remote places anymore (too little time and too many competing responsibilities). And on the few occasions when I do, it is rarely without appropriate clothing, compass, matches, and so forth: that is, I carry a portable form of contemporary society's protective layers with me. And of course, I never truly disappear into the wild, as did the protagonist in Jon Krakauer's story by the same title; someone always knows where I've gone and when to expect me back.

Still, sometimes you don't know you're in the backcountry until it's too late. Last summer I was driving along some lonely range roads in southeastern Alberta, looking for long-abandoned farm buildings to photograph. Late in the day I came across a well-preserved but long-deserted farm house, but for whatever reason decided to pass it by. A few hundred meters on I looked in the rear-view and saw the house looked far more beautiful than I had first thought. I shut off the car, grabbed my camera and walked back to the house. When I got within 30 meters of the house, a large coyote charged forward, hesitated and then dashed behind the building. I then saw her pups, playing in front of the house; she evidently had a den underneath.

Doing my best not to run, I made my way back to the car, all the time hoping that this coyote stayed true to the behaviour typical of coyotes: when given a choice, they do not confront humans. This mother coyote thankfully stayed true to form; had she wanted to take me down, I could not have stopped her. I could not have called for help, I had no phone. When I got back to the car, I drove back down closer to the house and stopped again to observe the pups playing. They paid me no heed. The mother did not show herself, though she was no doubt nearby. A few minutes later two large mule deer ambled past the house, again paying me & my car no notice.

I have since realized that the backcountry at that time and place began the second I closed my car door and took a few steps forward. The abandoned house was simply a relic of a past human presence on the landscape; the wild had already reclaimed that place, and I had unknowingly stepped into it, unprepared. Had a different animal reclaimed that abandoned building for its home, the outcome for me might have been different. And newspaper readers later that week might have been wondering, "What was he thinking?"

On land degradation and whippoorwill peas

2009-02-06T04:22:00.006-11:00

Each Thursday I run a graduate seminar on Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change. Yesterday's topic was desertification and we had read some of my favourite authors in preparation: Donald Worster (The Dust Bowl) and Piers Blaikie & Harold Brookfield (Land Degradation and Society). Both readings were written in the 1980s when, if my recollection of my undergraduate days is accurate, concerns about soil erosion and desertification tended to get greater attention both within the academic community and beyond. Perhaps it was because of the images of famine in east Africa, which spurred the Band Aid/Live Aid phenomenon, perhaps it was because climate change science was still developing and concerns about global warming had yet to dominate popular media coverage of environmental issues.

Whatever the case, soil erosion and land degradation continue to be ongoing challenges in many parts of the world today. The student leading yesterday's seminar showed us a CBC News video taken recently in Kenya, where drought in that country's southeastern region has caused widespread crop failure. Farmers are being forced to leave the land in search of work, and there are reports that speculators and corrupt government officials are driving up food prices, with the potential outcome that many may start to go hungry.

During the video, one of the other students remarked "Why is that farmer growing corn, anyhow?" Why indeed. Corn is not native to Africa. It's not a particularly drought-tolerant crop: in the Canadian context, corn is well suited for southern Ontario's hot and humid summers, but not southern Saskatchewan's hot and dry ones. The corn field was not intended for subsistence production. Its owner, his spouse and some of their ten children are shown breaking rocks to earn money with which to buy food.

The situation portrayed in the video corresponds very closely with the dynamics described in Blaikie and Brookfield: the "land manager" (as B&B describe the farmer) makes decisions about land use within a complex system of interaction processes, forces and agents at various scales, from the local to the global, over which s/he has little influence. Another student pointed out that, until this year, global corn prices had been rising as new markets for corn-based fuels appeared in North America. Since a farmer's ultimate and logical aim is to maximize income per unit of land, it's not surprising a Kenyan farmer with ten kids would be planting corn, even if there was a chance of crop failure. Crops better suited to dryland conditions, such as millet, cowpeas and sorghum tend to have low market prices, and so even a good harvest does not necessarily mean the farmer can pay all the bills at the end of the season.

One of the things that I would have liked to know about the farmer in the video is whether the family has a vegetable patch. In my own research into historical droughts on North America's Great Plains (which include the "Dust Bowl" Worster analyzes), the ability to maintain a vegetable garden was often a critical factor in helping families survive until the next growing season. In Oklahoma, farmers who remembered the 1930s talked about eating a lot of whippoorwill peas (vigna unguiculata), a type of cowpea/lentil that likely came to the southern US from Africa during the era of the slave trade. Whippoorwill peas, I am told, weren't terribly tasty, but they would grow when nothing else could, and would fill you up and keep you going. As in many parts of the world, "drought foods" like the whippoorwill pea tend to get shunned once the drought has passed, and I am willing to bet only a small percentage of Oklahomans alive today know what one is, let alone tasted one.

I wonder if the farm family shown in the video have access to their own home-grown supply of the local equivalent of whippoorwill peas. I certainly hope so. I should note I have ordered a package of whippoorwill peas and plan to grow them myself this summer to see what they are like. I'll let you know in the fall.

on good regional fictions and the imagined countryside

2009-01-14T01:07:00.011-11:00

In my grad research seminar course at Guelph back when I was doing my PhD, we once had a guest lecture from retired geographer Phil Keddie, who suggested that a well-written regional fiction could often be as good source for understanding regional geographies and histories as any text book or scholarly monograph. I recently completed a wonderful book that led me to that recollection. It's a novel by a Norwegian writer, Per Pettersen, called Out Stealing Horses.

The book is set in the Norwegian interior at two different locations during two different periods of time. The "present day" in the novel is set when the narrator/protagonist is pushing seventy years of age and has bought a run-down house overlooking a lake. It's coming up to Y2K, he has lost his wife and sister only a couple years previously, and he needs a retreat from his life in Oslo. He has no interest in the new millennium. As he fixes up the house, he reflects back on summers of his youth spent with his father in another place, a river valley near the Swedish border. His father, too, had reasons for retreating from Oslo to the countryside. And so the story begins to unfold.

I have been to Oslo and surroundings, but never to the Norwegian interior. But having read this book, I feel I can see at least parts of it simply by closing my eyes. The narrator's childhood valley was, at least in summertime, dominated by the colour blue. The sky, the river, even the interior of the houses (the narrator says rural people in the area believed the flies didn't like to settle on blue paint). People's eyes are blue. The farm woman who is the object of male desire wears a blue dress with a flower print, and becomes an embodiment of the valley and the way of life in rural, post-war Norway, which are equated with summer. The river's surface is calm but the current moves steadily underneath. Its water levels fall over the course of the summer drop, and it becomes a metaphor for time; the valley, its small-hold farms, horses, dairymaids and dirt footpaths will inevitably be carried away.

Present-day rural life is different. There are no horses near the lake where the narrator makes his late-life retreat; cars and snowplows have replaced them. The narrator is the only pedestrian; people drive even a hundred meters to the store. Conformity is the name of the game now: the rural residents all use the same brand of chain saw, drive the same make of car. The thoughtful young couple that runs the local garage displays the sorts of traits that we associate with rural Norway in the old days - thoughtful, frugal and caring of their neighbours - but we get the impression they are a throwback, an endangered specie. It's autumn when the narrator comes to this place, and it's becoming dark, much like the narrator's life, as the days grow rapidly shorter and Norway enters its long winter. Unlike years before, the water in the narrator's life does not flow, the lake is still. The narrator sits and watches the lake, and does some fishing where a river enters into it, but he does not swim in it or row a boat on it the way he did the river of his youth. This place seems barely alive.

In my own research I spend a lot of time in rural areas, and I found myself comparing my own past experiences with Pettersen's portrayal of rural life while reading his book. I have not encountered any dairymaids in my travels in rural North America, but I have met women whose youth was spent gathering blueberries or picking cotton. Mechanized agriculture and refrigeration have largely displaced these activities to valleys and hillsides in other countries. Simple riverside cabins and family farms are a rarity in our countryside, just as they are in Pettersen's Norway.

At the same time, we should be careful not to romanticize past rural livelihoods too much. It's nice to imagine a countryside populated with strong, gorgeous farm women and cheerful dairymaids with healthy glows from their cheeks and voices like flutes, who are admired and worshipped by men with strong backs and arms, an ability to tackle any job and who speak few words. The reality, however, was that rural livelihoods were often grinding and backbreaking, that simplicity is not always voluntary but may be a kind synonym for poverty. Rural poverty was (and remains) anything but romantic.

Pettersen's narrator is, in the end, a city boy, and his position vis a vis the rural people, landscapes and livelihoods he observes is contrasted against his own urban experience. This does not mean to say his observations are invalid; they are valid in the context of his own experience. And so, to return to Phil Keddie's observation, a good regional fiction can indeed open a window to the geography and life of a particular place and time. We just need to remember that it is just that - a window. We enjoy the view and can observe from it, but a window is still surrounded by the walls which we do not see through, but obscure much of the picture that might otherwise be seen.

on Canada's foreign cheddar

2009-01-07T15:08:00.009-11:00

As much as I try to stay up to date on issues related to the foods we eat, I still get surprised. A few years back I was given Michael Pollen's book The Botany of Desire, an interesting take on how certain species of plants have become adopted as preferred food choices. In it, Pollen talks about how that farmers growing the Golden Russet variety potatoes preferred by fast food joints require heavy spraying of chemicals to reduce the number of brown spots that can develop in the flesh of the potato. The brown spots are perfectly harmless, but according to Pollen the world's largest fast food chain and its imitators like it that their fries look as yellow and unspotted as possible. Ever since reading that, I've followed research and writing on our food production systems.

There are any number of books and films out there that can scare the living daylights out of you regarding what goes into industrial food production, and scholars like Syracuse geographer Don Mitchell have done equally worrying studies about how we treat agricultural labourers. Add to this the growing awareness of the amount of carbon dioxide emissions embedded in every shipment of imported fruits and vegetables, the rapid depletion of many of the western world's preferred wild fish species and the never-ending stream of advise from dietitians about good fats/bad fats, etc, and you start to worry you need a second PhD just to learn how to avoid eating yourself and the planet into a dark future.

In my own family, we have never eaten much in the way of tinned or packaged food beyond tinned tomatoes during the winter time, and I have for the most part given up my role as the only fast food junkie in the house. As we have become more aware of food issues (for lack of a better description) we have slowly been making further adjustments to our food consumption patterns. In summer, we try as often as possible to buy our weekly produce at one of Ottawa's farmers markets. The Lansdowne Park farmer's market has adopted a 100-mile policy, with the exception of soft fruits, which come from a Niagara Peninsula producer (try as you might, you can't grow peaches commercially in our climate). When winter arrives and we are obliged to buy veggies from the stores again, we try to diversify as much as possible. We buy frozen Canadian-grown veggies for our almost daily homemade soups, and we supplement our Canadian-grown apples, potatoes and carrots with fresh organic greens from abroad (if you have to buy from California, it may as well be organic). Canadian apple juice contains as much vitamin C as imported orange juice, so we skip the latter.

That does not mean to say that Canadian products are always the best choice, hence the surprise I referred to in the opening paragraph. In today's Globe and Mail, Sue Riedl reports that Canada's largest cheese makers - Kraft, Saputo and Parmalat - will be going before the Supreme Court to fight a new federal food safety regulation that will require them to make their milk out of 100% cheddar cheese. If you check the ingredients of the common brand name cheddars made by those companies, you'll find that they typically contain "modified milk ingredients" or similar milk-like substances. The big companies are arguing that the new regulation will provide an unfair benefit to Canadian dairy farmers (translation: Kraft et al may have to substitute a cheaper input with a more expensive one).

It's not so much the learning of the court case that troubled me (any time you regulate an industry dominated by a few large companies, they're bound to whine to the courts if the new regs will cost them even a penny, regardless of whether it is better for their customers or not), nor the fact that big producers have been using modified milk ingredients. I must confess, I don't know exactly what goes into a modified milk ingredient, but have no reason to assume the process poses any concerns (perhaps there are concerns I am unaware of?). No, it was the revelation that the modified milk ingredients may not have originated from Canadian milk, but are often imported from abroad. That's what troubles me.

I used to live in the US , and if I lived there today, I would be buying organic dairy products. I do not have the same concerns about Canadian milk; our producers have tighter controls on what they feed dairy cattle, the conditions under which cattle are kept, the use of medications and hormones, etc. We have a preschool child in our family who eats a lot of cheese, who I do not want consuming foreign-produced milk products when there is perfectly good milk being produced here in Ontario and Quebec. Lately we started buying cheddar cheese produced by the St Albert Cooperative based here in the Ottawa valley. We did so simply because their cheese tasted better and it is found in most supermarkets; we never really looked at the ingredients. Just the same, when a block of the mass-produced cheddars was on sale we would still often buy it. Not anymore, and we won't be doing so even should Kraft et al lose their court challenge and against their will be forced to make a better quality product. I checked the St Albert website, and (should I again be surprised?) they use 100% milk in their cheese. When will I ever learn to trust my taste buds.

no average Joe

2008-12-24T09:05:00.004-11:00

It's Christmas Eve, and I am staying with relatives in Waterloo Region. This morning we woke up to over a foot of heavy, wet snow that had accumulated overnight. I was up first, and began the chore of clearing out the driveway, armed with a plastic-bladed shovel. I got about halfway through the job before going inside to get a cup of tea and take a break; I was not looking forward to the end of the driveway, where the city plow had deposited a few extra feet for my shoveling enjoyment.

When I went back out, Joe from across the street had brought over his snowblower and without a word had already begun blowing out my relatives' driveway. Within a few minutes he had the bulk of the remaining work done, and with no further ado he moved on to another neighbours driveway. Nothing was left for me to do but to clean up a few small spots, thank him and wish him a Merry Christmas.

Much is made in international development literature, and in a variety of social sciences, of the importance of social capital. The World Bank was big on the concept a few years back. Social capital is related to economic capital, in that it provides tangible benefits to those who have access to it, but it differs in many ways. Some of the key figures in the development of the concept of social capital include sociologists James Coleman and Pierre Bourdieu, and political scientist Robert Putman, although the term can be found at least as far back as in Karl Marx's Das Kapital (although Marx used the term in a more generic sense to indicate that all capital has basic, inherent social properties). Bourdieu defines social capital as "...the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition"* Common maxims like "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" or "It's who you know, not just what you know that counts" or "A handshake will do" capture some of the properties ascribed to social capital by scholars.

The fact that Joe would voluntarily bring his snowblower over and clear out my relatives' driveway is a good example of social capital in action (it's also an example of how it is not just nested in more or less institutionalized relationships as suggested in Bourdieu's description (to be fair to Bourdieu, he gave descriptions in other works that downplayed the institutional element)). I quietly investigated how often Joe provides such a service for my relatives (answer: whenever there is a particularly heavy snowfall); what return service they provide him (answer: nothing); and, the degree of their social interactions (answer: they are on friendly terms, wave to one another, but do not typically visit one another inside their houses).

A classical economist might question why does Joe does this, when he does not appear to gain any tangible benefit. He incurs not only the loss of his own personal time, which might be better spent doing something else, but also the cost of gas plus the additional wear and tear on his machine. It ceratinly does not fit with classical economic theory, where "rational actors" do not provide services without the expectation of reciprocal benefit or compensation. The concept of social capital, which ultimately has its origins in economism, provides the explanation that their geographic proximity to one another makes Joe and my relatives de facto members of a network, whether they want to be or not. Joe therefore helps with the snow removal because he enjoys indirect benefits from living and raising his family in a neighbourhood where the residents have positive relationships with one another and thereby collectively make it a "nice place to live".

I would suggest, however, that even the watered-down form of economism that gave rise to the concept of social capital misses the point. If I were to put this posting to Joe for his scutiny, I suspect he would be offended by it in entirety. Instead of asking why he would help out his neighbours, I suspect he would ask the opposite: why wouldn't he help his neighbours when it is within his ability to do so? Posing the question in such a way has less to do with social capital theory than it does the underlying principles that people celebrate during holidays such as Christmas. So Merry Christmas, Joe, and a Merry Christmas to you, too.

*P. Bourdieu & L. Wacquant (1992) An invitation to reflexive sociology, University of Chicago Press, at page 119.

unfinished thoughts on televisions and two deaths

2008-12-06T15:21:00.010-11:00

Two deaths in the past ten days caught my attention: 75-year old Ted Rogers and 34-year old Jdimytai Damour. When I started this posting, I planned to use the circumstances of their lives/deaths to discuss some thoughts about public space versus personal space, but I got hung up on a more elemental question.

Rogers was one of Canada's richest men. He made his fortune in broadcasting, and today many Canadians deal with one of at least one of the Rogers companies at some point, whether it's to buy a cell-phone, watch TV, rent a video or listen to the radio. When he passed away this week, the pages of the Globe and Mail carried a front-page obituary, a business section obituary, a sports section tribute, and several paid advertisements (those catching my eye included a couple full-page ones from companies he operated plus one from Ryerson University, that received a $15 million donation from him a few years back). The tributes indicated he was a pioneer and visionary in the field of broadcasting, in addition to be a swell guy. Perhaps he was; I never met him, so I can't say for sure.

I never met Jdimytai Damour either. He had a low-paying job as a temporary maintenance worker in New York State. He was working at a Wal-Mart store on Long Island on "Black Friday", the day after US Thanksgiving when millions of Americans engage in that country's single biggest day of retail shopping. Many chain retailers stir up the enthusiasm by offering steep discounts on expensive electronics products (e.g. Wal-Mart was offering Blu-Ray DVD players for $128); some have "door-crasher" specials where the first X customers can buy their HDTV at half-price, or things of that nature. According to the New York Daily News, at 5am on Black Friday hundreds of people had gathered outside the Valley Stream Wal-Mart, where they literally crashed the doors down the moment the store was open for business. Damour was trampled to death as the mob stampeded into the store. Emergency responders attempting to revive Damour were themselves being pushed and shoved as bargain hunter continued to pour into the store. As Damour took his final breath, the Wal-Mart cash registers were already ringing up those bargain DVDs and plasma TVs for which Damour was killed.

To my knowledge Rogers Communications does not operate in New York State, so the DVD players and TVs that were purchased by those who trampled Damour are not today fed by Rogers HDTV nor do they play DVDs purchased at a Rogers Video store. Other wealthy individuals or corporations provide such services on Long Island. Given that he was near the end of his days when Damour lived the last of his own, I doubt Ted Rogers knew of Damour's death or would have had the strength to contemplate it if he did. I would have been fascinated to know what Rogers the broadcasting pioneer and visionary would have thought about it if he had been able to do so. After all, Rogers' life work involved supplying and delivering content to those TVs, DVD players and other electronic gadgets for which at least some people are willing to step on or over a dying man to possess.

on the first November without a Grey Cup

2008-11-23T14:03:00.005-11:00

It's Grey Cup Sunday, and although Canada's biggest single-day sporting event is already under way, I won't be watching it on TV. Not because I wouldn't like to, but because I can't. The problem is that the Canadian Football League has sold its TV broadcast to TSN, a sports specialty channel available only on cable or satellite. I don't subscribe to either; I have good old fashioned rabbit ears on my TV.

It used to be the case that Canada's two largest broadcasters, CBC and CTV, would both air the Grey Cup, each with its own commentators. Up until last year, the game was carried by at least one of the main, freely available networks. But, TSN ponied up more money than the main networks, and so now you have to incur a cable bill of at least $30-40 per month for the privilege of watching the game. That's assuming you live in an urban or suburban area where cable TV access is possible; in much of rural Canada it isn't. I am not entirely sure what satellite TV subscriptions run these days, but I doubt it's cheaper than cable. The point being is that much of rural Canada, where mast aerials and rabbit ears are still fairly common, and low income households that aren't able to afford to pay $500 a year to watch TV, are now left out of one of the few uniquely Canadian sporting events.

The removal of the Grey Cup from public airwaves is but one small moment in a worrisome trend in Canada. A bigger step will occur early in 2009, when the broadcasting of TV signals switches from analog to digital. Good-old rabbit ears won't work anymore, although I am told there is an electrical-powered converter available in electronics stores that will convert the digital signal back to analog. The movement of popular programming from regular networks to specialty cable networks and the end of analog broadcasting are essentially forcing ever more Canadians into the hands of Bell and Rogers Communications who, as much as they would like to think they own the airwaves (and charge prices like they do), do not. TV-watching in Canada used to be a virtually free pastime (once the TV and the rabbit ears were obtained); it is increasingly less so. I do not wish to overstate the matter, but it never fails to worry me when I see signs of formerly affordable, public goods undergoing de facto privatization. The outcome tends to benefit those already well off and to disadvantage those less so, especially the rural poor.

Perhaps it's not ironic, but if I had wanted to watch football today, CTV was broadcasting an NFL game that my rabbit ears could have pulled in. Instead I took my daughter skating.

on the possibilities of Bonn

2008-10-30T00:42:00.004-11:00

I am in Europe, attending an international migration conference in Bonn, once the capital of West Germany. I arrived at Frankfurt airport at noon yesterday, took a high speed train from the airport to Bonn (292 km/h average speed!) and then hopped on the subway to my hotel. I walked this morning from my hotel along the Rhine river to the conference centre. There are 2 pathways alongside the river, one for foot traffic, one for bicycles, both heavily used. Ships lumbered alongside, bringing goods up and downstream between Germany's inland industrial core and the ocean ports in Holland.

Whenever I am in Europe I am reminded of what is possible in terms of sustainable urban lifestyles. In Bonn, as in many other Europeans cities I have visited or lived in, public transportation is clean, affordable, efficient, and takes you most places you want to go at most hours of the day. Bicycle commuting is commonplace, and bicycle lanes are found everywhere, used by people of all ages. The city core is closed to private vehicle traffic, and the streets are filled with pedestrians well into the night: the inner city is as much a place to socialize as it is to work. On each block, and in front of every institutional and apartment building are large colour-coded plastic bins on wheels that are used to sort wastes: metals, plastics, paper, compost and so forth. They are emptied more frequently than the once-weekly schedule typical of North American cities.

Contrast this with Ottawa, a city that is often cited as one of Canada's more sustainable cities. For a Tuesday night flight, the only way to get to the airport is an expensive taxi ride or private car. The city bus service is good by Canadian standards, but pathetic in comparison to Bonn, a city 1/4 the size of Ottawa. In Ottawa, if you work downtown it is generally possible to get there and back at rush hour from most parts of the city, but after 7pm bus service drops off sharply. If you don't work downtown, you are almost certainly driving to work, and most main arteries are seriously clogged at rush hour. I ride a bicycle to work most of the year, and invariably have a close call with road traffic each week; bike lanes are few in the city core, and car drivers tend to be indifferent to the safety of cyclists. Bicycle commuting in Ottawa is still a relatively rare phenomenon. We do have a good many recreational cycling paths, but going to and from work still requires a willingness to put your safety at risk.

Much of Centretown Ottawa is an unfriendly series of windy, dark canyons walled in by ugly 1960s office towers. Most of the people who work there come in from elsewhere and flee the area at 5 o'clock. There is the lively, if overly touristy Byward Market district, but it is geographically distinct from that part of Centretown where people go to work, and as always, the ubiquitous private vehicle traffic spoils the place. Don't get me wrong; I like Ottawa very much, and by North American standards it does have a high quality of urban life. But I think the time has come to stop comparing our quality of life to North American standards, which are generally pretty low. We need to look beyond what we have, and look at what is yet still possible. Yes, Bonn does have its rush-hour traffic, but commuting by trains, buses and bikes is what the majority of the population does, and they do so without incovenience or risk to personal safety. There is a word in German with no direct equivalent, gemütlich, which loosely refers to a sense of comfort and well-being. Monday to Friday 9-5 life in Bonn is more gemütlich than it is in Ottawa, and this is something we should strive for.

On the current geographical realities of the NHL

2008-10-13T08:59:00.013-11:00

The opening week of the 2008-09 National Hockey League regular season has now come and gone, and already promises to be more interesting off the ice than on. While the NHL is the most popular professional sports league among Canadian spectators, and while a good chunk of the league's players are Canadians, most of the league's team are based in the United States (only 20% of teams are based in Canada). In the US where it is often called "ice" hockey, it is at best a second-tier professional sport. Even in America's self-proclaimed "hockeytown" of Detroit, general interest among residents in the day-to-day actions of the Red Wings falls behind that of baseball's Tigers, basketball's Piston's, university of Michigan sports teams and even the embarrassing-bad NFL Lions.

Over the course of my lifetime the NHL has expanded from six teams to thirty. If you accept that the modern sport of hockey originated somewhere in eastern Canada (several Canadian communities claim to be the "birthplace of hockey" even though Dutch paintings from the 17th century clearly show it being played out of doors there in winter) the Original Six NHL franchises were based at or near the geographic heartland of the sport: Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, New York City and Toronto. The teams traveled by train, most players' salaries weren't much different from your average blue collar worker, and the game was played before enthusiastic, knowledgeable crowds of men (for the most part; the Boston and Chicago franchises often struggled to sell tickets in year when their teams were losing).

In the late 1960s the league's managers undertook an ambitious program of expansion that has continued on and off until the end of the 20th century. I say ambitious because the league added teams not only in places where one would expect professional hockey to be popular (e.g. Minnesota, which has strong participation in minor and college hockey) but also in cities like St. Louis, where there was no natural affinity for the game. Indeed, the league expanded well beyond its northeastern base to the Pacific coast (Los Angeles, Oakland and Vancouver) and to the south (Atlanta).

In terms of success or failure of that first era of expansion, the geographic pattern was fairly predictable. Teams tended to survive in the northeastern US, where winters can at least occasionally be cold and snowy and where people are generally familiar with the sport; franchises tended to struggle or fail in places where ice (let alone ice hockey) tends not to occur naturally. The success of the franchise in St. Louis could not be replicated in muggy Missouri's other large city, Kansas City, where the Scouts quickly wound up moving to Denver and later to New Jersey. The Atlanta franchise moved north to a much more logical home in Calgary, while the Oakland franchise tried Cleveland, where it again failed and was eventually subsumed by the Minnesota franchise.

During this same period, a competing league called the World Hockey Association came onto the scene with its own quixotic assemblage of teams in the most likely of locations (e.g. Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnipeg) and the more unlikely (e.g. Birmingham, Houston, San Diego). When the WHA inevitably collapsed in 1979, the NHL took on its most stable surviving franchises (not surprisingly, all in the hockey heartland: 3 in Canada and 1 in New England). The failures of its own ill-placed franchises and those of the WHA have not deterred the NHL from placing and maintaining franchises in geographically illogical locations. Since 1979, only two new NHL franchises have been established in places where there is a natural affinity for hockey: Ottawa and Minnesota. The Minnesota franchise was actually the second one awarded to that state; the owner of the first one (the North Stars) sold the team to new owners in Dallas, a city where scrimmages by the NFL's Cowboys generate more calls to sports-radio phone-in shows than do the Dallas Stars in years when they are in the hunt for the Stanley Cup.

Instead of taking advantage of hockey's strong regional support in Canada and the northeastern US, the NHL persisted with its policy of expansion/franchise relocation into new regions. It was driven by economics, not geography. The final decades of the 20th century saw widespread economic decline throughout much of hockey's heartland. The state of Michigan, once among America's richest and home to Hockeytown, is now among America's poorest. Cleveland and Hartford lost their franchises; Buffalo and Pittsburgh struggled to keep theirs. At one point in the 1990s the Canadian franchises (with the exception of Montreal and Toronto, the old Original Six stalwarts) were in financial trouble. Team revenues in Canadian dollar were worth 1/3 less than their US dollar players salaries, and well-supported franchises in Quebec City and Winnipeg moved to wealthier Denver and Phoenix respectively.

As America's population and economic growth moved to sunnier climes, the NHL followed. Cities like Anaheim, Miami, Nashville and San Jose had glistening new arenas and deep-pocketed owners looking for "entertainment" to showcase in them. Professional sports franchises increasingly became sub-components of larger media and entertainment enterprises. By the end of the 1990s, there were as many NHL teams in California (3) as in New York State, and as many in Florida (2) as in Ontario.

In the middle of the present decade a new economic reality emerged. The Canadian dollar had appreciated to the point where Canadian franchises were suddenly the new cash cows of the NHL. The league was never able to make significant headway into US television markets, and so Canadian TV revenues continue to be the NHL's single biggest source of income. Revenue-sharing agreements that were designed to prop up Canadian and small-market Northeastern US teams a decade ago are now used to prop up illogically-situated franchises in the US sun belt. American franchises, which generate considerably less gate and merchandising revenue than do their Canadian counterparts, are struggling particularly with the fallout from a player lock-out and bizarre subsequent collective agreement with the players union. While the league has a salary cap to prevent the few financially-successful franchises like Toronto from spending too much, many more franchises are having trouble finding enough revenues to meet the minimum threshold for team salaries.

The current situation will not continue much longer. The current US financial crisis has brought a sudden end to the easy credit and whirlwind real estate deals on which many US franchises have relied. Unlike most professional sports leagues operating in the US, the lack of TV revenues means NHL franchises depend heavily on tickets sold at the arena, and attendance of fair-weather fans in sun belt cities will fall this year, you can bet your mortgage on that. The multi-million dollar salaries being given to niche players, whose replica jersey sales could not buy a hockey stick, are unsustainable. In the next few years we will almost certainly see a steady reassertion of geography over economics in the case of the NHL, as franchises start relocating back to that part of the world where the word "hockey" does not need an adjective to describe where it is played.

On gas prices and social capital

2008-09-16T13:12:00.006-11:00

In 1995, political scientist Robert Putnam wrote an influential essay with the unusual title Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. In it, Putnam pointed out a seeming paradox in America in that the number of people participating in bowling had been increasing for many years but the number of people participating in bowling leagues was rapidly declining. People seemed to enjoy going to the bowling alley to play the game, but were becoming less interested in participating in organized leagues, where the bowling was itself perhaps secondary to the social interaction that accompanies an outing with one's friends and neighbours. Putnam went on to use the metaphor of bowling alone to explain how social interactivity, and the beneficial social capital that was built as a by-product, seemed to be on the wane in America, with ominous signs for the country's future.

Social capital is a term that is at least as old as Karl Marx's Das Kapital, although its meaning and significance has evolved over the years. Social capital is in essence a beneficial economic outcome that emerges from a social connection. For example, if I go out to lunch with a friend, that's a social interaction. If during that lunch my friend provides me with information about an upcoming job opening at her workplace, and I manage to submit a resume and get the job before anyone else has a chance to apply, that's social capital: my friendship with her provided me with an economic advantage others who are not friends with her did not enjoy.

Social capital does not need to always manifest itself in simple exchanges of insider information; there are many other examples. Social capital can be manifest in terms of trust: I may loan you something or extend you credit on the basis of a handshake and a verbal understanding you will pay me back or return a favour to me when you can - simply because I trust you (try that at the bank or the Wal-Mart). Organized crime gangs often have high levels of social capital: membership in the gang offers protection from other gangs, the chance to share in the spoils of other gang-members and a code of silence to protect one another from the authorities (unless one offends the gang, in which case the social capital is quickly replaced with a punishment).

The key point is that social capital is ephemeral; it is a beneficial by-product of being an active participant in your community, in social groups, in the lives of your friends and neighbours and so on. Not all social interactions lead to the creation of social capital, nor are they supposed to. As soon as someone learns that you sought to become friends with them simply in hopes of gaining some economic favour from them, you will quickly be dropped. As a result, most social interactions are not social capital; social capital is stored in a latent form within social relationships and networks, much in the way potential chemical energy is stored in a fire log. Only when a flame is applied and only under the right conditions will a log catch fire and release its energy in flames (although some logs will never burn because they will never achieve the right conditions). Similarly, social capital may reside in many of our social relationships, but only under certain conditions will it be called into action.

As an example, I am not the only one who marvels at how rapidly gasoline prices in urban centres fluctuate. Urban gasoline station operators act as semi-competitive cartels, defying most of the basic principles of economic theory taught in first year university economic courses. One thing that tends to get overlooked when people examine why gas prices fluctuate so wildly is the inherent geographic restrictions on gasoline purchases. If you drive a car to work, you will by necessity make most of your gasoline purchases at a station located somewhere along your route between home and workplace. Consequently, the gas stations vying for your purchase are not competing with all the gas stations in the city (let alone gas stations father beyond); they only compete with the small number that fall along your commute. You won't deliberately drive to a more distant gas station unless there is a significant savings in doing so; but no other gas station is likely to be so foolish as to cut its prices dramatically, since it, too, is competing with a small number of competitors for drivers within its own established transportation networks. In any event, there is a distance-decay factor at work; your car will only travel so far on a tank of gas, and you need to burn gas in order to travel to buy more. Every extra kilometer traveled to purchase gas causes the savings you might realize to decay. So, urban gas stations are endlessly engaged in cat-and-mouse games with their customers, constantly trying to fleece a couple extra cents per litre out of them.

Gas prices in small, remote towns tend not to behave that way, at least not in my own experience. Instead, they tend to fluctuate far less often, with price changes occurring on a weekly basis rather than a daily or hourly one. For example, several times a year I drive 250km out of Ottawa along highways 7 and 41 to do research in a rural, somewhat remote township called Addington Highlands (see www.addington.uottawa.ca). In Addington, there are only about 2,500 people spread out in a series of small villages along 60km of highway, with only a few gas stations to serve them. The price of gas there is sometimes a bit lower than in Ottawa, sometimes a bit higher. On average, I would estimate the price is about 2-3 cents per litre more than at the two stations found near my house in Ottawa, but in Ottawa the price fluctuates rapidly over a much greater range.

Basic economic theory would suggest gas prices should be considerably lower in Ottawa, where there are more gas stations within 5km of my house than there are within all of Addington Highlands, but they are not. Why not? I would suggest it is at least in part due to social capital. In Addington, the gas stations are owned and operated by local residents. The operator is not selling gas to nameless customers; his or her customers are often friends and neighbours. The station operator's current profit on a tank of gas for a Honda Accord is probably less than $2. Any attempt to gouge customers through unpredictable changes in gas prices would net windfall profits of at best a dime or two per tankful - hardly worth the cost to the station operator's relationship with his or her fellow residents. The higher average price of a few cents per litre as compared with the Ottawa gas station simply reflects the added wholesale costs of transporting fuel to remote areas. It changes only when the operator has to purchase a new bulk shipment of fuel from the wholesaler.

In Ottawa, the gas station owner typically does not know his or her customers (the station is typically a self-serve operation staffed with a teenaged employee earning minimum wage). So the Ottawa station operator has no social capital to worry about, and therefore has no social disincentive to prevent him or her from gouging customers.

While I somewhat cavalierly attribute the behaviour of rural gas station operators to social capital, I would caution others to avoid leaping into making too many explanations of human behaviour using the concept. Too often in reading social science research I find that authors who seek to use social capital in explaining some sort of human phenomenon fail to make a clear distinction between social interaction and social capital (I am not the first to observe this; John Harriss and Ben Fine have written excellent if somewhat dense books on how the concept social capital is used in academia). The resulting fuzziness too often implies that most human relationships and behaviours can be explained in mercenary financial terms. I disagree with such an implication. While it may seem that our society has moved in such a direction (particularly urban gas station operators) I still cling to belief that most of what we do is done for reasons that are better explained by evolutionary principles (i.e. the evolution of humans as a species of inherently social and cooperative (if somewhat quarrelsome) primates) rather than economic theory (even if I do subscribe to the fact that social capital really does exist).

On the inequitable geographical distribution of Olympic medals

2008-08-15T02:57:00.007-11:00

There is considerable sweating and hand-wringing in the Canadian media today that, halfway into the Beijing Olympics, Canadian athletes have yet to win a medal. This sort of whining occurs every time the Olympics roll around, more so for the summer games than the winter games, much of it from reporters with little knowledge of the various Olympic sports. It tends to follow months of pre-games chest thumping by Canadian Olympic and amateur sport association bureacrats who were (perhaps) once themselves competitive athletes but now live vicariously through those who now compete. And of course, the federal government helps the hype by kicking in a couple million dollars 18 months before the Games, with the theory that if you can't buy Olympic medals, you can at least try to buy the votes of people who care about winning Olympic medals.

The fact is, the medal counts that appear in this newspaper each day reflect the inequitable distribution of the world's wealth rather than the athletic talents of the world's citizens. After a week of competition, Chinese and American athletes have won the most medals so far, with 4o and 44 respectively (the rankings in the papers tend to place China ahead of the USA because Chinese athletes have won more gold medals). Were this a world where the financial resources available to potential athletes were evenly distributed, Chinese athletes would have won 90 or more medals already, while Americans would have been satisfied with 20.

The rationale is this. At the 2004 Olympics in Athens there were 930 medals awarded (the number will change at Beijing, but because of the potential for ties, we won't know the actual total until it is over). The world's population in 2004 was approximately 6.5 billion. This means that there was one Olympic medal awarded for every 7 million people alive. Let's assume we lived in a world where the necessary financial resources and support to become an Olympic athlete were evenly distributed. Obviously, not everyone has the physiological and biological talent to become an Olympic athlete, but it is reasonable to assume that the physiological potential to win a medal is evenly distributed because there are so many Olympic events rewarding different body types (some favour tall athletes, others strong athletes, others people with endurance, etc).

Using the 1:7 million ratio, if all things were equal, China (with a population of 1.3 billion) could be expected to win a total of 185 medals, while Americans (300 million in all) could expect to win 42. Canada, with paltry 33 million residents, would expect to win between 4 and 5 medals. With many of Canada's strongest competitors competing in the second week of competition, we may still exceed this amount. The most successful country so far is actually Armenia which, with a population of only 3 million would have a less than 50% chance of winning one medal in an equitable world, but has already won 5. India, with a population of 1.1 billion but only one medal so far, is very much under-represented. In fact, the continents of Asia and Africa are disproportionately underrepresented in the Olympic medal counts, while Australasia is disproportionately over-represented. Here's a table showing the top ten medal-winning countries at the end of the first week, plus a few others of interest, ranked according to how much they are exceeding (or falling below) their equitable-world totals:

Country: Equitable world total / Actual after 1 week

Armenia: 0 / 5
Australia: 3 / 20
S. Korea: 7 / 17
France: 9 / 18
Italy: 8-9 / 14
Germany: 12 / 14
USA: 42 / 44
Great Britain: 8-9 / 8
Russia: 20 / 19
Japan: 18 / 13
China: 185 / 40
Canada: 4-5 / 0
Indonesia: 33 / 2
India: 157 / 1

Should Canadian athletes win even one medal in the next couple days, Canada would vault ahead of China in the above rankings. But of course, we live in the "real world", where resources are not equally distributed, and where Australians, Europeans and North Americans have the financial means to ensure they have a greater chance of Olypmic glory than do the majority of the world's population.

Look at things this way: Canadian athletes are performing very well at Beijing, given that Canadian funding for elite athletes is disproportionately low in comparison with other wealthy nations. If Canadian athletes return from Beijing with a pile of personal bests, new Canadian records and a handful of medals (at it seems likely they will) they will have all we could expect of them and more. And our performance would be consitent with that in an equitable world - how very Canadian of us.

Footnote: A variation on this posting appeared in The K-W Record editorial section 16 August 2008.

On cougars and field trips

2008-08-13T06:58:00.002-11:00

On Monday I was at Bon Echo Provinical Park in Eastern Ontario Shield country, scouting out locations and activities for the field course I will be running for my 4th-year Environmental Studies class in September. For those who have not heard of or visited this park, it really is a gem. The park is situated around Lake Mazinaw, a very deep (<150m) lake along the East shore of which rises an impressive 90m cliff face known simply as The Rock. At the base of the rock, just above the water line, are ochre pictographs painted there centuries ago by the ancestors of today's Algonquin people who still reside in the region. Higher up the face are scraggly cedars up to a thousand years old or more.

In a steady drizzle I was making my way along a pathway through some conifers near the park's visitor centre, when I came face to face with a young white-tailed deer doe (Odocoileus virginianus). I tried not to disturb her as I passed within a few feet, but I needn't have worried; she hardly paused in chewing her cud. This was not the first time I have encountered exceedingly tame deer in the park. There is a very large deer population in the general region of the park, and within the park boundaries some deer have clearly lost their instinct to flee humans. Not a terribly good long-term behavioural adaptation for the deer.

Across Ontario, white-tailed deer populations have been very high for a number of years. Part of this is because of a decline in hunting, but a greater cause is the steady abandonment of agricultural lands in many parts of Ontario, and the conversion of cropland to pasture in many other areas. Abandoned fields bordered by newly-regenerating forest make ideal deer habitat. Harsh winters tend to reduce deer populations, but there hasn't been one of those in Ontario for some time. Even last winter, when snow cover on the ground was very high in many parts of Ontario, including the Bon Echo region, temperatures never got terribly cold. Also, the snows did not form a hard crust, which is difficult for spindly-legged deer to traverse but allows natural predators like wolves and coyotes to move more easily.

Which brings me to the subject of cougars (Puma concolor). Officially, cougars do not exist in Eastern Canada, having been eradicated from east of the Great Lakes early in the 20th century. While the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) receives regular reports of cougar sightings (and a persistent rumour exists in rural Ontario that MNR has clandestinely reintroduced cougars), none have been officially confirmed or substantiated with corroborating evidence. Although I have not personally seen one, I have no doubt there are cougars present in the region around Bon Echo Park. I have several reasons for this.

First, hunters I know in the area and whose judgement and veracity I trust have seen cougars on high ground near the Madawaska River, to the north of the Park. A few miles to the west of the park, someone else I know and trust recently had a good look at a cougar on his gravel road. A cougar is not an animal whose size, shape and form allow it to be easily confused with a wolf (Canis lupus) or coyote (Canis latrans), and the nearest specie of large cat still present in large numbers in the eastern forests is the smaller lynx (Lynx canadensis), which has very distinctive markings and shape.

A second reason is that there are no natural impediments to the return of cougars to Ontario. The Bon Echo region's mixed coniferous/deciduous transition forests are part of a vast forest system that spans the northern part of the continent, providing an unbroken geographical link to the cougar's western range. The fisher (Martes pennanti) - another (albeit smaller) predator that had been largely exterminated from the Bon Echo region due to trapping - successfully reintroduced itself, likely spreading from reservoir populations in the Adirondack/Green/ White Mountains through Quebec and back into the area. There's no reason cougars could not do the same given the geographical linkages between its present and former range.

Thirdly, the quantity of potential prey for cougars has probably not been higher in a century. Not only are deer populations so large (and around the park, so stupidly tame), there are large numbers of wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) as well. Turkeys were deliberately reintroduced to Ontario in the 1980s to restore a population that had been exterminated by hunting, and have flourished to the point where many rural Ontarians now find them in their backyard bird feeders. It is not typical for nature to let such a biological imbalance persist for long, and so it is reasonable to assume that wolf and coyote populations will grow and cougars will return, if they haven't done so already.

The fact that cougar sightings in Ontario have been scattered, sporadic and difficult to substantaite is not surprising given the cougar's behavioural patterns. Even in areas of BC and Washington state where cougar denisties are high, encounters between humans and cougars are rare and are typically initiated by the cougar, not the human. With game plentiful and Ontario's rural human population density continuing to slide, there are few reasons for cougars to initiate contacts with humans, and few opportunities for chance encounters. The return of the cougar to eastern Ontario should be seen as a good thing in terms of maintaining the balance and health of the ecosystem. It does present some concerns to rural Ontarians that should not be dismissed. Cougars will occasionally attack livestock (a risk to household incomes) and, in rare instances, will stalk humans (most often children and people of small physical stature, and typically during seasons when game is unusually scarce).

This posting is not meant to frighten or cause unnecessary concern. There are already wolves and bears in Eastern Ontario, and the types of precautions people already take to avoid encounters with those animals will likely suffice to keep us away from cougars. Just the same, in two weeks time I will be taking 22 sons and daughters of other people into the forests of the Bon Echo region for their field study course, and it gives me one more thing to think about and plan for.

On the consumption of wilderness

2008-08-03T07:45:00.006-11:00

Last year in my seminar course for fourth-year environmental studies students, a colleague from the Anthropology department at uOttawa gave a wonderful guest lecture on "the meaning of wilderness". He began with a reading from William Cronon's The Trouble With Wilderness (my 2nd-favourite piece of writing by Cronon, the first being his 1984 book Changes in the Land) and went on to discuss a variety of ways in which "wilderness" has been represented in fiction and non-fiction over time. In a nutshell, the view western society takes of wild places has changed 180 degrees over time. Compare the portrayal of wild places in Grimm's fairy tales (where they are populated by wicked wolves and child-eating witches) to how the wild is represented in Group of Seven paintings, Ansel Adams photographs, the LL Bean catalogue and motion pictures like A River Runs Through It.

In present-day North America, some wild places (i.e. places where there is little visible evidence of human activity) have been elevated to the status of secular temples. Even if we have never visited them, we know the names of such places, and can readily conjure up mental images of what they must be like: Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Algonquin Park, Banff, Yellowstone. Of course these places have become such popular destinations for summer tourists, it's often hard to see the trees for the forest of RVs, and the last place you will find enough solitude to commune with nature will be on the more accessible footpaths, hiking trails or canoe routes. It's often the same thing at our lesser known parks and conservation areas in the summer: crowds of people trying to spend a little time in the Great Outdoors, even if that translates to little more than having a few beers around a campfire or swimming in a lake instead of a chlorinated pool.

I do not begrudge the fact that many of our most famous wild places can be especially crowded with tourists. The fact that the trailhead parking lot at Mount Washington overflows on a July Saturday (as it was last weekend) is, to me, a good thing. The fact that the trailhead parking lot is smaller than the lot at any strip mall is a bad thing. Traffic jams at the entrance to national, state and provincial parks are beautiful things that I wish would happen more often than just summer long weekends. I do not have much time for those who moan about how the most beautiful wild places are becoming overrun and therefore spoiled by large numbers of visitors. You know the type of person I am talking about - every stitch of their clothing is Mountain Hardwear or North Face, and they can't simply hike the slopes of Mount Rainier, but have to summit it at the fastest pace possible.

Yes, large numbers of tourists are invariably accompanied by litter, tailpipe emissions, noise pollution, soil erosion, etc, etc., things that make city-life disagreeable and which seem particularly out of place in the company of mountains, rivers and forests. However, I would like to think that out of every busload of package tourists who set eyes on the Columbia Icefields for the first time, there will be among them a few who will have an epiphany - an epiphany that will make them rethink their lifestyle and patterns of consumption when they return home.

For in the end, the greatest threats to our wild places are not the stray candy-bar wrappers and stray walkers who leave the trail and damage the wildflowers. The greatest threats come from our unbelievably greedy levels of frivolous consumption, our unrestrained use of fossil fuels, and the incessantly growing mountains of plastic refuse our society produces. These behaviours drive the clearance of forests around the world, create massive dead-zones in the oceans and modify atmospheric chemistry. I would gladly choose more litter at the base of the trees in Redwood National Forest if it meant a little less carbon dioxide and methane in the air at their crowns.

Finally, anyone who has visited a popular park in the off-season knows that the wild is always there. The deer retreat a little farther back into the woods on a July long weekend, but in mid-September they will be back browsing the shoulders of park roads. You can't hear the birds for the voices and radios on May 24 weekend, but you can't miss them on Thanksgiving weekend. We do far less harm to the wild going for a walk in the woods on a summer weekend than we do sitting in our homes with the A/C cranked and the TV bleating in the background.

On the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the perils of research by analogue

2008-07-19T16:17:00.012-11:00

In the last week or so there have been a number of reports in the Canadian print media suggesting that the Canadian military has been studying the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s for possible lessons on things to avoid today. There are currently about 2,500 Canadian troops on the ground in Afghanistan, most in the southern part of the country in Kandahar province, as part of the ongoing NATO mission in that country. Yesterday, the 88th Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan since the mission began died when he stepped on an improvised roadside bomb. Are there indeed lessons to be learned from the Soviet occupation that might help Canadian troops do their jobs better, reduce the number of casualties, and/or hasten the completion of the mission?

The study of past case studies to seek out lessons or meaning relevant to current or future cases is a common practice in academic research as well as in military planning. It is often referred to as research by analogue or analogy, and is a method used fairly regularly to study the potential for human systems to adapt to climate change (see M. Glantz 1988 Societal responses to regional climate change: Forecasting by analogy, Westview Press: Boulder). When it comes to predicting future human behaviour, unless one has a crystal ball there are not many methodological tools to choose from. One way is to attempt to create computerized models of human behaviour, such as agent-based modeling. Another is to undertake exercises that generate future scenarios, typically done by organizing a group of 'experts' (i.e. people with specialized knowledge of the problem at hand) and providing them with a framework and set of tools, parameters and instructions to use. And then there is research by analogue. None is perfect; each of these methods has its inherent flaws.

In my own research into the effects of climate change on human migration patterns, I have on several occasions used the 1930s droughts on the North American Great Plains as an analogue for studying how rural populations adapt to drought generally, and to tease out lessons about how future climate change-related droughts may affect the well-being of rural populations and affect human population patterns. It's not a perfect analogue for the present day. In the 1930s, more North Americans lived in rural areas or small communities than in big cities; today it's the opposite. Agricultural production represents a small portion of the overall Canadian and US economies today; back in the 1930s small family farms provided many of the jobs and sources of income in North America. the way we farm has changed considerably; today, large corporate-owned factory farms using intensive methods, chemicals, irrigation, etc increasingly dominate the land. And, interestingly enough, the long severe droughts of the 1930s that dessicated much of the Great Plains, drove hundreds of thousands from their homes and led to people calling it the region the 'Dust Bowl' actually weren't all that severe in comparison with previous droughts that occurred before European farmers came to the West nor in comparison with the type of droughts the West has experienced in the past decade and is likely to continue to experience in coming decades (see the research of Dave Sauchyn at University of Regina for long-term drought records reconstructed from tree rings)) .

So why use the 1930s as an analogue? For starters, it is arguably the worst environmental disaster in North American history, and coincided with the worst economic crisis in living memory, the Great Depression. The combination of economic and environmental hardship threw North American society and the global economy into crisis, and led to a sea change in American politics: Americans abandoned Hoover's laissez-faire market capitalist economy for Roosevelt's interventionist New Deal policies, which permanent change the relationship between the federal government and the citizen. When reviewing the predictions for future climatic conditions due to anthropogenic climate change, it is hard to imagine any scenario where severe environmental changes would not be accompanied be severe economic crisis and necessitate dramatic changes in political, economic and social policies.

In other words, many of the specific details of day-to-day life and of North American socio-economic structures and institutions have changed since the 1930s, but the potential impacts of climate change on human systems will be of a scale we have not seen since the 1930s, so it's worth remembering how our society adapted last time around. When you talk to people who lived through the 1930s (and there are still a fair number of them alive today) you are talking to experts in adaptation to environmental stress. While the specific adaptations they and their families chose to make in the 1930s may not be the types we would use today, the process of choosing courses of action during conditions of environmental stress, the recognition of places where governments could have intervened to reduce the damage to livelihoods and well-being, and the types of actions that need to be taken now to avoid crisis conditions in the first place: these are things those who lived through the 1930s can guide us with.

Which brings me back to the question of whether Canada's military can learn from the Soviet Union's experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s. I suspect there is relatively little of significant value, simply because the similarities between the two cases are systematically and fundamentally different. The Soviet Union's invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was an overt act of expansionist aggression, the idea of which had its origins the early part of the 20th century, when Britain and Russia were engaged in 'The Great Game' of colonialist expansion (see P. Hopkirk 1994. The Great Game, Kodansha Press: New York). Soviet soldiers were despised by the local population, regardless of ethnic group, and rightly so. The Soviet military indiscriminately attacked civilians, looted and vandalized homes and property, and committed any number of acts which we would today label as war crimes. A gripping account of life inside Soviet-occupied Afghanistan can be found in Danziger's Travels (Grafton Books, London: 1987), in which the author travels across the country by land in the company of mujahedin fighters. the chapters on Afghanistan in Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation are also worth a read, although Fisk was never able to 'embed' himself with local fighters the way Nick Danziger did.

Canadian forces are not in Afghanistan for the same reasons as were the Soviets, nor do they conduct themselves in anywhere near the same fashion. Their goal is to provide the security necessary to construct a civil society in which basic human rights are respected and in which basic human needs are met. The Taleban regime which was removed from power 6+ years ago was a despicable regime which the majority of Afghans by all accounts do not miss. Yes, military geographers could likely learn by studying the Soviet experience where mujahedin groups were more likely to launch attacks against Soviet forces, and might gain a few nuggets of information about well-travelled smuggling routes and such things.

Overall, however, I suspect there would be few great lessons to be taken from the Soviet occupation except the obvious one that blatant aggression and the use of military force against civilians are necessarily evil and will rightly stimulate hostility and widespread counter-violence from the population against which such acts are perpetrated. While it is always good practice to leave no stone unturned, and therefore to indeed dedicate some resources to studying the history of Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, I doubt there would be much to learn that would have helped reduce Canadian casualties to date or hasten the end of the mission.

On climate change, rising fuel costs and strawberries

2008-07-10T13:34:00.007-11:00

These are the final days of strawberry season in Ontario, and by now pretty much everyone who craves fresh strawberries most of the year has already gorged themselves on this year's crop, stocked their freezers, and may have made a few pots of jam as well. The strawberry is one of the ever-declining number of crops that defies industrialized production. No one has yet created a strawberry that will ripen properly after it has been picked (and you have to pick them by hand, although crop scientists are close to solving that challenge). You can get varieties that turn red after being picked prematurely, but a strawberry grown in South America or California and air-freighted to Canadian supermarkets in March will never taste the same as one you pick yourself from your local U-pick farm.

My family and I picked a couple buckets worth of strawberries at an Eastern Ontario farm in late June, as soon as it was possible to do so. As is my habit, I spent more time talking to the farmer about his operation than I did filling the buckets. In my academic research I have spent a fair amount of time looking at the potential impacts of climate change on the well-being of rural communities, and I am always keen to hear from farmers how they adapt to the ongoing stresses of farming, of which there are many, climate-related and otherwise.

Climate change research underwent a significant expansion in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a critical mass of data about past and current climatic conditions and a critical mass of computer modeling power converged to create a widely-accepted understanding that we had entered a period of 'global warming' and that human activity was likely the main cause of it.* Scientists using ever-more robust general circulation models (GCMs) were generating future climate scenarios and were starting to wonder about the implications of such scenarios (the "so what?" type of questions). One of the first "so what"questions concerned the implications of climate change for agriculture and food production. Early on, the typical methodology was to start by selecting a particular agricultural region, generate some future average temperature predictions (which GCMs tended to be best at doing) and perhaps some future precipitation predictions (GCMs are less good at this), add some evapotranspiration estimates and calculate how such changes might affect crop yields for common agricultural crops. Invariably, the predictions were that future food crop production would fall due to climate change.

Everyone at the time recognized such "top-down" models of future food production were fairly crude, but you have to start somewhere. A number of scientists in Canada and the US pointed out that these early models completely ignored the role of the farmer. In a landmark 1992 study of climate impacts on corn production in the US midwest, a research team led by William Easterling (now at Penn State) showed how you could generate wildly divergent predictions of future crop yields using the same climate data but altering your assumptions about farmers' behaviour. For example, in their 'dumb farmer' scenario, the research team used the assumption that farmers paid no attention to climatic trends or forecasts, but simply made exactly the same choices each year on what to grow, how to grow it, and so on, and never change even when climatic conditions take a turn for the worst (few if any such farmers exist in reality). Not surprisingly, crop production falls in such a scenario. In their 'smart farmer' scenario, it was assumed farmers not only recognized changes in climatic conditions as they emerged, but always chose the best set of adjustments to farm-level practices to ensure they maximized potential crop yields (again, few such clairvoyant farmers exist). In this scenario, future crop production increased even though the climatic parameters stayed the same as in the first scenario.

The message is that, to understand how climate change will affect future agricultural production, we need to have a better understanding of how agricultural producers and rural communities adapt to changing conditions. When you begin talking to farmers, you quickly learn that they are continually adapting to changes in crop prices, interest rates, farm input costs, fuel costs, consumer preferences, and a whole host of other, non-climatic forces. Farmers are keen watchers of the weather, and will adjust as best they can throughout the year to changes in weather patterns (their options may not always be numerous, it differs significantly from one farm to the next). Farmers are also aware of the potential risks associated with long-term changes in prevailing climatic conditions due to anthropogenic climate change, but it tends not to figure much in their day-to-day decision-making. This is partly because there are so many other changing production factors that need to be managed in the short-run; it's also because the types of information that climate models tend to be good at predicting, such as long-term global average temperatures, are not the types of climate information farmers need or use.

So, if we are to better understand the future impacts of climate change on our food supply, we need to spend more time talking to farmers, to better understand their processes of adaptation and start thinking about how we can provide them with climate change information they can use. And so that is one reason why I spent so much time chatting with the strawberry grower I referred to above (he also happens to generally be an interesting character). There are a number of stresses to which he is adapting at this moment. One is that he can no longer find labourers to pick his strawberries, and he is increasingly reliant on the U-pick client. Few Canadians want to perform back-breaking agricultural work these days, and so our strawberries and other fruit & vegetable crops are increasingly being picked by labourers imported from abroad (often the Caribbean and Central America). Only this particular farmer's strawberry fields are too small in size to justify the costs associated with bringing in foreign workers.

This farmer has left his U-pick prices unchanged from last year, because he doesn't want to discourage city dwellers (who make up most of his clients) who are feeling the heat from rising gasoline prices, and so may be less willing to drive out to the country to pick a few berries. He can do this because many of the farm inputs he is using this year (e.g. fertilizers and chemical sprays) he purchased last fall, before their prices really started to spike. When he goes to replace those items this fall he will face much higher prices, and will have no choice but to offset them by charging higher prices for berries. In the meantime, he has chosen to simply swallow the rising costs of fuel (of which farmers tend to use a lot), which will reduce his net income.

There are a whole bunch of other stresses this farmer told me about, but given the North American public's current obsession with gasoline prices (which Europeans must no doubt find amusing) and with worldwide concern about rising food prices (which is understandably taken seriously by all), I thought I would mention only how he is currently adapting to changing petroleum prices, and how his current adaptation options are influenced by how he previously adapted to changing labour market conditions by concentrating on the U-pick business. Current and future adaptation options are path-dependent; choices we make in the past affect the range of choices we now have or will have available to us in the future. My feeling is that monitoring how well this farmer and others like him navigate the next couple growing seasons will be a pretty good indicator of how likely they are to successfully navigate changing climatic conditions over the longer haul.

*I should note that global warming (i.e. a trend toward increasing average global air temperatures in the lower part of the atmosphere) is but one potential manifestation of anthropogenic climate change, others being increasing sea surface temperatures, changes in mean sea levels, changes in oceanic circulation, changes in ocean chemistry, changes in the spatial & temporal distribution of extreme weather events, changes in the intensity of extreme windstorms, changes in precipitation patterns... I have probably omitted some - feel free to remind me of ones I have missed.

On the relevance of geography

2008-07-03T07:55:00.005-11:00

PhD students are typically required to take at least one course in which they explore the origins of geography, identify some of the key moments in its development as a modern discipline and, ultimately, to consider in its simplest terms, "What is geography?" I suspect students in other disciplines are also expected to do similar things, although I wonder if they spend as much time wrestling with the meaning of their disciplines as do geographers.

It is a bit difficult to find a simple phrase or sentence that captures the broad range of what geographers are or what it is they do. For many Canadians my age, their main knowledge of geography is captured by grade school memories of emptying Laurentien pencil crayons from a plaid pencil case and colouring in outline maps of Canada, each province getting its own colour, each one of us struggling to label the words "Prince Edward Island" on a black oval little bigger than a cookie crumb.

Few of us ever meet someone who describes himself or herself as a geographer. We all know people who describe themselves as accountants, welders, stay-at-home parents, hockey fans, etc., but no geographers. On St. Patrick's Day you will see dozens of people wearing green "Kiss me, I'm Irish" t-shirts (although none of them are actually Irish, and most require vaccinations and a bath before anyone would dream of kissing them). On no day of the year will you encounter a "Kiss me, I'm a geographer" t-shirt.

Even among geographers, there can be a reluctance to identify oneself as simply a geographer. More common is the adjective-geographer, the two most obvious being human geographer and physical geographer, but there are lots of other variations: social geographer, cultural geographer, biogeographer, and so on. This may be due to the fact that geography is such a broad umbrella any number of people may shelter beneath it. In my own department, for example, there is a geographer who studies the distribution of permafrost, another who studies the experience of Latin American immigrants to Canada, and still another who studies psychosocial health and environmental risk perception. They all coexist quite comfortably within the geography department, even if, I suspect, one is not entirely sure what it is that the others do in detail.

So it is that your poor PhD student struggling to complete his or her mandatory theory course must wade through articles that ponder whether human and physical geography are actually separate disciplines; whether geography is actually a discipline at all or can be safely disbanded and its practitioners dispersed to other disciplines (as has been done at many American universities); or whether geography has a rosy future because of its ability to integrate so many diverse ideas and practices into the discipline. Fortunately for the student, there is no right answer to the question "What is Geography?" Many an answer will do, so long as it is given articulately and does not offend the instructor's sensibilities.

My purpose here is not to relive my PhD student days, nor to undertake any serious deconstruction of the meaning of geography or its philosophical underpinnings (it would not likely attract many return readers to this site). Writing a blog creates an imposition for other people; the blogger is in essence saying to the reader "I think what I have to say is so darn important you will want to give up your time that might be better spent on some other activity to read my postings". Blogging is, when you think about it, conceited and a bit arrogant. So now that I have decided to join the conceited and arrogant crowd, two questions become important: what is so useful about having a geographer's perspective on things; and, what sort of a geographer am I that anyone would want my opinion as a geographer.

My short answer to the first question is as follows. Geographers are often good generalists; that is, te nature of the discipline often forces us to acknowledge and become familiar with a range of theories, techniques and practices, even ones we don't ourselves employ. In the regular course of our duties, academic geographers are asked to sit on committees, preside over examinations and carry out administrative responsibilities relating to student research. In doing so we are exposed to everything from geomatic technologies to post-Fordism to aeolian geomorphology. I know what a thelweg is, though I haven't measured one's velocity, and I know what Foucaultian discourse analysis involves, though I have never tried it myself. This ability to understand what's going on beyond one's own potato patch is a skill in rapid decline within academia and elsewhere as well. Many of the sticks and carrots of the university research system lead academics to specialize and then specialize more. Why be just a geographer when you can be a critical-Marxist-social-theorist or a mid-latitude-alpine-geomorphologist? Yet many of the world's most pressing environmental, socio-economic and political challenges require broad-based, multi-pronged responses - exactly the opposite of what academic institutions encourage. It's therefore good, I would suggest, to have a few generalist geographers around the table to keep us all talking to one another.

As for the second question - what sort of a geographer am I - it will hopefully become apparent through this and subsequent postings. Whether or not what I have to say is in any way stimulating and engaging only time will tell. I do hope you, who has persevered through this long first posting, will visit again. I have some ideas I would like to share with you and get your thoughts on, so please do check back again.