Urban Meltdown - The Blog

WISH YOU WERE HERE, A new article I wrote published by Maisonneuve

Clive Doucet — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:19:23 -0400

WISH YOU WERE HERE
WHAT A VACATION IN CUBA CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE GLOBAL ECONOMY.
A new article by Clive Doucet, published by Maisonneuve.

I was sitting on the logia of the old Hotel Nacional in Havana smoking a cigar and looking out towards the Straits of Florida, the sun sinking behind the horizon. It wasn’t hard to see why Hemingway...

Read the complete piece on the Maisonneuve site. (free) www.maisonneuve.org

How refuge and refugee cities become the good and bad sides of the tracks in the 21st century

Clive Doucet — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:58:39 -0400

Cities have always had a good side of the tracks and a bad side. All that has changed is the economic forces which create them. In Elizabethan London, the Lord Chamberlain was worried about the entertainment industry, bear baiting, cock fighting and of course the theatre; not even James Burbage’s theatre company of which William Shakespeare was a co-owner was wanted in his neighbourhood and the Lord Chamberlain was successful in keeping it out for ten years.

In industrial Britain, it was the wind and coal fired furnaces of the midland industries which turned the countryside black that separated the good side of the tracks from the bad. Neighbourhoods downwind from the smoke stacks were poor and those upwind, upscale. The prevailing winds in eastern Canada are from the west and typically you will find the ‘good’ side of town on the west side and the poorer side on the east.

The arrival of the trains which criss-crossed the cities of North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were another way of dividing the comfortable, high quality of life neighbourhoods from the poorer. Keeping trains and their tracks out of the neigbhourhood were all about maintaining the quality of residential life.

It’s comforting to think nothing much has changed since James Burbage and Will Shakespeare’s day, but unfortunately they have. What has changed is the scale and intensity of the definitions. Now entire cities are being relegated to the good and bad side of the tracks.

Climate change is quickly turning the planet’s cities d into complex mosaic of refuge and refugee places. The scale is as populous as humanity, as encompassing as the planet and applies to every city and nation including the richest like Canada. Canadians like to look at New Orleans and think comfortably – well we don’t live on the Gulf of Mexico – we’re not subject to climate change driven hurricanes and (a little less surely) we don’t have any Detriots with its sagging car industry and abandoned neighbourhoods.

Canadians are wrong. The same economic and climate change forces fracturing other nations into have and have not places are present chez nous. There is a fault line somewhere a little west of Thunder Bay. On the western side of the fault line, you will find the richest, fastest growing cities anywhere. Fueled by the Alberta tar sands and Saskatchewan potash, western provinces are sucking up the younger generation of eastern Canada. From small Ontario towns like Welland to entire provinces, the indigenous replacement generation has left town and ‘gone west’.

Sustainability now defines where the good side of the tracks are and where they aren’t. If a city or town has this objective carved into its local administration you can bet you’re in a rich refuge city. You’re in a place like Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington, Vancouver, B.C., or Canmore, Alberta. These are cities worried about slowing or stopping growth entirely, investing in light rail, reducing homelessness to zero, greening streets. Upwind has become sustainability land.

The curious thing I find about the endless articles being published on sustainability is that very few ever concern themselves with outcomes. It is as if sustainability and the lack thereof are abstract, mathematical concepts to be mulled over like e=mc2. What non-sustainability means is that the things are not going to continue as they were. This consequence seems obvious enough for the polar bear which people can grasp will not continue once the ice shelf is no longer there for the bears to hunt seals from, but they can’t seem to grasp that many cities which are the human equivalent of the polar bear’s ice shelf will also not continue.

New Orleans is not continuing. It is shrinking. It will continue to shrink. The same can be said of almost all cities and towns on all continents as climate volatility, water shortages and energy prices make what were ‘normal’ activities more difficult to undertake. This is the next global revolution. It is one we have created together by insisting that nothing change about the way we live on the planet. The result is all cities and all neighbourhoods will eventually become divided into refuge and refugee places

This is what is happening now and is revealed in reports like the United Way’s ‘Poverty by Postal Code. The old mixed income neighbourhoods are fast disappearing in favour of cities being organized into poor neighbourhoods (bad side of the tracks) and rich neighbourhoods (good side of the tracks). Cities are also separating out this way with very rich ones like Vancouver and Victoria at one end and poor ones with declining populations and property values like Sydney N.S. and Windsor, Ontario. Climate change will accelerate this division.

My New Year’s resolution – Don’t buy from polluters

Clive Doucet — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 16:23:34 -0500

Well, it’s been quite a year. There’s been Mr. Mulroney (former Conservative Prime Minister, 1984-1992) with his “I’ve got nothing to hide,” except $225,000 or maybe $300,000, and ‘now I pay the taxes, then I didn’t’. There’s been the Mayor of Ottawa with his “I believe with every fiber of my being I’m innocent,” (after criminal charges were laid for alleged influence pedalling during the election) and John Baird (federal Minister of Environment and Ottawa West-Nepean Member of Parliament) with his ‘now you see it, now you don’t $200 million for Ottawa’s light rail project. And at year end he was in Bali with the ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ international climate change agreement. Does anyone know what they agreed to except more talks?

Looking into 2008, what’s a body to do? Whom do you trust? And what the hell is happening anyway? Where are the good guys? After giving this some thought, I’ve decided that the only person you can trust is yourself. We’re going to have to change the world for the better ourselves without help from our elected officials and I propose to do this by following President Bush’s simple and cogent advice after 9/11. “Just go shopping” – but not power shopping.

Power shopping, for those of you who haven’t tried it, is hitting select malls with a team of friends, cell phones and powering through every store to snag only the lowest price products. Power shopping is about owning the mall’s lost leaders, being fit and having a nearby hotel room to store the loot so you can return to that field of dreams to continue without your arms falling off.

As much as I respect the stamina and planning that goes into such frontal assaults, I’m not suggesting we can solve the world’s dilemmas with power shopping.The military organization that power shopping requires is beyond the abilities of most. I’m suggesting we animate the little known U.N. Resolution #452 or as it is known colloquially, Low Impact Environmental Shopping (LIEP). Low Impact E shopping starts with a global consumer boycott of any nation that has refused to sign on to Kyoto. This will solve the Bali impasse and it won’t take long. Remember boycotting South African wines during apartheid? Nelson Mandela says it worked.

Boycotting American and Chinese products, the planets two largest polluters will work also. To be effective, the boycott doesn’t have to be total. It doesn’t have to be every boat from every port or every product on every shelf, it just has to be big enough and wide enough to start impacting global profit margins, then things will change. Believe me.

Ahh, but what about our own cher pays, le Canada? Politically, we’re in the snivel position of ‘if the big guys won’t play, we’re not going to play either’. How do you boycott your own country? Well we can and in a unique way. Only Canadians can buy apples from around the corner, instead of apples from China. Canadian consumers can easily favour Canadian jurisdictions like Quebec who clearly identify their products and have agreed to be Kyoto compliant.

If you want to get really tough in 2008, buy yourself a bicycle and use it. If you must have a car for the job, find the smallest, carbon burner you can manage. If you really want to be revolutionary, dump the gas guzzler entirely and get yourself an electric car. The Quebec Zen is on the slow side at only 50 klics and hour but there are others which are faster.

The human community has seen revolutions of every stripe, colour and religious flavour. They begin with the highest of hopes and usually finish in the ugliest of traumas. A consumer revolution is entirely peaceful. It requires nothing but spending your money differently. We’ve had the global run by producers for a couple of decades now. Why not try having the world run by consumers? Individuals sans politicians can simply start to behave differently without any international concord and it will change the world.

Think about it. There’s no law saying you have to buy water in plastic bottles, toys from the United States or China. A global, low impact environmental revolution would be unstoppable. No one can force you to buy something from a polluting nation. No one can make you ‘not’ buy a bicycle and get on it. No one can stop you from buying locally and living more simply.

Mr. Bush’s post 9/11 advice was touching a powerful chord in the collective psyche. Purchasing and providing services is fundamental to the human condition. It’s not trivial. Polar bears don’t shop for anything but seals and at this they have been successful for millennia. But take away the ice from which they hunt and suddenly their very existence is threatened.

Human beings are not that different from polar bears. We need our planet to contain ice to cool the planet. We need clean air to breathe and fresh water to drink. The way we shop is determining right now whether the polar bear will have its shelf ice and we, the environmental fundamentals of human existence. Think about it. U.N. Resolution 452. Low Impact Environmental Shopping – coming to homes near you in 2008. Vive la revolution.

Happy New Year,

(Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, there is no U.N. Resolution 452. But why let that stop us.)

When a book is launched

Clive Doucet — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:46:36 -0500

When a book is launched into the world, it takes on, like a child who grows up and leaves home, a life of its own. If the book is lucky, it makes friends in far away places. The letter below is a from a reader in the United States and speaks for itself. I've asked the author if we could share it with you on the Urban Meltdown blog and he has happily agreed. He captures in a direct and powerful way many of the feelings other readers have expressed to me upon reading the book. Creating connections between like minded people can be a powerful tool for changing our city and national governments so that they will serve us better, and I offer the letter to you with this in mind.

Clive

Salutations,
I am almost finished with your book, Urban Meltdown. I stumbled upon it quite by accident, but I don't believe it was any accident. I find myself in agreement with everything you say-as well as enjoying the poetry, personal recollections, and historical comparisons. I wish everyone could read it, but most people don't like reading today, don't like to think, and don't want to be without their cell phones, laptops, or autos for any length of time (they don't even listen to music anymore, unless it is from earphones as a background cacophony to accompany their daily activities).

I live in Cleveland, Ohio; I don't play hockey or skate or speak Francais, but your book was both comforting and startling in its familiarity.

I've been telling people for years that we here in the U.S. are somnambulistically treading the same path as the Roman Empire, but Americans have no historical perspective anymore--not even on Iraq. This is our downfall: we take pride and revel in our ignorance--hubris ad nauseum. I've been telling people for years that 'buying what you want-when you want' does not constitute democracy or liberty. They don't get it, or else they are too overwhelmed paying off debt and trying to make ends meet to care.

As a child, my father and I dug up artifacts from an ancient Erie village site near our home....the Erie erased by the Iroquois, the Iroquois erased by Europeans...the progression of human folly. I also lived in Europe for a few years and became enamored of a slower lifestyle and rail systems.

Cleveland, at one time, had a wonderful inter-urban and streetcar system. My stepfather tells of electric trolley rides for a nickel that would get him across town in 10 minutes. I wish we still had them....

And so much more~we forget we are merely guests on this orb, "living on the bubble".
I just wanted to thank you for the inspiration, I have quoted your book often on my blog/website (http://ezzofmatara.zaadz.com)

May good sense and love prevail over the current state of affairs, if we indeed have time.
blessings and peace,
Eric D. Vogt

We are all Polar bears

Clive Doucet — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:10:43 -0500

A while back I heard on a radio newscast that photographs from space of the Canadian Arctic show that the northwest passage was cleared of ice and open to navigation this summer. This is the first time it’s been open in millenia. A political commentator explained that we can expect increased tension between contending powers, the U.S., Russia and Canada, over the rights to use it. This was followed by a brief clip from an American scientist explaining that models of climate change indicated that this was going to happen, but not for another 30 years.

Think about that last little piece of information. If the arctic melt is 30 years ahead of schedule what does that do for other climate change predictions? What if the rise of the oceans is 30 years ahead of schedule? What if the conversion of the Amazon rain forest into savannah is 30 years ahead of schedule? What impact will 30 years ahead of schedule have on our own survival? Think of the Caribbean hurricanes, which are devastating an entire region each year and the enormous Thames Estuary tide barriers. They were expected to be used once or twice a year, and are now being used once or twice a month. Think of food production.

Ultimately, we’re all Polar bears. We are all clan animals. Human beings no longer fight over hunting territories, but we still kill each other over religious thoughts, national flags and urban perimeters. And like any clan animal, we have a very hard time thinking outside the clan box. I see it around the table at Ottawa City Council every day. Ottawa’s Mayor acts as if the principal problem the city faces is how to reduce staff. It makes perfect sense to him, after all, he made millions running a temp agency which was all about getting non-unionized labour to take the place of unionized labour. The melt of the polar ice cap is of no interest to him.

I don’t blame him or anyone for that matter. Before I was elected if you had told me Polar bears were starving because the ice had become too thin to hunt on, I would have related to that little factoid about as much as reports of the Yangtze River Dolphin becoming extinct. River dolphins in China and Polar bears in the Arctic were just too far away to get my knickers in a twist. I would have responded that it is sad but what can you do? Species come and species go. Unfortunately, there is a very great difference between a species being hunted to extinction, and one disappearing from eco-system change.

The ten years since I was first elected feels like a lifetime ago, yet it’s no more than a heart beat in the life of the planet. But in that short beat, I’ve watched unrelenting climate change descend on Ottawa. My city is much more protected than most. It’s in a temperate, continental clime, far from rising tides, the storms and droughts of the south and the ozone hole of the Arctic at the confluence of three large rivers. We had a delightful summer, not too hot and not too cold with generous rain. But the trend lines are not reassuring.

Each year is warmer than the last. Winter rain storms and sudden thaws have become as frequent as snow storms and deep freezes. Last winter didn’t arrive until January 15. The Rideau Canal, which transforms into a seven kilometre skating rink, only froze for two weeks. In the previous winter the weather jacked around like a yo-yo with mid-season rain storms. No, the trend lines are not good. So the Polar bear is often on my mind. The bear has become a kind of shorthand in my mind for what’s going wrong.

But it’s got to be as distant for my compatriots as the Yangtze dolphin must have been for the Chinese. Why else would we elect a Prime Minister who subsidizes the most polluting form of energy generation known, the Alberta Tar Sands with an accelerated capital cost allowance? And then bring out a rebate for Mom and Pop for buying a small car? This belongs to the old and very successful electoral game of ‘everyone gets what they want’ and ‘no one gets what they need’.

Writing this little essay is largely an exercise in vanity because the folks who elect the various 'oilocracies' which govern Canada and the planet won’t read it. They listen to sound-bites on ‘talk’ radio, watch two-minute ‘news’ clips on T.V., glance at the headlines. All of this conjoins to confound, the way white noise in a café does. Everyone is aware of the noise but no-one’s quite sure what it means. The only way to break through these waves of white noise is to have a simplistic message and a powerful political party behind you. None of which most people have. So life goes on as it always has.

It’s better not to think about the disappearance of the Yangtze River dolphin or the decline of the Polar bear. What’s the point? But like it or not, at the end of the day, we are related. To continue, the Polar bear has to fill his/her stomach and so does the human. We can’t eat Ipods. Like the Polar bear we depend on the bounty of earth and sea, and some constancy in the climate. Our fates and lives are intertwined.

1953 was a big year.

Clive Doucet — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 12:44:58 -0500

I was six years old, almost seven and my father bought me my first guitar. It was not to be the presage of new musical talent which disappointed my father as he thought being a Doucet meant being musical. But something that occurred right across the street would root in my memory and be laden with prescience.

The mother hung a banner across the laneway. It was multicoloured and had balloons flying from it and said ‘WELCOME HOME, DAD.’ I had never seen anything quite like it and could not figure out what it meant. My Dad came home every night and nobody ever made any fuss. That evening a brand new, powder blue, Chevrolet parked in the laneway under the banner. It’s girth and general disposition were most impressive. Something important had happened on our street.

My father didn’t own a car. Dad walked to work and my mother took the streetcar to go shopping. A few months later, my father bought his own car.

When I think back to that banner and the powder blue Chevrolet, it marks for me the beginning of the oil age. Six years later, Ottawa would dismantle one of the largest, oldest and greenest city streetcar systems in the nation. (Ottawa had over 300 kilometers of track, built its own streetcars and powered them with hydro electric power from the Chaudiere Falls.) A year later, in 1960, the city’s principal inter-city rail line would also be torn up and replaced by an expressway. A few years later the city’s central train station itself would be dismantled.

In just seven years, the city shifted from a pedestrian-streetcar dominated neighbourhoods to one that was dependent on the single occupant vehicle. The new Ottawa would be grouped around the expressway, malls and parking lots. Car dependency would increase with each passing year. Nothing has changed. More people, per capita, drive today than ride public transit than did in 1953. This is true across North America.

What in 1953 was considered so special that a wife would welcome the family’s new car home with a banner, has become so omnipresent it is poisoning the planetary habitat for humans. Cars has changed the landscape of continents, the lifestyles and values of nations.

The best measure of the importance of people’s values whether familial or national is what people are prepared to sacrifice to maintain their values. Death in war is often referred to as the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ because it is made in the name of overarching values like ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’.

It’s clear that people are also willing to sacrifice a great deal to drive their cars, starting with their health – asthma, obesity, cancers. To be specific, asthma is the number one reason we admit children to Ottawa city hospitals. Mothers are 15 to 20 per cent more likely to deliver prematurely or have low birth weights’ who live near expressways’ (from a study by Quebec’s Institute of Public Health); traffic is the number one killer of primary school age children; tail pipe emissions are the largest, single contributor to greenhouse gases. I could go on but you get my drift.

City Councils are at ground zero for climate change. Eighty per cent of the greenhouse gases are generated by cities. And it’s clear the electorate values their mobility with cars above the threat of climate change, health or even the cost of running the city. Road construction is entirely subsidized from general taxes, there are zero user charges.

Consider these climate heating decisions by Ottawa city council. We just voted to send a fresh water city pipe 28 kilometers out into the country so that a rural township can ‘grow’ at twice its present rate. The folks who already live there need clean water because the local ground water has been contaminated by farm pesticide runoff.

Out of 23 councillors, there were only five who voted against it. In 2007, Ottawa city council will set a new record for road building – over 200 kilometers. It has approved another road bridge for a cool $50 million. Expansion of public transit has been deferred. Mr. Baird, the Environment Minister and same guy who helped kill light rail, is promising a federal share for another road project on the city’s eastern rural fringes. This one is worth $104 million. It will allow the 13,000 people from Rockland to drive to Ottawa faster, at least until they hit the current east-end road gridlock, which will require even more money to “solve”.

Climate change sprawl is nourished by all levels of government. West of Ottawa, the province is busy building a new divided highway from distant towns like Carleton Place, (Cost estimate in 2006 $106 million for 16,000 commuters) that will make commuting even longer distances easier than ever. Nothing new here. This has been going on since 1953 and is typical of any other city you care to mention.

Federally, the government has 3.2 billion dollars to purchase and service four planes to ferry tanks to and from Afghanistan, a 12 billion dollar surplus, but no national public transit program (the only G-8 country as such). Climate change ain’t black magic folks. The sprawl landscape, the number of vehicles on the roads, the hotter summers, warmer winters, declining water reserves, it’s coming from ‘we the people’, from our values and from the governments we elect.

Stop complaining. Hang out the banners.

Mr Harper’s greatest fear

Clive Doucet — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 22:38:20 -0400

There’s only one thing that Stephen Harper fears and it’s not Stephane Dion, Jack Layton, Gilles Duceppe or Elizabeth May. He welcomes their opposition to ‘his’ government. The press doesn’t cause him much concern either. He’s the first federal leader in many a year who doesn’t much care about whether his name or photograph are in the press. This gives him a tremendous edge over all of his opponents and the press itself. He meets with both on his own time and his own terms. As his political opponents and the Ottawa press corps are learning, he makes the wily old MacKenzie-King (conscription if necessary but not necessarily conscription) look like a slow learner.

Mr. Harper’s greatest fear, the greatest threat to his hegemony, is electoral reform.

Otherwise Mr. Harper is close to invulnerable. The Prime Minister is invulnerable because he doesn’t need a majority of Canadian votes to rule as a majority. All he needs is 38 to 40 percent and this shouldn’t be hard to attain. Thirty-eight percent is close to the traditional, core Conservative base i.e. those folks who vote C because Dad did. The six out of ten Canadians opposing Mr. Harper are inconsequential because they are split between the other parties, so the more the merrier. Bring on the Greens, please.

A new election would offer Canadians the choice of a reconfigured but a similarly, divided minority Parliament or a slim Harper majority. The former is no more palatable to opposition leaders than the present one and the latter is infinitely less so. No surprise that another election is being quietly resisted by Messieurs Dion, Layton and Duceppe. The only exception is Elizabeth May and the Greens who have no seats in Parliament therefore nothing to lose – not that this matters to Mr. Harper either.

Electoral reform was part of the Tory platform in the last election. It was part of the Liberal and New Democrat platform. All the major parties agree Canadians should be able to elect parliaments that more fairly reflect their political preferences, yet mysteriously electoral reform as ‘an issue’ has evaporated.

But Mr. Harper has been at work. The venerable Law Reform Commission which spent two years preparing a multi-volume report on federal electoral reform and which received much favorable attention (it recommended a mixed system of proportional representation) has been disbanded by the Prime Minister. It doesn’t exist any longer. Now that’s thinking ahead of the curve. Without any federal champion, electoral reform has sunk back into the familiar bromides of reorganizing the House of Commons Committee structure (again) and the election of Senators by region (again), both of which Mr. Harper vigorously supports. Both distract from the issue and do nothing to correct the seat imbalance in the House between how people vote, and the government they get. If you’re Mr. Harper, this has to be a happy thought.

In the coming election, the opposing parties will try to expose ‘the hidden agenda’ of Mr. Harper, just as they did in the last election. This is a waste of time because Mr. Harper doesn’t have a ‘hidden agenda’. The PM is clear about what he stands for - ‘protecting’ the nation from terrorists through incarceration without public charges or trials (anyone who doesn’t is ‘soft on terror’); tax cuts, reduced common services e.g. no national day care and a robust military. They were all in his platform and he delivered. What’s hidden?

The problem is not the transparency of the agenda. The problem is the majority of Canadians didn’t vote for it. Sixty per cent of Canadians voted for the kind of justice system that has made Canada renowned for fairness and judged to be a ‘positive’ international influence, not a negative one by our ‘tough on terror’ neighbours to the south.

The best thing that Prime Minister Harper has done for Canadian public security hasn’t been to truck brave young men to Kaladar but to admit it was a mistake to have allowed Mr. Arar to be confined in a Syrian torture chamber, offer a public apology and confer a monetary settlement on him. This sent out a clarion call to all that Canada was a nation that was honest and unafraid to declare from the highest public podium that its police forces and government were not graced with papal infallibility; that we could make a mistake and had the courage to admit it.

Curiously, Mr. Harper can’t see the connection between what happened to Mr Arar and his desire for ‘special laws’ to sequester possible terrorists without charge or public legal process. The one is a product of the other. Unfortunately, the disconnection isn’t restricted to the consequences of removing ancient, individual liberties that ‘special laws’ create for ‘special offenders’ create. The public-legal-political disconnect is rooted more generally and more profoundly in our present electoral system; which sustains governments that are based on who they exclude as much as who they include; and allows our judicial system to be manipulated for partisan political end.

Mr. Harper is easily the most adroit politician to grace the Canadian federal scene in a many a year, but Canada needs more than habile manipulators of ‘wedge politics’ and ‘the vote split’. We need a prime minister who is prepared to govern based on shared issues and true majorities which includes those who live in big cities, rural Canada and have green philosophies; but to do this we need an electoral system supple enough to respond to the complexities of the 21st century.

WOW! $40 bucks!

Clive Doucet — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 20:03:10 -0400

Ever since I heard the good news (federal budget surplus $13 billion – $750 million tax cut coming) I’ve been wondering what I’m going to do with my $40 federal tax rebate ($750M divided by 32M Canadians). To make it worthwhile, after all $40 will only go so far, it should be spent on something that I won’t be able to do easily in, say ten years from now.

How about parking under a city bridge with a good coffee and a little, deli lunch? Something really tasty- a slice of Roquefort, baguette, green salad, espresso. My rebate should cover this. Ottawa is a city of rivers, canals and creeks and it has a lot of bridges, more than 300. Given our current rate of repair, parking under them in 10 years is going to be a hazardous activity – so I should take advantage of it now.

I could choose the Dunbar Bridge where we have a makeshift, hip-hop park, some fabulous wall murals and an undulating, reflection of the bridge pillars on the water. Upstream there are dancing rapids and downstream royal swans sail. Then again, I could go right downtown and choose an urban ‘under the bridge’ experience where buskers and tourist boat traffic connect with the eccentric and the homeless make for interesting moments.

I know what you’re thinking - this city councillor is pathetic. There’s got to be a better way to spend my 40 dollars. But let’s face it; $40 is not going to get me a ship cruise across the Northwest Passage and why rush? The Arctic passage will be even more navigable in ten years, not less. There’s no need to check it off my ‘must do’ list today, although it sounds like polar bear sightings are going to get rarer.

Maybe I’ll buy a full colour photograph of a polar bear and have it framed for my office. Because there’s some question as to whether these old carnivores are still going to be paddling around the Arctic ten years from now. Yes, a really good, colour photograph of a polar bear sounds like a wise investment. Sadly, I discovered $40 will not buy me the photograph and the frame. Perhaps I could send the $40 back to the government to help them out with the ‘endangered species’ program that they recently cut, but it won’t go far there either. Protecting endangered species costs way more. Scratch that off my list.

Sending it back to the government is contrary to the spirit of the rebate. It’s about me; the government is returning the money for me to use, not save endangered species. Nonetheless there’s nothing wrong with noble impulses if not for bears then for people. My daughter and son-in-law are spending thousands for child care, I’ll pass along my $40 to them. Forty dollars should almost cover one day for ‘le petit Felix’ who is the apple of my eye. Yes, that sounds like an excellent idea. Although, it does make you wonder, the $40 the government is so generously re-distributing across Canada adds up to a cool $725 million or thereabouts. Surely that would have gone a long way to pay for a national day care program?

No, my daughter would recognize my $40 for what it is - another covert political statement from her father. No, I’ll have to think of something else. Felix’s second birthday is coming up. They want one of those push trikes, the ones with stick at the back that you can push along so the child feels he’s really pedaling but actually Mum or Dad is briskly doing the work from behind. Yes, that will do the trick. I went down to my local toy store to prospect for the purchase and found a brightly, coloured, very handsome trike, with a sticker price $145. Yupe, $145. Scratch the trike.

Books would be good. For $40, I could get Felix some books, but then again, he will be reading by himself in ten years and the idea behind my $40 purchase was to spend it on something that I or he won’t be able to do in ten years given climate change and the general deterioration of civic infrastructure – and the planet. What about skating? Skating is becoming an indoor activity as outdoor ice disappears. Forty dollars will rent me some ice time at a city arena, if I can convince some of my friends to pony up their share of the government rebate. I call around and find I’ve got the friends and dollars required. It’s a go!

Unfortunately, the city has no ice time available. The young woman tells me the arenas are all booked up for 2007/2008.

I guess its back to parking under the bridge.

Books and Ideas

Clive Doucet — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:21:53 -0400

Books are like people in an airport. They come in all sizes, shapes and colours, arrive and depart by the thousands. Writers of books are frequently asked “now ‘which book influenced you the most?” Or “what is your favourite book?” The question is always irritating on many levels, not the least of it is the absurdity for it assumes it is possible to reduce the thousands of books that have traveled with you to one or two ‘essentials’ and that somehow the rest don’t quite count. Just as an airport would be an empty building without passengers, it is the same way with literature and books. Books, the whole raucous, pushing, howling, ugly, beautiful, whining, sniveling, laughing, smiling, romantic, historical, terrible astonishing pile of them are needed to give meaning to a reading life.

Each one has its own important, irreplaceable place and together form the library of life. I look down the bookcases of memory and remember the adventure of my childhood. They are adventure books about children being brave and resourceful without an adult in sight. Some of them even have the word ‘adventure’ in the title. Enid Blyton wrote a whole series with the word ‘adventure’ smack in the middle of the title, The Castle of Adventure, The Mountain of Adventure and so on. I loved them all and read them until my eyes grew sore and my body stiff from stillness.

Down another bookcase, there are the first books where I discovered Acadie. La Sagouine, (the Washerwoman) by Antonine Maillet, Mourrir a Scoudouc (Death at Scoudouc) by Hermeningilde Chiasson made me reflect on and understand the experiences and feelings of my grandfather and grandmother were not isolated but belonged to the history of a people. But these are only small corners of my airport of books.

Two of the books which preoccupy me right now are as different again as Enid Blyton is from Antonine Maillet. Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas and The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Both authors are gone. Lewis Thomas in 1993 and Jane Jacobs recently. Lives of a Cell was first published as a series of essays in the New England Journal of Medicine between 1971 and 1973; The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961.

I’ve been wondering why these two books have suddenly jumped out of the passing crowd to remind me that they exist. There’s always a reason. Reading doesn’t happen by accident and usually has as much to do with what’s happening in the world as what’s happening between the pages.

Lewis Thomas begins his book with this small, elegant statement about man’s exalted place in the natural world. “…it is an illusion to think there is anything fragile about the life of the earth, surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia.”

The planetary paradigm shift which confronts us at the beginning of the 21st century is summed up in those few words. The great empires of human civilization, from Aztec to Soviet to American, have always behaved as if the natural world existed in one immutable place and the human existed in another. This has been the dominant view since someone penned the Genesis section of the Bible and remains so today in the halls of both the White House and the House of Commons.

Lewis Thomas, in the space of 148 pages, demolishes the idea without every exhibiting anything more violent than the Christian virtues of gentleness, tolerance and love. Jane Jacobs holds the same opinion on the intimate and irrevocable connections of the natural world to the human. Her perspective, however, is not from the mitochondria but from a much more familiar one, the lives of people and their greatest habitations, cities. Her thesis expressed in Death and Life... is the same as that of Thomas at the cellular level. Human beings, if they wish to continue, need to rethink how they live.

Unlike Thomas who died before the extent and power of the climate crisis presently upon us had been revealed. Jacobs died in full and complete awareness as her last book Dark Age Ahead makes clear. But what makes Lives of a Cell and Death and Life... so attractive is that they are not glum. They vibrate with confidence. Both are written with the calm and clear assurance of writers at the height of their physical and intellectual powers. Jacobs has a more pedestrian style and writes from a social science perspective rather than a physical but each constructs and deconstructs the world around them with the aplomb of a Charles Dickens taking dictation from God.

It is this vast confidence that draws me to the books. So often today, books dealing with the biological and social consequences of humanity’s ‘me first’ approach to dealing with all other living species reek with the wail of Cassandra. These books are graced with such intelligence, yet unflinching confrontation of reality that it is impossible not to feel, as Thomas and Jacobs must have when they first wrote them, that humans can overcome anything. They just need to think a little.

This is a good thing to feel at a time when great empires are fracturing and climate change headlines bark from the front pages of our newspapers.

The Middle Ages survive into the 21st century

Clive Doucet — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 18:54:17 -0400

In 1888, the United States Congress ratified the Geneva Convention on the insistence of Clara Barton, an American who had become a one woman national and international lobby for the fair treatment of prisoners of war. She persuaded Congress through the force of her own bright personality and because the American Civil War had made many realize that the humane treatment of prisoners was essential to forging any lasting peace.

The United States respected the Geneva Convention through two World Wars and in turn enjoyed the respect of its opponents with defeated ‘enemies’ preferring Allied prison camps to Stalin’s interpretation of the Geneva Convention. Clara Barton’s work and the American signature on the Geneva Convention was the beginning of a long, slow journey the United States Congress began towards becoming a world leader in international governance designed to create norms of civility and justice between nations.

American men and women continued to distinguish themselves in this way. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the U.N. committee which created and piloted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNHR) through working and standing committees to the floor of the U.N.’s General Assembly. On December 10th 1948, the first ever world agreement on fundamental human rights was achieved.

The 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) were quickly accepted as a summary of the basic freedoms, rights and obligations citizens of all nations should enjoy, and just as importantly how the relations between nations should be ordered. Article 28 states: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this declaration can be fully realized.”

In 1961, for this and many other accomplishments, Eleanor Roosevelt was nominated by President Kennedy for the Nobel Peace Prize. Eleanor Roosevelt would not become a Nobel laureate but just five years later Martin Luther King would for his crusade ‘to fully realize’ the principles the Universal Declaration of Human Rights espoused.

A more just and caring world has been a tapestry created by many hands and many of them have been American. The American people and their national leaders have exhibited a yeasty combination of battle toughness, generosity and fairness rarely seen among the community of nations. A succession of Presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy were respected and admired around the world.

What the hell happened? The temptation is to play the blame game, but it isn’t useful. We need to search more profoundly to understand the American transformation from a world leader of a new ‘civil’ international order to the world leader of a new military order – with troops, not diplomats leading the charge. A good place to start would be the transformation of the United Nations from the final arbiter of international justice into a Worldwide Welfare Agency, (WWA) specializing in refugee camps.

The extent of the American withdrawal from the U.N. as an international justice agency should be more frequently in the press if for no other reason than it is so astonishing. The United States now runs prisoner of war camps in contravention of the Geneva Convention using legalese to defeat both the letter and the spirit of that essential convention. President Bush frequently describes himself as a ‘war’ President, but with whom is he at war? How can only one ‘side’ be at war and the other ‘side’ not? Through what logical alchemy can this occur?

Consider that the United Nations was created after World War II to prevent the bully aggression of any state against another state from exploding into a more generalized, unregulated conflict as both the First and Second Wars had. Yet, both the bombing of Yugoslavia and the invasion of Iraq were unleashed without U.N. agreement or sanction. In fact, it was the United States which led both invasions. Consider that the United States will not recognize the jurisdiction of the World Court or sign the Kyoto Accord.

I could go on, but the point worth emphasizing is: ‘What impetus can there be for nations to search out accommodations when disagreeing over religion, justice, boundaries, the sharing of resources or the reduction of greenhouse gases if there is no governance structure in place that is respected by the most powerful nations? We are back to Jean de la Fontaine’s prescription for social order, ‘might makes right’. This is where the strongest nation on the planet is pushing humanity today. It is back to a medieval concept of government.

Kurt Vonnegut must be looking down and smiling for he would affirm again that there is nothing written in the sky that says the 21st century will be any better than the 20th. Indeed, it may be much worse. But let us imagine for a moment that we will be moving forward and when I say ‘we’ I mean all the nations of the planet. Surely this advance must start with the strongest, richest nations respecting and supporting the rule of international law?