Skip to main content

IRIS Director Blog

Climbing the CN Tower for WWF Canada

Published by

My daughter and I were in the first group of 10 climbers at 06:00 this morning, and we shaved a minute off our previous time for climbing the CN tower. For me, the best thing about the climb is the inspiring art, painted by school children in the Greater Toronto Area, that decorates the stairwells and the atrium where hundreds of people patiently line up (some for hours), for a chance to fundraise for World Wildlife Fund Canada, by climbing 144 flights for a total of 1776 stairs. This year, my daughter's entire class contributed paintings. Looking for the work of children that I know encouraged us to keep climbing. My favourite of the ones that we recognized today (other than my daughter's arctic fox, naturally), is the one that says "thoughts are not enough, the importance is action". Um, I also liked "climb the CN tower, burn your breakfast."

 

Sustainability, the Concorde Fallacy and mechanical pencils

Published by

Sometimes I wonder if a lot of unsustainable human behaviour is an example of the Concorde Fallacy, which is basically the idea that "we keep on throwing good money away after bad". We North American humans just seem to keep carrying on with our wasteful behaviours simply because we did them before. Why do people keep driving gas guzzling sport utility vehicles when there's plenty of evidence that they are not the safest vehicles on the road? There's actually lots of research into this kind of behaviour, including that described by the New Scientist article about why people should call it quits but don't.

I have done a lot of field work in a lot of remote places - including the shores of Hudson Bay, in what is now Wapusk National Park, and the main island of the St. Kilda archipelago, the wettest and windiest place in Britain. If there is one thing I absolutely hate in the field, it's mechanical pencils. A basic lead (graphite) pencil and a sharpener are much more reliable for field data notes (and btw NEVER write your field notes in ink - it will run if they get wet).

I found myself hating mechanical pencils again last week. It was the first writing tool that I grabbed for writing a grocery list. Although I never flew on the fabulously expensive Concorde supersonic jet, we somehow inherited one of the "loot" bags that the passengers received! It contained stuff like a cashmere scarf and a posh mechanical pencil - that simply doesn't work properly, but I couldn't bear to throw it away. Well, I finally threw this one out, after I photographed it. Of course, I felt guilty about disposing of it, and would welcome ideas for recycling mechanical pencils and disposable pens.

To ecologists and evolutionary biologists, the Concorde is famous as the inspiration for the term "Concorde Fallacy" coined by Prof. Richard Dawkins. The cost of developing the Concorde Aircraft was enormous, but the British and French governments kept on supporting it to justify past investments (but check out the British Airways "the taxpayers recouped the investment - really they did", site). Dawkin's used it to describe the tendency of some animals to carry on investing in an activity, simply because they have invested a lot in it in the past. Of course, the reasons for this kind of behaviour usually turn out to be rather complex. When I think of unsustainable behaviour in this context, it puts the challenge facing humanity in a sobering context.

Dawn Bazely, very happy to not be on St. Kilda in early April.

Sociology prof., Kathy Bischoping’s first play a success

Published by

The last two performances of York Sociology Prof. Kathy Bischoping's new play, The Demise of Ordinary Objects, are today and tomorrow at HUB14 Studio Theatre at Bathurst and Queen. The company performing the play is draft89. While this definitely counts as an avant-garde theatre experience for me (I don't get out much), it is a thought-provoking and inspiring play that is well worth checking out as an example of how interdisciplinarity can be energized and dramatized.

The play looks at how our society deals with life cycles, and in particular the end of the life span of all kinds of things - from disposable coffee cups to to people. Kathy is a good friend and colleague, and I was thrilled to learn that her sabbatical includes having her first play produced. The collective that she is working with includes graduates of York's theatre programme. While her sociological research and teaching includes Holocaust studies, and survey methods, and she has won the University Teaching Award, she also shares a huge interest with me in sustainability. In particular, that having to do with reducing one's ecological footprint, by inventive recycling and growing and canning one's own vegetables. Her play reflects these varied interests and experiences, and there are many comments about life cycles that are directly related to issues of sustainability. In sustainability, full life cycle assessment or cradle-to-grave analysis looks at the total amount of energy and resources that it takes to produce some object or product. It embodies the concepts inherent in full-cost economic accounting (and here, I have done the unthinkable for a professor and linked to a Wikipedia webpage - so I hope that all of the students who lost marks for referencing these pages in their research essays do not come back to haunt me!).

Dawn Bazely

Trash Talk today, on CBC’s The Current, with MP Bob Mills

Published by

[photopress:Capetown_car1.jpg,thumb,alignright][photopress:Captetown_car2.jpg,thumb,alignright]Wow! Bob Mills knows about garbage, land-fill, incineration and gasification, and he is passionate about them. His interview with Anna Maria Tremonti was really interesting. In the last few years, I spent 4 months of sabbatical and research time in Sweden, so I am well aware of what various European countries are doing with things like co-generation around incineration and mining of garbage dumps. The "con" position, to the gasification technology being expounded by Bob Mills, was provided by Clarissa Morawski, the principal of CM Consulting.

Bob Mills and his wife aren't the only people with a passion for recycling and garbage. In my Applied Plant Ecology and graduate courses, students invariably do seminars and papers on garbage, e-waste, etc. and, on my holidays, I always look out for how people deal with garbage and recycling.

In Cape Town, South Africa, you know that garbage is a valued resource for the very poor, who live in the shanties of the Cape Flats, because they turn it into unbelievable art, that they sell to tourists. Here's a true piece of modern, African art, that I bought from a street vendor in 2004. He and his family had walked into South Africa from neighbouring Zimbabwe, to escape the troubles. He did not make this, he was merely the seller, but I did not bargain with him for any of what I bought (and I do know how to bargain). This is a 15 cm long model of a VW Beetle. It's made from an aerosol can of bug spray. The wheels are made from bottle caps of Schweppes sparkling lemon, and Golden Pilsner beer. I doubt whether the average Canadian who, in 2002, was estimated to have produced 383 kg of residential solid waste, could be this creative with their garbage.

Dawn R. Bazely

[photopress:capetown_car3.jpg,full,centered]

Excellent Water Articles in today’s Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Mag

Published by

There are 3 excellent articles by Andrew Nikiforuk, John Lorinc, and Eric Reguly, plus a book review of Dry Spring by Chris Wood, in this morning's business mag. They all discuss how demands for water in Canada (and the world) are impacting the environment, business and ordinary people. It's well worth the price of today's newspaper (And, no, I am not being paid by the Globe to promote their paper!). The first, Liquid Asset, by Andrew Nikiforuk, is a great follow-up to the recent doc about the Tar Sands, aired on CBC. If you haven't yet read Vandana Shiva, Maude Barlow and Marq de Villiers, these articles will get you up to speed on the issues, fast.

When we began collaborating with colleagues from the National University of Mongolia, I was really struck by how little water Prof. Sonya Nergui used when she washed her hands in the sink at my house! Water conservation and respect for water is utterly ingrained in her culture. Canadians can learn an awful lot about water conservation from our Mongolian friends and colleagues.

What’s your March Break ecological footprint?

Published by

At current rates of resource consumption, we need at least 2 more planet earths to sustain our North American lifestyles. The NGO, Learning for a Sustainable Future (LSF), develops sustainability curriculum content for schools across the country, and since their offices are in IRIS, I am constantly awed by their hard work and innovation. Now, I have two school-aged children, and therefore, some first hand experience through the homework that I see, of which sustainability issues are being integrated into classrooms and which aren't. I recently chatted with LSF Director, Pam Schwartzberg, about the fact that the biggest contributing factor to the ecological footprint of students in many Ontario schools is likely to be any family vacations that involve airplane travel. So, I wondered what sustainability education was doing to address this. Now it's one thing to vermicompost in class, but what would happen if little Johnny or Jane, in Grade 5, demanded that their March Break ski/Florida etc. vacation be cancelled, in order to reduce their family carbon emissions? And how likely is this to happen? I certainly hope that a conversation about the relative ecological footprint of local travel versus flying (or, if doing that, an understanding of how to purchase reliable carbon offsets) could be stimulated through current sustainability school curricula.

My older daughter and husband have flown for March Break and I am of the opinion that they should carbon offset their flights. In contrast, my March Break involved a rather more local trip to Niagara Falls. Given the limited outdoor options that exist in Niagara Falls in March, I decided to become a sustainability detective with my younger daughter ("BORING", she told me), and to search for evidence of our reduced holiday footprint. I was delighted to find that every toilet I inspected in both of the Niagara Falls hotels that we visited was a low-flow loo. The worst aspect of the trip, from an ecological footprint perspective, were the "meal-deal" components of the hotel package, which seemed to consist of huge meals and huge portions of steak. I couldn't eat it, and it certainly made me feel guilty, especially when one considers what most families around the world get to eat in one week (What the World Eats - Time). Check out this photo of our doggie bag - at least 8 oz of uneaten steak leftover from a family meal for 3 adults and 1 child. But, there were veggies, although simply boiling them did not make them very appetizing. Gordon Ramsay would not have been impressed.

I would love to see the emergence of challenges, in which, following classroom and school-wide calculations of ecological footprints, entire schools or classes compete to reduce their collective footprint. It would also be fascinating to use these calculations to explore the nature of the relationship between overall prosperity/family income level of the school population with the mean ecological footprint of a student in the school. I predict that the same kind of trend that we see globally, would emerge at local scales, with students in wealthier Toronto neighbourhoods having much higher ecological footprints than their counterparts in lower income neighbourhoods. Dawn Bazely

Earth Hour 2008

Published by

Next Saturday, 29th March, is Earth Hour, when, at 8 pm, the Toronto Star and World Wildlife Fund Canada is asking Canadians to turn off the lights for an hour. Various events are being organized by York students (we have asked them to let us know, so that we can let YOU know on this website). My husband, has, naturally, signed up our family and I am trying to figure out how we can take this further... What do we do as a family, once the lights, the computers, the tv (maybe my fridge?) and other electrical equipment, is all unplugged? Will we walk to our local park and look at the stars, free from light pollution? Since there has been massive sign-up in Toronto, I expect it to be quite dark. What are you doing for Earth Hour?

Dawn Bazely

Yesterday was World Water Day

Published by

What with Earth Hour and Earth Day coming up and International Women's day come and gone, I totally forgot about World Water Day. But, last year, 2007, York University students, led by Korice Moir, who was helped by Roberta Hawkins (see the gender and water poster), and Paul Marmer, the 3 Master's students, who went to Mongolia for 3 months in 2006, as part of our Sustainable Water in Mongolia project, organized a great event with fellow Faculty of Environmental Studies students. Here are a few pictures. We had a hike around the campus (see our former Campus Planner, and IRIS exec. member, Andrew Wilson, in the central picture at the bottom) and learned about lost rivers, and the First Nations land claim that still remains to be settled. There were also posters and displays in Vari Hall and students taste-tested the difference between tap and bottled water (top photo).

[photopress:world_water_day4.jpg,thumb,alignright] [photopress:world_water_day1.jpg,thumb,alignright] [photopress:world_water_day3.jpg,thumb,alignright]

Alberta Tar Sands documentary airs on CBC tonight

Published by

A new documentary "Tar Sands, The Selling of Alberta" commissioned by the CBC, will be on channel 5 Toronto, tonight at 9 pm. In an interview on The Hour last night, the filmaker, Peter Raymont, pointed out that Fort McMurray, in Alberta, is the third largest Newfoundland city in Canada (that's an indication of the extent of within-Canada migration!).

For those of you who haven't paid much attention to exactly what the fuss about the Tar Sands is, imagine that you take a can of motor oil, walk over to your child's sand box (or the local park's kiddie sand box!), pour the oil into the sand, and mix it around. Then, someone tells you that you need to get that oil off of that sand and back into the can! That is the challenge with the Tar Sands - it's a huge fossil fuel reserve, but the oil is very difficult and energetically expensive to extract. When it comes to carbon emissions, the cost of extracting the oil is huge. The documentary explores the social impacts and geopolitics of this issue, moreso than the environmental aspects. But, all of these aspects are directly linked when it comes to sustainability. Highly recommended viewing.

Dawn Bazely

March 8th – International Women’s Day

Published by

When I spent time in Tromsø University, Norway, in 2005 and 2006, developing a joint International Polar Year project with my colleagues there, I was very lucky to have my office in the Peace Studies Centre. While this very modern building reminded me of a Dalek from Dr. Who, simply sitting there, got me thinking about and paying attention to recent Nobel Prize winners (this is me with the bust of Mahatma Gandhi outside the Centre - ironically, he never won the Nobel Peace Prize, though he was nominated. I was so inspired by this bronze bust that I wrote an essay about Busts of Gandhi in Toronto and Norway).
[photopress:dawn_gandhi.jpg,full,centered]
I was particularly inspired by the story of Wangari Maathai, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her work on women’s rights and environmental protection in Kenya. Wangari Mathai is a feminist, environmentalist and human rights activist, who has, in the past, been jailed for speaking out. Her autobiography, Unbowed, is a fascinating read, and I highly recommend it. Women’s rights - access to education, political office, and simply basic human security - are as much an issue today as when I was learning about them, while growing up, attending all-girls schools, and reading authors like Germaine Greer. I am delighted with the support that the Nobel Foundation gives to women - visit their web site today.

css.php