A new report from NRCAN indicates that the massive number of tree deaths in western Canada resulting from mountain pine beetle outbreaks, is driving carbon emissions on a huge scale. Many people blithely assume that our Canadian managed forests will be a great help in sequestering carbon (and reducing greenhouse gases) but this is not always the case. NRCAN researchers estimate that the amount of carbon dioxide that will not be sequestered: (1) because trees aren't growing, and (2) because decaying trees eventually produce CO2, will be similar to that resulting from Canada's annual forest fires. They recommend that this should be accounted for in future climate models. The beetle is spreading due to warmer winters (the bugs die in cold winters). This is an example of how a warmer climate is triggering outbreaks of pests and pathogens, which in turn are causing tree death and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. If you don't know what's been going on for years now in BC, check out Patrick White's excellent article on the mountain pine beetle in the Walrus magazine (April 2007). dawn bazely
Blogs
Earth Day: Five Minutes After Midnight
I must admit, it's been years since I celebrated Earth Day (pictured to the right laying out an endangered species graveyard on the Cornell University Arts Quad in 1994). Back in the early nineties, I participated in Earth Day preparations throughout high school and college. Those were the heady days of the Rio Summit, the Brundtland Report, and TV specials such as After the Warming that highlighted the potential impact of global warming through the next few decades. Environmental concerns were going to be the next big thing as the Berlin Wall crumbled, or so we thought.
Amazingly, it's After the Warming that starkly reminds me how much time has been wasted on the climate change front. From its broadcast to the Kyoto Treaty, eight years elapsed. Four more years would pass for Canada to officially ratify the treaty, and four more for Canada to all but pull out of the deal, leaving the entire regime in shambles. Despite the increasing sophistication and dire nature of the warnings emanating from the scientific community, we have seen political stagnation and regression as economic growth and globalization dominated the 1990s, followed by war and terrorism in the 2000s. Environmental concerns largely fell by the wayside, and even now, anything besides climate change and energy is all but ignored in the media.
As such, I cannot but feel wary of the recent resurgence of green issues in the body politic. I am also wary of the increasingly corporate and commercial edge of this new environmentalism as it substitutes individual consumer choices for the broader transformational change necessary to harmonize human civilization with the urgency of biosphere survival. My fear is that this upsurge of interest may quickly dissipate, leaving us next time to muddle through an upcoming planetary crisis, a dark authoritarian period veteran journalist Ross Gelbspan termed the Permanent State of Emergency.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel put it this way in March:
"It's not five minutes to midnight. It's five minutes after midnight."
We were perhaps five minutes to midnight in 1990. Not so anymore. We can't afford any more wasted time.
Indigenous Perspectives on Climate Change
Beginning on April 21st and continuing until May 2nd, the UN's Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has been meeting to discuss climate change, bio-cultural diversity and livelihoods from an indigenous perspective. This is the first session of the group since the historic passage of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples last year that only four countries -- including Canada -- voted against.
Indigenous communities are particularly vulnerable to climate change, due to the close association between their livelihoods and ecosystems that stand to be heavily impacted by changing climate patterns. This is especially true of the Canadian North, where rapid shifts are already being witnessed and the repercussions on the marginal Arctic economy could prove devastating.
At the opening ceremonies of the UN session, Bolivian President Evo Morales Ayma outlined a new set of ten commandments that could guide the over 3000 delegates as well as the world at large in developing a framework for an alternative future and a new model for living. As the first indigenous head of state with an indigenous perspective in the whole of the Americas, Evo has become an inspirational figure beyond Bolivia and South America, and has talked frequently about our relationship with the Earth.
Below is a brief version of his commandments (compiled on the Climate and Capitalism blog): Continue reading
Stuff: fixing rather than tossing
Saturday's Globe and Mail had an article titled If it's broke, fix it which lists a multitude of items that can be fixed rather than tossed, such as shirts whose collars have become too tight, luggage that needs a new panel or zipper, and purses that need to be relined. The point of the article is that you can help the environment and your wallet by repairing items rather than replacing them. It's a great message, but as is pointed out by the readers in the comment section, this is generally only practical for high quality items. When you buy something cheap, for example from a dollar store, it is normally more expensive to fix it rather than to replace it. And in our consumer society where one always wants the newest and latest thing, buying something that will last 20 years can be a hard sell.
[photopress:story_of_stuff.jpg,full,alignright]Another issue, is that things are simply designed to not last very long. Check out the fabulous The Story of Stuff video with Annie Leonard. This 20 minute look at stuff, from extraction to sale and use, and then disposal, highlights that things are designed to only last long enough for consumers to still have faith in them. This process, which is called planned obsolescence, essentially creates things for the dump - to last a little while, break, and be thrown out, so that the consumer will then go out an buy a new one. Annie also talks about perceived obsolescence, when we throw away things that are perfectly useful. This gets back to the issue of having the latest version of stuff - for example smartphones, such as the BlackBerry Curve, as I discovered recently with some MBA friends who seemed more interested in the "look" of the item, or "beauty" according to the website, rather than its features or "brains".
As Annie points out, all the advertisements that we are bombarded with try to tell us what we should want and have. And then we go out and get these things, otherwise we feel inadequate compared to our peers. So this means that we don't just buy cheap stuff because it is cheap, but we buy it because this is the only way the majority of us can afford to always have the latest thing. All of this reminds me of something somebody once told me: unhappiness is unmet expectations. It seems the root cause of our "stuff problems" is that we compare ourselves to what's happening in popular culture too much, rather than concentrating on what makes us happy. The take away then for me is to always aim to buy things that I really love rather than just what's in style, so that I won't get tired of them. I guess I'd better go get my brown boots fixed now, and walk my talk!
Climbing the CN Tower for WWF Canada
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."
Hold that cell phone purchase!
From the late 1990s onwards, a genocidal conflict has been raging in the Congo with little notice from the West. Indeed, western multinationals have been deeply implicated in the brutal regional war that has claimed up to 5.4 million lives. At the root of the conflict has been yet another scramble for the Congo's enormous wealth of natural resources including timber, minerals, gold, and diamonds.
One of the most overlooked, but profoundly disturbing of these resources is Coltan, a tantalum containing mineral that is a key component of modern electronic devices such as cell phones, laptops, and media players. Coltan is mined from the same region as the habitat of the Eastern Lowland Gorilla, and illegal extraction has led to the steep decline of the overall wildlife population in the Eastern Congo. The exponentiating demand with the increasing disposability and affordability of consumer electronics has also fueled the conflict to new heights.
The whole sordid story is outlined in "Apocalypse Found" that speaks to the connections between "Coltan, cell phones and crisis in the Congo." The article starkly illustrates the relation between this catastrophe and our consumer habits in the following excerpt:
Earth Island Journal argues that the 2000 spike in coltan prices was caused by the launch of the Sony PlayStation 2 and a new generation of mobile phones. The irony of that observation was not lost on British Labour MP Oona King when she expounded, "Kids in Congo are being sent down into mines to die so that kids in Europe and America can kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms."
Major manufacturers such as Nokia have taken note of this, but they argue that because of third party sourcing it is often difficult to tell where your components are coming from (Nokia is however pushing suppliers on this). At the consumer end, cell phone recycling programs such as the Eco-Cell Initiative at the Toronto Zoo are beginning to make headway, but it might be worth unplugging your life to really get away from another nightmarish impact of our modern technologies.
Biking to York University
Today I finally took the plunge and biked up to York, rather than my normal Subway and bus commute. Although it took much longer than I expected (mostly due to my frequent stops to check my map, and despite this, a few bad moves resulting in more hills than anticipated), it was a fantastic day to be out cycling! I’m looking forward to making this my regular means of commute over the spring and summer at least. My coworkers Lidija and Emily at Learning for a Sustainable Future, where I also work, also bike up to York. They tell me you can do it in an hour. This is only 10-15 minutes more than my TTC commute, plus I get my exercise and save money too. Suddenly the looming TTC strike on Monday, unless a deal can be reached by Sunday at 4 pm, doesn’t seem quite as daunting. While I do hope a deal can be reached, as strikes are never really fun for anyone, I am sort of hoping that a strike will happen so that a few more of us will get our bikes out and realize it doesn’t take nearly as long, and is quite enjoyable to bike to work. Of course, it would be even easier if we were all provided with proper shower facilities, but that’s a whole other issue.
Sustainability, the Concorde Fallacy and mechanical pencils
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.
Rural Scotland regenerates
Interesting things are afoot in Scotland, where under devolution and a 2003 law that ends the legacy of feudalism, rural communities have been allowed to buy land in remote highland areas and islands for the first time in centuries. As part of the fantastic Al-Jazeera People & Power news magazine series, the following documentary reveals how rural folks are trying to regenerate the land and build sustainable futures in the Scottish countryside:
Sociology prof., Kathy Bischoping’s first play a success
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
