Urban Meltdown - The Blog

Greetings from a tree being to a human being

It has been a strange week on the climate change front. Ten years is a long time to complete a book and sometimes I used to fret that it would never be completed. The irony is that if I had been able to finish Urban Meltdown more quickly, it would not be getting the attention it is receiving now. There’s never been so much public interest in climate change and Urban Meltdown is already receiving exceptional attention both in the local and national media – and it’s just arriving in the stores.

At the launch of the book last Friday evening, at Southminister, a church in my ward, over 80 people showed up for the presentation and we ran out of books for sale, which surprised and pleased everyone. But on the climate change ground, it continues to be a rough ride. Trees are the front line soldiers in the battle against climate change. They clean the air by producing oxygen, reducing the carbon dioxide content, recycle and clean storm water and stabilize the soil. Yet, my city has no by-law to control the cutting of trees on private property. An absentee landlord can buy a property for rent, roll it over in 12 months and chop down all the trees which have cooled and cleaned the neighbourhood air for generations.

Pamela White and I managed to save one 150 year old oak on Sunnyside through rather exceptional circumstances. (I was able to buy the fallers time using some money from my office budget to pay them not to cut the tree down. And Pamela who lives next door to the white oak agreed to purchase the side lot on which the oak tree stands.) It was exceptional in the sense that every day magnificent trees come down and there is little I or anyone else can do to save them. Last week, Hydro Ottawa has severed the street trees along Hopewell Avenue just a block away from Sunnyside, the tree where the white oak was saved to make it a little easier to repair the street hydro poles and wires. This shouldn’t have happened. Trimming a tree should not mean butchering the main stem of canopy. 

We need to recognize that trees are necessary to our lives because they are essential to the air we breathe. Air cannot be privatized. There’s no Ottawa air or Calgary air or Shanghai air, there’s just air. It’s a collective necessity and should enjoy collective rights as should the trees which are essential to its support.

Here is a poem that I wrote after the happy experience of saving the white oak and read on CBC’s  Sounds like Canada [listen to the radio interview] today with Pamela White.

Greetings from a Tree Being to a Human Being

Welcome person
to my domain of wild flowers at my feet,
the sun and sky around my head.

I am alone now
in the side yard of a small clapboard house,
but my branches are still great arms
sufficient to hold the sky;
my trunk a powerful bellow
to all those who pass by.

Welcome small powerful person,
you are an amazing creature
that cannot be denied
you have taken all my brothers and sisters,
all my aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents
who used to stretch in an ocean
of great tree voices as far as the eye could see.

Who would have thought when I was nothing
but a poke above the forest floor,
dreaming of the day to come
when I might tower above all
green cousin to the blue sky,
servant of the yellow sun,
brother of the brown earth
that one day I would be all those things,
but alone, the last of my kind;
the last to have a memory
of the time when we trees
ruled the earth
and the sunrise greeted only the voices
of the oak and the walnut,
hemlock and maple,
pine and spruce.
When the human beings
were no more important than
the wildflowers at my feet before
passing into winter memory
or come and gone like the wolf after the deer,
that you would one day cut us down
one after another, until it was we,
the oak and the walnut,
the hemlock and the maple,
the pine and the spruce
that had passed into memory.
but who’s memory?
that is what I don’t understand;
who will there be to remember us?

The memory of the white oak
is held by the white oaks.
The memory of the walnut
is held by the walnuts, and so it goes.
It is we trees that remember who we are;
who embrace the sun each day
and breathe life into the air.
It is we who create the forest roof and floor,
and scrub the air
from which life comes.

What is it you humans do?
Besides separate our hands from our arms,
our arms from our trunks,
our trunks from our roots,
our roots from the earth?

What do you humans do?
To make the earth, the earth?
To greet the morning sun?
To sigh away the dusk?
To perfume the sky?
To give life life?

What do you do?

(Composed on the occasion of a tree crew arriving to take down the oldest white oak in Old Ottawa South, by City Councillor Clive  Doucet who asked the tree what she wished to say in her defence, April 5, 2007.)

On Kurt Vonnegut dying

Kurt Vonnegut died last week. He was to the 20th century what Jonathan Swift  was to the 18th and Cervantes was to the 17th. Both Swift and Cervantes were little understood in their own times; Vonnegut enjoyed the same fate. The chattering classes are busy trying to cement him into his appropriate position in the literary wars for honors and finding him wanting.  Repetitive towards the end of his life, never won the Nobel, America’s uncle with a tendency to depression, smoked too much, was popular in the sixties, but drifted into obscurity and so it goes.

He was all of those things. He was also one of those writers who enjoy such an exceptional position in the literary arts that he is not obliged to share it with anyone else or be measured against anyone else. He was unique, just as the authors of Gulliver’s Travels and Don Quixote were. And he gained in his own lifetime the prize that every writer aspires to but few accomplish, his books remain in print and continue to be read.

Why didn’t he win the Nobel Literary prize? Why wasn’t he regarded as central to the modern western literary accomplishment like authors such as Saul Bellow and Gabriel Marquez. The typical answers are: he was just a science fiction writer or he wrote with little grace. His own father complained that there were ‘no bad guys in his books.” The reality is Vonnegut’s enemy was humanity itself. 

In book after book, Vonnegut confronted humanity’s endless capacity for self-deception and self-destruction. Yet, he loved people that was the tragedy in his writing. He was not a misogynist or a racist, an angry socialist or a self-righteous capitalist. His affection for the human species with all its warts glowed in all his novels and stories. He never turned into an angry old white man which is the sad fate of so many. People bewildered him; but they didn’t make him angry. Just as real life bewildered him when he was captured by the ‘enemy’, only to be saved from the firebombing of Dresden by his captors locking him inside a meat locker. 

Vonnegut’s literary accomplishments were never taken seriously as they deserved, because he challenged the status quo, the way that great literature is supposed to but almost never does. If you take Slaughterhouse-Five seriously, you would know instantly that the Iraq invasion was doomed from the outset. You would not have been convinced by Colin Powell giving his death in a test tube speech at the United Nations, because you would have known from reading Vonnegut that military solutions do not work in the modern age. They accomplish nothing more than to push the violence around.

Military solutions are linear. Modern life is complex and conflict requires complex multi-dimensional response where context is everything and values cannot be simplified into my nation right or wrong. They cannot be reduced beyond the simple declarations of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Vonnegut understood this instinctively and all of his writing reflects this conclusion. He was a great writer whose pessimism about the possibility of any future for the human species will remain to haunt as long as humanity endures.

He would have been sympathetic to the chapter in Urban Meltdown which advances the idea that humanity needs to rethink what ‘progress’ is and until we do this, all the technical inventions in world ‘to save the environment’ won’t mean much.

I will miss him and the unspoken hope that one day we might have met.

Urban sprawl and a book's title

I’ve written many books but Urban Meltdown was the hardest and took the longest. I wrote and re-wrote, trying to pull the threads of my life together with the experiences of being a city councillor. Now that it’s out, I’m going back through my electronic files to clean them up and have discovered more than ten different working titles. All of them discarded as I reshaped the book. Some of them were:

• A Poet Goes to City Hall
• Citizens or Consumers?
• Cities, Greed, God and the Cod
• Bully Politics and the Tipping Point
• On the Bubble
• At the Volcano’s Edge
• New Politics and New Values for the 21st Century
• The Rise of Cities and the Decline of the Planet

“The Rise of Cities and Decline of the Planet” lasted the longest before finally being rejected for Urban Meltdown: Cities, Climate Change and Politics as Usual. This last title does best capture the essentials of the book. Nonetheless, I’m still fond of “The Rise of Cities and the Decline of the Planet” for this, in a general way, describes what has happened and is still happening. In a recent meeting with a senior city planning official I was told confidently that Ottawa’s intensification policy is working. I was so astonished. I could think of no immediate reply. How can it possibly be working?

The purpose of intensification is to reduce the ecological footprint created by urban growth and increase the quality of urban life for the area that becomes more densely populated, (more lively streets, more parks, more trees etc.). Intensification must reduce the per-person draw on resources as the city grows. That is the whole point. Instead the reverse is occurring. Ottawa’s ecological footprint is increasing and at the same time the quality of neighbourhood life is declining as urban green space and tree cover shrinks under the assault of intensification. (The city is not compensating for intensification by creating new park space, saving heritage trees or aggressively planting more street trees. The old city is just getting grayer.)

At the same time, we’re losing trees and greenspace in the inner city, the asphalt imprint of the entire city continues to increase rapidly. In the last 30 years Ottawa’s population grew by 40% but there was a 75% increase in residential roads. That’s sprawl! This year will see a record growth in new roads – 200 kilometers. That’s sprawl! In other words, we’re seeing  grey growth increase at almost twice the rate of our population growth. That’s not intensification – that’s sprawl!

On the transit side, less people per capita use transit today in Ottawa than they did in 1960 when all we had were streetcars – that’s sprawl. Ottawa is not alone. Bill McKibben reports for every 1 per cent of population growth in North America, residents take up 6 to 8 per cent more land. (April 2007 issue Mother Jones.) Cities like Winnipeg, Manitoba that are basically stagnant in population growth are still growing geographically. In 2007, the city takes up more than twice the land it did in 1970. This is one of things that I meant by the working title “The Rise of Cities and The Decline of the Planet”.

Eighty per cent of the carbon load being injected into the atmosphere, which is basting the planet like an over cooked turkey, is coming from cities and the way they grow, from places like your town and mine.  It’s happening not because we don’t know better, but because businesses and politicians are frightened of change.

Saving an 'Ent'

If you want to find an Ent in Ottawa (Ents are giant, ancient, magical trees that appear in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) you can find one on Sunnyside Avenue. It’s a white oak which was a stripling when Colonel By was building the Rideau Canal and is now a forest giant stretching four stories towards the sky.  It has an immense green canopy that cools the neighbourhood in the summer and cleans the air for all those living near it.  White oaks can live for 500 years. It has already endured great ice storms, broiling summers and freezing winters for 150 years. What an Ent can’t endure is a chain saw.  In a day, a single chain saw can reduce a 150 years of life to a memory and that was where the white oak was going when I arrived.

The owner wanted the side lot on which the tree stood cleared of any obstacle to future development. This is normal. We have lost many great old trees to infill buildings. The trees closest neighbour was upset at the idea of losing the oak, not just for herself but for the community. There is no other tree like it in Old Ottawa South. On Monday, morning, I bicycled over to find a removal crew already setting up, the site cordoned off with yellow, caution tape and the chain saws were out.

I offered to pay for the crew’s time, not to start cutting until I could see if there was any way we could save it. Then I phoned the city’s forester for advice and discovered it was not possible. The city had no authority to protect trees on private property. The owner was entirely within his rights to bring it down. There was only one way to save it, we had to buy the land from the owners. I thought that this might be possible because the city has collected thousands of dollars in development charges for infill housing all along Sunnyside Avenue, some of these charges are called ‘cash in lieu of parkland’. This charge is to compensate the city for the decrease in greenspace infill housing causes. The city has never bought any new green space with this development charge.  But I couldn’t do this in time to save the tree. It would take a year to pull it off.

I explained all this to Pamela White. She nodded and then went into her house to consult her husband. She came out and looking rather pale said, she and her husband were prepared to take a mortgage out on their house to purchase the lot the ‘Ent’ stood on. The owner happily agreed to this and on a handshake, the old oak was saved. I agreed to pay for the work ‘not done’ by the tree crew from my office budget and to search for money from the city in next year’s budget to buy the lot for a community park. Pamela agreed to to purchase the property in the short term. She is getting an independent arborist’s opinion on the health of the tree and I have begun to enquire of city staff about the amount of money the city has collected in infill development charges just along Sunnyside Ave. This will be the first step in justifying the city re-direct some of these charges towards creating a little park around the oak.