Urban Meltdown - The Blog

Being Green and Talk Television

It ain’t easy being green and it ain’t easy trying to fit a complex book into a sound byte which is what interviewers always want. “What’s the one thing, you want to leave people with,” is the typical question a five minute interview frequently ends with. This leaves me with concocting a meaningless bromide like ‘you can’t change and be the same’ or something more erudite, ‘we need a planetary charter of Collective Rights’. Because air and water quality are all about collective rights, not individual rights, what’s the point of having great individual liberties when you can’t breathe the air?”

This is always confuses the interviewer because it’s a bromide that requires a good deal of explanation and context to make any sense. And in a five minute interview, I don’t have the time to explain that the western democracy began in 1215 with the Magna Carta in Britain and was all about the protection of individual property rights. From that point on, western, representative democracy slowly evolved based on the protection of individual rights – the ‘right to hold property, own a gun, speak your thoughts’ became enshrined in constitutions, legislation and so on. The problem is climate change and global warming are being caused by the relentless protection of individual rights. What was used to liberate humanity is now being used to destroy it.

Corporations which are collective endeavours are classified for legal purposes as individuals. For example, water is a property or a ‘natural resource’. Thus corporations have the ‘property right’ to ‘take-water’ permits issued entirely legally by the Ontario government that allows them to pump millions of litres out of waterways to keep the golf courses green, and at no cost. Neilsons, Coca-cola, and so on have the ‘individual’ right to pump water out of municipal aquifers for resale in little plastic bottles until the aquifer goes dry. Similarly, the corporations draining the tar sands have the ‘right’ to do this, just as a farmer has the right to drill a well in his backyard for household water. This is the way it has evolved. There is no legal or political history or even traditional wisdom that air and water are a collective right; that it should be illegal for the atmosphere to be treated as a sewer or aquifers as ‘liquid mine’ for the enhancement of individual rights.

There has never been any thought given to the idea that the air and the water are needed by all human beings to sustain life and hence should be considered a ‘collective right’, that the increase of private wealth cannot be permitted at the cost of destroying the commonwealth. This is an entirely new idea that enjoys no currency anywhere – hence getting it into a sound byte is impossible. The good news, for me anyway, is that last week I was interviewed for an hour by James Hendricks on Rogers Cable (Ottawa) and the interview was entirely satisfactory. Mr. Hendricks had read the book, understood its many dimensions and we had a long, discursive and interesting conversation that I hope the viewers enjoyed as much as I did.

Books and hopscotch

Sorry, I’m late with this posting but I’m discovering that it’s not easy trying to sell a book and do my job as a city councillor. This weekend I had the great hopscotch crisis in the Glebe, as well as many plant exchanges, community gardening events and a terrific show in support of a local day care by a group of students called ‘Off Beat’ who prove that ‘white guys and girls’ also have rhythm. At the same time I had to sandwich in half a dozen ‘book’ interviews, speeches - when Monday morning came it was almost a relief.

The hopscotch crisis culminated in a national news story with the reporter tracking me down at an Energy and Transportation show at Lansdowne Park to interview me about the delinquent children who had been chalking up the sidewalks  with hopscotch patterns.  (They were going for a Guinness world record.) The children, supervised by their parents, had done an entire block before the city graffiti police arrived to power wash their chalk marks off the sidewalk after a complaint.

It was all good, as the kids say, in the sense that it gave me a focus for something I’ve championed for a long time, the streets belong to the community first. The streets are the city’s largest single asset, they are the greatest single play area for children. Children have skipped on them and chalked the sidewalks up with hopscotch patterns since children have been children and cities have been cities. You would think that these things would be a given, that they are just part of life, but no, it’s not so.

Life in the modern city is nothing if not complex.. Graffitti has become a great source of irritation for many people. The ugly ‘tagging’ especially is akin to a visual version of a dog marking off his territory except unlike urine it doesn’t dissipate but remains for months and sometimes years. So after much lobbying from the business community, the city has just approved a two million dollar program to get rid of all graffiti on city property within 72 hours. Good news, right? Well in comes the complaint of ‘graffitti’ on the sidewalk and out roll the city swat team to clean up the sidewalk. I have some sympathy for the city workers in that they were just doing their job promptly, which no doubt someone would have complained about if they hadn’t.

I don’t have much sympathy though for anyone who says kids shouldn’t play hopscotch on the sidewalk or ball hockey in the streets. The streets belong to children as well as adults. It falls to the adult driving his or her car to watch out for children when they are driving on residential streets. Having the right of way, obliges the children to clear the way for the driver to pass a game of street hockey, it doesn’t give the driver the right to knock over a child because he’s in the right of way. The responsibility falls to the adult to care for the child, not the child to care for the adult.

Long live hopscotch! Long live street hockey!

Amities,

Clive

Talk Radio

I’m doing a virtual tour of the country. A media savy person in Toronto has been hired by my publisher and she organizes radio interviews that I can do between meetings at City Hall. It’s an environmentally friendly, no getting on planes and churning jet fuel exhaust into the atmosphere kind of tour.

A lot of them are on ‘talk’ radio. Do folks who listen to ‘Talk Radio’ buy books? I hope they do because the interviews themselves are quite difficult. My first interview was on a Halifax radio station and it was for a full hour. Both the length of the interview and the enthusiasm of the show’s host caught me by surprise. He had actually read the book, liked it and asked good questions. I tried to answer them as I would to someone over the garden fence.

On reflection, my answers were too long and discursive. We had one caller who was concerned that solar flares and new cracks in the earth’s crust appearing in Ethiopia were insufficiently reported on. I tried to make the point that we couldn’t do much about solar flares or cracks in the earth’s crust but we could do something about human activities which were loading the atmosphere with carbon. He was not convinced. 

To make a long story short, my apologies to Halifax.. I’ve since learned that no matter what the question, I’ve got to respond in a simple, uncomplicated way. On ‘Talk Radio’ you can’t afford to wander.

But there are no real rules. If you stick resolutely to some formula, you will end up trivializing yourself and your listeners. On CFAX, a Victoria Radio station, the host asked me to read the poem which starts Chapter 13: Care of the Soul/Care of the City/ Care for the Planet.

                If you came from the stars
                Across eons of dark and cold
                Upon a planet
                That was not cold, that did not burn,
                That sparkled in a great and glorious disk
                Of sea blue and white swirl;
                That was bright like a great jewel,
                You might be forgiven if, for a moment,
                You’d thought, you’d found heaven.

This begins the chapter that advances the idea that the soul is not a singular Benedictine flight to heaven, nor is the poetry of existence a solitary affair, but a shared facility, connected like a string of DNA to the community, to the city and to the planet.

A bientot,

Clive