Urban Meltdown - The Blog

Knowledge vs Political Calculus

I have resisted trying to compress Urban Meltdown into a few sound bites for personal reasons. The book is really about my life and compressing one’s existence down to a couple of lines is not a happy thought. The other reason is sound bites are often deceptive. They work in the sense that a nifty phrase can convey a complex reality.  Think of E = MC2. But more often than not the nifty phrase distorts reality as much it expresses it.

The nifty phrase from Urban Meltdown would be ‘knowledge isn’t the problem, politics is.’ From that phrase one could draw many conclusions. Get rid of all politicians might be one. The book never suggests that, what it suggests is that the political processes which result in democratic governments – all too often make it impossible for politicians to behave the way knowledge would dictate. We see this over and over again in my hometown and around the world.

Think of Mayor Bloomberg’s great idea to follow London and start charging congestion fees to enter Manhattan and then turning that money into improving the transit system which is the life line any sensible person knows we must improve if we’re to keep our cities alive and at the same time reduce tailpipe emissions. The state government in Albany, New York on whom its approval depended refused the legislative go-ahead.  Wonder why? Could it be they did the political calculus, not the knowledge calculus and it came up short on votes. You bet.

No one likes the thought of getting laid-off and that’s what a politician risks every time he votes on something that he or she thinks the majority of voters will disapprove of. It’s a normal and healthy reaction to want to keep your job, so politicians do the barbecue test, (3 opinions at a community barbecue) listen to talk radio and when really desperate commission a poll. The result is very, very rarely what the doctors, scientists, or teachers are telling them to do. Recently, we had a very small example in my town. We had a miniscule program called the ‘harm reduction program’. It cost all of $7,500 annually to provide what amounts to clean plastic straws for crack addicts to use. This slows the spread of diseases like Hepatitis C and HIV which happens when addicts use old tin cans as conveyers of the hot drug or other makeshift implements, and then pass it on to someone else, passing on at the same time any disease they might have contracted.

Our City Council voted 15 to 7 to kill the program. Why? Because the Medical Officer of Health (MoH) was telling them it wasn’t working? No. Because the Chief of Police told them it wasn’t working? No. I asked exactly this question to Dr. Salisbury, our MoH - was their any evidence to indicate that if addicts didn’t have access to ‘free’ city crack pipes, they wouldn’t smoke?  His response, “No.” My next question was ‘was their any evidence the availability of clean plastic pipes saved lives? His response 6 to 12 human beings a year would be saved from contracting fatal diseases like Hepatitis C and HIV.  These diseases would cost the medical system $600,000 per patient to treat, not to cure, before the patient died – usually within 10 years.

The medical and financial evidence seems pretty clear, doesn’t it? For $7,500 we could save six to twelve people from a long and agonizing death. Our council did the political calculus and it was clear the barbecue test and talk show sound bites were more important than the medical evidence. We see this over and over again at every level of government from the State of New York to the city of New York, from national and G-8 leaders. The most terrifying disconnection between knowledge based decision making and the political calculus is, of course, climate change.

Climate change is now killing 600,000 people every year and the evidence grows more compelling that if we don’t act fast, we will not only destroy the polar bear’s habitat, we will destroy our own. This isn’t news. It’s knowledge roaring out at us from NASA, from UNESCO, from scientists in every city and nation. Yet, politically, it’s as if no one is home in Russia, China, India and the USA. The Kyoto Protocol which the politicians of these great nations can’t bring themselves to respect is already considered by scientists as insufficient. At the same time Kyoto is ignored, there are immense resources devoted to ‘fighting terrorism’. A threat to humanity which is only as great as the stupidity of our reaction to it.

It doesn’t make any sense if you’re thinking of knowledge based action, but if you’re thinking of political calculus and the evanescent opinions of anger radio, it works quite well as a recipe for electoral political success. It has always been thus. Cicero’s brother Quintus advised him to if given the choice in an election campaign between lying and not lying that it was better to lie. For two reasons, 1) people wanted to hear politicians say what they wanted to believe and 2) if you were elected and couldn’t deliver, it didn’t really matter because you were elected; that’s a political calculus which remains in place 2,000 years later. The problem today is that this disconnection between reality and the political calculus of elections is frying the planet.

In friendship and hope,

Book Review, The Globe and Mail, Toronto. page D7, Saturday, July 21, 2007

An astonishing 80% of the world’s greenhouse gases come from activities in energy hungry urban centers. Thus, the solutions to climate change reside with the world’s cities. As city dwellers we have the most to lose if we fail: the extreme weather caused by climate change threatens our urban “lifelines”: transportation systems to move people and goods, communications systems, water, food, and energy distribution, sewers and waste removal systems. 

Clive Doucet, an Ottawa municipal politician, as well as a writer, is the author of Urban Meltdown: Cities, Climate Change and Politics as Usual, which deals with issues of air quality, climate change, and the politics of urban sprawl and transportation. It’s an interesting effort for a local politician. As a group, Canada’s politicians are not popular; they break their promises, raise taxes while reducing services and all too often slide across the floor to embrace the party they condemned last week. Nevertheless, with the global climate crisis capturing headlines the Canadian public is increasingly searching for signs of political leadership.

The fundamental question that Doucet poses is: Why is it that 50 years after Jane Jacobs wrote Death and Life of Great American Cities, followed by bookshelves loaded with intelligence on good urban form and the environmental crisis, (A Short History of Progress by Richard Wright springs to mind), and so very little progress has occurred? Why do we keep making the same mistakes in urban development over and over again when we really should know better?

Our cities are sprawling out over the landscape faster than ever. Our street life is stunted as people and sidewalks are dwarfed in a wasteland of parking lots, roads and highways. Our air quality is declining. Our energy consumption and greenhouse gases are ever-increasing. Doucet’s answer is at once both simple and complex. “Knowledge isn't the problem, its politics”.

People have been looking in the wrong place for answers. We do not have policies that will result in less destructive human environments, according to Doucet, because politicians are not willing to take leadership to make it happen. In spite of all the books, polls, media environmental chatter about climate change and the importance of more sustainable human environments, it is 'politics as usual’ for city, national and international governments.

Doucet’s book is more a collection of stories – about cities and climate change woven from the fabric of his real-life experience – not an academic treatise. He takes us on a wide ranging journey that tours the reader through old Roman cities, 1960s student activism and the Stop Spadina movement, up to the present with the World Social Forum in Brazil. 

Doucet suggest we are heading going down a path similar to one we already took in the 1960’s. Then visionary leaders such as Martin Luther King, JFK, and Rachel Carson ignited popular desire for new values and a better world. Only now, Doucet writes, signs of political leadership are coming from municipal leaders. Examples include the mayor of Seattle who put together a coalition of over 200 cities to enact Kyoto in defiance of the Bush administration’s refusal to join the international accord; the mayor of Hiroshima who assembled an international coalition of mayors against nuclear weapons; and Canada’s big city mayors who are coalescing around demands for more spending on transit and other urban amenities long neglected by Ottawa.

Governments have utterly failed to curb the cancerous growth of sprawling cities with their dependence on highways and roads which are the largest single source of greenhouse gases. The burden of dealing with the consequences falls to local government, requiring Canadian municipalities to spend between 25 to 50 per cent of their budget on road construction and maintenance, sucking resources from longer-term community needs like public transit, energy-efficient buildings, libraries and daycare.

Urban Meltdown argues that global consumer capitalism, which has empowered international corporations while enfeebling national and state governments, has also unexpectedly empowered cities. And therein, Doucet contends, is our best hope for a more sustainable future.

“The Roman empire, which lasted a millennium, was both conservative and conserving”. Roman urban form was characterized by low maintenance and low energy needs. While there is danger in comparing our modern society to the Roman Empire (after all, their labour force included slaves and prisoners of war), leaders of the Roman Empire, unlike their modern counterparts were smart enough to realize that it pays to plan for the long-term.

We  have many simple long-term, low-tech urban solutions available to us today including design that separates side walks, bike paths and transit from car lanes; complete communities where commercial districts are walking distance from residential areas and buildings that conform to low energy standards to name a few. Political leadership, not new knowledge, is required to make these solutions an everyday reality. Contrast this with the short-term “mega-cities which depend on a constant, carnivorous, planetary energy burn.”

Many who saw Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth or read international climate change best sellers, such as Tim Flannery’s, The Weather Makers and George Monbiot’s book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, have been  pushed out of complacency about the extraordinary things that are happening to the earth and the great potential for things to go terribly wrong. Clive Doucet’s Urban Meltdown: Cities, Climate Change and Politics as Usual, adds a new dimension, warning that our search for solutions is doomed unless we target both our cities and our politicians.

Will Canadian voters be persuaded by the faint green tinge of policies coming from our current political leaders and reward them with comfortable “business as usual” majority governments? Doucet warns we can no longer afford that luxury.

Eva Ligeti is the Executive Director of the Clean Air Partnership. She was Ontario’s first Environmental Commissioner.

The other blue planet

We have always thought of Mars as the ‘Red Planet’. But a story in a Globe and Mail starts “Mars was once a blue planet…“ (Red Planet: Scientists find ancient seas on Mars, June 14, 2007). Coloured in blue were areas where oceans once flowed. It looks remarkably like Earth, and it struck a distant but powerful chord in my childhood memory. In the 1960s Ontario students still had a common literary education. From Rainy River to Alexandria, we all opened up the same plays, novels and short stories. You could mark just how old someone was by whether he or she had studied Julius Caesar in grade 9 and King Lear in grade 12. 

The principal short story collection that we all studied was a hefty, hard cover tome  with the intimidating title “Man and His World”. In retrospect, it is easy to understand how and why the educators of the day chose the stories that filled the pages behind the now politically incorrect title. Forty years ago, teachers were fighting the same hormonal firestorm that rages in adolescent bodies as they do today. Thus, the stories were admirably brief, clear and delivered a pointed, compelling message. The teachers  must have chosen well because 40 years later some of these little stories still bound and rebound in my head long after the book has disappeared into the abyss of the second-hand book shop.

The disconcerting thing about remembering these little stories now is how many are migrating from fiction into reality. There was one about an old man – someone in his fifties. His name was Walter Mitty. Mr. Mitty had been married for centuries. The story was about the non-relationship with his wife,  and the unexpected life that went on in Mr. Mitty’s head which was daring and zany, but he never communicated these thoughts to his spouse.  The story was both sad and funny because in spite of being married, it was clear he lived alone.

His wife lived on a different planet, seemingly oblivious that her husband was no longer cohabiting with her. I have now arrived at the ancient age of the story’s hero and have been married for aeons myself. Many of my friends have been also; and I notice that there is a disturbing tendency towards Mitty mutism. One or the other of a long married couple seem to have given up trying to vocalize thoughts or rely on the briefest of replies – as if they were Walter Mitty. 

When I look back on these stories, it is clear that the our teachers were doing their best to leave us with both an appreciation for the short story and impart some useful ‘life lessons’. In retrospect, the stories were worth thinking about and like Walter Mitty extraordinarily prescient.

The one that continues to haunt me has to do with a ‘blue’ planet that had become a ‘dust’ planet. I’ve forgotten almost everything about this particular story except that some author had imagined there had once been oceans, forests and prairies on Earth and they had been changed into nothing but dust by the actions of humanity, by how we lived. The idea was intriguing but absurd when I read it as a high school student. Nonetheless, I never quite forgot it. To my astonishment, here we are forty years later and I’m watching in a kind of fascinated horror as the planet’s biosphere rockets towards the end that forty years ago only a fiction writer could have contemplated.

For those that are paying attention, life in 2007 is like living in a war room and the war is going very badly. The tropical lungs of the planet are disappearing into dry grass savannah. Alpine glaciers have evaporated and those that haven’t are expected to be gone in another ten years. The earth’s great polar and Greenland ice caps are melting. The Arctic melt is inundating the gulf stream pushing it away from the ocean surface. On most summer days, the sun’s ultra violet readings are at hazard levels; most disturbing of all, each year is hotter than the last and the last ten years have been the hottest in a century.

Maybe, I wouldn’t be so conscious of all this if I wasn’t a city councillor. We are now building storm sewers for 250 year storms because the old 100 year average no longer applies. We now build multi-million dollar storm retention ponds because they are necessary to control rain surges; with flash thaws and flash freezes winters are changing to ice clearance from snow clearance; all city buildings are now equipped with air conditioning when ten years ago, they weren’t. We now use more electricity to cool our buildings in summer than we do to light and heat them in winter. Asthma driven by bad air is the number one reason we admit children to hospital – the list goes on.

I have no idea who the teachers were who chose the stories that we read in “Man and His World”. They may no longer be with us, but in absentia or in their presence, I would like to thank them. They did help me get on with the long and difficult project of growing up – and they helped me to vote differently on Council today.