Urban Meltdown - The Blog

We are all Polar bears

A while back I heard on a radio newscast that photographs from space of the Canadian Arctic show that the northwest passage was cleared of ice and open to navigation this summer. This is the first time it’s been open in millenia. A political commentator explained that we can expect increased tension between contending powers, the U.S., Russia and Canada, over the rights to use it. This was followed by a brief clip from an American scientist explaining that models of climate change indicated that this was going to happen, but not for another 30 years. 

Think about that last little piece of information. If the arctic melt is 30 years ahead of schedule what does that do for other climate change predictions? What if the rise of the oceans is 30 years ahead of schedule? What if the conversion of the Amazon rain forest into savannah is 30 years ahead of schedule? What impact will 30 years ahead of schedule have on our own survival? Think of the Caribbean hurricanes, which are devastating an entire region each year and the enormous Thames Estuary tide barriers. They were expected to be used once or twice a year, and are now being used once or twice a month. Think of food production.

Ultimately, we’re all Polar bears. We are all clan animals. Human beings no longer fight over hunting territories, but we still kill each other over religious thoughts, national flags and urban perimeters. And like any clan animal, we have a very hard time thinking outside the clan box. I see it around the table at Ottawa City Council every day. Ottawa’s Mayor acts as if the principal problem the city faces is how to reduce staff. It makes perfect sense to him, after all, he made millions running a temp agency which was all about getting non-unionized labour to take the place of unionized labour. The melt of the polar ice cap is of no interest to him. 

I don’t blame him or anyone for that matter. Before I was elected if you had told me Polar bears were starving because the ice had become too thin to hunt on, I would have related to that little factoid about as much as reports of the Yangtze River Dolphin becoming extinct. River dolphins in China and Polar bears in the Arctic were just too far away to get my knickers in a twist. I would have responded that it is sad but what can you do? Species come and species go. Unfortunately, there is a very great difference between a species being hunted to extinction, and one disappearing from eco-system change.

The ten years since I was first elected feels like a lifetime ago, yet it’s no more than a heart beat in the life of the planet. But in that short beat, I’ve watched unrelenting climate change descend on Ottawa. My city is much more protected than most. It’s in a temperate, continental clime, far from rising tides, the storms and droughts of the south and the ozone hole of the Arctic at the confluence of three large rivers. We had a delightful summer, not too hot and not too cold with generous rain. But the trend lines are not reassuring.

Each year is warmer than the last. Winter rain storms and sudden thaws have become as frequent as snow storms and deep freezes. Last winter didn’t arrive until January 15. The Rideau Canal, which transforms into a seven kilometre skating rink, only froze for two weeks. In the previous winter the weather jacked around like a yo-yo with mid-season rain storms. No, the trend lines are not good. So the Polar bear is often on my mind. The bear has become a kind of shorthand in my mind for what’s going wrong.

But it’s got to be as distant for my compatriots as the Yangtze dolphin must have been for the Chinese. Why else would we elect a Prime Minister who subsidizes the most polluting form of energy generation known, the Alberta Tar Sands with an accelerated capital cost allowance? And then bring out a rebate for Mom and Pop for buying a small car? This belongs to the old and very successful electoral game of ‘everyone gets what they want’ and ‘no one gets what they need’.

Writing this little essay is largely an exercise in vanity because the folks who elect the various 'oilocracies' which govern Canada and the planet won’t read it.  They listen to sound-bites on ‘talk’ radio, watch two-minute ‘news’ clips on T.V., glance at the headlines. All of this conjoins to confound, the way white noise in a café does. Everyone is aware of the noise but no-one’s quite sure what it means. The only way to break through these waves of white noise is to have a simplistic message and a powerful political party behind you. None of which most people have. So life goes on as it always has.

It’s better not to think about the disappearance of the Yangtze River dolphin or the decline of the Polar bear. What’s the point? But like it or not, at the end of the day, we are related. To continue, the Polar bear has to fill his/her stomach and so does the human. We can’t eat Ipods. Like the Polar bear we depend on the bounty of earth and sea, and some constancy in the climate. Our fates and lives are intertwined.

1953 was a big year.

I was six years old, almost seven and my father bought me my first guitar. It was not to be the presage of new musical talent which disappointed my father as he thought being a Doucet meant being musical. But something that occurred right across the street would root in my memory and be laden with prescience.

The mother hung a banner across the laneway. It was multicoloured and had balloons flying from it and said ‘WELCOME HOME, DAD.’ I had never seen anything quite like it and could not figure out what it meant. My Dad came home every night and nobody ever made any fuss. That evening a brand new, powder blue, Chevrolet parked in the laneway under the banner. It’s girth and general disposition were most impressive. Something important had happened on our street.

My father didn’t own a car. Dad walked to work and my mother took the streetcar to go shopping. A few months later, my father bought his own car.

When I think back to that banner and the powder blue Chevrolet, it marks for me the beginning of the oil age. Six years later, Ottawa would dismantle one of the largest, oldest and greenest city streetcar systems in the nation. (Ottawa had over 300 kilometers of track, built its own streetcars and powered them with hydro electric power from the Chaudiere Falls.) A year later, in 1960, the city’s principal inter-city rail line would also be torn up and replaced by an expressway.  A few years later the city’s central train station itself would be dismantled.

In just seven years, the city shifted from a pedestrian-streetcar dominated neighbourhoods to one that was dependent on the single occupant vehicle. The new Ottawa would be grouped around the expressway, malls and parking lots.  Car dependency would increase with each passing year. Nothing has changed.  More people, per capita, drive today than ride public transit than did in 1953. This is true across North America. 

What in 1953 was considered so special that a wife would welcome the family’s new car home with a banner, has become so omnipresent it is poisoning the planetary habitat for humans. Cars has changed the landscape of continents, the lifestyles and values of nations.

The best measure of the importance of people’s values whether familial or national is what people are prepared to sacrifice to maintain their values. Death in war is often referred to as the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ because it is made in the name of overarching values like ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’.

It’s clear that people are also willing to sacrifice a great deal to drive their cars, starting with their health – asthma, obesity, cancers. To be specific, asthma is the number one reason we admit children to Ottawa city hospitals.  Mothers are 15 to 20 per cent more likely to deliver prematurely or have low birth weights’ who live near expressways’ (from a study by Quebec’s Institute of Public Health); traffic is the number one killer of primary school age children; tail pipe emissions are the largest, single contributor to greenhouse gases. I could go on but you get my drift.

City Councils are at ground zero for climate change. Eighty per cent of the greenhouse gases are generated by cities. And it’s clear the electorate values their mobility with cars above the threat of climate change, health or even the cost of running the city. Road construction is entirely subsidized from general taxes, there are zero user charges. 

Consider these climate heating decisions by Ottawa city council. We just voted to send a fresh water city pipe 28 kilometers out into the country so that a rural township can ‘grow’ at twice its present rate. The folks who already live there need clean water because the local ground water has been contaminated by farm pesticide runoff.

Out of 23 councillors, there were only five who voted against it. In 2007, Ottawa city council will set a new record for road building – over 200 kilometers. It has approved another road bridge for a cool $50 million. Expansion of public transit has been deferred. Mr. Baird, the Environment Minister and same guy who helped kill light rail, is promising a federal share for another road project on the city’s eastern rural fringes. This one is worth $104 million. It will allow the 13,000 people from Rockland to drive to Ottawa faster, at least until they hit the current east-end road gridlock, which will require even more money to “solve”.

Climate change sprawl is nourished by all levels of government. West of Ottawa, the province is busy building a new divided highway from distant towns like Carleton Place, (Cost estimate in 2006 $106 million for 16,000 commuters) that will make commuting even longer distances easier than ever. Nothing new here. This has been going on since 1953 and is typical of any other city you care to mention.

Federally, the government has 3.2 billion dollars to purchase and service four planes to ferry tanks to and from Afghanistan, a 12 billion dollar surplus, but no national public transit program (the only G-8 country as such). Climate change ain’t black magic folks. The sprawl landscape, the number of vehicles on the roads, the hotter summers, warmer winters, declining water reserves, it’s coming from ‘we the people’, from our values and from the governments we elect.

Stop complaining. Hang out the banners.