Urban Meltdown - The Blog

Two degrees of centigrade

I was a guest on a popular, local radio show a few weeks ago with a rural councillor. I think the host expected me to be confrontational but what is there to be confrontational about? We don’t have a city council. We have a township council. Two more rural councillors were added in the last election. These two councillors have been elected with a new Mayor devoted to cutting taxes and building more roads.

The result is easy enough to see. Council moved 10 million dollars from transit to roads, approved the Strandherd bridge design (across the Rideau River) and once the Strandherd Bridge is built, Armstrong Road which now dead-ends in the countryside will be linked with the 417 on the west and then on the east giving the city another ring road to join Hunt Club. This will push the suburban sprawl out another 30 kilometers and create more traffic in Manotick village than they can imagine changing the entire landscape around it from rural to suburban.   

As I write, Toronto is reducing its road budget and spending $17.5 billion on transit to create 17 surface electric light rail lines to serve the entire city. In 2007, Ottawa will build a record 200 kilometers of new residential roads and spend 167 million on the top ten arterial road projects. This is at a time when road construction costs are rising at 7 to 8 per cent a year and our city taxes are rising at 2 per cent. Do the math.  It isn’t complicated to see this is a recipe for financial failure. As we build more roads to debt, gasoline prices are rising even faster than construction costs.

The news on the climate change front is even more alarming.  An Australian report by Dr. John James for the ‘Climate Crisis Coalition’ indicates that the political will is not there to stop global warming from hitting 2 degrees Celsius within a few years. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Just two degrees centigrade.

The earth’s climate has certainly changed in the past by two degrees and more, but never so quickly, and the heating is not being distributed evenly. It affects the Arctic regions where the temperature is spiking more than 8 degrees. According to this report, once the planet heats by 2 degree centigrade overall, the permafrost is expected to melt and this will release methane gas into the atmosphere which is 20 times stronger than carbon dioxide in terms of its green house gas effect.  Methane gases from the permafrost and methane released from the sea have the potential to heat the planet as it never has been in human history – up to 60 degrees. 

On the radio show, I try to explain that we are facing a crisis of unimaginable proportions but how can you find solutions when Council won’t even acknowledge there’s a problem? One of the solutions I suggest is that we concentrate on maintaining the roads already built while building electric light rail as vigorously as Toronto is doing. We have put public transit expansion on hold for more than a decade in the past, why can’t we put new road construction on hold for a few years while we create greener transit alternatives for the city?

The host responds with “It’s been cool lately and what about that intersection at Bronson and Carling? Councillor Doucet, you have taken a turning lane out, narrowed the intersection and planted trees? What were you thinking? It’s a pain.”

End of interview.

I went back to reading to reading the Australian report. One of the points that it concludes with is that although the science of climate change and its consequences are now crystal clear, politicians aren’t listening, not even to their own appointed experts. The experts are right and it’s one of the principal points of my own book, but the extent of the denial is a great deal larger than a political one as my little radio show experience makes clear.

Tewkesbury is a quaint little place.

Tewkesbury is a quaint little place of about 17,000 people a couple of hours outside of London. Formerly famous for its cathedral, now famous for being under water. In Canada, we are reassured on the front pages of the national newspapers that all this is quite understandable now because government scientists have confirmed that global warming is creating a wetter north and a drier south. So we can plan. Isn’t that great!

It’s like attending a play where you’ve read the prologue and you’ve figured out how Acts I to III are going to unfold. Tewkesbury will be remembered as the opening Act. There are 300,000 people displaced by the current high water in the United Kingdom. Act II will be London under water. Try and imagine the city of London under water just like Tewkesbury. Fifteen million displaced people, that’s the population of London and environs. Then try and imagine it happening again.  Then try and imagine millions of very comfortable people having to find some other place else to live. They ain’t going south because it will be too hot and dry. 

The prologue to Act I is the theory of fat tail change which was elaborated several decades ago by scientists who weren’t government employees. Fat tail says that the carbon loading of the atmosphere is creating a new atmospheric balance, which will result in weather change that isn’t smooth or gradual but spikes sharply straight up. It will continue to go straight up for many years even if the annual carbon loading stabilizes or reduces, (which is isn’t, it’s increasing). This is exactly what has happened and is happening. Since 1997, municipalities across Ontario have seen fat tail change at work. Each year is hotter and wetter than the last.  Municipalities are now building storm sewers for 200 and 250 year floods; that means they are expecting annual rain storms with volumes that in the past we only saw every 200 or 250 years.

This is what is happening. Rain storms of tremendous ferocity are regularly rolling down the Ottawa Valley to drown summer fields and flood city basements. The last one was just a couple of weeks ago. Last winter, Ottawa had 17 separate ‘weather events’. A weather event is an exceptional circumstance, e.g. freezing rain, flash freezes, extreme precipitation. Stratford, Ontario could be thought of as the Tewkesbury of Canada. It is now re-building its entire storm sewer system after being flooded from one end to the other. Stratford can do this because it’s a relatively small city and relatively rich. You can’t do this for a city the size of Toronto, Montreal or Ottawa, the costs are simply too large. All you can do is start replacing the ‘mains’ which will take decades. But even if your city has 250 year storm sewers, if the water table rises, no storm sewer in the world will protect your city, it just floods.

Don’t refinish your basement. Don’t use carpet anywhere. Use tile. Do not have expensive, difficult to move furniture or electronics. Have nothing in the basement that can’t be moved easily or be repaired by anything more complicated than washing and drying. And don’t expect the city to protect you from storms beyond the 100 year horizon because that’s all they have been built for and they can’t be changed overnight. Suing the city may seem like a satisfactory alternative but when the entire city or large portions of it are underwater – whom do you sue? At the end of the day, you are the city.

This kind of knowledge and planning is useful in that it can mitigate the damage in the short term. But the long term continues to look grim as the folks who control the planet’s thermostat – the federal governments of the largest, most polluting nations, China, India, the United States, Russia, Canada – continue to preach that religious extremism is the greatest threat to humanity’s well being. While the greater threat, of the planet’s ice cover from Greenland to the Antarctic disappearing into the oceans and those oceans rising and moving into people’s living rooms, continues to elude them. 

We can be confident that sooner or later, they will grasp this large but simple relationship but the problem is fat tail theory teaches us when London is under water, it will be too late. Climate change doesn’t work on election cycles.

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.

One of the reservations New Society Publishers had about publishing Urban Meltdown was that it offered the reader little hope. It was too depressing. New Society was about reality but a reality that people could cope with in a positive way. They advised me that I should try to leave the reader with a sense that something could be done to stop global warming. I re-read my manuscript and agreed with them. There’s no point in leaving the reader balanced on the edge of a cliff face with no place to go but down.

The reality is that it is possible for us to wrench the world back towards eco-sanity. (By eco-sanity I mean stop destroying the habitat, not just polar bears but everything humans need to exist.) There are many solutions easily  within our grasp: stop consumer driven growth (do we need swifers?), develop 360 degree manufacturing, tax diesel and gasoline so that long haul is out and local haul is in, put that tax money into less destructive infrastructure like inter-city rail (freight and passenger) and intra-city rail (streetcars). This is all pretty simple, doable stuff; hence we have reason to be hopeful. But where I differ from New Society and still do is that I don’t have much confidence these things are going to happen because I see no evidence that the political level is ready, capable or even organized to do anything but – ‘business and politics as usual’.

Let me give you one example. I have a colleague on Ottawa City Council. He’s a bright, sensitive man. He’s read Jim Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency: Confronting the Converging Crises of the 21st century”. He believes Kunstler is correct and ‘off-line’ often agrees with me. But at the Council table, he votes against city light rail and has never met a road expansion he didn’t think the city needed. I used to ask him why and always got the same response. He represents a rural/suburban area of the city and his constituents want him to vote for roads and against rail. He believes the responsible thing to do is vote with the wishes of his constituents. Even though he knows, long term, it’s all wrong for them. (I have tried to convince him unsuccessfully that it’s also wrong in the short term.)

My sense of it is that politicians at all levels will only wake up to the gravity of the crisis before us only when there are climate driven crises of such proportions, they are forced to change. But by then it will be too late. We will have missed our window of opportunity which was ten years ago, eight years ago, two years ago, and belatedly right now.

The two most plausible North American disasters which will force politicians into actually changing the public paradigm within which we all live are 1) water shortages in the southern United States so severe that millions of people will be forced to move, 2) that Miami and southern Florida will get the same hurricane treatment as New Orleans. Both of these scenarios are eminently plausible.

The greater problem climate change poses is not just about a couple of natural disasters, neatly boxed into a few years and a few States like the prairie drought was the dirty thirties. Climate change is a global phenomenon; it won’t just be the southern United States which will be hammered. A global phenomenon means every corner of the human habitat will be struggling in some way or other to overcome their own challenges. Once begun these climate crises will accumulate one after the other in a cascading effect that will be the climate equivalent of governments everywhere trying to fight a world war on many fronts. Not surprisingly, they will be unable to bring the focus or the resources to bear to really address any of them.

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

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.)