Urban Meltdown - The Blog

How refuge and refugee cities become the good and bad sides of the tracks in the 21st century

Cities have always had a good side of the tracks and a bad side. All that has changed is the economic forces which create them. In Elizabethan London, the Lord Chamberlain was worried about the entertainment industry, bear baiting, cock fighting and of course the theatre; not even James Burbage’s theatre company of which William Shakespeare was a co-owner was wanted in his neighbourhood and the Lord Chamberlain was successful in keeping it out for ten years.

In industrial Britain, it was the wind and coal fired furnaces of the midland industries which turned the countryside black that separated the good side of the tracks from the bad. Neighbourhoods downwind from the smoke stacks were poor and those upwind, upscale. The prevailing winds in eastern Canada are from the west and typically you will find the ‘good’ side of town on the west side and the poorer side on the east.

The arrival of the trains which criss-crossed the cities of North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were another way of dividing the comfortable, high quality of life neighbourhoods from the poorer. Keeping trains and their tracks out of the neigbhourhood were all about maintaining the quality of residential life.

It’s comforting to think nothing much has changed since James Burbage and Will Shakespeare’s day, but unfortunately they have. What has changed is the scale and intensity of the definitions. Now entire cities are being relegated to the good and bad side of the tracks.

Climate change is quickly turning the planet’s cities d into complex mosaic of refuge and refugee places. The scale is as populous as humanity, as encompassing as the planet and applies to every city and nation including the richest like Canada. Canadians like to look at New Orleans and think comfortably – well we don’t live on the Gulf of Mexico – we’re not subject to climate change driven hurricanes and (a little less surely) we don’t have any Detriots with its sagging car industry and abandoned neighbourhoods.

Canadians are wrong. The same economic and climate change forces fracturing other nations into have and have not places are present chez nous. There is a fault line somewhere a little west of Thunder Bay. On the western side of the fault line, you will find the richest, fastest growing cities anywhere. Fueled by the Alberta tar sands and Saskatchewan potash, western provinces are sucking up the younger generation of eastern Canada. From small Ontario towns like Welland to entire provinces, the indigenous replacement generation has left town and ‘gone west’.

Sustainability now defines where the good side of the tracks are and where they aren’t. If a city or town has this objective carved into its local administration you can bet you’re in a rich refuge city. You’re in a place like Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington, Vancouver, B.C., or Canmore, Alberta. These are cities worried about slowing or stopping growth entirely, investing in light rail, reducing homelessness to zero, greening streets. Upwind has become sustainability land.

The curious thing I find about the endless articles being published on sustainability is that very few ever concern themselves with outcomes. It is as if sustainability and the lack thereof are abstract, mathematical concepts to be mulled over like e=mc2. What non-sustainability means is that the things are not going to continue as they were. This consequence seems obvious enough for the polar bear which people can grasp will not continue once the ice shelf is no longer there for the bears to hunt seals from, but they can’t seem to grasp that many cities which are the human equivalent of the polar bear’s ice shelf will also not continue.

New Orleans is not continuing. It is shrinking. It will continue to shrink. The same can be said of almost all cities and towns on all continents as climate volatility, water shortages and energy prices make what were ‘normal’ activities more difficult to undertake. This is the next global revolution. It is one we have created together by insisting that nothing change about the way we live on the planet. The result is all cities and all neighbourhoods will eventually become divided into refuge and refugee places

This is what is happening now and is revealed in reports like the United Way’s ‘Poverty by Postal Code. The old mixed income neighbourhoods are fast disappearing in favour of cities being organized into poor neighbourhoods (bad side of the tracks) and rich neighbourhoods (good side of the tracks). Cities are also separating out this way with very rich ones like Vancouver and Victoria at one end and poor ones with declining populations and property values like Sydney N.S. and Windsor, Ontario. Climate change will accelerate this division.

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.

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.

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.)