HTO: hidden water and local exploration
Now that the holidays are over, and the baking and preserving is finished, and I’ve splurged on a third bookshelf and rearranged my books to be layered two-deep instead of three (discovering a number of duplicates in the process), I finally have some time to settle in and read some of the new aquisitions. Two in particular are fascinating: Unbuilt Toronto and HTO. Both are worthy of a review, but I’ll concentrate on HTO in this post.
HTO (Wayne Reeves and Christina Palassio, eds.) is both a history and a geography of water in Toronto, but is also a collection of essays about local exploration, water use, engineering, and architecture. Among other things. I’ve been racing through it, but I’ll be going back to re-read it again.
The essays are full of interesting facts about Toronto (mammoth bones uncovered at Bathurst and Dupont? who knew?), but more importantly, in explaining and discussing the history of the construction of the city, the authors challenge their readers to consider how dramatically we’ve changed the land around us, and whether that can be sustainable. There’s no blanket condemnation of the watercourse diversions and burials that have taken place since the 1800s, but there is a lot of discussion as to how we can achieve the same goal of a safe water supply for humans while allowing space for wildlife to survive. Several of the essays are also concentrated on the interaction between humans and the waters we live around, both physically and culturally. This emphasis on the many dimensions of the value of water, whatever its form, seems like the right approach to me.
While reading this book, I was also struck by how little I know about the city I’ve lived in for years. I know the major streets and the neighbourhoods I’ve lived in pretty well – but on the other hand, I used to live only a few minutes away from the Riverdale Park, and I’ve been there only a couple of times, and I don’t know the Western waterfront at all. I’ve mostly seen the Don River from the Queen Street bridge and the subway. I think I’ll be using HTO as a guide for exploration (though I won’t go as far as the urban infiltrators who explored and photographed some of the city’s storm sewers – I do think that’s an activity that people should be cautious about) as much as an information source. If everyone who reads it feels the same way I do, the book’s most important effect is going to be the number of people who start really getting to know their home.
This is a book I’ll be coming back to for ideas and information on a regular basis.
Filed under books, environmental issues | Comment (0)Fightin' words
Via Grist, I watched Obama introduce his environmental team, and I’m jealous, I really am.
Sounds like all of his picks may have their problems, although I think I have high hopes for Stephen Chu: anyone else hearing echoes of Science in the Capital? However, despite their problems, their words are at least encouraging. Not only did I hear a clear statement about environmental justice from Lisa Jackson, but Obama himself stated unequivocally that his administration will respect science and act boldly on scientific knowledge. Watch here: Obama’s energy and environment team.
The end results of Obama’s administration might well be disappointing. Words, after all, are worth their weight in gold.
But it sure would be nice if Stephen Harper took a statement like “we understand that the facts demand bold action” as a thrown gauntlet for his own government. Mr. Harper, you criticized Stephane Dion for not being a leader, and it wasn’t entirely inaccurate. But Dion recognized, as the new US administration seems to, that anthropogenic climate change and ecological damage are the major issues of the day. Economic growth is meaningless if there is nothing to grow but money.
Now there’s a chance for you to prove that even if you follow where others lead, you too can recognize the need for bold action and lead within our country, instead of holding us back.
Filed under environmental politics | Comment (0)The Pembina on carbon capture & sequestration
Yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time laying out my objections to Jeffrey Sachs’ views on the use of technical solutions to our ever-growing need for energy. His support for carbon capture and sequestration, in order to allow us to exploit energy sources like coal, is especially irritating. There are two main reasons for this. First, the technology is unproven and has some significant barriers (for example, where will we put all of those megatons of carbon?). Second, focusing on a technical solution that may or may not work can siphon resources away from actions that will be effective, such as reducing our energy needs by improving home heating efficiency.
However, it’s nice not to be alone in one’s opinions. Not surprisingly, the Pembina Institute has a section of their website devoted to CCS:
Canadian federal and provincial governments have high expectations for carbon capture and storage technology as a tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, key questions about carbon capture and storage have yet to be resolved.
The Pembina isn’t out and out against CCS, but they do acknowledge the problem of ensuring that we allocate adequate resources to other emissions reduction strategies.
The page is not new, but contains a wealth of material on the subject, with a focus on the Canadian context. Worth following for updates.
Filed under climate change, policy | Comment (0)Technology and optimism: more thoughts on Common Wealth
A few weeks ago, I posted my preliminary thoughts about Jeffrey Sachs’ book Common Wealth. Now I’ve finished the book and had a bit of time to digest the ideas in it, and I still think that Sachs suffers from too much optimism about what technology can do for us, and too little consideration of just how much consumption each of us needs to do in order to enjoy a good life. Continue reading »
Filed under books, economy and environment, environmental politics | Comment (0)Canada's "constructive" role at the UNFCCC
The Canadian government is doing a poor job of representing our country at the UN climate change conference in Poznan: dishonesty seems to be our specialty. According to the Toronto Star:
Michael Martin, Canada’s ambassador for climate change and the country’s chief negotiator at the conference, denies obstructionism, saying Canada is playing a constructive role.
Michael Martin apparently has an idiosyncratic definition of “constructive”.
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Thinking about Detroit
I just discovered the blog Sweet Juniper, and a powerful photo essay about Detroit, via Obsidian Wings.
Perhaps the foremost thought I had in reading this article was about what will happen next to this neighbourhood, and others like it.
Many people (at least on the Toronto Star’s somewhat regrettable comments pages) have responded to the request of the big North American auto makers for government help to get through the current recession (depression? slowdown?) with variants of “let them fail, they’re not producing what people want”, “it’s all the fault of the unions and their greed”, and so on. I like to think that I’ve avoided the union-bashing response, but I know I’ve had the occasional Schadenfreude moment at the thought that big, gas-guzzling, noisy cars might someday stop running.
I certainly don’t think that an open-ended handout to the auto industry is an appropriate response, but at the same time, I don’t want to see Oshawa or London or Windsor look like Detroit, as depicted in the photos of an abandoned school. These cities may need to change – they do need to change – but as a society, Ontario and Canada as a whole need to ensure that change happens in a controlled way. Continue reading »
Filed under economy and environment, politics | Comment (0)The problem with economic optimism
I picked up Jeffrey Sachs‘ Common Wealth on Tuesday, and it’s an interesting book so far. Sachs and I seem to agree on a lot of issues; for example, population size and climate change are both concerns for long-term human sustainability.
However, we part ways in a big way when it comes to talking about what solutions are going to look like.
Not on all things, of course; for example, Sachs argues in favour of a carbon tax, combined with hard emissions targets, in order to stabilize and reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Lots of evidence out there that this is a good way to go, and probably less cumbersome than a cap-and-trade system.
However, Sachs is an optimist. This is probably a good way to be, but sometimes it gets out of hand. Sachs argues, in the first chapter, that world-wide, incomes are growing and will converge at some point, upwards of where those of us in the developed world are now, provided we begin to substitute sustainable technologies and work to stabilize the population. It’s not clear from Common Wealth, at least to this point, whether he’s talking about everyone when he talks about incomes, or just average incomes. And given everything else I know, I think he has to be talking about averages. If some 70% of the world population is not actually catching up, but only treading water or even falling behind in terms of the ability to consume, I think it’s a bit ridiculous to argue that we’re all going to end up with roughly higher living standards with only a few small tweaks, as nice as that idea is.
The chapter on climate change which follows is also problematic, for a similar reason. Sachs argues that climate change is a pressing problem that will effect everyone in the world to some degree. He does, as noted, make some good points; in addition to arguing in favour of a carbon tax, he also argues for a global fund to support mitigation efforts and technology transfer, especially for the most impoverished and hardest hit countries. However, for Sachs, the main two efforts should be improving efficiency and carbon capture and sequestration. Both of those are great ideas, and the first in particular should certainly be a major R&D focus in my opinion. But both of these concepts, particularly CCS, involve new technologies. The benefits are only potential.
If climate change is an urgent problem, and Sachs and I agree that it is, shouldn’t we simultaneously be arguing hard for public policies – such as the carbon tax – that will reduce our overall emissions now, instead of waiting for new technologies to emerge? Shouldn’t we allocate most of our public resources to what we can do right now, in order to buy time for the new technologies that might help in the future?
Unless I’m misreading Sachs, I think he’s arguing that we should put our efforts into these new technologies instead of trying to stabilize and reduce consumption in other ways. I’ll update my thoughts when I finish the book.
Updated to add: I just learned that the term for what Sachs is advocating is weak ecological modernisation.
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