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Sometimes big environmental crises and other types of crises can feel more like thought problems than emotional problems to me, in a manner that makes me empathize with this fellow, and I think is in part because big crises are usually very hard to understand.

But some crises are not at all hard to understand. Some are so overwhelmingly dumb in an across the board meta-ideological kind of way where the hardest thing to understand is how they arose at all, and it is for these that I reserve my anger. One such crisis is the BONE-HEADED PLAN TO TWIN/REPLICATE THE PORT MANN BRIDGE FOR 3.1 BILLION DOLLARS.

This kind of planning is so bone-headed that it doesn’t even belong in the complex-nuanced-conflicted pile with most other bone-headed decisions, like no-to-STV or yes-to-fish-farms. How can it be so out of synch with everything else? Mayor Gregor Robertson wants to make Vancouver the greenest city and there is no way he can ever do this when seemingly all the provincial heavy hitters have joined the  1950s urban planning  frenzy.

I’m not terribly up to speed on the New Urbanism,  but I know enough to know that adding lanes to the highways that link a city with its ever-reaching sprawl is going to get you the very very opposite of a green city.  Adding lanes adds traffic.

The story of the Cypress Viaduct, which famously collapsed during the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, is a handy way to illustrate the point. The Cypress viaduct was a double decker stretch of Interstate 880, and it carried hordes of commuters in and out of Oakland. After the collapse, one of the big challenges was to decide where to put it, since the double-stack was no longer considered safe. Surveyors set out to find out which alternate routes the Interstate traffic had shifted to, and what they found was that IT HADN’T GONE ANYWHERE; it had just gone.  The increased bottle necking on the remaining routes had shifted incentives for drivers, a certain percentage of whom had made the choice carpool or transit or move away or stay home.

Of course, no one should have to move away or stay home because of bad traffic, but in our case, that wouldn’t be necessary. Because for anyone who might have missed it, here is what else 3.1 billion dollars of provincial money can do to address congestion in the Lower Mainland .

The reason this gets me so angry is that the choice at hand, with billions on the table, for a while there represented an epic, momentous, and potentially very exciting decision to either build the kind of Lower Mainland that lives up to its geography and its modern green ambitions, or to keep plowing myopically towards a 10 million person gridlock .   And once the call to go ahead on the bridge has been made (which by all accounts it seems to have been), there isn’t really any going back on it.  Maybe it’s just the sallow afterlight of the election that’s tainting my vision but I feel a little disenfranchised in this great town.  Though if anyone can prove me wrong it is probably the good folks at Rail for the Valley, so maybe I should ask them.

In response to the various calls one hears for more/better collaboration between disciplines, I give you:

Geography.

Where else but the faculty page of a Geography department could you scroll down a list of research interests and find Dr Cowling’s “Physiological significance of low atmospheric CO2 for plant-climate interactions” directly after Dr Cowen’s “Welfare Warriors: Towards a Genealogy of the Soldier Citizen in Canada”?

Or a little further down the page, find Dr Gough’s “Interannual variability of Hudson Bay ice thickness” followed directly by Dr Goonesardena’s “Spontaneous Romantics of the World, Just Do It!”?

Instead of tinkering with our institutions to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, maybe it makes more sense to just have one very very big discipline, and put everything else inside it.

(photo: Brent Danley)

road in

This weekend I tagged along on a visit to Wildwood, the famous British Columbian model for sustainable forestry, and a famous little chunk of British Columbian history. I’m a bit embarrassed to note that fame, because I had never heard of the place. Nor had I heard of Wildwood’s famous visionary and founder, Merve Wilkinson, who began managing the place in 1938 (yep), and is still there.

As is the case with many pioneers of conservation (Ducks Unlimited comes to mind), Merve didn’t start out an ideologue. Rather, he was a man with a wood lot, who just happened to be paying close enough attention to notice that the trees grew better with the whole ecosystem intact. Ecoforestry as a philosophy seems to be as simple as that: ecosystem function trumps timber volume; but as a methodology it takes knowing your forest intimately.

Because Merve has logged enough hours (ouch) in the field to earn a rest, Wildwood is now run by Jay and Nina Rastogi, who give weekly tours, and do indeed know the forest intimately. Individual trees are selected for harvest based on what job they are doing in their area – who they’re shading out, competing with, sheltering, housing, and if they if they have already done their job then they can retire as an expensive table, or a beam for Merve’s house.

Hugh Stimson enjoying cookies with Merve

Before going and meeting the old man himself for a few stories, Jay showed us around and it was a great field trip. One thing I learned is that kids are usually bored by sustainable forest management (admittedly not a sexy discipline) unless you let them eat ants, which makes it fun and cool. Another thing I learned is that eating ants makes sustainable forest management more fun and cool for adults too. I also learned that the most lucrative Non-Timber Forest Product in BC is field trips, so if you are looking to subsidize your sustainable woodlot and the chanterelles are a little too soggy to sell this year, you might try fieldtrips. Or maybe ants.

One of my sillier new habits for 2009 is to constantly relate everything to Cameroon, and so the obvious thing is to try and map Merve’s (and Jay’s) model for forest management onto forests there, but that’s the thing with site-specific ecoforestry: it isn’t applicable elsewhere. Not only are growth rates and species interaction are all different, but market conditions and all different, and so is land ownership/tenure.

But so long as I am insisting on relating everything to Cameroon, I will say, with mind to my conservationist friends over there who believe that the only sustainable timber harvesting is absolutely none at all: there is such thing as doing it right. Wildwood is not a cashcow, but it has kept a family afloat for generations, and still looks like a lot of old growth. Part of that might be related to another fundamental harvesting principle.

The Canadian International Development Agency, which sponsored my time in Cameroon, offers ‘re-entry workshops’ to help people mitigate ‘reverse culture shock’. I neglected to attend, because I figured there could be no more shocking transition then from professional Tokyo Nightlife Agent to interior British Columbian treeplanter, and I thought I navigated that one quite gracefully back in ’03.

The things one notices after transitioning from developing- to developed- world are well known I think: less life on the street, more space, consumption and waste ranging from overt to obscene, reliability, predictability, punctuality, bad weather and the like. These things I expected to notice, and did.

But I’ll tell you what really stood out this time, wandering through downtown Victoria after 6 months in the Congo Basin: Do we ever have a lot of homeless people. No kidding. This is a town that as a Vancouverite I have dutifully mocked for it’s sterile, pleasantville retirement community vibe, lacking the grit of my favorite gentrification-havens on the mainland. And it may well be those things. But for all of the wealth and docility, this town (like the rest of the province, and maybe the whole country, and probably America too) lets a ridiculous number of people through the cracks.

During my time in Limbe, whose population is roughly one half Victoria’s, I was asked for change exactly one time. It seemed so out of context that it actually took me a moment to remember my lines (“Sorry, you want what? Some of my money? ). That first evening stroll through Victoria I was approached a handful of times in 40 minutes or so, which come to think about it is not that unusual in many areas.

This isn’t to underplay poverty in Cameroon; in fact I suspect the people living out of shopping carts in Victoria are better fed then about half of my 9-to-5 colleagues in Limbe. But there is something in-your-face about BC homelessness that I had forgotten about until I saw it with my post-Africa goggles.

A few usual explanations that come to mind: A tighter weave on Cameroonian family structures keeps people in family homes even if they have tendencies that would estrange them in these parts. Also there may be a bigger cultural taboo on vagrancy that keeps Cameroonian homeless people off the street and in the shadows where I don’t see them. The other half of the coin is BC’s housing crisis (I can barely afford to live here), employment crisis (don’t get me started), something about substance abuse which I’m not prepared to get into, and a social services system that seems to fail the people who need it.

It would be interesting to hear the take on poverty of a Cameroonian visiting BC for the first time. Maybe I should go find one.

It seems my stays in Yaoundé always play themselves out against a background drone of looping headlines on international network TV. Today it is Euronews; less familiar to me than BBC World Service or Al Jazeera, but the same formula.

This probably isn’t news to many people, but I’ve just now been exposed to No Comment, and I am sold. For anyone who hasn’t seen this, or any other equivalent, No Comment is an approximately minute-long segment (or a couple of segments stuck together), consisting of breaking news footage with -you guessed it- no commentary.

No voice introduces or concludes, and nothing is written on the screen except time and place. The scene unfolds itself in silence leaving the viewer to, remarkably, interpret the events on their own. What I just watched was an antiwar demonstration in Munich, which turned violent in some relatively minor way. Or that is what I gather. It looked to me like in a peaceful, organized crowd of a few hundred demonstrating against Europe’s involvement with NATO, and a small handful of punchers, mostly a few police taking down a guy with a green Mohawk. I was enthralled.

This may just be me reacting to a novelty technique, but it seems reasonable that leaving people to think and conclude on their own will yield better thoughts and conclusions generally, in much the same way as removing all of the traffic signs and lanes on the roads lead to better driver awareness in that Dutch experiment that anarchists are so fond of citing.

Now that interesting and educated and commentary is free and prolific online, (most places) it may be that best service TV broadcasters can give to an audience is slick, high-resolution, first on the scene, professionally shot footage broadcast quick and wide. We interpret first and follow up on the facts later, if we care to. Could Show-Don’t-Tell reporting be the new big thing in TV journalism?

Unlikely; not all stories are suited to being told without words (how ever would we talk about climate change?), and of course if we remember our Chomsky, networks would not be doing their jobs if they let us do too much critical thinking.

Also, yes I know that filming and editing are subjective persuasive arts with or without narration, but there is such there are degrees of objectivity, and this new thing has less.

The link to no comment tv is here, although I do prefer thinking of it as a tube thing rather than an intertube thing.

There’s been some talk in Old Limbe Town lately about the unfortunate evolution of the local poultry market. As recently as a few months back, chickens and eggs came to people in Limbe the same way plantains or cassava did, via some small producer who grew a bit and sold it at one of the local markets, or even out of their home. The last time (only time really) I needed a whole chicken on short notice, we called up a colleague of mine who keeps about 40 ‘table birds’ (chickens and ducks) in his back garden, ready for slaughter on short notice. Great.

But over the course of a few short months the local market has been completely flooded by the birds and eggs of a certain non-national, who has started a battery farm in a certain other town, and has proudly declared that any chicken you eat in a Limbe restaurant these days is his (I’m told). Now our yolks are paler, our breasts more meager and our local producers are presumably in big trouble.

I have just left Limbe for good, but it seems the same thing is going on with chickens right now on a national scale. The other night in Yaounde I met a Canadian who was brimming with excitement at his new Cameroon-wide battery chicken venture. Apparently by 2010 we can expect the whole inhabited country to be dotted with high-tech battery operations churning out 30 000 birds per day, each. He could barely contain his glee about the coming era of higher meat-to-bone ratios and industrial sanitation standards (proudly insisting “our chickens NEVER see the light of day”!).  To my very predictable query about effects on local producers he gave a very predictable answer about hiring locals in the factories and paying them well.

For me this is a gloomy little story how headless and steamroller-like development can be. Why can’t we choose what to include and what to leave out? Given the choice between a localized organic food market that provided a little income to a lot of people with minimal eco-footprint and animal cruelty, and a foreign-owned, small-farm-squashing poultry monopoly, I don’t think most people would have to think very long or hard. Even the Canadian in question, who seemed nice enough, would probably go with the local/diverse/healthy economy option if one had asked him some time last year when he was a web-designer.

On the other hand, say Boles, is that 5 laptops with shiny new ArcGIS9.3 that you managed to collect into a single Limbe room there?

(In fact software credit goes mostly to Global Forest Watch and WRI.)

]]> http://janeboles.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/203/feed/ 4 Jane Boles (In fact credit for that goes moslty to Global Forest Watch and WRI.) http://janeboles.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/just-send-nets-a-whining-complaint/ http://janeboles.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/just-send-nets-a-whining-complaint/#comments Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:29:45 +0000 Jane Boles http://janeboles.wordpress.com/?p=198 ]]>

I know that the idea of there being “Not enough computers in Africa” became dull once Brian Eno declared there was “Not enough Africa in computers”, and that that became passé when Ron Eglash declared that in fact there’s just “not enough Africa in Brian Eno”, but hey, you know what?

There’s not enough computers in Africa.

Similarly, I know that when I took my dicky little intro GIS class in school they were keen to point out that “GIS is not just software”. Sure, but you know what? You need software to do GIS.

And again similarly, I know that in academic development discourse, “technical fixes” are pooh-poohed as the most childish oversimplified bandaid non-solutions to deeply political crises, disguised as apolitical while covertly inoculating institutions for neoliberal agendas, but hey:

Would somebody throw me a technical fix? Just a little fix. I’m trying to run a workshop here.