Urban Life

When i was a young man, just into my twenties, I was graced with the opportunity to spend a fall, winter and spring living away from the noise, filth and insanity of the city. For a time, I whiled my way in a little house on a half acre just outside a village on the edge of nowhere.

I lived on the Kings Highway, a small snakey road that traverses our entire vast country without ever passing through anywhere that anyone cares about anymore, so it is dotted with tiny villages that are crumbling as the children scamper off to the big city. So, I was allowed the experience of being an inconsequential fly orbiting the quaintest of dying life forms.

It was a rejuvenating bucolic time for me, spent reading Tolstoy and Thoreau in between bouts of chopping winter wood and clawing back the wild from overrunning my utopic idyll. OK, it may not have been that idyllic. I was working in a cardboard factory in the nearby village and twenty years later, my lungs are still paying for it—seriously, it was the most depressing place in the world and the employees made book on who and when each would drop dead. That isn’t a joke or hyperbole. While i worked there, a man came up on retirement and instead of much wistful conversation on what one might do with retirement, he was sunken and silent, and the rest joked about how long he would last. He died before his pension was processed. Money changed hands. It was that sort of place.

But still, it was one of my few experiences in life that didn’t take place deep in a large metropolis. I treasure it to this day. The odd thing is that other than the time I was in a vehicle than slammed into a deer head on (a great story unto itself), I don’t really recall any of the wild life that one might normally think to be abundant in the country. I remember the marina, the back trails, the woods, and grapevine wrath, but not regular ambulatory life forms.

Contrasting this, I have always found the concrete jungle to be teeming with life. Really. A ridiculous amount of life that very nearly gives us the finger for how much it cares what we do. My experience of the wild is inextricable from my experience of the city.

I used to live in a claustrophobic apartment complex that bordered on an embassy. I don’t remember which embassy, except it was the sort that always had an RCMP vehicle keeping it under surveillance (don’t we all miss the innocence of the cold war, considering how bloody the world is now). They had a tall fence around their complex, but at one end, on their side, was a hill leading right up the fence, and on our side a dumpster. I awoke one morning to loud chittering and found an entire family of raccoons had sauntered up to what they thought was a gorge-atopia and having plummeted in, couldn’t get back out. The large male hissed and bared its teeth at me when I peeked in. I found a long thick branch, fallen from a nearby tree and put one end in, forming a ramp up and out of the cornucopic trap. No dummies, the raccoon family immediately formed rank and climbed up and out and waddled off single file and never looked back at me.

Just last year, i found another family of raccoons living in a small tree in my yard. Up until then, I had never given thought to what animals do when they aren’t foraging. But for most of that summer, late at night, this family hiked up into the branches to sleep. I would never have known, but when I went outside to smoke at night they would startle awake and clamber off the tree, trundling sleepily down the length of a fence next to it. It was never a fearful run, more an irritated grumpy stumble, much the same as humans look when a fire alarm empties an apartment building. They’d go about 100 feet, dad would rear up and look back. I could see the moon reflected in his eyes, and then while I still smoked, they would start back and hoist their chubby bodies back into the branches. From evacuation to being all tucked in again took less time than my cigarette. Even if I fretted about my cats some, I enjoyed these barbapappa-like raccoons.

For a while I lived in Vancouver and lacking gainful employment often found myself rambling around Stanley Park. Raccoons were well known there, only they were much larger than those I knew in the east. They would stand on their hind legs, doing their best imitation of cute to get people to feed them. They resembled nothing less than small bears with masks. Fences had been put up, adorned with warnings not to feed them as they were known to attack small children, evidently not being choosy between peanuts and babies.

Out West, everything seemed bigger. And more prone to eating you. While living in Victoria, on the island I found myself sitting on the roof promenade of a mall eating a take-out, when some sea gulls came to investigate. I saw signs in bold red, warning not to feed the gulls. They were the same sort of signs that you would see at a power station warning you not to electrocute yourself by playing in the wires. Alas, I was the very snotty age of 21 and always on the lookout for a way to stick it to the man.

I tore off strips of my hamburger bun and began tossing. Soon, where there were three gulls, and then there were a hundred, then two hundred. These gulls, like everything out west were much larger than I was used to. They didn’t settle for squawking but began attacking. Like the raccoons, these gulls saw no point in discriminating between a hamburger bun and my flesh. I fled for the safety of the building and they flung themselves on the, apparently bullet proof glass. There was a lesson there about not fooling about with pompous ideas of us ruling nature.

I try not to forget it. I try, but forget anyway. I have had similar experiences since then, with squirrels on Mont Royal in the wet days of late March.

While i was in Victoria I also got to see a pelican. Up until then, my minds image of a pelican came mostly from Walter Lantz and I expected to see the enormous pouch hanging from a dopey bird. Unlike everything else, they were smaller than expected and when they haven’t swooped up a load of fish and water that pouch is barely a waddle. Aside from a long beak, they looked nothing like what I imagined. And they looked quite regal, not like the drunken sailor cartoons made of them.

While on the topic of Walter Lantz, I never saw or heard a woodpecker until this summer. Sitting on a porch in Minnesota, again smoking (i think if it were not for my filthy habit, I would never see any of the world), I first heard and then witnessed the famous bird. They are indeed handsome and bright. More than that, they are loud. Really loud. You think sawing a tree is loud? Try head butting one. That yard in Minneapolis was always chock full of colourful birds I could not name. I felt so jealous. Back home, most of the small birds were a dingy brownish grey. It was a big event to see a jay or a cardinal. In Minnesota, everyday was Tales Of The Green Forest come to life.

Back in the ol’ hometown, one of the more common animals I see is the skunk. They are so common that I think they get a bad rep for spraying. It is obvious that they only spray under dire circumstances, like being run over. If it were otherwise, the entire city would stink of skunk instead of car exhaust. While working night security for an elderly home, I used to routinely come across what I assume was the same skunk, while making my perimeter rounds(this was more for bringing back naked senile escapees than keeping predators out). I learned that skunks can make an impressively aggressive chittering noise to ward you off. They really do hold that spray back for emergencies. I’m glad, because, puppies aside, there is nothing more adorable looking than a skunk. That skunk flipping the bird at me each night was the highlight of that job.

Speaking of, where I live now, one night I was out back(you guessed it, smoking), when I nearly peed myself because a chuthulian nightmare came undulating across the yard straight at me. My paranoia was not delirium tremens; the thing coming at me was real and resembled some kind of manta ray. While I was making out my last will in my head and browning my shorts, it pivoted and writhed up to the front of the yard then slithered under the fence. I dashed after it in some madness, opened wide the gate and watched it ripple across my street.

Under the street lamps, I could see it was a family-or tribe--of skunks(really, what do we know about them?) traveling in a close knit phalanx. The characteristic waddle ripple of a skunk is amusing when it is one. Eight of them all voltron’d up into one being looks distinctly otherworldly. The land manta gang of skunks silently disappeared into another yard and I have never again seen anything like it.

At home, mostly what I like to watch are the crows. They are everywhere, ubiquitous. They do not become invisible to me though, I always think of them as knowledgeable demigods watching. And they do seem to keep tabs on us. Luckily they seem non-participatory. Science has demonstrated that they remember everything they see and do and that they transmit this information between themselves, so from what i can see, they are like a CIA who can fly. I live not that far from a house where legend has it a schizophrenic man lives, who buys enormous quantities of meat which he tosses up onto his roof to feed them(appeasement?).

I do not know if this is true, but, where I live, the word ‘murder’ to depict a flock of crows is insufficient. They darken the skies in the tens of thousands. I see hundred year old trees bend under their weight. If they do signal mystical portent, then I am at ground zero for when the hobbits surface. Or the apocalypse arrives.

The other bird that people nearly forget, because it is everywhere, is the pigeon. It is more common in the central city than the suburbs, but where they live, there are millions of them. I used to adore pigeons as much as I do skunks. They warble in a way that is so appealing, they sheen a great green and blue around their necks, and pivot their heads as though everything we say is daft. What’s not to like?

When I lived in Montreal I used to love how many tiny plazas they had, dubbed “parks”. Usually it was a corner with prettier concrete stones, some benches and a circular fenced enclosure of bushes and a tree. These places tended to have only a few denizens other than the pigeons. There were the elderly, the unemployed and the narcotic addicted. (I will leave off mention which category I fell into). All of them, without ever conferring seemed to agree on feeding the pigeons. These parks are about as serene a place as you can find in the inner city.

But that all changed while I lived in a groovy apartment in Little Italy, Ottawa, with a nice old dilapidated wooden balcony. During the winter, when we weren’t using it, it became over run as a roost for pigeons. I probably could have lived with that except that was the winter my girlfriend got pregnant. If you haven’t had children, this is the moment in life that transforms you from seeing the world as a playground to cavort in to seeing the world as a mortal threat to the well-being of your child. Overnight you become a hyper-vigilant pre-emptive strike kind of person.

Before my daughter was born we began planning on an off-site location to lock up the cleaning supplies and whether we could live without electrical outlets. The pigeons were a major assault on our fortress of fertility. Pigeon guano is quite poisonous, and once dry is easily dusted up into the air. Since my girl had been tasked with the whole gestating thing, dealing with the pigeons fell on me.

Despite a childhood spent revelling in the god-like power of torturing bugs, I grew up, not into a serial killer, but a gentle soul. I didn’t really want to evict these families who must care about their own children as much as we did for our unborn. But, I did feel it was a us-or-them kind of thing. And when I thought of my little baby breathing in pigeon bio-weaponry, my jaw set.

Now, I know from humane traps. At a restaurant I used to work at, we used to lay out the humane traps. They consisted of shallow trays of a gluey substance. The idea was the little mouse feet would get caught in the molasses and then you would pull them free and deposit them in some more appropriate, nurturing environment, like the woods (wherever that is if you work downtown).

In reality, the glue was supernaturally strong, and the caught mice, terrified would rail against it, only to trip and get their bodies caught up in it. Even more frightened, they would pull harder, slowly ripping out of their skins. I would find mice squealing in agony and if I tried to peel them off, all I achieved would be pulling them right out of their skins altogether. Very humane. I took to putting the trapped mice, trap and all, in a bag, bringing them out back and stomping on them before sending them on their farewell voyage to the dumpster.

I took this painful lesson to heart when dealing with the pigeons. I went out onto that balcony, wearing my air filter, kicking up guano dust everywhere and stomped on the cheeping babies in those nests. Then I shovelled everything into garbage bags before scrubbing everything in detergent. Urban life--for them and for me. I never told the mother of my child what had been necessary. She had, generally, more sympathy for animals than people and probably would not have understood. I thought to myself, maybe it is some primal evolutionary part of fatherhood that one lives with killing the babies of the competition.

That is my penultimate anecdote of urban life. Perhaps a poor one to devote so much time to, given the genial nature of this piece. It is just to say that the urban jungle is like any other jungle—vicious and decisive.

I’ve left out a lot of urban life with which I am familiar. Countless rabbits and gophers could also have provided stories. Then there was two summers ago when Ottawa was inexplicably infested with wild turkeys—it became a local internet meme to post photos of a spotting. I never knew there was such a thing as a wild turkey until then. I also have loving tales of snakes and frogs in the city, but ran out of space. I will leave off on one final anecdote of life in the city.

For a time, I lived in the old country, not my old country; I’m Scotch-Irish, but the old country just the same. While I hung my hat in Berlin, I cycled one day to visit the historic site where Hitler signed his little document deciding the world would be a great place with all the world’s religions minus one. Winded from a long ride I walked my bike under the shade of a wooded area and came across a boar.

For fellow North American Urbanites, a boar is neither a cute little pygmy pig, nor a vacuous aimless farm pig. A boar is a large dangerous beast that can take out a human easily. Without arms, you cannot fight one and you cannot outrun one either. I looked at it. It looked at me. It measured me as no threat, snorted derisively and wandered away. In that moment I first understood what wildness was. I first connected with the idea of mankind as a naked frightened animal in the wilderness. I understood our fires and guns and mistrustfulness. I understood the uneasiness that, even in our concrete world, we still cannot shake off. I understood another living thing as something other than food or an irritant to be erased. I understood the possibility of being knocked off by something else's primal nature.

I was quite shaken and cycled off. At my destination I had no stomach to visit the famous building and sat smoking in the garden. While I smoked, two young foxes leapt out of the woods, cavorting and playing without a care in the world. They never noticed me, but just jumped and rolled and yipped. Eventually an adult fox emerged from the trees, looked balefully at me, and barked. Tails down, the two young foxes skulked away and disappeared into the woods. Just another family coping with urban life.

Welcome To The New Dark Ages

My problem with democracy is 50 million Elvis fans can be wrong. They can be wrong about all kinds of shit.  But it is much more than the oversimplified idea that electing leaders based on popularity, soundbites and tie choice is a dodgy way to go about things.

My problem with democracy is most people are, through no fault of their own, not in a great position to make informed choice--whether they are smart or stupid, greedy or community oriented.  Even if inclined towards good decisions, does the average citizen have the time, energy and accurate information to become knowledgeable about economics, environment, climate, social costs and benefits?  I'm not saying the average voter is a simpleton (though it seems that way at times) but that s/he is very busy with mundane immediate concerns (like paying the rent or feeding the kids) and the world is a very big and very complex set of systems.

Add to the recipe a media that confuses people about important issues so intensely that people will often become hostile at even being asked to think about something. Sometimes this media is incompetent in exactly the same way as the poor voter, but often the Media, concentrated as it is in the hands of a wealthy few, has a strong agenda not at all in line with the best interests of the average voter.

Now you have a voter, commuting several hours a day, working at a job that is perhaps underpaid, struggling to keep a roof over his two kid’s heads and he has at best 20 minutes a day for information gathering.  This, he usually gleans from The Sun.  His peers are pretty much identical.  None of them want to appear ignorant.  All of them are biologically wired, and socially conditioned to look for group identity and fear the consequences of standing out.  Now you have a group with very little real information, a great deal of misinformation and slant, and a strong desire to take the shortest route to a comfortable unconflicted solidarity.  

If you think I am painting an unrealistic portrait of Joe Six-Pack, chances are you are an idealist who spends little time among the working class.  It’s not so different among the white-collared except they have a bigger mortgage and receive their propaganda dose from The Globe and Mail.  Then these people are expected to vote, not on an issue, but for a fairly concentrated executive group who will make decisions and laws for four years.  When the government screws them over, they are told tough titty, you got what you voted for. But did they understand what they were voting for?

The vast majority of people, including those with higher education—which face it, isn’t what it used to be, and at its strongest tends to be highly specialized--are not well informed about virtually any of the issues that should concern them most when it comes to civic activity, politics or voting.

The average citizen doesn't even understand that smaller government (a constant Conservative rallying cry) means less social goods and protections.  They do not understand that the majority of tax money is recycled right into society via jobs, social programs, culture, healthcare, infrastructure, safety regulations, etc, etc.  They vote for the party promising smaller government because they have been bamboozled into thinking that the government is their enemy.  

Ironically, by fulfilling the promise of leaner government through gutting social spending, deregulation, closing down oversight departments, cutting science spending, and fighting public unions, the resulting social problems confirm for the voter his suspicion that government is the enemy.  As a bonus: that same government still manages to overspend, just not in ways that benefit the people, further aggravating the voter. The sad thing is this cycle often does not translate into a shift in alliances to parties that actually would look after the voter better.  Absurdly, the voter often takes out his anger on the party that would be his best ally.  This does not happen in a vacuum, it happens in a heavily mediated environment.

Take for example, recent talks to privatize Canada Post.  CP is not an essential service, but the way privatization is framed perfectly illustrates the smaller government fallacy.  The spin in the media is that this will create competition and efficiency and benefit you.  Now, Canada Post is not only fiscally responsible, but generates a profit, nearly 300 million dollars annually, the article I read stated.  So talks of privatization are, from the get go, about fixing things that ain’t broke.  The article went on to state that 2/3 of CP’s expenses are the incomes of its 71 000 employees and that that money is costing you too much.  The article warns that in coming years a stamp could rise to 61 cents.  Given the size of Canada, this still strikes me as a steal. 

 

What made me angry is this angle I see all the time that you should feel vindictive because people are employed at a living wage, that wages are a frivolous unacceptable use of money.  These wages, posed as a negative are wages that get spent on houses and washing machines and cars, on restaurant meals, on clothes, on charitable donations, on taxes that keep parks, sewers and roads in good shape.  These wages aren’t stolen from you; they are part of the social compact of interdependence and mutual benefit.  These wages contribute to a healthy economy and a functioning community.  

With privatization, some significant portion of those jobs disappears altogether; many become rehires at substandard wages with benefits and protections removed.  The newly unemployed are added into job competition (which pushes wages down), the reduced wage employees have less money to spend in the community and contribute less tax to the government leaving it less able to provide for the community.  The collective economic and political clout of the people is reduced as well.  Lastly, the price of postage does not go down because private executives make much bigger salaries and with those fussy government regulations out the window perhaps the mail is less reliable too.

There isn’t a single good reason for an average person to want Canada Post privatized, but if all a person has to go on is the persuasive slanted media (that doesn’t feel the same strident need to portray “both sides of the story” as it does with climate change), that person will probably feel encouraged and supportive that another fat-cat public institution is getting its comeuppance.

More and more often, it’s the same story no matter the issue.  People are fooled into laws that harm them, deregulating safeguards that protect them, foisting costs into the public and profits into the private.  Is it really hard to see the harm in a Harper government?  Slash social spending; this grows poverty desperation, and social ills.  Create an omnibus crime bill with harsher sentencing and wider swathes of criminally deemed activities which eventually soar due to the aforementioned.  Build private super prisons for a slave waged “competitive” manufacturing industry for profit.  Is that what it has come to mean to be Canadian?

 

What is the end game in destroying civil rights and their institutions—for women, minorities, homosexuals, the poor, children, psychiatric patients and what motivates someone to vote for that?  What’s the end game in destroying environmental protection departments, closing down scientific bodies and denying the already actualizing consequences of climate change and what motivates someone to vote for that?  What motivates an average citizen to vote for a constrictive police state of disempowered citizens while creating a free for all for banks and corporations?

Why do farmers vote conservative, their worst enemy?  I know working poor and unemployed people who voted conservative.  I know rabid atheists who voted for Harper.  I know women who voted for Harper.  You would think in a world of record oil profits even the most ignorant voter would be wary of a party that endorses fat subsidies and tax breaks for the oil industry?

I get angry at voters even though voters are so poorly situated to vote well so it’s hard to blame them.  I do blame our voting system and voter apathy for awarding a majority government to the party that received approval from 24% of the electorate. 60% of the electorate voted, and nearly 40% of those chose Harper.

Harper doesn't even talk a good game about "the people" or "family values" or any other traditional political veil.  Whenever he refers to Canadians, he sounds like he is speaking of foreigners who he deems barely human, an irritating obstacle that needs to be humoured at times.  So, I just don't understand him winning an election, except that a lot of the non-voters are people who wouldn't have voted conservative had they voted.  They did not understand that refusing to vote was not a vote for none of the above, or an act of defiance, but a tacit endorsement of whoever did end up with the most votes.  If every person who earns less than 25 grand a year and didn't vote had added their vote to the NDP, we'd likely have Prime Minister Layton today.  

There were a lot more non-voters than Harper votes.  Think about that.  If every non-voter had voted rhinoceros party, they would be the government of Canada.

John Ralston Saul, in The Unconscious Civilization, discusses at length how helpful it is to conservatives to encourage the idea that "all parties are the same" and "what difference does my vote make" and "politics is all corruption and greed", because it never fools conservatives, only left leaning people and vulnerable people who feel powerless.  Every time a conservative rolls back the social good, it reinforces powerlessness to the vulnerable people in society and they feel further disenfranchised from the political process.  It’s a terrible ignorance fed feedback loop.

I keep hearing “the people have spoken”.  And I think, so what.  Even if it weren’t the case that a small minority has granted a great deal of power to a dangerous man, even if it was a real majority, even if it was unanimous, should I feel consoled that democracy has been served?

300 Years of Fossil Fuel Addiction in 5 Minutes

Here's a short film narrated by Richard Heinberg.  It is the most efficient introduction to industrial/environmental/economic issues ever, but I am mostly posting it to see if i can figure out how to post a video



The video is part of promotions for the Post Carbon Institute's brand new Post Carbon Reader.  Selections from the book are available here if you are curious.

I Am Ironing A Kitten: Play For That F*ckin' Money

It’s that most wonderful time of the year, the leaves are turned, the jack-o’-lanterns are rotting, Starbucks has redressed itself in festive Christmas red and school is arching into a murderous crescendo.

While I am too educated to ascribe facetious causal explanations, I do find a correlation between my motivation to post to my blog and the intensity of assignment deadlines. I was faced this morning with the choice to either write something for this space or to catch up on email with an out of town dear friend—the reasoning being I had time for neither so had to choose just one. You get it, don’t you? In the time honoured spirit of self-plagiarism, I realized I could borrow portions from my message to generate a post, thereby maximizing the efficiency of my procrastination!

One of my best methods of procrastination is imagining justifiable procrastinations. I briefly entertained a fantasy that friends would rent a car to go to the Montreal Small Press Fair this weekend and call me to come along and I would be forced to abandon my homework for the greater cause of vital socializing and cosmopolitanism. I stared hard at the phone and willed it to happen, the same way I have applied my will to Carleton University’s union to make their negotiations break down so they would make good their threat to strike. The spineless fuckers just keep sitting at the table while getting whittled at.

I just can’t catch a break.

Seriously though, I’m so frazzled. It’s reaching beyond peak frenzy. I have a paper due on Monday in my population class and it has my colon in a knot.

Background: I got the best mark I have ever received, on the midterm in this class, and have week after week engaged the Prof in debate in class and on the class website. Last week, argument started to become a euphemism, during a vigourous discussion(euphemism) on China’s one child policy (I wasn’t defending it or condemning it; I was defending the notion of seeing it from China’s point of view—i.e. having 1.4 billion people and being a nation whose philosophy favours the collective over the individual).

My Prof stormed up and down the aisle blaring about dead baby girls and an empiricist world that wants to solve its problems by telling Africans(?) they can’t have babies. He was mostly being bombastic and playing agent provocateur—and despite my promise to myself to not keep falling for it, I too was sputtering red faced. I was really out of control. My logic and focus was actually a cut above its normal level(at least in my vaseline-lensed perceptions anyway), but I was hollering and interrupting both the Prof and students. I revved up and started yelling directed questions at the class, nearly Socrates style, minus the stylish cool. Seriously all mental. A very uncivilized ape.

At one point, I thought I had gained an ally, but it turned out that we had awakened a nazi-styled element in the class, who chimed in that international institutions should “get in there” to “stop them from having more babies” so china "wouldn’t wreck the planet”.  So thereafter I had to fight my Prof on the one hand, who professes to believe that everyone should have lotza babies and that growth produced human ingenuity will save us, and on the other hand, fight the pseudo nazi sounding fellow behind me who felt some good old fashioned genocide was in order to make the world safe for North Americans. The only thing more antithetical to university dogma than neomalthusianism is colonialism, so I was saved from being the troll, but just barely.

All that to say I feel like I have to produce a ringer of a term paper for this class. Due on Monday and I haven’t written a real word yet. I shouldn’t be writing this. It is stealing energy from my essay.

And my head is broken. I started out with a theme examining the refugee wave of Somalis in Ottawa in 1993 following the Somalian civil war, and accumulated a wealth of data (it seems every Master’s thesis at Carleton from ’95-’97 was on this topic). I started to drown in data, and couldn’t find the right tone—I was thinking about the nightmare of being forced from a rural, subsistence, oral culture to an urban capitalist bureaucratic culture, and I was thinking of the naked piercing hate that was the response of Ottawa’s citizenry.

From there I trekked over to a more general theme, examining the population composition of Ottawa. I collected a cornucopia of demographic data on Ottawa’s immigrants with the thesis that today’s Ottawa immigrants are more successful than immigrants anywhere, anywhen ever(in contrast to the media’s constant bleet that Multiculturism is failing). And then I started to flounder in lack of focus.

In a completely random mind belch I moved on to global food production and arable land.

From there I caffeinated my way to global population and the apocalyptic nature of growth. I couldn’t find any supportive data there. In scholarly circles there is a perceived crisis in the notion that the global population may start retracting sometime in the next century. Of course this is the same scholarly milieu that feels a reduction in global carbon emissions is also a crisis as it would impact food production (via the C02, not a reduction in petro farm inputs). I calm myself with the Jay Hanson quote that “magical thinking is still taught in universities”.

I saw another scholarly article from an economics journal stating that human populations are proportional to information storage and that to be sustainable and accommodate growth, the world needs to focus on information technology. Aaaaaaaaagggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

At this point, I took a break and wandered aimlessly around the internet. I found this captioned photo that I pasted on the inside of my forehead as relief humour to remedy frustration:

Fortified, I dove back into the fray. I started digging into China’s one child policy and the unintended consequences it is beginning to reap—an aging population and a more aggravated than usual imbalance in gender, both very serious issues that a society can wrangle with if it isn’t busy coping with mass famine and the kind of feral warfare that crashes that sort of party. I found lots of articles furiously furrowing brows at these coming Chinese crises, though little analysis of the benefits of a greatly reduced fertility rate.

So, that’s where I am now. The paper is due at 6pm tomorrow and I have 18 papers on the topic that are ideal sources for a paper criticizing China’s efforts to stem population growth.

And I still feel like an atomic ADHD sketchmonkey.

And I don’t want to write this paper. I don’t want to write anything. I want to go to a cottage on a river and watch the leaves floating by. I want to bring a bunch of books and sprawl on a sofa in front of a pot-bellied stove warm with aromatic wood burning inside.

I’m also halfway thru a paper on the Huron Indians of 17th century Ontario for my anthropology class. My thesis is on the historical evidence for settled agricultural egalitarian societies. I chose the anthropologist I am studying, the late Bruce Trigger from McGill University, based on the weediest intuition that his study demonstrated this idea. It turns out that he was a Marxist with global impact on archaeology and anthropology and was furiously concerned with applied anthropology influencing the “real world”. In popular scholasticism civilization is synonymous with hierarchy and class. Accordingly, settlement and agriculture lead inevitably such “progress”, the same way over-consumption, waste and throughput (instead of cycled) economies are part of progress. Trigger spent his career challenging not just this idea but how we formulate ideas(i.e. theoretical work). Incredibly fascinating stuff. I would like to spend a year studying his work and the work he was influenced by. This paper too is a towering overwhelming nightmare of too much curiosity and not enough precision. I don’t want to keep working on it either. The whole thing is moot: soon this paper will be handed in and I will, circuit training fashion, jog on to the next station. Sigh.

I want to watch 70’s era Saturday morning cartoons and ponder the semiotics of my televised upbringing while slurping ice-cream. I want to spend the day rambling Conroy or Bruce Pitt Park and pet dogs. I pretty much would accept going to the dentist or boning up on tax law over my assignments.

I lost 8 days of work(and much more in data) due to the fact that my computer melted down on Halloween. I attribute this entirely to the trickster gods who mind me. I attempted some magick that day, purposed to jar me from a rut. Coyote laughed his ass off and punctually stomped my computer into oblivion(seriously, within an hour of the ritual), which did indeed have the appropriate, if not desired, effect. Never let it be said that I am above tempting the gods.

Through magicks I was able to replace my existential angst surrounding school with frantic panicked measures to actually get the work done. I also had to reach out, ironically enough, to my neglected personal networks in order to re-descend into the digitally connected world. The cherry on top was that I was unable to sit in the narcotic-like fog of the internet (which for me includes all my television and music habits) and instead read many books and worked on fall yard cleanup(screw you Green Man, I hate leaves!).

For 8 days, I didn’t stay on top of weather updates, ugly world news, or hourly micro reports on the movie industry. For 8 days I didn’t trawl chapters.ca for books I can’t afford, didn’t troll comment areas in right wing publications and didn’t truant school for the almighty click. For 8 days, there were no LOL cats, spam or online gaming site pop-ups.

With this sabbatical to the tangible world I felt wholly renewed and experienced a transcendent moment of an angelic Freddy Mercury singing about new times.

The dangers of real world, real space, real time utopia were eventually overcome and I am comfortably sedated back in cyberspace.

I am putting off finishing this post because then it means I have to go back to schoolwork and I just can’t bear it. I can’t find any way to rationalize not working on my essay, but I am trying really hard.

There have been so many assignments that there is never a full day to sit back, breathe easy and say “I am on schedule and today is a day off”. Matters are aggravated by the idea that I will likely not be given the opportunity to use this degree in a professional capacity. More slowly and more troublingly, I am circling around the idea that I don’t think I want to use this degree in the given professions it is intended for. I can imagine being an environmental activist, or working on a farm in a small town, or even working in a bookstore and writing freelance. But I can’t imagine being a planner in a society that thinks of megacities as inevitable and insists on the nihilistic masturbation that is “sustainable growth”. I can’t imagine working for Stats Can when we can only compile reports that support dominant paradigms, or going on to graduate studies for the same reasons. I think working for Natural Resources would be equally maddening-we control 80% of earth’s mining and just quashed a bill that made gentle non-mandatory gestures toward international social and environmental accountability. Canada—a nation of malevolent dwarves.

I’m putting off ending this post because what I really need is to commune, to ‘hang out’, to span some time with people, with friends. The last thing I need is to continue pouring over articles with a highlighter, composing arguments that I don’t believe but that support the data. I noticed, researching, that when an indexed article doesn’t fit a given dominant paradigm it often hasn’t been uploaded to an online database. Makes you wonder what isn’t even indexed? Maybe I am paranoid, but its spookily common.

More and more often I find, if I use the language and frameworks that I am taught in school, and I use the data sources that are sanctioned, I am unable to say what I want and need to say. Often I can only say the polar opposite of what I mean. Eat your fucking heart out George Orwell. When I am trying to write my papers for the marks, and feeling acid burn in my tummy, I think of a line one of the characters in the TV show Treme was always saying: a horn player, scraping by from gig to gig, rarely playing what he wants to play; he always looks over slyly at a bandmate and says “play for that fuckin’ money”. He doesn’t say it bitterly or ironically, it’s just a bemused rally.

I seem to be running low on energy to play for that fuckin’ money. And I don’t get money, I pay for the privilege.

Did your childhood teach you to deal with austerity?

The sun is drifting away and winter is on the horizon. This time of year always makes me nostalgic and frightened. There’s no conflict there: it’s a time of dying and blowing away so we think of things that are gone. And in Canada, it is the harbinger of the long human-lethal season. So naturally my thoughts turn to times gone by simply to avoid thinking about impending winter.

This moment’s nostalgia goes to a Saturday morning animated cartoon called Fat Albert. It was an early seventies creation of Bill Cosby’s back when he was a stand up comedian and long before America became comfortable with the Huxtables.

It’s very alien compared to today’s cartoons (not that I watch cartoons). It exists in a realistic context and that real world is poverty. Just try and sell that to a network, “hey, I’ve got a show about impoverished kids who muck about in a junkyard looking for ways to get by”. Just try and sell that, I dare you. But this show was born in the shadow of the oil embargo that strangled America and left it for dead for many years, you know, the years where America sacrificed its manufacturing industry to save banking profits. I don’t know why I bring that up since today’s children’s shows don’t reflect anything of reality.

You may not remember the day to day adventures of the Cosby kids, but you may remember the specials. There was the Christmas special, where our gang finds a homeless couple having a baby in the dump because they were evicted by their rich landlord. Holy Christian imagery aside, it was a holiday special about the plight of homeless people and detailed the horrific experience of a woman giving birth at a landfill. Then there was the Halloween special. Our gang loves this holiday because they don’t have to feel hungry (they tell us this). After braving a scary house and realising that the old witch is a nice old lady, our gang wanders home sated, feeling jubilant that they got to drink soda pop. So, no ipods, no Xboxes, no extra huge burger king meals, they have reached the pinnacle of childhood excess because they got to drink soda.

Day to day, the fat Albert gang need help in coping with the conundrums they face. Naturally, they get this from a wino who lives in a park, named Mudfoot. He is a recurring character who always helps the kids out. He’s sort of Yoda in ripped clothing with a bottle of wine.

The thing I find most fascinating is that their home base or headquarters is a garbage dump. In the show this is called a junk yard, because, assumedly once upon a time there were junk yards and not just landfills. Most opening shots in the show feature a hollowed out manufacturing city that pans into the dump. Fat Albert and the gang often repurpose the junk they find to facilitate their adventures. In the same fashion they finance several adventures through the activity of collecting bottles, cans and paper to sell to recycling.

In one episode they all want musical instruments. When all their cash gathering attempts fail they create instruments from the garbage they find in the junk yard. They form a band that provides musical interludes throughout the series.

We have to assume their parents have work, though it must pay abysmally considering the state of the kids. Parents are never around. These kids need to navigate the world and learn for themselves. Kinda like the kids in my neighbourhood so long ago. Kids are kids, but kids who are marched from violin class to playdate and back home are not kids Albert or i could relate to.

I think I must be getting old because I get these urges to recount tales of my childhood that seem magical to me and extinct in the modern context. I don’t think my nine year old would relate to Fat Albert the way I do. It’s almost too bad. The world is crumbling fast and I feel like the resourceful imaginative kids from Fat Albert, and Fat Albert’s time might fare better in an uncertain age where wealth dwindles and your violin and videogame skills don’t help you. The Fat Albert kids will cope better with austerity and the economic meltdown that is only just unfolding. hey hey hey.

Plug: Retribution For A World Lost In Screens

I just need to post a link to the very best and smartest, yet pained rant I have read in a while. I appreciated the fire, yet felt shamed for my own state of wallow. If you go ahead and read it, keep watching Chris Hedges, he writes a lot of thought provoking material:

Retribution For A World Lost In Screens

I came across this via countercurrents, but it originated at:

Truthdigs

And my apologies for calling a desperate plea a "rant", but really, where are we but ranting at this point?

Mad Max: The Classic and The Apocrypha

The other night my local popcorn house screened one of those holy of holies, 1979’s Mad Max. I live in a town of cinema lovers and a good twelve of us made the pilgrimage through the new climate’s perpetual rain to pay our respects to feverish visions of collapse. It was a glorious night of scratchy popping images and sound that rivals that of those doohickeys you hung off your car door at the drive-in.

Remember drive-ins: we loved our cars so very much we didn’t even want to get out of them when we went to the movies. That sentiment is significant to the version of Mad Max that got off the ground.

Mad Max opens with the cryptic words “A few years from now” printed on the screen as we pan back from the arches of a really dilapidated Halls Of Justice swaying in a drought plagued wind. With that we are introduced to a failing industrial town limping along in the early days of financial collapse. The town population idle about in diners and trailers, pretending the world is normal. It’s not unlike a scenario a “few years from now” where folk drink weak tea and wait patiently for the recession to end.

The film focuses on two kinds of disenfranchised youth. The first are marauding bands of unemployed young men who carouse and ride the roads on stolen gas. They are like ghosts who mime the things they knew from previous life: looping through endless commutes between town centres and distant factory jobs.

Because we have all studied a little sociology, we know things can’t go well from here. A society is in peril when it cannot employ its youth. Men without a function quickly regress into an aggressive antagonistic state, and men without paychecks cannot secure wives and even more quickly regress into leather pants, motorcycles and bizarre homoerotic theatrical rituals. I know it is true because I have seen it in Mad Max.

The other kind of disenfranchised youth, and I will say here, it takes a subtle film goers eye to differentiate them as they also parade about the highway in defiant leather using mayhem as a desperate stopgap to keep the immense despair of civilization’s collapse from pouring down onto them, are the local police. They recall Little Alex’s colleagues from A Clockwork Orange who trade in their gang colours for a civil servant paycheck(or at least a vehicle) in one of those professions that truly blossom when the shit hits the fan. See, if you had spent your vacations in South America, India or Russia instead of some disney resort island, you would already have a template for crumbling societies where the wealthy retract every limb they can and employ as much of the riffraff as possible as security enforcers to keep regular folk away from the canned tuna and the soda pop. Perhaps that is why the lead villain was named Toecutter—he sought to nibble away at the edges of what power remained.

You might be inclined, in these first few minutes, to think that perhaps you are about to watch a film about the last of the heroes holding civil society together and at bay from nefarious barbarous haters of law, order and good hygiene. But again, this is a film of subtlety and nuance—it’s not just guns and macked out cars. The action sequence that opens the film has virtually the entire town’s police force running down a villain until they kill him in a fiery explosion of overkill. We know he is a villain because we witness him . . . speeding. Not only does he speed, but he goes by a pseudonym(as only super villains do), The Night Rider, and he spouts nihilist poetry right into the radio. This is an instructive part of the film. If you are trying to hang tightly to the remnants of society, you don’t invest in schools or civic projects, you hammer down on the citizens who have nothing left to lose, the ones who've gone a little batshit because they were on the edges that fell apart first.

I won’t give away the rest of the film for those who haven’t seen it, but in between the Village People antics of the Last Police and some bizarrely idyllic moments of Max’s family life, we get to bear witness to the final crumblings of civilization, which of course open the doorways to the apocalypse and a spectacular film franchise.

It’s almost sad to note that George Miller had virtually no budget for his fantasy film and had to resort to filming reality. So, the dusty dying towns are real, the boarded up buildings are real, the deserted industrial plants are very real. Inadvertently, Mr. Miller struck a chord in the film goer by basically filming a documentary and punctuating it with exploding cars.

What is less familiar to people is his original script, the one before even his meagre financial backers got their sticky fingers into it.

George Miller was an emergency room doctor, that is to say the sort of person with an enormous will to work long and hard and face ugliness with optimism and determination. Not the sort of man who makes depressing end of the world films. I have it on good authority from the internet that his original script was much more uplifting.

In it, the film opens on the same scenario, only our cast responded differently.

Being the last formal social institution standing, and inspired by the same “the people need a hero” speeches that made it to the final cut, our heroes throw out the rules they knew from the dominant economy. They sell off most of the town’s cars and motorcycles to a nearby city that isn’t yet so badly degraded as the periphery. They cannibalize and sell off great chunks of the various industrial plants too. With the seed money, Max starts a horse ranch. Miller depicts him as the kind of visionary hero who invests for the long haul: Horses, of course are self-fuelling, self-reproducing labour and transportation machines that also manufacture fertilizer. Goose, in an inspired fit of pragmatism, uses his share of the seed money to start an ostrich farm. The hearty plains birds do well in the outback and provide a steady food supply to the town that the world forgot. Yes, in the original, we don’t have to watch vibrant life-affirming Goose get barbecued. Soon everyone is gainfully employed in the busy pursuit of keeping the community alive and well.

Initially, before they retire the last of the cars, they form road crews who, with pickaxes, tear up segments of the highways at intervals, to make their little oasis less inviting to those who would just pillage their way to the end. The recently unemployed chemical engineers from the plant immediately start repurposing the asphalt for more constructive uses.

The mechanical engineers, relieved from the odious and underemployed duty of keeping the cars running set themselves to building windmills and other equipment that can generate electricity from the surrounding environment. With very little formal education, many of the towns people get in on these endevours. It was to be filmed as a montage to BTO's "Taking Care Of Business"

The until now perpetually unemployed post grads from various humanities programs form the ambassador league and build ties with nomadic indigenous tribes who are developing a loose trading web with other towns. There is a glorious scene where, once the cancerous growth economy is abandoned, it becomes clear how easy it is to forge alliances with the aboriginals. Had it been filmed, the audience could have thrilled in the tension of watching tribes who might have essentially taken control of the economy as pedestrian railway barons--overseers of all trade, but instead form mutually beneficial trade schemes, as had been their wont for millennia.

the third act opens a year later and a majority of the biker gangs have come asking to trade labour for food and are accepted into the town and it turns out there was nothing especially villainous about them.

The final scenes, had they been filmed would undoubtedly have earned Mel an Oscar. George’s script was, even in this benevolent version, still called Mad Max. Just for very different reasons. The film was to close many years down the road. An aging Max has become one of the town story tellers. He entertains and educates the children with frightening tales of how things were before. He speaks of poisonous smoke billowing into the sky, of faceless men in the castles called “banks” who decreed when people could work, and whether they were allowed shelter. We, as the audience, can see his stories for what they are, cautionary tales, designed in a “lest we forget” fashion. There is a perversion of these scenes in the third Mad Max movie, so all was not lost.

The great ending warmth that was to bring the audience to tears comes from Max saying these are his tales of the Mad World that came before, and the children laugh merrily at Max, unable to believe any of his stories because they are just too far fetched, and they dub him “Mad Max”.

The screen fades with max looking up into the clear starlit sky with a never-lost relieved look. Wind turbines tilt lazily in the background, and just before the screen goes dark, we see the soft loving look of Max’s wife pushing some grey hair behind her ear as she watches the children cavorting about over top of Max in their glee.

Well, anyway, that version of the script never got made, but we still got a pretty nifty Mad Max Trilogy, revolving around violence and a lust for fuel. Pure fantasy, I know(it's not like the whole world will go to war over gas), but not every movie can be a social drama.

Happy Canada Day

Youtube video of peaceful protest in Toronto.
Link: Peaceful protest of G20 in Toronto

Not that long ago footage like this would have cause outrage and public outcry from regular run of the mill Canadians. Now, we are willing to spend a billion dollars to make it happen. The outcome: no new tax for banks, and cut the fuck out of social spending. They should be so lucky the protesting was as peaceful as it was.

Welcome to the middle ages with cell phones.

just a plug:

here's a post on the gulf oil spill by acclaimed sci-fi author, and marine biologist Peter Watts:

rifters.com

(there's nothing like being so lazy that I let someone else do my ranting for me)

and an even better one, more generally on governments, science and the environment from Peter's old blog:

no moods, ads or cutesy fucking icons

Honest Junkie.

I will admit, I am a junkie. And I am far gone too, I will do pretty much anything to keep my shit flowing. And I will go major apeshit if anyone tries to stop or slow me down. Luckily, I'm hooked on oil, not smack, so very few people look down on me. It makes it way easier to go far off the deep end with one's habit. It helps too, that it is a common habit—we junkies all rationalize together. I feel bad for folk hooked on things where people think them weak or pathetic. I don’t have this problem.

I require 7 or 8 layers of oil 3 to 6 times a day just for the food I want. Seriously, from manufacturing farming equipment, to fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides, and then processing and packaging and then trucking, not to mention storage and cooking, and then waste removal, a huge chunk of my habit is just food. That’s just the oil that keeps me alive to enjoy more oil.

There are other things. Half my clothes, most of the crap I buy for my house, lots of the shit that allows me to have a job is made of oil. All of it is made by oil. Fuck, I rarely touch anything that doesn't exist only because of oil. I can’t even shave without it.

Like any other addiction, it’s insidious. it pretends to be a small part of life while taking over your whole life, and i mean everything. I have a little rubber chimpanzee that sits on my dresser and reminds me that I am a primate, just another insignificant, self-preoccupied biologic organism. He’s important to me and my thought process. But he’s not really made of rubber though, like not from a tree. He’s pure mass produced petroleum, shipped lickety-split from china or some other Asian place I know little about. So, he seems like a grounding lodestone to me, but he’s just another rock in my addiction.

Even my words are oil soaked. An unimaginable amount of oil goes into keeping me up to my eyeballs in computers, hard drives, fibre-optics, servers, electricity. It also paid for my schools and the freedom from fields to allow me to learn to read and write in the first place. It makes the books I read. it gave me access to information about oil addiction.

Much of the healthcare and medicine I have required(or desired) in my lifetime simply isn’t possible without oil.

My childhood lunchbox was made out of oil, just like my toddler diapers that sustained me until i made it to petroleum clothes. My first record collection I ever owned and loved as some statement of my identity was made out of oil. My entire 20’s ramblings back and forth across one of the very biggest countries in the world, only possible because oil was so cheap even a degenerate bum could traipse about in ways even royalty couldn’t imagine for most of the last 10000 years of “civilization”. My alarm clock that gets me to my job is made out of oil, my paycheck is all electronic, which is another word for oil, i spend it all on oil and oil soaked products.

I collect all my favourite movies(made possible by copious amounts of oil) and they are stored on hardened oil. I love burning candles, but my candle “wax” is pure oil. I import endless supplies of random shit from all over the globe only because oil feeds my habit. After i have earned my oil, i have to spend it on other forms of oil. That's how it works. If I don't do that, the risk is all the oil will stop, the best of it and the worst.

I’ve had sex thousands of times and only produced one child, all due to oil based freedom.

I don’t think of myself as evil, it’s just all so seductive, and once you have a taste, how can you say no, if it is in front of you, available everywhere, no stigma? Crist, sometimes it is practically free, and when you are down on your luck, there are places everywhere to get free oil benefits. Can I say no thank you, oil makes me and my world sick, and then risk ostracization? Can I say, no, I’ve broken free? Come to think of it, how far would I have to go to break free? Might I get locked up because I broke some junkie supporting law?

Seriously, I am so far gone, I can’t think of a single aspect of my life that isn’t funded by, propped up by, made available by, sustained by, oil. I'm so far gone, I cannot imagine life without all the glory of oil.

That’s the important part of being an oil junkie today. Desperation. Every system I have is hooked in full throttle. Because I cannot imagine anything else, I am a crazed lunatic, a psychopath. If I am to be frank, I will pay any price for the stuff and its wonders. I will make a nation worth of strangers suffer just to get it. I will kill off hundreds of species a year to get it. In a pinch, if things were hard, i might kill you for it. Do you get the picture, I can’t be reasoned with, I can’t think in long term survival strategies. I can’t think of my children’s needs. I just want more oil today, and the thought that I might not get that, makes me desperate and fearful, and aggressive and stupid.

When oil burns for years in Kuwait, my only lament is the loss(oh, I might pay lip service otherwise). When the Valdez spilled its guts, it was the oil loss that freaked me out. I don’t give a flying fuck about the environmental damage. It was far away from me, and the repercussions were going to be delayed and diffused among all us junkies.

When my pushers said it had come to the point that they could only keep supplying me if we were perpetually at war with the suppliers and some of the competition, do you think I suffered a single moral blink? Fuck no! Bring it on, I said.

For years, whiny cry babies have been saying we will soon run short in supply, and some junkies will go hungry, and that all of us will go hungry in my lifetime. I listened patiently(it’s not hard, I'm stoned on oil all the time after all). When they were done ranting with all their scientific talk, and economic and sociological predictions, I answered the only thing a self respecting junkie can. Get the fuck off my lawn! It’s not my problem. I'm sated in oil and I want to be sated in oil as long as I can be. I like being fat and wealthy and satisfying my every whim and urge instantly. And as long as I can keep doing it, that is my right.

This most recent supply disruption, the Mexican Gulf “catastrophe” is a real fucking headache. My pusher says he has to make some cutbacks, and put some temporary pseudo policies in place, or else the junkies who maintain delusions will get uppity. Fine. I get it, I have to pay a little more for my fix, just shut the fuck up and hook me up. Oh I understand that it is a huge biodiversity issue, not to mention a new economic meltdown, I just don’t really care. I want roads, I want fresh produce from Africa every day, I want movie theatres, I want bug spray. It’s summer now, I definitely want air conditioning. So do whatever you have to do, fewest concessions hopefully, and keep my shit flowing.

And climate change, seriously, I wish there was a way to suck back enough oil to drown that noise out. I mean, I'm not deluded, I know it is real, that is here, and that we ain’t seen nothing yet. In that respect, I am in the same camp with all the scientists, politicos and military guys. Not to mention the insurance pimps. Yeah, we all know, and we all get it, we are on a collision course with a major extinction event, all of our own making. And I know we could have done things to avert it, or slow it, or cope with it. it’s only the sappiest rubes who read and argue in the newspapers who don’t get it. It’s moot. We were never going to get clean, dump the oil monkey off our backs. We all knew it. We all pretended otherwise. We even light-heartedly talked about all these ways we could get off and still get some comforts, rather than going cold turkey. But we all looked in each others eyes, eyes glinting with oil addiction and we knew we meant none of it. Underneath, we actually just wished for even more oil and wanted everyone to shut up.

I'd like to say this piece is a bitter satire, but it isn’t. It’s reality stripped of all the false fronts. I'm not “part of the solution”, I'm the source of the problem. I mean, seriously, raise your hands, who isn’t in the same junkie boat that I am? And why in hell should I go into rehab, get stuck with life the way it was before the industrial age if nobody else is going to get with the program? No, I'm just like you, I'm riding this dragon right to the end. I look around me and everything that makes up my life is oil, and oil splendour.

And I can live with that, I can face my maker and say I was foolish, psychopathic, greedy, drunk on excess, a lemming in the pack, hooked, a junkie. And I can say give me my just deserts.

The only thing I would like(because I never have enough) is if we could all be honest. We don’t have to be good, or brave, or self-sacrificing. We don’t have to get clean, don’t have to work toward a solution. I'm just an old fashioned junkie that likes honest junkies. I don’t want to have to read about distraught outcries when gas costs too much, or a spill destroys a major ecosystem. I don’t want to hear academic ethical polemics about unjust wars or oppression. There really is nothing worse than a whiny junkie who can’t take responsibility for their addiction. “ohhh, it is someone else’s fault”, “oh, won’t someone help me”, “aww it is my whole parents generations fault”. Give me a break.

I figure, we got the life we asked for, in full, overflowing. And how many people in the history of human beings can say that? So let’s just be honest and stop fussing over the cost of addiction, we all know the lengths we are willing to go, deep in our festering hearts. Can’t we just take the ball and run for the end zone?

. . .It’s what separates us from the animals

Opposable thumbs. That was supposed to be a good one, except other apes, raccoons and even some cats have opposable thumbs.

We’re bipedal, that’ll do it; except penguins, meerkats, those dang raccoons and any other number of animals, including chimps and bonobos climb up on their haunches as well, when they want to see something at a distance.

I once heard that missionary sex, indicating eye contact and love separated us, but again many animals do this too.

Some cynics argue that deceit separates us from the animals. But even birds feign wounds to distract predators from little chics, cats pretend indifference when they are paying attention, and apes play up indignities for political gain.

Then the idealists come in. It is altruism, our ability to care that separates us. but that doesn't cut it either. Leaving the philosophy of what altruism really is aside, many animals will take in strays, of their own species or others. Dolphins rescue humans, who eat them for gods sake!

It goes around and around. The size of our brains, our organization, our arts. So many folk, for one reason or another trying to differentiate us from “the animals”. I have to ask why? Why is it so important to see ourselves as separate? Does it justify domination? Stewardship? Freedom to exploit? Is there something deeply frightening about the idea that we may be all closely related?

Some of the people who are distressed by human activity say it is our capacity for cruelty that separates us. I say they have never owned a cat. Or they bring up our capacity to inflict violence on our own kind. Again, these folk never owned hamsters who had scrabbled up against the hard limits of their environment. All carnivores are violent, comes with the territory. All carnivores will eat each other when resources and habitat become tight. Yes that includes hamsters and humans.

So what is this desperate need to differentiate ourselves from the other creatures of the world, with whom we share so much DNA as well as behavioral habits? The reason it is so easy to make animal metaphors is that we are little different. Army ants. Plague of locusts, king of the lions, the treachery of jackals, the persistence of salmon. The songs of whales. Loyal dogs. Promiscuous bonobos. Sycophantic hyenas.

I often think the desperate passionate need to differentiate ourselves is the same bid for survival as any other creature feels. Let loose some bacteria in a petrie dish filled with sugar solution, and the little buggers multiply like mad until all the food is gone, then they die off. Humans do think about things more than other creatures seem to, so we need to justify things to ourselves so we don’t get ulcers. One of the things we need to justify to ourselves is consuming everything in sight to the detriment of other less successful species. We are locusts, but we have to find ways to reflect on our locust activities.

I saw an animated movie a couple of years back, involving forest animals who marvelled at how the humans ate everything and had found ways to ensure an endless supply of everything being directed at their mouths. That was the way animals understood everything we do—ensuring more food. It was meant to be humorous, with just a morsel of truth in it, but as a student of environment it was kind of horrific and blatant.

We’re like all the animals, only more efficient. We breed like rabbits, we survive like cockroaches, we transform in ways beavers, spiders, birds and termites could never imagine and we use everything. When we come across something that looks useless, some clever human comes along and finds a way to consume it.

And we are like those bacteria in the petrie dish. Only earth is our petrie dish. Despite a hundred years of exciting science fiction we are not on the cusp of launching our voracious appetites out among the stars. We have this one planet to eat. And despite all our engineers, scientists, philosophers and seers, we can’t help but follow our animal instincts and say “super-size me”; no matter what limits we are capable of seeing.

3D movie technology seems to separate us from the animals, maybe SUV’s do too. But basically, we seem quite the same as all our cousins of the animal world. Undoubtedly we could learn a few things from the many thousands of species that have been doing their thang longer than us, but we probably won’t. Why? Because we are animals and we are doing what comes natural to us.

So maybe that makes us a kind of locust. Denuding the land, depopulating the habitat; hell, even changing the climate in ways that won’t actually benefit us in the long run.

But like a rutting deer that says “be damned with traffic in the road, I'm gettin' me some”, so too do we careen drunkenly into the future, eating and breeding to the fullest possible extent, and like every other animal in its habitat, we will drunkenly enjoy that party until we hit the limits and then we will continue to fit into ecological reality as we die off. Some species stay a long while on earth, some enjoy success through grand changes. Some do not. Again, it is the elegant system of evolution.

In the very short-sighted sense of time I have, things seem dramatic, tragic even, but if I were a geologist or biologist and was able to step back and understand the way things occur over time—the rise and fall of mountains or ecological niches or climates, maybe nothing would look amiss.

Humans have achieved great things planetary wide including transforming global climate, but no one will care since we have been the only species so far that thinks about such things. There won’t be a later historian to document our meteoric rise and fall. Everyone else is just busy frolicking and doing the birds and bees. That special place we occupy, in our minds, will come and go, a tiny blip on history’s radar—that brief strange bald species that wore the skins of other animals to stay warm, all the while feeling superior. The strange scavenger predators that so briefly were so good at eating everything. We will have left our mark, left the planet different, and cost a good many other more civilized species their demise. But in the end, the weird and unlikely process known as life will continue tickety-boo without us.

I'd bring up the lemming metaphor, except it is a myth. Lemmings do not follow each other off of cliffs the way humans do. It’s one of the things that separates them from us.

Reverie

Reverie

If you are old enough that your deepest memories are of wooded places and child quests in the wild, than this reverie is for you.

I bring the age up because it is a well known phenomenon that parents routinely shield their children from the kind of wildness that you and I experienced. Yes, today’s kids get a foundation in Motzartian fiddling, and are relatively safe from broken bones and pedophiles. And they are taught early to cope with the scheduling complicities that we cope with as adults in this world. . .

But I feel like some wild ranging orang-utan who appreciates his scars—and has to speak out against the domestication of children.

Parents have two primary fears. In no preferential order, the first is the fear of physical compromise. This fear is about bee stings and broken bones and the ever present horror that our children will actually break each others heads. It’s not unfounded. Left to their own, Golding style, children will devise systems to test each other and many will die, their eggs broken open in a non-poetic display of evolution. If you are watching the Darwinian drama, everything looks kosher, if you are a parent, everything is psychological terror. Supposedly, I tread the distance in between. I am a parent, with a wee little tot, venturing forth in the world, and I am a scholar who follows anthropology.

I have a cautious child who would rather bathe in mothers beauty than explore and so my Darwinian sense is not tested too often. My sister’s two boys, are both rambunctious, more the sort who you might fear will succumb to their own ambition. I need gravol just to watch them play. I am sure our parenting is informed as much by our heritage as our offspring. I haven’t had to learn how to keep my child from launching into flight off of a banister.

But I wish I had to. (Here we come sounding all old and stuff) When I was little, we were wild. We were crazy and stupid and spontaneous. Our favorite playground was a sewer tunnel that one had to traverse in the dark to prove worthiness of inclusion in the pack. Some of the games we played were really for keeps, and I am sure our parents would have turned grey to know what we were up to. But the point is, we were often left to our own devices to make our worlds.

It does seem to me that the shrinks agree that this is an important stage of life, learning limits, making social rules and what not. Testing, exploring, recuperating. The vast jungle of my childhood was a testing ground for survival, and I can understand parents not relishing their children wandering unattended in it, but I keep thinking it was not only fun, it may have been very necessary for our development.

Some day, our little children are unleashed from parents and school and they have to face sabre toothed workplaces, life-and-death civic choices, and a whole big bizarre world that the adults have created. And they need to be creative in it, and spontaneous. And they have to survive stupid things. They have to survive us. I really wonder that our planned play times and structured hobbies do not prepare them to live life to the fullest and certainly do not prepare them to understand being a living creature in an interdependent universe.

Do we need more adults who are very indoctrinated to quitting time and videogames? Or could we use a few wild children who make up reality as they go?

A Riot Of Life

Part One: Change is Bad
Yesterday, winter arrived out of nowhere, burying a breezy autumn that I was only just getting used to. Jack frost sends us to his icy bowels around the same time each year, yet always takes us by surprise because like all things stressful we exile it to the furthest limits of our minds. That first heavy snowfall always shocks me to my core. My initial response is universally one of crisis, panic and flight. It’s perfectly normal because of the mantra that repeats itself 24 hours a day in the swampy lizard part of my brain. It’s the mantra playing in every life form, in every life that ever lived: change is bad.

We’re each of us still slinking around the savannah, still lurking in the trees, eyes and ears wide for danger. We’re each trying to stay fed and avoid being picked off by a predator. Part of how we do that is learning the lay of the land and embracing a healthy fear of change. Change means unknown, and throughout most of history the unknown often meant death. So we like things to remain predictably the same. The more predictable things are, the better. The orange berries are yummy, the red berries make us shit wasabi sauce. Hard lesson, but just avoid the red berries and everything is hunky dory. Until the orange berries are gone. Or it turns out that colour isn’t a universal predictor of food safety. No one is ever immune to change, nor would that be a good thing, but it has served as a useful enough rule of thumb to imbed itself in our deepest understanding of the world.

The odd thing that comes to mind when I think how far people will go to avoid change is that for several hundreds of years the very mythos of our species been progress, which means change.

Part Two: Change is Good?
The seed of progress may have formed in science and its seeming limitless ability to learn and discover and in some ways change our destiny on this planet, but science has generally been concerned with predicting and controlling. I think science mostly believes change is bad, and the kind of change we don't see coming is the worst. Economics, on the other hand has had grand designs on the concept of progress for at least the entire industrial age. Progress means change is good. Out with the old, in with the new. Produce, consume, toss, repeat. Progress equals growth, growth equals profit.

But it’s all kind of a scam because its only an illusion of progress, kind of how Disney might portray it. Commercial activities offer us just enough options and improvements to keep up the illusion of progress, hence motivation to buy, while keeping any changes small and controllable(nothing says sexy like control!). This year’s new improved I-pod is pink instead of green, but still plays tunes just like the old one(just like your great gramma's phonograph, and her great gramma's harpsichord--in fact there’s nothing very new about it since the times we beat out rhythms on hollow logs, except now you just press a button). New, but the same. Progress, just the way we like it.

it’s a whole other topic that somewhere along the line there was a revolutionary change in that we went from making music and expressing ourselves, sharing in some social way, to quietly consuming music in a passive solitary way (preferably with noise canceling headphones that keep that pesky outside world at bay). For all our fear of change, we routinely lose thing by pursuing our perverse logic of progress

Part Three: Change is Confusing
For a while now, we have tended to define change, development and progress via technology. We talk about the radio era, the television era and the internet era. We described the technological application of fossil fuel inputs to farming as a green revolution that introduced an era of plenty. We view history through the same lens, calling ages by our tool making abilities—the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age and so on. we act like its reality instead of simply a filter for ordering things. Had we become a religious society we might have named ages differently: the polytheistic age, the monotheistic age, the mystical age, the transcendental age, the rational theology age. As social engineers we might observe the tribal age, the village age, the city-state age and the nation age, and we might more recently look at the suburban era, the urban renewal era, the city of villages era.

I could think of plenty of worldviews, that whatever shortcomings they might have, I would find more comforting than the technological worldview. The technological worldview is all about thoughtless change. The more the better, the faster the better. It got a slow start: wise men resisted the written word, fearful of what it would do to our reasoning abilities and memory. Scholars resisted the printing press, thinking too much decontextualized information was not necessarily a good thing. Pundits to this day scorn the television as a mind rotting cancer(sometimes they do it on television). Who’s to say any of them were wrong?

Either way, things picked up speed once we developed machines and the ability to use concentrated fuels. We made cars and planes and spaceships; Factories and assembly lines; An endless stream of entertainment gadgets. We made powered versions of everything: toothbrushes, lawnmowers, can openers, you name it, if there was a way to make something less skill and labour intensive through the application of fuel or electricity, we did it. Machines raise our chickens and milk our cows. Machines tell us when to wake up. If you believe the medium is the message, then computers define the content of our communications. We adopt new technologies so fast we don’t have time to think about what they bring us or what they take away. Is it good to drink milk from a pillow shaped plastic bag and never see or touch a cow? Does twittering strengthen my social bonds and psychic maturity?

If it were only a metaphysical question about the purpose and quality of life, then mouldery luddite academics could debate and polemicise about it over brandy for all of eternity.

But we did stop listening to our mantra. We felt we had out evolved it. We’ve kept changing things while shielding ourselves from any negative feedbacks that would have set off the alarm bells in the old lizards den. But they are coming.

Part 4: Change or Die
This brings us back to the winter of 2009. The leaders of the nations of the world are gathered in Copenhagen, supposedly to talk about change. Drastic and direly needed change. Only they don’t want to change and we don't really want them to change things either. It was one thing to get a little tipsy with lots of little incremental changes that made tasks easier and life more entertaining, but now that we need to make changes that involve hardship and sacrifice, fundamental changes to infrastructure, essential changes to our concepts of purpose and accomplishment, well-being and quality, well it’s not just a salamander in the back of our heads whispering change is bad. No, we have Godzilla pounding the backs of our eyeballs screaming CHANGE IS BAD!

My nation is an energy and resource giant. Our nearest neighbour is an economic and military giant. Together, the two arguably concentrate some of the greatest wealth and influence in the world. Together, the two are primary drivers of global direction. Where they stand on the fulcrum of following known patterns or risking change has a direct and consequential effect for everyone on the planet, and I'm not talking just people.

During the breezy fall that just went the way of the dinosaur, I heard far more about Prime Minister Harper and President Obama courting China than I did about their preparations for the Copenhagen Summit. I heard about increasing trade, promoting growth and generating economic prosperity.

The thing is, there is a direct incontrovertible link between economic growth and fossil fuel use. Economic growth is achieved by burning fuels to produce raw materials, burning fuels to manufacture tradeable goods and burning fuel to cart those goods around the planet. And if those goods are machines, fossil fuels are burned to operate the machines. Fossil fuels keep advertising, accounting and managerial divisions going too. And it is all that fossil fuel that is changing the climate

The scientists have been unequivocal. Our current way of life is on the cusp of making most of the planet incompatible with life: Planet Sahara. Some of the destruction has begun. A lot of it we have ordered and paid for and are just waiting on delivery. But we may still be at the point where we can choose between an altered climate that we can make do with and struggle in, and a climate where everyone and everything pretty much dies.

So, when my leader or yours says they are working hard to increase trade and grow the economy it is entirely, and with no hyperbole, interchangeable with saying I am trying to expedite the destruction of life on earth. When our leaders say they are going to grow the economy they are also saying they will ensure that no useful strategy comes out of Copenhagen

What is called for today far outstrips the imagination and courage of most people. It requires individual efforts and mass efforts. It requires law, and maybe martial law. It requires making sacrifices now to influence outcomes that are years down the road. Most of all it requires resisting the lizard brain telling us change is bad. We can’t afford to get panicky or light headed or fuzzy headed and simply hide in HBO and hope the danger moves on. It’s not going away.

It’s becoming more clear than ever that sitting patiently waiting for international consortia of leaders to pave the way is not going to bear fruit. I'm not sure what to do, especially since so many people don’t even see that something needs to be done, and many that do don’t want to give up cars and plasma TVs and so keep waiting for a technological fix. We’ve lived with so much complacent wealth and plenty, and in north America are so untouched by real events taking place around the globe, that I don’t have the foggiest idea what would wake us up and get us changing.

In Copenhagen this week, activist Naomi Klein said, “Let's not restrict ourselves to polite marches and formulaic panel discussions,” and “we need to be more disobedient”. I believe her, but then I also recall George Monbiot saying “nobody ever rioted for austerity”. But it is essentially what we need. A riot against our corporate governments. A riot against global economics. A riot of activity to wake us up and get us participating. A riot of life or a riot of death, the fruits of all our changes in the last few hundred years are leading inevitably to riots, and the time when we get to choose is quickly passing.