If we are not careful...

Life, Money, and Illusion: Lesson from the East Coast Fishery

The City of Hamilton’s planning committee recently heard from Mike Nickerson, the author of Life, Money and Illusion: Living on Earth As If We Want to Stay. Excerpts from his presentation are reproduced below. The full transcription is on the CATCH website.

“…The really fundamental change between human beings and the earth has been well illustrated by the east coast fishery, because when Europeans came to North America you could drop a bucket into the ocean and pull up codfish. They were so dense in the water they couldn’t escape from a basket. And for 400 years, they were the foundation of the maritime economy. Anybody could go fishing and make a living.

“If somebody was ambitious, they fished a little more than they needed to for their immediate needs, they make some extra money and they could invest that in their boat or their net and catch more fish, and make more money. And that more money – more fish – more money – more fish process went on for 4 centuries. It just got better, and better and better and better and then it collapsed. And there’s something about better and better and better that doesn’t naturally need to collapse.

“There is something important going on that wasn’t being paid attention to. And that was the fish stock. And the reason it wasn’t being paid attention to is that for four centuries there was nobody that could even imagine that we would dent this incredible volume of fish let alone bring them to the status of endangered species. But because of the expansion of the number of fish and people fishing and particularly because of the power of the equipment we were using for fishing, you could no longer support yourself fishing cod on the east coast.

“And what we did with the fish we’re doing with the forests. We’re doing it with fossil fuels; we’re doing it in some places with fresh water, with soil fertility; with the ability of the environment to absorb our waste. These are all wake-up calls to the human family. They’re all telling us one thing. They’re saying we’re grown up now. We’re no longer a young offender; we’re fully responsible for the laws of nature, and we will be tried in the court of natural selection.

“There are only two laws in nature that we have to obey. One is the law of the minimum. How much resources do we need compared to what the planet offers – which is what the fish and the fossil fuels is about. And the other is the law of tolerance. How much of our waste can we tolerate - can the environment which supports us tolerate?

The war on the car is over?

"Ladies and gentlemen, the war on the car stops today . . . Transit City is over. We will not build any more rail tracks down the middle of our streets."
-Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto

"The war on the car is over? If only it had actually BEGUN!"
-Christopher Hume

Map shows that Light Rail Plan delivers more winners than Subway Expansion Plan

[from Toronto Environmental Alliance]

Biking: My Life, My Love

"Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living! I take exercise every afternoon that way. Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well now, that's something! And then go home again after three hours of it, into the tub, rub down well, then into a soft shirt and down to the dinner table, with the evening paper and a glass of wine in prospect - and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!" -- Jack London

Student Bicycle Essay Contest: http://www.ibike.org/essays/index.htm

Clear-cutting our forests

Some of the current forestry practices, even here in Ontario, are very short-sighted. In 2005 I witnessed first-hand the clear-cutting of our Northern Ontario boreal forest while driving on a logging road north of the Agoki River (see photos below).
-S

"A forest is far more than trees. It includes the soil, with all its interdependent bugs, fungi, burrowing mammals, grownd-covers and undergrowth, the trees themselves, the birds and animals living in or moving through it, the natural water systems and the air. A forest is a balanced ecosystem. If you destroy that balance, you are going to be in trouble." -Merv Wilkinson

"By selective logging at or below the growth rate of the trees in a forest, trees can be profitably harvested indefinitely instead of once every hundred years or more. Nor is the diversity that is the key to resilience and regeneration sacrificed when trees are selectively removed." -David Suzuki

Quote from Thomas Edison...

"I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait till oil and coal run out before we tackle that."

Thomas Edison, 1847 - 1931

Main streets

"Americans love traditional American small towns, main streets, and historic districts. But largely because of minimum parking requirements it's completely illegal to build anything like that again in most American cities. It's really hard to build anything where anyone would want to walk from one building to the next."

"Single-use zoning, low-density development, and space-hogging automobile infrastructure make life without driving seem a fanciful notion."

Loss of species hurts us all

"We are all connected in this great circle of life." - Lion King

Tragedy of the Commons

A “tragedy of the commons” is a type of social trap that involves a conflict over resources between an individual’s interests and that of the common good. In this situation, a group of people work toward short-term individual gains, which, in the end, leads to a loss for the group as a whole.

Tragedy of the commons originated from a parable published in 1833 by William Forster Lloyd. The theory itself, however, dates back to Aristotle who said:

“That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.”

One example of this tragedy of the commons is driving. More people driving more to satisfy their individual needs is actually a tragedy in two ways. Firstly, road capacity gets used up causing traffic congestion for everyone. But more importantly, and tragic, is the global warming, environmental degradation, and the destruction of cities caused by cars, and yet, people drive on.
-S

Mobility Justice

"Governments have subsidised the car so heavily at the expense of everything else that they have caused car addiction. Mobility justice is connected to transportation balance. At present, in North America, there is no such balance. Car transport is almost 95%, public transport is 4.5%, and walking and cycling accounts for the rest. There is no justice in this situation for people who cannot afford cars, and that includes new immigrants, seniors, and lower income families. And now that gas prices have skyrocketed, it has become a problem for the middle class." -Lela Gary, Canada's Air Pollution Coalition

The American way of life is a blessed one?

"That's a big no. The president believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one." -White House press secretary Ari Fleischer on whether President Bush would call on drivers to reduce their fuel consumption

Then the car came along...

"The 250,000 miles of railroad lines that defined the continent's architecture of settlement beginning from the mid-nineteenth century, was the envy of the world. The second, the sturdy interurban, meshed city and city, city and countryside over many miles. The lightest, the electric streetcar, the city's artery, connected downtown and neighborhoods, the dwelling and working places of America. The efficiency of this triad of railed movement set the outlines that produced the finest streetscapes and architecture in America."
Taken from Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, by Jane Holtz Kay

Cars a step backward in spiritual civilization

"I'm not sure about automobiles.... With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization - that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that... the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree...that automobiles 'had no business to be invented."

From Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, 1918

Progress?

This blog exists to inspire change--to become more in harmony with nature in order to improve the quality of life for this and future generations.

"But the day soon came when the mountains began to leave them. It started with roads. Engineers in sola topis arrived with their sinister instruments and charted their designs on reams of paper. These were to be modern roads, they promised, roads that would hum with the swift passage of modern traffic. Roads, wide and heavy-duty, to replace scenic mountain paths too narrow for the broad vision of nation-builders and World Bank officials.

…Progress was slow at first, so slow that Mr. Kohlah and all the inhabitants of the hills harboured an irrational hope: the work would never be completed, their little haven would remain unscathed... But the road continued to inch upwards, swallowing everything in its path. The sides of their beautiful hills were becoming gashed and scarred...

Then the promised rewards began rolling up the road into the mountains. Lorries big as houses transported goods from the cities and fouled the air with their exhaust. Service stations and eating places sprouted along the routes to provide for the machines and their men. And developers began to build luxury hotels."

Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (1995), selections from pp. 259-61