Earth Justice

Jeremiah and Resilience

2011-07-24T02:22:00.000-07:00

Resilience is the ability of communities, cultures, and social systems to survive major shocks. When we look around us, what social institution stands out as being resilient over a major span of time?

What stands out for me is the history of Judaism. What other religion, language, or people has survived in the face of repeated foreign conquests, forced exiles, and enslavement for 3000 years and counting? I would call the continued survival and prospering of Judaism the prime historical example of human resilience.

What is it then that made Judaism resilient? Strange as it seems, I believe that part of the answer to this question lies in the writings of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah.

The lifetime of Jeremiah ( 655 -586 BCE) was a profoundly crucial time in Jewish history. Jeremiah had predicted that Jerusalem, the Jewish capital, home to Solomon’s great Temple, was about to be conquered by the Babylonians, a prediction which was not implausible given that at the time the Babylonian army was laying waste to most of the rest of the Middle East.

But the people of Jerusalem were in denial. Jeremiah was characteristically unrelenting, he unnerved them, as he would us today. They did not want to hear Jeremiah’s message and they rejected him and brutalized him, treating him as a pariah.

Unfortunately for the people of Jerusalem, Jeremiah’s prophecy came true. After a prolonged siege, which caused terrible suffering, the Babylonian army took Jerusalem and destroyed the Jewish temple, put to death much of the Jewish leadership, and enslaved the rest of the Jews and marched them off to Babylon. Jeremiah they spared, and he was left to live where he chose.

At this point the Jews as an identifiable people should have disappeared from history. But, in fact, just the opposite occurred. During the next sixty years of slavery, the exiled Jewish community thrived and developed a resilience that is maintained to this day.

Within a hundred years of the exile the Hebrew Bible had been compiled and gathered together, largely in the form we see it today, with Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Kings, Lamentations, Psalms, the Prophets, and the wisdom literature.

What role did Jeremiah, who was left behind in the ruins of Jerusalem, have in all of this? Because the Jews were in exile, and the Jerusalem temple was no more, the strategy, championed previously by Jeremiah himself, of basing Judaism on a centralized temple with its hierarchy of temple priests became unworkable.

But this went against the whole tenor of ancient Middle-Eastern religions, which was that any particular religion was based on location.

Jeremiah, at some point, realized that basing a religion on sacrificing at a temple created a fatal vulnerability. His innovation was to promote the idea of an “inner covenant” - an inner relationship between individual Jews and God best exemplified by the daily Jewish prayer from Deuteronomy called the “Shema”.

By reciting this prayer everyday any Jew could keep covenant without the need to make sacrifices in the holy temple. Thus permitting Judaism to thrive in exile, or in any place where there were a gathering of Jews, even where a Jew existed outside of any Jewish community.

The Shema is still recited twice daily by observant Jews. At the very beginning of the day and at the end of the day. It goes:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart...

The book of Deuteronomy, which contains the Shema, as well as a second retelling of the Ten Commandments, hence the name “Deuteronomy”, appears to have been “rediscovered” during King Josiah’s rein. Jeremiah was closely associated with King Josiah and there is good reason to believe that Jeremiah probably had a hand in writing Deuteronomy and in its “rediscovery”.

The centralization of Judaism in the sacrificial temple in Jerusalem had given the Hebrews the illusion of enduring power. But successive conquests by the Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans proved the folly of this idea.

When things fall apart, people often have difficulty facing and accepting the changes that are required to survive.The choices seem to be either to embrace expediency and abandon tradition altogether, or rigidly adhere to tradition and deny that anything has really changed.

But the first choice of abandoning tradition leads to dissolution and the eventual loss of identity. The second choice, of rigid adherence and denial leads to escape from reality and self-destruction as the familiar world falls apart around one’s ears.

This situation is a lot like the worsening ecological and economic crisis that confront us today. In the face of these crisis many people may recognize that there is a problem, but they will deny that we need to make any major changes to our comfortable way of life.

Like Jeremiah, modern environmentalists predict disaster but things still don’t seem that bad,so they are mocked and ignored as scolds and annoyances.

But, eventually this commonplace view will prove untenable, as the global economic and political crisis deepens. We may well have to adapt to severe economic shocks and the breakdown of social structures in the wake of these shocks. Our entire global civilization may be at risk of collapse.

In today’s world, political leaders have relied on the continuing prospect of economic growth to solve our most pressing problems - best exemplified by the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. But the expanding global economy is rapidly drawing down our reserves of fossil fuels, while the global exponential increase in energy use is leading to the spectre of uncontrollable global warming.

The idea that we can continue growing our national and global economies in the face of finite resources and finite reserves of fossil fuels is a similar kind of illusion to the one in Jeremiah’s day that a religion could remain powerful only if it continued to be identified with a certain location.

. Our Industrial way of life, that is predicated on the massive utilization of cheap fossil fuels, appears to us as powerful and impregnable. But it is incredibly vulnerable to disruption once we reach peak oil, and the effects of climate change begin to overwhelm us.

The signs of these coming catastrophes are all around us, but, as in Jeremiah’s time, most people choose to ignore them or discount their relevance. The lesson of Jeremiah is that resilience - the ability to survive shocks and insults - comes not from economic or political power or advanced technology. Resilience comes from inside of us as we work together on achieving a sustainable civilization.

Autism and Executive function deficit

2011-02-05T01:26:00.000-08:00

The science behind the study of executive functions is still relatively new even though these abilities have been around long before humans evolved.

We can list a series of skills that a captain needs to sail a ship: Commanding a crew, planning and setting a course. Monitoring the behaviour of the ship, the behaviour of the crew, and the weather, and correcting deficiencies and changing course if conditions warrant; Being able to navigate and negotiate dangerous and technically difficult waters; Anticipating and correcting for future changes in conditions.

Perhaps one could say that while sometimes the ship can sail on auto-pilot some events, not anticipated, will happen that will challenge the ship and its crew and call upon the captain to make a decision that only he can make.

Neurologists know that the ability to initiate and inhibit behavior, the ability to monitor the environments response to our behaviour and to alter our behaviour in response to changing conditions, are all part of an interrelated group of functions centered around the prefrontal cortex.

We think we know about executive functions, but in actuality we take them for granted and don’t know very much about how they work together. We use these skills to shape our own behaviour, but their use in others is often invisible to us because a lot of it has to do with self monitoring, which is something that’s hard to observe in others.

It turns out that adolescents are lacking fully operational executive functions and their prefrontal brains are still developing. That’s why adolescents attend school and are under their parents responsibility and not completely free agents. Sometimes they need their parents executive functioning to survive.

It’s in adolescence that we have to learn to do things even when we don’t want to, to control our impulses, not to fight, not to lie or to steal. We learn to internalize morality and not just to act in order to avoid punishment. It’s in adolescence that we learn to distinguish between true friends and people who are just out to use us.

All these skills we develop as adolescents, require the mastery of executive functions: planning, anticipating consequences, inhibiting impulses, monitoring ourselves and correcting for errors.

“Executive function deficits are disastrous to a normal life” That’s a central point that Nancy Perry makes early on in her book, Adults on the Autism Spectrum Leave the Nest . According to Perry if you have executive function deficits you cannot live as an independent adult. And some kinds of brain-damage and high functioning autistic individuals have deficits in executive function.

It’s most noticeable when these individuals are dealing with novel situations where typical behaviour doesn’t work. They end up in trouble and needing the help of adults who, in effect supply the needed executive function.

These individuals are not retarded, their thought processes are intact. they can be of normal or above average intelligence, they can do well in schools. But things like dealing with money, balancing food and rent, getting and keeping a job, dealing with strangers, and developing a relationship or a friendship are much more difficult for them than for the normal population.

According to Perry, individuals with executive function deficits can’t do two cognitive things at the same time. For instance, they can’t do what they are doing and think about the probable consequences at the same time. “….they don’t think about the morality of their actions, unless directed to stop and think by another person who serves as the missing executive function.”

So autistic individuals will insult others or say hurtful things without thinking about consequences, and will often argue that they are just “telling the truth” when challenged.

Perry relates how she once inadvertently observed her students in a grocery store, mesmerized by the big pyramidal display of soda pop and ending up spending their entire week’s grocery money on pop and chips, with nothing left over to pay for basic groceries.

They have difficulties learning proper behaviour in social situations because they cannot both engage in a social situation and hold in their mind’s eye an awareness of how they are functioning. Most of us do it so easily that we take it for granted. Not so for autistic people.

Hence the reason for the popular theory that autistic people cannot put themselves in someone else’s shoes. This requires doing two things at once in the mind. Imagining we are in someone else’s situation, and comparing it with our own.

They can get along if the environment is more structured but as soon as things happen that are outside of the ordinary they will have trouble functioning, still trying to adhere to behaviour patterns rigidly, without being able to adapt and change course.

Just at the point that the crew needs the captain to intervene and make a decision the captain is not there. The ship founders and heads for the rocks unless there is somebody there to take charge.

To be independent one needs to be able to make adjustments to one’s behaviour according to changes in the environment. You learn to avoid getting killed in traffic. You design your life around a career and a family or some combination of elements. These all require the use of executive functions.

For all young adults becoming independent is an important goal to achieve. But for autistic and brain-damaged individuals becoming independent is very problematic because of their deficiencies in executive function.

Complex vs Simple: Thinking in Systems

2011-01-25T06:41:00.000-08:00

There are two basic ways to see things: as simple issues with only two ways to see them or as complex issues that deserve our attention and understanding.

Simple sees things only in black and white and avoids colours and shades of grey. Simple is good to grab people’s attention but it doesn’t sustain it.

Simple thinks there’s only two choices when there are many.Too much simplification leads to polarization as well as to prejudice and hatred, and ultimately to social fragmentation and war.

Simple thinks that the easiest way to solve problems is to get rid of people. Joseph Stalin, one of the worst mass murderers in history, said: “No people no problems.” You can see that same kind of frightening stupidity in racist rants about undesirables, and illegal immigrants. You can also see it in people who say the earth would be better off without humans.

Life is simple if you just consider it to be about birth, marriage, and having children. But it’s complex if you consider that everything living is connected to everything else.

The economy exists, and society exists because they are systems. They are not simple. And that means that our response to them cannot be simple either.

.Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain back in the 1980s, once said: “ There is no such thing as society”

I know that society is a real thing because it has effects: we are who we are, with the language, customs, food, and clothing, and livelihoods that we have because we live in certain kinds of societies.

So much of what we do we do in groups. We are defined in many ways by being in these groups, in effect being in society. Yes we are individuals, but we couldn’t be who we are without the cooperation and trust of countless others. Without our parents to raise us; Without our peers to play with us when we were children and work with us when we are adults; Without our teachers to teach us.

I can’t help feeling that Margaret Thatcher denied the reality of society, because she didn’t want to face the moral questions that become relevant with the existence of society. Moral questions such as: How much is too much? Why is their inequality and what should we do about it? How can we as a society facilitate citizens to reach their fullest potential as human beings?

Like society, an economy is a real thing too, a system made up of billions of human parts. And the regional economies, the national economies, and the global economy all have huge effects on people and on nature.

When it comes to understanding systems, understanding how much is too much comes to the fore. The human economy cannot grow indefinitely because it depends on the earth, which is finite.

According to many politicians, economists and business leaders the present global economic system, is the best system possible because continued economic growth will lead to everyone’s eventual betterment.

But to do it justice we need to look at economic system as a subsystem within the larger biosphere of living ecosystems. Our ability to survive depends not only on non-renewable resources such as metals and fossil fuels that are priced in markets, but it also depends on renewable resources that are not priced in markets.

I am talking about agricultural soils, clean water, and the ability of earth’s water and atmosphere to to absorb pollutants and recycle life’s vital molecules. All of these are renewable resources, but it takes time for the earth to renew them and the exponential growth of our global economy is surpassing that ability. These unpriced renewable resources are fast becoming non-renewable because the growth in human populations and economies is depleting them.

The problem is that many economists do not perceive that the global economy is a subset of the earth’s ecosystems. Therefore, they do not see that “How much is too much?” is a pertinent question to ask. And because vital ecosystem services, which we all depend on, do not have prices, economists don’t see any evidence for their depletion.

Global warming is the clearest evidence that our global economic growth has surpassed the earth’s ability to absorb our increasing output of stuff. It also suggests that other physical limits to economic growth are not far behind.

Human systems work by rules and by market forces. Rules tell us what behaviour is expected or prohibited. Rules also determine the relative size and direction of market forces. Change the rules and you change the incentives behind production and consumption. But, to be successful something more is needed because there are some very big players, for instance, fossil fuel corporations, that don’t want those rules changed.

It is no coincidence that people continue to deny that global warming is caused by human activities. To accept the facts of global warming would be to recognize that our present economic system needs to be overhauled. In other words, we need to change the rules so that the depletion of soils, clean water, and clean air are taken into account. And the most efficient and effective way to do this would be to put a price on carbon emissions. By doing that we could use the efficiency of the market system to change people’s behaviour so that we can keep living on this earth indefinitely.

There’s the thing - as individuals we are just a tiny part of so many human and non-human systems. It’s the systems that have such powerful effects.
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To start the process of building truly sustainable societies means first rethinking where we are going and then planning how to get there. We can’t change the system only by exercising individual consumption choices. We gain the power to change through joining organizations. We are most powerful exercising our rights as citizens to inform ourselves and to participate in decision making and planning for the future.

Economies and societies are are living systems. Their continued existence depends on earth’s ecosystems to support them. We cannot survive without oxygen, clean water, a liveable climate and a thriving and diverse biosphere.

If we think too simplistically, that it’s only about individuals, property rights, small government, and "free enterprise", we ignore the fact that our economic system is just a part of an even greater earth biosystem. We need to take this inherent complexity into account if we are to ensure our continued survival.

Machines Make Us Different.

2010-09-08T02:46:00.000-07:00

What makes us different from everything else? Some say language, some say morality. Some say tool use. But these have predecessors in nature: birds and mammals exchange signals and information via cries and body language; chimpanzees and elephants exhibit empathy and altruism; chimpanzees use sticks as tools.

What’s new about humans is that they make machines. Although you could argue that beavers also make machines. The beaver dam is a system that runs on water and gravity. A kind of proto-machine.

Machines are a kind of tool that uses energy to perform a pre-designed activity. Machines are built, maintained and have evolved, with the care and guidance of human hands.

Simple tools like a hammer require the human body to apply the energy, but many machines run by themselves with the assistance of some power source. A machine like a computer, can execute a human command to fetch or manipulate information all on its own.

Machines are a wholly new phenomenon. They did not exist before humans existed. That’s why it is an error to conceptualize living things as machines, as was done by Descartes. Descartes was the first modern philosopher. He framed the famous body-mind dichotomy for the modern era.

Machines don’t have instincts. They require human purpose and guidance in order to survive over time. If you look around at nature, it does not require human purpose and guidance. It’s parts are self organized. The Earth does not require our help to orbit the Sun.

We call living things like cells and mitochondria - machines. We say, in a metaphorical fashion, that the mitochondria “is designed” to provide energy to the cell.

That’s our inner engineer talking. Once we started building machines they started to influence us and the way we looked at the world. We’re envious of the natural world where things work by themselves, independently of us.

It appears that the evolution of machines is going in the direction of greater autonomy. There are now robotic submarines and spaceships that can work on their own, separated by great depths and huge distances.

And this seeming trend towards machines gaining autonomy has actually spawned a a new religion out there, which has influenced the minds of Silicon Valley, with the awkward title: Singulatarianism. It’s main tenant appears to be straight out of the plot of “The Terminator” the 70’s science fiction movie. It’s actually based on the theories of a writer named Raymond Kurzweil. The idea is that when computers are all interconnected and reach a certain processing speed and degree of technological sophistication, they will combine into a globally conscious self (the singularity) which will be able to maintain itself and replicate without human intervention.

What makes this a religion, is the insistence that this is inevitable, and that it will lead to eternal life. (I won’t get into the specifics here, but you can check it out on Wikipedia.

Most Religions see God as creating nature, whereas Singulatarianism sees humans as creating God. Perhaps this is apt, coming from Silicon Valley. But is it really something to look forward to?

And does it not remind you of genetic engineering? Corporations are creating plants with characteristics designed for industrial purposes in order to improve on nature. And once these plants are created and shed their pollen, they are out there, able to replicate themselves and share their genes with natural varieties, because that’s what life does.

Machines and other human creations don’t have empathy or caring for others. That requires emotions and their coordination in human minds and bodies. Computers can replicate ideas but they can’t replicate emotions like love, desire, and happiness. We’ve forgotten that it takes both positive and negative emotions to make decisions, to understand the past and plan for the future, and to change our behaviour. That’s our responsibility as humans, something we can’t delegate to machines or market forces.

As simple as boys versus girls

2010-08-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

Is this the twilight of the patriarchy? Cracks have appeared in the edifice of the Catholic Church with its all-male hierarchy. It’s certainly not like the way things used to be, when women knew their place and didn’t step out of line.

That way of life is on the wane because women can now own property, they can earn money outside the home, they have legal rights, and they can vote. They can send their children to daycare and public schools. They can teach and write books, and they can call out men for their moral failings without fear of being beaten or killed.

Before modern society, women could not rise to fulfil their talents. They were forbidden to do many things. The Taliban, the modern Islamic Fundamentalist political movement in Pakistan and Afghanistan, specifically targeted women. They made a point of publicly executing women for being independent.

Christian Fundamentalists are not as crude as the Taliban but they can be just as afraid of women. Why do you think they are so dead set against birth control and abortion? Both are ways that women can use to raise smaller families or just focus on a career. They don’t want women to have those freedoms.

But there is a darker secret. There is a hidden relationship between patriarchy and sexual abuse and it has to do with a simple but unavoidable fact - the vast majority of sexual abusers of children are men.

It’s not hard to see why. Most women don’t have the powerful sexual drives that men have. And women make it their business to care for and about children, whereas most men are less involved in child care.

Men who like to abuse others can easily hide within the confines of a patriarchical system. Patriarchy is the original old-boys club. As men, we tend to forgive and make wide allowances for our shared shortcomings. “Boys will be boys.” If you have an organization where the hierarchy is exclusively male, it’s bound to be protective and secretive.

In a real old fashioned patriarchy, certain men have absolute power and women and children are not allowed to question their authority. This works very well for men who sexually abuse children, because they can effectively forbid their prey from telling others. In such a society a man’s word cancels out a woman’s or a child’s, so the man can get away with more.

Lately the Catholic Male Hierarchy has let the cat out of the bag. In a Vatican press conference last week, sexual predation and the ordination of women were both called “graviora delicta”, which means: a grave offense. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/opinion/17sat4.html?ref=roman_catholic_church_sex_abuse_cases

Most of us know of or have heard of female clergy. We might disagree and dislike them but we are not likely to hold them in the same contempt we hold a sexual predator. How could the consequences of a woman giving the sacraments be of the same gravity as a priest sexually abusing children? Only in the mind of someone so bound to the patriarchal system that he is deathly afraid of women’s sexuality.

How else to explain the disproportionate zeal with which the Church rejects the idea of the ordination of women, compared to their painfully slow and lacklustre campaign to stop priests from abusing children. In one case the Church bureaucracy is pulling out all the stops in order to prevent heterodoxy, and in the other, it has been using the full weight of its bureaucracy to stonewall police investigations into child abuse cases.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of these guys thought that ordaining women was worse than sexual predation. Sexual predation ruins some people’s lives, it turns even more people away from the church, but ordaining women strikes at the very heart of the system. It could mean the end of the Catholic Church as we know it.

There are plenty of women out there who would be willing to make up for the alarming shortage of male priests. But, by God! If women could be priests then they could exert authority over men. They could change doctrine. They could dismantle the hierarchy. That would mean the end of the old boys club wouldn’t it?

A patriarchal church hierarchy feels instinctively threatened by girls who want to take charge. Could be as simple as that.

What is the Earth?

2010-07-12T14:55:00.000-07:00

I belong to a little-known organization called the metaphor police. Our job is to seek out inappropriate metaphors and stop them from further damaging the collective consciousness by exposing their inappropriateness in the light of day. It has fallen to me, then, to attack and destroy the metaphor of “spaceship earth” once and for all.

What is the Earth? The Earth is a planet, a self-organizing system that has evolved over the vast time period of four billion years. The earth is a planet in the solar system, a self-organizing system of the Sun and the nine or so planets in elliptical orbits around it.

Perhaps the universe as a whole was designed. Perhaps not. One can just as easily argue either way because there is no way of knowing what preceded it. But all matter organizes itself. It coalesces into atoms, and atoms into stars and planets by the force of gravity and by other fundamental forces of nature.

Anybody who calls the solar system a “machine” or a “mechanism” is making a fundamental error. All machines are made by human beings. Each machine is designed by someone to do a certain kind of work. A hammer is designed to hammer nails, and to pry out old nails. A bicycle is designed to carry a person from one place to another.

They are all designed to work for various human purposes. The solar system was not designed to be a solar system. It came into being because matter coalesced into bodies by the force of gravity, and these bodies then interacted with each other through the force of gravity. The planets orbit the sun because the sun happens to have a disproportionate amount of mass compared to the rest of the planets.

When we call a natural phenomenon like the solar system a machine we are anthropomorphizing. That is, we are taking what we know about ourselves and projecting it on to other things which were not made by us.

We look at the solar system and we realize that it serves a purpose for ourselves. It provides a source of energy and a stable livable environment for life on earth. Because it serves an important human purpose - making our continued survival possible - we can easily fall into the trap of perceiving the solar system as designed for our sakes. This is like a small child who believes that the world exists solely to further its own existence.

In order to understand how different phenomena work we have learned to analyze things according to scientific principles about the composition of matter and the forces that influence and interact between the component parts. We take these principles too far when we talk about the design or mechanism of natural entities.

When we say that the huge wings of an albatross are “designed” for long-distance flight we are speaking metaphorically. But it is sometimes not easy to realize this. The albatross's wings make long-distance flight possible, just as the wings on a jet plane make long-distance flight possible. But no-one designed an albatross. The albatross evolved over millions of years from previous kinds of birds. There was no conscious design involved. The principle involved is given the particular environment that these birds lived in - namely the open ocean, those birds with longer wing spans up to a certain limit, were more likely to survive and produce progeny than birds with shorter wings, and the progeny will have longer wings because they have inherited the DNA of their parents. This is Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of life by natural selection plus a bit of modern chemistry.

It is a mistake to call natural selection a “mechanism” although lots of biologists do so. Natural selection is a form of self organization amongst populations of the same species and their environment. Living things try to maintain themselves. In order to do so they eat each other. They sometimes cooperate. They mate and produce offspring. They die. In doing this some life forms pass on more progeny than others and eventually some of these surviving life-forms become separate species. Their is no overriding purpose to this other than that each living thing wants to survive and pass on its progeny.

When we call natural selection a “mechanism” we are speaking metaphorically. But, unfortunately, by using the term “mechanism” to describe natural phenomena we import the idea of design and purpose into our perception of these phenomena.

When we call the Earth, “Spaceship Earth” we are making the same mistake. The Earth exists and evolves by the self-organization of it’s parts, as in the interaction of earth, water, fire, air and life. A spaceship is a human machine, designed and built to escape the Earth’s gravitational field and fly into space. It is somewhat self-contained, in that astronauts who fly in spaceships can live for short periods of time in space without physical contact with earth.

But note the proviso: “short periods of time.” No-one has invented a spaceship that serves as a world. That is, no-one has invented a spaceship that allows people to survive indefinitely in space away from the planet earth. Every astronaut that leaves earth’s gravitational field is just as totally dependent on the materials from earth for his survival as is all the rest of humanity who remain on earth.

The idea of “Spaceship Earth” was developed by Kenneth Boulding to emphasize the point that our economic system is bounded by the limits of the earth which is a finite thing. The earth does not receive any significant amount of materials from outer space, so we must make do with what is here already.

Unlike a spaceship, the Earth does allow human beings to survive indefinitely because life forms a self organized system on Earth, of which we form a part. We may have spent hundreds of millions of dollars designing and building spaceships but no-one has been able to design a spaceship that can maintain itself and the life inside it independently.

The idea of such a spaceship is a fantasy. But the Earth is a reality. If what we want to do is live responsibly within the limits of the Earth so that we continue to survive as a living species, we need to base our perception of Earth on reality, not fantasy.

The Ideology of Libertarianism

2010-05-31T03:58:00.000-07:00

Rand Paul, the tea party Republican candidate for Senate in Kentucky, Is a libertarian. He is not a racist. Libertarianism isn't explicitly racist, but this ideology got him into trouble recently because he explained to Rachel Maddow, that he was against certain provisions of the Civil Rights Act, namely those that forbid businesses from discriminating.

It's been pointed out now, many times, that if it wasn't for the Civil Rights Act, southern businesses on their own would not have stopped discriminating against blacks because they would have been penalized by white patrons if they had.

Now let me guess – Rand was named after Ayn Rand, the patron saint of high testosterone Capitalism? Both Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act not because they were racist but because they saw it as unwarranted restrictions on individual property rights.

Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 election to Lyndon Johnson, but Goldwater the Republican candidate carried the up- until- then, Democratic South. After Johnson decided not to run for a second term, Republicans such as Nixon, Reagan, and Bush kept winning the Southern vote by emphasizing “states rights” and “small government”. In fact, both these policies were little more than code for keeping blacks in their place

Now, if you have less government involvement in the economy, then in Southern whites' eyes you have less social services for black people. You have less regulation of Southern businesses and less desegregation of school systems.

In the late forties President Truman tried to enact a universal medicare system but was defeated by Southern Democrats, who rejected the idea of equal access for blacks and whites to medical services. That's why the United States is alone among other industrial countries in not having universal medicare.

This is where libertarianism comes in. Libertarians are for a much reduced role of the state in the economy. They believe that a legal system that prioritizes protection of property rights replaces the need for government regulation. These ideas dovetail nicely with the Southern Segregationists who don't want the “big government” ie., the federal government and the Civil Rights Act, telling them what to do.

It's true that Libertarians aren't usually racists. A while back, about thirty years ago, I was a libertarian. And I and the libertarian friends of mine, and the authors I read, were not racist.

But no libertarian I know of considers inequality a problem. Inequality isn't a problem because the market reflects reality and rewards hard work and excellence. The poor are poor because they're losers who don't try hard enough. Government programs that “help” the poor should be abolished because they only encourage people to be idle and lazy.

Southern whites were privileged. They benefited from underpaying and discriminating against blacks. Just as they benefited from slavery. Only government intervention changed the situation and gave blacks a chance.

Another thing that Libertarians never seem concerned about is the rising power of corporations and their perversion of the legal and political systems to serve their interests. You may note that all the think tanks that support libertarian views like: the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, Freedom Works, the Fraser Institute, etc., are heavily funded by big corporations, especially, but not only oil companies. You will never hear these Institutes calling for government to balance or compensate for the disproportionate power of corporations.

Lastly, I've never met or heard of a libertarian who doesn't dismiss global warming as a fraud. These three problems” inequality, disproportionate corporate power, and global warming are all denied or ignored as problems by libertarians. When they deny that these are problems they are letting their ideology blind them against seeing the evidence.

I know they are problems. Inequality leads to social breakdown, political corruption, poverty, and exploitation. Corporate power leads to more political corruption, and the stealing of and destruction of common resources. Global warming will lead to more extreme weather events and the breakdown of eco-systems that support human life as well as other kinds of life.

. The huge amounts of money earned by corporations, and CEO's perverts and corrupts our political system. Our governments are turning away from the public interest and doing the bidding of giant corporations. In fact the global economic system is fixed to favour corporations against the common people in many ways.

Government can be changed to become more responsive to the people and protect the public interest. Libertarians don't recognize a public interest. It' s ultimately a narrow self-interested perspective of the economy. "I want what works to get me rich and the hell with everybody else." Ayn Rand called it “the virtue of selfishness”. We need to go in the opposite direction.

Bike to Work Week, May 31-June 4 2010

2010-05-25T03:47:00.000-07:00

The bicycle is one of the greatest human inventions. It is the most efficient self-powered human mode of transportation on the planet. It is eminently practical, with baskets, paniers, and trailers available to carry extra loads. At the same time bicycles afford a qualitatively better form of physical exercise- than most other kinds because cycling is fun, it's low impact and achievable even by people who are overweight.

In the sixties schoolyards were full of bikes. It was a major way of getting to school and university. They were affordable for everyone. They still are. There are twice as many bicycles as cars on this planet right now. However, bicycles are underutilized at this moment whereas cars are overutilized. Think BP and TarSands.

The idea behind bike to work week, is that if you get out and try biking to work during the first week of June, you might take it to the next level, and bike to work all summer. And then who knows. These things can snowball and influence other people's behaviour.

The first bicycles were invented in the the early part of the nineteenth century. The standard looking bicycle as we know it – the kind with equal size wheels and a chain and sprocket - was developed around 1885.

Bicycles were one of the first mass produced consumer goods. The same principles that were first used in manufacturing bicycles: machine standardization of parts, assembly lines, mass marketing and advertising were later put to use in the development of the automobile and aviation industries. The Wright brothers were originally bicycle mechanics.

The very best thing about bicycles is that they are fun to ride. And they are fun to ride for a wide range of ages and abilities. Bicycles come in all shapes and sizes. The kind with tassels on the handlebars that girls like to ride. BMX trick riding. Mountain bikes. Commuter bikes. Racing bikes (we used to call them 10 speeds). Recumbants, and tricycles for the elderly.
There's a bike for everyone, and, in general, bikes are still pretty affordable.

Bicycling is such an elegant way to travel. It's silent, but it's social. It allows you to feel the wind through your hair, breathe the fresh air, and splash through big puddles, if you feel like it.

Bicycles are not as big and dangerous as cars. You don't need insurance to ride one. Once you learn the rules and learn how to balance they are safe.

By riding to work each day your body will be in better shape. Riding up the hills will make your leg muscles stronger and your heart fitter over time.

One of the things that stops some people from biking to work is the issue of sweat. There is several things you can do about this problem. Taking a shower at work is great if you have the option. Otherwise you can dress in layers and shed layers progressively before you warm up so that you never get to the point of sweating. Make sure that your windbreaker, or rainjacket has underarm zippers and leave them open all the time. Or you can follow the lead of hundreds of millions of Chinese and ride an electric bicycle – no sweat.

The more bicycles on the road the more room there is for everybody and the quieter the traffic. Bicycles improve the quality and atmosphere of a city. Just look at Vancouver and Victoria.

Next week is Bike to Work Week. Some organizations such as Northern savings credit union have consistantly put out the riders year after year. Forestry is being seriously downsized so they're not a contender this year (and that's a whole other story worth telling isn't it?)

Perhaps you or someone else in your organization would like to bike to work next week. Please check out the website www.biketowork.ca for information and inspiration.

Get Out Migration a wild success

2010-05-12T23:52:00.000-07:00

What did Alexandra Morton's Get Out Migration accomplish? Why do wild salmon migrate? They go to such huge efforts and for so long a journey. A journey that takes up most of their lives. And then they come back to the stream where they were born in. They come back and make the forests green and feed all the critters.

They have sustained first nations all along the coast. Salmon are sacred. They literally bring this coast alive. We cannot take them for granted.

And yet our governments have looked the other way as salmon farming corporations have despoiled our coast and threatened the wild salmon. The DFO has abandoned it's raison d'etre to protect our wild fisheries just as it betrayed the East coast cod fishery a generation ago.

Humans can migrate too. And that's what we did in the thousands on May 8th , to join with Alexander Morton in Victoria to tell our governments to get the Norwegian Salmon corporations out of our ocean. It was a beautiful day as thousands marched in the streets of Victoria to the Legislature buildings.

It was a joyous occasion as speaker after speaker spoke of the importance of getting the salmon farms out of the ocean and into closed containment.

It's not rocket science. Industrial farming requires the concentration of food product which attracts parasites such as sea lice from the wild. This kind of farming requires heavy doses of chemicals to control the parasites and if this kind of farming is done in the ocean in open net-pens, the sea lice and the chemicals are allowed to spread out and harm the wild fish and other critters.

Putting farmed fish into closed containment protects them from most sea parasites so they require less toxic chemicals. And separating them from the ocean prevents parasites from spreading back into the wild where they are especially dangerous to salmon smolts – the young salmon.

When I listened to the speakers at the legislature I was most impressed by what the first nations elders had to say: Wild salmon are our lifeblood. We can't survive without them. They are a part of us.

The elders have been trying to tell us these things for hundreds of years but it's only now that biology has come to understand these connections. Maybe now we can listen to the wisdom of the elders.

Alexander Morton and the people of the archipelago did not march in vain. We, the people can make a difference. Here's one thing we can do without even leaving the comfort of our homes. Write to the Federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Gail Shea and tell her to get the Norwegian salmon farms out of the ocean: Shea.G@parl.gc.ca . Write to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and tell him we need a BC minister of Fisheries: pm@pm.gc.ca Write to MP Fin Donnelly and tell him what you think of his bill to remove salmon farms from the ocean: http://www.findonnelly.ca

We don't have salmon farms in Prince Rupert now, but if we don't let government know what we think of open net-pen salmon farms, they will stand by as Norwegian fish farm corporations take over the whole coast and drive the wild salmon to extinction. We can make a difference.

"Stepping Stones": The Best Kayaking Book Ever

2010-05-04T02:38:00.000-07:00

Make no mistake about it, this is one of the best if not the best sea-kayaking book ever written. Nigel Foster, who builds kayaks, has his own school of kayaking, has written books and produced videos on sea kayaking is one hell of a good writer.

Stepping Stones of Ungava and Labrador has got everything that I would want in a kayaking tale about northern labrador: apt, succinct descriptions of the people met and the land and seascapes traversed by kayak; A brief but eye-opening look at the interaction of Europeans and Inuit of Labrador over the last three hundred years; And to top it all - a sea-kayaking adventure that'll have armchair travelers biting their knuckles in suspense.

That's what makes Stepping Stones such a good kayaking book. He describes each day of the trip as it unfolds, the people, the adventures, the changing weather, encounters with wild life. He says just enough to give you a good idea of each day. And then he weaves in the historical background, and brings it alive when they run into Inuit people who were part of that story.

I've read lots of Farley Mowatt, but I wasn't aware of the forced abandonment of Inuit villages in Labrador that went on in the middle of the last century. This is a chapter of Canadian history that deserves to be better known and Foster does an excellent job of talking about it and describing some of the people he met who were caught up in it.

I consider myself to be a fairly proficient kayaker, but after reading Foster's description of an incredibly dangerous crossing of Hudson Strait, I'm glad he was there and survived to tell the tale and I'm in the armchair reading about it.

Picture seven knot tidal currents. Seven knot tidal currents! And the kind of steep breaking waves that occur when the wind blows against such a current. When the tops of the waves break the sound is like an explosion.

Now imagine it's so foggy you can hear these "hay makers" all around you but you can't see them until they're breaking over you and your kayak and filling your "drytop" with ice cold water. Imagine that kind of crossing for twelve hours. It's easily the scariest description of a kayak crossing I've ever read.

According to Foster, it took him three years to psychologically recover from that experience. That crossing forms the climactic chapter of the book although what it describes is something that he did almost twenty years before in 1981.

The story that "surrounds" the description of this crossing is his daily log of an ambitious kayak trip that he and his wife Kristen took following the Labrador coast from Ungava Bay to Nain in 2004. There's less suspense, and less adventure in their contemporary trip than in the 1981 crossing but Foster does such a good job of describing each day's journey and weaving in historical references that the whole story becomes that more satisfying a read.

If you're considering kayaking the northern Labrador coast you might think again after reading of these kayakers' hair raising encounters with Polar bears. When it comes to encounters with polar bears I appreciate having that experience passed on to me in one ripping good tale by a true master of the kayak. Thanks for sharing Nigel.

Joining Alexandra Morton's Get-Out Migration

2010-05-01T17:58:00.001-07:00

Thank you George Baker for bringing to my attention Alexandra Morton's march down Vancouver Island to protect the wild salmon (prdnews Apr 23). Your article inspired me to buy plane tickets to go to Vancouver Island and join the “Get-out Migration”.
I called friends, my family... I found one other person from Prince Rupert who wants to go. Anybody else out there in Prince Rupert? Give me a call I'm in the phone book.

Up here in the north, it may seem as if that whole salmon farming thing is over. There's a moratorium here. We won. But let me tell you something. It's partly because of Alexandra Morton that we got our moratorium. She did the science, she publicized the issue, she took the salmon farming companies to court, and she has been a relentless voice in defence of the wild salmon.

“We will lose our wild salmon if government continues to carelessly put farm salmon before wild salmon.” Here's a person of great integrity standing up to the Norwegian Fish Farm Corporations, and calling the government repeatedly to account for their failure to protect wild salmon.

There's not many people like Alexandra. She knows that letting the wild salmon die is wrong to the very core of her being. “Salmon embody the essential unity of mountain, forest and stream.” She says.

Meanwhile the government sits on the evidence that open-net fish farms kill salmon smolts and does nothing. The government's view is that salmon are not sacred. They are a stream of income. And if farmed salmon yield a bigger stream of income then wild salmon then so be it.

The character of the north pacific coast, the ecosystem the identity of the people who live here – that doesn't matter to the federal or the provincial governments. It's all about money. But of course no politician has the guts to admit that out loud.

Bill Vander Zalm will be up here in a couple of weeks flogging his American style anti-tax campaign. Who has the integrity? Who is standing up for what's really valuable ?

Look what's happening in the United States. The big banks and the investment firms brought the global economy to the brink of disaster, and then got the government to bail them out and gave themselves million dollar bonuses. And recently the Supreme court took away all limits to corporate contributions for election campaigns. It's official, the U.S. Government is for sale to the highest bidders.

Back in BC we have a government that pretends to be green, but like our American neighbours, really just listens to the sound of money. It's only people with integrity like Alexandra who have made the fish farming moratorium possible. But let's not take the absence of fish farms here for granted.

Money talks and government listens, but government also listens if sufficient numbers of people make their feelings known. When you get down to it it's either we the people or it's the corporations. If we don't join together and make our voices heard they win and the wild salmon go extinct.

What's important to you? Do you fish for salmon? Do you smoke and can salmon? What would it mean to you if there were no more wild salmon?

Before I moved to Prince Rupert salmon didn't mean much to me, but after living here almost twenty years I see things very differently. I'm going down to Vancouver Island to support Alexandra Morton and to tell the BC government to get the Norwegian salmon farms out of our ocean.

Come and join us. Or, even if you aren't planning to go, go to Alexandra's website www.salmonaresacred.org. And check out the progress of the get-out migration. E-mail a comment of support, sign the petition. Show Alexandra and the BC government that Prince Rupert cares about wild salmon.

Book Review: "Beyond Stick Control" by Glenn W. Meyer

2010-04-27T03:13:00.000-07:00

Do your rudiments! That phrase couldn't be more of a turnoff to me. As a drummer I want drumming to be fun, not a boring job. Too bad then, that for so long I neglected the rudiments and therefore neglected fluidity and control.

Beyond Stick Control, by Glenn W. Meyer has increased my speed, fluidity, and control demonstrably. The name Beyond Stick Control is significant because Stick Control was Lawrence Stone's classic book of snare drum technique based on the rudiments. How do you go beyond Stone's famous book? Meyer does it by incorporating the bass drum in a marvelous variety of ways.

Yes, do your rudiments but throw in accents, and do variations. First learn them slow, then speed them up to get a sense of fluidity and flexibility. But, you say, what does the bass drum have to do with rudiments? That's what makes the modifier “beyond” so appropriate for this book. Adding the bass drum is what takes your playing beyond stick control.

Glenn Meyer divides his book into four sections. This is important, because each section involves using the bass drum in a different way. Section A ignores the bass drum. It doesn't even ask you to play solid four while you're practicing rudiments. Still I practice section A by tapping out quarter notes just as I learned with Ted Reed's classic book Syncopation.

Section B goes beyond Syncopation by incorporating improvisation in the bass drum. The bass drum becomes part of the beat by following and preceding phrases played by the hands. Meyer calls this technique “Linear Style” and he specializes in it. See especially: his encyclopedic book Funk and Fusion Concepts for a cornucopia of examples.

I love practicing section B. It has given me a powerful sense of control and fluidity with my right kick.

Section C is all about bass drum ostinatos. Don't know Italian? “Ostinato” is a repeated pattern played underneath everything else that supports and holds up the whole rythmic structure. Start with halfnotes, then count time with quarter notes like in Reed's Syncopation, then take your drumming beyond Syncopation by incorporating some latin bass beats, Samba, Baio, Tumbao, and the beautiful Baio/Tumbao. And Meyer knows his latin beats.

Section D “Linear Jazz Style” is worth the price of the whole book many times over. It incorporates what you've learned in the previous three sections into the entire drum set. This section is played with a broken triplets swing feel on the ride cymbal. My suggestion, which if you do take, you'll thank me for, is to practice section D with both R hand ride and with L hand ride. It seems like twice as much work but it isn't because the R hand “teaches” the left. And the added bonus is that you further strengthen your right kick without even thinking about it.

Speed these exercises up and play them as written instead of swinging them and they become more like cut time rock rhythms with the back beat on the three. Try, for instance page 56, #11 to see what I mean. Or they gain a latin like feel from the rudimental patterns. It was when I started practicing the triplet rudiments that I realized how challenging these exercises really are.

I love Syncopation, but doing straight four on the bass drum all the time drives me crazy. Going beyond syncopation I can use the hihat to tell time, and that frees up the bass drum to become a more powerful improviser. Section D takes lessons learned in the rudiments and incorporates them into jazz /rock fusion ride rhythms. For me, that's what makes rudiments so much fun to play instead of being a job. Before this book I had no idea how to play this stuff. Now it just seems natural.

The Real Carbon Economy

2010-01-03T17:44:00.001-08:00

We say the economic system works through flows: flows of resources, flows of capital, and flows of produced goods, which are all mostly exchanged through buying and selling, and then invested, saved, or consumed.

These flows can be measured in terms of money value. That's what the GNP and GDP are: dollar measures of the circular flow of a nation's economy over the time period of a year.

Think of life now. Life can't be measured by dollars because life includes a lot more than just humans and life has been around a lot longer than humans.

But life has circular flows too, flows of resources, flows of energy. And like an economy, life should have a balance between consumption and production.

Think of the Earth as an economy, a circular flow of resources with an input of high quality energy from the sun and output of low grade energy in the form of infra-red heat.

The Earth is a successful economy because it has life. It is life that is able to capture some of the sun's energy and maintain itself for countless generations in a continuous manner since its origins.

The Earth Economy is a lot bigger than the human economy and a lot lot older. In the Earth Economy carbon is the medium of exchange. In other words, carbon in the Earth Economy plays the same role as money does in the human economy. Carbon, like money gets cycled through the Earth Economy, but unlike money, carbon takes hundreds of millions of years to cycle through.

In the human economy money commands resources, goods and services. And money acts as a store of value. It can be saved and spent later. But money, unlike carbon, is conceptual, it only exists because we believe it has value. It ceases to exist when we cease to believe in it.

Money is really only a virtual reality. Ultimately, what makes all things work, all things go, and what makes living things alive is energy.

Energy flows, and like water, it always flows downstream. In the case of water, it flows downstream to the lowest point on Earth, which is the bottom of the oceans. In the case of energy, when we say it flows downstream we are talking about the “Second Law of Thermodynamics”.

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. That's the first law. The second law has to do with what happens when energy is converted into work.

Living systems capture energy and convert it into chemical energy. The second law says that this must be a downhill process. You cannot reconvert chemical energy to electromagnetic energy (light) unless you add more energy from outside the system.

That's why a perpetual motion machine is impossible. Because whenever work is done, the energy used up, even though it still exists, cannot be used again to do the same amount of work. It gets degraded, or disorganized in doing work. In this sense it always flows downstream.

On Earth, carbon plays the role of life's currency, life's means of capturing, utilizing, and storing the high grade energy, and getting rid of the low grade energy. Because it plays such a central role in life, carbon is a lot like the Greek god Atlas, holding up the sky.

Energy is necessary for life because if there's not enough of it then life's activities stop. But too much energy raises the temperature too high and life can burn up.

Over vast scales of time the carbon cycle has had a huge influence on the flows of energy and the overall temperature of Earth's surface. And during those same spans of time, life has had a large influence on the carbon cycle, and hence on Earth's temperature.

Like goods and services in the smaller human economy, energy flows and circulates amongst living things. First, to the Producers: bacteria, diatoms, algae, and plants. Producers take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Producers utilize photosynthesis and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to capture solar energy and store it in carbon compounds.

. Next, the energy, in the form of carbon compounds, flows to the Consumers: the bacteria, protists, fungi, and animals that feed on plants and on each other. Consumers breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.

When there is a balance between Producers and Consumers Earth Economy is as healthy as it can be. If there is too many Producers and not enough Consumers, then too much of the plants and algae die without decomposing and more carbon gets locked into sedimentary rocks. Then the available supply of carbon decreases and Earth's temperature decreases. This is just one of, but not the only causes of ice ages.

We can call ice ages “Depressions” in the Earth Economy because just as in depressions when there's not enough money to buy everything the economy freezes, during an ice age there's less carbon available to capture the energy needed to drive life. Some of the great extinction events such as the Permian - Triassic extinction 250 million years ago are thought to have been caused by ice ages.

If there is too many Consumers and not enough Producers we get too much carbon available. Remember, Consumers breathe out carbon dioxide, so the more Consumers there are and the more that they consume, the more carbon dioxide there will be in the atmosphere. The amount of available carbon becomes so high that Earth's surface temperature climbs. We can call this “Inflation” .

For thousands of years the human economy was just an insignificant fraction of Earth Economy. But then we discovered fossil fuels – coal, and oil. These are forms of carbon that were saved long ago when for various reasons, plant life was not consumed by other life forms, but eventually was subducted underground. There it was converted by the heat and compression of Earth's techtonic forces into coal and oil.

By tapping into this stored form of ancient sunlight, we have been able to extract both biological and mineralogical resources at an accelerating rate. This is a situation akin to hyperinflation in human economy, where the circulation velocity of money (carbon) has increased at the same time as vastly greater quantities of money (carbon) are available.

The result is an overheating of Earth Economy and a new mass extinction event. We call this “Global Warming”.

Spontaneous Organization

2009-12-14T04:23:00.000-08:00

The market economy is a self-organizing system because it is made up of countless people who act out of their own self interest to buy and sell to other people. It is not designed and not made by a designer.

A language system such as the english language, is a self-organizing system. Each speaker of english uses english words in conversation with other english speakers. The language itself is shaped and evolves through the sum total of individual conversations and at the same time the language system as a whole shapes the way that each individual speaker uses it in conversation.

Although laws are made by governments and moral codes are often passed on from one generation to the next through formal and informal education, moral systems can also be seen as self-organizing. Our interpretation of values, social norms and rules helps to shape our everyday conduct with others. Each person's conduct in turn, is interpreted by and influences other's value systems and conduct in a vast circle of social networks. Some people's behaviour is exemplary and very influential, other's behaviour is despicable and serves as an example to be shunned.

All these human systems I am describing have emergent properties that are not reducible to a simple description of physical causes. Being an english speaker I can choose to speak eloquently or massacre the language. Either way, I am part of the english language system without being determined by it.

Consciousness is another system, in this case neurological, where the state of consciousness is an emergent property, not reducible to a physical chain of neurons firing.

The parts of consciousness interact together with the other parts: The mid-brain systems that keep us alert and awake and that help us to pay attention, the sensory systems, the motivational system that helps us to focus and prioritize, the memory systems of the cerebral cortex that help in making associations with past experience, and make experiencing into a continuous flow, the parts of the cortex dealing with language, and meaning that help to put ideas into words, the parts that allow us to visualize ideas, and the prefrontal areas of the cortex that assist us in judging and and decision-making.

Our thoughts, sensations, feelings and judgement get organized into coherent ideas and narratives spontaneously without being planned or designed. For any planning, necessarily already involves ideas and narratives, so it can't be primary.

We tend to model reality after ourselves. This is called “anthropomorphism”. At first we attribute human qualities to natural phenomena such as the weather, the sea, volcanoes, the sun and moon, and the stars. We invent mythologies to explain how these things act, as if they were people and acted according to their own purposes.

Determinism can be seen as just another form of anthropomorphism. Just as all humans make things and do things for a reason, determinism sees everything that happens as determined by previous causes. Determinism equates living things with machines as if they were designed for a reason.

According to determinism there is no free will because everything that happens is determined by antecedant causes. But does causation explain everything, and does it really determine behaviour?

Think back to the flock of sandpipers that I talked about in a previous article. The flock flies in unison, quickly manoevering around obstacles as one, and lands on the beach in unison. Where was the cause of that flock's behaviour? Was it the sum total of all the individual sandpipers' behaviour?

But didn't the behaviour of the flock as a whole influence the behaviour of each individual bird? The behaviour of the flock influenced the behaviour of the individual birds, and the individual birds influenced the behaviour of the flock. In which direction was the cause?

We're talking in circles here. If causation happens in both directions or is “circular” in what sense is it determinate?

Everything can influence us at once, and if so what is it that causes us to do what we do? Everything? Then the concept of causation and determinism itself are both meaningless.

It seems to me that self-organization can generate free will because the influence and interaction of a self-organized system can be omnidirectional.

Think of the brain. Interactions between many different parts of the brain contribute to each moment of consciousness. At the same time our conscious experience influences those interactions. What causes the experience then?

That's why we say that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and not reducible to the firing of nerve cells. And we can say the same thing about “purpose” and “meaning”. These emerge out of living and self-organizing systems.

Purpose is more basic than meaning because it does not require consciousness. The purpose of maintaining life appears to be already part of every life-form. Meaning emerges from consciousness so it requires consciousness.

It may seem rather abstract, what I'm talking about but these are all things that science has a problem dealing with but are in the province of religion. Consciousness emerges from physical phenomena but cannot be reduced to them because it influences those phenomena. Purpose emerges from life and influences life, meaning emerges from consciousness and influences consciousness.

The key to all these phenomena is that they appear to emerge spontaneously from the bottom up in self-organizing systems, without being designed or planned. This has obvious implications for religion. But that's not my department.

Just Add Water - It Stirs Itself

2009-12-07T23:55:00.000-08:00

I'm reading a book by Phillip Ball, called: Water, Matrix of Life. If you want to know more about water, it's fascinating and well written. I particularly like this quote of his: “Water is the agent of geological, environmental and global change. It confers fecundity on parched regions, while it's passing turns grasslands into deserts.”

Water does all this and more. But water is incredibly effective at what it does because water is a team player. Apparently there's water on the moon in the form of patches of ice, but it's inert, it doesn't do anything because it lacks the other team players. Let's introduce these other team members.

Water is a compound not an element although the Greeks and the Chinese thought it was one of the “four elements” - Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Let's run with this idea but let's assume that fire can mean all types of energy, especially the Sun. Let's use a bigger name for Air. We'll call it the Atmosphere. Let's say that “Earth” means the planet and not just a hunk of rock. Now let's add a fifth element, and call it “Life”.

Put these five elements together and they will interact spontaneously. And these interactions form the great geophysical systems of the Earth.

The Earth's surface has mountains and basins. It's lowest points are where most of the water is – in the oceans. The Earth's gravitational field is strong enough to hold all the gases: the oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapour that make up the atmosphere.

Think of Earth as a house without a switch because it runs itself. It's roof is the atmosphere. It lets vital energy from the Sun in and gives us a bit of insulation at night. Too much insulation is not good, as we see with the planet Venus, with its surface temperature of 460 *Celsius.

The Earth's got plumbing, heating, ventilation and power, mostly run by one system: the weather. But it's also got backup power from internal heat which causes plate tectonics to reconfigure the seas and continents every hundred million years or so.

It's not like a house that was designed and built, because it repairs itself. Tell me, what house that we have built repairs itself, or has lasted as long as Earth has?

As a plumbing and heating system and power system the weather is partly predictable and partly unpredictable. Sometimes we get too much water sometimes not enough. Sometimes it gets too hot, sometimes it's just right.

The weather operates under the usual physical laws. The Earth's spin causes winds to curve in the direction of rotation making cyclonic wind patterns counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Sun's radiation heats water on Earth's surface and causes water molecules to change from liquid to gas. The water vapour can rise into the atmosphere because it contains heat from the sun.

Weather is partly predictable, we recognize the seasons, but also unpredictable, we don't know what the weather will be like a month from this day. The weather is a self-organizing system. Weather systems can last up to a week and travel thousands of kilometers.

Let's call a system: a group of parts that interact together to form a whole that is separated from the external world by a boundary.

Let's divide the world of systems into two: machines created by humans and self-organizing systems.

Self organizing systems are systems of parts that interact via simple physical laws. The parts of the Solar system - the sun and the planets, interact by the laws of motion and gravity to form a balanced system that has maintained itself over time.

All machines are mechanical systems designed and built by humans for various goals. A house is a mechanical system that transfers heat and energy from outside and holds it inside. Houses and other machines have switches on them. When the switch is turned on, the machines start to work and when it's turned off they stop working.

What is a self-organizing system? Think of a flock of sandpipers flying low over the water – the precision and coherence of their flight. The flock swoops and glides as a unified whole as if it acts with one mind.

But each bird is acting on its own and the subtle alterations in flight that each bird makes in response to its neighbours creates an emergent unity.

Unlike machines, self-organizing systems are not deterministic. These systems have properties that emerge from the interaction of all the parts that cannot be predicted from the nature of the parts alone.

You cannot predict the weather beyond a week; Human behaviour is both predictable and unpredictable. Weather systems and societies exhibit complex behaviour that is the hallmark of self-organizing systems. The implications of this are revolutionary for Science, Religion, and Philosophy. Tune in next week when I try to explain just how that is.

How Water Keeps Us Alive

2009-11-30T04:14:00.000-08:00

It's uncanny how many essential functions water serves for life processes. But perhaps the most important function is the regulation of temperature. And the amazing thing is, water acts to regulate temperature simultaneously and independently on multiple levels. On a micro sub-cellular level, a human level, a regional level, and a global level.

Life survives in a narrow temperature range that just happens to correspond with the temperature at which water is a liquid. That's not a coincidence. Life and water are tightly coupled on Earth. All of life's metabolic processes – the things that make a living organism “alive” - happen in water.

The temperature at which water is a liquid is not necessarily the temperature that's ideal for many types of chemical reactions. In some cases heat needs to be added to get a reaction underway, or a chemical reaction can produce a lot of heat in an uncontrollable chain reaction. Either way, the reaction proceeds at a temperature much too hot for life.

All biochemical reactions are catalyzed (made easier) by large convoluted protein molecules called enzymes. The key to an enzyme's function as a catalyzer of chemical reactions is its complex shape. And the key to an enzyme's shape is how the molecule twists and folds in on itself in relation to the water molecules that surround it.

Water is also necessary because it facilitates the flow of dissolved molecules that form the raw materials and the products of enzyme mediated reactions. But that's another story.

The enzymes that catalyze most biological reactions work best within a narrow range of a few degrees centering around 37 Centigrade, normal body temperature. Hotter than this and the enzymes lose their shape and cease to function. Too cold and the chemical reactions slow down too much to sustain metabolic processes.

The human body has several independent systems that work to keep the body's temperature within the narrow range necessary for life. All of these systems involve water in a crucial way and yet each uses water in a unique way.

When we are cold our circulation system shunts blood away from the extremities, where it would be more likely to lose heat to the external environment. This keeps more of the body's water within the better insulated core where it protects the vital organs.

When we are too hot our circulation system shunts more water out to the extremities where heat can be transferred out of the body. Another independent system kicks in to cool the body by secreting water in the form of sweat on the body's outer surface. On a hot sunny day the sweat on our skin evaporates cooling us off.

When we are cold another independent system come into play. We “shiver”. This is a muscular reaction that produces heat to warm the body by increasing metabolic rates and shunting blood to the large muscles of the body. Muscle cells are controlled by nerve cells, and nerve cells cannot tell muscle cells what to do without the medium of water.

So here comes the analogy. Just as water plays the major role in keeping our bodies alive it also plays the major role in keeping life on Earth alive. For it is water in all it's forms that moderates temperature on Earth's surface.

Did I already mention in a previous column that water has the second highest heat capacity of any liquid? Water retains heat. That's why we use it for radiators. But that's also why it's warmer near the ocean in winter, and cooler in the summer. Large bodies of water moderate climate, because they absorb heat and are slow to give it up.

In places far inland it's colder in the winter and hotter in the summer because these places lack the moderating influence of a large body of water. Note that the majority of the world's population lives within 50 miles of the ocean.

Water also has a huge role to play in temperature regulation via an entirely different system – the weather. Here's how it works: The Sun's radiant energy heats the surface water of the oceans. When this happens some of the surface water evaporates. It changes from it's liquid form to water vapour – a gas. In doing so it absorbs heat and cools the surface water.

Not a big deal in terms of the proportion of water that ends up in the atmosphere .001 % of Earth's total, but it's still enough to make a huge difference to the Earth's surface temperature.

The water vapour rises up into the atmosphere where it gets blown far away by the winds. The higher the water molecules rise the colder the air. Eventually the the molecules condense back to liquid and form water droplets. When this happens the latent heat of evaporation is given off into the atmosphere.

But here's the deal - where the water molecule absorbed the heat and where it gives it back can be thousands of miles apart. Thus the sun's energy powers the transfer of heat over the Earth's surface through the medium of water.

But that's not all folks. There's another couple of systems involving water in a major role that effect the Earth's surface temperature independently of the one's I just mentioned. Water freezes into ice at 0 C. Ice reflects sunlight and cools the Earth's surface. That's why during an ice age the Earth's surface gets colder.

But there's more. In the atmosphere water vapour molecules have a stronger greenhouse warming effect than carbon dioxide. This is counterbalanced both by the cooling effect of evaporation, and the fact that water molecules do not stay long in the atmosphere before gravity takes over and pulls the water down to the earth in the form of rain.

OK but there's still more. Because water, unlike most other liquids expands when it freezes, ice forms on top of liquid water and because of that ice insulates water and keeps most of it from freezing in the winter.

Used for warming and cooling, multiple independent systems involved. Where have we heard this before? Something's fishy about water's dual role in regulating Earth's surface temperature and the temperature of individual life -forms. Tune in next week when we delve further into this mystery.

Water, The Restless Creator

2009-11-23T02:19:00.000-08:00

The cells of our body are bathed in water. It circulates throughout our bodies in our blood vessels. Water is intimately involved in all aspects of life. No other substance is as important for life.

Water is constantly moving, circulating over the Earth's surface in ocean currents, or drawn downhill to the sea by Earth's gravity, or up into the atmosphere.

Water is drawn up into the atmosphere by solar powered evaporation, it forms into clouds and falls again to Earth as rain, sometimes in the sea and sometimes on land.

When it falls on land some of it ends up as groundwater, some in lakes. But all is drawn to the sea by Earth's gravity. It is the triple actions of the Sun's radiation, the Earth's gravity, and its centrifugal motion that creates the water cycle on Earth's surface

As if to mirror what goes on on the face of the Earth, water in the form of blood is pumped and circulated throughout our bodies by our hearts. This coordinated internal flow of water provides us with food in the form of dissolved carbohydrates , dissolved oxygen, and electrolytes; It gets rid of wastes; It carries immune cells that protect us from disease, white blood cells and platelets that help to repair the body and hormones and chemical transmitters that communicate information from one organ to another.

Water is not just water. It is the universal solvent. It can hold an unbelievable amount of different molecules in solution. Water is constantly in motion, carrying things, carrying chemicals in solution, carbonic acid, which eats away at minerals and carrying sulphates, phosphates, carbonates, and oxides to the sea.

Streams and rivers carry aluminum and magnesium silicates in suspension, and carry rocks and boulders down stream , depositing sediments on the edge of the continental shelves. Over vast scales of time water recycles all the major elements of life except nitrogen.

No-one can survive without water. Not only do we have to drink it every day, but we wash in it, cook with it, clean with it, use it in manufacturing, use it in transportation, and in recreation.

Without water we wouldn't be able to make cement and even our houses would lack a foundation. It's indespensible in religion, where it signifies holiness, purity, and rebirth

Water is the mother of life. The very first living cell was born in water, All of us were conceived and gestated in water. When we are born, we are born from out of our mother's water.

We find ourselves drawn to water, and feel it's calmness, it's churning, it's raging, and it's bubbling. Houses with a water view are worth more money because of the positive psychological effect of seeing water.

But water by itself is not sufficient for life. Without the Earth in it's special relationship with the Sun, and the Earth's size and shape to hold and channel the water, life could not have existed.

What do I mean by Earth's special relationship with the Sun? We know that the Earth, unlike the rest of the planets is just the right distance away from the sun to keep most of the water on Earth in a liquid state. Not to cold to freeze everything and not too hot to boil it all away.

Water is necessary for life, but it's got to be largely in liquid form for life to have originated and for life to continue. That's because life's metabolic processes, the ways that living things get energy, all happen in liquid water.

When, cells photosynthesize it happens in water; When cells do respiration it happens in water; When cells divide it happens in water. All the molecular reactions that are necessary for life work in water and never outside it.

That doesn't mean that water isn't important to life in it's non-liquid phases. Right now 2.9 % of Earth's water is locked away in glacial ice. Over millions of years the glaciers ebb and flow creating ice ages and lowering sea levels then mysteriously stopping their advance over the Continents, retreating towards the poles and making the oceans rise during warmer times.

Water vapour is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide but the reason it does not play as important a role as carbon dioxide in global warming is because a water molecule only stays in the atmosphere for a matter of days, whereas a molecule of carbon dioxide can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

97% of Earth's water lies in the great oceans. Because water has one of the highest heat capacities of any substance, second only to ammonia, the Earth's oceans play an important role in moderating and regulating climate and temperature. Tune in next week when I talk about the effect of water on global temperature regulation.

Science vs Religion

2009-11-14T19:02:00.000-08:00

Religion and Science are two very different activities, but they are both quintessentially human endeavors.

Science is really a way of asking questions and getting answers. Scientists asks how things happen and look at antacedant causes to find the answers. But answers in science are provisional – never final. For instance, Issac Newton's Theory of Gravity was supplanted two hundred years later by Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

That's why scientific knowledge is made up of theories, not immutable decrees. Scientific knowledge is ever growing and never completed. This is different from religion where if someone adds new revelations to established scripture, it often becomes a separate religion with separate adherents, like Mormonism.

Religion, is also a way of asking questions and getting answers but it asks the question “Why?” rather than “How?” because it is really about meaning and purpose in our lives.

We are the only religious species because we don't do well if we don't have a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Science can also give one a sense of meaning and purpose but, because science is provisional – it doesn't give the same sense of security that religion does.

One of the reasons that science and religion conflict is because they are both about life, and life, as we have discovered, is about maintaining itself. Life is intrinsically purposive. Living creatures try to keep on living for as long as possible; They try and begat progeny; They behave purposefully.

Science has subtle problems with this because it doesn't like asking questions about purpose – that's too subjective. It would rather ask questions about physical causes.

One of the main reasons a lot of people are uneasy with scientific descriptions of life is that they sound too mechanistic and meaningless. You can get the impression from strict Darwinists, like Richard Dawkins, that life just happened to evolve purely by chance.

This offends our religious sensibilities – it certainly offends mine. Since everything about life is purposeful, I don't see how the evolution of life could all be due to chance.

But that's a religious approach, not a scientific approach. The questions: “Why does life exist?” and “Why am I here?” - that sort of thing.

I like to think that I'm here for a purpose, that the universe begat life for a purpose, that there is a meaning to life. These are concerns about my subjective experience, about my participation in life.

Science is trying to be objective, trying to approach the ideal of objectivity - which it never quite reaches, because it is provisional and never final. Science is largely uncomfortable getting mixed up in “subjective experience” But that's OK because we've got religion and our religious propensities to deal with the subjective.

We can be uneasy about mechanistic explanations of evolution and human behaviour, but some people go to the extreme of denying the existence of evolution and global warming.
When people deny that life evolved they are taking Martin Luther's extreme position that the holy scriptures trumps every other human authority, including and especially Science.

The people who wrote the Bible were not scientists, they were not really interested in the question of causes and evidence for causes. They were interested in religious questions about who we are, why we are here, why do bad things happen to us, and what happens after we die.

The people who wrote the Bible were fundamentally people. Therefore they had axes to grind, they had personal and political reasons for writing the things that they did. No living person is immune from this, especially not people who claim to be inspired by God, as recent events testify over and over again.

Whoever wrote the book of Genesis, in the Bible was not writing a scientific description of how life originated. He or she, was trying to get people to observe the Sabbath.

God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. So we should observe one day in the seven day week as a holy day. That's what that story is all about. This writer had ulterior motives as do all other writers.

When scientists ask questions such as: “How old is the human species?” and “Where and how did humans originate?” , the answer from Genesis, that God created the world in six days, just doesn't cut it. It's just a way of telling people to shut up and stop asking inconvenient questions.

The evidence is all around us that life is constantly changing, that life is incredibly old, that the Earth is incredibly old, and that we, as the human race, are not all that old. We should have respect for our elders.

Eukaryotic Cells: A Symbiotic Journey

2009-11-09T02:03:00.001-08:00

Symbiosis, is everywhere around us if we know what to look for. Lichens, those scraggly little things that grow on rocks, are half algae half fungi. Fungi and Algae are two very distant families The algae provides the ability to photosynthesize and the fungi provides the physical structure and the ability to gather nourishment from rocks. Neither of the two species that makes up the lichen can exist anymore without the other.

Coral is a creature that forms all the coral reefs in the warm waters of the oceans. Coral is both an animal and an algae. The algae is what gives coral it's colour the greens, reds, and yellows. The animal, called a polyp, is what secretes the calcium carbonate or rock hard body of the coral. If the water stays too warm for too long it kills the algae. If the algae die, the coral dies, because the animal part cannot survive without the energy it gets from the photosynthesizing algae.

The largest structure made from living creatures is the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. This is a series of coral reefs 2600 kilometers long and 344,000 square kilometers. This huge living structure is bleaching out and dying because the algae part of the coral organism cannot tolerate the warmer waters.

Trees are in symbiotic relationships with soil fungi that live on their root tips. The fungi extract minerals and chemicals from the soil and feed them to the tree and the tree is able to feed the fungi with sugars manufactured through photosynthesis in it's leaves.

Termites, which can eat wood, digest the wood with the help of specialized bacteria in their stomachs. Cows and other grass eating herbivores are able to digest the cellulose in grass because of bacteria in their stomachs. Without the bacteria, the cow would not be able to digest the grass. Without the cow, the bacteria wouldn't have access to so much fresh grass,

There are bacteria in our intestines that help us process our waste, making it easier for our intestines to absorb Vitamins B12 and K. Without these vitamins we get blood disorders. When both creatures benefit this is called symbiosis.

There is, in every cell in our body a thing called a mitochondria. Much smaller than a cell, the are about the size of a bacterial cell. The mitochondria take oxygen and sugars and join them to phosphorus creating molecules that store energy. They're like little generators inside your cell. And there can be anywhere from one to a thousand or more of these little mitochondria in each cell, especially in cells that do a lot of work like muscle cells.

In fact, mitochondria are in every type of eukaryotic cell, the type of cell that makes up just about every living thing we know about . But they do not exist in any prokaryotic cells, which is what bacteria are. That means that mitochondria originated when eukaryotic cells originated, two billion years ago, after the proportion of oxygen had increased in the atmosphere. Bacteria could live without oxygen, but eukaryotic single celled creatures with their bigger size and more complex structures couldn't have done without the extra energy that oxygen provided.

One of the most interesting things about mitochondria is that they have their own DNA. Not only that, they appear to be one of the few organelles like plastids in plants and algae, that divides by itself.

Microbiologist Lynn Margulis was not the first scientist to suggest that mitochondria and plastids were actually forms of ancient bacteria, but her version was the first to gain acceptance in the biological community. This was largely because when it became technically feasible to analyze the DNA of mitochondria and plastids separately from the cell's nucleus, scientists discovered that the DNA of these organelles was more closely related to the DNA of ancient bacteria then to the DNA in the cell's nucleus.

Something happened two billion years ago. An oxygen breathing bacteria got swallowed by or invaded a non-oxygen breathing bacteria. Instead of harming each other they benefitted each other. The new cell couldn't survive without the oxygen breathing bacteria so they too were passed on whenever the cell divided. Over time the oxygen breathing bacteria lost some of it's independence, until it too could not survive outside the cell.

All algae, all plants, all animals, all fungi, all single-celled eukaryotes came from this symbiotic combination of bacteria two billion years ago. And the evidence for this caper is in every one of our cells.

One of the reasons it took so long to accept this theory of cell symbiosis is because this didn't quite fit the Darwinian picture. Natural selection was supposed to be imperceptively gradual and stepwise. But here we have the biggest revolutionary change in biology next to the origin of life, the evolution of eukaryotic cells from procaryotic cells, occurring through the fusion of two or more types of ancient bacteria.

This wasn't a gradual series of changes in the cells' characteristics. This was a relatively sudden jump in the structure and functioning of a cell due to the joining together of two or more distinct species. It was not the slow gradual time frame that Darwin had suggested.

The evolution of dinosaurs and human beings was child's play compared to the evolution of the eukaryotic cell. And it couldn't have happened without symbiosis.

Eukaryotic Cells: Size Matters

2009-10-31T19:03:00.000-07:00

Every living thing is either a cell or made up of cells. The fact is, every living thing starts life as a single cell. This divides and divides again as the body is constructed cell by cell.

Lewis Thomas in his famous essay “Lives of a Cell said: “ The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived originally from a single cell.”

The cell is the basic building block of biology. It can be all there is to an organism as many creatures are single-celled, including all bacteria. For humans and other multi-celled creatures one cell can be a tiny fraction of our body, yet each and every cell in our bodies carries our entire genetic identity.

The cells of every living thing are unique. They all contain DNA molecules, the molecules of heredity, that are unique to that particular organism and nothing else. That's why my body can detect the cells of other organisms and produce antibodies that mark these alien cells for destruction by my immune system.

It was about two billion years ago I recall, when something very important happened and a new type of cell developed from bacterial cells. This new type of cell we call Eukaryotic.

If you are old enough to remember, at that time there were no plants, no animals, only microscopic critters called bacteria. Lots and lots of bacteria, many different kinds of bacteria: bacteria that ate iron sulphate and produced sulphur and bacteria that ate sulphur and produced hydrogen sulphide, bacteria that produced methane and bacteria that ate methane. And while there was great diversity in the different metabolic processes that bacteria could do there wasn't much diversity in the size and shape of bacteria.

Why would diversity of size and shape matter? Think about what a world of nothing but bacteria would look like... We're talking soup, slime, and ooze, and PU, what a smell. Enough to literally kill you - not a particularly attractive place to raise your kids. And that was what life on Earth was like for maybe three billion years. Until eukaryotic cells came along, that is.

OK, now what does life look like? There's grass, human beings, seaweed, eagles, redwood trees, moss, elephants, sharks and whales. There's microscopic single-celled sea creatures with fantastic glass houses called diatoms, there's turtles and squids and giant clams and periwinkles. Talk about different shapes and sizes and temperments. Better than 60 degrees of slime any day.

Eukaryotic cells, which is what plants, animals, fungi, and diatoms are made of, are bigger and more complex than prokaryotic (bacterial) cells. They have more parts than bacterial cells and much more DNA, 1000 times more. Eukaryotic cells have more membranes that separate and protect all the numerous parts of the cell.

Eukaryotic cells can do more things, they can specialize and link up to other cells forming organs and entire bodies. They have structures and scaffolding that allow the cells to move about like amoeba or link together like bones, skin, nerves and muscles or layers and fibers in a tree. They can secrete shells of calcium carbonates or silicates to surround and protect themselves.

Bacteria just don't have it in themselves to do any of these things. Their masters of the slime universe but what do they do besides consuming and polluting and exchanging genetic calling cards?

Let's not be disrespectful to our elders now. After all it was out of bacteria that the eukaryotic cell evolved. And that's the amazing thing that I'd like you to contemplate, because if we're looking at the “tree of life” then bacteria aren't in the branches and they aren't part of the trunk. They are in the roots.

Charles Darwin conceived of evolution as a tree with successive species as successively smaller branches, as old species went extinct and new species came into being. New species developed by inheriting new characteristics that eventually separated them from the old species.

Darwin saw the mechanism behind the generation of new species as the competitive struggle to survive. But note: the roots of a tree don't compete with each other. They each extract nutrients from the ground and send them into the tree.

Just so, the first eukaryotic cell evolved not from bacterial competition but from bacterial cooperation. That's something that Darwin didn't anticipate. Tune in next week as I describe how this symbiosis came about.

May the Phosphorous be With You

2009-10-22T18:23:00.000-07:00

Our brains require both sugar molecules and oxygen to remain conscious. Sugar is the product of photosynthesis. Oxygen is also the product of photosynthesis. Consciousness would not be possible without photosynthesis.

Imagine that. We think we are so independent, we can understand things not seen, see things that are no longer there, and predict things that haven't happened, yet we could not do any of these things without the existence of photosynthesizers.

Oxygen has great potential, electrically speaking. And molecules with phosphorous are the key to tapping its potential. Phosphorous is essential to bone formation and basic metabolism in most animals. It forms a part of ATP, otherwise known as Adenosine triphosphate and ADP, or Adenosine diphosphate. These are the molecules that are the workhorses of “ cellular respiration”

And DNA – the molecule of heredity, is non-functional without phosphorus. Maybe it's the power of love between Oxygen and Phosphorous that has really made it possible for life to endure longer than the mountains and the continents

Phosphorous burns with desire for Oxygen. To prove its love it will even burn under water. Carbon won't do that. So it is Phosphorous that makes Oxygen potential food rather than poison. Without Phosphorous Oxygen would have remained on the dark side of life. A deadly toxin that was killing off it's photosynthetic producers. We should be thankful for this intense love affair between Phosphorous and Oxygen, for without it we wouldn't exist.

In cellular respiration oxygen atoms are passed from one molecule to the next in a controlled stepwise process that extracts the maximum energy from an oxygen atom and makes it available to the cell for work. It is molecules of ATP and ADP that makes this possible.

Microbiologist Lynn Margulis is the scientist who first brought to our attention the idea that oxygen played a major role in shaping the direction of early evolution.

“Whereas fermentation typically produces two molecules of ATP for every sugar molecule broken down, the respiration of the same sugar molecule utilyzing oxygen can produce as many as thirty-six.”

“With greater quantities of energy available to them cyanobacteria exploded into hundreds of different forms. They spread into greater extremes of the environment, from cold marine waters to hot freshwater springs.”

“Cyanobacteria's continuing air pollution forced other organisms to acquire the ability to use oxygen too. This set off waves of speciation and the creation of elaborate forms and life cycles among them.”

“Growing, mutating and trading genes, some bacteria producing oxygen and others removing it, they maintained the oxygen balance of the entire planet.”

Oxygen has been twenty-one percent of the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years. This is a sign of the endurance of the balance of nature. It shows that there has been a balance between photosynthesizers and respirers for at least that long.

If oxygen was much higher than 21% then all the plants on land would burn even if they were wet. But if there was much less oxygen than 21% then all animals, including humans would asphyxiate. So as animals that need to breathe and depend on plants for food we are lucky that there is just the right proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere.

How could this be? Some lovers of certainty think that there must be an intelligent designer behind it all. On the other hand, strict Darwinists, like Richard Dawkins can't explain this as anything but a coincidence. Neither considers that new properties can emerge from the ground up. In fact, living things maintain themselves. They sometimes adapt to change by changing the environment.

When too much oxygen was produced its dark side came into play. There was massive extinctions. When new forms of life evolved to take advantage of oxygen, the new form of energy, they quickly expanded in population. A new balance was created between the creatures that produce oxygen and the creatures, like us, that consume it. All this occurred over a timescale of millions of years.

There is a parallel between oxygen and oil. We humans have changed the face of the Earth much faster than any other creature. We discovered coal and oil in the ground and developed technologies like steam, diesel, and internal combustion engines to utilize the new form of energy. This occurred over a few hundred years.

Developing transportation, agricultural and extraction technologies based on machines that run on fossil fuels allowed the human population to grow rapidly because it gave us the ability to get more resources from the ground, to grow more food, and to provide more amenities for ourselves.

The greater population led to the greater utilization of fossil fuels which in turn is leading to a greater output of carbon dioxide. It is carbon dioxide that regulates global temperature and ocean acidity. Increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere along with other stresses on other life forms caused by increases in human population is leading to a new major extinction event.

Many creatures will go extinct. Carbon dioxide will stabilize at some higher level until millions of years from now new life forms evolve to fill the empty niches left behind by the mass extinctions and they draw down the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere once again.

The balance of nature is a metaphor, but it represents a real process. In maintaining itself life uses energy and creates pollution. Pollution is toxic to many organisms and many of them die off. New life forms evolve to take advantage of the pollution creating a balance.

But remember the sand pile. Adding a single grain of sand can sometimes effect the entire pile. The global combination of all living creatures may keep the content of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in stable proportions until a new creature, in this case one that adds huge amounts of carbon dioxide, tips the entire system over.

Oxygen: Saviour

2009-10-15T23:09:00.000-07:00

We're the blue planet. That's us. When you're talking planets - blue is associated with life. The blue colour comes from oxygen which makes up a large portion of the weight of a water molecule. And the blue sky also comes from the element oxygen. Oxygen comprises twenty-one percent of our atmosphere.

The colour red also has to do with oxygen. Rust, gets it's red colour because it is oxidized iron. Blood gets it's red colour from the iron and oxygen in hemoglobin. The planet Mars gets it's red colour from oxidized minerals which means that Mars used to have oxygen, probably in the form of water.

Oxygen, with it's all consuming hunger for electrons, has a lot of potential energy. But it is potential for good or ill. Free oxygen has the potential to destroy biological molecules. That's why we use bleach to get out stains. Bleaching is an oxidation process. Oxygen, by grabbing electrons from other elements, weakens covalent bonds in organic molecules leading to their disintegration.

Atmospheric oxygen is the source for ozone, a molecule made up of three oxygen atoms. Ozone is a toxic pollutant, an ingredient in automobile exhaust, but it also exists in the atmosphere where it protects life on Earth from ultraviolet rays. High up in the atmosphere a layer of ozone absorbs the ultraviolet light that would otherwise harm living creatures.

Not only does ultraviolet light harm living things but for time periods of billions of years it has even greater potential for harm. The high energy content of ultraviolet light means that it has the power to break the bonds of water molecules.

Once liberated from water, hydrogen can escape Earth's gravity into space. Without protection, over billions of years, the sun's ultraviolet rays could deplete the oceans of water.

There is evidence on Mars – the famous “Canals” - that there was once water there. Now there is no water and only a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide. No oxygen in the atmosphere. No ozone to protect against ultraviolet light. No water anymore. And without water there is no life.

No life without water and no water without life. Earth has both. Mars had only one and now has none.

Twenty years ago there was an international treaty signed to protect the ozone layer from a man-made substance called freon. Freon was used as the main coolant in virtually all refrigerators and air conditioners. The problem was that when it was released into the air , which is what happens eventually when all fridges and air conditioners are discarded, it rose high into the atmosphere where it chemically reacting with ozone - destroying it.

Sometime during the 1990's Scientists discovered a “hole” in the Ozone in the southern hemisphere. The Ozone hole has gotten smaller since countries complied with the treaty and stopped manufacturing freon, but not before it took it's toll on Australia, where the incidence of skin cancer has increased considerably.

When bacteria first existed there was no oxygen so there was no ozone to protect living things from ultraviolet rays. It took millions of years for oxygen to reach a high enough percentage for the protective ozone layer to develop. We call that a “Time-lag. In that time bacteria were on their own to develop resistance to these deadly toxins: oxygen and ultraviolet light.

Life is autopoietic, but in maintaining itself life alters the chemistry of the Earth. And when that chemistry changed from zero free oxygen to twenty-one percent free oxygen, life developed in a radical new direction.

From photosynthesis, to – “respiration” – the utilization of oxygen to supply chemical energy to life, oxygen,which was first a pollutant and a toxin, became the basis for all new forms of life.

Tune in next week when we learn who helped Oxygen turn from the “dark side” and transform into a Creator.

Why Bacteria Invented Sex

2009-10-07T22:56:00.000-07:00

Bacteria are the ultimate survivors. They've been around for three and a half billion years. Longer than the continents, and all the mountain ranges on Earth. In contrast, the animal kingdom has been here only a paltry six hundred million years – one sixth of that time.

Bacteria are the simplest of creatures being as they were the first of all creatures to exist. They are single-celled. They are so small,that they are invisible to the naked eye. But they are not solitary creatures and they live in huge communities that are sometimes visible in the form of coloured blobs of slime, the kind you might see in a petri dish or on rotting food. It's easy to look down on them as disgusting and smelly but without them we would not exist.

It is bacteria, more than any other creature that has altered the face of the Earth – breaking down it's rocks, and adding to it's atmosphere gases such as carbon dioxide - which is crucial to Earth's temperature regulation, methane, and oxygen – without which we animals could not survive.

The technical name for bacterial cells is “Prokaryotes” , which refers to the fact that bacteria don't have a nucleus. All “Eukaryotic cells” - the kind of cells that we have in our bodies – have a nucleus. The nucleus contains all our genetic material wound up like the rubber strands in a golf ball only way tighter – if the DNA in the nucleus of one of your cells was unwound it would stretch to the moon and back several times.

That extra genetic material and the protective membrane means that eukaryotic cells can do more things and make up more complex multicellular organisms like us.

In contrast bacteria don't have as much genetic material. And the genes are looser, not packed as tight because they are not surrounded by a nuclear membrane.

But, bacteria have an advantage over eukaryotic cells. Bacteria are the original party animals. They love to hang out in huge numbers, and they're not so particular that they have to hang out with their own species. They love to mix and when they mingle they can easily exchange genetic material with whoever they please. They have no shame and the whole thing is over in seconds. Which means that bacterial evolution has been fantastically quicker than the evolution of eukaryotes

This bacterial promiscuity is the basis for genetic engineering, by the way. Because it's so easy to get bacteria to take on different genetic material bacteria can be given genes that will manufacture just about anything we want. That kind of stuff is just not possible for eukaryotic cells, thank God.

Technically speaking, “sex” is the exchange of genetic material between different organisms. It isn't necessarily tied to reproduction the way it is for bigger eukaryotic creatures. Bacteria aren't male and female because they pre-date reproductive sex.

It's immaculate conception. Bacteria can split all by themselves, And go on making millions of exact copies of themselves. They don't need love. But they need protection from toxins.

Ultraviolet light coming from the sun is hazardous to life. It can damage biological molecules. It damages DNA molecules,the genetic material for all forms of life. In Microcosmos, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's book about microbial evolution, the authors hypothesize about this connection: “The pressure to patch up damaged DNA or die induced the development of DNA repair systems. Sometimes instead of using healthy copies of their own genetic material, crowded bacteria borrowed DNA from their neighbours.”

“By adapting to life under harsh light the microcosm had invented sex. Though this first sex was different from the kind of sex animals are involved in, it was sex all the same...”

This was probably their most important means of evolving rapidly in the face of environmental danger. We now know why it was so easy for bacteria to aquire resistance to deadly toxins like anti-biotics. Bacterial sex takes advantage of the natural variety in the population to provide resistance to new toxins.

It's easy enough to say that bacteria should have just kept away from the sun's dangerous rays, and then they would have survived. Because if that's all they ever did they would never have developed photosynthesis and then we wouldn't exist. It's autopoieses. Life maintains itself. And life that survives over time does so because it adapts to Earth's changing environment. In next week's article we will discover how life can also change the odds for itself in a positive direction by altering the environment.

Oxygen: Destroyer

2009-09-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

Oxygen gas is an anomoly. Earth's atmosphere should not be 21% molecular oxygen because oxygen is a very greedy element. It wants electrons badly and would much rather take those electrons by binding with elements on Earth's surface, then hanging around with other oxygen atoms in the atmosphere. As long as these elements are out there oxygen will "oxidize" them, which is what happens when iron rusts or something catches fire.

So why is there always 21% oxygen in the atmosphere? No other planet in our solar system has free oxygen in it's atmosphere (even though it's the third most abundant element in the universe). But no other planet in our solar system has liquid water and no other planet in our solar system has life. That's where the connection lies. It all hinges on a metabolic process called photosynthesis that was invented about two billion years ago by the bacterial ancestor of cyanobacteria or "bluegreen algae".

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, in their book, What is Life?, call photosynthesis: "the most important metabolic innovation in the history of the planet." Why? Because with photosynthesis life could derive energy from freely available sunlight for the first time.

The first bacteria probably lived off hydrogen sulphide bubbling up from volcanic vents under the sea. They derived their energy from catalyzing the hydrogen bonds, combining hydrogen with carbon to make simple sugars. Eventually, different kinds of bacteria evolved that were able to catalyze various non-organic substances such as iron and sulphur, then other bacteria evolved that could derive still more energy by fermenting the waste products of previous kinds of bacteria. Note that all early bacteria were "anaerobic", that is they did not use oxygen in any metabolic process.

There's a pattern here. First, an organism develops a way of getting energy from one substance. Then it grows and multiplies until it exhausts that resource. A crisis ensues which leads to the evolution of new life that is able to utilize new forms of energy, then those resources are exhausted and a new crisis ensues. Out of these series of life-crises bacteria came to invent every single metabolic process utilized by living things. Margulis and Sagan's point is that the development of photosynthesis temporarily bypassed this boom and bust process. By utilizing the energy from sunlight the ancestor of cyanobacteria was able to metabolize enough energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, obtaining hydrogen from a virtually limitless source - the oceans - something that no bacteria before it was able to do.

But photosynthesis wasn't just a brilliant solution for bacteria, it rewrote the rule book for every single new life-form that has evolved since that time 2.5 billion years ago. Because, other than bacteria, all forms of life are either photosynthesizers themselves or they survive by eating photosynthesizers or by eating animals that eat photosynthesizers. That's what we mean by "the food chain".

Let's go back to that connection between oxygen in the atmosphere, water, and life. Because they had just liberated themselves from energy scarcity, the new kids on the block - bluegreen bacteria - were able to grow and multiply and grow and grow and grow until they had covered Earth's surface, wherever there was moisture. We're talking all the oceans and most of the surface rocks. We're talking a vast global empire of bluegreen slime.

But in the process of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, bluegreen bacteria gave off oxygen gas as a waste product. Thus the second type of crisis: pollution. Life multiplies up to it's limit, but in this case, because we are talking about sunlight and water as raw materials there was no imminent shortage. But there was a problem with pollution. Oxygen was created as a waste product and oxygen was toxic to bacteria in those times. In fact if sufficient atmospheric oxygen had been around at the time that life originated it wouldn't have originated. The oxygen would have burned up all the organic molecules before they had a chance to react with each other. Like I said, oxygen is greedy.

At first the oxygen pollution wasn't much of a problem, because oxygen was reacting with all the surface rocks, so it didn't stay long in the atmosphere. There are red bands of oxidized iron and other oxidized minerals in the layers of ancient rocks that date back to that time about two billion years ago. And, in fact, that's the strata of rocks that supplies us with iron ore to this day. From the rock record of oxidized iron we can read back the time it took for oxygen to get a foothold in the atmosphere - four hundred million years. But once everything was oxidized, all the oxygen that was produced by photosynthetic bacteria stayed in the atmosphere, creating a vast die-off of anaerobic bacteria.

Nowadays anaerobic bacteria are far less dominant, existing only in earth, mud, stagnant water, and in the guts of animals, all places where they are safe from the ravages of free oxygen.

This global event, when oxygen increased from one millionth to one fifth of the atmosphere was, according to Margulis and Sagan, in their book: MicroCosmos, "..by far the greatest pollution crisis the earth has ever endured." Unfortunately, there is no fossil record of this event, as bacteria, not having bones or hard shells have left very little in the way of fossils.

Since animals evolved,six hundred million years ago, and three billion years after bacteria evolved, there have been five major extinction events recorded in the fossil background. These were global catastrophes, where from fifty to ninety-five percent of all species on Earth were wiped out. The most famous of these was the Jurassic-Cretaceous event sixty-five million years ago, believed to be caused by a giant meteorite striking the Earth, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs and paving the way for warm-blooded species like birds and mammals.

We are now, as we speak, involved in the sixth (or seventh, if you include "the Oxygen Holocaust") global extinction event, an event which is predicted to lead to the extinction of more than fifty percent of all species in our lifetime. This one is due to carbon dioxide pollution and habitat destruction caused by our clever utilization of a previously unused energy source - hydrocarbons. What goes around comes around, as they say. Whether we will survive it or not, is an open question. Stay tuned.

The Carbon Connection

2009-09-01T00:21:00.000-07:00

“Only connect!... Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...” E. M. Forster

What do we mean when we say that life is an interdependent web? Partly it's a metaphor that points to the way that living things make up of a vast network of interrelations. How are living things connected? All life-forms are made from the same types of molecules: water, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, DNA, and RNA; All life forms metabolize energy with the help of enzymes made from amino acids; All life-forms share a common ancestor, according to Darwin's theory of evolution; All living things ultimately depend on the Sun's energy; All living things share materials and substances that are only available on Earth; All living things interact cooperatively and competitively with other living things.

All well and good, but what makes this vast and intricate global interdependence possible? If I was to pick one thing it would be the element Carbon. You may recall that I said in the previous article that each element is a kind of character. Carbon is the most extroverted sociable element there is. He is an exceptionally friendly fellow. He makes bonds with everybody and they are often strong bonds called covalent bonds that require more energy than the other two kinds of bonds to break apart. Diamonds, the hardest substance known, are made from pure carbon bonded covalently.

OK, lots of elements bond covalently, but what differentiates Carbon from everyone else is that he can't get enough of himself. Carbon loves to bond with himself and does it over and over in chains, and in rings, in two dimensional sheets and in three dimensional tetrahedons. There is literally no end to the number of carbon atoms that can join together to form chains of fantastically diverse lengths.

And Carbon is a multi-tasker extraordinaire. So while he's linking up to carbon copies of himself, he's always socializing with the other elements on the side, especially with Oxygen,Hydrogen and Nitrogen. These chains of carbons with various side links then form the backbones for literally all the molecules of life: the proteins, enzymes, carbohydrates, fats, etc... It's the incredibly complex shapes that are created by carbon bonds that are the key to life.

Life is autopoietic - it maintains itself over time. But in order to maintain itself a living organism must perform many functions , all of which require a vast variety of different kinds of molecules and only Carbon makes that possible .

But that's not all, because Carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, is essential in regulating Earth's surface temperature and the acidity of the ocean and our bodies. These are big jobs and somebody's got to do them, or life as we know it would cease to exist. So why Carbon?

You'd think that a substance that makes up only .03% of the Earth's atmosphere would hardly be up for the job, but it's the size of the molecule that matters when it comes to the greenhouse effect. And carbon dioxide with three atoms, one Carbon and two Oxygen, is a bigger molecule than the two other main components of the atmosphere – Nitrogen and Oxygen - which each form molecules of only two atoms each. Note that water and methane, which are also bigger sized molecules are even more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide but they don't remain in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide does, so their effect is smaller.

We think of carbon dioxide as being the bad guy because of global warming but in actual fact without carbon dioxide the Earth would be a ball of ice. It's just that our industries and transportation systems are producing too much carbon dioxide right now. But that's for another article.

When carbon dioxide dissolves in water it forms a weak solution of carbonic acid and bicarbonate which together makes it a buffer. Chemical buffers keep the pH of a solution more stable by neutralizing acids and bases, thus keeping the ocean and our blood at near constant pH. But if too much carbon dioxide is dissolved in water then it loses it's buffering quality and becomes an acid. When that happens in our blood stream we die from acidosis. The thing is, the metabolic reactions that sustain life only occur in a narrow range of temperatures and pH, so Carbon's role in regulating temperature and ocean pH is vital to life. The problem is when too much carbon gets into the atmosphere both those systems go out of whack and then we get into trouble.

When you think about it, we take Carbon for granted. Carbon has got a lot of responsibility for supporting life as we know it . We oughta give him some slack instead of making his job harder. After all, he's kinda like that guy Atlas, the one who holds up the sky in Greek mythology. Maybe somebody should write a book about him – a “green” Atlas Shrugged.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

2009-08-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

“We are called to restore within ourselves the sense of awe and delight, to respond to matter as a mystery of ever increasing connection.” - Patriarch Bartholomew

What makes life possible? For those of you who successfully avoided Chemistry classes in high school, I'll try to make it simple by talking about four (that is, mostly four) elements. But it doesn't end there. To really understand what makes life possible you need to go all the way back to the beginning of the Universe. You think I'm kidding right? Nope.

Just about everything there is is made from countless atoms. Atoms are ridiculously small. You can't see them even in electron microscopes. There are only about one hundred kinds of atoms. Each kind is called an element and it has unique characteristics that differ from all the other elements. All the atoms of a particular element say, Hydrogen, have virtually identical chemical properties. If you've seen one, you've seen em all. And the same goes for the rest of the elements. But to reiterate, each element has a set of chemical characteristics that's unique to it and it alone. So understanding those characteristics helps to understand why those particular elements are so basic to life.

Our bodies are mostly made up of four main elements. They are, in order of abundance: Oxygen, Hydrogen, Carbon and Nitrogen. I like to think of each one of these four elements as characters in a story. Each one has it's quirks, it's own special history.

Hydrogen is really special. It's in a class by itself. It's the lightest element, the simplest element, and the most abundant element in the Universe, although wait another ten billion years and that will no longer be the case. But for now it's tops. Hydrogen is also the oldest element because all the hydrogen that exists came into existence during the Big Bang – the origin of the Universe.

Let's just stop and think about that for a moment. One of the main ingredients that makes up our bodies comes from the very origins of the Universe. Every hydrogen atom in our bodies, and believe me, there's a lot of them, is fourteen billion years old. Talk about experienced. Those hydrogen atoms have seen it all. And because hydrogen is so simple – one proton and one electron – it reacts with everything. They've had relationships with every other element many times over. Been there, done that.

Hydrogen is also the main fuel for stars. Stars like the Sun are giant furnaces that burn hydrogen giving off incredible amounts of energy that we see as light. It's the Sun's radiation, caused by the fusion of hydrogen atoms that ultimately supports all life on Earth.

Hydrogen is the building block of the universe, and all the other elements are made from it, forged in the fiery furnaces of stars. A star like our Sun, which is about 4.5 billion years old and counting, is too small and doesn't burn hot enough to create many kinds of elements. That job is reserved for supergiants, stars so big that they burn up in a matter of tens of millions of years , then explode into supernovas, explosions so awesome they can light up a whole galaxy, outshining millions of other stars. It's in the unbelievably hot core of these explosions where all the heavier elements are forged, which include the other three elements that are important to life: Oxygen, Carbon, and Nitrogen.

Life, which requires these and other heavier elements, could not exist without the death of supergiant stars. Joni Mitchell was right, we are stardust. And we have to get back to the garden too, but that's another article. And so begins a theme that I will come back to again and again: even as every living thing dies, life itself comes from death.

What is Life?

2009-08-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

What is life? Biology is the study of life and yet a typical modern biology text with, say, about 1200 pages will devote at most about three pages (and usually less) to answering this question . You will be hard put to find any University courses exclusively devoted to this subject. But after all, Biologists study living things, they are not philosophers.

Everyone has an intuitive feeling for what life is. We can generally tell the difference between something that is alive and something that is either dead or simply material matter. Living things move, they feel warm to the touch, and they react to stimuli. That's enough for most people. But think of a flame or a hurricane. They both move, grow, and die, they react to stimuli and give off heat but they are not alive in the same sense as you or I.

What differentiates a living thing from a flame? Like living things, a flame metabolizes. It takes energy in from the environment and processes it. A flame burns because it's reached a certain temperature and it's fed by fuel. Once the fuel is used up the flame dies. The flame does not go looking for more fuel somewhere else. But a living creature will maintain itself purposefully; it will search out food sources; it will avoid dangers and predators; it will adapt to changing circumstances; it will reproduce and thus maintain some of it's genetic characteristics even after it dies.

This ability to self-maintain is called “autopoiesis”. It's an amazing property because it has created an unbroken link between us and the very first cell. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, in their book, What is Life? capture it's essence well: “ Once autopoiesis appeared in the tiniest bacterial ancestor it was never completely lost....As sheer persistence of biochemistry “we” have never died during the passage of three billion years. Mountains and seas and even supercontinents have come and gone but we have persisted.”

How does autopoiesis come about? We have to be careful when we try to answer this question because it's all too easy to go in circles. Did the first bacterial cell create itself on purpose? And this is also the place where those of us who are impatient for certainty want to bring in God, alias - “The Intelligent Designer”.

Imagine a sandpile. A constant trickle of grains is being added to the middle of the pile. At some point just adding a single grain can cause an avalanche. Maybe a small avalanche, maybe a large avalanche. There's actually no way predict which it will be. Thus the sandpile exhibits complex behaviour. Per Bak, the Danish Physicist who came up with the sandpile model explains how it works in his book How Nature Works – The Science of Self-Organized Criticality:

“The addition of grains of sand has transformed the system from a state in which individual grains follow their own local dynamics to a critical state where the emergent dynamics are global.... It is clear that to have this average balance between the sand added to the pile say, in the center, and the sand leaving the edges, there must be communication throughout the entire system. There will occasionally be avalanches that span the whole pile. This is the self-organized critical state.”

Of course the sandpile doesn't do anything besides reach a peak and spill over it's edges but the point is that it is a simplified model that gets at the essence of emergence. It shows how complex global behaviour can emerge from the simple addition of individual parts without recourse to purpose or design. This model has been used to explain how complex systems such as living cells, human societies, and economic systems can come about from the bottom up, that is through the action of individuals alone.

Obviously autopoiesis, life's ability to self-maintain, is an emergent phenomenon. It cannot be predicted from the chemical properties of all of the molecules in a cell. But we now know that it is possible for such an emergent property to come about from the bottom up, that is from some critical state brought about by the addition of a sufficient number of certain kinds of molecules. For now how these molecules first came together is a matter of conjecture.

One of the problems with Darwin's theory of Evolution has been that although natural selection can explain the evolution of life from the first cell to all the living creatures that exist today it doesn't explain how the first cell came to be. Many critics have pointed out the fantastically small odds of such a cell ever coming to be by chance. We used to think that there were only two alternatives: chance or design. But now we see a third alternative: self-organized criticality. And this fits better with the continuing scientific project of reading universality into the world. Life is an inevitable property of a certain level of molecular organization. That is, whenever that level of organizational complexity is reached that organization will self-maintain and life will occur. The question is – what are the conditions that make autopoieses possible? This is a question I will address in my next series of articles.

What Are They Smoking Now?

2009-08-24T23:25:00.000-07:00

It ain't easy being green, making Canadians feel badly about the Tar Sands. I could have had a comfortable job like Ben Eisen, earning a living working for the Frontier Center For Public Policy, helping Canadians feel good about themselves. ( http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/opinion/article/767682 ) The Tar Sands may be spewing megatons of carbon dioxide into the air but it's really OK because Canada's "emission intensity" has decreased.
Gosh, I feel better already, knowing that Canada has gotten much more efficient at contributing to global warming. Let me guess.... The Frontier Center For Public Policy wouldn't be funded by any oil companies would it? Nah. After all they're at the frontier of public policy, and have nothing to do with the nasty corporate back rooms where they're pulling the strings on government energy policy.
Reminds me of a story I once heard. Remember "light cigarettes"? Not so long ago the big tobacco companies spent millions in an effective campaign to confuse the public and delay governments from regulating what has turned out to be a very carcinogenic product. During those times some marketing genius thought up the idea of "light cigarettes" - cigarettes with less nicotine and tar. The idea was that if smokers knew that tobacco caused cancer they might be enticed to smoke a product that appeared to be safer. Instead of quitting, they could feel less guilty and better about themselves by smoking something "safer". It turns out that light cigarettes were just as likely to cause cancer as ordinary cigarettes because smokers unconsciously smoked them more intensely and therefore received equivalent amounts of nicotine and tar as if they had smoked regulars.
It's no coincidence that the global warming delayers are talking about emission intensity instead of "crude indicators such as total emissions" of carbon dioxide. Why not recycle a clever idea when you don't have anything good to offer in the first place.

Prophecy and Kairos

2009-08-16T22:33:00.000-07:00

“From the moment when a (large scale) disaster appears inevitable and especially after it becomes a reality, it can, like every great torment, become a productive force for the religious point of view. It begins to suggest new questions and to stress old ones.”

“Dogmatized conceptions are pondered afresh in the light of events, and the faith relationship that has to stand the test of an utterly changed situation is renewed in modified form. But the new acting force is nothing less than the force of extreme despair, a despair so elemental, that it can have but one of two results: the sapping of the last will of life, or the renewal of the soul.”

I love this quote from Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian because it seems so appropriate for our times. And yet, it was not written in response to the threat of global warming, it was written seventy years ago, just after the second world war ended, a war which like the ancient Babylonian and Roman assaults on Jerusalem, threatened the very survival of Judaism. This quote comes, not from Buber's most famous work: I and Thou, but from a book called The Prophetic Faith, a book about the ancient Hebrew prophets.

Judaism is unique among the world religions in having a long historical line of major prophets – historical figures like Jeremiah who spoke truth to power at a time when there was no free press or human rights. The Hebrew word for prophet “nabi”, means “one who is called” . The nabi saw themselves as called to speak the word of God even if it was opposed to what the Hebrew kings and their subjects wanted to hear. The prophets challenged their rulers to adhere more strictly to monotheism and eschew the worship of other gods. They also protested against injustice and gross inequality. This was at a time when the Hebrew culture and religion were under direct threat of extinction from the much more powerful empires around them.

It is instructive to note the historical period when the Hebrew prophets were active. We are talking about a period of about four hundred years from the time of king David and king Solomon, to the rebuilding of Solomon's temple after the Babylonian exile. During these times the Hebrew kingdoms of Israel and Judah were declining in power and increasingly threatened by the powerful empires of the Assyrians and the Babylonians.

Eventually in 722 Bce , the kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian army and the population scattered to the four corners of the Assyrian Empire, where they disappeared from history. That's what happened to the ten lost tribes, by the way.

Two hundred years later Judah, the remaining Hebrew kingdom was conquered by the Babylonian army. Solomon's temple was reduced to rubble and the major portion of Jerusalem's population was exiled to the capital city of Babylon.

It was during these disastrous times that the Hebrew prophets were active. The amazing thing is that with all this destruction the Jewish religion not only survived it became more resilient. In contrast, there is no Moabite, Canaanite, Egyptian, or Babylonian religion today in spite of the fact that some of these countries lasted much longer than Israel and Judah.

After Solomon's temple was rebuilt the Hebrew Bible records no more major prophets. Ezra, the Jewish leader who oversaw the rebuilding of the temple was most likely the same person who edited and redacted the Hebrew Bible into the basic form that we know today. He wove together the various writings – the historical material, and the writings of the prophets into a single work which codified Jewish monotheism. A large part of the Hebrew Bible, in fact, is devoted to the writings of the prophets, and for a very good reason. For without these prophets the Jewish religion would not have survived.

A common misperception of a prophet is of someone who predicts the future. This is not what the Hebrew prophets were doing, and if it was they would not have been able to save the Jewish religion from extinction. I think Buber has the best description of what prophecy is about: “ A true prophet does not announce an immutable decree. He speaks to the power of decision lying in the moment and in such a way that his message just touches this power.” The future is uncertain. What decisions we make now will effect our future. The role of the prophet is to point out the consequences of our present actions and the possibilities of renewal if we change our behaviour.

Today, three thousand years later, our global civilization is under threat of extinction from the very different threats of global warming and eco-catastrophes. And religion does not play the same role that it did in ancient times. Because our civilization is global, and there are many world religions no single religion has the capability to unify and preserve our cultures. Our civilization probably doesn't have one hundred years left, let alone four hundred years. The world religions are slowly responding to the new ecological threats, but the role of the prophet is now paramount and the new prophets are not necessarily religious prophets. While religion has a definite role to play in all of this it is largely scientific knowledge that feeds modern prophecy, if we keep true to Buber's definition of what prophecy is.

In the Greek language there are two concepts of time: “chronos” which refers to sequential time, and “kairos” (pronounced keros) which refers to the right time or opportune moment. According to the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich kairos refers to a crisis in history which demands a life-changing decision on the part of each person. According to Tillich, the coming of Christ is the prime Christian example.

Today global warming is our kairos. This is what Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew has said, and he elaborates in his essay: “The Orthodox Church and the Environmental Crisis”

Our way of life is humanly and environmentally suicidal....yet the crisis is not first of all ecological. It is a crisis in the way we perceive reality and relate to our world......At a time when we have polluted the air we breathe and the water we drink, we are called to restore within ourselves the sense of awe and delight, to respond to matter as a mystery of ever increasing connection.

I can't help seeing an analogy between Patriarch Bartholomew's saying that this is a crisis in the way we perceive reality and relate to our world and the Hebrew prophets' relentless emphasis on monotheism during their prolonged crisis. The ancient Hebrew prophets saw monotheism as the key to Jewish survival. The importance of monotheism to Judaism is that it redefined the relationship between the Jewish people and the divine and it changed the way they perceived the divine. Jesus called the “Shema” from Deuteronomy the great commandment: “You shall love the Lord God with all your heart and all your soul, and all your might.” It basically sums up Judaism in one sentence.

I am not advocating monotheism as the answer to the ecological crisis. Judaism was saved from extinction because a lot of people worked hard to change the Jewish people's perception of their relationship with the divine. To love God with all your heart is to make God personally meaningful, which means that this relationship can survive regardless of whether or not there is a temple, or official priests, or the proper sacrifices. That's why Judaism could survive and grow stronger after the destruction of the temple and the exile. Our civilization will only survive if we stop perceiving nature as something we can control and start seeing ourselves as just one part of the interdependent web of life. “We are called to restore within ourselves the sense of awe and delight, to respond to matter as a mystery of ever increasing connection.” I say amen to that.

Why We Love

2008-12-17T03:13:00.000-08:00

I've just been reading a book called “Hold Me Tight” by Sue Johnson. Johnson's claim is that love between adults has the same emotional attachment issues as the love between a mother and child. She writes, “You are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection.”

Attachment Theory, is a psychological theory proposed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, that infants form attachments to any consistent caregiver who is sensitive and responsive to the infant. This is usually the child's mother, but it doesn't have to be. It could be the father, grandmother, or older sibling. The theory posits that children attach to mothers or other caring figures instinctively. The need for safety and protection, which is paramount in infancy and childhood, is the basis of the bond. If the mother figure is unavailable or unresponsive, separation distress occurs and the anticipation of such an occurrence arouses separation anxiety.

We've all seen examples of this in babies and toddlers when they are relaxed and willing to explore strange situations in close proximity with their mother but react to the same situations with fear and anger if they are deprived of access to their mother. An implication of attachment theory is that a lasting attachment bond with a mother figure is necessary in order for children to be physically and emotionally healthy. Strong evidence in support of the theory comes from observations of babies in orphanages, who, in spite of being fed, clothed, and housed, failed to thrive in the absence of emotional bonds to caregivers.

The theory, which initially was scoffed at by the psychoanalytic mainstream is now universally accepted. But the theory that adult loving relationships are attachment bonds is less accepted. Most of us would agree that adults should be mature, independent, and self-sufficient. We have names for people who are too dependent on others. We call them “immature”, “undifferentiated”, “clingy”, “enmeshed”, and “co-dependent”.

Right now about fifty percent of those who marry eventually get divorced. Having gone through one myself I know all too well how painful and destructive a divorce can be for a family. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. Sue Johnson, a marriage counsellor, wanted to help people in struggling marriages stay together. After working with and then observing them over and over on tape she developed a therapy called Emotionally Focused Therapy or EFT, based on the “key negative and positive emotional moments that defined a relationship.” When she tried to figure out why her therapy worked she came up with the idea that bonds between adult couples were based on “the innate need for safe emotional connection” just like the needs of infants for their mother.

When we feel secure with our lover we can reach out and connect to others easily, we are more curious and open to new information but when we feel insecure, we become anxious, angry, controlling or distant and we are less empathetic to others. “Just what Bowlby and Ainsworth found with children and their mothers,” says Johnson.

According to Sue Johnson, when a marriage is in trouble it is usually because the couple is disconnected emotionally. Neither partner feels emotionally safe with each other. “Most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection,” she says. “Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: “Can I count on you and depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you?” When we express anger, criticism, and demands in a marital spat we are trying to draw our spouse in emotionally and re-establish a sense of safe connection. What we are really saying is: “Notice me. Be with me. I need you.”

When they first express these emotions it can actually work to draw couples together, but over time it only makes them more stuck. Couples quickly develop negative patterns of interaction which work to push each other farther and farther apart. When one partner becomes critical and aggressive the other becomes defensive and distant. According to Johnson, when we withdraw and detach from our partner we are really trying to soothe and protect ourselves. We are really saying: “I won't let you hurt me. I will be independent and stay in control.” Unfortunately the longer we engage in these patterns of conflict the greater the loss of mutual trust. According to psychologist and marital therapist John Gottman, “couples who get stuck in this pattern have more than 80% chance of divorcing within five years.

Johnson emphasizes that “When marriages fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness.” When a relationship is failing men often focus on sexual incompatibility. Men aren't comfortable acknowledging their need for emotional closeness so they focus on sex which is a more limited expression of this need. “Think of sexual distress as the relationship version of the “canary in the coal mine,” says Johnson. “What's really happening is that a couple is losing connection; the partners don't feel emotionally safe with each other. That in turn leads to slackening desire and less satisfying sex...”

The idea is to let secure attachment and sexuality come together by creating a “positive loop of closeness, responsiveness, caring, and desire.”

What's Happening to Canada?

2008-12-08T21:59:00.000-08:00

There's an old Chinese curse that some of you may have heard of: “May you live in interesting times.” I think of it when I compare the Canadian election this past October and the parliamentary crisis this December. For the first time in a long time Canadian politics is actually more interesting than American politics.

When Barak Obama was elected President in November the whole world rejoiced. When Stephen Harper was re-elected the head of another minority government in Canada it seemed barely a blip in our consciousness.

But what a difference one month makes. Just last week I've had people who tell me they have little interest in politics, turn around and ask me to explain to them the workings of minority parliaments. I can't remember this much interest in Canadian politics before.

The turn out for this latest federal election should have been a wake-up call. Only 59.1% of those eligible voted. The lowest rate ever recorded. And no wonder. The previous minority government was boring. It wasn't a coalition. The Liberals, who supported the government, had no say in it. They just went along with whatever Harper threw at them for fear a sudden election would kill their popularity.

Now that Stephane Dion has agreed to step down he's finally had the guts to stand up to Harper, but, of course it's too late for Dion. Still it has made a huge difference to our political situation. We've gone from a pathetically low election turn-out to a bunch of super-motivated people. Noisy demonstrations in our nation's capital; people singing “O' Canada”; ecstatic greens and leftists; outraged -and- vocal- about-it conservatives. It's definitely woken-up a large cross-section of Canadians. And that's a good thing.

Now Albertans are talking about separation because of those “pointy-headed easterners wanting to run Canada.” And in Quebec, the until-now moribund separatist movement has sprung back to life because Harper decided to adopt the tactics of Karl Rove. (to motivate your base demonize your opponents and their political parties even if that will alienate the other half of the country.) Because all that's really important for him is getting and holding on to power.

We've been witness to the real Stephen Harper in these last few weeks. The guy who wants it all but doesn't want to compromise with anybody else to get it. In the recent election Harper seriously hurt his party's chances in Quebec when he showed his disdain for government assisting culture. Now he's permanently blown it there by demonizing the Bloc Quebecois.

If Harper gets a majority in the next election he will get it by dividing the country not by unifying it. That is the strategy of Karl Rove and George W. Bush, but they used it to their advantage in a country that's had a long history of disenfranchising and holding back African-Americans. It won't work as easy in Canada because we have always been a multicultural society. The Rovian strategy of division may work here temporarily but the long term consequences are likely to be dangerous to the Conservative party and to the country.

What's in a Week?

2008-11-30T18:00:00.000-08:00

All units of time are circular. They repeat themselves endlessly. Day dawns, the morning passes, afternoon passes, the sun sets, night falls and eventually a new day dawns.

The day corresponds to a relationship between the sun and the earth. The year also corresponds to a relationship between the sun and the earth. A new year is born, winter passes, then spring, summer, fall, all follow in sequence.

The “month” loosely corresponds to the relationship between the earth and the moon over a 28 day period. The two words “month” and “moon” obviously are derived from the same word, as is true in almost all other languages.

Tens of thousands of years ago, before the invention of agriculture, all humans lived as hunter gatherers. They told time by the sun, the moon, and the stars. They told tales about things that happened years ago, but they had no concept of a linear system of dating that one could refer to from any point in time. That's a modern invention requiring writing and calendars. Time was circular. People were born, lived and died and new generations grew up to replace them.

A week is a peculiar unit of time that we take for granted but it is not a natural division of time in the same way that a month or year is. Hunter gatherer societies don't really need to divide time into weeks. Their lives are organized around the daily, monthly and seasonal rhythms of nature and the weather.

Dividing a month into quarters and then naming the days probably first occurred with more sophisticated civilizations like the Egyptians and the Babylonians. The length of a week has varied in history from 3 to 8 days. Seven days has always been the most popular, because it divides evenly into a lunar month of 28 days; and because the number 7 corresponds to the seven celestial objects that can be seen by the naked eye: The Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Indeed, in many languages, including English, the days of the week get their names from the seven celestial objects.

The concept of a week is very important in the Hebrew Bible. It's first mentioned in Exodus in one of the Ten Commandments. (Note the connection of the Bible's focus on the week and the backdrop of Egypt here.) In Exodus 31, 16-17 God says: “The Israelites shall keep the Sabbath, observing the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a perpetual covenant. It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.” Nowadays we work for five days , or even less, but we still like to rest and receive refreshment on the weekend. Building heaven and earth must have been quite a job, even for God, and that's why even God needed that extra day for R and R.

When the Ten Commandments are repeated in the Biblical book of Deuteronomy, instead of citing God's making the world in six days and resting on the seventh, it says in Deuteronomy 5, 12-15: “ ...But the seventh day is the Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work... Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord God brought you out of there...”

It makes sense to me that there are all these connections to work and the week, because the organization of time into working days and resting days has to do with agriculture and urban civilizations where people for the first time were brought together as slaves, servants, or contracted labourers. I find it noteworthy that the author of Deuteronomy uses the idea of liberation from slavery as a justification for the Sabbath. Everybody needs at least one day off in a week, I recommend more. “Let my people go”, as the good book says.

And so it came to pass, that this week was the one week in the year when the Prince Rupert phone book arrives at our doorstep. Now we can figure out which days are garbage days for next year. We can also read about cool outdoor activities and enjoy the local tide table for another year. All units of time are circular. They repeat themselves endlessly.

God and Gays

2008-11-25T15:31:00.000-08:00

I've just read a fascinating book called Biological Exuberance. by Bruce Bagemihl. It's about homosexuality in animals. Many of us have witnessed homosexuality in domestic animals - cats, dogs, sheep, bulls, etc. I had no idea that it was widespread in wild animals. According to Bagemihl, homosexual behaviour has been observed in Mountain Sheep, Mallard Ducks, Ostriches, Lions, Buffaloes, Female Cheetahs, Bottlenosed Dolphins, Grey Whales, Gorillas, Giraffes, female Grizzly bears, Canada Geese, Monarch Butterflys, and the list goes on and on.

I realize that for some readers this will be a topic to avoid at all costs. Homosexuality is morally wrong; It's not natural; It's against God's law; It's just plain disgusting; Etcetera. Obviously it's only a minority of individuals of each of these species that engage in homosexual behaviour, just like with humans. Otherwise there wouldn't be enough progeny to continue the species and it would go extinct. But you may be interested to know that humans are not the only species where same sex pairs adopt and raise youngsters. Female Grizzly Bears sometimes pair up and raise cubs. Pairs of male Black Swans are actually more successful than heterosexual Black Swans, because their combined strength makes them able to build bigger nests, and acquire the largest and best quality territories. Bagemihl says that there are at least twenty species documented in which same sex pairs have successfully raised young.

I've always thought that the most important criterion for the ability to be a parent was to love and care for one's children. In my book, it's better to be raised by loving same sex parents than neglectful or abusive heterosexual parents. But in the recent U.S. elections, people voted in Arkansas to make adoption by same sex parents illegal and voted in California to prohibit same sex marriages.

I used to think that the whole same sex marriage issue was trivial. Why were Fundamentalist Christians making such a big deal about it when there were real issues to contend with, like the loss of biodiversity, global warming, and growing inequality? What difference does it make if homosexuals can or cannot marry? No church is going to be forced to marry same sex couples. The way I see it, this whole thing is a wedge issue, used by the Republican Party in the United States to manipulate Christian believers into supporting and campaigning for their candidates. Karl Rove is an atheist, but he learned how to motivate Fundamentalists to volunteer their time and money to support George W. Bush in two presidential elections.

But after the latest elections in the States a protest movement has sprung up. Gays in California and elsewhere in the U. S. are angry about Proposition 8. They see it as a human rights issue. I admit that this whole issue makes me nervous because the more that it's championed the more vociferous the backlash from Fundamentalists, and the easier it is for right-wing politicians to use it to their advantage by motivating their religious base. Even writing about this topic is risky as I am certain to turn off a number of readers by doing so.

But for what it's worth, I think that the fact that homosexuality is widespread in the animal kingdom, as documented by biologists and other close observers of wild animals, has important theological implications. If the practice is widespread in other species then who's to say it's not natural? One can argue that it's a moral question when it has to do with humans but is it really morally wrong for same sex giraffes, and lions, and butterflies to get it on? And if it's not a moral issue for them why is it a moral issue for humans? Why don't we save morality for behaviour that helps or harms people rather than consensual activities that adults do with each other for their own enjoyment?

And if homosexuality occurs throughout the animal kingdom there must be a reason. Why does God create homosexual animals? I think a lot of people will refuse to accept the evidence in Bagemihl's book because they see homosexuality as a defect. And if it's a defect, how could God be responsible for it? That's why they think that people are not born gay but choose to be that way. Because God couldn't possibly have created them to be that way. But think about it for a minute. Why would anybody choose to be gay? There's no advantage to it. You're virtually guaranteed to be despised and ostracized if people find out. It makes it way harder to have a decent life and raise a family.

I don't remember any time in my life when I chose to be attracted to the opposite sex. It's just the way I've always been. I would think that the same would go for gays. If God created straights to be attracted to the opposite sex then God created gays to be attracted to the same sex. I'm not sure why, but how could it be otherwise? We can't always understand God's creation but that doesn't mean we shouldn't respect it in all it's manifestations.

The Rise and Fall of the "Southern Strategy"

2008-11-17T23:55:00.000-08:00

In the recent U.S. Presidential election Barak Obama won a majority everywhere in the United States but the South. There, McCain won Southern whites by 38 percentage points. For the first time in 50 years a Democratic Presidential candidate was elected who wasn't from the South.

The fact that Obama was elected President without the American South means the end of the Republican party's forty year old strategy of appealing to a Southern white evangelical base. We saw this in the recent Presidential campaign, where the veiled attacks on Obama, an African American, for being - too different, not a real American, a scary radical – appealed to the Republican base but fell on deaf ears for everyone else. The “Southern strategy” that worked so well to keep the Republican party in power had finally exhausted itself.

The Southern strategy was premised on the South's unique identity: A more rural, less educated, less tolerant, more church going, more racist white population. For almost a hundred years southern whites had voted for the Democratic party because it was the Republican party under Abraham Lincoln that had led the Union to victory against the Confederacy. But in the 1960's Kennedy and Johnson, two successive Democratic Presidents had supported the civil rights movement and enacted civil rights laws that had challenged white supremacy in the South. Because of this association an opportunity arose for the Republican party to get Southern whites to switch their party allegiance.

In 1964, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater campaigned against the civil rights act. He wasn't a racist, he was a libertarian who believed that individual businesses had the right to do business with whomever they chose. But he campaigned for “States Rights” which was a kind of shorthand in the South for continuing the policy of segregation between whites and blacks.

Goldwater lost in 1964 but he carried the South. In 1968 Richard Nixon won the election on the campaign of State's rights and law and order. Nixon was able to appear moderate to most Americans because his campaign referred to integration obliquely through State's rights and busing. Nixon won again in 1972. In 1980 Ronald Reagan started his campaign by giving a speech supporting states rights in Philadelphia, Mississipi, a town who's one claim to fame was the brutal murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. Reagan was not racist himself, what he did was to promote policies that targeted blacks, but without mentioning race.

The South has the highest concentration of white evangelical Christians of any region in the United States. Except for the Quakers, who were driven out of the South, Southern Christians actively supported slavery in the nineteenth century and white supremacy in the twentieth , often citing verses from the Bible in support of their racist views. The US government enforcing school integration coincides with the start of the association between Christian Fundamentalists and the Republican party. The perennial Republican themes of small government and "getting the government off our backs" was seen as code to Southerners for an agenda supportive of segregationism.

Since Reagan, Fundamentalist Christians have been used by the Republican party as dedicated party workers who were key to getting out the vote. Clever operatives like Karl Rove have used hot button issues like abortion, and homosexuality to motivate evangelicals to do the basic footwork for their campaigns. Because Southern Evangelical Christians have such deep abiding prejudices they were especially vulnerable to being manipulated by the Republicans.

Paul Krugman, New York Times Columnist and Noble Prize winner sums it up nicely: “The Republicans above all are concerned with making America safe for the rich. Right wing economic ideology has never been a vote winner. Instead the party's electoral strategy depended largely on exploiting racial fear and animosity. The religious right supplied the passion and the economic right supplied the money.”

A leader like Barak Obama is a great leader precisely because he rises above sectarianism. He seeks that which ties us together, that which we have in common. When we build societies together we benefit from a multiplicity of beliefs and viewpoints. Focusing on what separates us and on emotional dividing lines is ultimately destructive to society. America is changing. A growing Spanish-speaking sector in California and the South-West is making even a covert appeal to racism a non-starter. The Southern strategy has seen it's heyday and the Republican party is about to pay the price for promoting hatred and intolerance.

The Value of Democracy is in Getting Involved

2008-11-11T03:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday evening my wife and I went to the municipal all-candidates meeting at Chances. I've been living in Prince Rupert for almost sixteen years and each time that there is a municipal election seems more important and more interesting then the last. It's only in the last two years that I've actually attended any city council meetings and I've been pleasantly surprised to see democracy in action in every one of them.

I've lived in Vancouver and Montreal – two big cities where you could never get the access to city council that you can here. There is something to be said for a place the size of Prince Rupert. It's possible to get acquainted with the mayor and city council members. There isn't a huge distance between them and the public the way there is in the big city.

Sunday's all-candidates meeting was fun. I've been so wired to the U.S. Presidential election and the Canadian Federal election that I'd lost touch with what it feels like to be undecided. Not anymore. There are two mayoralty candidates, both former one term mayors of Prince Rupert. Judging from their words, either one would make a good mayor.

There were the five incumbent city councillors and ten wannabees. They all got to have their say and I thought it gave a pretty good sense of where each of them stood on the issues. If you didn't get a chance to go to either of the two all-candidates meetings you can still listen to this last one on Channel 10, at 5 PM and 8Pm as I recall. Or visit princerupert.ca and check out who is running for what. Then google the candidates to look at their web pages.

Unlike our federal and provincial and the U.S. Presidential elections ideology and negative campaigning don't really come into the picture. All the candidates came across as practical and pragmatic and that's a relief. Most seemed aware of the financial and employment problems that we face here, most had good ideas for solutions and most saw the importance of having a well-thought-out vision for the future of our town.

Of all the new faces I was most impressed by the bus driver. Now there's a great occupation to have as a city councillor. He's bound to get an earful from a good cross-section of citizens every day. I liked the way that he suggested, more than once, that more people should take the bus. He's right and everybody knows it. You can save money and make this a greener city by taking the bus. He's got my vote.

I hope the turnout is good. The turnout for the recent Canadian election was terrible. On the other hand, the turnout for the American election was the best it's been since the 1960's. That's because Americans are so motivated to avoid a repeat of the last eight years and so inspired by the promise of Barak Obama.

Democracy is a treasure that we've built up over the years. In my opinion a treasure is only valuable when it gets shared. If you horde it it becomes meaningless, it loses its value. When we vote, when we attend city council meetings, when we petition city council, when we run for council, and when we write letters to the editor we are making democracy more valuable. The more people get involved the richer we all are. So get out and vote this Saturday and make a difference to the future of this fair city.

Obama's Election Heralds The End Of An Era

2008-11-03T03:47:00.000-08:00

By the time most of you are reading this Barak Obama will be the first African-American President of the United States. Elected on a campaign of change, he appealed to American voters, tired of the divisive tactics and incompetent government of the Bush Republican White House.

Ironically, by abandoning international cooperation, waging preemptive war, and legalizing torture Bush and Cheney have seriously weakened American power. President Obama, who so clearly represents the positive aspects of the American Dream has the potential to reverse the decline in American prestige and power because the very fact of his election has resurrected that dream in the minds of people from around the world.

Over the month of October the world has witnessed the biggest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression. In the space of one month, hundreds of billions of dollars has been flushed away by panic and the loss of trust on a truly global scale.

Even Alan Greenspan, a devoted follower of ultra-free market philosopher Ayn Rand, who resisted calls to regulate sub-prime mortgages when he was chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, has finally admitted that his free market ideology was mistaken. Testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Greenspan said: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief...”

For years the Republican party platform of “limited government” and privatization has led to the use of government institutions for the benefit of wealthy corporations like Haliburton, Exxon, and Blackwater. The American middle class has had it's income stagnate, while the top 1% has grown immensely richer. Meanwhile fraud and abuse of taxpayer's money has reached epidemic proportions. For the entire eight years of the Bush Administration the government has not served the public interest.

During the last months of the presidential campaign much was made by the Mcain Palin team of Obama's “redistributionist” philosophy. Supposedly, the fact that Obama wants to raise taxes for the hyper-rich, means that he is a socialist. The irony here is that it has been previous U.S. Administrations' abandoning government regulation that has led to the redistribution of wealth from ordinary Americans to Wall Street CEO's.

It should be apparent to anyone today that a country cannot prosper if its government abandons economic and environmental regulation. We've seen how people have no compunction about putting the entire financial system at risk if it means they can enrich themselves by doing so. And this year we've witnessed the spectre of thousands of infants in China being put on life-support because a few unscrupulous merchants increased their profit margins by spiking milk with melamine.

Now who wants to buy food from China? Chinese dairy farmers and milk producers are pouring millions of gallons of milk down the drain and suffering severe financial losses because of the Chinese government's failure to regulate it's own food industry. Americans: Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm, and Milton Friedman all believed that capitalists pursuing their own self-interest would somehow magically lead to the best of all possible worlds. And they've been proven wrong by recent events.

Our rights to health care, public education, clean air and water, and old age security should be universally accessible to all. The unregulated market is incapable of providing universal access to these public goods. Nor is it capable of eliminating public “bads”, like pollution and global warming by itself.

A new era is dawning. With Barak Obama, The United States now has a President who is not encumbered by free-market ideology. President Obama can now work to implement universal health care, lead the way in fighting global warming, and, with the help of other world leaders, put the global financial system back in working order.

Let's Banish Violence From This Town

2008-10-21T02:38:00.000-07:00

Early in the morning on Friday, October 3, on second avenue in downtown Prince Rupert a man was beaten within an inch of his life. Three local thugs beat him up so badly that he had to be flown down to Vancouver for reconstructive surgery. Every bone in his face was smashed and it's since been reconstructed with metal plates.

Because of a vicious act of thuggery a man has been permanently disfigured and his family's life has been disrupted forever. He and his wife have now left Prince Rupert for good. A senseless crime has been committed and the repercussions are felt for a lifetime.

It's nothing new for people to be beaten up in down-town Prince Rupert late at night, but that doesn't mean that it somehow should be tolerated. Ten years ago a fisherman was beaten to death by thugs here . No-one was killed this time. Instead a man was scarred and disfigured for life.

This is a wake-up call for Prince Rupert. We need to do something together as a community to heal this wound and to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. I am so appalled by this act of violence that I feel compelled to publicize and write about it.

In a couple of minutes three thugs have destroyed a good person and his family. Three thugs have raised the level of fear and stained the reputation of our good city. They've been arrested for "aggravated assault" and I hope they go to jail for a good long time. But it shouldn't end there.

An RCMP spokesperson has told me that they plan to meet with downtown stakeholders sometime in the near future to discuss solutions to this problem. I certainly hope that the RCMP follows through on this. And I hope that they don't just leave it to downtown merchants because I think that the entire community should be involved. Lives have been ruined and our communities reputation has been dragged through the mud by this senseless act.

Are we going to stand by while this kind of thuggery keeps happening or are we going to get together and do something to prevent it from happening again? We need to put our minds together and come up with a way of banishing violence from this town. We've got to unite on this or we risk our community's future.

Two suggestions I've heard from downtown stakeholders are: bringing back police foot patrols downtown after dark and putting up surveillance cameras on second avenue. Good suggestions, but this is only a part of it. Maybe our schools and colleges need to get involved in educating against violence. Maybe we, as a community, need to be a lot less tolerant of violence. Maybe we need to widen the focus from violence against women to violence against anyone, period.

Violence is not just a bad thing that people do to each other - it's a cancer that eats away at people's good-will and trust. It needs to be rooted out and banished once and for all.

A Green Economy or an Economy Built on Sand

2008-10-14T01:52:00.000-07:00

The three main issues of the 2008 Canadian Federal election have been, in order of importance: 1. The Economy. 2. The Economy. 3. The Economy. Leadership and The Environment were also supposed to be campaign issues but they got shoved aside by the increasingly bad economic news. That news – that the global economy is on the brink of a depression due to the sub prime mortgage meltdown in the United States – has dominated TV, newspapers, and the web for the duration of the 2008 campaign.

By the time you read these words Stephen Harper will probably still be our Prime Minister. That's a shame because what the economic news is really telling us is that Harper has got it exactly wrong when he argues that going green would hurt the economy.

For the last 25 years the economies of both the United States and Canada grew through a prolonged consumption spree fuelled by a prolonged expansion of credit. The amount of credit in the U.S. tripled while real manufacturing declined. American consumers became the motor running the global economy. The United States ran a current account deficit for years while Asian and Middle -Eastern countries contentedly built up their currency reserves in American dollars. And 5% of the world's population consumed 25% of the the world's oil.

For a long time it seemed to work well, but the American economy that was the engine of global economic growth was built on sand. And once the wind blew strong enough it proceeded to crumble.

Twenty-five years when the United States went from being the acknowledged world economic leader to the world's largest debtor. Twenty-five years when the dominant ideology was “laissez- faire”, let the market decide, and “streamline” financial and environmental regulations that fettered industrial growth. Twenty-five years when the energy security of United States became increasingly compromised by dependency on oil imports.

For 25 years Ronald Reagan, The Bushes and the Republican party have argued that going green is bad for the economy. The American way – to shop till you drop was “non-negotiable”. Now look how the mighty have fallen. The American economy is broken far beyond the imaginings of its worst critics.
What we have really seen is that 25 years of easy credit and profligate consumption have been far worse for the American economy than any carbon tax could ever have been. Yet Harper still echoes the Republican theme song that green is bad for the economy.

For ten years Europe has been going green, developing clean energy technologies and shifting taxes and they have prospered and manufacturing expertise and jobs have stayed in Europe. If we had gone green in North America the Canadian economy would have been stronger – we would have had more manufacturing jobs, the automobile industry would have made more fuel-efficient cars and would have stayed more competitive in world markets. We would have been in a better position to weather high oil prices. And we would be contributing less to global warming by emitting less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

We could have developed made-in-Canada green technologies and exported them to developing nations like China, leading the way for the rest of the world. Instead we've followed in the footsteps of the Bush Republicans, squandering our opportunity to prevent global warming and clean up the environment.

Harper has gotten it exactly wrong. By doing nothing we've made ourselves more vulnerable to the U. S. debt explosion. Going green would make our economy both stronger and more resilient than it could be otherwise.

We can hitch ingenuity and know-how to developing clean energy and sustainable technologies, and build a solid foundation for Canada's future . We can produce economic growth honestly by re-tooling to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. We can inspire Canadian youth to participate in making our Country a leading example of sustainability to the world. Or we can let ourselves become increasingly vulnerable to the fallout from the decline of the American economy.

Harper tries to scare us with nonsense about carbon taxes harming the economy while he ignores the devastation brought on by right-wing ideology. We need to move from a faith-based economy to a reality-based economy, and the only way to do that is by going green.

What To Do About Weapons Of Mass Deception

2008-10-06T13:46:00.001-07:00

One of the scariest things about politics these days is the sophisticated use of techniques of deception – better known under the euphemism of “spin”. Spin originally meant to “spin out a yarn” - to tell a make-believe story. But in the hands of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove it has become something far more dangerous.

In the twentieth century totalitarian regimes were masters of deception. In the former Soviet Union, the government tightly controlled information so that the public only got to see a glowing picture of Communism and a bleak picture of Capitalism. The British journalist George Orwell wrote his anti-utopia, 1984, about a totalitarian state which controlled the news, rewrote history, and constantly manipulated people's minds with slogans like “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery”.

1984 has come and gone a generation now and we are not living in totalitarian states yet. But, there are danger signs. The Bush regime convinced the American public to go to war with Iraq by falsely equating Iraq with 9/11. and then concocting false information about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. And, in the realm of science,the Bush government has altered testimony and blocked publication of information concerning global warming.

Two people that offer insight into modern political deception are author and scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson and billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Both, in various publications, but independently of each other, are telling us that our modern societies have become too tolerant of deception because we don't want to hear about painful truths. Soros calls America a “feel-good society” - a society where success is admired no matter how it is achieved. “Politicians do not aspire to tell the truth,” he says. “They want to win elections, and the best way to do that is to skew reality to their own benefit.”

In Unspun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation, Kathleen Jamieson agrees that deception is widely accepted and even admired in our society. She talks about the “I know I'm right syndrome” - our ability to deceive ourselves by consistently rejecting evidence that contradicts our belief system.

“There's real harm in pretending that there are easy solutions to big problems or that problems don't exist,” says Jamieson. “Accepting the spin means letting the problems fester. Meanwhile, the solutions become ever more painful, or the problems overwhelm us completely.”

In his essay “From Karl Popper to Karl Rove and Back” Soros argues that democracy is being abused by techniques borrowed from advertising and the cognitive sciences. “When emotions can be aroused by methods that bypass consciousness the public is left largely defenceless,” says Soros. But, he adds, “if the public is made aware of the various techniques it is likely to reject them.”

The key then, is to call politicians out on deception and to publicize examples whenever possible. As Soros says, “Politicians will respect rather than manipulate reality only if the public cares about the truth and punishes politicians when it catches them in deliberate deception.”

This is an important role for the media. It's heartening to know that in the United States in the 2008 Presidential Campaign some of the more egregious of the McCain campaign's attacks on Obama have been effectively challenged by the mass media. And, there are now reliable websites such as factcheck.org that help to sort out fact from fiction in American politics. In Canada, CBC TV has a welcome new feature called “reality check” that looks at the claims and counter claims between the various parties in the federal election.

Political discourse should be about reality. It should point to problems that actually exist and to genuine evidence of what works and doesn't work. When we are misinformed or denied pertinent information we are deprived of our power to choose and just as important, our ability to learn from experience. Deception undermines trust in democracy and ultimately makes it harder to govern.

This is why the Bush government had so much trouble convincing the American people to support a Wall street bailout package recently. Because they had been deceived about “The War on Terror” the American public was not ready to accept his recommendations on the financial crisis.

If you deceive people in order to get elected, then you end up continuing to deceive when you are in power and undermining the publics' trust. Let's hope that neither the Canadian nor the American election are won again this way.

Avoiding Overshoot Means Weaning Ourselves Off Oil

2008-09-23T04:20:00.000-07:00

In 1957 twenty-nine reindeer were introduced to St. Matthew Island, a small island in the Bering Sea that had never seen reindeer or caribou before. Six years later there were 6000 reindeer. But three years later, in 1966, there were only 42 reindeer left. What happened? 6000 reindeer were too many for such a small island. In the absence of natural predators they grew to a huge population and damaged the habitat so severely that they overshot the island's carrying capacity. Consequently the island was only able to support a small remnant of the reindeer.

The development of agriculture, thousands of years ago, enlarged the carrying capacity of land for humans. Saving and planting seeds meant that early farming societies were able to support larger populations than the hunting and gathering societies that predated agriculture. In his book, Overshoot, William Catton Jr. argues that when technology began to be powered by fossil fuels our relationship to Earth's carrying capacity changed dramatically for the worse.

By developing machines that liberate the energy locked up in fossil fuels we have supported a vastly expanded human population. Our global population is about 6 billion people and still growing. The problem is that instead of enlarging the Earth's carrying capacity, the use of fossil fuels has diminished it by giving us the ability to cut down forests, overfish the oceans, eliminate bio-diversity, and cause global warming, all at an accelerating rate. Thus, our global civilization has run out of unspoiled habitats to exploit. In the past, when civilizations ran out of room people migrated elsewhere. But now, there is no elsewhere. .

Catton draws an analogy between our dependence on fossil fuels, which originated from dead plants, hence the name "fossil fuels" with what he calls "detritus ecosystems". Detritus is the accumulation of dead organic matter. Bloom and crash cycles such as the algae blooms in lakes and seas depend upon exhaustible accumulations of dead organic matter for their sustenance. These algae blooms collapse and die off after all the seasonal detritus is used up.

"Detritus ecosystems flourish and collapse because they lack the life-sustaining biogeochemical circularity of other kinds of ecosystems." Our global industrial civilization is doing the same thing. By using up fossil fuels, a non-renewable source of energy we have managed to exponentially increase our population over a period of several hundred years. But our society is precariously dependent on dwindling non-renewable sources of energy to feed, clothe and house everyone. If we don't retool our economies soon, when we run out of oil the vast majority of people will starve to death.

Now that the price of oil has increased substantially, governments and oil companies are quickly moving into more unconventional sources, such as tar sands and shale deposits. Doing this will only accelerate environmental breakdown and global warming. It takes three times as much energy to extract and refine oil from the tar sands as it does to extract and refine crude oil. That means that the more we depend on the tar sands, the faster we use up accessible fossil fuels. The Alberta Tar Sands is already using enough natural gas to heat a quarter of Canada's homes. Not only that, but the process of extracting oil from tar sands is accelerating the growth in carbon dioxide emissions which is linked to global warming. The Alberta Tar Sands is now the largest industrial project on the planet, devouring millions of acres of boreal forest, creating huge man made toxic lakes and emitting almost a third of the total carbon dioxide emissions for all of Canada.

A carbon tax or a cap and trade system, eliminating subsidies to the oil and gas industries, and subsidizing public transit and renewable energy technology would preserve our market system and encourage a greener renewable economy.It would help make us more resilient in the face of peak oil.

It's the Vice President, Stupid!

2008-09-16T01:13:00.000-07:00

The office of Vice President is a kind of strange animal in the United States. Many Vice Presidents have been forgettable and inconsequential. After all, it's the President who is “The Decider”. But every once in a while a president dies in office and the Vice President becomes the President. That is how Lyndon B. Johnson and Harry Truman became Presidents. And as the case with George Bush, the Elder and many others, the office of Vice President can serve as a springboard in a new Presidential election.

In the last twenty years the choice of Vice President has had a huge impact. Bill Clinton picked Al Gore to be his running mate in 1992. Gore lost the 2000 Presidential election to George Bush, the Younger – a ridiculously close election that was decided by the Elder Bush's buddies in the U. S. Supreme court. Gore went on to become a far more influential and respected leader than the sitting President,Bush, by tirelessly raising public awareness about global warming – winning a Nobel Prize in the process.

Bush the Younger, had Dick Cheney, a cabinet member in several previous Republican administrations and the former CEO of Haliberton, choose himself as his running mate. As a Vice President, Cheney has made his mark in U.S. history by promoting torture, taking away the rights of prisoners of war, deceiving the American people about the existence of nuclear weapons in Iraq and merging official U.S. economic and military policy with that of American oil companies.

Cheney is famous for saying that he had no intentions of running for President after Bush's term ended. We now know he didn't have to because he was pulling the strings behind George W. Bush, “The Decider” all along.

The choice of a Vice Presidential running mate says a lot about the person running for President. Bush the Elder chose an intellectual light weight named Dan Quayle, who's most famous for misspelling “potato” and criticizing a TV sitcom because it's main character had a baby out of wedlock. Richard Nixon, chose Spiro Agnew, A nasty person with an attitude who ended up getting indicted for corruption charges.

As we all know, John McCain's choice for Vice President is Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin. The most interesting thing about her is how McCain's choosing her has energized his campaign. Before he picked her he was trailing Obama in the polls. After he picked her he pulled out ahead.

Compared to Obama, McCain is not a very inspiring speaker and it was difficult for him to attract large crowds. Now with Palin by his side, the crowds and the excitement have intensified. But what does that say about John McCain, that his pick for Vice President outshines his own star?

Before he picked her, Palin, who had been Governor for two years, was a virtual unknown outside of Alaska. Now,Many of us know that she is a hockey mom, she is able to shoot and field dress a moose, she is a Christian Fundamentalist, and, like Dick Cheney, she has no qualms about stepping on people to get what she wants.

She delights the Republican base, but the McCain team has kept her cocooned, away from too many prying reporters. She apparently has no experience, knowledge, or interest in international affairs. This doesn't bother the party faithful, but it should bother everyone else. Unlike John McCain, she doubts that global warming is caused by humans. She believes that Iraq was behind 9/11 and was not aware of the “Bush Doctrine” of preemptive war. Like McCain she seems eager for a war with Russia or Iran.

When McCain ran against Bush the Younger in the 2000 Republican primaries, he called Fundamentalists Jerry Falwell, and Pat Buchanan, “agents of intolerance”. Fundamentalist Leaders, James Dobson and Richard Land, who were previously lacklustre in their support of McCain, are now vowing to help get out the vote for the McCain/Palin ticket. Just before the 2008 Republican convention McCain who wanted senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate, was told by party bosses to pick another choice because Lieberman was too liberal for the Fundamentalist Republican Base. He then picked Palin and launched a campaign as the team of “mavericks” out to reform Washington. As New York Times columnist Frank Rich said in last sunday's paper, it's amazing that Palin,“...a candidate who embodies fear of change can be sold as a “maverick”...”

Since picking Palin, McCain has become more hardline about abortion and backed off from any firm position on dealing with global warming – both positions that sit well with Fundamentalists. As Frank Rich points out, McCain's choice of Palin, against his own preference for Lieberman, and his recent policy shifts toward the fundamentalist base call into question “who has the power in this relationship and who is in charge.”

How the Economy Caught FIRE

2008-09-09T03:42:00.000-07:00

A fire is a chemical oxidation reaction. It's products are heat, light, and carbon dioxide. When a small amount of combustible material, a match, for instance, reaches a threshold temperature, a chain-reaction ensues. The fire feeds on itself and keeps itself going until it runs out of fuel.

Think of debt as a combustible material. When entire classes of debtors default on their loans , as has occurred with the U. S. sub-prime mortgages then banks and mortgage companies that hold large portions of these debts become vulnerable to their own creditors. This can create a chain-reaction of bankruptcies where the value of all debt holdings, even the ones with AAA credit ratings go up in smoke as everyone tries to sell at once. This kind of “deflation” in value doesn't stop burning until it runs out of combustible material unless the government steps in and buys up the bad loans, letting taxpayers foot the bill.

The above scenario is getting played out, more and more frequently, as huge financial behemoths like the hedge fund “Long Term Capital”,Bear Sterns, and now the two mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have had to be successively bailed out by the U.S. Government. These two private companies hold five trillion dollars in home loans, one half of the U. S. Total. This time, it's the biggest and costliest government bailout in U.S. History.

It's as if the government has been busy snuffing the fires without really putting them all out. And for years they have been adding to the amount of combustible material by loosening restrictions on credit and finance, allowing private debt to became a larger and larger proportion of the economy. The United States Government has been supporting the Financial, Insurance and Real Estate industries – the “FIRE” Economy – at the expense of other important sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing. That's the thesis of American pundit, Kevin Phillips, in his recent book Bad Money.

According to Phillips, between 1987 and 2007 debt became America's largest fastest growing business. In that period, credit market debt quadrupled from $11 trillion to $48 trillion. “ The financial services sector...muscled past manufacturing to become the largest sector of the U. S. Economy.” By 2005 financial services made up 20 % of U. S. GDP while manufacturing was only 12%. “Instead of seeking to restore the older manufacturing industries or build the new technological sector, Washington steadily protected and advanced banking and finance.”

During the eighties and nineties U. S. Corporations “downsized their labour force by eliminating five million jobs and shifted production overseas or south of the border, sharply lowering their tax burden. By doing so they were able to triple their profits and increase their value on the stock market eightfold. Shareholders and CEO's benefited but obviously workers did not. That explains why the top 1% have become immensely richer while everyone else's income has stagnated.

Since the 1970's economic growth and social health indicators have diverged from each other. The problem with a large portion of economic growth in the last thirty years is that is too focused on financial markets which is too narrow a base to build a stable economy on. For instance, over the last five years the U.S. Housing sector provided 40% of growth in GDP and that was fuelled by a huge expansion in mortgages. No country can remain a major economic power by increasing the number of houses it builds. The focus on financial markets at the expense of manufacturing, and skilled jobs, Phillips argues, has been endemic to the steep decline of previous European Empires, namely the Spanish, Dutch, and British. “ The Dutch of the 18 th Century polarized into a nation of rentiers in which the wealthy lived off interest, while industry, fishing, and shipping declined.”

In the United States, the Great Depression of the 1930's followed a similar expansion of credit and widening gap between the rich and the poor in the 1920's, but it was reversed by the policies of FDR, leading to a huge increase in the average American standard of living during the 50's and 60's During the 1980's and 90's successive right wing administrations dismantled FDR's regulatory system while keeping interest rates artificially low, leading to excessive credit expansion and the crash and burn eras of the savings and loans fiasco, the Nasdaq tech stock bubble bursting, and most recently the sub-prime mortgage debacle.

Not only does this make the U.S. Economy more and more vulnerable to crashing, it puts the entire globe at risk. The BC lumber industry is dying because of bad mortgages in the United States.

We need to avoid the vicious cycles of deregulation and government bailout, that leads to burning up and wasting our national wealth. Our government can make our economy more self-sufficient by encouraging us to produce real manufactured goods, instead of encouraging us to buy more stuff on credit. That way we'd have more jobs, higher skill levels and economic growth would be benefiting a wider base of population, leading to a more stable economy.

Can We Trust "Trust"

2008-09-01T13:05:00.000-07:00

What is trust? Trust is a universal relationship we have with people and situations in the world. Most of the time, we make exchanges with other people without having full knowledge about their intentions. When we “trust” someone it means that we believe in their honesty, benevolence, and competency even though we don't have certain knowledge that they have those qualities.

An important aspect of trust in relationships is delayed reciprocity. We do things for other people without expecting immediate gain from doing so. We trust that eventually our good deeds will get back to us. But we don't really know if and when that will be. This is how society works. Mutual trust is a kind of “social glue” that creates a sense of community and makes it easier for people to work together.

Trust is an essential part of many kinds of relationships – in love, friendship, and companionship, for example. We can relax and feel comfortable with people we trust. When we trust a situation we say “I feel at home”.

The opposite of trust is hostility, hatred, fear, and paranoia. In these cases we do not trust others because we believe that they are either incompetent or they mean us harm. We do not trust strange situations, and we say that we do not feel at home there. Not enough trust leads to social isolation, breakdown and bloodshed.

Ironically this kind of situation can lead us to trust certain people and certain religious doctrines too much. People are attracted to religious cults because of fear and a desire for certainty. In a small group such as a cult a leader can demand and obtain blind obedience from his followers. The followers of Jim Jones committed mass suicide after he told them to drink cool-aid laced with cyanide.

The price we pay for absolute certainty is always too high. Too much trust is wrong because it prevents us from correcting course when we make mistakes. The more you concentrate trust in one leader, in one set of ideas, and in one book of Scriptures, the less trust you have in outsiders and new ideas. It is inevitable that everyone will make mistakes, and that many of our ideas will turn out to be wrong. If we put too much of our trust in particular people, groups, or ideas we will not be open to making corrections when reality contradicts what we thought was true. In extreme cases, people will refuse to hear information that contradicts what they believe and will do anything to suppress the information and attack the messenger. But if we make it impossible to learn from experience we will eventually end up destroying ourselves.

The problem with trust is inherent in all relationships. That which we trust can end up harming us. We trust in our food supply, but sometimes packaged meats that we buy in the grocery store can kill us, as happened recently with meat tainted with Lysteria. We trust that nature will be predictable and benevolent – supplying us with water, sunshine, warm temperatures and good soil for growing crops. But sometimes nature is not benevolent as we witness major earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes, and forest fires. We trust in our parents or our minister, or teacher and the vast majority of the time we benefit from this trust. But sometimes our leaders breach our trust and exploit us physically or sexually.

We trust the “system”, but sometimes our political and economic systems let us down – if we are in the midst of a war, or live in a “failed state”, or if we are living through an economic depression, or hyperinflation. When enough bad things happen to us we can lose faith in society, grab a gun and head for the hills. This makes the world an even more dangerous place.

Today our deep trust in human progress has been broken by the prospect of human-induced climate change. Climate effects virtually everything on earth. It determines the temperature, the amount of rainfall, the amount of ice and glaciation, the length and character of the seasons, and even the sea level. It is ultimately what makes a place livable.

This particular breach of trust is too much for some people to handle which is why they've ended up denying global warming. That our industrial civilization is accelerating global warming means that we can no longer trust our technology and economic systems to make the world a better place. It means that we have to get off our butts and help change the direction our society is going before its too late.

Defeating Terrorism One School at a Time

2008-08-19T04:36:00.000-07:00

On Monday Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, a longtime ally of U. S. President Bush, resigned in the face of growing calls for his impeachment. Musharraf was a problematic ally to the United States. Although he agreed to rein in the Islamic extremists and help root out al Queda, both groups have grown and prospered under his command. In spite of the twelve billion dollars that the United States has given Pakistan since 9/11, 90% of which has gone to the military, the Taliban and al Queda are now healthier than ever and using the northern territories of Pakistan as a base for incursions into Afghanistan.

At 169 million, Pakistan has the 5th largest population in the world. Born in the Indian Partition of 1947, it has been ruled by the military for most of its existence. While it has a nuclear arsenal and a modern army it is a “failed state” lacking in basic public infrastructure. It is in fact a feudal system, without a sufficient middle class population to ensure economic and political stability. With the majority illiterate and uneducated, Pakistan is mired in corruption and a breeding ground for Islamic extremism.

The roots of Pakistan’s malaise centers on the military’s longstanding rivalry with India, which started during the 1947 partition of India when the two states fought over who should control Kashmir, with it’s largely Muslim population. Early on, India won control, and the Pakistani military has remained obsessed with getting back at India, fighting a series of costly wars and bringing the world to the brink of a nuclear war twice, in 1999 and 2002. Meanwhile the rulers of Pakistan have consistently neglected economic development to the detriment of the Pakistani people.

Pakistan’s problems have been compounded by their “friendship” with the United States. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the CIA funneled billions into arms and training of Mujehadin insurgents in Pakistan through Pakistan’s military intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the Americans, under George Bush senior, lost interest in the region. But the Pakistani military and the ISI continued to support Islamic extremists as part of their greater game plan to foment insurgencies in Kashmir and install a weakened regime hostile to India in Afghanistan.

According to Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani author of Descent Into Chaos, one of the best books ever written about the region, the Pakistani army backed the Taliban in the ensuing civil war in Afghanistan “encouraging thousands of Pakistani youngsters to fight and die for the Taliban just as it mobilized thousands of Pakistanis to fight in the Kashmiri insurgency against India.”

“Pakistani militants were providing manpower for both the Taliban and al Queda and running a vast logistics, communication, and transit network in Pakistan on behalf of al Queda… This support base in Pakistan was to prove critical to al Queda’s survival after 9/11”. Meanwhile, George W. Bush was supporting the very Pakistani military and political system that helped fund and arm the Taliban that sheltered al Queda when it attacked the U. S. in 2001.

Let’s stop for a second and consider the following: Suppose that instead of giving military support to Pakistan’s army, the U. S. had given money to build schools in Pakistan. Think what would have happened to Pakistan’s economy and democratic institutions if aid money had gone into building and operating public schools for the last twenty years. . People who remain ignorant are more likely to offer themselves up as suicide bombers for al Queda and the Taliban. When society becomes literate the mullahs become disempowered

That’s what one American mountain climber decided to do after receiving life-saving help from the remote village of Korphe in northern Pakistan in 1993. Greg Mortenson vowed to build a school to pay the villagers back. Mortenson, did go back and help the villagers to build a school in Korphe. And he went on to build 60 schools in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those 60 schools have educated over 27 thousand children, more than half of them girls.

Mortenson argues that fighting terrorism only perpetuates the cycle of violence. “You can drop bombs, hand out condoms, build roads, or put in electricity, but unless girls are educated a society won’t change.” When you educate girls infant mortality decreases, population growth slows down, and the general health improves. .

The CIA and the ISI both contain the word “intelligence” and yet that is the very quality that is missing from their actions in the “War on Terror”. You can donate to Mortenson’s organization - the Central Asia Institute (www.ikat.org) and see your money increase intelligence in the world rather than diminish it. That’s what I’m going to do and I invite others to join me.

Trees Are the Answer

2008-08-11T13:09:00.000-07:00

My dad, Clive Justice, has a bumper sticker on his car that says: “Trees are the Answer”. No, he's not a member of a religious tree cult. He just thinks that planting trees can answer a lot of problems: climate change, the food crisis, pollution, urban blight, and many others.

As a landscape architect, he has spent his entire adult life working around trees. When I was a child he designed the grounds of the Vancouver Unitarian Church at 49th and Oak and had trees planted along the main sidewalks and took some of the trees from the original site to complement the church building. Some of the new trees were scraggly looking things then but fifty years later they've grown larger and given the church and it's grounds more maturity and substance.

Many trees live long lives. Trees grow very fast initially and then their growth tapers off and they slowly decline over hundreds of years. The twisty knarled yellow cedar that grows all along the BC coast, can live for thousands of years.

The first thing I noticed when I saw Prince Rupert, was how many trees there were surrounding the town. We are surrounded by mountainous coastline, with forests as far as the eye can see. You'd think that with so many trees in the distance, we wouldn't need so many here in town. But the fact is that trees are important in town as well.

Consider our golf course, the Hays creek ravine, the wooded areas around summit, the beautiful vertical park on Fulton that features maples at the bottom, rhododendrons in the middle and a majestic stand of sitka spruce at the top of the cliff - trees are essential to the identity of these places.

Even individual trees have importance. There are four big oak trees in town I've noticed that include a pair of tall and stately oaks on the grounds of the Masonic Temple. There are two beautiful big linden or lime trees, with their spicy fragrance, one on E 7th and one a couple of blocks away on E 6th. There's a huge Cottonwood down in the “holler” between E7th and 8th. There's a mysterious MonkeyPuzzle Tree on Borden Street across from the little park.

Trees that are commonplace elsewhere can seem exotic in town. Drive up the Skeena valley past Smithers , and quaking aspen are ubiquitous. When the wind blows their circular leaves shake. But, it's hard to find them in Prince Rupert. That's probably why I'm very fond of the aspen that towers over my back yard. Here and there the odd chestnut tree, with it's big palmate leaves gives deep and satisfying shade in the summer.

Trees can keep a house cool in the summer, and protect a house against wind in the winter. They are pleasing to the eye. Their roots help to hold the soil together absorbing excess water and preventing erosion. Trees provide vital nesting habitat for birds. Trees help to moderate dry climates by pulling water up from the ground and allowing it to evaporate into the atmosphere from the leaves. Large forests, like the amazon, actually make their own climate by creating rain clouds. Without trees the Amazon would not get any rain.

Trees give off oxygen and take in carbon dioxide. They are an answer to global warming. Planting trees store carbon in a form that doesn't cause climate change. Trees also absorb pollution, taking mercury up from the soil and up to one and a half pounds of air pollution a day per tree. A recent study from Columbia University showed that children who lived on tree lined streets were 25% less likely to have asthma than children who lived on streets without trees.

We stand to lose many pine trees in the BC interior because global warming has made BC more hospitable to the pine bark beetle. The pine beetle crisis is leading to economic devastation in Northern BC, as a gap in time of more than a generation lies between harvesting the dead and damaged pine and the growth of more mature trees to replace them.

When you plant a tree, you have to plan ahead, because the benefits of trees are often not fulfilled for a generation. It takes decades to build up an orchard. But after twenty-five years you have a renewable harvest of apples, pears, cherries, or what-have-you.

The red and yellow cedar, the sitka spruce, could be used here, on the BC North Coast for timber, for local construction, for furniture making, for boat building. It takes time to grow a tree, and you don't realize the benefits right away. If we develop resources that we have here we can support each other when times get harder. If we let big corporations extract our resources without our say, they won't look out for our future. We need to grow businesses and contractors here that use local wood and get involved, as stakeholders in the sustainable harvesting of our forests. If trees are the answer then we need to take the long view while we still have time.

Sheep and Softwood Lumber

2008-08-05T11:49:00.000-07:00

What have sheep farming and softwood lumber got to do with each other? Dennis Loxton is a Canadian Sheep farmer. Born in Australia, he learned the sheep business there, from the ground up. At its peak, Australia had 180 million sheep. Because of a sustained drought the number has declined considerably, to 120 million. In comparison, Canada has one million sheep.

But part of that one million sheep was a once thriving business in BC called sheep vegetation management. For seventeen years Loxton hired tree planters in his silviculture business, then he saw the advantages of sheep vegetation management and for the next seventeen years he hired tree planters and shepherds to plant trees and feed sheep in Northern BC clearcuts. Here's the beauty of it – sheep don't like conifers. Sheep won't eat pine or spruce, or fir, but they'll eat the fireweed that grows in the clearcut and competes for sunlight with the conifers. It turns out that fireweed is 23 % protein, the perfect well balanced diet for fattening up sheep. Not only that, they leave behind a valuable manure that provides much needed nutrients to the depleted soil, accelerating the growth of the confer seedlings.

You might think that predators – wolves and grizzlies – would be a real problem with sheep herds in clear cuts. But the solution, according to Loxton, is livestock guardian dogs. In seventeen years of sheep herding and tree planting, averaging about six thousand sheep per year, Loxton says he lost only eight sheep to predators, thanks to the dogs.

Started in Oregon in the seventies, the sheep vegetation management business spread north to BC where it grew to 50 thousand sheep by the mid nineties. But the softwood lumber dispute and the corresponding fall-out of mill closings and mass layoffs hurt both silviculture and vegetation management. When it came to the bottom line, forestry companies could save money by using herbicides to kill competing broad leaf vegetation. Herbicides are really much more expensive then they seem. The risk that introducing such toxins to our environment does to our health and to the health of other creatures is not included in their price. But it's up to governments to solve that market failure by encouraging healthy alternatives like sheep farming.

Loxton tells me that BC's Sheep vegetation system is down to less than five thousand sheep now. There have been job losses and business closings all over the BC interior as a result of the mill bankruptcies. . He used to hire two hundred tree planters and twelve shepherds every summer and he had a herd that totalled an average of six thousand sheep per year. In the recent economic downturn his 1000 acre sheep farm in Prince George was repossessed. "I lost me shirt. I lost me farm, in spite of thirty-four years of perfect silviculture production", he said.

Dennis Loxton is an articulate man. When I met him in Kispiox, it took less than a minute for him to get me fascinated in the idea of sheep farming and silviculture. For me he exemplifies the saying: “Think globally, act locally”, because he is describing the kind of sustainable local economy that we should be aiming for. When he looks at the pine beetle disaster he sees both an opportunity for silviculture - 20 billion seedlings to be planted - and ten million hectares of potential sheep pasture. It's an inspiring vision of sustainability.

By combining sheep herding with tree planting forest companies can avoid using carcinogenic herbicides; Sheep aren't in the farmer's fields in the summer eating hay that would otherwise go to feeding them in the winter; and wool, mutton, and sheep dairy are the byproducts. This kind of local enterprise adds value and diversity to our economy.

A key factor in giving a place it's distinctiveness is what the people there produce. Extracting resources and shipping them overseas to be finished, without producing some form of finished goods locally just impoverishes and depletes an area and drives employment overseas.

Value-added enterprises create jobs, build human capital, by increasing the level of know-how and help to diversify the local economy, multiplying the income that circulates through local communities.

Resource extraction by itself, can permanently degrade the environment. The classic example is mountaintop removal – strip-mining mountains for coal and filling up valleys with tailings. Tailings smother and poison watersheds, killing wildlife and contaminating the water supply.

Unfortunately Premier Campbell and his liberal government have been fast-tracking resource extraction without any thought to developing and diversifying local economies. More and more jobs have been lost while we've watched raw unprocessed logs shipped to China and the United States.

Signing trade deals like NAFTA and TILMA have taken away our rights to environmental protection and made us more vulnerable to economic downturns. For most of us, our standard of living is falling or is just barely being maintained. With the prospect of higher fuel prices and global warming, the Provincial and the Federal governments should be making it their policy to encourage local value-added enterprises like sheep vegetation management and locally milled lumber. The path to a sustainable future is through developing and diversifying local resource economies.

Midsummer's Festivals

2008-07-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

We live in the BC Rainforest. No doubt about it. A friend of mine told me he had lived here thirty years and never saw a summer so bad.

I've been hitting the summer music festivals in the Valley. First there was Smithers. That really is held on “midsummer's eve”. So of course I stayed up all night and sang songs with a select drunken few, including a scotsman from Terrace who insisted on singing this Stan Roger's song over and over again.

The old Kitimat Indian village, at the head of Douglas Inlet, is a beautiful setting for a music festival,. Thank god they didn't have camping and we stayed in a motel as it rained and rained. And you wonder why we don't have an outdoor music festival here in town. Let's face it, camping does not work well in Prince Rupert.

A certain musician I know insists that our town should have a proper covered bandstand like the one in Terrace. I don't know, Third Ave around city hall worked on Earth Hour. It would work even better with amplification. A festival can use a mix of indoor and outdoor venues. That's why the rodeo grounds in Smithers and Kispiox work so well.

Of the three music festivals I went to Kispiox outshone them all. Certainly the weather helped. But it was also the crowd. There was a wonderful mix of all ages: from babies to grandparents and a lot in between. And the feeling at Kispiox was relaxed and laid back. The perfect atmosphere for a music fest.

There were a good number of Rupertites at Kispiox. Three of our bands were playing: Mermaid Cafe, The Grifters, and Nonsuch. We all did well and got a good reception.

I love that song of the Grifters: “I'm not adapting well” It's kind of like what I feel at music festivals. So much music, so many people. Too many choices. I ended up turning in early and missing a fantastic late night drum circle with some real African drummers.

Smithers had the best jam sessions, both formal and impromptu. I especially enjoyed Skeena Skiffle, Ray Leonard's new band that features Cynthia Pyde, James Powell, as well as former Prince Rupert musician Paul "Ammo" Sametz.

One of the high points for me was the Akasha Belly Dancing Workshop at Kispiox. Krystyna Moss is a Belly Dance teacher in Terrace. She gave the workshop to a group of about thirty women. I was the only guy there, but I wasn't dancing. I got to play Middle Eastern drum beats on my “doumbek” That's an Arabic type of drum that's usually featured in Belly Dancing. I had a wonderful time. One of the great things about Belly Dancing is that a woman doesn't have to be shaped like a ballerina to do it well. Why can't Prince Rupert have Belly Dancing classes? Only in Terrace and Smithers, pity.

Now Prince Rupert has two great dance acadamies that are training a lot of good dancers. We host a provincial dance competition, but we're behind the other towns in this Valley in musical events.

My favourite concert at Smithers was the Valley Youth Fiddlers. It was a whole lot of kids from Smithers playing fiddles together, accompanied by an adult rhythm section. For them to play that well, required a lot of dedicated parents and teachers. Smithers has got a really well established support network for all kinds of musicians, and you can hear the result. It is impressive.

Kispiox, has got the atmosphere down though. Partly it's location, out in the country beside the Kispiox River, it just seems made for it. One of the organizers told me it takes six months out of the year to organize the festival. The volunteers at all the festivals made it all possible, setting everything up , cooking for the musicians, cleaning everything up.

By the time we played at Kispiox I was getting better at doing announcements and microphone patter between songs. I made a point of thanking the Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition for all the work they've done in publicizing Royal Dutch Shell's proposed coalbed methane drilling in the Sacred Headwaters. They had set up booths in all three of the festivals this summer. Shannon Mcphail first brought this issue to my attention, and her organization has done an amazing job of getting this issue out in public view where it needs to be.

It's our water they're messin with. People all up and down this valley are deeply concerned about the risks to salmon and wildlife. We need to bring our concerns to the BC government and to Shell Oil. We have a lot in common with people from the other towns in the Skeena River Valley.

On The Beat

2008-07-22T03:15:00.000-07:00

A lot of people feel that the drums are the timekeeper for a band. But if that were really true most bands could replace their live drummer with a drum machine and be the better for it.
The drums sets up the groove, which is not just keeping time but producing a sense of forward propulsion that drives the music and makes our bodies want to move.

In keeping time, every division of time gets equal emphasis but when the drums lay down a groove they do so by varying the dynamics and tonal qualities of every note played. Every groove is a rythm – a cycle of increasing tension building to a climax then a release – A mini crescendo and decrescendo.

The fact that drums do much more than keep time was brought home to me this weekend at a rainy outdoor concert in Kitimat when I saw a trio from Alberta. I won't tell you their real name, let's just call them – “The Anemics”. They were bass and lead vocals, lead guitar and rythm guitar. Three musicians but no drummer. Instead, they were using a drum machine.

The problem was, without a live drummer, they sounded anemic. No dynamics – no sense of propulsion. A drummer could have supplied dynamics and energized that band. Believe me, one whack from my snare drum could have woken that lead singer up in a big hurry.

A drummer in a band is like a system within a system. Each of his four limbs plays a different instrument, and it's as if they each have a mind of their own when they play. The left foot keeps time on the hi hat cymbals whereas the right foot plays the bass drum. The left hand plays “ghost notes” and back beats on the snare, while the right hand plays a driving pattern on the ride cymbal. When they all play together the parts interweave into a cyclic pattern of tension and release , tension and release. That pattern gives a feeling of forward movement that propels the rest of the band and the audience.

The bass drum is the foundation of the drum set. It's the largest drum, the lowest pitch and the one that is most felt throughout the body. When I was first taking drum lessons I was taught to use the bass drum as a timekeeper. Military marching bands also use bass drums to keep time. When you keep time with your right foot, by playing each and every beat, it provides a very solid foundation for the two hands. A steady, even bass drum is easy to follow and easy to dance to but it very quickly sounds monotonous.

In “swing” jazz, the bass drum keeps steady time, as the right hand plays a pattern of broken triplets on the ride cymbal, while the left hand plays ghost notes on the snare. In latin music the bass drum forms a regular pattern, called an “ostinato”. African and caribbean music often use the bass drum as the “backbeat” in place of the snare drum as it is used in rock music. Rock music borrowed the ostinato bass drum rythms of latin but used them to set up a regular back beat with the snare.

Modern jazz dispensed with the steady four bass drum and the back beat and freed up the bass drum to improvise and punctuate the phrasing of left handed ghost notes, while the high hat kept time. The phrasing in modern jazz is much longer and more relaxed than in rock music. Some people describe the feel of modern jazz as “spacey” because of the lack of a solid bass drum beat, especially on the “downbeat”, or first beat.

A lot of drummers play “double-bass” by having two bass drum pedals and using both their feet instead of just the right foot. That way you can do bass drum rolls and effects that go well with heavy metal music. I have probably irrational objections to the double-bassdrum. I would never use it myself because I consider the high hat too important to abandon, and I find double bass too much foundation and not enough architecture. I guess that means that I don't like heavy metal music. Although I do like Led Zeppelin, and their late great drummer John Bonham. He got his big bass drum sound with a single bass drum. It was a twenty-six incher, four inches bigger in diameter than what most drummers use.

Because the bass drum is the foundation, if you try and make a major change to the way you play it you can end up messing up your sense of time and the coordination of all the rest of your limbs. Don't mess with the foundation unless you've got a lot of free time and a basement where you can chop wood (ie., drum sticks). If you've successfully rebuilt the foundation, then you can take your drum set out of the woodshed and use it to energize a real band. Rock on drummers.

The Tipping Point

2008-07-15T01:05:00.000-07:00

For those of us who want to facilitate change toward sustainability the idea is to find the point of leverage where a small effort can create a big change in behaviour. According to the latest research, one underestimated and underemployed lever is our perception of what other people do in our neighbourhood and community. We think we do things because of the kind of person we are, but much behaviour is contagious. If we see others doing something in a certain situation, we are more likely to act in the same way.

“When it comes to interpreting other people's behaviour, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.” So writes Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point. The Premise behind Gladwell's book is that while the world might seem like an “immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped.”

According to Gladwell, the key to finding tipping points is to see social change as like an epidemic. Social behaviour is contagious, and there is always a minority of people who seem to have an inordinate influence on shaping new social trends, just as there are certain people who contribute more than their share in disease epidemics because they are great social mixers.

For instance, teenage suicide is a good example of a contagious behaviour. When one charismatic teenager in Micronesia committed suicide, a rash of similar suicides erupted in these islands over the months and years that followed. There is evidence that when a prominent suicide is featured in major newspapers, the rate of suicide temporarily increases afterwards.

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell features James Q Wilson's and George Kelling's “Broken Windows Theory of Crime” as a prominent example of epidemic behaviour. If a window is broken and left un-repaired, then people walking by will assume no-one cares and no-one is in charge. This sends a signal that anything goes, which encourages criminal behaviour.

In the 1970's and 80's a crime wave swept the inner cities of America. In New York, the subway system became dysfunctional as graffiti, litter, fare-jumping, public disorder, and muggings increased dramatically. In the the late 1980's and early 1990's the New York Transit Authority hired David Gunn and William Bratton, both disciples of George Kelling, and his broken windows theory of crime. Subway cars were kept clean, graffiti was painted over, and fare jumpers were prosecuted. They believed that graffiti, and fare beating were small expressions of disorder that invited much more serious crimes. Bratton went on to become head of the NYPD, where he applied the same strategies to the city at large. The result was a dramatic decline in serious crime in New York by the late 1990's.

Following from the idea that social change is like an epidemic, Gladwell lists three guidelines for finding tipping points They are: “The Law of the Few”, “Stickiness”, and “The power of context”.

“The Law of the Few”, states that certain kinds of people are critical in spreading information. These are people that can manage to take new innovations and translate them into something that the rest of us can understand. They often cultivate large circles of friends and are up on all the latest information. Gladwell calls them “Connectors”, “Mavens” and “Salesmen”.

While contagion is a function of the messenger's behaviour, “stickiness” is a function of the message. Messages that have stickiness are messages that are memorable and that move us to action. By tinkering with the presentation of messages we can significantly improve their stickiness. Gladwell goes into some detail to show how by progressively honing the message through continually testing on preschool audiences, the makers of the children's TV shows – Sesame Street and Blue's Clues were able to get and keep the audience's attention and promote learning.

The Power of Context is essentially a generalized version of the broken windows theory. “Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places they occur.” “ We are more than just sensitive to changes in context,” says Gladwell, “we are acutely sensitive.” “The power of context says what really matters are little things... It is possible to be a better person on a clean street or in a clean subway than in one littered with trash and graffiti."

Hence the potential power of such programs as Communities In Bloom and Civic Pride. If people in Prince Rupert participate together to clean up and beautify their property - clean up litter, plant flowers, cut down weeds, and do some landscaping, they feel pride in having a cleaner city and pride in having contributed. Neighbours are inspired to clean up their yards Social trust increases and more and more people are willing to pitch in and cooperate in other public projects. A better looking city stimulates tourism and discourages crime. The small effect of a group of people cleaning up their yards can have big effects on their city. That's the idea behind “The Tipping Point”. Major positive change can come about from small changes in people's behaviour because behaviour is contagious.

There's Hydrocarbons in Them Thar Hills

2008-07-09T00:20:00.000-07:00

Last week Shell Oil came to town and gave an open-house about their coalbed methane project in the Sacred Headwaters. I had a fascinating chat with Shell Canada employees, Larry Lalond and Kathy Penney. It was disappointing to note that only a handful of local people came to the open house. Perhaps Shell could have done better to advertise their open house. I would think it would be in their interest to encourage more local participation.

Hopefully, we have gotten past the bad old days when resource extraction was a kind of smash and grab operation with no meaningful consultation with stakeholders. This time I'm assuming that Shell, who appears to be in this for the long haul, is really serious about listening to the public. The issue that grabs attention anywhere downstream of the Sacred Headwaters is the issue of water. In order to get the methane out, Shell is proposing to pump water from underground to the surface. This “produced water” could well be contaminated with heavy metals or salts, we don't know yet, until it is properly tested.

Shell insists that it will truck all the contaminated water, a thousand kilometers away to Fort St John, where it will be re-injected underground. This is dubious, because it is not only a ridiculous waste of energy, but also totally impractical, once more than a handful of holes are drilled. The other problem is that pumping water out of an aqueduct is likely to affect ground water levels which could adversely effect salmon fry. These are all excellent reasons for local people to get involved in the consultation process with Shell. We're talking about them screwing around with our water, people!

Royal Dutch Shell is one hundred years old. It is now the second largest energy corporation in the world, after Exxon-Mobil. Last year, Shell made thirty-two billion dollars. The CEO of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer, acknowledges both Peak Oil and Global Warming. He'd like to see a global agreement on Carbon Cap and Trade soon.

Why I mention this is because it has direct consequences for all of us. Peak Oil means that the global demand for hydrocarbons is or will soon exceed supply. The price of oil may have its ups and downs, but as long as global demand keeps rising faster than supply, which is near peak production, it's likely that it will become more and more expensive over time. This means that there is and will be a massive transfer of wealth from consumers of oil and gas to producers. Ordinarily, this would be business as usual in our global capitalist system, as the higher price would just encourage everyone to avoid these products, but in this case it isn't – for two reasons: First, there are no good substitutes for oil in our modern economy; and Second, burning hydrocarbons on the massive global scale that has been happening is leading to climate change. For these reasons it is essential that governments step in and limit the amount of carbon emissions in the economy by putting a price on carbon.

Everything is connected. The atmosphere is common to all and if too much carbon dioxide gets produced the costs are spread to everyone, in terms of the damage from climate change. On the other hand, Oil companies, and consumers of oil products are not paying for those costs. This is what is called: “market failure”, when one group in the economy avoids paying for all the costs of their activities. That is why government has to step in and devise a fair means of compensating the public for this cost and at the same time, slow down the massive transfer of wealth from consumers to oil producers. Stephan Dion, leader of the Federal Liberal party got it right when he said polluters should pay.

Unfortunately in all this consultation with Shell, where are our governments? The Campbell government has streamlined and fast-tracked coalbed methane tenures and subsidized roadbuilding and initial drilling. Not only that, the Campbell government has taken away the legal rights of municipalities and regions to have a say in resource extraction decisions. Something doesn't jibe here with the provincial government's commitment to fight climate change .

This is where the other problem of “political failure” comes in. From the huge transfer of wealth from the public to oil companies, a portion of big oil's money is going towards lobbying governments. This has led to political corruption on a scale not seen since the nineteenth century. As a result oil extraction, production, and consumption is subsidized instead of being properly regulated. And we have huge military expenditures for wars in the Middle East which just might possibly have to do with securing oil supplies there. You can see the damage this has done to our democratic institutions in the obvious bias of the Bush and Harper governments toward oil companies and their blatant foot dragging over doing anything decisive about global warming.

You may say, “What's global warming got to do with me personally?” Here's the connection: Only if ordinary citizens get involved and take governments to task on these issues will we be able counter big oil's money and influence. Otherwise they'll run the show. And if you want to know what that's like, take a look at Iraq.

Carbon Dioxide and the Magic of Exponential Growth

2008-06-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

If a frog is put into a pot of boiling water he will immediately jump out of the pot and save himself. But if the same frog is put into a pot of water at room temperature and the water is slowly heated, the frog will not notice the water is getting hotter until it is too late. The frog is a lot like us. He is built to notice and respond to sudden changes in his environment but is not as good at responding to gradual changes.

Two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). It is now 385 ppm and increasing at a rate of 1.7% a year, due largely to the industrial development of China and India, and their increasing dependence on coal – the dirtiest of fossil fuels.

At 1.7% per year the amount of CO2 emissions will double in 43 years. That's the magic of exponential growth. As the world industrializes, more and more energy is needed and if that energy is from fossil fuels, the amount of CO2 emissions keeps growing too.

At this rate of growth, before the end of the century the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reach and surpass 1000 ppm. Carbon dioxide is toxic to the human heart causing decreasing contractile force as well as difficulty breathing. At concentrations of 1000 ppm CO2 causes discomfort in the form of nausea and headaches for about 20% of people. At concentrations of 2000 ppm – which we would reach within a century – the majority of people would experience discomfort. At that point, we might want to live outside all the time because the concentration of CO2 inside buildings would be even higher.

Although it is true that plants need carbon dioxide to grow, not all plants would benefit from increased levels of CO2. Specifically, our food crops would not do as well, but apparently weeds would thrive under these conditions.

Is this the kind of world we can look forward to? A world of mass hunger, misery, and nausea? Notice I haven't even mentioned global warming up until now. What is driving almost all the greatest threats to humanity, including global warming, is industrialization and economic growth.

People who believe we can continue on with business as usual are a lot like that frog in the pot – they don't notice any difference from day to day. It's not hotter today than it was yesterday. More and more children are getting asthma, but the increase is gradual so we don't notice. More people are getting cancer from the increased amounts of toxins in the environment, but the increase is so gradual that we barely notice it. Forests, which are net absorbers of CO2, are being cut down at an alarming rate – but we don't notice it because it's happening somewhere else.

Some people are worse than the frog. They're more like the ostrich that hides its head in the sand. They find the consequences of this news too overwhelming. They are too chicken to face up to the fact that we have to stop the growth of industrial output or we won't survive.

The Fifth Discipline: Systems Theory

2008-06-24T03:07:00.000-07:00

All human organizations are systems. They share common patterns, behaviours, and properties with electrical, and biological systems that can be understood and used to our advantage.

We can define a “system” as “ a web of relations among elements”. The structure of any system – the many circular interlocking, sometimes time-delayed relationships among its components – is often just as important in determining its behaviour as the individual components themselves.

Think of the solar system – a system of planets dominated by a sun, many times bigger than any of the other planets. Only the planet earth has the right distance from the sun so that the sun's energy was enough to support the development of life but not so much as to destroy life.

And life itself is a global system that has interacted with and changed the earth's atmosphere, climate, geology, and chemistry over hundreds of millions of years.

In a system, all the parts interact and influence each other in ways that aren't predictable . Think of the Beatles – who could have imagined the evolution of their music and the vast audience that could be created by those four guys as separate individuals?

Human organizations are built up to serve various purposes. Like a machine, it is individuals that make up the parts of the whole. But, unlike a machine, human organizations can learn and improve themselves. They can change and evolve.

A machine is built to further someone's goal. All of its parts are created and put together in the pursuit of that goal. Human organizations have goals, but those goals can evolve over time and come to influence those who serve in the organization as well.

You want to keep a machine running smoothly, but a human organization is much more than a machine because its components are living individuals with their own attitudes and goals. What is more, unlike the components of a machine, as human beings we care about each other and the world around us. This caring for others means that we are emotionally involved in social systems.

To be emotionally involved, to care about others, makes seeing the whole picture much harder to do because in order to see the whole we need to stand back from it and get some distance. Think of your own family as a system. It's not easy because we can't usually distance ourselves from our family. We care too much. But families are interacting systems of individuals just as much as a rock band, a corporation, a hospital, or a school.

When we learn how what we do is part of a system, we can picture ourselves as a participant rather than just a lone individual. We can be more effective than we could be as a lone individual. We can learn how to improve the system, make it work better. Sometimes we can even change its goals if we have a strong vision of what is most important to us.

The more accurate we are in seeing the workings of the system the easier it is for us to find the the points of greatest leverage and change the way the system works.

Obviously, not all change is beneficial, Some changes make things worse, which is why every organization needs to strive toward continuous learning. We all need to learn to see things accurately so that we profit from our mistakes as well as our successes.

We need to encourage diversity within all organizations because it is diversity that supports successful adaptation to change. According to Bill O'Brian, CEO of Hanover Insurance, a manager's fundamental task is in providing the enabling conditions for people to lead the most enriching lives they can.

As Peter Senge puts it in his book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization “In effect, the art of system thinking lies in seeing through complexity to the underlying structures generating change... It means organizing complexity into a coherent story that illuminates the causes of problems and how they can be remedied in enduring ways. Ideally, that's what I see myself doing as a columnist and a blogger.

Gordon Campbell and the Dark Side of Green

2008-06-17T02:52:00.000-07:00

He may have the most impressive looking carbon tax in North America, He may be encouraging renewable energy projects all over British Columbia, but dig beneath the surface and you'll find that Gordon Campbell's government is on the dark side of green.

To begin with, all those renewable energy projects are for private companies only. BC Hydro, which could have been developing wind farms and smaller hydroelectric power projects for British Columbians has been legally prevented from doing so. In it's place, the Liberal government has given away the rights to hundreds of "run of the river" hydroelectric projects as well as a bunch of wind farm licences to his business buddies for bargain prices. It's Liberal government policy to fast track and subsidize these renewable power projects, which is arguably a good thing, except that there is no benefit for BC's citizens.

You see, certified green power, that is power that comes from renewable sources like wind and water, command higher prices in the power-hungry U.S. Once these wind farms and hydro projects are up and running with the help of tax-payer subsidies there is nothing stopping them from selling their power to the U.S. That means that U.S. companies can cover our land with wind farms, can dam and divert our rivers, and we don't even benefit from the power that they generate. If we want to buy that power, we would have to pay higher prices than what we pay to BC hydro because it's "green power". Can you see the irony of this? Foreigners are going to profit from using our land and selling the power to other foreigners and our government is subsidizing them.

We've been lulled by Campbell's green public relations into thinking that the Liberal government cares about the environment. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's all about privatization, about selling off BC's resources to feed the hungry appetite of the biggest economy in the world and taking away our public rights to affordable recreation and hunting and fishing in the process.

Ask yourself why has Campbell's government consistantly avoided public consultation on privatizing BC Hydro, and on it's renewable power policies like "run of the river"? If local municipalities had a say in renewable power projects, and if BC Hydro could develop them, all citizens would benefit by generating green power in our backyards. But not Campbell's way. We lose our wilderness, and our rivers so that multinational corporations can make a profit selling energy to the United States.

Without public involvement, so-called green projects are nothing more than resource grabs for the rich and powerful. Going green is meaningless if it doesn't lead to a sustainable future. In order to be sustainable, we need local control over the use and conservation of our resources. If we allow Gordon Campbell's Liberal government to sell them off now their won't be anything left for our children and grandchildren. If you want to know more about these issues please check out www.saveourrivers.ca and www.thetyee.ca

What's Growth Got To Do With It?

2008-06-10T01:03:00.000-07:00

In biological growth, living cells multiply by dividing their genetic material in two and then splitting into two distinct cells. Each cell is then free to divide in two again indefinitely, providing conditions are favourable. But at some point growth gets limited, either because the food supply runs out or because production of waste interferes with the consumption of food.

That's where variety or biodiversity comes in – because what is one creature's waste is always food for another. Everything is connected. Living things are never isolated, but are always part of what we call “ecosystems”.

When people think of a jungle, they often think of competition of many creatures eating each other up in a race for survival. But actually, a jungle is made up of a huge diversity of plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria – that, although partly competing , on the whole are cooperating with each other to form a vast interconnected web of life that supports the growth of all the countless individual species.

If one invasive species were to grow to fast and take over everything else it would eventually run out of food or end up suffocating in its own waste. That's why diversity supports biological growth – animals breathe out carbon dioxide as waste and plants take it in as food and produce oxygen as waste which animals take in as food.

Think of a cancer cell. A cancer cell is a cell in our body that's just like other cells except for one thing. Healthy cells are programmed to stop dividing after a time, which means that eventually they will die. If not for the sacrifice of healthy cells the body would not survive long. But a cancerous cell keeps multiplying and making millions of copies of itself without end.

And all this cancer cell growth consumes valuable nourishment and creates excessive waste products, both of which puts stress on the body's organ systems. At some point this excessive growth destroys the functioning of the organ systems and the body dies.

Economic growth is analogous to biological growth. Here's how Herman Daly and Joshua Farley define it in their book, Ecological Economics: “We define growth as an increase in throughput, which is the flow of natural resources from the environment, through the economy, and back to the environment as waste. It is a quantitative increase in the physical dimensions of the economy and/or the waste stream produced by the economy.”

Economic growth cannot continue indefinitely because, like a cancer, the consumption of too much resources and the production of too much waste will eventually over-stress living systems and cause breakdown of ecosystem support, which will then compromise human survival.

There is no question that economic growth has pulled human society out of mere surviving and into a world of comfort and abundance. But growth has become a secular religion. Instead of seeing it as a tool that may be close to reaching the end of its useful life, we have ended up worshipping it in a reckless and unquestioning manner.

Our task today is to convert endless economic growth into endless human development. Right now, in the developed world, we are producing more and more stuff, but not necessarily improving human life. We need to learn how to increase the meaning and quality of life without increasing material throughput.

In the old days, when a person was diagnosed with cancer, his doctor would often lie about it in order to spare his patient's suffering mental anguish. In those days, there weren't many useful treatments available.

In some ways we are in an analogous situation with regard to economic growth. Politicians and economists are denying there's a problem with unlimited growth because they haven't got the guts to try alternative solutions. Just as there are now plenty of chemotherapy treatments for cancer, there are solutions to economic growth for those who have the imagination and courage to try.

social marketing

2008-05-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

How do we get people to lower their green house gas emissions? How do we get people to act more sustainably?

We can enact regulations that forbid excessive GHG emissions, like an anti-idling bylaw. But regulations are only as good as public compliance, and public compliance depends on people's attitudes.

We can tell people about the threat of global warming but we need to be careful. Because if we just pump them with information about how bad a situation will be without showing them that their actions can make a difference, they are more likely to ignore the information in self-defence.

If we perceive that we have some control over how to improve the problem then we are more likely to act. If we perceive that in concert with others we can make an impact we are also more likely to act. Information by itself is impersonal. People are strongly influenced by personal contact with other people.

People don't necessarily need to know more about global warming. They need to know how lowering their greenhouse gas emissions is easy to do and convenient. Any appeal to change has to be in the form of a quid pro quo – if people are going to make a sacrifice they have to feel like they are getting something in return. That's where Social Marketing comes in.

Good marketing creates a set of benefits for the customer. Commercial marketers study the habits, perceptions and attitudes of consumers to see how they can produce a product that will satisfy consumer wants.

In social marketing, the goal is to reduce bads and increase public goods by influencing public behaviour. Composting can reduce the amount of landfill and add fertility to gardens – but only if people are willing to do it. Buses can replace a lot of cars on the street and thereby reduce traffic congestion and lower emissions, but only if people actually take the bus.

Why do some people adopt sustainable activities and others do not? Those who do not act sustainably may do this out of ignorance, or because they perceive barriers to the sustainable activities, or because the benefits are higher for competing behaviours.

The fact is, people will always find attractive – behaviours that have high benefits and few barriers. But a benefit to one person may be a barrier to another. Benefits and barriers vary both over persons and over time.

If we don't know what the barriers to a desired behaviour are, then we cannot successfully influence people to change their behaviour. In order to influence people we need to understand what are the actual and the perceived barriers to that activity.

What behaviours do we want to promote? Reducing carbon dioxide emissions can be done by increasing the fuel efficiency of cars, reducing the use of cars, by insulating houses, and by increasing energy efficiency. For an example, let's look at reducing car use.

The behaviours we want to promote are taking the bus, walking, and riding a bicycle. Let's narrow it a bit more. What are the barriers and benefits associated with riding a bicycle? The barriers might be: the weather, seasons, self-image, lack of physical fitness, fear of traffic, riding is uncomfortable, don't have appropriate clothing, etc, What are the benefits of riding a bicycle? Self-image, it feels good, seeing more of the landscape, enjoying the good weather, getting fresh air, exercise, saving money, etc.

Who are we targeting? This is a very important question. We do not target people who do not want to ride a bicycle. We want to know which people are most likely to want to ride a bicycle and which people are most likely to change their behaviour in this direction. Teenagers? Young adults? Working people? Parents? Here's where field work is required. Surveys need to be done in order to target the correct audience.

Once you target the correct audience you need to gather facts on the ground. It's time to observe what people actually do; to compare how people should ideally do behaviour to what they actually do. What are the target audience's perceptions of barriers? What motivates them? What do they see as benefits? Then you want to determine what barriers would be easiest to lower and what benefits would be easiest to add. This requires more research.

Now we are getting up close and personal because this kind of information requires focus groups to get at the right details. Note that, when dealing with focus groups we would want the participants to be uninformed about any campaign for encouraging cycling because if they were informed beforehand they would not be representative. Here are some questions we might ask at this stage:

1.What makes it difficult to ride a bicycle?
2. What makes it easy to ride a bicycle?
3. What positives are associated with riding a bicycle?
4. What negatives are associated with riding a bicycle?
5. Who wants you to use a bicycle and how much do you care about their opinion?
6. Who doesn't want you to ride a bicycle and how much do you care about their opinion?

Once the more detailed information about barriers and benefits is acquired from the focus groups, a plan is devised and a pilot project is attempted with a small selected group. The pilot project is evaluated and then the plan is modified until it will work for the community as a whole.

Behaviour Change Tools

The diversity of barriers to an activity like bicycling mean that information alone won't get people to switch activities. Personal contact is the key to influencing people which is why most of the tools of social marketing involve direct social contact.

Communication - present information that is vivid, concrete, and personalized. It will more likely be noticed and remembered and have a lasting impact. Know your audience – their attitudes, beliefs and behaviours. To do this you need to gather evidence before you develop your message.
Have your message delivered by an individual or an organization that is seen as credible to your target audience.
Frame your message. Messages that emphasize losses which occur as a result of inactivity are consistantly more persuasive than messages that emphasize savings as a result of taking action.

Committment – Individuals who agree to a small initial request are far more likely to agree to a subsequent larger request. The act of committment subtly alters one's attitude. People have a strong internal pressure to behave consistantly. Example: During a blood drive, volunteers were told over the phone: “We'll count on seeing you then OK?” Just saying this made volunteers more likely to show up. Another example: Earth Hour – committing to turning off the lights for one hour.
Written committment is even more effective. Asking for permission to make the committment public leads to lasting change even if it isn't made public. Home visits, or when a service is provided, such as the delivery of a compost unit, are ideal opportunities to employ committment.
Existing volunteer groups like church groups and boy scouts can be effective in getting group committments or working door to door. We can ask people who commit to trying a new behaviour to ask others to commit. We can point out other sustainable behaviours that they are already involved in. The idea is that we are helping people to see themselves as environmentally concerned.
Committment must be voluntary. Do not ask a subject if they are not interested in the activity.

Prompts – are reminders to engage in action that we are already predisposed to do. We tend to forget to do things – we leave cloth shopping bags at home, we forget to shut off the car's engine when we are waiting, etc.. Prompts need to be noticable, self-explanatory, and in close proximity to targeted behaviour. Example: removable decals on dashboards to remind drivers to stop engines while waiting. Signs can be put in common waiting areas like school parking lots. Prompts should be used to encourage positive behaviours rather than to avoid negative behaviours.

Norms – People look to the behaviour of others around them to determine how they will behave. Start with people who want to do the target behaviour. Identify natural leaders. People are more likely to imitate or conform to a behaviour if they see someone they respect or look up to doing it.
Communicate to people the number of people in the community who are already doing the activity – eg., riding a bicycle to work.

Acting to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and acting sustainably are complex activities that transcend the kind of simple behaviour of switching brands of toothpaste, etc. that commercial advertising targets. That is why information campaigns, no matter how clever, are not usually effective. Social Marketing emphasizes techniques of observation and social contact that help form more long lasting and effective patterns of behaviour.

Bibliography

McKenzie-Mohr, Doug, and Smith, William, Fostering Sustainable Behaviour , New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island BC. c.1999

Bird, Tom, “Five Secrets of Social Marketing” Alternatives Journal, V 34, number 1, 2008.

Beyond the laws of leadership

2008-05-20T01:40:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a book by leadership guru John Maxwell, called
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. I'm impressed with Maxwell's
page-turning writing style and his simple pithy examples. "Leadership
ability is the lid that determines a person's level of effectiveness."
That's an eye-opening point he makes in his first chapter.

Another quote: "to add growth lead followers but to multiply
growth lead leaders." This one reminds me of what's behind the success of the Religious Right and the Christian megachurches in the United States. Maxwell himself acknowledges his connection to Bill Hybels ,pastor of the hugely influential Willow Creek Community Church.

Outside Bill Hybels' office is a poster with the caption: "What is
our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?"

Every year Willow Creek Church hosts a leadership conference
which, in previous years, has featured Presidents: Jimmy Carter, Bill
Clinton, and George W. Bush as speakers.

Like the corporate goal of maximizing profits, the goal of the
Willow Creek Megachurch is to maximize the conversion of unbelievers. It has 13,000 member churches and a 50 million dollar state-of-the-art worship center that features the largest auditorium in the United States.

Hybels, in his book: "The Couragous Leader" says: "Leaders see the big picture and understand how to help others to find their place of
service within that picture." My problem with Bill Hybels is that he
is not thinking big enough. Just because you use words like "God" and
"Jesus" doesn't mean that your vision is big enough. It's simple – the
big picture is how are we going to survive, both as a civilization and
as a species. One of John Maxwell's quotes on leadership is apt here:
"Anyone can steer the ship but it takes a leader to chart the course."

Corporations, are required, by law, to be run soley in order to
make money for their stockholders. And they have become enormously successful to the point where the size of many corporations rivals that of the nation-state. Exxon-Mobil Corporation has an economy that's bigger than 180 countries. Many of these huge corporations,including Exxon, are corrupting governments so that they will
implement policies that further the corporation's own profit-making
goals. The problem is that, even though corporations are now as
powerful as nation states the rules of the game are fixed so that
these corporations assume no responsibility for future generations.

The problem of focussing on growth of any kind, is that it is
too narrow a focus. While corporations have grown bigger than many
states the environmental and human cost has become too high. Think about the fate of the Titanic. It was so big for its time that people thought it was unsinkable. But its captain couldn't see the iceberg in time to change the big ship's course and the Titanic went down.

When you don't see the bigger picture you aren't navigating,
you're steering blindly. By concentrating on growth, corporate leaders
have forgotten to look ahead at the consequences of their actions.
Making more money is great but as the Indians say: "When the rivers
stop flowing, and nothing can grow in the soil you won't be able to
eat money."

Bill Hybels' favorite quote is "the local church is the hope of
the world." But where was the church when corporations were denying and delaying action on global warming? By prioritizing emotional issues like abortion and homosexuality the religious right has wasted its moral capital. And by mobilizing it's members to help elect the worst president in U.S. history for two terms of office it has essentially abdicated it's leadership and become a tool of the Republican party.

Megachurches like Willow Creek may be exemplary at churning out leaders but if those leaders don't see what's coming then it's more a case of the blind leading the blind.

Is Environmentalism a Religion?

2008-05-12T00:08:00.000-07:00

Some people accuse environmentalism of being a religion. There are lots of similarities: There is always a list of “Biblical” catastrophes that are predicted to rain down from on high because of our transgressions; People in general are castigated for having too much and not giving more to those who have not; Society as a whole is criticized for heading down the wrong path, etc., etc....

As an environmentalist, I've succumbed to those temptations many times. I admit to preaching fire and brimstone and loving every minute of it. Of course, that was a long time ago, when I was only 50. I'm a lot more mature now.

But at a certain point I realized that the world does not need another religion. We've got plenty of them already. Pushing religion, whatever the type, is divisive. Just look at our neighbours to the south and their Christian President. And look at the religious fault lines that opened up in Iraq after the American invasion.

The American Economist Robert Nelson, who often compares economics to religion draws a convincing parallel between some strands of environmentalism and Calvinism. Calvin was the 16th century Swiss Protestant theologian who inspired the Puritan movement which in turn inspired the first settlements of the New England colonies. Puritanism is the percursor to Christian Fundamentalism which has been so influencial in modern American politics.

According to Calvin, humankind is utterly depraved and corrupt. And even if we do change our ways, God plans to obliterate the vast majority of us anyways. How's that for a cheerful theological message?

It's interesting that, as Nelson points out, there are some environmentalists who sound just like this. Case in point: Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepard Society states: “We, the human species have become a viral epidemic to the Earth.” When three maritime sealers died while out sealing Watson said that their deaths didn't matter as much as the thousands of seals that were being slaughtered.

The idea of valuing life on earth more than human life gives me pause. I know it's good to be able to put ourselves in some other critters place but ultimately it's our future that we are interested in. This is my problem with Animal Rights activists. Because if we aren't more important to ourselves than the rest of life, then anything we can do to destroy ourselves faster would be a good thing. We should pollute and consume as much as possible and fight nuclear wars to hasten the end of our species so that life on Earth can get on without us. But, humanity matters. Our future matters. And nature matters because we ultimately depend on her to survive.

Scientifically we know much more about life on earth today than we did centuries ago in Calvin's time. We know that life is an interdependent web. Life supports life. Plants are food and animals are food. Certain elements essential to life: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are recycled over vast spans of time so that life can continue on over eons. If these elements were just used up and not recycled, Earth would eventually become barren, like the planet Mars.

Ecosystems continually provide us with food, fresh air, fresh water, climate control, top soil for growing crops, erosion control, and flood control. We cannot put earth's ecosystems in jeopardy without putting ourselves into jeopardy – our ability to feed ourselves, our ability to provide shelter, our ability to breathe, and our ability to pass on our genes and our culture. We don't understand enough about how ecosystems work. To damage them is to risk damaging them beyond repair.

Religious preaching always assumes the presence of faith in listeners. So warnings about God's judgement on sinners and how they're going to hell if they don't do X, all presuppose belief in the Judeo-Christian God. But a warning can be just that – a warning. “Get off the road before you get hit by that car!” is a warning but it doesn't require belief in God. You can believe in God, you can be an Athiest. In any case, you'll still want to avoid getting hit by the car.

Who Was Ayn Rand?

2008-05-06T01:50:00.000-07:00

In 2006, on the eve of the subprime mortgage crisis, Alan Greenspan left his job as chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, after twenty years of service. In a speech given a year earlier, Greenspan had praised the rise in the subprime mortgage industry as the right kind of market response for the financial services industry.

Alan Greenspan was a close friend of Ayn Rand, and a close follower of her philosophy. Vitriolic conservative talk show host, Rush Limbaugh is also a follower of Ayn Rand. So is arch-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Republican Presidential contender Ron Paul. Who was Ayn Rand?

She was perhaps the most influential American intellectual in the late twentieth century. Ayn Rand was a novelist and a philosopher. Her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, was considered the second most influential book after the Bible in the United States in the 1990's. This book, first published in 1957 is a perennial best seller. Part novel, part philosophical treatise, Atlas Shrugged is about a group of industrialists who set up a free market economy based on the gold standard, in a hiding place deep in the Rocky Mountains. The industrialists break away from the United States economy because excessive government regulation is stifling their creativity.

Ayn Rand was born in Russia and lived through the Russian Revolution as a teenager. She went to University in the Soviet Union and then moved to the United States in the mid 1920's. Rand hated communism and believed passionately in individual rights, private property, and laissez-faire capitalism. She was an militant atheist and also hated Christianity. She died in 1982, but her influence in American politics lives on.

Rand's philosophy, which she called “Objectivism”, is based on the idea that humans can gain objective knowledge from reality. Morality is objective if it can be based on those values that serve to preserve and enhance one's life. She argued that selfishness rather than altruism was correct morally because “man's own happiness is the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” Altruism was wrong because it was “suicidal”, it encouraged people to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others.

Ayn Rand believed that capitalism is the most ideal form of human society because it gives individuals the right to pursue their own interests through ownership of private property. She disagreed with any government interference with the economy, and argued that government should not be in the business of helping others. Only individuals should help others based on their own free choice. In 1964 she opposed the civil rights act because it violated individual rights to private property.

The fatal flaw in Ayn Rand's philosophy is her epistemology. Knowledge cannot be objective because objective reality is not attainable by humans. All human knowledge is fallible and thus open to improvement. Any model of reality will be fallible because we have to oversimplify reality in order to fit things into concepts. Declaring one's own ideas infallible leads to excluding competing systems of thought, some of which may be valid. This means that you close yourself off from any evidence that might weaken or disprove your position. Then the question is, how can you learn from experience?

The “free market” is an abstraction, a conceptual model that exists because of certain assumptions, such as perfect knowledge and perfect mobility. These assumptions are violated by the real world. Hence, basing moral philosophy on them leads to critical errors.

No matter what happened to the American economy: The Great Depression, the saving and loans fiasco, the subprime mortgage melt-down – all three of which followed the crucial relaxation of financial regulations – people like Alan Greenspan refuse to see the evidence that unregulated markets lead to financial disaster.

Followers of Ayn Rand's “Objectivism”, like Rush Limbaugh, waste a lot of time denying the existence of global warming and denying that there is a problem with anything but environmentalism itself. The evidence says otherwise. By closing their “objective” system from contrary evidence and ruling out most forms of government intervention they have helped to drastically reduce the tools available to build capitalist solutions to environmental and financial problems. The economist's toolbox will remain empty until and unless there is a real change in the American political system.

Accepting our Limits: It's the Adult Thing to Do

2008-04-28T18:25:00.000-07:00

An adult understands limits better than a child. Sometimes a little boy will eat too much candy because he doesn't know that his body can only stand so much sweets at any one time. Or he will stay up so late that he cannot function the next day. Children aren't able to anticipate limits and control their own behaviour because they have undeveloped prefrontal lobes in their brains. Adults know better, which is why they commonly impose limits on their children's behaviour.

When it comes to global limits though, it seems that economists are a lot like little children. They believe that we can keep consuming the earth's resources for as long as we like, in contradiction to the fact that the earth is a finite planet.
There is a concept called “substitution” which economists use to demonstrate this possibility. When the price of one resource goes high enough then all we have to do is substitute another that's similar enough to do the job. If we run out of cheap oil, we use ethanol, or methane, or hydrogen. If we run out of wild salmon, we raise genetically modified salmon in saltwater “farms”.

Economists can use all the fancy mathematics they want to prove their sustitution theory. The fact is, when we lose the wild salmon we will have lost something irreplacable.

Isn't it interesting that life itself has to live within certain limits else it won't survive. If you take three of the most common elements: Carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen – these three elements in various combinations, determine life's basic limitations.

Not enough carbon dioxide and the earth's temperature would be too low for life and water, which is part hydrogen and part oxygen, would always be frozen. Way too much carbon dioxide and the earth would be too hot for life, while all the oceans would boil away.

We know that plants require a certain minimum amount of carbon dioxide in order to grow, while all animals require a certain minimum amount of oxygen in order to breathe. If there was too much oxygen, then all the forests in the world would burn up in a matter of weeks.

Why is there just the right amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? We don't really know the answer to that question. We may well take breathing and livable temperatures for granted but the fact is, we cannot substitute anything else for them.

That's why I say economists are like little children. You tell them that if we keep on with business as usual it will have rather negative consequences and they will tell you, in free, unregulated markets demand will always equal supply, and the movement of prices will most efficiently change behaviour without denying people free choice.

The price may be right in terms of demand meeting supply, but if the costs of our activities to the earth's ecosystems are not taken into account in the price, then allowing free markets to do their thing will run us up to those limits too fast for comfort.
Because corporations with their huge economies and budgets have much to lose if certain government action is taken, they are interested in directly influencing the political process. Their powerful influence has caused the U.S. and Canadian governments to hinder and delay the essential assessment, planning, and action that needs to be done in order for our civilization to survive this crisis.

The idea that we can keep on growing, heedless to any limits is pure wish fullfillment and a sign of an overly childish trust in free markets. As adults we know we are responsible for more than just our own wants and desires. We are also responsible to our children and to future generations. If we continue to ignore earth's physical and biological limits we will end up running into these limits at full speed. We don't allow children to drive automobiles because of the destruction they could cause. If we want human society to sustain itself we have to grow up and take responsibility for where we're going and how we're going to get there.

Reaching Our Limits

2008-04-20T22:57:00.000-07:00

It's not easy being green these days. It can be frustrating when there are just too many things to write about. Things that seem to be happening all at once.

Take the news last week. Food riots throughout the Southern Hemisphere. The global price of staples like rice doubled in a very short amount of time and doesn't appear to be coming down any time soon.

The higher price of food is probably due to a number of factors: Crop failure in Australia and other places due to drought probably caused by global warming; There are almost 1.4 billion Chinese and more of them are eating meat as China rapidly industrializes; Industrial farming of beef and hogs required more grain than the grain we grow for human consumption; All kinds of industrial farming have sharply increased costs due to the increase in the price of oil; And, misguided Bush Administration subsidies have encouraged American farmers to grow corn for ethanol instead of for food.

The process of industrialization has reached the point where we are screwing up the weather. That means that humans have reached their first global limit. We've so polluted the atmosphere that the huge climate system of the earth is responding to us. The earth is finite and the problem with limits is that once you reach one, the others are not far behind.

Industrialism , which has so far lasted about two hundred years, has always been fuelled by cheap supplies of coal and oil. Oil is getting too expensive because global demand is overtaking supply; Coal is costing too much in terms of air pollution and environmental destruction; Biofuels are crowding out food production.

There are no other cheap and easily available sources of energy that can replace fossil fuels. You cannot run an automobile or a tractor on solar or wind power. Nuclear plants take decades to build and require huge expenditures.

With the development of the Chinese and Indian economies industrialism has become a global reality and it is quickly exhausting the world of cheap resources. Sure, there is still plenty of oil, coal, iron, fresh water, etc., but the bigger the global population gets, the faster it needs to extract resources, and the more expensive it becomes to extract those needed resources. And the more expensive resources get the more expensive food gets.

What to do? If we make the world more equitable we can slow population growth, because, up to a point, people who have more income have fewer babies. And we can also slow the growth of chronic hunger the same way. To avoid collapse we could slow down and stop the growth in demand for the world's finite resources by stopping industrial growth. Then we could hook economic development onto using what we already have more intensively and efficiently.

If we recycle everything we can maintain society without the need to extract more resources from the ground. Japan was able to keep its economy in a steady state for three hundred years, during the Edo period. If we learn to conserve energy we can decrease our carbon dioxide emissions and slow down global warming before it runs away from us.

Everything is connected. The fact that we have already caused the global climate to heat up means that we will soon run out of slack with other systems of resources. Better by far, to anticipate reaching our limits before it happens, then allowing ourselves to overshoot and cause civilization to collapse permanently.

There are so many things to be aware of. Economic and environmental systems are highly complex. What I am saying here could be wrong. But when we press infinite demand on a finite world how can we not avoid coming up against limits eventually?

Meet Prince Rupert's Green Team

2008-04-15T08:21:00.000-07:00

Last September Premier Gordon Campbell signed the BC Climate Action Charter together with the Union of BC Municipalities. The city of Prince Rupert was one of the cosigners of the Charter. The Charter recognizes that global warming is a real and growing threat to BC and as a consequence that each and every community in BC needs to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and become sustainable.

Premier Campbell and those who drew up the Charter realized that reducing GHG emissions and becoming sustainable are not things that should be done in isolation. They understand that it is vital that all levels of government work together to share best practices in this endeavor.

A year ago, the Prince Rupert municipal government convened a green advisory task force to assist in developing and implementing a GHG emission reduction plan. This task force or "Green Team" is made up of a cross-section of Rupertites, representing business, professionals, the environment, academia, and our municipal government.

One of the tasks that the green team took on was to bring the city's Official Community Plan (OCP) in line with our commitment to the BC Climate Action Charter. Changes to the OCP include: a commitment to reduce GHG emissions, making Prince Rupert more transit, pedestrian, and bicycle friendly, and the movement towards LEEDS efficiency standards for all publicly funded buildings.

The green team has advised the city in the hiring of a planning firm, Sheltair, which is currently drawing up the GHG reduction plan. The plan should be completed and presented to city council sometime in late May. But the green team's most important task, consultation with the public, has only just begun.

It is important that even before the plan is implemented we start the process of public consultation. At each stage of the planning process we need public input so that we can learn what will work and what won't. Ultimately it is public participation that will make or break the transition to a greener Prince Rupert.

BC is a beautiful place to live. In Prince Rupert we have everything that's good about BC and little of its downside. No congested freeways, no urban sprawl and no pollution. A magnificent harbour and one of the greenest container ports in the world thanks to efficient sea connections to Asia and railroad connections to eastern Canada and the continental USA.

Our region is uniquely poised to capture several forms of clean and renewable energy in the coming years - wind, hydro, and tidal power. If we the people, the city, and the province can work together to build a sustainable society we will have harnessed the far more important human energy of cooperation and mutual trust in the bargain.

The green team would like to invite the public to our first Community Engagement Workshop. This will be an informal get-together, with snacks and refreshments, where the public can meet members of the green team, take a look at the draft of the Sheltair Plan, get a brief glimpse of what other BC communities are doing, and get a chance to make verbal or written suggestions of their own. The workshop will be held on Saturday, April 19 from 11 AM to 1 PM at the Civic Center, in the Raven Room and on Tuesday, April 22 from 7PM to 9PM at the Civic Center, in the Judo room. Please come out and meet Prince Rupert's green team.

The Risk Society

2008-04-08T01:37:00.000-07:00

Under Mont Blanc in France, the European Union is building “The Large Hadron Collider”, the latest and most expensive in a series of particle accelerators designed to plumb the mysteries of physical nature. The bigger size - 27 kilometers in circumference, and bigger bucks - $8 billion, means that atoms can be smashed together at greater speeds and energy.

A legal suit was brought against this project by a group of seven people in order to stop it from going forward based on the argument that particle collisions at these previously unachieved energy levels could unleash uncontrollable chain reactions that could destroy the earth. Far fetched? Most physicists think so, but they do allow that it is, in fact, a theoretical possibility, although a very small one. One of the seven: Walter L. Wagner, had brought a similar legal suit against construction of an accelerator in Brookhaven New York nine years ago. The suit was dismissed, the accelerator was turned on, and as a Times reporter said: “ We're still here.”

Still, that fact doesn't mean it couldn't happen the next time does it? It's the scientists overseeing the creation of this monstrosity that are the ones who will try and determine what the actual risks are. In fact, because of gaps in theoretical physics, no-one really knows what the risks are. Perhaps this “experiment” will help us fill in these gaps. Do you feel better now?

Doesn't the fact that they want to see this thing built so they can smash things up and see what neat new particles are created mean that there is a conflict of interest here? Maybe their insatiable curiosity about what really happened during the “Big Bang” makes them less risk averse than your average citizen.

It reminds me a little too closely of science fiction - the recent movie - “I Am Legend” and the late Kurt Vonnegat's book “Slaughterhouse Five”. Both are stories about scientific experiments that go horribly wrong on a global scale.

About twenty years ago a German sociologist named Ulrich Beck wrote a prescient book called The Risk Society. Beck claimed that modern industrial society has undergone a fundamental change since the Second World War. We have gone from a society organized for the production of goods to one that is increasingly organized in response to its production of risks.

Of course, human society has always known natural risks such as disease, crop failure, earthquakes, floods, etc, but in the twentieth century, for the first time, our lives have come to be dominated by man-made risks. Nuclear meltdowns, nuclear winter, chemical poisons like DDT and dioxin, CFC's and the destruction of ozone, and that grandaddy of all – global warming, to name a few.

As Beck points out these man-made risks share certain characteristics: They are caused by advances in technology. The consequences of these risks are increasingly global, affecting everyone everywhere. Hence they cannot be easily escaped by having a large income or living in gated communities. The nature of these risks is often neither visible nor perceptible to the victims. This implies that they can only be understood through scientific expertise, but at the same time it is science and technology that has created the risks in the first place.

Finally, much of these risks are unknowable and incalculable. They may or may not play out in the future so we can only guess at their extent or severity. According to Beck, society has been turned into a laboratory where scientists cannot really determine the risks until they actually go ahead and perform the experiments on all the rest of us. It's no wonder then, that the priviliged status of science is under attack from many quarters.

The science of “geoengineering” has led to proposals that global warming could be counteracted by dumping mirrors into space or having jet planes spray sulfer into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight away from the earth , and to dumping tons of iron filings into the ocean to increase ocean fertility and thus increase the global absorption of carbon dioxide. There could be catastrophic risks involved in doing these things but we won't know what they are unless we are stupid enough to try them out.

The question of the development and employment of technologies is being eclipsed by questions of the political and economic management of the risks that utilizing these technologies creates. Indeed, certain political forces are deeply involved in denying these risks because of the perceived costs of eliminating them. We see evidence of this in the Bush administration's suppression of climate science and the Harper government's decision to ramp up tar sands production in the total absence of public input.

We really have no choice but to become more involved as citizens in risk prevention since the politicians and the scientists are more than happy to use us as their guinea pigs in their quest for knowledge and power.

Get Em While They're Young

2008-04-01T01:25:00.000-07:00

Bicycles were popular when I was a kid. I remember that the high schools in Vancouver had a lot of bicycle racks and they were nearly full to capacity every weekday. Now, what I see in highschools today is just the opposite. Even if a school does have a bike rack there are hardly any bikes there.

What happened? My guess is that over the years, more and more parents thought it was safer to drive their kids to school. So kids fell out of the habit of riding to school and then they stopped using bicycles to get from A to B.

Things are now reversed, so that more adults than kids use bicycles as a means of transportation. Sure, lots of kids have bicycles, but they use them more for tricks and dirt riding, than anything else. Riding your bicycle to school is considered uncool because it suggests that you're family is too poor to afford a car, or that your parents don't care about you enough to drive you. This is just a conjecture on my part, but the fact is, that for whatever reason, kids are not using bicycles as a means of transportation as much as they used to.

I find this unfortunate because if we want our society to become more sustainable we've got to start with our children. Many adults are lost causes when it comes to persuading them to bicycle more and drive cars less. They've gotten too used to the comfort and the convenience of automobiles. It's too late to teach an old dog new tricks. But children have open minds and they actually enjoy being outside if they're given the opportunity.

The bicycle is really an ideal means of transportation for a child. A bicycle doesn't cost a lot, it's easy to ride, it keeps a person fit, it's something they can do together or alone, it gives one a sense of independence and yet it does not require a lot of responsibility and upkeep the way a car does.

Plus, if you start em young, then they are more likely to use a bike when they grow up. And that's the key. Start em young. I'm dedicated to using a bicycle as a means of transportation, but I've been doing it all my life since I was six. I can see why other adults can't do what I do because they may be out of shape and not used to being exposed to the weather. But I enjoy it in all kinds of weather. I love the fresh air, and the burst of muscular energy that it takes to climb a steep hill. I love flying downhill with the wind whistling by me.

When I was a kid, I associated a bicycle with independence, with exploring the world, with meeting and beating every challenge. Those positive associations with childhood made it easy for me to choose biking over driving as an adult in spite of all the pressures to conform. If children associate bicycling with positive experiences than they will be more likely to bike instead of drive as adults.

Let's face it, people are not likely to use their cars less and bicycle more because of worries about global warming and carbon dioxide emissions. Switching from driving a car to riding a bicycle is not like switching to another brand of toothpaste. It's a major lifestyle change. You've gotta be really motivated, and abstractions like global warming are not that motivating.

Not all of us can make the switch from automobiles to bicycles. But if we encourage our kids to bicycle and have fun doing it, they will be in a much better position to make that choice when they become adults. As for how to make cycling for transportation more cool and attractive for teenagers, I really have no idea, but I'm sure that someone out there does. Times change and things come around again and maybe one day in the not too distant future bicycling to school will be all the rage.

Poisoning the Sacred Headwaters

2008-03-23T23:13:00.000-07:00

What have Tar Sands extraction and Coal Bed Methane (CBM) extraction to do with one another? They both involve contamination of ground and surface waters. Sometimes Tar Sands oil is deep underground and the way to extract the oil is to inject steam down the well, to heat and liquify it enough to bring it to the surface. But injecting water under heat and pressure also allows heavy metals and hydrocarbons to leach out of the surrounding rock and clay and they can contaminate groundwater as well as come to the surface with the oil. In CBM production huge amounts of pressurized water are pumped up from deep underground where it can contaminate ground and surface water. But more on this later..

225 kilometers downstream from the Tar Sands is an old Hudson's Bay Company post called Fort Chipewyan. Most of the population of Fort Chipewyan is made up of a combination of Cree, Dene and Metis people. Many of these people live off the land, catching fish, hunting moose and muskrat and picking berries. Lately their ability to hunt and fish has been compromised because the fish have aquired a taste, “like gasoline”. and the moose are reputed to contain high levels of arsenic.

A couple of years ago a doctor raised a big stink about the elevated death rates from rare forms of cancer that were turning up in the Fort Chipewyan population. Alberta Health and Wellness and Health Canada have since sluffed it off as statistical anomalies. They've even driven the doctor who raised the alarm out of the province. After all, this kind of publicity makes it harder to recruit much needed workers for the Tar Sands.

Methane is in big demand these days because conventional gas wells, the kind where they drill a hole and pressurized gas comes to the surface, are drying up. Oil extraction of the Alberta Tar Sands is putting a huge demand on natural gas because it is used to heat the sands and extract the oil. As a result there is a lot of pressure for oil companies to come up with more methane from unconventional sources such as Coal Bed Methane (CBM).

In the states such as Montana and Wyoming, and the provice of Alberta tens of thousands of CBM wells have been dug and many ranchers have had to have their water trucked in or have had to abandon their land because their well water became toxic. We're talking water that had so much methane in it that you could light it on fire.

It was oil companies like Halliburton that first developed the technique of “fracing”, (pronounced “fracking”) or fracturing coal beds to release the methane that was bound to the surface of the coal. In the fracing process a toxic brew of chemicals which may include diesel fuel, benzene, propylene glycol, napthalene, aromatics, etc.,are pressure injected along with explosives to break up and force millions of fissures throughout the coal bed.

The exact mixture of fluids is kept a proprietary secret by each oil company. This makes it difficult to trace where the chemicals come from when they turn up in someone's water supply. But the possibility that these fracing fluids could contaminate groundwater is often denied and minimized both by the oil companies and by compliant governments like Alberta's .

In 2001 Vice President Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton, personally intervened to exempt CBM fracing from regulation under the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act. Now why did he do that? You would think that he would know more about this subject than most people. The problem is that he is supposed to represent the people of the United States, not the oil companies.

What does that matter to us here on the BC coast? North east of here is a place they call the Sacred Headwaters, where the Skeena, the Nass, and the Stikine Rivers have their sources. But there happens to be a big coal bed deposit right underneath the Sacred Headwaters area. The company Royal Dutch Shell wants to start exporatory drilling there for methane. And the BC government has given the go-ahead along with generous subsidies for Dutch Shell to build a road into the disputed area.

The only thing that's been holding Shell up is a road blockade by elders of the Tahltan tribe. Indians! Why do they always block progress? They don't live in the Sacred Headwaters. They just go up there to hunt. So what if the bad water from the CBM wells poisons the caribou and the moose and makes their fish taste like gasoline. They can always buy their meat from Safeway.

With tens of thousands of gallons of contaminated water being pumped out of each CBM well everyday and up to ten thousand wells that could be dug we are talking about a lot of bad water running into these watersheds.
Water runs downhill, and whether all those chemicals are pumped to the surface or contaminate the groundwater, they will eventually get into our food supply.

I don't know what those Indians in Fort Chipewyan are griping about. If they just stopped hunting and fishing, and started drinking bottled water, then they wouldn't die of cancer. Alberta Tar Sands needs our gas and the United States needs the Tar Sands oil and if we happen to live downstream then we should just get used to it. Let's thank Premier Campbell for so generously inviting the oil companies in to develop the Sacred Headwaters. Yes, please write Premier Campbell a letter or e-mail expressing your appreciation of his efforts.

Earth Hour

2008-03-17T00:44:00.000-07:00

What is an hour? - A division of time, an hour is 1/24th of a day. It's something that has been created by humans - a representation of reality that has become useful to the way we live, although it has no reality outside of human consciousness.

Imagine 8:00 in the evening of March 29 in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on the international dateline. As this hour begins it's progress around our globe it first touches the Fiji Islands, where at 8:00 PM the people of Suva, Fiji's capital turn off their lights and turn down their electricity for one hour. Then it reaches New Zealand where the people of Christchurch follow suit. When this hour touches down in Australia it will have been a year since the city of Sydney first celebrated Earth Hour.

One year ago 2 million people in Sydney celebrated Earth Hour, when they turned their lights off for one hour. In just one hour they managed to decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 25 thousand tons from what it would have been otherwise. Why did they do this? Maybe it was because Australia is one of the places in the world most affected by global warming, due to the increasingly severe drought occurring there.

It has been known for more than a hundred years that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that increasing amounts of it in the atmosphere would lead to an increased mean global temperature. For the last two hundred years our society has been producing more and more carbon dioxide as a result of our exponential increase in fossil fuel consumption. But it's only in the last twenty years that scientists have begun to see evidence of an accelerated rise in the Earth's mean temperature.

Global warming has become history's greatest threat to humankind. But we have brought this on by our ever increasing consumption of fossil fuels. At first the thought that we are all responsible for accelerated climate change is difficult to swallow. Indeed, many of us have not been able to accept the truth of this and so have wasted themselves in pettiness and denial.

Others may recognize the problem of climate change, but feel powerless to do anything about it. But the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. If we can make a dent in global greenhouse emissions in one hour then we can know in our hearts that each and everyone's efforts count for something.

Now Earth Hour reaches other Australian cities: Melbourne, and Perth. And they turn off their lights and turn down their electricity. Earth hour comes to Manila in the Philippines, then to Tel Aviv, Israel, then to Copenhagen, Denmark. It crosses the Atlantic Ocean and reaches the Canadian City of Toronto. The lights of Canada's greatest city darken for one hour.

Finally Earth Hour reaches Prince Rupert. We become part of a massive human wave beginning in Fiji and lasting 24 hours. Everyone who participates becomes a part of something bigger. Everyone of us can make a difference in how much energy the world consumes in just one hour.

Everyday 8:00 PM comes and goes – but the hours change, the days change, and the seasons change. The same hour goes around the Earth again and again but the events of this hour and this day will resonate long afterwards.

Become part of this human wave to stop runaway global warming on Earth Hour and turn off your lights and reduce your electricity for one hour from 8:00 to 9:00 PM on March 29.

Please come downtown and join in the official festivities as parts of Third ave. will be blocked off for unplugged music and fun times from 7:30 - 9:30 PM.

It's about responsibility isn't it? What we create interacts with the Earth we live on. If our creations are mucking things up then eventually we need to do something about it 24/7. But in the mean time, let's start with Earth Hour.

New Sins on the Block

2008-03-13T03:48:00.000-07:00

The Roman Catholic Church has now recognized polluting, genetic engineering, drug abuse, abortion, pedophilia, and the widening gap between rich and poor as mortal sins. These are add-ons to the ever-popular "seven deadly sins": pride, envy, lust, anger, greed, sloth, and gluttony.

Mortal sins are sins of grave matter where the sinner is fully aware that the act is wrong but does it anyways. The act of committing a mortal sin cuts off the sinner from God's grace - if left unreconciled, mortal sins result in eternal punishment in hell.

I can't help feeling deeply dissatisfied with the idea of sin. One the one hand, it's fun to say: "Don't do that. It's bad. You better say you're sorry." On the other hand, it focuses too much on the negative. Sometimes, when you tell people: "Don't do that. It's bad." it makes it more attractive and they want to do it more. I'd rather that people get excited about what they can do to make this world a better place than to fret about what they shouldn't do.

Even Jesus pointed out, more than once, that focusing on people's sins leads to hypocrisy. As the story goes, it becomes hypocritical to single out individual sinners because everybody is a sinner.

Concentration on eternal punishment, and confessing your sin and getting absolution from a priest are distractions from actually doing the right thing.

Many protestants teach that, due to original sin, humanity blew it, and there is nothing that we can do on our own that will reconcile ourselves with God. But all is not lost because if we become receptive to God's will we can open ourselves to God's saving grace.

Mohammedans have an official list of seventy sins, among which are slandering a chaste woman, not praying, and charging interest.

Some Hindus believe that you can nullify the effects of sin if you chant the name of certain Hindu gods enough times. These gods are obviously starved for attention.

The whole idea of "sin" appears to engender an institutional world of lists and classifications: of the severity of the sin; of God's escalating punishments; and of our increasingly elaborate means of avoiding them. What a colossal waste of time and effort

If you take the problem of pollution and the gap between rich and poor - there is plenty that we can do to turn the situation around. Telling people that they are "sinners" just gets people's backs up. Confessing one's sins is indulgent and ineffective.

Stop worrying about how mortal a sin it is you've committed and commit yourself to lowering greenhouse gas emissions and helping to eliminate extremes of wealth and poverty!

When I see a "new" list of sins it makes me question the credibility of the concept. If you had to make a new list, that means that the old list was incomplete. Did these new sins suddenly come into existence? Because if people didn't know they were sinning, then they weren't really sinning were they? Only now it's supposed to be a sin because some Official Church Guy says it is. Give me a break!

Polluting the environment and enriching yourself at the expense of impoverishing others is wrong. But calling it a sin is lame and ineffective. It's a poor and roundabout way to motivate good behavior.

Huckabee's Second Favorite Book

2008-03-03T23:26:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, when someone asked the Republican Presidential candidates what book they would bring to the White House if they could only bring one, Mike Huckabee, the Southern Baptist minister and former governor of Arkansas, spoke in glowing terms of the book How Should We Then Live,by Francis Shaeffer. Huckabee, the most popular Presidential candidate among evangelicals, has won the Republican Primaries in some of the southern states, but overall he's a distant second to front runner John McCain.

You can certainly tell a lot about a person by the books he recommends and How We Should Then Live is no exception. When I heard that Huckabee was praising it my ears perked up because I've got that book and I've even read it. The author, Francis Shaeffer is considered by many to be one of the leading intellectual lights of the religious right. How Should We Then Live was conceived in 1974 and published in 1976 along with a film version. I picked up the book for 50 cents at a garage sale about five years ago. The DVD sells for $60 but it can be rented out.

The book is a brief but comprehensive survey of art, theology, and philosophy from the time of the Roman Empire to the 1970's. The subtitle of the book is a good indicator of what it contains: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. According to Shaeffer, who is a Calvinist, the pinnacle of Western civilization was the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century. Why? Because "...they (the reformers) took seriously the Bible's own claim for itself - that it is the only final authority."

Shaeffer's thesis is that Western Civilization has been declining ever since because of the corrupting influence of humanism. By "humanism" Shaeffer means the doctrine that "human reason alone can think out the answers to the great questions which confront mankind." "At its core", he says, "the Reformation was the removing of the humanistic distortions which had entered the church."

What bugs Shaeffer, Huckabee, and all the other Fundamentalists about humanism? Shaeffer does a good job of summing it up: "unless there is an absolute, these things are lost to us: morals, values, the meaning of existence, and a basis for man." "If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict - we are merely left with conflicting opinions."

While I admire Shaeffer's clarity I take issue with his conclusions. If there is absolute truth, how do we know it's absolute, and how do we know that his interpretation or anyone else's is the right one? Just look at all the numerous sects of Christianity, all based on different interpretations of the Bible.

I believe that knowledge is provisional. We can approach the truth using scientific method, but we can never know if something is absolutely true. We need to listen to conflicting opinions because there is always the chance that we are wrong. Believing in absolute truth is psychologically satisfying for some people, but it is very dangerous for political systems. Fundamentalists like George W. Bush, believe that they are following God's plan and therefore they ignore criticism and bypass legal checks and balances in order to get their way.

If I know the "absolute truth" then those who disagree with me are dangerous heretics who should be put down. It becomes OK to torture people if I think that they are terrorists and they might have information about terrorist plans that they don't want to tell me willingly. If I'm privy to the "absolute truth" then how can I make a mistake? Nor do I ever need to be corrected or to learn anything new.

The fact that George W. Bush's most loyal supporters were evangelicals is pretty strong evidence that they have no monopoly on truth or morality. And the fact that evangelicals support Huckabee show that they haven't learned much from experience.

BC's Carbon Tax

2008-02-26T06:33:00.000-08:00

A year ago Premier Gordon Campbell painted himself green, following in the footsteps of the California Governator. Campbell had committed to slashing BC's greenhouse gas emissions 30% by 2020. Would he succeed? Was he really serious? These are the questions we've been asking ourselves for the past twelve months. Now the other green shoe has dropped and Campbell's finance minister Carol Taylor has presented a “green budget” that includes one of the first real carbon taxes in North America.

The BC carbon tax, effective July 1, will start at $10 a metric ton. That's 2.4 cents a litre, in case you're wondering. By 2012 the tax will rise to about $30 a ton. This is not an increase in taxes it's a “tax shift” because the government plans to compensate taxpayers for the lost revenue by doling out $100 to every citizen and decreasing income tax across the board.

Both the Sierra Club and the Mining Association of British Columbia are in favour of this budget. Marc Lee, senior economist for The Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, a left-wing think tank, said “ certainly the best budget I've seen coming out of the liberals.” And the president of the BC Chamber of Commerce, John Winter said: “I think we were nicely surprised.” Can this be happening? Talk about politics being the art of the possible.

For someone who used to despise Gordon Campbell, I have to admit I'm impressed. But I still don't trust him. After all he hasn't done anything about the billion dollars in subsidies that BC gives the oil and gas industry every year. And he's pouring one billion dollars into highways while at the same time giving only a pittance - about a third as much for public transit.

Instituting a carbon tax, is an excellent first step on the road to combating climate change. And it doesn't hurt that business and the environmentalists are on side right from the beginning. A carbon tax has the potential to bring the price of fossil fuels in line with their contribution to global warming. Once prices reflect reality on the ground then the market can do its work of nudging people in the direction of conserving energy, buying more fuel efficient cars, or driving less and using alternatives more.

“When you walk, you save money, you save yourself, and you save health care costs,” said Gordon Campbell last week. If I didn't know any better I'd swear that Campbell has been reading my newspaper column.

The dark cloud on the Horizon is Alberta. Premier Stelmach and Prime Minister Harper are dead set against a carbon tax because it would stall the growth of the tar sands. Harper made a clandestine deal with the United States in 2006 to ramp up tar sands production fivefold by 2020. His hands are tied by his foolish agreement, so he has no intention of actually lowering greenhouse gas emissions (GHG's).

A fivefold increase in tar sands production would yield an estimated 140 million tons of GHG's per year. That would be about three times what Premier Campbell plans for all of BC by 2020.

Harper's environment minister John Baird is pedalling something called “carbon intensity targets.” which is a public relations scam for making the appearance of lowering emissions without actually lowering emissions. Kind of reminiscent of tobacco companies suggesting that “light” cigarettes were better for your health. Carbon intensity targets are also favoured by Premier Ed Stelmach and U.S. President George W. Bush. Do I detect a pattern here?

The vacuum of leadership on global warming in the United States has led to governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger taking the initiative to lower emissions through emission caps and stricter fuel efficiency standards for cars – all of which have been mightily resisted by the Bush administration.

The same vacuum of leadership exists in Canada but Premier Campbell has taken a solid first step in the fight against global warming. Other provinces are sure to follow. The dynamics of Canadian politics is changing and the greatest threat to national unity now comes from Alberta and not Quebec.

Ballroom Babies

2008-02-19T01:07:00.000-08:00

I just had a look at the latest in reality dance shows: “Ballroom Babies”. about prepubescent children in an Australian dance competition where the object is to be the best ballroom dancing couple.

Dancing and music are about people enjoying themselves. And the more often people actually get out and play music or dance the greater their enjoyment.

Just watching people sing and dance on television eventually becomes boring. That's why reality dance shows are obsessed with winning. Like a heroin addict who develops a tolerance to his drug so that he has to keep taking bigger doses, television programmers are always upping the ante by emphasizing the drama – the highs and lows, the losses and the triumphs, and the more risque subjects. But this obsession with “winners” and “stars” denigrates all the rest of the participants who were eliminated.

This isn't the the case in real life. If we go to a dance every week we can enjoy ourselves in spite of our imperfections because we get involved physically. Meeting people and getting to talk are added benefits.

Think for a moment about the neurological disorders of autism and attention defecit. ADDH kids and autistic kids love watching TV. But in real life they have major difficulties with other kids, their siblings and their parents. It's harder for them to get a sense of reward from paying attention to other people.

An autistic baby doesn't respond to facial expressions. But a normal baby appears to catch our smiles. The autistic brain gets no reward from interaction with people.

A normal person feels pleasure from talking and interacting with other people. That's because our brains are wired that way. We grow to love our immediate family, in part , because of the pleasure we get from being with them over a period of time.

But television short circuits our reward system and lets us feel pleasure with no effort on our part. What happens when your brain is wired differently is that television provides that reward if you can't get it from being around other people. It constantly changes scene and subject so that it keeps you from getting bored. It does all the work for you.

They say it takes 10,000 hours to become a world expert. If you devote three hours a day for ten years than you can become a recognized expert. Devoting time to a subject increases our mastery. But people aren't going to devote time to a subject if they don't get pleasure from it, and,or, they spend their time watching television. Do we really need to spend our lives watching TV shows about how winners eliminate their competition?

I hear there's a trend today for parents to let their babies and toddlers watch TV. They say it' educational. In fact, this practice is taking away vital experience from the formative years in childhood.

Children's play is physical. It can be risky and it can be messy. But it is vital because it shows children how to derive pleasure from doing things and interacting with other people. By contrast, the more television they watch the more easily they are bored because they have less ability to derive pleasure from just living.

When we spend our time doing things we get better at doing things and we get a deeper, more satisfying appreciation of the world. This, in turn, makes it easier to enjoy spending time with families, working, and playing sports. What I don't like about the “Ballroom Babies” is that the pleasure that one can get out of dancing is drilled out of these little children so that they can win a contest. What a shame.

Prince Rupert Needs to Clean Up its Act

2008-02-12T08:29:00.000-08:00

I had a talk with Harbourmaster Gary Paulson last week. He did a good job of convincing me that we have the greenest container port around. Sailing times from the Far East to Prince Rupert are up to three days shorter than to the big Pacific ports like Long Beach in California. Plus our port utilizes the railroad ( a more efficient form of transportation than trucks) to a much greater extent than other ports. There are no long lines of idling trucks waiting for containers as in Long Beach, no congested highways, no bottlenecks.

According to our harbourmaster, there is another reason that our container port can be considered green - its wastewater treatment facility. Prince Rupert's new Container Port has a sewage treatment plant that treats greywater and blackwater from the port and puts out water into our harbour that is clean enough to drink. It even has a rainwater separator that separates the oil residue from the rainwater runoff.

When it comes to wastewater treatment Fairview Terminal clearly outshines the city of Prince Rupert, which has absolutely no sewage treatment at all. Nothing but seven aging outlet pipes that drain untreated sewage straight into our harbour. And if you think that that sewage always stays on the bottom think again. If we really want to be considered a green port Prince Rupert needs to clean up its act.

If you look at what we have in our city for separating oil from runoff and oil from bilge water it's pathetic. When it rains, oil from our roads goes straight into the harbour. The two waste oil containers that are situated near the water - one at Fairview Marina and the other at PetroCanada on George Hills Way, are constantly overflowing and guess where the overflow ends up?

Prince Rupert has stringent rules forbidding ships from dumping wastewater, which it should have, but the irony is that many of the big cruise ships that visit in the summer have state of the art wastewater treatment that produces cleaner water than what we have in our harbour.

The cruise ship industry, that a decade ago was considered the bad boys of waste disposal, has come a long way. Now in partnership with an outfit out of Victoria called Peninsula Wastewater Services Ltd. the cruise ships that visit our city send their recyclables to the local recycling depot, donate reusable items such as clothes and tablecloths to local charities and pay the Prince Rupert landfill to truck in their garbage.

According to Keelie Barr, Port Coordinator for Peninsula, there are plans afoot to build a small oily water separation plant for Prince Ruperts' waterfront - something that I think the city should encourage and expedite as much as possible. When it comes to wastewater treatment and recycling the new container port and the cruise ships are leaving Prince Rupert in the dust. If we want to go green we need to follow in their footsteps. As a port city we ought to be consistent. If we are going to call ourselves a green port we need to live up to that standard across the board.

Television's Dark Vision

2008-02-05T01:19:00.000-08:00

The 2004 U.S. Presidential race cost Americans $693 million dollars. The 2008 election is projected to cost at least twice as much. In contrast, the 1988 election that put Bush the elder in office cost just 59 million dollars. If this trend continues, in a few decades presidential elections are going to cost more than health care for Americans.

Most of that money goes for TV ads. But how much can one tell about a candidate from TV ads? At the same time that American political parties have been spending an increasing amount on TV ads there has been a trend towards fewer and fewer people voting in elections. There is something ominous about these two trends, if you ask me. And the common denominator is television itself.

I've already talked about the decline in civic engagement from the mid 1960's to the present, chronicled by Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone. According to Putnam, most of that decline is due to the passing of the generation that fought in the Second World War. But Putnam also points out that the next strongest cause of the decline in social and civic engagement is television.

The trend is clear, the more television that people watch the less they are involved in social and community life. Part of this disengagement is due to time constraints. If one is spending time watching TV then one has less time to pursue activities outside the home. But the same cannot be said for other activities such as reading newspapers, which is positively correlated with civic engagement.

Television was first introduced to a mass audience in the 1950's. By 1959, 90% of Americans had a TV. Since then the amount of time people spend watching TV has steadily increased, until by the 1990's Americans were watching on the average four hours of television a day.

Not only is amount of TV watched correlated with social disconnection, the greater the exposure to TV during childhood the greater the degree of disconnection. My parents didn't get a TV until I was about five, and during the fifties there wasn't a lot to watch. I did watch a lot of TV in my adolescence but I was never wedded to it. But the generation after me, Generation X, grew up with the presence of TV from the moment they were born. That's a big reason why Generation X'ers both watch more TV and are less socially engaged than baby boomers.

“Television is the cheapest and least demanding way of averting boredom”, says Putnam. It engages our attention without requiring the effort of actually being engaged. But what makes TV so attractive is exactly what makes it so potentially dangerous for democracy. It's no coincidence that television plays such a sinister role in 1984, George Orwell's famous novel on Totalitarianism.

As Putnam says, TV privatizes leisure. It makes us feel engaged with events and people without actually having to leave our houses or spend time with anyone else. The problem is that if not enough people are involved and volunteering in civic and political organizations then democracy itself becomes staged - a virtual reality like everything else on TV.

I'm not suggesting that we throw away our TV's but we might consider watching less. And, instead of just turning it on to see what's on we ought to be more purposeful about what we do watch.

Spending time outside the home, whether volunteering, playing in a local band, serving on a comittee, playing sports, learning a new subject, visiting friends, or just going for a walk is ultimately more satisfying than watching TV. The strictly private environment of television is an impoverished environment. Getting involved in social activities has a wide range of benefits for both ourselves and society as a whole. The thing is it takes effort and courage to get involved. But the rewards are more profound and can last a lifetime.

In Bed With Coalbed Methane

2008-01-29T19:56:00.000-08:00

Methane is close to twenty-five times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. However, when methane is burned it releases less carbon dioxide than burning oil. It's a cleaner fuel than gasoline but the problem is that certain ways of extracting it are very dirty and contribute too much greenhouse gases. Coalbed methane extraction involves drilling wells into coal seams. It involves a lot of wells, many more than for conventional oil and gas drilling. And when it's extracted this way, 70 to 80% of the methane escapes into the atmosphere where it contributes to global warming.

They told people in Wyoming, in the Powder River Basin, that there would be only 200 coalbed methane wells. Then they built fourteen thousand more. Now they plan to drill a total of fifty-one thousand in the next few years. This issue is the one thing that has united environmentalists and bedrock republican ranchers in Wyoming.

In order to free the methane from the coal seams water has to be pumped out from deep underground. This water is often saline and there is a lot of it. Each pumping station pumps about fifteen thousand gallons of waste water a day. Multiply that by the number of wells and you begin to see a problem. It can ruin a lot of farmland.

Then there's that other problem – our legal rights or lack thereof. In the United States and Canada landowners have no right to refuse drilling, construction, or extraction of oil and gas on their lands. It's not like the Beverly Hillbillies - our rights to surface land don't extend to subsurface mineral rights. A great nuisance for property owners in oil fields but a disaster for property owners who live near coalbed methane wells, where the constant roar of pumps and compression stations drowns out any peace and quiet.

There are very few coalbed methane wells in BC but there are proposals to drill in three of the far corners: on Vancouver Island, in the southeastern corner, and in the Peace River Country. Royal- Dutch Shell would like to drill a lot of wells right here in the northwest corner in a place they call the Sacred Headwaters. Royal-Dutch Shell plans a modest 14 wells to start, but if they drill productive wells there could be as many as ten thousand in the near future.

The Sacred Headwaters are the headwaters of the Skeena, the Nass, and the Stikine Rivers. This is a pristine Wilderness with Moose and Caribou , where chinook salmon spawn. This is the traditional hunting grounds of the Tahltan first nations people. For three years the Tahltan have been setting up blockades, and sitins to try and stop Royal-Dutch Shell from building roads into their territory. It's gotten to the point that Amnesty International has set-up a campaign to help the Tahltan's fight off big oil.

The BC government has consistantly denied their rights to be consulted. Concerns about the ill effects of drilling of coalbed methane have to be brought to an official sounding body called the BC Oil and Gas Commision which was created by the Campbell government as a front for fossil fuel companies. Ask the Mayor of Fernie whether they were properly consulted before coalbed methane wells were drilled nearby.

Regulations for coalbed methane are so streamlined that there is no requirement for environmental assessment. After all each one of these wells takes up only about a football field worth of land so how much environmental impact can it make? But that conveniently overlooks the sheer number of these wells and the invasiveness of the huge network of roads, wells, pipelines, and compression stations that will be required.

The people in Smithers and Telkwa raised such a ruckus about coalbed methane that the company proposing to drill in their area withdrew their plans. The Tahltans are not so lucky but the Canadian Constitution is on their side. They have a right to be consulted if this development impacts their rights to hunting and fishing. But what about everyone who lives downstream? Shouldn't we be concerned about the risks to water, fish habitat and private property also? The Skeena is our lifeblood. Northwest residents should have a say in how this land is developed. We owe it to our descendants.
If you would like your voice to be heard please write or e-mail Premier Campbell or checkout the active campaign at www.skeenawatershed.com.

Bowling Alone

2008-01-21T22:51:00.000-08:00

My wife tells me not to write a book review if I haven't finished reading the book. Ordinarily, that's good advice. But after reading about a third of Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, I want to tell everyone about the issue that this book discusses. Why do more people bowl alone now, when thirty years ago they would have bowled in leagues? Why has membership in service clubs, like Lions and Rotary, been declining since their heyday in the fifties and sixties? A large part of his book is devoted to describing and understanding this trend of decreasing civic involvement in the last half of the twentieth century.

Americans have lost what Putnam calls "social capital" in the last fifty years, as less and less people volunteer to serve in community organizations, less people get out to vote, and less people run for office. Think of how a community benefits when people pitch in to help. And the more that people get involved in community activities the higher the level of mutual trust there is.

Trust is a product of social capital. Just as we need physical capital - (land and things) - and human capital - (education and experience) - we need social capital in order for society to work, because it is mutual trust that lubricates social life.

A society characterized by generalized reciprocity is a society where people volunteer to help others without the aim of immediate reward. I do something for you today, trusting that eventually you or someone else will return the favour.

Without reciprocity people act strictly in their own self-interest. We trust our neighbours less and less. When people are more distrustful they are less likely to cooperate with others. Society does not work as efficiently and we end up hiring more lawyers, more police, and more private security.

What caused the peak in civic engagement in the mid-sixties, and what caused it's subsequent decline? Putnam examines the usual suspects: broken families, greedy corporations, and decline in church attendance, but finds that they don't account for much of the change. The two factors that really make the difference are TV and the passing of a generation.

It's obvious why TV has contributed to the decline in social capital. People nowadays watch a lot more TV than they used to. Time spent watching TV is time that is not spent volunteering or attending PTA meetings.

It was my parent's generation, the generation that grew up during the depression and fought in the Second World War, that had the highest rates of civic involvement, trust in others, voting, and volunteering. Growing up in the depression, they learned that people could not get by without help from others. Then World War II gave them a chance to work together for a common cause. Those two momentous events made my parent's generation the most involved in civic society in history.

My generation, the baby boomers were much less engaged in civic society. We distrusted authority. Some of us wanted to drop out of society, most of us wanted to "do our own thing". The next generation, the one we call generation X, was even more disconnected and inward looking than the baby boomers. And so it goes. Now my parent's generation is in their seventies and eighties so they have gradually wound down their engagement in social activities and organizations. Hence the continued decline in social capital.

Is there any way that we can reverse this decline? The part of Bowling Alone that covers possible remedies is the part I haven't read yet. But I would venture to say that Global Warming could be this coming generation's Depression and World War II combined. The reality of climate change requires a tremendous outpouring of effort and coordination from all the people of the world.

It took time for the Americans to enter the Second World War. Not everyone realized the danger Adolf Hitler held for humanity. While Americans entered the war late, they still managed to pull together with the Russians and the rest of the Allies and defeat the Nazis. It won't be long before the United States and Canada join the rest of the world and work together to stop runaway global warming.

Let's encourage alternatives to cars

2008-01-15T01:26:00.000-08:00

Prince Rupert could become the greenest port city in North America but we've got a long way to go. Last september city council signed on to the BC Climate Action Charter, an agreement between BC municipalities and the BC government to commit to lower greenhouse gas emissions (GHG's).

So how do we get there? One of the cheapest and easiest ways to lower GHG's is to make alternatives to automobiles more attractive. Prince Rupert's compact size has a lot going in its favour because it makes walking and cycling much more practical. But a town's layout can also inhibit alternatives. Rupert has a lot of hills, which means that people who might considering cycling don't bother.

If Prince Rupert had a designated bicycle path along the waterfront, where it is relatively flat it would go a long way towards encouraging cycling. When cycling is perceived as easier and safer more people are willing to try it.

Our town's compact size also makes people drive more responsibly. I'm impressed by the courtesy and safety of Prince Rupert's drivers. This city is relatively safe for cyclists and pedestrians, especially compared to bigger places like Prince George and Vancouver.

We can't change our topography or the weather so that probably puts a limit to how many people are into travelling by bicycle, but it should be less of a factor for walking. The city ought to make walking more attractive and convenient. Besides lowering GHG's, walking and cycling make a city safer and quieter and the more people that do it the better the general fitness of our population.

We could start by requiring that all new developments and subdivisions have sidewalks on both sides of the road. Over the longer term, sidewalks could be widened and put on both sides of all of our streets. I admit I enjoy walking on the irregular surfaces of some of the city's older sidewalks but I imagine it makes it very difficult for seniors to walk without the risk of falling.

lThe new winding sidewalk on the north side of George Hills Way has made walking a more positive experience for local pedestrians and given people walking their dogs a bit more leeway as well. It would make a difference to tourists coming off the cruise ships if there was a sidewalk on the other side of third Ave. east of McBride.

Street lighting could be improved, making walking and cycling after dark easier and safer. Perhaps the city can get a grant to help defray the cost of installing more energy efficient and maintenance free LED type streetlights.

We could narrow some of our residential streets and put in traffic circles to slow car traffic making residential areas quieter, safer and more attractive for walking. Just like on 4th Ave. E. Even without the view walking along 4th Ave. is much more pleasant than walking on 5th Ave. because of the lighter traffic.

As for that other alternative to cars - a city bus, utlized to capacity, can take the place of up to forty automobiles. The city ought to do a survey in order to find out how we could make taking the bus more convenient and attractive. Our compact size and higher per-capita density is one of the main reasons that our bus system works so well here. Our bus system is great but it could be made even better if we could find out how to increase ridership. A good public survey could tell us whether extended hours, extended routes, or some other factor could significantly increase bus ridership.

City businesses could support alternatives to cars by rewarding employees for not using company parking spaces. There are probably many more things that our businesses and municipality could do to foster alternatives to cars. And they would eventually pay off in a greener healthier city.

If anyone else has ideas about how we could encourage alternatives to cars please step forward. Write letters to the editor, go to city council meetings and speak up. Join a climate action group. If you would like to use the buses but don't, let us know why. The city might be able to do something about it.

Prince Rupert could become the greenest port. It wouldn't cost a lot. All it would take is good planning and the active encouragement of alternatives to burning fossil fuels.

slavery and fossil fuels

2008-01-07T23:22:00.000-08:00

The nineteenth century global economy was a like a small scale version of today's global economy. Trade in slaves, sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cotton were the drivers of global economic growth. But the growing trade in the above mentioned non-human commodities was first made possible by slave labour in plantations in the tropics and the American South.

In our modern global economy, cheap fossil fuels have taken the place of slaves. Industrial farming, convenient travel by automobile, and the transportation of commodities by trucks and tankers is all made possible by fossil fuels.

The nineteenth century movement to abolish slavery, called “Abolitionism” was entirely based on the moral inhumanity of slavery. Slowly but surely, the idea of buying and selling human beings, of separating members of slave families, of punishing slaves with whippings and other forms of torture, came to be seen as morally unjustifiable.

The twenty-first Century movement to stop runaway global warming is based more on science than on morals. Science tells us that the unchecked growth in fossil fuel consumption is leading to accelerating global warming. Science also tells us that this warming has catastrophic potential for all humans because of the increased probability of drought, forest fires, flooding and destruction of biodiversity.

Because the case for preventing global warming is largely based on science it has a much better potential for gaining widespread agreement among the world's nations. It took fifty years for the British abolitionist movement to halt slavery in the British colonies, where it finally ended in 1833. But it took closer to a hundred years and a wrenching civil war for the United States to abolish it.

It's instructive to examine the difference between British and American abolitionism. In both countries slave owners and slave traders stood to lose profits from abolition. But in Great Britain slaveholders were a small society of men who owned plantations in the British colonies, mostly in the Caribbean. In the United States slavery was the basis of the Southern states' economy. When American abolitionists first aimed a direct mail campaign at the South in the 1830's, the Southern reaction was swift and decisive. The entire white population of the South rallied around the cause of slavery, intimidating and physically expelling anyone who dared to disagree.

As a voting block, the South was able to stalemate and paralyse all three branches of the federal government whenever attempts to deal with the issues of slavery were made. It took the election of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, to end the stalemate, but the Southerners refused to accept the result and quickly declared war on the Northern states.

There is no doubt that the economies of Great Britain and the United States were harmed by abolition. Slavery, was, after all, profitable. But the majority of English and Americans were persuaded that the moral result was worth the cost.

In our modern global economy, it is the richest corporations – the oil corporations like Exxon and Shell that stand to lose the most from our taking action to stop runaway global warming. The fact that they are so profitable is relevant here because their huge profits are being used to subvert political systems all over the world.

Some of the worst examples of this are Canada and the United States where so much oil money is flowing into the coffers of the Republican and Conservative parties that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Harper have made it their policies to block the kind of national and international action necessary to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Bush has one more year to make mischief, and there's a chance that Harper's Conservatives could be defeated in a spring election. One of our priorities going in to the next federal election should be to put a stop to the undue influence of corporate money on politics. We don't even have ten years to turn things around, let alone fifty. There is no justification for putting the human race at risk for the sake of oil company profits.

"Go" - contemplating the oriental mind through a board game

2007-12-28T02:59:00.000-08:00

I'm not usually impressed by the effect of TV on children. But here's an example of something really exceptional. Consider Japanese comic books, they are called "manga" and sometimes they are made into Japanese TV animation, called "anime".

The manga and anime titled "Hikaru no Go" became so popular amongst Japanese youth that it singlehandedly reversed the decline of the oriental board game called "Go" in Japan.

The Japanese, who dominated the game for more than a thousand years, had been eclipsed by the South Koreans by the end of the Twentieth Century. By the 1990's go had become an old man's game in Japan. But the story "Hikaru no Go" which came out in manga and anime in 1998 changed all that. Suddenly tens of thousands of Japanese children wanted to learn how to play this old person's game. And once the anime series was shown in other countries it popularized go around the world.

" Hikaru no Go" is about two boys. One is the son of a professional go player. The other is a boy who is possessed by the spirit of a medieval go player. You laugh, but this TV series changed the course of Japanese culture.

It must have touched a nerve in Japan, a country that valued its past but was quickly discarding it at the same time. There is something about the game of go that deeply reflects the oriental mind.

Go is said to have originated in China, where it is called "Wei Chi", about four thousand years ago. A bit more than one thousand years ago it was introduced to Japan where it caught on very quickly.

The western game of chess is the other great game of skill. Even though chess originated in Aisia, it's character now reflects the western outlook. A game of chess represents a single battle, an all or nothing struggle to capture your opponent's King.

There are many battles in a single game of go, some of them going on simultaneously. The object of go is for each player to capture as much territory as he can.

In chess there are many different pieces, each with different functions and properties, with all of the pieces already set on the board at the beginning of the game.

Go is maddeningly simple. It starts with an empty board. Very "Zen". Go pieces are called stones and they are all identical except one player uses black stones and the other uses white stones. Once a stone is placed on the board it stays there and doesn't move unless it's captured.

What makes a go game so intricate and even more complex than chess is the go board. In go the stones are put down on the intersections whereas chess pieces occupy the squares. The chess board has 64 squares but the go board consists of a grid of nineteen by nineteen lines that forms a total of 369 intersections. That makes for many more possible moves than in chess.

A computer has defeated a chess grandmaster but no computer has come close to matching the skills of a professional go player.

The best go players play with an economy of effort. Each move they make does many things at once: extending territory, defending one's stones from capture, capturing the opponent's stones, etc. Certain well placed moves will have more effect in the latter part of the game than when they are first played.

I first learned to play go in my grade eight science club. I've played off and on, but basically neglected it. But all that changed after I watched a dozen or so episodes of "Hikaru no Go".

You can play go on the internet, but it's more fun to play an opponent face to face, snapping the pieces onto the board, rather than having the computer do the work for you.

There is a go club in town. One of the great things about go, which is not true of chess, is that players of unequal strengths can play as near equals by giving the weaker player extra handicap stones. Games are played at the Prince Rupert Public Library almost every week. If you already play go, or would like to learn please come by. For more information you can call me at 622-2716 or email cjustice@citytel.net.

Wolves? Oh Deer!

2007-12-17T23:27:00.000-08:00

The problem in Prince Rupert is that is that we've let the deer take over here. They're feeding off our gardens but because we don't hunt them there is a predator vacuum and that's what's drawn in the wolves.

We don't have a wolf problem on Kaien Island, we have a deer problem. There has to be a balance in nature between predator and prey, otherwise things get out of kilter. Without predators the population of deer rises until it becomes unsustainable, stripping the forest of undergrowth and leading to a population crash from starvation and disease.

I'm not a hunter, but I've been thinking about this problem for years. I'm a gardener of sorts and I've had deer eat my young raspberries and blackberry plants, strip the leaves off my four year old pear tree, and strip the bark off one of my apple trees.

For years I've had revenge fantasies. For instance: What if we sent all the women and children off the Island and all the menfolk make a sweep from one end of town to the other to flush all those varmints out and shoot them? I like the idea but I hazard a guess that it would not be a very popular idea. Besides, there's municipal rules about discharging firearms in Prince Rupert.

Still, the thought of so many gardens being eaten up by the deer and so many deep freezers begging for venison gets to me. Besides, if we don't allow any hunting on Kaien Island, the wolves get the wrong idea. These wolves need to know who's the top predator around here, otherwise they get too cocky and start hanging around where they don't belong.

I've heard of one person, there may be more, who catches his deer in his yard at night, using a flashlight and a hammer. This is illegal by the way - it's not real hunting. But in my opinion, more power to this guy.

In BC hunting any closer than 100 metres from an occupied residence or building is illegal, but that still leaves the greater part of this Island. The municipal bylaw makes it illegal to discharge a weapon but as Jeff Beckwith pointed out in a recent letter to the editor, that could be amended to exclude the discharging of a bow.

Why not allow bow-hunting in areas outside of town? Bow hunting is safer for bystanders than firearms because it is only effective within 30 metres of a deer. A hunter with a shotgun can kill a deer from a kilometre away so the potential for a hunter to not recognize human bystanders is greater. Plus bow-hunting is more difficult than hunting with a shotgun because you have to get a lot closer to the deer, so the deer have a better chance too.

We've got a local source of meat. Why can't we make use of it in a safe way instead of letting the wolves take over.

Climbing out of the Trash Vortex

2007-12-11T05:07:00.000-08:00

A lot of my own motivation for recycling comes from guilt. (Catholics do not have a monopoly on guilt, that's for sure.) It really bothers me that my household produces so much garbage. Anything that I can recycle I hold back in various overflowing bins and containers. And sometimes these piles of recyclables hang around for a long time before I get around to bringing them out to the recycling depot.

I notice that there is a new local recycling service in town called "eco-management". They will pick up two clear plastic garbage bags full of recyclables per resident every other Saturday for 16 bucks a month. So, for all you other guilt ridden people out there who, like me, are procrastinators, I recommend this service. People out there who don't recycle because it is inconvenient, now's you're chance.

My wife pointed out to me that where she was living, in Sitka, Alaska, the city charged resident's less if they put out less garbage. Now there's an idea - the city could provide incentives like this for people to recycle. Because if more people in Prince Rupert recycle, the landfill will take longer to fill up and the city would save money.

But there are more important reasons to recycle. The amount of garbage we produce is directly proportional to our patterns of consumption. For years our rate of consumption has been increasing without limit. The vast majority of raw materials that go into manufactured goods are discarded. Much of what we consume is thrown away within a short time. Then there is all the plastic packaging.

In the North Pacific Ocean there is a great clockwise gyre formed by four ocean currents. This gyre forms an area of ten million square miles. In the middle of this circulating ocean is a huge floating cloud of garbage called the Pacific Trash Vortex. The center of the gyre is an attractor of garbage because it is relatively stationary but the prevailing winds all blow into it. Most of the garbage is plastic because plastic does not biodegrade and it is light enough to float. Instead, plastic photodegrades. Ultraviolet light from the sun slowly breaks the plastic down into smaller and smaller pieces. These pieces of plastic get mistaken for food and end up in the stomachs of sea birds and other marine creatures. Nice. If we don't get them with crude oil spills there's always the products that we manufacture out of the oil to finish them off.

Here on land, a lot of discarded electronic products or "e-garbage" contain toxic heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Each TV contains several pounds worth of lead and lesser amounts of other toxic metals In two years the United States Federal Communications Commission will have mandated a massive shift from analogue TV's to high definition digital TV. This means that up to 300 million analogue TV sets are going to end up in garbage dumps, all at the same time. What a toxic metal nightmare that will be. And for what? So that everyone can see more detail on their television screens. Apparently, this is the result of lobbying from the electronic manufacturers. Can you say, "planned obsolesence"? It's the same with all the cell phones and computers that are obsolete within a couple of years after purchase.

In Prince Rupert CityWest's cable service is going digital in January. What does that mean in terms of the number of TV's that will end up in our landfill? Here's an area where the city could be proactive and organize some sort of e-recycling so that the landfill doesn't get swamped with old TV's. Our garbage is threatening our health and the health of future generations.

Market Prices Should Tell the Truth

2007-12-02T18:46:00.000-08:00

Market prices should tell the ecological truth. When prices “lie” about nature they lead us to devalue and destroy the environment, which ultimately supports our existence. Market prices “lie” when they don't take into account the costs of pollution and resource extraction. More than a trillion dollars is spent globally every year on activities that harm the environment. The amount spent on protecting the environment is a ridiculously small fraction of this.

Every time a country sells or leases the right to clear-cut forests at bargain prices it is encouraging environmental destruction. Every time a country subsidizes the extraction and production of fossil fuels with tax write-offs it is encouraging runaway global warming. As it stands, tax policy and economic subsidies are overwhelmingly tilted toward the liquidation of resources and increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

Last January President Bush said: "We'll leave it to the market to decide the mix of fuels...” Bush likes to tout the free market and future technological breakthroughs as the solution to environmental problems. But both of these “solutions” don't exist in reality. The free market has never existed because every known economic system is guided by government tax and spending policy. Every legal system of property rights favours certain uses of capital over others.

And future technological breakthroughs don't exist here and now where it really counts. There are existing technologies that could significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions and lower the liquidation of resources compared to what we are doing now: railroads, bicycles, clean alternative energies like solar, geothermal and wind power; better insulation, increasing energy efficiency... the list is a long one. Sure, there could be new technologies out there, but there is no guarantee that any new technology will pollute less or have less environmental consequences than what we already have.

Waiting for the “Free Market” or technological breakthroughs to solve our problems is a mug's game. It's really about delaying significant change. It's really about pleasing the fossil fuel corporations . It's really about keeping the status quo, because a certain class of people benefit from things the way they are.

Last week the Australian electorate kicked Prime Minister John Howard out of government. Like Bush he was a global warming denier, and a delayer of action on climate change. But the negative effects of global warming: extreme droughts and more destructive tropical storms, had become too difficult to ignore for most Australians so they gave him the heave ho. The new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, plans to be more proactive on climate change.

Clean air, water, and earth are common property because they benefit everyone. When corporations pollute or take the tops of mountains without having to pay compensation they have an incentive to keep destroying public property.

We could shift our tax system to make polluters pay the real cost of pollution and resource extractors pay the real cost of the resource. Taxes on pollution and carbon emissions could be increased while income taxes could be reduced. This would see the cost of so-called “cheap energy” like coal increase in relation to clean energy. This would make alternative energies more competitive and encourage more investment in that sector of the economy, while discouraging dirty energies like coal and tar sands. And the decrease in income tax could free up human ingenuity to solve our greatest problems.

Future generations have no say in the way we are running our economies and liquidating natural resources, because those who are young or not yet born have no money and no votes. But they will be the ones most affected by the legacy that we leave behind. If we “let the market decide”, without changing the taxes and incentives that we now have in place, then nothing that the market does will alter the course toward our own extinction.

Smart Growth for Prince Rupert

2007-11-27T00:00:00.000-08:00

Nature provides Prince Rupert with its greatest assets: A sheltered deep water port and proximity to the Skeena River.

You can think of both Prince Rupert Habour and the Skeena River as a kind of infrastructure. The deep water and the network of Islands make this port viable. The Skeena supports multiple uses: salmon runs and the wildlife that feeds on the salmon; a transportation corridor which made it easier to build a railroad and a highway; and finally, an efficient drainage system for a vast inland area that only backs up and overflows about once every fifty years. Just imagine if we had to provide the drainage ourselves, what that would cost. Luckily, nature doesn't charge us for the use of it's infrastructure.

We are not as blessed as the Fraser Valley where the flood plains of the Fraser have yielded ideal land for farming. That rich farmland comes from the periodic flooding of the river. The Fraser River is a great infrastructure for farming but not so great for housing in that it costs taxpayers a lot of money to protect their homes and businesses when the river overflows.

In Prince Rupert we don't have any good farmland. Nor have we experienced the unchecked growth of population that happened around the city of Vancouver in the last fifty years. As Vancouver has grown the suburbs have grown and farmland has been taken over by highways, subdivisions, and shopping malls. We may soon regret destroying that farmland, as higher energy prices will eventually convert to higher food costs.

Suppose Prince Rupert were to grow substantially in the next fifty years. Where would we put all the houses? Our town lies on the lower slopes of a mountain so there is not a lot of room to grow. We ought to think about “smart growth” about how we could avoid some of the problems of places like Surrey, where urban sprawl has significantly lowered the quality of life for many residents.

In the past sixty years urban growth has favoured the automobile over people. As a result there has been more and more land paved over for roads and parking lots, more agricultural land lost, more traffic congestion and longer commuting times. Developer's have extended subdivisions farther away from city centers but have not paid the full cost for new roads and infrastructure.

The quality of life in suburbs like Surrey has suffered because these places are not built on a scale for people to get around by walking. Prince Rupert is an exception in that it has a compact size where it is possible to walk from home to work or to school. Part of the friendly atmosphere here has to do with the ease of meeting friends and acquaintances when one is walking around downtown.

If Prince Rupert was to grow in a smart way the city could save on infrastructure costs by increasing the density of neighbourhoods rather than expanding the city's area. Smart zoning bylaws could encourage townhouses, row houses and apartments rather than single family dwellings on big size lots. This would make housing more affordable for low income and families without children. Zoning could also encourage multiple use so that businesses and residents could be in the same area. This would make it easier for people to get places by walking, reducing congestion and making for a better quality of life.

Making walking a viable means of transportation helps make a town safer and healthier. The North American epidemic of obesity is largely due to our over-dependence on cars. We could also encourage the inclusion of parks and greenways as we grow in population. These also improve our quality of life, improving the view, providing bicycle paths and walking trails. As an added benefit, natural areas of woods and field absorb more water than streets and driveways causing less runoff and saving the city money that it would otherwise have to spend on added storm drainage construction.

Adopting smart growth principles in Prince Rupert's Official City Plan would save the city money in the long run and lead to a better quality of life.

Play's the Thing

2007-11-19T21:54:00.000-08:00

My favorite summer sound is the sound of children playing outside. You can tell by the sound of their voices that they are having fun. I'm lucky that I live in a neighbourhood where kids go outside to play.

When children play they lose themselves in what they are doing. They are not playing for external goals as most of us are at work. Unlike work, play is self-motivated. That's why it's fun and work often isn't.

I've been reading two books which both argue that play is crucial for healthy psychological growth. In, The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness, Ed Hallowell argues that the ability to play is a key indicator of adult happiness. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, (pronounced: Mehigh Chicksentmehigh), In his book, Flow, argues that the ability to control the flow of experience originates from childhood play.

Nowadays we have many ways to enjoy ourselves so why focus on play? Almost everybody enjoys watching TV and many people like computer games and video games. It's certainly fun and you can lose yourself in these pursuits, just as children can in play. But, children who watch a lot of TV are missing out on the challenge and interactions that ocurr frequently in play. Video and computer games are more interactive than TV, and they can be challenging, but children are missing the use of their imagination when they spend too much time on the computer. They are also depriving themselves of the physicality of play: the experience of our own bodies in motion and the richness of face to face encounters - seeing another's facial expressions and body language; hearing the tone of their voice and the timing of their conversation, and much more.

When children go out and play they create a world with its own rules, straight out of their memories and imaginations. The rules may seem anarchical or nonsensical to adults but they ensure just the right amount of challenge - not so challenging that one is continually frustrated and not so easy as to be boring.

Have you ever seen children get a big expensive toy at Christmas time and end up having more fun playing with the box than with the toy itself. They make, castles, and forts, and towns out of these boxes. Dr Hallowell says: The skill of play, of being able to make creative use of time, no matter what you are doing, is the skill that lies behind all discoveries, all advances, and all creative activity.

Adults have lots of responsibilities, which means often having to do stuff that they don't want to do. We can let children play and have fun as much as possible before they need to take on the pressures of adult life. Sometimes kids are given too much structured time with sports and lessons and not enough unstructured time where they can make up their own activities and play. Sports and music are supposed to be about playing but often they are too goal directed and cease to be fun. According to Dr Hallowell, seventy percent of children stop playing sports by the time they turn fifteen.

The purpose of youth sports should be having fun. If you make victory or discipline the first goal you can kill the fun... The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present.

Playing gives us access to the infinite resources of our imagination. What we most enjoy when we play gives us an idea of the kind of person we can become. According to Hallowell, play teaches skills of problem solving and cooperation. It teaches the ability to tolerate frustration and the "all important ability to fail"

But play does a lot more: according to Csikszentmihalyi, people who can enjoy themselves in a variety of situations have the ability to screen out stimulation and to focus only on what they decide is relevant for the moment, just as we are able to lose ourselves in play by focussing on the object of play and ignoring everything else. Studies of survivors of extreme conditions show that what all these survivors had in common was the ability to transform bad situations into subjectively controllable situations. They were able to take a very bleak objective condition and focus on the minute details, some of which led to the discovery of hidden opportunities.

According to Dr Hallowell, it is crucial for happiness that you feel in control over yourself and your environment. But what people enjoy during play is not so much the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations. According to Csikszentmihlayi, it's not enough to be happy to have an excellent life, the point is to be happy while doing things that stretch our skills, that help us grow and fufil our potential. When we do this we feel good about ourselves because we know that we have done something we couldn't do before. We get an inner feeling of accomplishment which raises our self-esteem. This experience is a powerful motivator. And that's why play is so important.

In play children naturally match skill to level of challenge. The experience of play is enjoyable because we are so easily able to focus our attention on the object of play and screen out anything extraneous. The problem with TV and computers is that they do this filtering out for us so we aren't actually excercising any control over our experience while we are engaged. When we stop watching the TV we don't have the memory of ourselves doing anything. Play and our memory of playing connect us to our imagination - the most important resource we have.