From Argentina: prepping to set sail for Antarctica with Students On Ice
Students On Ice“Always think about where you are.”
At just this moment, I’m in a wood-panelled hotel conference room with a small stage at the front. Outside the windows are the slanted streets of Ushuaia, Argentina, a cozy port town nestled in amongst the awe-inspiring mountains of Tierra del Fuego. The people in the rows of chairs around me have arrived over the last few days from more than a dozen countries from around the world, and Geoff Green, the utterer of the words above, is giving an orientation talk, our group’s first official get-together. From the moment he begins speaking to us, Geoff exudes the sincerest enthusiasm for the mission of his organization, Students On Ice. We are here, in his words, “to use these amazing parts of our world as classrooms.” These amazing parts of the world being its north and south polar regions; the classroom in question today being Antarctica.
Always think about where I am: I am planning to take this motto very seriously. About a week and a half ago I learned of the existence of Students On Ice, a Canadian organization that runs yearly educational expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic for students in university or high school. (In 2009, Nicholas Hune-Brown wrote here about SOI’s trip to Canada’s Arctic.) At the same time I learned of their willingness to take me along on their Antarctic University Expedition 2011 — and now here I am, a little bewildered to find myself in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, preparing to leave tomorrow on a ship headed for the most alien and unwelcoming land on the planet. But as far as I have gotten to know the fifty-seven students and twenty-nine professors, scientists, experts, and staff who are coming along, I will be making the trip in delightful company.
For the rest of February, watch this space for updates on the icebergs, lectures, people, and penguins I will be encountering.
Tracing the genesis of evangelicals’ environmental views
The evangelical Christian is a perennial bugbear of the environmentalist movement. In videos like the above — in which a representative of the US Congress cites the books of Genesis and Matthew as proof that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming cannot happen — we see a stereotype that is particularly familiar from American politics. Congressman John Shimkus (R-IL) not only shows casual ignorance of the issue he’s discussing (suggesting that the Earth is in fact a “carbon-starved planet,” and that if anything we could use more of the “plant food” CO2), but gives only religious reasons for his conviction that everything is going to be all right. To those who share his views, disastrous climate change is necessarily an impossibility — or, if it is happening, it represents the end of the world and the long-awaited return of Jesus Christ. Meantime, God gave humans “dominion” over the Earth, so all that is on it is ripe for our taking and using without a second thought. So goes a typical perception of evangelical views.
It’s horrifying to those on the outside that these ideas could be directly shaping government policy — and not just in the States, but here in Canada, too. However, the sensationalism with which these views are reported gives us a slanted picture of what beliefs evangelicals must hold. Thanks to our natural habit of assuming that groups we don’t belong to are uniform, and the eye-catching scariness of the views described above, our collective impression is that climate skeptic propaganda like the recently released twelve-DVD set Resisting the Green Dragon (in which “radical environmentalism” is a “false religion” designed to control the world) represents the views of all evangelicals. Thankfully, that is not so.
In recent years, a growing environmental movement has sprung up among some evangelicals with a very different interpretation of their religion’s relationship with the planet. These advocates of “creation care,” like the Evangelical Climate Initiative, see the “dominion” of Genesis as a duty of stewardship toward the world, not an invitation to do as we please with it. As reported by Wen Stephenson of Slate, “the ECI states that human-caused climate change is real, that the impact will be felt disproportionately by the world’s poor, and that Christians are called to take action.” This statement of values has now been signed by hundreds of evangelical leaders, some as prominent as megachurch pastor Rick Warren and World Vision president Rich Stearns. (more…)
In Western Canada, climate change takes the form of a hungry maw
Pine beetle courtesy of Natural Resources Canada/Canadian Forest Service, forest photograph by Eamon Mac MahonIn the April 2007 issue of The Walrus, Patrick White reported on an epidemic of mountain pine beetle wreaking havoc on the forests of British Columbia. The population of the pine-killing pest, a native resident of western North America’s forests, began to explode in 1993, and has laid waste to much of BC’s pine. The infestation is now receding there, moving on to Alberta and the US. Vigilance and luck appear to have kept it from traveling any further east across Canada, but the lesson learned is a hard one: even well-intentioned human interventions in the ecosystems we live in and use can have surprisingly devastating effects.
The size of the beetle epidemic is massive. Between mountain pine beetles and wildfires, BC’s half-million square kilometres of forest actually became a net emitter of carbon in 2002 (PDF download), and are expected to remain so until 2020. What should be a valuable carbon sink instead unleashed the equivalent of 40-60 million tonnes of CO2 in 2007 (although this figure includes the carbon contained in wood harvested during that year). Thankfully, Alberta has learned from BC’s example, mounting a swift response that seems to be holding back the outbreak. The sharp winter drops in temperature that would normally have helped to control the beetles also finally showed themselves over the last few years — although too late to save over 600 million cubic metres of British Columbian trees.
The main reasons for this outbreak’s severity are generally put down to two innocuous-sounding factors: slowly rising average temperatures brought on by global warming, and decades of fire prevention by forest management authorities. The warming has made it ever less likely that winter temperatures will dip low enough to kill the beetles; fire suppression has created forests unnaturally dense with old trees — ripe ground for both severe fires and hungry beetles. It is thanks to the complexity of ecosystems that a few degrees of warmth and an effectively carried out fire-fighting policy could have these counter-intuitively disastrous results. (more…)
From Toronto to Torino, divergent takes on the common problem of the plastic bag
Plastic bags — normally one of the most ubiquitous and least noticeable members of the urban ecosystem — are enjoying an unusual bit of attention right now. As of the new year, the government of Italy has banned stores from buying nonbiodegradable plastic bags; meanwhile, Toronto mayor Rob Ford announced at the end of December that he wants to retire the city’s five-cent fee on plastic bags, less than two years after its introduction.
Some of the controversy surrounding Toronto’s fee is over the fact that it’s not quite a tax: it only legislates that stores charge a minimum of five cents for bags, with encouragement that the revenue be put to charitable uses. But despite that strange feature of the bylaw, it has already had its intended effect: according to Allen Langdom, vice-president for environmental issues at the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors, the fee has already caused a 71-percent reduction in use of plastic bags among Toronto stores that belong to his group.
Toronto and Italy have joined a mounting number of other cities and countries that have taxed or banned plastic bags in recent years. Many have shown similarly speedy and dramatic effects: Ireland introduced a 15-euro cent tax in 2002 (since bumped to 22 euro cents) that reduced its use of plastic bags by 94 percent (and raised milions of euros in revenue); Washington DC instated a five-cent tax in 2009 which immediately cut its monthly bag usage from 22.5 million to three million; China outlawed giving plastic bags away for free in 2008, and despite widespread evasion of the law, consumption of them dropped by 50 percent, saving what is now estimated to total about 100 billion bags. (more…)
Hope and tension as the 2010 UN convention on climate change sputters to a close
© Rosa Merk / WWF (via Treehugger)Among the slew of American diplomatic cables recently released by Wikileaks is a report on a senior US diplomat’s meeting with Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Union, last December. In it, Van Rompuy departed drastically from the EU’s official stance of cautious optimism: he referred to the 2009 UN climate change conference in Copenhagen as “an incredible disaster” which “excluded” and “mistreated” Europe; he expected nothing to be resolved at the 2010 conference in Cancún, or through the multilateral process at all, and instead hoped to make progress at an EU-US meeting in Madrid, which never took place.
With the Cancún conference (November 29–December 10) now drawing to a close, the question still seems to be an active one: will such pessimism be borne out?
In Mexico, the already-embattled Kyoto Protocol — currently the only binding international greenhouse gas-reduction agreement — has gotten into greater trouble. Japan created a stir at the conference by announcing it would not renew its Kyoto pledges once they expire in 2012. But there may be good reason behind Japanese lack of faith in the agreement: (more…)
How our susceptibility to bias makes a big problem out of climate change skepticism
It’s been a discouraging year for proponents of the theory of anthropogenic climate change, a.k.a. human-caused global warming. Since the media sensation of the release of the “Climategate“ emails just over a year ago, science has been put on the defensive in the public sphere. Even while the scientific consensus itself has not changed, the issue has become more politicized than ever before, and skepticism is rapidly mainstreaming: half of the 100 new Republican members of the US Congress deny the existence of climate change, and 83 percent of them oppose enacting legislation to address it. (The Republican-led session of Congress has yet to even begin, but things are already not looking promising.) This could not come at a worse time: last year’s climate conference at Copenhagen was widely considered a disaster, and the current one in Cancún is labouring under the weight of the resultant pessimism.
Those advocates of climate change who haven’t been throwing up their hands in despair have instead been coming up with new outreach efforts intended to educate the public. A group of climate scientists hoping to provide the media with a source of accurate information on demand has just launched its “Climate Science Rapid Response Team”; the Guardian’s website is beginning to assemble an “Ultimate Climate Change FAQ” to authoritatively answer reader questions on the subject. Other scientists run blogs aplenty devoted entirely to attempting to dispel this and similar controversies (like those over evolution, the origin of AIDS, alternative medicines, etc.). So how can all this resistance to the scientific consensus persist? With so much information on hand, shouldn’t we expect everyone to be persuaded by now?
To make an educated guess at the answers requires us to understand why people are skeptical about climate change in the first place. Volumes have been written on the denial of scientific findings, and many popular hypotheses about its causes focus on what the blog Denialism calls “the psychology of crankery” — a search for individual factors, like an inherently suspicious personality, that can explain why one person rejects the mainstream scientific consensus while another does not. That search may yield interesting results, but a very plausible (and perhaps less belittling) explanation is already available to us: most skeptics simply don’t believe that there is a scientific consensus on climate change, or if they do, they are convinced that the consensus was arrived at through politics or even conspiracy and so has little to do with the facts of the matter. Confirmation bias, a simple and universal effect long recognized in psychology, can help account for this stark difference in beliefs. (more…)
Forecasting haze and unhappiness at the United Nations Climate Change Conference
The United Nations Climate Change Conference for 2010 is set to begin on Monday in Cancún, Mexico. Running from November 29 to December 10, this meeting follows last year’s session in Copenhagen, which, despite high hopes, turned out to be a mess. A study released this week suggests that the voluntary emission reduction goals set in Denmark wouldn’t be sufficient to mitigate catastrophic climate change, even if they were met in full (which is quite unlikely). The world is in a much less hopeful, and much more skeptical, state now than it was last year, and there are many hurdles to overcome — so what’s at stake in Cancún, and what should we expect to come out of the conference? In the lead-up to the talks, commentators have had a lot to say:
There is no chance of completing a binding global treaty to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases, few if any heads of state are planning to attend, and there are no major new initiatives on the agenda. Copenhagen was crippled by an excess of expectation. Cancún is suffering from the opposite.
Hot and bothered by Bill C-311′s sudden, extraordinary death on the Senate floor
Bill C-311, the “Climate Change Accountability Act,” was a small but very significant piece of legislation that had been crawling its way through our federal lawmaking apparatus since 2006. It would have enforced on Canada obligations set by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: a return to 25 percent below 1990 carbon emissions levels by 2025, and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The bill’s success would have signalled a dramatic shift in Canadian policy toward climate change — that is, since we bailed on meeting the standards set by the Kyoto Protocol, which we signed on to — and would have given us something to show the world at the next major climate conference, beginning later this month in Cancun. Liberal, Bloc, and NDP MPs passed the law in the House of Commons in April, sending it on to the Senate. Unfortunately, this past Tuesday, in an almost unheard-of political move, Conservative senators abruptly shot it down — before anything like the normal Senate process of debate and evaluation had taken place, with senators who would otherwise have supported the bill not present.
As I am no authority on Canadian politics, and am often horrified at the gaping partisan divide that splits those of the US, I tend to be cautious about leaping to accuse our ruling party of political treachery. But this episode stinks of cynicism and hypocrisy.
The Senate is designed to be a place of sober second thought, where bills passed by the politically charged House of Commons are debated and committees are formed to closely examine their merits. To make it clear what is so extraordinary about what happened on Tuesday: Claudette Tardif, Deputy Head of the Opposition in the Senate, points out that the Senate has only rejected a bill passed by the House of Commons four times in the last seven decades. Each of those bills was subjected to days of committee hearings and debate before being voted down. In Tardif’s words, “That is the history and tradition of a legislative chamber that respects its unelected nature by defeating legislation adopted by the elected members of the other place only after listening long and hard to a great many Canadians.” But Bill C-311 was killed on its second reading, with no advance notice, before ever being taken to committee. (more…)
Introducing “What on Earth,” the newest, greenest member of The Walrus Blog family As long-time readers well know, The Walrus has a lengthy (and award-winning) tradition of covering important environmental issues, both within Canada and worldwide. I’m pleased to announce that, over the next several months, I’ll be building on that tradition here, with the help of the YMCA’s Post-Secondary Youth Eco Internship Program. As walrusmagazine.com’s resident “eco-blogger,” I will be putting together online supplements to environmental pieces from the magazine, profiling people, ideas, and projects that are changing life on Earth (for better or worse), sharing relevant links from around the web, and exploring the environment and humanity’s place in it with more fleshed-out blog posts. (All of which will be marked by the little Earth icon you see above.)
I am neither an expert on environmental policy or science, nor even highly accomplished at charting the ever-changing arithmetic of “green”/sustainable living. But I hope to use this to my advantage: I’ll do my best to report news that is accessible, informative, and enjoyable, and to leave the highly technical content (and the risk of radiating sanctimony) to others whenever possible. I hope you’ll like it, and that you’ll correct me in the comments if I happen to, say, miscalculate my carbon footprint (a mere nine tonnes per year, if my guesstimations hold true).
Weekend links no. 44: recommended browsing hand-picked from The Walrus Blogroll
The Walrus Blogroll was alight this week with reflections on war, commemoration, and the practice of Remembrance Day:
Weekend links no. 43: Recommended browsing hand-picked from The Walrus Blogroll
On Tuesday in America, the Republican party made considerable gains in midterm elections. The Atlantic Wire has a host of roundup posts analyzing the results. Some highlights: “Welcome to the New Political Landscape;” “Now in Power, Some Conservatives Say ‘Take It Slow’ on Spending Cuts;” “How Much Did the Tea Party Really Help the GOP?;” “How Republican Victories Might Start a Science War;” “So, How Did the ‘Mama Grizzlies’ Do?;” and “Why Are More Gay People Voting Republican?”
“In the wake of what is being called the deadliest midterm election in the nation’s history, Washington’s sole surviving politician, Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon’s 4th Congressional District, emerged from the rubble of the Capitol building Wednesday to announce his intention to rebuild the fallen US government.” After an election season characterized by wild punditry and aggressive attack ads, it feels like The Onion is only exaggerating a little. “Last Remaining Politician Must Rebuild Entire Government Following Bloodiest Midterm Election In American History” (The Onion)
Glen Pearson argues that there is little for Canadians to envy in the theatrics of US politics: “To be sure, the collective anger south of the border is real, but I’m not sure the answer to it is ribald characters capitalizing on that anger and dividing Americans even further in the process. It’s a zero-sum game that’s likely to lead our neighbours down a dark road. And while some might delight in the sheer theatrical belligerence of it all, behind all those stage performances lie people in desperate situations, trapped between reformers on the one hand and demagogues on the other.” “On Politics As Entertainment” by Glen Pearson (via Maclean’s)
In the midst of controversy over Stephen Harper’s appointment of business executive Nigel Wright as chief of staff in the prime minister’s office, Duff Conacher examines the Canadian government’s atrocious record on dealing with conflicts of interest as far back as Brian Mulroney. “Loopholes, Lapdogs, and the PMO” by Duff Conacher (The Mark) (more…)
Weekend links no. 42: recommended browsing selected from The Walrus Blogroll
lovegifs via FFFFOUND!“The election story line that is rapidly crystallizing into received wisdom is that our new garbageman-in-chief Rob Ford won a landslide protest vote fueled by taxpayer anger over senseless waste at City Hall. The winds of change are upon us. There’s a new sheriff in town. The revolution will not be televised. Pick your cliché…. [But] the apparent tidal wave of populist outrage may be a good deal less frothy than the result depicted in the mainstream media.” “Ford’s waste collector cometh” by John Lorinc (Spacing Toronto)
“[Calgary] elected Naheed Nenshi, a visible-minority Muslim academic, as its new mayor. Elsewhere in the country, Nenshi’s victory has been greeted with a combination of puzzlement and surprise. Not so in town. Calgary has always seen itself as a young, cosmopolitan, confident city attractive to migrants and eager entrepreneurs. And by this standard, Nenshi is just a typical Calgarian who proved smart enough to get himself elected mayor.” “The real face of Calgary — young, cosmopolitan, confident” (Macleans.ca)
Meanwhile, down south: “We thought it would be impossible to top the 2006 midterm election, with its selection of sex scandals from Mark Foley’s dirty IMs to Larry Craig’s wide stance to the D.C. Madam. We were wrong. Even insiders are saying the 2010 midterms will go down as one of the nuttiest campaign seasons of all time.” “16 Signs the Crazies Have Taken Over” by Elspeth Reeve (The Atlantic Wire)
“When will the Liberals and the NDP get it? Without some kind of accord between these two parties, the country is locked into a kind of political version of the movie Groundhog Day — doomed to repeat the same depressing, cynical, and destructive politics day-in, day-out until our democracy is so damaged that no one will bother voting.” “A Coalition: Still the Only Way Out” by Murray Dobbin (Murray Dobbin’s Blog) (more…)
The Walrus HOOPP Pension Debate
Be It Resolved That Canadians Are Incapable
of Saving for Their Retirement Needs Alone
12 pm, Wednesday, May 30 at
Hart House Debate Room, Toronto
The Walrus Glenbow Debate
Calgary’s Cowboy Culture:
Living Legacy or Just History?
6:30 pm, Thursday, June 7 at
Epcor Centre: Max Bell Theatre, Calgary
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