Roger LemoyneOn June 2, 2011, demonstrators in Tahrir Square rest on the tracks of a tankToday marks the first anniversary of the protest movement that forced Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak (and his attendant thugs) from power. Last year, journalist Paul Wilson, a former editor of The Walrus, travelled to Tahrir Square and its environs to report on the state of the Egyptian people for the magazine. Here, he reflects on what change has come to the country — and what remains to be done.
JULIE BALDASSI: In 1989, you witnessed anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe; decades later, you travelled to Cairo to write about the Arab Awakening for The Walrus (“Adrift on the Nile,” October 2011). Did you participate in these revolutions as an activist, as well as a journalist? Do you think it’s possible, and furthermore, important, to be non-partisan and objective as a journalist?
PAUL WILSON: I think you have to keep those two aspects — the activist and the journalist — separate when you’re on the job, otherwise readers will have a reason not to trust you. It’s something deeply embedded in the culture of Western journalism: there’s a powerful taboo against reporting on something you’re personally involved in. That’s the territory of memoir, not reportage.
But it’s a professional separation, not a personal one. It doesn’t preclude your sympathizing with — or viscerally opposing — a cause you are writing about. When you’re reporting a story as complicated, as far-reaching, and as full of huge, life-changing emotions as the collapse of communism or the Arab Awakening, you need to be open to many different sources of information, because what you’re after — what you’re trying to give the reader — is a complex understanding of what’s happening. Sympathy, the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, is a tool of understanding. So is scepticism. I see objectivity in journalism as more of a technique than an ideal state of mind. In any story of importance, it’s almost impossible to be truly objective. But telling the story is always more interesting and engaging, and probably closer to the truth, if you do your best to represent its different sides. (more…)
Gordon Graff’s planned SkyFarmGordon Graff’s SkyFarm, a fifty-eight-floor behemoth priced at $1.5 billion, was to be Toronto’s ticket to the future of urban agriculture. In 2007, the vertical farm was envisioned to occupy a block of downtown Toronto that has since become home to the Toronto International Film Festival. Even before the global food crisis hit in 2008 and the locavore movement picked up steam, the idea of urban farming was a provocative one. Science fiction and environmental geeks gushed. For green-aholics, the idea appealed to both the inner consumer (“raspberries in February!”) and the environmental conscience (“local, organic raspberries in February!”). The media ate it up. ”Sometimes,” the Huffington Post wrote, “the answer to a complex problem is so simple, so elegant that you wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself.” But four years later, Graff, who is now an intern architect at Toronto’s DIALOG, admits that his SkyFarm will never be built, and many in the media have begun rubbing the stars out of their eyes. The apparent retreat of the ivory-green tower raises the question: is vertical farming still the promised evolution of agriculture, or a case of the life and death of an idea?
Graff became interested in vertical farming at the University of Waterloo, where he wrote a master’s thesis on sustainable urban architecture. He began communicating with Dickson Despommier, a Columbia University professor of environmental health sciences and microbiology who is vertical farming’s biggest cheerleader. With urban population densities and a slew of attendant environmental problems increasing around the globe, the answer, Despommier and his students thought, was to grow farms up, instead of out. “All the water is recycled,” Despommier raves in this publicity video for his 2010 book, The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century. “All the nutrients are recycled. And the only thing that actually leaves the building is the produce.” (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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