Austin

It's a lovely city even in inclement weather. I'm glad I was able to visit and I would love to return but it may be that it's right to remember that feeling I mentioned in my last blog entry. It may be not such a bad thing to know the patterns that are there to form the fabric of one's life.

All those ancient Greek metaphors about weaving make sense to me now. We stretch and strain and try to believe in possibilities and every now and then something does change in a very major way but for the most part things do seem to stay the same, don't they?

And another thing

I really wish people would stop using the word "classy" as a synonym for elegant. There is nothing elegant about being overly conscious of your elevated social class, in fact, it is the very essence of vulgarity.

Same goes for fulsome as a synonym for comprehensive.

If you're determined to be a snob at least get your terminology right.

A few things that have completely thrown me over the edge this week.

1.) They are providing lockers for the homeless in my home town of Victoria BC. Not housing, not help - lockers. This is ostensibly so people who end up homeless do not have to risk losing their material possessions. What's wrong with this? Well, granted, it does make it easier to be homeless, not having to drag around all those reminders of a time when you might actually have had some place to go must be a bit of an emotional relief. Although in my experience of travelling for nine months last year, it is not the stuff you miss, maybe I'm wrong. It renders the most obviously homeless less visible and I am sure that's a great relief to everyone, knowing how they think in Victoria, I am sure it is only a matter of time before people start considering themselves to be virtuous because they don't notice someone's poverty status - "oh, you're homeless?! I had no idea - I see you only as a person and my friend" This attitude is common in Victoria, it's a great insulator.

Victoria - be ashamed. Stop sheltering people's belongings and start sheltering people. They say you can never go home again, honestly, if home is Victoria - who would want to?

2.) The Pope. He says he will go to visit earthquake victims when he has time. Probably after Easter. Oh that's great, I'm sure they'll put the dying on hold for a while and set aside their need to be comforted for a few days - what's a few days in the face of a busy Pontiff's overbooked schedule? For Christ's sake, it's a natural disaster, in Italy, his home turf. Does this man's callousness know no bounds?

3.) The snow. It continues to drift over the city in waves. It looks like dust being continually shaken from some filthy feather duster and it is not going anywhere. I have heard scientists say that global warming could actually result in colder temperatures and more precipitation for northern latitudes and that does seem to be the case. Last summer was the greyest, wettest on record, this winter we have had six months of snow and very little sun to give it the beauty that makes most of us feel affection for it. Instead we have wind, cloud and snow - day after dreary day of it. I have friends who say they like grey weather, I think a person should live where the weather best suits their personality. I moved to Ottawa because I like sunshine and I like extremes. This climate suited me ten years ago and I haven't changed but the climate has and part of me gets angry when people say - with a self-satisfied sigh, that they like it this way. It's not normal for it to be this way here, it's not uplifting and it's not OK.

4.) The infant heart transplant in Toronto and the fact that it is news. A baby in Toronto was dying of a congenital brain defect, or so the doctors thought. Her parents decided to remove her from life support, let her die and give her heart to another baby in need of a transplant. A wrenching decision, I'm sure. They removed the life support equipment and the baby lived. Now nobody knows what to do and the press is all over this. Having lived with a transplant recipient, I can say with some authority that a transplant is not a "life-saving" surgery. Transplants do not last forever. They are not a guarantee of life and for those reasons among others we take them only from the willing and the dead. That baby could not consent to be one of the willing and she is not yet one of the dead. This whole thing is ethically shaky and it is ghoulish of us to watch it with such an appetite.

pointy things and why we should love them

I am presently writing a proposal to write a policy paper about rural land rights, to that end, I watched a BBC documentary about sustainable farming last night. It got me thinking about how all of these issues are deeply connected and how the only way to make progress in securing a food supply that will last beyond the fossil fuel age is also a land-use issue.

Since most of the people concerned about property rights in Canada are farmers or ranchers and most of the time their autonomy over their land is threatened by resource exploration or expropriation and or changes to zoning and the subsequent loss of monetary value that comes from new environmental legislation, it makes sense to have a closer look at the land they are holding, their livelihoods and the prospects for the future. (Expropriations are all about the future.)

Turns out agriculture as a practice at the present time, is a very high consumer of fossil fuels. Chances are good that the group of angry farmers who want to keep the value in their land or want to keep the land itself are probably not going to be able to keep farming the way they do into the next generation anyhow. I suppose what I am saying here is, if the government doesn't take it from them then chances are very good that they will be faced with the choice of making radical changes to how they use the land or they will have to sell it to survive.

What we are talking about is survival here - for all of us. For that reason, I do think it is important that we start thinking about farmers not as the kind of loopy guys who get hot under the collar and surround Parliament Hill with their tractors because they are just generally unhappy. Rather we should try to see them as a group of people, mostly elders, who are, in all likelihood, the canaries in our collective coal mine. They are telling us they are about to collapse and that should worry all of us very much no matter how we view the ways they frame their grievances. When someone keeps telling you they're in pain, they are not lying. (even if they're faking, they're not lying - psychological pain is still pain, there's a reason behind even the whiniest of human complaints.)

One of the things pointed out in this Documentary was that farming is stripping the land of the nutrients it requires to produce food. The filmmaker's proof of that was pretty compelling but if you need more a comprehensive outline of the same issue can be found in Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery.

As a culture, we use a lot of fossil fuel based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and of course all farm machinery is run on gas these days. This means that agriculture ends up tied very closely to the price of oil and it means that we are really in an interesting bind - if we're lucky for the long term, the oil will run out while the soil can still recover and we will have the opportunity to change, if we're lucky in the short term it won't and our generation will live and die without ever understanding what kinds of deep systemic changes we need to make to continue living comfortably on this planet. I think it's likely that being lucky in the long term is smarter than going for the immediate pay-off and doubtless, that will have an influence on how I see this paper.

One other thing I noticed was my own reaction - there seem to be instinctively recognizeable motifs in nature. Plants that are useful to humans seem to be designed to display visual cues that can tip us off to the idea that we can make use of them to survive. At the top of the page is a picture of a sweet chestnut taken from this website: http://tree-species.blogspot.com/2009/03/edible-chestnuts-vs-horse-chestnuts.html

It is followed by an image of a plant called "Traveller's Joy" also known as "Old Man's Beard" taken from this website: http://accipiter.hawk-conservancy.org/MeadowMuses/200601.shtml

And finally a sea urchin taken from here: http://blogs.menupages.com/boston/2008/02/amuse_bouche_craving_extraordi.html

OK - those are in reverse order, thinking backwards is difficult for me and there is not much intuitive about structuring a blog or at least not much intuitive to me, nothing ever seems to end up where I want it to be and since the point of it is to write, I haven't yet taken the time to spend a day choking down the impossibly dry instructions on how to make it work - I'm hoping technology will just catch up to the way most of us think - most of the time that turns out to be true so, my apologies for the reversal but until this blog serves some specific purpose, it is unlikely to change.

Anyhow - my point here is that these three things that all look so much alike are all things we can use moderately to our benefit. (Horse chestnuts, before you ask, don't resemble these things, at least they don't summon up the same response - these spines or feathers are all very tightly packed - horse chestnuts look and feel very different)

Furthermore, our use of them does not threaten anything. Sea urchins become a threat only when they become overly abundant when sea otter numbers decline to dangerous levels. At that point, they begin feeding on living kelp forests and if they threaten the kelp beds that can be disasterous. When we overuse a resource nature gives us ample warning. Sea otters are important because they feed whales, sharks and eagles. It's all about balance and we are a part of it but moderation is the key. You can't live on sea urchins.

Traveller's Joy (aka Old Man's Beard) is a herbal medicine for a few things and is also used in basket weaving. I'll bet, once the research is done, someone will find they do something important to the soil but not if they get completely out of hand - so make the baskets, use the seedheads - that's what they're there for. (You can also use it as a visual representation of how sperm look while trying to penetrate an egg - which is interesting but really only useful if you are trying to bore a 5 year-old into giving up pestering you with questions about where babies come from - which, granted, can be pretty useful but only in very limited circumstances)

Chestnuts can make enough flour to replace another starch, like rice, for a family with a chestnut tree as long as they don't eat rice every day. They have roughly the same nutrient value as rice (the brown stuff) and they don't require cultivation past the occasional pruning.

Of couse, most people are aware of how important species diversity is for stands of trees so deciding to make some kind of industrially produced starch from chestnuts just will not work. And that could turn out to be a benefit - a kind of self-regulating mechanism.

I think it is quite possible that the signs for how we should be approaching the issue of food production are already there, already visible. I think we have the ability to recognize symbols because it is a survival tool, more than a survival tool - it is a tool we can use to thrive. And yes, crazy at it sounds to some people I think it is possible to bring the farmers, the public, First Nations communities and environmentalists into one group around the issue of rural land and our rights to it as the people who live and work there every day.

I believe it is possible to stop suppressing and begin expressing common interests. In the end, it all comes down to the elimination of fear, it all comes down to having the courage to say so and that is my job for the day.

Rebecca Hosking's excellent film, "A Farm for the Future" may be found on the CBC Radio program "Dispatches" website for the time being - that's here: http://www.cbc.ca/dispatches/

More about Spring

Lots of media assumes that where I live is the default climactic position. We have four seasons, they occur in a predictable order and they include all the classic benchmarks of a season: snow in winter, colored leaves in autumn, hot sunny days in summer and rain in spring.

All the weather cliches apply here too - March does come in like a lion and go out like a lamb, January is the coldest month of the year and April showers really do bring May flowers to name the first three that come to mind.

What people who don't live in a classic eastern climate don't anticipate and don't often see are all the things that go with living in a stereotypical climate.

It's April. The snow dump is a brown mound of melting ice. In the sugar bush, the last of the maple syrup is being boiled and the buckets are starting to come off the trees, buds are clearly visible and the pussy willows will soon be past it. The streets are wet about half the time, wind blows like crazy and it rains a fair bit. All of that is fairly predictable but the street sweepers are not.

One thing an urban Ottawa resident needs to keep on their nightstand at this time of year is a set of earplugs. This is because you can never tell when it will happen and it will never be the same type of mechanism twice but you can count on this; it will happen and it will be deafening and repetitive almost to the point of physical pain. This is the time of year when the street sweepers clean up the accumulated grit of winter and that grit is stubborn and substantial.

Everyone I know who lives in a climate that does not get snow understands the lovelier, more romantic aspects of the stuff but none of them realize that snow is still frozen rain and it mixes with the kind of dust and dirt that you'd find on any city street. Under that lovely mantle of white is a cake of dirt and salt that will melt some and then harden to a crust in April - and then the city will send out the cleaning equipment and your late nights or early mornings will be shaped around just how dirty your neighborhood got while the winter took its toll and how zealous the street cleaners are in their job of making it clean again.

In order to sweep a rind of salt and dirt from a city street, you need something more aggressive than your average street sweeper - there are trucks with hoses, machines with hard and heavy metal brushes and scraping apparatus.

The one factor they have in common is their volume and their unpredictability. This morning at 7:00 the first of the sweepers went by my back lane. Apparently it was a difficult task as they went over and over the job. The noise is what you'd expect - scrape metal over pavement as hard as you can for half an hour and you get the idea. Last week it was a truck with a power washing hose going over and over the boulevards. There will probably be another machine later, it will sound like a giant vacume cleaner which is more or less what it is.

Like the snowplows, I realize these machines are necessary and I know they will fit us in wherever time permits. I also know that they do not wish to hold up traffic so, like the rest of the city, I get a good set of earplugs and resign myself to it. The seasons are changing and people's peaceful mornings are not as important as the flow of traffic. Really.

But I wish they were.