It’s rare that people actually ask you why you’re interested in sustainability. Probably, it’s because the answer seems blindingly obvious - to help avert future doom and gloom. While that’s almost certainly the real, fundamental answer, when it comes to the day to day motivation behind my work, there’s more to it.

One of the most fascinating aspects of sustainability for me is the sheer scope of the problem, encompassing nearly every aspect of civilization and the natural world beyond it. There is never a simple answer to any question. Any problem might have a hundred solutions; and often, any solution has a hundred problems. Counter-intuitive facts abound, forcing you to re-evaluate what were once touchstones. Looking at things from a different perspective often brings fresh insights, for better or for worse.

Can walking really be worse for the environment than driving a car if you eat a lot of meat? Can mercury-filled compact fluorescents really reduce net mercury emissions? Can trains really have a greater footprint than airplanes? Can planting trees really promote global warming? Can nuclear power really reduce the amount of radioactive material in the environment? Can eating local really produce more greenhouse gases than importing food? The answer to all of these is a resounding “maybe.” Or, “it depends.”

In short, I can’t imagine a more intellectually stimulating field to work in. Building a sustainable future is, without doubt, the most complicated challenge humanity has ever faced.

That’s a big statement. But just try and deny it.

Laos is the most isolated country in Southeast Asia, a slash of thick forests, jagged mountains, and snaking rivers that cuts through the heart of the region. Until relatively recently, road access to other countries was virtually impossible, and the flow of people, goods, and information was along the Mekong or the Nam Ou rivers. Even today, nearly half of the settlements in the country have no road access.

While Laos is developing at an explosive rate, much of it remains relatively pristine, and it was fascinating for me to see first-hand the course that development has taken in these untouched areas. I’m going to use Laos as a microcosm for how I see the way that culture relates to the prospects for sustainable development in the Global South.

One of the most startling initial impressions while riding through the winding mountain roads was seeing huge swathes of forest on the mountainside slashed and burned. In much of northern Laos, this is how agriculture works; the burnt forests provide rich soil for planting crops, though they last only a single season. After the rice is harvested, the torrential rainy season washes away the arable soil on the unterraced hillside, and the local farmers repeat the process somewhere else. In a sparsely populated country where three-quarters of the people live rurally, its easy to see how farmers might imagine that their natural bounty is inexhaustible. Especially when that style of agriculture is what they have always practiced. Trying to convince a poor, scattered population that they need to break from tradition and work harder to foster more sustainable methods of agriculture ‘for the good of the planet’ is hardly a challenge unique to Laos.

However, while food and farming may be firmly rooted in cultural history, there is some reason for optimism when it comes to the elements of development that have no traditional precedent; namely power and communications. In these circumstances, the best technology wins, and when it comes to remote regions with inaccessible, inhospitable geography and climates, more often than not, the winner is renewables.

When I visited the village of Ban Kiew Kan in northern Laos, a day’s trek by foot from the village of Muang Ngoi, itself accessible only by boat, I would never have expected to see electricity. Yet every home had a compact-fluorescent bulb, and the chief’s house was even decked out with a satellite dish. Fossil-fueled generators would have been impossible option here in the mountains, with no practical or affordable way to resupply them with fuel, and so the solution came in the form of micro-hydro.

Scattered among the infinite streams that flow down from the mountains, the locals had set up wooden scaffolds that held machines resembling tiny outboard motors, their long driveshafts dipping into the current. These generators were enough to provide a modest, but simple, cheap, and consistent electrical supply to remote villages. The villagers aren’t ‘going green’ to pump up their eco-cred; they’re doing it because fossil fuels just don’t make sense for them.

Local micro-generation shows great promise to spur development in areas that lack access to transportation, let alone grid electricity. This sort of leap-frogging is certainly not restricted to power generation; the mobile phone has been the basis for a tremendously important communications revolution in the Global South, especially Africa. Without even the option of expensive, infrastructure-intensive land-lines, mobile phones in Africa have quickly become one of the fastest growing and most profitable industries in the entire world.

The take-home point is, while there are obvious challenges associated with shedding bad habits, places where those bad habits have not yet had a chance to take root can become great breeding grounds for sustainable development. When cleaner technologies win on the basis of practicality, availability, and affordability, is it any surprise to see their adoption?

Before last summer, I disliked cycling. Then I actually started commuting to work - from my first place, it was an easy 9 km round trip, mostly on bike lanes. My next move bumped my commute up to 12 km, and I actually enjoyed spending a bit more time on my bike in the mornings.

Now that I’m temporarily living in North York, my daily commute ends up being about 35 km. While the bike infrastructure in parts of Toronto is actually adequate, as far as I can tell, there is no safe, direct corridor that cuts north-south across the city, thanks in part to two major chokepoints; highway 401, and the Don Valley. As a result, I need to spend at least part of those eighteen morning kilometers sharing the road with cars.

A number of bike advocacy groups promote so-called ‘vehicular cycling,’ which sees bicycles as viable road traffic, privy to the same rights as cars and trucks. While the law is (largely) on the side of vehicular cyclists, I suspect most car commuters don’t give much of a shit before they’ve had their morning coffee. As a result, I’m given three options, none of which are especially desirable; I can ride, pressed at the side of the road, on broken pavement amidst glass and gravel debris; I can periodically swerve further into the lane to avoid the worst of the potholes, making sure I have an omniscient sense of traffic flow behind me; or I can simply take the lane and infuriate drivers behind me, and hope that one of them doesn’t decide to take me out.

This situation was make acutely transparent to me this morning, when I realized, about 3 km into my ride, that I’d forgotten my helmet. Anti-helmet groups (such things exist!) say that wearing a helmet may lead to ‘risk compensation’ behaviour, leading wearers to feel safer than they otherwise would, and thus take greater risks. Previously, I’d dismissed such arguments offhand - after all, helmet or no, no one wants to get hit. But I realized today that it rings true to an extent. When I’m wearing my helmet, I tend to take for granted that I am part of traffic, and assume that drivers will at least respect my existence on the road. But when it becomes clear that the only thing that is preventing you from ending up splattered across the road - not even a foam bucket - is your wits and the desperate hope that the other people on the road are actually paying attention, you choose take your life into your own hands much more seriously. Boiling down a steep, bumpy hill on Bayview at 40 km/h with cars whipping by made me feel like a gazelle in a pack of fucking lions. And I can’t remember the last time I’ve had less respect for my fellow man than when half a dozen cars blatantly steamed through a red light, nearly running me down as I was turned in, waiting to cross the road.

Tomorrow I’ll probably don my helmet and throw myself into the fray once again, but I can see why people in the suburbs feel uncomfortable about commuting into the city by bike. Bikes remain the perfect way to get around in dense urban areas, but long-haul treks along sprawling urban arteries can be downright dangerous. The car-centric urban planning that has prevailed since the ’50s has ruined our cities, and it will take a concerted effort - and probably some spectacular circumstances - to fix things.

Here’s hoping gas hits $200/bbl this summer.

As champions of all that is good and right in the world these days, it seems the EU can do no wrong. From social welfare, to progressive environmental policy, to animal rights, time and again those Europeans make us North Americans look like the dirty, ignorant provincials that we are. In truth, this is only half sarcasm; but the new EU-wide ban on seal products carries with it the disgusting reek of hypocritical political pandering, just in time for June’s European parliamentary elections.

Animal cruelty is apparently the issue at hand. After all, what could be worse than clubbing an innocent, ivory-furred week-old baby seal, not yet old enough to even move? Never mind that hunting pups has been illegal in Canada since 1987. It must have lifted such a burden off the hearts of the EU’s politicians to finally rid their union of such (fictitious) malignity. I wonder, did the French celebrate with a satisfying spread of pate de foie gras? Perhaps the Italians indulged in some veal parmigiana? Or maybe the Spaniards, in such a mood of lusty self-satisfaction, reveled in a stirring round of bullfighting? Was a fox hunt in the cards for the good old boys in Britain? Maybe not - I’m sure that every single smug one of them is an ethical vegetarian, just like the animal-loving populations they represent.

The self-serving hypocrisy represented by condemning the Canadian seal hunt while casting a blind-eye to the disgusting depravity of industrial meat production is simply staggering. That the cute-factor plays such a paramount role in the ethical considerations of animal rights is similarly shameful. I wonder how many of the politicians who signed the bills have seen a seal that’s older than two weeks, once it’s shed its pristine white coat - would they still be so sympathetic after laying eyes on the bloated, parasite-pitted monstrosities they become after a few years? (Funny how we shudder at the prospect of Koreans or Vietnamese eating dog, but think nothing of digging into a pork chop, which comes from a demonstrably much more intelligent animal.) Then again, I guess impoverished Newfoundland fishermen aren’t the most attractive things around, either.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on the EU, though. Maybe they aren’t looking to capture the moral high ground in order to please their constituencies (which seem to love consuming seal-products, given that Europe is the world’s largest market). Maybe it’s just plain-old illegal protectionism, given that Sweden and Finland both hunt commercially, and the UK culls seals to preserve their fisheries.

(Since the issue at hand is strictly cruelty, of course, I won’t bother mentioning that the seal hunt has been a traditional, sustainable aspect of Canada’s maritime ecosystem for hundreds of years, and that the harp seal population has never been in any risk of collapse. More sustainable and humane, dare I say it, than the vast majority of farming practices in the Western world…)

I continue to hate politics.

So last night, for the first time in years, I went to a straight-up punk show at a Vancouver metal bar. Besides the predictable but entertaining power chords, the show was also the book launch for the latest from Gofuckyerself Press. Before the second act, the author went on stage and (once suitably bespectacled) read a brief excerpt.

In the dialogue, two characters were decrying the impact that the 2010 Olympics was having on the besieged poor in the Downtown Eastside, while drinking heavily at a rooftop hotel bar. It would be hard to accuse the author of literature, but that would also be missing the point. At the scene’s climax, the protagonist hurls a broken whiskey bottle from the roof onto a police car parked out front. “It was a glorious blow for the revolution,” the author read, laced with irony.

I’d been cringing a bit throughout the reading, but the self-deprecation in that line nearly redeemed it all. It made me think. While in recent years, I’ve largely stopped believing in the feasibility of ‘the revolution,’ or ultimately even in its desirability. I’d thought that was the product of a maturation in my political views (perhaps part of why I haven’t been to any punk shows in a while), but hearing the same sentiment coming from the mouth of a dyed-in-the-wool lifer punk threw me off a bit.

It made me realize that if even in the hearts of its staunchest supporters, ‘the revolution’ is just sort of an vague abstraction that will - and possibly can - never come to fruition, it still has its place. Things may get better, or they may not, but the punks want to remind us that this isn’t the best it can be. This is not the end of history.

When dire situations drive people to radical action, you have to ask why. White-collar office workers who commute from the suburbs in Honda Civics don’t throw Molotov cocktails. Violence is inexcusable, but then again, its rarely the resort of people who feel socially and politically enfranchised.

There was something Sisyphean in the author’s words. Being part of the angry detritus as society’s margins isn’t pretty, but maybe somebody’s got to do it. If only to pinch us awake every now and then.

Saw this over at Inhabitat:

If you live in a city where plastic takeout containers are not recyclable, you may be feeling the same frustrations that we are. Those of us who can’t bear the thought of simply tossing the receptacles that hold our beloved chinese food, sushi, and wraps try to reuse them as many times as possible. But what could make people who don’t really care about the environment want to hold on to their food containers instead of trashing them? That is the question that designer Takeshi Miyakawa set out to answer. His solution? Shaping the containers to look like a childhood favorite that most adults find difficult to resist–legos!

This does not strike me as a positive development. Unless it uses a more benign material that can biodegrade (recycling/downcycling is better than nothing, but not by an awful lot), gimmicky design like this merely delays the inevitable. Instead of storing their garbage in a landfill, consumers will merely store it temporarily in their homes before they bore of it. I doubt even the designer holds any illusions that these won’t be the first thing to go when the users need to make some room in their apartments, move out, or simply tire of having a space filled with uncomfortable, ill-constructed, barely-usable furnishings. Yes, they may linger in the household for a little bit longer than otherwise, but we’re talking about at most a few years in the lifespan of a plastic container that will live on in the environment for hundreds. On top of that, the containers remain a useless oddity until you acquire a sufficiently large critical mass of them to actually do something with them (which will take either a very long time, or simply drive greater consumption of take-out…)

It seems to me that a great deal of new industrial design objets d’art have are earning their “green” credentials by feeding upon the trend of largely superficial reuse-o-philia. While there is always some limited potential to repurpose old waste and turn it into something new and valuable, more often than not the ‘waste’ was never really garbage to begin with. I’m reminded of a translucent lamp design I saw that was made up of hundreds of drinking straws (there have been lots of these - feel free to visualize whatever example comes most recently to mind). I’m sure the straws were all post-consumer, of course. Because the designer must have paid some poor sap to sort through cafeteria garbage cans for hours, and then to clean them all before they were repurposed, right? Making it so expensive that it will remain an object of transient amusement for some yuppie with eco guilt?

Making new, attractive things - and taking advantage of industrial processes that can make said things accessible to the masses rather than just the elite - is not inherently bad. It’s only bad so long as we work in open loops, and the energy and material put into that object cannot be reclaimed in some way or another (either by nature, in the form of biodegradation, or by us through reuse or recycling). While good design blends art and technology, I fear that the eco movement’s schizophrenic consumption has skewed the direction of contemporary design too far to the former. Maybe it takes more effort to think about efficient materials, processes, and technology than it is to handcraft an art-project bauble out of old junk and sell it to the rich. Given that the result will evidently be lapped up by an uncritical design press eager for new sustainafashions, I’m inclined to think so.

(As an afterword to this somewhat unintentionally raging post, my hope is that the large companies that actually have the power to influence consumption patterns in some meaningful way will take the high road and look towards macro-level solutions and innovative materials to close the loop. I suspect the ‘high’ design magazines, blogs, shows and fairs will continue to mostly fill their pages and halls with irrelevant frippery, but I suppose that’s always been the case.)

One interesting aspect of Canada’s economy compared to nearly all the other G8 members is that it remains myopically focussed on our extractive primary industries, without pushing that growth into education, research & development and the emerging industries and manufacturing that will help strengthen and broaden the base of our economy and international competitiveness. The US economy, though not based on natural resources to nearly such an extent, has also fallen victim to letting its manufacturing industry and technological dominance languish, ‘growing’ their economy almost solely on the premise of financial markets. While the EU’s sectoral growth in manufacturing has lagged behind those of emerging economies (unavoidably, given the latter’s momentum), growth in many EU countries at least remained positive - and in the case of Sweden, Germany, and Denmark, quite dramatic, based on the strength of wind manufacturing.

While the Canadian government’s emphasis on taking our natural resources for all they’re worth may lead to huge surpluses in boom times, that same emphasis has damaging repercussions in a recession. For instance, in an ironic twist, the $78/bbl of oil that Alberta built their 2008-2009 budget on was considered comically conservative (which led the opposition to question the transparency of a government that expected a ‘hidden’ surplus of $5B+), but with the price of oil now under $50 and still dropping, that same government faces a deficit. By failing to separate our economy from the vagaries of the market for natural resources (a folly we share with such shining examples of economic foresight as Nigeria), it reduces our ability to weather shifts in demand.

Of course, to sound like a broken record, I continue to believe that the strongest move to generate long-term economic growth is a re-emphasis on technology, innovation, and sustainable development and manufacturing that will reap dividends regardless of the economic climate. Of course, oil will rebound back up to $150 and beyond, no doubt, but it seems like it befits a healthy economy to view that as a windfall to be plumbed back into future growth, rather than the sole basis of our economic platform. This notion of “green-collar” manufacturing was one of the soundbites that led me to support Obama early in his campaign, and I can only hope that Canada has the presence of mind to adopt a similar policy.

Stephen Harper is a cock munching asshole.  There.  I said it.  How many people do you know who voted Green (or NDP, or other party that clearly was not going to win) because “I just want them to get my two dollars so they can *maybe* get somewhere next time”?  Hopefully you actually know some of these people - I personally know plenty.  Anyway, Harper’s new “economic update” proposes scrapping all this funding, pissing off all three opposition parties.  The NDP, Liberals, and Bloc have actually agreed to bring down the government 6 weeks after an election if this funding cut goes ahead.  On the bright side however, apparently we might not go back to the polls if this happens.  The Liberals and NDP are finally doing what they should have done all along - apparently talks are underway to figure out the logistics of a coalition government.  Even those French assholes, the Bloc, have signalled support.

For some reason, I am incredibly enthusiastic about this turn of events.  It has always seemed to me that a Lib-NDP coalition would be the best of both worlds (progressive politics without handing the country over to unions), and if it happens this way, I just love how badly Harper is getting fucked over.  He is already whining to anyone who will listen that this is undemocratic, blah, blah, because the “Canadian people elected myself over Dion”, forgetting that we don’t have some stupid two party system up here.  In fact, the Canadian people voted overwhelmingly (63%) AGAINST Harper.. and considering virtually every other popular party leans left, it seems like Canadians voted for a left leaning coalition.  So fuck you Stevie, you fucking lose.

The ZENN (zero-emissions, no noise) electric car is one the most promising innovations I have read about over the last couple years.  In their current incarnation, these cars have some significant suburban limitations - 80km range, 40km/h top speed -but for urban commuting the ZENN is ideal.  This utility has been recognized by British Columbia and Quebec, as well as 43 US states.  However, Ontario continues to block the use of ZENN cars on public roadways, citing safety issues.  All that has been approved is a 5 year pilot study, ending in 2011, allowing the use of ZENN vehicles in provincial parks to assess their safety in low speed settings.

What I want to know is why, if jurisdictions across North America are allowing ZENN cars on low-speed limit roadways, why won’t Ontario?  This is a fully enclosed vehicle, based on the chassis of a European diesel car, that meets or exceeds FMVSS 500 standards (the US safety standards governing electric cars) - why are we so slow in allowing these on our roads?  And think about the manufacturing opportunities - the ZENN cars are currently being built in Quebec, but the company is planning on expanding fast - and about to introduce a high-speed all electric car (125km/h top speed, 400km range with a 5 minute charge time) based on a battery that “would instantly turn vehicles like General Motors’ much-hyped Volt into museum pieces,” according to Peter Gorrie of the Toronto Star.  You’d think Ontario would be doing as much as possible to attract such a company to do business here - especially considering the troubles currently facing the auto industry.  But, alas, the ministry of transportation would rather institute measures to prevent teenagers from carpooling.

(Stolen from Cagle.com - please don’t hurt me)

So the global economy is fucked, our overlords claim. However, “the crisis was not a failure of the free-market system, and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system,” according to W.  My question then becomes, why does the current administration support an Obama-esque “socialist” bailout of the financial industry… wait… the financial industry and the auto industry (and probably all big business pretty soon).  Shouldn’t an ardent capitalist decide that companies which have clearly been mismanaged, misguided, or are straight up outdated die a quick death?  There should be no real opposition to high risk/high reward behaviour, as long as all involved parties understand the nature of the risk involved, but this also means that losers must be treated as such - the range of possible results should not range between roaring success and neutral.

I am still torn over this whole bailout situation.  On one hand, I really want to let everything pan out according to the rules of the free market… if these car companies were too stupid to invest in clean technology while their foreign competitors realized that this was where consumer demand was headed, then fuck them.  But then I feel like the realist kicks in, and you have to consider the impact of tens of thousands of laid off autoworkers.  These people were betrayed by greedy unions and horrible corporate policies, and it seems somehow wrong to leave them suffering.  Besides, according to Obama anyway, the cost of social assistance for these people would exceed bailout money many times over.

This post isn’t really going to go anywhere, because despite all the time I have spent thinking about how the economy should be helped, I haven’t really gotten anywhere.  Any thoughts?