Save your breath

I once again venture into politics, briefly, tonight. The Wildrose Alliance in Alberta seems to getting more press these days, and today headlines linking the Wildrose Alliance and the BC Conservative Party appeared. Now I wouldn’t mind if the BC Liberal vote was split a little, but a quote from the Wildrose leader caught my eye in the Globe & Mail today.

It went like this: “Danielle Smith, the rookie leader of Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance Party, say’s BC’s Progressive Conservatives must focus on issues that matter to voters in selecting their next party chief.”

Ummm…I’m confused. Just why did she open her mouth? The statement kinda leaves me waiting for the politician who says, “you know, we’ve talked way too much about things voters care about. It’s time to change that up. It’s time for some glorious irrelevance.”

Seriously. Inane statements like that are why people don’t vote. Oh, wait. That’s exactly what the big parties want…

Have fun

Looking back, it’s evident I’ve long been a complete rebel behind the scenes, and a partial one in my conduct. I disliked everything unfamiliar to me in childhood, from music to vegetables to swimming. I’m paying for that now. As a teenager, it was being human that got my gander. If everybody was getting their first car, I was busy cycling around. If everybody was forming social groups, I wasn’t going to be part of any social clique, and I just did my own thing. If everyone was listening to whatever band was popular back then (and I kid you not, I really have no idea), I was only interested in differentiating between the calls of a black-headed grosbeak and a robin. (ever tried it? it ain’t easy). If everybody was celebrating some cultural holiday, I couldn’t really have cared less, seeing only an orgy of consumerism based on questionable history where others saw an excuse to celebrate. Back in teenage days, sex too, was new of course, and even there I just said, well hey, all 20 billion (or whatever the number is) of us humans who’ve ever graced this planet do that… Sure, I’m sure it’s fun, but what’s unique in that? As a friend of mine quotes on her profile, a quote I rather like, “Human beings are here because of several million years of sexy ancestors.” (G & K Hendricks). Well, I can pick holes all through that argument, but still there’s a lot of truth there.

I bring these things up because I sometimes lament my lack of rebellion, despite the fact that I disagree with consumerism, growth at all costs, genetic modification, over-harvesting, burning gas so prolifically, eating animal flesh unnecessarily, not cycling places, monopolizing resources, make-up, fashion, over-consumption, capitalism, socialism, and most other “ism’s,” violence of any sort for most if not all reasons, etc. etc. etc. Hell, I’ve rebelled against just about everything we do as a species, just not in overly blatant or confrontational ways. It’s no wonder my psyche was where it was and is where it is, or that lately I delight in flagrantly and hypocritically counteracting my supposed worldview of ideal conduct.

You’ve likely realized by now how easily I put a positive spin on things. We humans are really capable of rationalizing anything, a theme I return to time and time again, and I have only barely gotten started. Fortunately, I’ve held off of acquiring too much history to have to rationalize.

Because I’m no illusionist, as she warned against. No, it’s all laid out for all to see. I realize I sometimes seem to invoke a certain stereotype more often associated with the feminine; that of being “complicated”. Well, first of all, I’ve never liked stereotypes or put much stock into them, but secondly if being “simple” is an attractive attribute, what planet do you hail from?

#3

She said he told her that, “He wasn’t even worth the oxygen that he breathed..” She said she told him to, “get a grip!” (pauses for a swig of coffee, contemplating writing three blog posts in one night. That night, too).

It’s dangerous, this big picture stuff. This (more coffee) rigidity of thinking. As per the title of Roy’s book, perhaps God only goes exist in the small things of life. Perhaps you’ll only truly find that God-essence if you limit your universe. Too much, too early, is suffocating, and de-motivating. To the Beatitudes should be added, “Blessed are they who live in ignorance,” because as has been made cliche, ignorance is bliss. Blissed, then, are the ignorant.

Terrible singing. Self-deprecation. Unwitting embarrassment. Breaking a sweat. Puns, wit, and good cheer. In these are the spice of life; not in tackling humanities’ ills. The proof that we are worth the air we breathe, the food we consume, the space we inhabit, is that we are here. That we were born. I have no explanation for it, but it cannot be random. It simply cannot be. If it is not random, it is meaningful; a conclusion derived from deductive reasoning of the highest illogical order. Last year around this time I wrote that, “It has to be important that we learn collective self-restraint and abandon selfishness by embracing altruism and humility, and we have some level of free-will in determining our path, be it self-destruction or evolution to a higher level of consciousness, I have a hard time believing that all of this can end in the erasing of one of the universe’s chapters, namely the human chapter, with nothing to show for it. That we could simply fuck things up, orchestrate our own demise, and become a mere blip on the radar, a failed experiment on the part of God knows who.”

I stand by those words today. I think of them as consolation to those, like myself, who are prone to devaluing our own existence in the context of the immense, overwhelming, unfathomable, and hidden ways in which our success looms as our failure. Perhaps soon, I will renounce, to the same extent that x cannot equal zero, environmentalism for all except possibly employment, because it is so limiting, and I’ve done my bit. Perhaps, I’ve already done so, in all except habit…

Or perhaps, there are other things which would be better to renounce. Any takers? (more coffee; it’s a good thing I’m driving this weekend, or something stronger might be the order of the day).

First spawner survey

We surveyed the lower reaches of Stoney Creek this morning, the three of us and Slesse. Already there are salmon here; a welcome change from 2007, the first year that this creek was surveyed, when salmon and only coho didn’t appear until mid-to-late November. Today there were 2 chum and 2 coho in just the lower section, with 2/3 of the creek left unsurveyed to date, something that will be done soon.

Stoney is such a great indicator stream to survey; without question one of if not the best in Abbotsford. It’s entire riparian strip remains relatively intact, unlike many streams that flow through farmland or urban environments. At the same time, it’s watershed is quite heavily urbanized, creating high run-off conditions; usually something that is a strongly negative factor in a stream’s biological health. The creek is bordered in multiple places by well-used walking trails, meaning spawning populations and the streambed are heavily impacted by canines of all sorts, from the ones that gambol and frolic joyously in Stoney’s pools to the ones that plod morosely at their human companion’s heels. Lastly, the creek has seen heartening efforts at mitigation of some of our negative influences, with the culvert having been reconstructed to improve fish access during low water conditions, and large amounts of invasive blackberry having been removed and replaced with native vegetation, which admittedly is still too young to give the stream the same protection as the blackberry did, but will do a far better job of that when mature.

Stay tuned for pics and more reports, or better yet, come with us.

One step further…

Writing on the weblog is not something I should be doing just now. Blogging is something I ought to reserve for times when I have something of particular interest to contribute, rather than times of soul-searching and existential crisis. This blog isn’t intended to be a raw, no-holds barred transcription of my life, and it isn’t going to become that either. But often I’m tempted to write that way, and resist for a few reasons, among them that I can’t write about a lot of the most urgent and pressing issues in my personal life without also writing about other people whose anonymity I can’t really protect even by using only initials or aliases, because it’s their relationship to me that’s important.

Perhaps more importantly, it would mess with my psyche to be writing about stuff that isn’t related to sustainability and policy and transportation. To clarify, it’s not that not writing about those things would get to me; more that the other topics I’d tackle wouldn’t sit too well with me, being items rather unsuitable to be made that public.

Suffice to say that at this point and time, despite living in one of the most fortunate places on Earth and basically having everything handed to me on a silver platter until perhaps the last few years, I’m finding the term “basket-case” a frighteningly accurate description of my state of mind; something I’d attribute to being 25% my fault, but also to my challenges being 90% out of my control, offering 0% satisfaction to address, yet feeling like 100% of my responsibility at the same time, with the results being a constant oscillation between being a penny-pincher and wantonly blowing my wad, which is better than being indulgent 100% of the time, but still not so good. And that is as specific as I’m going to get. (I am starting to sound like an economist, what with assigning a value to everything, aren’t I?

It is, after all, Halloween morning. If it was otherwise, don’t you think I’d be out partying?

Return of the Dead, Dying, Mangled, Mutilated, and Rotting

No, I’m not making a zombie movie.

Volunteers around the mobile holding tank

I am bringing back spawner surveys for Stoney Creek, together, of course, with the Stoney Creek Salmon Stalkers. In 2007 we definitively counted 31 spawning coho salmon returning to east Abbotsford’s Stoney Creek, and quite likely several more that we couldn’t verify. In 2008, we were AWOL. MIA. Showing gross dereliction of duty. Clean and dry.

This year, the Stalkers are back. Weekly, or semi-weekly, we’ll be tramping up Stoney Creek, counting how many spawning chum, coho, and chinook (now there’s a pipe dream) have made it all the way upriver to Stoney. To speak no more of this, a la Peter Donaldson. To mate. To die.

You’re welcome to join us. Requested in fact, even if it’s only for one session, or two, that would help. Will you see salmon? No guarantee of that, unfortunately, but there are guarantees. Fresh, crisp Autumn air. Exercise. Getting to know one of your local creeks. Seeing other wildlife. So join us. Tramp up and down Stoney Creek a few times. Write down what you see, and we’ll get a second year of salmon data for Stoney Creek.

You might have heard that our salmon stocks aren’t doing so well. 9/10ths of our sockeye disappeared this summer. It’s true that coho and chum aren’t sockeye. But they’re still important. They teach us about the cycle of life. Our large predators, bears, eagle, and the small ones too, the larvae and insects, feed on them. Even the trees and plants are nourished by our salmon. They tell us how our ocean is doing. Whether it’s able to produce food for our priceless salmon stocks, or whether we’re overfishing it, or trashing it. In this circle of life, the Stoney Creek Salmon Stalkers will play a small role. One that hopefully enhances community awareness of fragile salmon stocks, and encourages responsible lifestyle choices that both strengthen the community and are salmon-friendly.

We’re working under the auspices of the Abbotsford Ravine Park Salmonid Enhancement Society, in close collaboration with the Fraser Valley Regional Watersheds Coalition. The ARPSES actually started when a guy who had grown up in the Clayburn Watershed, of which Stoney Creek is a part, returned from military service, and noticed that the creek didn’t play host to nearly as many salmon as it had when he was a child. So he started a salmon hatchery to reverse this trend, and every year the hatchery now releases thousands of salmon fry into fragile, urbanized Stoney Creek. Is it working?

We won’t know unless you join us and help us find out.

Goin’ for a bike ride…

Leaving behind for a minute the question of what is money, how do we make it, who makes it, and what is it really worth, let’s accept for a minute that money as we know it is currently the way in all things are valued, and let’s face it, is an unequivocal bottom line, the determining factor for so many of the things that matter. We instinctively recoil at that thought – I know I do, at least – but it’s very difficult if not impossible to get around the fact that without access to funds, it’s going to be very difficult to acquire the things that we need, or establish something of a safety net so that when shit does hit the fan in our lives, we have something to fall back on. Without money, we can’t buy health care, we can’t buy natural health products, transportation is next to impossible, post-secondary is out of the question, and the list goes on, and on a little bit of a larger scale, corporations and extractive industries continue to be able to wield the “job provision” stick in justifying the pillaging of our wilderness.

Now, money is central in our lives, but even more so for regions far more poverty -stricken than here.  Often, just a small sum, is enough to make a start at a business that can mean the difference between continuing to live in poverty and creating some flow of income so that there is hope for the future. That’s what micro-credit finance is all about. Pioneering it is what won Mohammed Yunus the Nobel Prize. The high re-payment rates of loans made on the micro-credit principle speak strongly for its success. It should even make the hardline right-wingers who decry what in my economics class they call, “transfer payments” – social benefits, employment insurance, welfare, GST rebates, child benefits, and the like – happy, ’cause what microcredit is undeniably doing is giving a leg up to those just don’t have a means to get a start otherwise, and not doing so in perpetuity or extended periods so as to create dependence, but just providing a start-up amount so that people can put their ideas and skills to the test.

So that’s just micro-credit off the top of my head. As with everything these days, there is a wealth of information about it online. At Dr. Google. Or…fine…I’ll do some research. Go here: http://www.globalafc.org/blog/press/microcredit-an-agent-of-change/

So micro-credit fits perfectly with my belief in a need for far-reaching reform, but that only a massive shift in how we use money is practical right now. We can use small sums to fight poverty. We can donate small amounts to non-profit groups doing work that we believe in. We can make small sacrifices in the monetary sense so that there’s still some money at the end of the month, and we can contribute to something we feel good about. It’s the path I was on back in 2006, and got away from in a big way since then, and would like to re-capture.

Even better, there’s a program I’m going to do next summer called the Global Agents for Change, in which money is raised by participants who cycle together for weeks at a time. Three rides are available in 2010: Vancouver to Tijuana; Amsterdam to Istanbul, and a Cambodia ride. Now I ask you, was anything ever designed that was more suitable for me? A 2-3 month bike ride, an extremely low-carbon and pro-fitness way of travelling, while raising money to lessen the income gap between rich and poor nations? I was intrigued from the moment I heard about this, so it didn’t take me long to make up my mind that I was going to do this. It’s going to happen. Summer 2010, and I’ll do what it takes to get there. I’ve been throwing around ideas for long distance bike rides or walks for a while now, and this totally fits the bill.

So what do I need? Well, $3000 bucks and a good bike. Not that I don’t have  a good bike. Right now I have an old Raleigh, probably from the ’80’s somewhere. Bright blue. A little faded. No gear slippage. Sturdy, if a little heavy. A good touring bike? Not really. Too heavy, considering I’ll probably want to carry 60lbs of gear. Not customized for my body, and for a 9 week ride, that’s essential. So a new (used?) touring bike is probably essential for this trip.

How am I going to get the bike and the money? Scrounging. Not eating out. Buying and re-selling. Re-developing the focus I haven’t had a semblance of since I had a concussion at the behest of a giant, moving, chunk of steel in March, and leveraging that into having a job while going to school. That, for me, is hard. I’m not a great saver. I tend to say, “screw it, when I decide what I want to do with my life I’ll save. For now? No way Jose.” But to cycle from Amsterdam to Istanbul, it’s worth it. No question. So I’ll do that, with a little help from my good buddies who read this blog who have my permission to give me a good kick in the ass whenever I spend too much…

Speaking of getting some money together, if you like and believe in micro-credit and want to see what it can do, feel free to send some cash in the direction of this important cause – from now until June saving to donate money to this is what I’ll be doing, that much is certain. Although….probably best to wait until I’m accepted before you decide to contribute

Pedagogical Edification

Post-secondary,  as it stands today, has at least one major flaw, and that is that since virtually no student has enough time to properly dedicate to his/her studies, the quality of their work goes down, as they cut corners to save time. Often, this is not evidence of the student being uneducated or unskilled; merely that he or she has run out of time to do the work that they are capable of.

As a result, instructors end up teaching concepts and practices that many students already know, but simply don’t have the time to implement because they are scrambling to get to work on time. Then they go to class, where they are told to do better what they already know perfectly well how to do, which wastes  time – both theirs and the instructors. Students end up paying just to be made busy, instead of paying to learn new things, akin to flushing their hard earned (or not yet earned) dollars down the drain, while their abilities and skills remain unchanged.

This is not at all to say that university is always a waste of time; it obviously isn’t, as it bestows the freedom to pursue higher level learning without being too concerned (yet) with being part of the work-force. Lots of valuable things are taught at the post-secondary level, but too often poor performance due to busyness dumbs down the level of teaching.

This situation is just one more symptom of an economic system that’s failing its people. If we want to students to pursue learning to a higher level, we should then also make it so that they have the time for their studies. At one time, perhaps, this was so. As things currently stand, too many students simply go through the motions in exchange for a piece of paper stating that they’ve achieved a level of learning that in all honesty, may not be greatly more accomplished than could be achieved by being in the workforce, and pursuing self-directed learning in a disciplined way.

Outliving the Bastards

“You don’t date people” she observed, with characteristic abruptness, a few months ago now when the topic came up. It is an observation that is more or less true, though there are undoubtedly episodes she doesn’t know about. Generally though, I’m not the guy who shows up with a new girl in tow the night after a break-up, or even the one who’s never without a girlfriend for more than a few weeks. Though I’m not one to obsess over these things, since I mostly allow life to run its course, it is something that’s been eating away at me for a little bit now. So despite being something of a “non-interventionist” in the sense that I too often allow life to unfold as it will, rather than taking a “grab life by the horns approach,” as well as a technophobe (in the sense that I don’t particularly like technological gizmos rather than that they confound me) I  did decide recently to explore an online dating site, something I haven’t ever done in the past. But the question remains, why don’t I very often get around to dating people? Well yeah, there’s the classic  ”I have high standards line,” but I think that one’s a little bit too stock, too stereotypical of an explanation, but partially true nonetheless. I think the other part of the answer to that is two-fold, only one of which I’ll dwell on here.

I think it’s undeniable that I hold some rather odd opinions, that not a great many people share, and which put me at odds with a lot of the people I come across.  Like the time I was hanging out with my brother recently, and we were chatting with a friend of mine, and they shook hands in saying good-bye, and he complimented my bro on his handshake – a perfect opportunity for me to chime in (after he left) and say, “That’s BS – what does the firmness of your handshake matter?” after which a good 20 minute “animated discussion” ensued, not over whether or not it was important to have a strong handshake, but over whether that was something we should really value. I won’t get into the whole discussion, since I’m just using this as an example of where I had an opinion that runs counter to what I think is the predominant view in our culture, and if you’re really pressed and trying to carve out a niche for yourself in a pretty competitive economy, definitely the most practical viewpoint. I certainly won’t deny that practicality is definitely something I need to pay more attention to at some point, getting off this rollercoaster of academics interspersed with temporary jobs and sometimes rather aimless, drifting search for both the meaning behind why we do things the way we do, and a deeper meaning behind this oh-so-mysterious human experience.

Then there’s my scorn of the oh-so pervasive suburban lifestyle, of sacrosanct institutions and customs that we simply adhere to without questioning, and in Abbotsford, the particularly difficult one of spurning (for the most part) the use of an automobile, something my tailbone is all too aware of right now, not to mention I don’t currently have a bike to ride. I in fact disagree with so many people about so many things that I’ve taken to just listening, patiently, and not bothering to point out where I think their reasoning is off.

Because it’s not like I have a ton of solutions to offer at this point anyway. I often even offer a counter opinion to one of my best friends in Abbotsford, who, one time after we’d left a billiard hall, said he hadn’t really connected with anybody, and that when somebody asked him how he was, he just said, “Opinionated”……which was such a breath of fresh air. To end this piece on a solid note, some things I know I do like and want to be part of my future are the thrill of physical exertion after a run, bike ride, or hike, the satisfaction of being able to produce your own food or know the people who did so, and the knowledge that the natural systems, the streams and the rivers and forests, that ultimately are the source of life on this planet, are intact and not compromised by our presence. That’s been one of the guiding principles of my life to date, but one that’s taken a little bit of a backseat to Edward Abbey’s admonishment, which I’ll paraphrase since my innernet’s down: That it’s not enough to simply fight for the preservation of our wilderness areas; we have to take the time to enjoy them, to experience them, so that we can truly understand them.

Well, I now have the ‘Net again. Here’s what he really said (my paraphrase was SOOOO not worth it):

“It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
— Edward Abbey

A quickie

I’ve recently gotten a Twitter account. That means I’m now connected into to Facebook, Twitter, MSN Messenger, Skype,  and right here at WordPress. Never mind that I rarely use MSN, Skype, or Twitter,  and only rarely use this blog of late. This seems like definite overkill – do I really need to be that wired in?

So I just thought I’d put a quick post here for those of you who still land here now and again. Quick, but guaranteed to be better than Twitter, which is basically Facebook status blurbs on disability.

Briefly, I’ve decided that I’ll almost certainly finish my degree here at UFV. Yeah, yeah. Booooring….

I’ve been pretty frustrated by university lately. I really have no patience to sit in lab being instructed about how to draw a graph. I’ve only been fed that drivel since Grade 8. I think I should either know that by know, or be resigned to never learning. Be clear, be precise, and you’re good.

There are definitely more scintillating, titillating, and engaging aspects to campus life than that. However, 2 more years of this appears ominously stifling. But because I have invested so much into it (getting on 15k now), and because there is value in having a degree as well as freedom in pursuing higher levels of thinking without constraints, yet, I’m going to suck it up for a couple years, hopefully buckle down, and do my best to skip town at every opportunity. Besides which, I’ve a family here that needs me.

UFV’s got a good Geography program. It’s a university now as opposed to a University-College. The program is well-regarded, and can be complemented by a Master’s, PhD, or perhaps BCIT Fisheries & Wildlife or Forestry. I’ve got roots here too. Just have to learn to give some people what I’ll term the “warm shoulder” when I meet them in the hallway – a polite, “Hey, how are you” without a full blown conversation ensuing. I do, after all, have to get something done…consider yourself forewarned.

Aside from the University,  Abbotsford’s a good place to be. I can get around ridiculously cheap, yet quick enough to get my things done. There is a new community garden, a thriving, vibrant Farmer’s Market, developing bicycle infrastructure, and a transit system that will get you most places, especially in tandem with a bike.  In short, all the things I love. There’s a bit of wilderness here and there – Sumas Mountain, but also the Chilliwack River Valley, and with a car rented for the odd weekend or a Greyhound Bus, the rest of the province is plenty accessible – it’s more finding the time that’s the issue. Heck, on transit not even Van. is far away, the odd time that I need to go there.

So yeah, this city’s got most of what I need, and is close enough to what I don’t have. The car-free lifestyle, though not easy, is very feasible. Sure, I want to find myself in Hasselt, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Tasmania, Nagasaki, Holland, and more. That’ll happen. Not without some kind of a foundation however. Fall of 2011 is when that should be over with, in the form of a BSc, if I can bite the bullet, yank back on the reins, and put a bottle-cap on that wanderlust.

Only question is, how much do I like soup? To breathe, I mean?

Chew on This

I’m no different from anybody in that I dread taking trips to the dentist, for the impact on my cashflow, but perhaps more because of the seemingly inevitable stream of bad news. Universally, the term “dentist” is synonymous with bad news. Perhaps one of the few things that distinguishes my relationship with my dentist from that of most people is that for a long time it didn’t exist. Not until around the time of my graduation did I begin to suspect that maybe dental health was something I ought to be paying more attention to, and when I did pay a visit to a local dentist, the news wasn’t good. Without going into details, it was obvious it was high time to devote a little bit of time and attention to what exactly good dental health meant, and how to achieve it. I suspect it’s something a lot of people struggle with, but it’s not exactly the best topic for dinner table conversation. Hence, this blog shall pick up the slack.

As usual, the conventional answers weren’t very satisfactory. The official explanation of why so many people fall victim to dental decay is that when we eat sugary, starchy foods, remnants hang around on our teeth, give bacterial populations a big boost, and that these bacteria then create acidic secretions which gradually break down our enamel, and eventually our teeth themselves. The solution to this, the story goes, is frequent brushing and flossing, basically to the point that it becomes obsessive, which should slow decay. At the same, we’re told that we should avoid sugary foods and carbonated drinks. This all sounds pretty reasonable and logical.

For me however, this explanation leaves some definite gaps. It doesn’t explain why one guy that I know, who by all accounts considers coke and alcohol a food group of its own, and yet has nothing to worry about when it comes to the dentist; yet my brother and I, who grew up in a household that treated coke as a substance invented by the devil himself were obviously more severely impacted. It also doesn’t explain the well documented existence of indigenous groups with excellent dental health to whom a toothbrush is about as familiar an object as a condom to a Catholic.

So, as usual, when in doubt, I turned to the available literature; namely one book in particular (so far) called “Cure Tooth Decay” by Ramiel Nagal – a title with a bluntness that makes it promising. When I finally got it in my hands, it’s width also, raised my hopes for it. Rather than being a comprehensive treatise, a dictionary on its own, it was a slender, perhaps 75 page volume – something that promised not to stray too far from the topic at hand, while being easily, ahem, digestable…..(sorry, couldn’t resist).

Upon reading it, what I found was both shocking, as well as a tad relieving.  In a nutshell, the author emphatically refutes any contemplation of a vegetarian, let alone a vegan, diet, stating that the essential elements of strong teeth, and by extension, bones, are the fat-soluble vitamins – A, D, E, & K, which are difficult to ingest from plant sources, and even when found in plant-based foods, are present in significantly higher concentrations in butter, yogurt, and milk. Importantly, unlike virtually all dairy products available on the market today, these products have to be raw – read unpasteurized – in order to be effective.

Now, I’ve long been afflicted by eczema, relatively insignificant from essentially high school onwards, but much more of a nuisance early in life – so much so that my parents went to some lengths to figure this one out, and they identified dairy as a possible culprit, an allergen, with the result that dairy was simply not included in my diet. Couple that with a not half-hearted addiction to black licorice, the saltier the better, and a stubborn streak that banished pretty much all vegetables from my dinner plate, and you have a recipe for a very rich dentist, to say the least.

The trouble with this whole raw dairy thing is that it goes against the grain of my dietary habits and education on dairy. From the common belief among vegetarians that dairy consumption is useless from a calcium absorption perspective unless care is taken to also ensure adequate intake of magnesium and Vitamin D, and perhaps more importantly, that milk, dairy, and animal flesh, instead of promoting protein fortification as many believe, actually cause the excretion of protein. Here I admit to a weakness of this weblog – it is not a scientific treatise, but rather a log of thoughts and mish-mash of facts which may or may not be referenced. In this case, I’m going to admit to not remembering the exact reason behind animal products such as meat and dairy causing protein loss, and just say that my understanding of this stems from a video featuring Dr. Michael Klaper, M.D., which unfortunately, after “borrowing” for two years from a friend, we’ve lent to another friend (without notifying the owner of course). I’ve just checked, and he does appear on Google and in limited fashion on Youtube. The video I saw is called “A Diet for all Reasons,” to the best of my knowledge (a 45 second search on Youtube) isn’t available for viewing, but available to buy. I believe the explanation for a diet including animal foods causing protein loss centred around the acidity of the amino acids which compose protein.

There are many more aspects to preserving that healthy bite in Nagal’s book, but I have covered the absolute essentials here. I should add that Nagal states that tooth decay and tooth remineralization have more to do with the concentration of calcium and phosphorus in the blood than with oral cleanliness. I do want to hear from you though, whether you are vegan, vegetarian, or just plain like to eat normally and not obsess over what goes into your body, what are you thoughts on this? Do you have any further information that I have not yet come across? How to achieve good dental health on a plant based diet, perhaps? Or perhaps why you think Nagal is right on the money? Other good books on this topic? Or just what works for you and what doesn’t?

Speak up, do.  Or should I say, “Bite me?”

Let Sleeping Elephants Lie

More or less the extent of my astrological knowledge is that I am a Libra, which I strongly associate with a tendency to seek balance, logic, and rational judgement, and to shy away from impulsiveness. In a lot of cases, that describes me to a T. Whether those are actually things characteristic of a Libra is anybody’s guess.

Taken one step further though, being strongly “Libra-esque,” or any other astrological sign, inherently makes one unbalanced. Perhaps this is why I sometimes strive to leave behind the search for balance, and instead, embrace impulsiveness, spur of the moment type decisions. Because I seldom make a decision on the spot. No, I usually want to use just about all the time that I have before I come to a decision. This might be why, in high school when test writing was a frequent occurrence, I would usually be one of the last to leave the room. Had I less time, I’d still have completed it, but why would I use less time than I’d been given?

I broach this topic because for me, this seems to be a time of great upheaval. On the heels of being unemployed for longer than I have been since I entered the workforce, the array of possiblities and opportunites clamoring to once again engulf me is bewildering and overwhelming. Some of the few concrete decisions that I’ve come to are that by no means do I ever want to have an office job, but even that is not concrete, because it is at loggerheads with my recent interest in economics. Where, oh where, could economics ever lead but to a desk and a cubicle?

And yet, outside the realm of economics, where is the root of the inequities, failures, and injustices of our world? Surely it is not in our best interests to have a system where money is debt and debt is money. Nor to work until June or July just to pay the tax load. Nor to measure progress in the Gross Domestic Product while ignoring the Genuine Progress Indicator. Yet who, besides an economist can address these problems?

We’ve been through the 60’s and 70’s, when peace and love reigned supreme, when people stood up to their governments, and the general trajectory was towards weapons disarmament. Yet that was also a time of international tension, as a cloud of fear hung over the world as everyone waited for somebody with a happy trigger finger to jetison the world into nuclear hell. Fortunately, that never happened, and today the threat seems distant.

The funny thing is that I’m really talking out of my ass, because I’m no expert on the events post WWII. (this particular post is perhaps more of a confession of lack of expertise than anything else). Despite all the awareness of that era, and what I perceive to be a trend towards lightheartedness, the elimination of racial differences, and the valuation of the simple things in life but also freedom through eccentricity and individuality, where are we now? Not any further ahead, I think it’s fair to say. Perhaps the people who pull the strings at the highest levels don’t want the people to lose their sense of tension, of foreboding. Perhaps complacency really isn’t the goal, because as soon as the people become comfortable in where they’re at, and confident in the state of world affairs, they start to demand civil liberties. They become harder to control.

These are the issues which swirl in my head as I ponder a diversion into economics, and yet, that spectre of being nailed to an office chair leaves me trembling with angst. Better, perhaps, as some of my friends have done, to develop physical skills and competency, maximize the body’s potential, take premium care of it, and so journey throughout life, relying on physical skills for my bread and butter,, and working towards sufficiently strong community bonds to deter the folks who pull our society’s economic strings from getting too reckless in terms of letting equality and prosperity for the average person fall by the wayside.

That, to me, is a key area to focus on. Community through strong bonds that is attuned to what our government is up to. In BC, and Canada as a whole, we’re in a period marked by talks of cuts and deficits. Across the river in Mission protests recently arose in response to plans to close the emergency ward. Now advocates of our library system find themselves needing to mobilize to demonstrate strong public loyalty to maintaining the library system’s funding base. At the same time, The governing Liberals announced the introduction of a Harmonized Sales Tax a year from now, nicely timed so that they hope people will more or less have forgotten. In theory, the HST is a logical concept – why do the paperwork for two taxes when you could only do it for one? However, the HST means that more tax will be levied on some consumer items, raising more revenue for the government.

This revenue, of course, is what the government needs to pay for service maintenance, because with an ongoing recession, revenue is down. So to the best of my understanding, in the absence of new revenue such as that from an HST, the maintenance of existing library and health services will mean cuts elsewhere. That is simply unavoidable, unless the government is going to run a deficit, which is not something they want to be known for. BC taxpayers lose no matter which way the ball tumbles, whether it’s in higher taxes or in reduced services.

Advocacy groups are doing a fabulous job of mobilizing to create awareness and protect local funding, and I commend them for that, because even though protecting funding locally will mean cuts elsewhere, a healthy level of citizen displeasure sends the message to our governments that their population base is not happy, and pushing the envelope too far carries a serious risk of reprisal.

So watch it, Victoria boys. This elephant’s showing some signs of life.

1500 and Counting

Our booth in Clikz

The drive to see a transit link between Abbotsford and Chilliwack is accelerating, and I have no doubt that if we can follow through and collect the target number of signatures, that we will succeed. I said after U-PASS that I never wanted to hear the words “bus” or “public transit” again. U-PASS, to me, was a big victory, one that has the potential to significantly change the drive-by culture of this university. The campaign itself, however, was nauseatingly repetitive, and now I find myself in the same situation with the campaign to finally link up Abbotsford and Chilliwack with some form of public transit.

When this campaign wraps up, I will be taking an extended break from this type of public transit advocacy. I am passionate about public transit that adequately services the community and region, and strongly feel that there will still be tremendous room for improvement once we do get the Chilliwack-Abbotsford Connector route, but for the short term, I will not be involved on more than an advisory level.

Now that we have that out of the way, I’ll quickly update how this campaign is going. There are 489 signatures to SFS’s petition online, and I have in the neighbourhood of 950 collected in hard copy. We have some 1-200 still circulating, so we have almost certainly passed the 1500 signature threshold. That’s one quarter of what Edith Griese collected to get the Aldergrove line in place.

On Monday I rode the #21 over to Aldergrove to pay Edith a visit (and get her to sign of course!) I chatted with Edith for about 20 minutes, and at the end of that conversation, I was more determined than ever that to succeed in this effort. We needed this service 30 years ago, and seeing Edith’s resolve and enthusiasm, despite being well into her senior years, was uplifting. In total, Edith collected some 6 000 signatures, taking just over two years to do that. Now, there is no way I am spending two years on this – currently we have been doing this very actively for perhaps three months, so at this pace will need one full year, or 9 more months to match her total. I want to do it faster, as I can’t commit to being here for that long. To accomplish that we will be setting up booths at the Farmer’s Market, the Flea Market, the Greyhound station, and the Welcome Back BBQ’s in September.

Recently, the Abbotsford News wrote a story about this petition effort, and the Aldergrove Star will be publishing a similar piece today (Thursday). The story can be read here, along with my ugly mug about to be run over by a bus.

http://www.bclocalnews.com/fraser_valley/abbynews/news/49038981.html

I am sitting in Clikz cafe, the Tim Hortons on campus as I write this, having collected an additional 50 or so signatures over the last few hours.  It is interesting how people seem to be too preoccupied to notice the petition despite there being a highly legible banner displayed out front, but once you invade their consciousness by asking them if they’ve seen the petition, generally respond enthusiastically. It makes me wonder how many opportunities in life they miss by simply being oblivious to them, being too focused on where they’re going to pay attention to anything else.

This petition, in fact, is one reason that I’m still in the Fraser Valley. When SFS helped the Student Union to pass the U-PASS which will be implemented this September, we committed to advocating for a Chilliwack – Abbotsford Connector, so it was important that somebody take this on. After my bicycle accident in March, I have the time to spare, so here I am, striking a few blows for a workable transit system.

The issue has recently taken on added importance, with UFV’s declared intent to build a ring road and adjoined parking through what is currently one of the last intact mature Douglas Fir forests in the area, the woodlot on the southern half of the campus. To erect new buildings, UFV must provide more parking, and this is the only space which they have to do this, so  they are willing to destroy a grove of mature forest, in which some of the trees must be at least 300 years old. If we can encourage a broad mode-shift to transit, the need for parking will be reduced, and the building permit authority may just waive the strict requirements for more parking for the new buildings.

You’d think that if the City can build a 6 or 7 thousand seat Entertainment Centre with 500 parking spots, that they could arrange something to ensure this small tract of rare forest is preserved.

Locavoring

Food is such a big part of our lives. This simple fact is impossible to escape, much as we might prefer to haphazardly eat what we’d like, when we’d like. Good food really excites me, especially when it’s locally produced and more or less benign – and Sundays at our house really take the cake.

We have glorious Sunday breakfasts that have evolved from a meat, cheese, peanut butter, and jam affair to a veritable feast at which we have Silver Hills sprouted bread, and a choice of: lettuce greens, broccoli/garlic sprouts, tamari, hummus, tahini, eggs, peanut butter, jam, onion, tomato, and butter, together with a black or twig tea. Such variety and exquisite taste simply can’t be beat.

Then over the rest of the day, we had a salad picked fresh from the garden, handfuls of fresh salmonberries and thimbleberries, and a garden smoothie containing lamb’s quarters (a plant related to Quinoa), dandelion, carrot thinnings, very young carrots,  and then made palatable by adding banana and apple. Last and probably least was some cooked cauliflower, quinoa with apples & cinnamon, and black beans with pasta sauce.

Such fare is simply extraordinary, and makes me wish it could be summer in perpetuity, as it is only in summer that it is so easy to find abundant food, and even now, we are still buying produce grown in California, not to mention the things like pasta sauce produced who knows where. Still, a day like today where we had control over so much of what we consumed leaves me feeling empowered, and motivated to do better yet. I am reading Steve Solomon’s “Growing Food in Hard Times” which asserts that with about 2-3 000 sq.ft. of land, cutting one’s food cost in half is entirely within reach with only 2 hrs. of work per week, not to mention the health benefits this would bring. I’d say this is very realistic, and while I only have about 1 000 sq. ft of land that is shaded until noon or later, I can foresee the day that I work at least 3000 sq. ft.

Because I can eat, cook, and sleep anywhere – for that I don’t need to own land. The land I need to own is the land that I work and condition the soil on. If that land happens to also have a place to lay my head, bonus, I’ll take it. But at the end of the day, it’s the productive land that matters, because we can’t rely on Californian imports forever.

The Starbucks Universe

Today I want to do something I never thought I would. A shout-out to a multi-national, ubiquitous corporation with the type of success that borders on being a monopoly. Starbucks. As much as my sweet tooth loves the store and it’s drinks, I really like something the store does that sets it apart from almost all the stores out there. Starbucks has a coffee-grounds giveaway program – one that has turned me into a literal Starbucks junkie. Not because I need my caffeine fix, but because my garden needs its nitrogen.

I’ve been stopping in at the 3 Starbucks locations that I pass by virtually every day to grab the roughly 5 kilo. bags that contain used coffee grounds, which Starbucks staff package up and put out for people to take home. In addition to the grounds being a good source of nitrogen and trace minerals, this saves the grounds from going where they would otherwise go – the landfill. It reduces Starbuck’s trash load, saving them money in disposal, and has made me one loyal customer. Because of course when I stop to grab my coffee grounds, I can’t resist grabbing a drink or a pastry either. It’s basic economics; I’ll spend my dollars with the companies that have practices that I support, and while I don’t drink much coffee, if that happens to be Starbucks, well, then it’s Starbucks.

Edit: Apparently, Go Go Beans in Abbotsford does the same thing. Actually, I suspect a lot of coffee shops will if  y ou ask. But Starbucks makes it soooo easy….end edit.

In my garden I’m growing a few types of crops. Lettuce, carrots, bush beans, pole beans, arugula, chard, broccoli, and raspberries, not to mention the grapes and pears that were present when we moved in to the property. In addition, there’s a roughly 3×3m. area that I use for composting, and it’s the compost where most of my grounds end up. Just yesterday I turned the pile, and to my great delight, could feel the warmth emanating from it, and even see some steam rising from it’s centre as I forked it over. The heat is generated by the copious abundance of micro-organisms feeding on the kitchen and garden waste that I add to my compost, and they do especially well when they have an abundance of nitrogren to feed on – something coffee grounds are high in. The hotter your pile, below a certain temperature, the faster you will get compost and the stronger it will be.

Another use for coffee grounds is as a foliar fertilizer. I soak the coffee grounds in water for a day or so, strain out the solids, and then use a hand-held sprayer to spray the leaves and stems of any plants that I think can use a boost. The liquid nitrogen content of the water, as well as the other nutrients it absorbs from the grounds, is highly absorbable to the plants who get it. For instance, I used it on a couple of squash plants that I had to move because they were growing in my lettuce bed, and suffered from root disturbance following the move. They seem to be recovering now, but like with natural medicine, you really don’t know if it’s because of the treatment or whether they would have recovered anyway.

So a big kudos to Starbucks for going to the effort of making coffee grounds available for people to filch; we might be playing footsie with the planet’s systems by moving the nutrients in coffee so far around the world, but at least this is one step towards closing the loop and getting some use out of what would otherwise be a waste product.

Nope, Starbucks didn’t hook me with their caffeine, but I’m hooked to Starbucks nonetheless.

Just goes to show; if they don’t get you one way, they’ll get you another.

I should have tried to sell them this post.

Survival and activism

I wrote this short blog post a while back in response to a posting on the Care2 site, www.care2.com, for cause bloggers. I didn’t hear back, but felt I had to give it a shot. I obviously didn’t give this post enough time or energy or the right direction, but even so, getting paid to blog would be a little beyond belief. I doubt it would have been much, but still….

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I first came across the Care2 community way back in early high-school. My idealism and passion for a better world immediately pulled me in, and I enthusiastically began using Care2’s leveraging of the power of advertising to save just a little bit of big cat habitat, conserve marine wetlands, and protect the rainforest. I wasn’t quite changing world events just yet, but I was making a difference, however incremental, and that’s what I cared about. It thrilled me to see an organization aggressively using online media and the power of economics to effect change. Today, I still see Care2 doing exactly that.

–Edit–: In fact, since I wrote this, I’ve learned from Care2 Founder Randy Paynter’s blog that Care2 is currently combating a DDOS attack – a malicious effort to seriously undermine Care2’s effectiveness. Randy writes: “We do not know who is behind the attack. Clearly, someone is threatened with the impact the PetitionSite is having. It’s possible the attack is being coordinated by a single unhappy hacker, or it’s possible it’s related to some of the petitions we’ve recently had related to international events. It’s pure speculation at this point as we simply do not know, however its size and characteristics suggest it’s a well coordinated attack.”

So there you have it. As some reader’s have pointed out, the fact that whoever is behind this attack feels threatened by Care2 means it’s making a positive difference. I encourage you to use or explore Care2. — End edit.–

Since that time, my activism has counter-intuitively expanded to become more local. I’ve passionately raised awareness about my watershed and its salmon populations, chipped in with the local cycling advocacy group, and participated at the civic table. But I’ve also come to realize that though we might want to change the world, there are limitations to how much we can do, and it’s important not to overextend, but to function within our capabilities.

These are tumultuous times, to say the least. Gone are the days when the only thing that mattered was “making it” in the big wide world. Fashioning a product to sell, acquiring personal property, growing your family and staying in touch with your network – it’s easy for these things to pale in comparison to the challenges that science and intuition tells us are coming, if they’re not here yet. A rapidly warming climate, proliferation of packaging and industrial waste, growing worldwide debt loads, all these things and more call on us to act differently, to do more than we ever have before, above and beyond the demands of our careers, and yet for many of us, simply staying afloat in the ever-changing sea of current events and economics is challenge enough.

Some give in to apathy, reckoning the pace and scale of the things that are happening are simply too much to effect change over. That’s not the spirit we need. If we can cultivate an attitude of passionate involvement, and value effort even when the result doesn’t materialize, we can change the course that we’re on. It’s what I’m working towards in my areas of interest, and I hope you do the same in yours.

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Today I’m using Care2 more than I ever have before. I mainly use their e-mail service, figuring that if I’m going to do e-mail anyway, why not do it with an organization that spreads goodwill by raising money for habitat and endangered species preservation among other things, rather than with some anonymous, for-profit, corporation like Hotmail or Gmail?

–Second Edit– One other Care2 feature that I’ve contributed to is absolutely free, and amazingly ingenious. It involves using advertising dollars to fund preservation initiatives. Companies are given the opportunity to advertise on the Care2 site, and Care2 hosts a link that people must log onto the site in order to click. By logging onto the site, they are exposed to that company’s logo, and voila, these companies have gained exposure while contributing their advertising dollars to preservation. For example, one company that stands out as gaining profile in my eyes is Kashi  - the high-fibre healthy cereal company. Now I don’t buy much cereal, but when I do I’m more likely to buy Kashi because of their contribution to the Care2 “Click-2-Donate” sites.

To do some vainglorious chest-thumping, but also demonstrate Care2’s effectiveness (something I was skeptical of for a while) since I started clicking, which I did pretty much daily in early high school and have only recently started doing again, I’ve made the following contributions out of the Care2 totals:

Offset 18 lbs. of carbon/2 549 495 lbs. total

24 THOUSAND sq. feet of Marine Wetland, American Prairie, and Rainforest habitat/ 612 MILLION total

305 ACRES of Big Cat habitat (tiger, jaguar, snow leopard)/ 27 400 SQ. MILES total

830 pcs. fruit for primates/ 18.7 MILLION total

supported Care2 kids for 505 days /18.2 MILLION total

659 pets/ 18.3 MILLION total

1218 letters protesting violence against women/ 12.5 MILLION total

As well, Care2 supports  efforts to help seals, oceans, and to eliminate the environmental causes of breast cancer, albeit with less tangible ways of measuring progress.

I really see Care2 as a shining example of one of our primary options in this rigged economic climate. Until we can achieve wide-reaching reform, we have to try to create a shift in spending habits from supporting harmful practices to supporting beneficial ones, and being willing to pay a little more for it if we have to. Done en masse, this can effect change.–End second edit–

Those of you who read here regularly will have noticed a precipitous decline in the frequency of my posts of late. This is no accident, and has a definite reason, so don’t despair! For the time being, I’ll be posting infrequently, and with little mention of myself. That’s probably as it should be anyhow.

…and the reed canary grass is high…

Life has slowed to a crawl, just in time for the hot weather to sweep in. If your parents ever sang that song about, “Lazy summer days, with the fish jumping and the cotton being high,” well, that’s what things feel like right now. Replace the cotton with reed canary grass or corn, and the fish jumping with red-tailed hawks soaring, and the songs fits perfectly.

I walk home everyday from the bus stop on Blueridge, from which I span the rural-urban divide, going through the subdivision, around the detention pond under the power-lines, through the barbed-wire fence, along the makeshift pathway through a young alder grove, down the hill as the pathway snakes through a grove of middle-age cottonwoods, and then through a large patch of grass that’s waist high, before I cross the creek and cross the field to my house. All in all, it’s about 10 minutes from the bus stop to my house, 13 if I’m going uphill.

It’s a bus route on which I’m starting to know some of the users. There’s Rick, the laid off reformed gang-member and now born-again Christian who’s using his free time do some serious working out. There’s the girl who goes down to the City Blends with her laptop to do her homework and do some people watching. There’s the red-haired girl who draws faces on balloons to pass the time. There’s the Indo-Canadian security guard, who remains the only one to offer to sign my petition to implement a transit line between Chilliwack and Abbotsford. Everyone else I’ve had to approach. There’s the lady who disagrees vehemently with Tim Felger’s “election” signs downtown which say things like, “Your mom called. She said to bring home a baggie.”

Riding transit so much, you start to love the endless variation among the people on the buses. The quirky bus drivers, the poverty, the young punks who hang out in the back of the bus, the young single mothers who you feel sorry for but admire for their pluck, all the people who don’t jive so well with the rest of society. Who you don’t see are the young professionals, the businessmen, the people who think they’ve got it made, who drive sporty cars around town and still believe the world’s their oyster and shun transit at all costs. Here in Abbotsford, there’s a certain homely feel to using transit, almost a sense of ownership that simply isn’t present when you’re in Vancouver or some other urban metropolis, where the sheer multitude of people makes any sort of group identification based on transportation routes unlikely.

Transit slows things down as well. Countless times I’ve walked the 15 minutes to get to the bus stop, lounged for 20 minutes reading or chatting at a bus stop, or walked the distance that the bus was going to cover because it wasn’t going to arrive for 20 minutes. As I recover from the concussion that I suffered, I’m not working yet, freeing up 35 hours per week or so. I’m still too stubborn to apply for student loans, having paid for everything out of pocket so far and determined to keep doing that as long as I can, so I’m not taking any classes because I just can’t do it financially. That leaves me with a lot of time to myself. Heck, I don’t even have the money to use all the free time getting my entertainment fix. Instead, an independent business opportunity has arisen to which I’m dedicating myself – one to which I see no downside or risk, and the potential for great rewards –  along with some casual, simple work in my garden, and some excellent literature. Ebay, too, has become my second home as I try to liquidate all the un-needed items that  are scattered around the property.

It’s a lifestyle I’m going to miss when I move on, and make no mistake, move on I will. This little 15 hectare patch of land bi-sected by Downes Creek and containing my little garden patch will be places that I will always visit fondly, albeit with mixed memories of a place that sustained me throughout high-school and early university, literally and spiritually, but also saw the accumulation of more sheer stuff than I could ever use or reasonably dispose of, along with the emergence of health challenges about which I’ve been relatively mute and will remain vague.

All my instincts scream at me to simply play it safe, and establish some kind of shelter against what may or may not metamorphose into an international if not a global catastrophe, as our society’s energy supplies start to stagnate, taxes rise, the baby boomers leave the active economy and demand their social security benefits instead, and the extinction crisis driven by a changing climate begins to mount, affecting not just the world’s ecological systems, but the people who are intricately tied to them.

By nature, I remain a cautious person, with an avid dislike for casting preparation to the wind and letting the chips fall where they may.  Yet, there are things to be said for a devil-may-care lifestyle governed more by the changing of the winds and the seasons than the fickle shifting of society’s economic outlook. It’s a hardy, no-expectations and no set plan lifestyle which takes life as it comes and doesn’t focus too much on the future, outside of idle speculation to pass the time. Perhaps most importantly, it relies on natural skill and capability to pull one through when hard times do arise instead of reserves that have been put aside in good times. What I can’t seem to decide is whether the people who lived in that way did so deliberately, knowing that any disruption in the current socio-economic state of things could turn their world upside-down, or whether they were simply too ignorant, lazy, stubborn, or selfish to focus on getting ahead and laying something aside to help them deal with bad times when they did arrive. I’m not mentioning many names, mainly because there are really only a couple of figures who characerize that lifestyle who I know much about, and even my knowledge of them is limited. But I am thinking of the people who characterized the Beat Generation, the free lifestyles of the 60’s, 70’s, and more recent decades as well. What I am coming to realize is that there was no heavenly balm of peace and good times which settled over that post World War period. There was the Cold War, and the ideologically justified combat of the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. The threat of the annihilation of a way of life was ever-present, as it is now. As I develop a broader understanding of the way things work, I find it more and more difficult to pronounce anything with certainty.

The idealism that would have seen the proliferation of public transit and bicycles, high density self-sufficient housing, community gardens, and the emergence of a government aware of the complete inadequacies of economics as usual, is fast fading within me. From the time of the first catastrophic detonation of the atomic bomb, groups have called for nuclear disarmament without success. The Kyoto Treaty was first adopted in 1997 and took effect in 2005, and today we are further from its goals than we have ever been. People continue to gradually lose traction against the ceaseless wheel of economics, as more slide into poverty and taxes rise ever higher. We are at the point where prominent British scientist James Lovelock, founder of the Gaia Theory, believes that we have finally passed the point of no return, and that the best expenditure of energy is now in preparation for the inevitable collapse of the world as we know it. Now, that’s easy for him to say – on the one hand, advancing a theory that costs him nothing but casts him into the spotlight even if he is dead wrong. But on the other hand, the science and economics of where we are does look grim. The main point here is that progressively minded activists have been calling for certain changes since many of my friend’s grandparents were teenagers, and as far as I can see, have been stymied by a range of factors, from the military-industrial complex, to fractional reserve banking, to simple human nature and greed.

Yeah, that much vaunted idealism that saw me quietly advocate for the things I believed to be of paramount importance, is giving way to a higher degree of realism that espouses one of my brother’s core beliefs: That if you don’t help yourself, you can’t help anyone else. In the face of escalating financial challenges that make a mockery of the naive, simplistic, and innocent desire to triumph over the power of money, the cogs of ICBC, housing markets, food costs, the price of accredited education, physical limitations, and prohibitive health care expenses,  a lot of the edges that defined my core beliefs about the role of a good citizen are being worn away – as near as I can gather, what happens to all idealists who don’t take jobs with the goverment or in government funded academia.

I have not yet seen or met anyone who meets two conditions: 1) is not constrained by money, and 2) acquired their wealth through means that obey the “do no harm” principle. Willful ignorance, rationalization, forced justification, and turning a blind eye seem to dominate in people’s mindsets, which is certainly not to demonize humanity, but to assign fault and to acknowledge our inherent imperfection and pragmatism.

To fly in the face of established wisdom about conclusions, I’m not writing a proper conclusion here. Rather, I’d simply like to urge you, if you read this, to disagree vehemently or simply play the devil’s advocate. I do hate it when people agree with me. I know I’m right anyway; I just wish people wouldn’t admit that. So come on. Tear my impromptu essay to shreds. Give me a failing grade, and I’ll do the same for you. Tell my why and how I’m wrong, and I will be your friend forever. Just know that I don’t make many enemies.

Bitten Tongue

I was going to write something related to family and what makes for a satisfying life tonight. However, I got into a bit of a mental quandary about the possibility of it coming back to bite me in the ass, and decided not to. So this is what you get instead – just a short little note explaining that what you are reading is not a dramatic, controversial expose of the most risque stuff that goes through my head. Rather, it’s a high-percentage log of ideas that don’t appear to have the likelihood of exploding on me, and that I’m very confident about.

Maybe one day I’ll decide that there’s no harm and actually some benefit in spewing out outrageous material, or just material that somebody might twist and use against me. For now, I’ll adhere somewhat to the realm of political correctness, and save anything else for my private life. If you were looking for something else, too damn bad is about all I can say.

Or just wriggle your way into my private life.

What thou eat thou art

Running with the crowd has never been my thing, quite possibly to my detriment, but at certain times, most definitely to my great delight. I wrote a few weeks ago about the oxymoronic ubiquitous phenomenon of claiming not to be mainstream, but truthfully, very few people can make that claim.

What I do know is that I haven’t developed a great deal of friendships, mainly, I think, because I’ve never been remotely interested in what my peers were doing. By Grade Six I had an extensive list of bird species that I’d seen; no one cared when I did mention wild birds.

In Grade Six I’d pull my desk over away from the rest so that nobody would bother me. My future Grade Seven teacher wonderingly said I must like it that way.

By the time my peers reached age sixteen, some were beginning to acquire driver’s licences. Me? I couldn’t have cared less.

After high school, I cycled and bused across town to get to a university, and watched in amazement as the parking lots swelled each day.

At a youth gathering at a friend’s church (ok, I had some friends), when mentioning facts about ourselves, I said, “I grow my own food.” Despite the stifled laughter, it was true. In Gr. 12 I’d put in a veggie garden, to see what my backyard could save my family.

In this picture, you can see where Downes Creek runs by the line of trees, my house in the distance, and the field where I get a lot of my stinging nettle.

On Sunday mornings, despite going to a Mennonite school, I wouldn’t go to church, even though I promised a cute girl that I’d go with her one day. Instead, I’d go on long rambles over Fishtrap Creek or Downes Bowl, figuring that was all the church I needed. In retrospect, they weren’t long enough by miles. Oh yeah, she’s married now, a fate I’d sooner put off. But that’s what they all say, isn’t it?

These days, I cook stinging nettle for dinner. It’s free, abundant, and great for you. What better combination is there in this world than that, and yet who among my peers does it?

I never have cared much for alcohol, blazing, smoking, or drugs, reckoning this world was still good enough I didn’t need those things. Besides, I ride transit. I know where overuse of them will land you. It ain’t pretty, though better than some fates I suppose. As to whether this world’s good enough, well, the jury’s hung on that one. And they’ll probably appeal the verdict anyway.

To find like-minded people, Abbotsford probably isn’t the place to be. I know that, and yet I can’t leave. Besides, I’d probably find a way to disagree with the like-minded ones too.

Probably it’s the stinging nettle. I hear the system can only handle so much before you become an ornery contrarian. Haven’t you heard? It’s called biomimicry.

The Eclectic Herd

Canucks mania has spread like wildfire in the Fraser Valley. Establishments frequented by hockey mad folk are thanking the heavens for the rush of euphoria that is helping to counteract the effects of the recession. People schedule tasks around Canucks games, gladly opting to take a few hours away from the grind to relax in front of the tube, knowing that remaining caught up in the status of the NHL playoffs will benefit them. You might think that that’s an odd thought; how on Earth can keeping one’s eyes fixed to a hockey screen displaying unrelated men vying to insert a black rubber disk into a net, and doing this for three hours, possibly benefit one?  Around playoff time we humans certainly exhibit some strange behaviour, but upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that it’s not as if this type of behaviour is at all impractical on a personal level. A lot of stuff I don’t like isn’t, actually.

Drivers and pedestrians celebrating the Canucks Game 2 win

Before I go any further, I just want to point out that until the last year or two, I was as big of a Canucks fan as anybody I know; hell, I made friends on the basis of talking about hockey and the Canucks together. Even today, I still get a kick out of watching the game; if I’m at home I’ll still follow the game log or watch the game despite having a grainy, wavy CBC image. We don’t have any cable TV; never have and I probably never will.

Recently however, I’m not really the kid who would want his sports section along with the morning oatmeal in Gr.5. I still want my oatmeal, but not so much the sports. But the question remains, what could possibly drive people to become so rabid over something so inconsequential?

The first big benefit is pretty simple. Hunkering down in front of “the game” relaxes people! Taking a few hours out of a busy day to do nothing productive and focus on cheering on a favorite team, be it mentally or physically, is a powerful urge because it gives us an excuse to take a long break. It would be one thing if that break was taken in isolation, but what’s even better is that in this case there are huge social benefits! Since everybody’s talking hockey these days, if you can join in or even direct the chatter by knowing what’s going on, you’ve immediately got a social leg-up. For basically doing nothing.

At the same time, though I’ve done absolutely no research on this and have no intention of doing so, I believe it’s been shown that having a championship team locally gives a region a big boost. There’s a general sense of euphoria as people have their innate desires of seeing “their” team win fulfilled. This tends to raise feelings of goodwill. Also, having a local play-off team gives people a reason to get together and celebrate, and what do people do when they celebrate? They buy stuff and consume it, so it boosts the economy. Whether it provides a long term boost is questionable, but there’s a high likelihood that all the simultaneous celebrations result in increased sales, which in turn makes local retailers happy and also boosts the euphoria level. As with the social benefits, this is all well and good until you think about the fact that all this is accomplished through manic support for a group of millionaires, most of whom have nothing to do with the local community and are only playing here because a General Manager, who also likely hails from somewhere else, had the aptitude to bring them in. By cheering these people on, we’re basically saying that being here by default makes you a better player or manager than all the other players or managers in the league. It’s senseless, but hey, it boosts the economy and makes us feel better so we’re going to go party, alright?

After Game 2, a 3-0 Canucks win in which Sundin scored the first goal, a buddy and I walked out to South Fraser Way to check out the celebrations. The dominant thought that I had as people beetled down Abbotsford’s main artery honking and waving and basically letting go of some steam, was, “Gosh, when does Abbotsford ever get excited about anything? Now look at this!” I’ve heard estimates of around 1000 people out celebrating, and that doesn’t include the many thousands more who stayed home. It’s basically a herd mentality; what we’re basically saying is that, “Even though few of the Canucks actually hail from Vancouver, when they win we feel happy and drink beer and consume other stuff and watch lots of ads, so let’s all join in!!” How’s that for logic eh?

Somewhat miraculously, I apparently am in near complete agreement with my brother on what I’m going to say next. This pretty much never happens. We respect each other, but live very different lifestyles and hold some pretty different viewpoints, so I’m pretty flabbergasted whenever we agree on something.

What I heard him saying yesterday is basically an exact replica of what I was arguing with my buddy a couple nights ago; that it’s great to see Abbotsford citizens out in numbers to support something, but how in hell have we come to a point where the only time they will ever come out in numbers for anything is when something of absolutely no consequence except how they ‘feel’ goes in their favour? How assinine have we become, and how has this happened? How is it that about issues such as land use or transportation or tax rates or pollution we raise nary a peep, by comparison, but when a bunch of millionares defeat some other millionaires by playing with marginally more skill, and subsequently causes the supporters of the other millionaires to be dejected and generate a collective pall over their goings on, that we rejoice!?

When our very food and drink is at stake because of development on agricultural land, and our ability to feed our family is threatened by economic rumblings, we clamor but do nothing, but when ‘our’ team wins we celebrate and drink beer and give ourselves a collective pat on the back.

Is that we’re completely happy with the way things are organized by our governments and leading personalities? Is it that we’re all too confused to adamantly advocate anything? Are we too apathetic to stick out our necks for anything when there is the slightest element of risk, which there is none of when celebrating a Canucks win? Have the forces of media forced us into enough of a philosophical straightjacket that we trust that our duly elected leaders will do the right thing?

So, you down for some drinks when the next series starts? Sure, I’ll buy.

I mean, you did read this far didn’t you?