The road less cycled

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

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.

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.

I believe it was Wednesday, though it may have been Thursday. I woke up some hours before I had to go to work, and tried to turn on my lights, and laptop. Neither showed much of a response, so I figured the breaker had flipped or something. The wiring in our house is kind of assinine, or at least, it’s not designed to accomodate the electrical consumption of people in active residence both upstairs and downstairs. So the breaker flips fairly routinely, usually on Sunday mornings when I’m sleeping in from working late on the Saturday night, and the family is having Sunday breakfast, which means there is an extra toaster on a circuit which is already running several lights and my electric heater.

This day however, the breaker wasn’t the problem. I went upstairs and was immediately struck by how dark everything was. Of course, the power was out throughout the house, which struck me as distinctly odd given that it wasn’t cold enough for anything to freeze on the power lines, and any snow that had been weighing down the lines a couple of days ago had long since melted in the torrential downpour which followed the whiteout. In any case, the power was out and that was that. No problem right? It would probably only be a couple hours at most, and then we could resume life as usual.

Not so fast; we sat around the house a little bit, took out a few candles, the usual for a power outage. My dad hooked up the generator to our pellet stove, so we still had heat, and nobody was particurly hungry, though we joked that now would be the perfect time to whip out some raw food, something we’ve been doing more of lately.

My plan was simply to go to work as usual, and if the power wasn’t back on around dinnertime, I’d take a break from work to bring home some pizza or perhaps some pitas from the Pitapit. Now everybody’s hopes were up; secretly we all like that much better than our usual meals of course, and as a bonus nobody would have to actually cook. Never mind that our meals are always, nearly without exception, hearty and satisfying – the prospect of take-out food, which we might do once a month, is always appealing – appealing enough for some of us to be disappointed if the power did indeed come back on.

So I got ready to go to work; I was parked in front of my dad’s Safari, owing to the fact that our driveway was still only partially navigable, and our usual parking spots were a little inaccessible. He’d have to move his van and that would be that. Well, it wasn’t that easy. The Safari’s got problems with its sparkplugs; moisture build-up  prevents it from starting, and of course, it doesn’t get much moister than it’s been for the past weeks. Sure enough, it wouldn’t start. So until it did, I was good and stuck.

Normally not much of a problem. Hook up a hair dryer to an extension cord, put it under the hood for half an hour or so, and bob’s your uncle. No more moisture. So I went inside to find a hair dryer while my dad hooked up his charging unit to check the charge on his battery. After getting it hooked up, he stared at it for a while, before exclaiming, “Oh! No power!” The charger, hooked up to an extension cord, still wasn’t getting any power of course – the first graphic example of how ingrained electricity at our fingertips is.

We realized that of course the hair dryer wouldn’t work either, but thought we might be able to plug it into the cigarette lighter of my car with my engine running so we wouldn’t drain my battery, if the voltage was low enough for my inverter to handle. So we scoured the house up and down for a hair dryer. No such luck, though my dad had used it mere days ago.

Then SD showed up; she needed an oil filter wrench for Konrad to get his oil filter off. So I accompanied her out to the garage, only to press the button and stare at the door in stupefaction when it didn’t open. “Oh! No power!” I exclaimed. That door, too, needs power to open – it won’t open manually. So no wrench for Konrad. My dad did find a workable substitute in his van.

We still hadn’t found the hair dryer, which just pissed us all off, and made us realize how far up shit creek we’d be in a prolonged power outage, if we couldn’t even find a hair dryer when we needed it. So there I was. There was no way I was getting out of the driveway short of pushing the van down the driveway and onto the road, which wasn’t happening. So I took a seat, and waited for electricity, the invisible god that controls virtually everything we do.

Faced with being rendered completely dysfunctional after losing power for three hours, the ludicrousness of the situation hit us. In these difficult economic times, when we and virtually every person like  us, are completely dependent on a “just-in-time” shipping system to stock the grocery stores, where would we be in the case of a longer power outage? Do we have back-up power? Not really. A generator that’ll last for a few hours is about the extent of it. We don’t even have a woodpile to burn in the fireplace.

As for food, there’s probably a week’s worth of canned food in the pantry, on top of the output from the last shopping trip or delivery from Ladybug Organics. That’s not very much to go by, and yet, probably 90% of people are no better prepared. Is it even possible for an entire city like Vancouver to be prepared in the event of prolonged and widespread power loss? Can we function without refrigerators? How do we cook without electric stoves? The reality is that most of us are woefully unprepared, and would have few alternatives than descending into a chaotic scramble for access to the remaining supplies in grocery stores.

In a day and age when planning for the next vacation is given a far higher priority than preparing for self-sufficiency, isn’t it time we started working together to re-learn the skills of our ancestors, instead of buying video games and home entertainment systems? Isn’t it time we pulled up our bootstraps, lest we get caught with our pants down?

My first experience with him was quite some time ago now, probably last spring. The CV shafts in my ‘86 ‘Lude had been creaking something awful ever since I’d bought the vehicle in November ‘07 from my brother. This is a situation of more urgency than I thought at the time, so I didn’t get around to having them replaced until I’d driven the vehicle for a half year or so, but eventually I did decide to reluctantly sink some money into my car.

My dad recommended talking to a fellow named Jim who apparently worked for cheap – cheap being $30/hr. So we went down to his place, then on the Fraser Highway halfway to Aldergrove, to see if he could do the job. He was home, and had obviously just completed a job for another client, because as we pulled in, we were treated to the rather odd sight of a man tucking bills into Jim’s pockets, saying that Jim wasn’t going to get away with it this time. Jim obviously didn’t want the money, but reluctantly accepted it.

He ended up doing the job for me as well – both CV shafts, for which I bought the parts and he installed them. Afterwards, I was elated, because although the job had taken longer than he’d estimated, he wouldn’t take much money for it! I think I paid him around $150 for it; far less than a repair shop would have charged.

Then, just a couple weeks ago, the car overheated while my dad was driving it. Turns out it had lost its coolant solution; there was a leak in the block heater, Jim diagnosed after coming out on the same day to have a look. So I cycled out to Lordco to pick up a new one; a block heater is something you can usually do without in temperate southwest BC – it keeps your water lines warm at night if you plug it in during cold nights.

Anyway, Jim ended up replacing the block heater for me. It took about four hours, yet all he would take was $40 that I gave him. Tried to give him an extra $50, as it was easily worth that, but when I handed him the envelope he looked at me in horror. “What’s that?! No no no. You’ve already paid me.” And with that he was gone. For $40 he gave up a good chunk of his Sunday so I could be back on the road in time for work.

So this post is a tribute to Jim, and all men and women around the world like him. They’re people to whom money is no object, not because they’re awash in it, but because they only want what they need to get by. What’s more, they think nothing of working long and odd hours. To Jim, I’m sure, life is full of frivolities; there are so many distractions and pursuits that can fill up your time if you let them, but at the end of the day, they don’t necessarily bring happiness. For that, I’ve a feeling Jim would say, all you need is a good day’s honest work to do, sufficiently compensated, a wife, husband, or lover, and some basic comforts are really the main ingredients.

The way things are going however, some of those might be in short supply. How much time is left to prepare for what’s coming? Problem is, it’s people like Jim, and more than likely you and I, who pay the price when people like another Jim I could name bungle up our economy. To be fair, the seeds for our current harvest were planted decades ago.

Mighty poor seeds they were.

My head’s been awhirl lately with the seemingly limitless reverberations of the collapse of financial markets. Today we heard that Citigroup chopped over 50 000 jobs; one of the biggest downsizing operations in history. It’s sobering news; especially considering that I once almost worked for a Citigroup subsidiary, Primerica, where representatives used having Citigroup as a financial backer as ammunition for the stability of their products.

My own RRSP’s have crashed, insignificant as they might have been. Am I concerned over that? Not overly. When I took them out, I did so knowing that markets have always crashed and risen again; that boom and bust cycles are inevitable and that the long term market average is positive despite the crashes we’ve seen in the past. In financial services, they call this riding out the market via dollar cost averaging; contributing a set amount on a regular basis in solid investments irrespective of what the market happens to be doing. But I’m rather nonchalant about my RRSP’s for another reason as well.

Mutual funds are not an investment I would make again. Having learned what I’ve learned since, knowing what I know now, I do not believe that mutual funds are a responsible investment. They’re a mainstream financial vehicle that serve to maintain the status quo, providing huge sums to the biggest corporations in existence. Sure there are some socially responsible investments (SRI) out there, but they’re just mutual funds with a smiley face; by and large just business as usual with a dollop of reason.

For someone looking simply to get ahead in this society; to put aside a nest egg for retirement, or to provide for one’s family, mutual funds are a solid investment. Diversify yourself well; don’t be too jumpy with your money, and the value you’ve lost in the past months will be regained, barring worse developments than a mere recession. But try to do those things while also thinking about your children’s future, and their children’s future, and mainstream mutual funds, even SRI, won’t get the job done. Many SRI funds do not filter their investments on a sustainability criterion; rather, they have a “better than the rest” criterion. They’ll pick the best of a bad bunch, but in general, they won’t boycott any but the absolute worst, the least reputable, all the while filing shareholder resolutions which amount to dick-all if they’re not eventually backed up by a withdrawal of investor money.

Money still calls the shots in this world. What we need is solid financial management on a local level. The withholding of money from the financial mega-machine which runs all our lives, and the usage of said money in the construction of strong community partnerships and investment in local, new sustainability economy type businesses. My local Mt. Lehman Credit Union is a prime example, as is the Aldergrove Credit Union. They might not be as green as we’d like them to be, but given more involvement from those of us on the cutting edge of that front, they can and will be.

The last true depression saw many people out of work; widespread hunger; and desperate measures all around. Hell, people were happy to go to war, just to have a job to do. Nobody wants to believe we will see a repeat of that scenario, least of all myself. If we do however, are we prepared for reduced wages, widespread cost cutting, empty grocery stores? Most people seem oblivious on two fronts; on what’s actually happening, and what caused this in the first place. Whatever the case, now’s not the time to be spending any more than we can absolutely afford to, irrespective of our leaders urging us to keep on spending the well dry. We can see where that mantra’s gotten us – in the shithole and more of the same just isn’t going to wash. We can bail out our banks until the cows come home, but in the meantime more people will have gone broke; the gap between the rich and poor will be even greater; more people will be homeless, taxes will be higher, and any strong governmental action on climate change will have been thrown out the window, because obviously we can’t afford that. Oh no.

I don’t know about you, but I for one am not taking for granted that our benevolent leaders will solve this problem and we can all go toodling back to our dreamworld where everything is done for us and all we have to do is show up fifty hours a week (does anyone actually work fourty anymore) and we’ll be taken care of. Recently I published a list on Facebook from ex Halton, Ontario MP Garth Turner’s blog The Greater Fool, (also the title of his latest book) which outlined the steps to take in the case of a depression. It included such drastic measures as moving to the country, freeing onself from reliance on government services, getting off the grid, getting a dog, a bike, and chickens.

Will that be necessary? Don’t rightly know. Could be yes, could be no. Whatever the case, doesn’t sound like a bad lifestyle.

Shared, it could be a party. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go make some hummus.

Papa and I had a neat conversation last night. It ended up where all our conversations ended up, but that’s beside the point.

What came out of it is that we shared some laughter over the sheer ludicrousness of the U.S. financial picture. What many people do not realize is that the government does not issue the nation’s credit. Rather, it is private banks who have secured control over the nation’s money supply. When the government needs a loan, private banks can print money at no cost to them, for which they then charge the government interest, which is why the nation’s debt can never be paid down.

In the U.S. today, banks and lenders are falling like flies because they have overextended themselves. In order to prevent complete economic catastrophe, the government is forced to act in some way to stem the bleeding. It does this by providing bailouts to the nation’s banks. However, where do they acquire the means to bail out the banks? They borrow it from the banks, and then pay interest on it. Or rather the taxpayers pay interest on it. So the government, in order to prop up the economy, borrows money from private banks so that it can nationalize those same banks with the money that it borrowed.

I’m sure my understanding of this is simplistic in some fashion; it simply seems too ludicrous to be true. However, remember what Henry Ford said: “It is well enough that people do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution by morning.”

It’s nearly sacrilegious or heretical in our society to openly express acceptance of littering, or to actually engage in it oneself. In high school, Principal Neufeld spoke of using the amount of litter in the hallways as a barometer of student’s attitudes. At the time I agreed in full; and to some extent still do. If the hallways are cluttered with garbage of all sorts, it’s generally an indication that the students don’t give a shit, which would appear to translate to more than simply the cleanliness of the hallways; also their marks, morals, values, etc. Concern for one’s habitation (and make no mistake, school was and is a habitation) is a basic benchmark of character. Ever hear someone labelled a “pack-rat?” Well, I doubt that person was a socially respected individual.

There are exceptions of course; some people are just natural tinkerers, fixers, refurbishers, recyclers of whatever they can lay their hands on. These people are driven and can’t stand waste, hate to see anything thrown out. So they don’t. Instead, they’re always welding this gizmo to that gadget, and coming out with some pretty spiffy stuff. Kudos to them. But for every one of them, there’s five who never throw anything out regardless of it’s condition, and seem to attract “stuff” like a messy beard attracts food crumbs or blood draws sharks. The metaphors are appropriate, as more than likely they have the messy beard as well, and like sharks, their stuff will eventually consume them, weighing on their backs until they can turn neither left nor right and stagger with each step. Remember the late and brilliantly offensive George Carlin saying how, “Other people’s stuff is shit, but somehow your shit is stuff”?

Of course, dirty hallways can also be indicative of apathy at higher levels; perhaps the administration simply doesn’t care enough to adequately fund the janitorial department, or the janitors take every chance to slack off, or in the case of my high school, (remember, this is hypothetical) the private donors don’t care enough to actually donate in adequate levels forcing budget cutbacks, or hell, perhaps dirty hallways can be traced right up to those who control our money supply not caring enough to manage it wisely, generously, responsibly, or perhaps most of all, honestly. Truly, there’s a crescendo of implications.

But let’s not think about this too deeply; we might just hurt ourselves or actually accomplish something and we couldn’t have that. Oh no. Let’s just accept that littering is bad and those who do it are lazy and apathetic and that lots of litter means bad people and clean streets mean good people. Keep it simple, stupid.

Before I continue, let me point out that I’ve participated in garbage clean-ups, and not just at the behest of an elementary school teacher in a bad mood and equipped with lots of bright new shiny garbage picker-uppers, or, just to use my favorite childhood phrase, “super-dooper-pooper-scoopers.” No, stretches of Clayburn Road, Clayburn Creek, Ravine Park, and Downes Creek are all cleaner because I felt the desire to chip in and lend a hand, or in the case of Downes, herd some of the fearsome “Streaming Eagles” crew down into the creek to haul out whatever we could find.

What happened next, to use the Downes Creek example, to the 11 garbage bags of wrappers, busted sports balls, barely recognizable bottles, and other miscellaneous junk we hauled out of that creek? We put it in the school dumpster for a garbage collection agency to come and collect, and lo and behold, to dump it again!!! That’s right. We put in all the effort (a good part of our weekend as I recall, to haul this shit out, just so it could be re-dumped, several hours drive away. How does this make sense?

Moreover, what actually benefit did we do the creek? Sure it looked a little nicer to the human eye, but I don’t think a coho salmon decked out in bright red spawning colors would look at that little pocket of intertwined condoms wedged in a back-eddy behind a log, and turn tail back downstream because “boy, I don’t know if I can spawn in the vicinity of used condoms.” (and for that matter, the contents of those condoms might well enrich that streambanks nutrient profile, lol) No, that old tire wedged in the streambank might take thousands if not tens of thousands of years to decay, so it’s not significantly affecting the water quality. Nor is it likely to be impeding fish progress, or in any way posing an immediate threat to wildlife or the local ecosystem. One exception would be six-pack rings which can strangle waterbirds, or plastic bags which can do the same, but in general, I think we can agree that a lot of garbage is fairly harmless.

So now we’ve taken our 11 garbage bags and dumped them. All we’ve done is re-arranged the waste and emitted tons of carbon in order to do, and oh yes, we’ve bumped up the GDP a notch because us urbanites paid those Cache Creek hill-billies money to take our crap. Whoopee. Now the waste is all concentrated in one area where nobody can see it, instead of being spread out where everybody sees it. So what happens next? Well, out of sight, out of mind is what happens. We accept that we can simply send our waste elsewhere. We subconsciously condition ourselves to believe that it’s okay to generate copious quantities of waste because it doesn’t affect us tangibly. We don’t think twice about buying those oh so tempting muffins from the supermarket and throwing out the package afterwards only to repeat the process next week. Sure we can sometime recycle the package, but only for a limited time and not neccesarily for the same purpose, besides which recycling takes energy too. Eventually it’ll still end up in Cache Creek.

What if instead of doing those garbage clean-ups, we had dedicated our time to educating people about the automotive waste fluids which undoubtably affect Downes Creek? I’m by no means advocating apathy here. Merely that efforts be re-directed, as has become almost cliche in the health-care field, towards addressing the issues rather than the symptoms. Instead of picking up somebody else’s garbage, why not write to manufacturers indicating the future loss of your business should they not take whatever steps possible to reduce packaging? Or put time into re-vegetation of the streambanks (which we did, too)? Or any number of projects with potentially valuable long-term impact?

Do I regret participating in those garbage pick-ups? No; the exercise did me well and I made friends out of it, and gained some great feelings of accomplishment, because at the time, I believed wholeheartedly in what I was doing. My opinions have evolved; hey, if Stephane Dion can evolve his opinion of a revenue-neutral carbon tax that affects an entire country, I think I can update my thinking about garbage. Because, as I can’t resist pointing out, my thoughts ain’t garbage.

Neither do I regret, however, releasing two organic energy bar wrappers and a bag that contained mixed nuts out of my sunroof today. I may have ruffled some feathers, but that’s about all.

What I do regret is buying items wrapped in plastic in the first place. That is true apathy. I am conscious of this when I buy, and I will buy items wrapped in plastic again because I’m one person on a schedule, but perhaps it’s time to re-examine packed lunches and homemade snacks. Were I truly motivated, it’s what I’d be doing.

That’s right; brown-bag it. Just like your momma taught ya.

You might be able to detox in a matter of days, but the planet can’t. No, the planet, needs thousands of years, and you just might not survive that process. I, for one, would rather not risk it.

A Letter to the Editor I sent while all steamed up after reading the July 6 edition of the Abbotsford News.

I am tired of hearing the policy of pricing carbon dioxide emissions through carbon taxes and carbon trading systems trashed and mis-represented.

Yes, these new polices will have a slight impact on the price of gas at the pump as well as on consumer goods at the store. But this will be nothing compared to the rise in fuel prices we have seen in recent years. I remember when gas sold for 70c/litre. I’m young, obviously – I’m sure there are those who remember gas being half that or less. Now we are seeing double those prices and more. That’s right – a 100%+ increase, incrementally, in a few short years. What sort of reaction did this provoke from consumers?

That’s right; nary so much as a squeak of protest. Barely more than a grumble of discontent. We just took the price hikes square on the chin, and kept right on pumping and pushing that gas pedal.

Compare that to the carbon tax – a miniscule increase by comparison – and you’d be forgiven for thinking the sun would never rise again judging by the outcry in the media.

The difference? The gas price increases we’ve seen, independent of any kind of carbon tax, are market induced, while the carbon taxes are government driven.

When the markets impose price increases, we grin and bear it. Yet when the government enacts proactive policy, such as the carbon tax, an essential component of tackling one of the greatest threats to face mankind, all hell breaks loose. People talk of breaking out the pitchforks and kicking out those bums in elected office -the very ones who actually have the stones to take the necessary steps to combat climate change. (and even for those who do not yet accept the reality of climate change, you must agree that reducing pollution is a positive step).

People, give your heads a shake. What is this holy grail known as “the market”? It is simply the result of unilateral decisions made at the board room level of the top corporations, banks, and yes, some governmental institutions, in tandem with some good ol’ supply and demand. It is not some irresistible force which we must all be slaves to. At the end of the day, it is the consumer who determines how the markets will play out by way of what we do and do not consume.

We all know that oil and gas are limited resouces. Why not begin the shift away from them now, rather than waiting until every last barrel has been extracted from the pristine natural habitats where it is found? Why not embrace change now, and create a gradual transition that is under our control, rather than be shocked when we can no longer live in the high consumptive ways we are so accustomed to?

For once, our governments are taking sensible measures to motivate us to adapt to a different future. Let’s take our heads out of the proverbial tar sands, cut them some slack, and see if we can’t biccycle to work or the grocery store next time around.

My almost obligatory reaction to the recently announced BC carbon tax? I’m pretty stoked about it – I hardly expected the BC Libs to take this rather bold step. Despite the harmless nature of this tax, any concept of a new tax tends to get people up in arms before they really know what the implications are, so it’s quite rough political terrain for the Libs to wade into. With that said, I also know there’s a broad current of concern over climate change so I think that once people realize that in effect this will be revenue neutral they will get on board with it.

Some have suggested that the $100 cheque to be mailed out to each adult in BC amounts to little more than pocket money that’ll be spent at the first opportunity on trinkets and consumer goods, and that therefore this will have little to no impact. I disagree – it’s no different than receiving an income tax refund, and many of these same people laud an income tax refund as forced savings because they don’t have the discipline to save this money themselves. This $100 cheque can be considered in the same light – forced savings which people can just as well roll over into a savings or investment account as they can spend it on something trivial.

I’m part of a demographic which is very likely to be supportive of a carbon tax – I bicycle or take transit whenever reasonable, and I combine trips into town when I have to drive, and I really only have an automobile for out of town trips and to generate an income. Now it’s true that I happen to work as a pizza delivery driver, so I use a lot of gas and I’ll be one of the most impacted from that perspective. But that’s a personal lifestyle choice – no one’s forcing me to do that for a living, so I have to live with the consequences and I accept that.

The carbon tax will have an extremely complex effect on the economy (ie. raising food costs and encouraging people to seek out either jobs requiring less mobility and/or less consumptive ways of getting to them). One question I have is whether this will place local shipping companies at a competitive disadvantage, as fuel purchased within BC will be more expensive, especially as the carbon tax increases in size as the years pass as it’s designed to do. Exporting goods may become more expensive and these costs will have to be passed on to the customer, while little impact will be felt on imports. We need a North American carbon tax to level the playing field.

It would also make more sense to levy the tax at the source, rather than just at the pumps, so that industry would feel the pinch as well as the end-consumer. Or would it even make a difference, as the cost of the carbon-tax would eventually be passed onto the consumer anyway, and the economic shift away from carbon consumption will be felt by industry regardless in the form of decreased demand? I’m no economist, and have a basic understanding of supply and demand, but like a natural ecosystem, any kind of price changes, whether applied by social policy or laissez-faire economics has broad economic reverberations which can be extremely difficult to predict. The great conservationist John Muir once said that, “Whenever we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else.” So it is with nature and so it is with our economic systems.

I strongly recommend the following article by UBC Prof. Dr. William Rees on TheTyee: http://thetyee.ca/Views/2008/02/26/TaxShellGame/

Also, there will be a talk by SFU climate and energy policy expert Dr. Mark Jaccard Tues. March 4 at 7 p.m. at Canadian Memorial United Church at 15th and Burrard. I’m generating carbon emissions that night instead of going to the talk, but there you go. Looks very interesting – visit www.vtacc.org for more info.

So, I worked for my car deck and Chevron Oil company today.  Made about $80.00, gave $50.00 back to the guy who owns the faceplate my car came with, spent most of the rest on gas.  Dang, but why does it seem like I have to gas up every other day?  Yeah, I drive a lot, but the only way gas can go that fast is if I had a tube going to the tank and I was drinking it while driving.  Speaking of drinking unpleasant substances, the other day we paid S.S. to sample a bottle we found filled with an unknown yellow substance to find out whether it was apple juice or urine.  Poor fellow.  Let’s just say it wasn’t apple juice and he was filmed doing it.  But he got his $5.00.  Well, I shouldn’t say we…I was too cheap to fork over anything for the pleasure of seeing him drink it…pleasure which I got anyway because somebody else paid him, so score.  I suppose the stigma that Dutch people are cheap skinflints is rubbing off on me and I’m becoming a cheap skinflint.  There’s no end of banter about cheap Dutch bastards in the store – not exactly sure where that originated, but it sre if fun.  Whatever floats one’s boat, I suppose.

Realistically though, I’m not all that cheap.  I have very little respect for money, and when I have it I’ll darn well spend it without hedging too much.  For instance, some drivers will write down their tip amount after every delivery so they know exactly how much they should make at the end of the night, whereas I simply take the payment, shove it in my yogurt tub (yes, my yogurt tub) and jump in the car and take off.  I figure the less time I take writing, the quicker I’m back in the store, the more deliveries I get to take, the more I make in tips, and at the end of the day I’ll do better that way than painstakingly tracking everything.  I don’t like to sweat the little things.  You’ll never catch a millionaire counting pennies, because he knows his time is too valuable for that.  (“He” being a gender neutral term ).  I do believe in both giving and investing fairly liberally, roughly 10% each.  Every financial advice book I’ve read (the best are The Richest Man in Babylon, The Monk and the Merchant, and Your Money or Your Life) recommends giving away at least 10% of your gross earnings, and that’s what I try to do.  At the same time, it’s recommended to invest that much as well.  For quite a while I did both; lately I’ve done neither, mostly because I had no or little income and big tuition bills.   I acknowledge the importance of money; I damn well resent it strongly, and I don’t let it rule my life.  Neither do I treat it casually.  The older I get, the more cynical I get about how, truly, money does make the world go round, and with our wacked up system of having to borrow money from private banks at interest just to pay the interest on our collective debts the more I just want to say, and here I offer my very insincere apologies for fatigue induced profanity, “fuck this shit; I’m heading somewhere to start my own country.  But where?”.  If you divide the U.S. population into the U.S. national debt, each U.S. citizen is something like $30 000 in debt, in addition to their own personal debts.  Yaaay.  It’s tempting to offer platitudes such as “if you do what you love, the money will follow” or “money doesn’t make the world go round, love does.”  We are fortunate to live in a country where opportunity still abounds, but anyway you look at it, Canadians have less retirement savings, are working longer hours, and have greater collective debt.  The national savings rate is at or close to zero, the workweek is increasing, social services are declining and health care is harder to come by.  These are the hard realities, together with the fact that in the main metropolitan areas of Canada, young people like myself are being priced out of the homeowner’s market unless we make all the right moves, like being career focused and investing knowledgeably and not splurging on material goods.  Those of us who don’t will by and large find themselves with a 40 year mortage or being lifetime tenants.  It’s not a very pretty picture, and yet this situation has crept up on us so slowly that few of us realize how widespread it is.  Even fewer know what to do about it.  It’s the old frog in boiling water syndrome.

 On that note, I feel like I’ve become more materialistic and identified with popular culture in recent times; I’ve never really been that way at all.  Some people demonstrate rebellion through embracing rebellious aspects of our culture and society; I demonstrated it by pretty much ignoring most of what my culture offered altogether.  Lately however, I’ve really begun placing increasing importance on the material things that I surround myself with, and I’m not sure why.  Perhaps I’m seeking to strengthen my personality through that; perhaps I’m merely bored.  It is a trend I recognize, however, and that disturbs me a little bit.