climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph
We had to cancel a planned long weekend camping trip near Temagami because everyone is in crisis, but at least today I got a hike with three friends in the Claireville conservation area, a half hour bus ride west of Vaughan Metro Centre.
I appreciated the forested areas around shallow creeks, the frogs croaking in the marshes, and the bright weather which was neither unpleasantly hot nor oppressively humid. Strangely enough, the one unlocked bathroom we found was even air conditioned.
Because it is a frequent and respected source of information about things and places I likely would not hear about from free news sources — and because it routinely goes into usefully greater depth on complex topics — I renewed my print and digital subscription to The Economist.
I certainly don’t always agree with them, but I always find their position worth reading. Furthermore, however one might want to characterize my unusual educational and career path, the magazine has been an important part of the process.
I have been subscribing to The Economist since their coverage of the Bush-Gore election in 2000, renewing it in three year batches and taking advantage of a student rate when possible.
My subscription expired yesterday and I will not be renewing if for now, just because life is too strained. That feels a bit like giving up on myself — since the value of staying informed lies in being better able to think and make decisions in the future — but it also feels like a suitable part of a post-PhD rethink. I am working through making sense of the implications of my time in government, academia, and activism and contemplating what I ought to do in the future.
What that future may be is very hard to say. For their varied reasons, governments and environmental NGOs don’t actually want to solve climate change, or at least it is much less of a priority than other contradictory things their leaders want to do. Perhaps the best hope is to get into the non-fossil energy / grid interlinkage / energy storage space in the private sector. At least they are building solutions.
Today begins my final month on Marlee Avenue. My landlords at Old Orchard Properties unlawfully refuse to assign anyone new to the lease, or to recognize me as a tenant even though they have been collecting rent from me faultlessly for two years.
I have not low income for years and the job hunt is proving difficult. Finding somewhere to live is more urgent and fundamental though. If I can find an OK room with good people for $800–$1000, I should subsequently be able to find an OK way to pay the rent.
For a long time I have been using the Thesis WordPress theme for this site, but as far as I can tell it is now so old that it causes the site to crash when my hosting provider applies a now-mandatory update to the PHP programming language.
I will eventually work out how to re-customize the design. If you need something which you can’t find anymore, the last Wayback Machine snapshot still has the old theme.
(As an aside to anyone interested, I mean the original Thesis theme which was actually user friendly, not the supposedly improved later version which I couldn’t use at all as a non-programmer.)
With the Ottawa trip joyfully concluded (photos not yet processed) I have a seder and a photo gig today, then am off to a farm in Cambridge, Ontario near Guelph tomorrow, and then am going camping on Friday in the Catchacoma forest with three friends.
As distant and improbable as it seemed at times, at tonight’s Convocation High Table I was given the dictionary traditionally awarded by Massey College to PhD graduates:
Photo by Chantal Phillips
This was a much more meaningful graduation for me than attending a U of T ceremony would be, and hearing the biographies of all the graduating Junior Fellows was a reminder of how many critical fights humanity is engaged in right now, and how it will take the best from all of us to fight our way to a successful, liveable, humane future for the world.
Early tomorrow I am off for back-to-back-to-back trips: first to visit our dear friends in Ottawa; then for a couple of days of quiet and reading at a dairy farm in Cambridge, Ontario; and then straight out on my first camping trip in many years.
After that, my full-time job will become finding a new affordable place to live in Toronto. Finding inexpensive accommodation is actually more urgent and important than finding an OK job. Per George Monbiot’s tough but invaluable career advice, financial security really comes from minimizing your expenses, not maximizing your income. The cheaper you can live, the freer you are to work on what is important and bring everything you can to the fight.
I am back to being kept up all night by:
It feels like being back in the sleepless days of the early pandemic.
Sasha’s visit was great fun, a great reunion, and a great chance to have him spend time with people who are important to me here.
My main task remains finding a post-PhD job, at least to cover my expenses and student loan payments for a while, followed by doing what I can to resolve my two overlapping bad landlord crises.
In June 2013, I went to Montreal to see my brother Sasha graduate from McGill.
That was about 9 years, 9 months, and 3 days ago.
On Friday the 10th I am graduating in absentia and able to pick up my PhD diploma. Five days later I will be seeing Sasha in person for the first time since that Montreal visit.