climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker
Posts where I spout off on one topic or another
Maybe the idea that you should seek a career doing what you really care about is flawed. Doing anything for money tends to involve many compromises and sacrifices of principle or aesthetics.
Perhaps it is wiser to earn your money in a field that you don’t really care about at all, so that you can be able to act freely in the areas that are really important to you.
For those struggling in today’s super competitive job market, The Economist suggests becoming a butler:
The time-poor new rich are generating demand for household staff, and this sort of work can be very well paid. A private secretary and general factotum can earn up to $150,000 a year nowadays. Salaries for standard butlers range from $60,000 to $125,000 and a head butler can make as much as $250,000, according to the website of the Butler Bureau.
You already help out the rich by absorbing their pollution, giving sweetheart loans to their companies, and bailing out their high-risk schemes when they fail. Why not make them breakfast Bloody Marys to combat post-party hangovers as well?
Spending an extended span of time undertaking travel definitely makes me appreciate every comfort and convenience when they are available.
These comforts include a comfortable horizontal surface to sleep on in the dark and quiet; easy access to laundry; being able to have a shower; having internet access; being able to change outside a cramped bathroom or bathroom stall; being able to borrow access to a local telephone; being able to leave groceries somewhere cold; being able to hang up suits and dress shirts properly; being able to leave batteries around to charge; not having to worry about checkout times; and not having to worry about your things being stolen if unattended.
My period of transition is still not complete. I still need to relocate most of my possessions from Ottawa to Toronto and I still need to find somewhere to live in Toronto and shift all of my things there. That being said, I think I now have the basic requirements for being able to live and work. I can shuttle them around with me from place to place – as necessary – until I have a place of my own.
One lesson reinforced by this move is the general benefit of keeping personal property to a minimum, especially in terms of bulk. Every gram and cubic centimetre of objects you possess makes you less free, though much of it may be awfully pleasant and useful to own.
Packing has become a task that seems to involve odd metaphysical complexities.
For days and days now, I have been packing and packing. Boxes get filled and added to the pile in the corner. Papers are sorted and then either filed or discarded. Closets are cleared. Food is eaten, packed (for stuff that has unusual value per unit weight and/or volume), given away, or discarded. Books are stacked and packed and tucked away, and then new caches of previously forgotten books are discovered and given the same treatment.
And yet, through all of this, there always seems to be the same amount of packing left to do. Back on August 5th, I was supposedly 50% packed. That number still seems basically right six days later, despite having spent more of the intervening time packing than doing anything else.
Hopefully today will be the day when 50% mysteriously and near-instantaneously becomes 100%, when I can throw a few critical items into a suitcase, and when I can get on the bus to Toronto/New Orleans/Washington D.C.
As processing power becomes cheaper and smarter software is produced, it seems inevitable that more and more people and organizations will begin to identify people automatically by recognizing their faces with surveillance cameras.
London’s Heathrow airport is planning to install such a system, and Facebook may be the ultimate database to let freelancers do it themselves.
To me, it is all rather worrisome. At a basic level, life becomes more paranoid and less creative and interesting when you are being watched at all times and all of your actions are being archived forever. It’s only a matter of time before photos from every fun party ever are being combed through by investigative journalists hoping to catch someone who has become famous in an embarrassing-looking situation. Facial recognition allows for the creation of databases that can be used for truly evil purposes, from suppression of political dissent to stalking and blackmail.
Like nerve gas, facial recognition technology is probably one of those things that it would be better if we could un-invent.
If you think your computer is secure because it is a Mac, you are dead wrong. The latest patch for OS X – 10.6.8 – contains 29 patches for security holes that allow arbitrary code execution. Any of those holes could be used to totally own your computer, circumventing any antivirus or encryption software you may be running. These 29 have been patched, but you can be sure there are others in the OS and in popular software like Flash and Adobe’s PDF reader.
If you want to keep a system safe, keep it physically disconnected from the internet.
The overall aim of governments and political parties in North America an Europe at the moment seems to be serving the interests of people who are about 50 and at least fairly well off. Keep stock prices and house prices up, prop up failing banks and car companies, keep pumping fossil fuels, don’t worry about climate change or what future generations will use for energy. After all, the core supporters of the politicians (especially when it comes to all-important campaign cash) will probably be dead by the time the most serious effects of climate change are felt. The same goes for the people in high-level decision-making positions in government and industry today.
It seems that future generations will have good cause to hate us. We have had climate change endlessly explained to us, with multiple convincing lines of evidence to back up the theory. We have been told what we need to do to stop it, but we have chosen to do nothing because we care about our short-term economic welfare more than anything else.
If that is the implicit attitude of the politics of today, it would be helpful if it was made explicit. “Vote for Party X for 30 or 40 more years of relative prosperity. After that, no promises.”
At least for the next few years, it seems likely that the level of public concern about climate change has peaked, and attention will be focused elsewhere. That isn’t justified by the facts, but it seems to be the case, and it is the reality that people pressing for more action need to deal with now.
We have to be intelligent and determined enough to drive the emergence of acceptable climate change policies – ones that protect the planet which we all fundamentally depend upon from casual destruction, because people prefer to have cheaper electricity and transport right now. We need to do that despite how people are worried about other things, how the science is complex and challenging to understand, and how the ideal path forward can only be approximated through risk analysis. We need to try approaches until we find ones that work.
The other day, I was looking back over the photos I took at the Fill The Hill climate change event in Ottawa, back in October of 2009. At the time, the event made me optimistic. Here were all these young people concerned about climate change and ready to take personal action in response to it.
When I look at the photos now, the Hill seems a bit thinly populated. Contrast how many people turned out to express their concern about climate change with how many people get excited about a meaningless hockey game or concert and it seems like humanity has cause to worry.
The most important reason to deal with climate change is the ethical obligation we owe to future generations – the obligation to leave them a planet that can support their welfare. When it comes to how people decide on their priorities, however, it seems like such ethical obligations are very low on the list, way below personal financial welfare or convenience.
When I think about how the Amazon rainforest may be doomed because of human greenhouse gas pollution, along with the Great Barrier Reef and countless species, I feel overwhelmed with revulsion about how casually destructive our species is, and how little regard we show for the world which we inhabit and ultimately depend upon completely. We do not have the technical means to build a self-sustaining spacecraft and so the continued life of every human being on the planet depends on the continued operation of all the physical and biological processes that make the Earth habitable. Now – largely because we are fond of cheap energy – we are willfully assaulting those processes as though they are indestructible.
In the face of that, I wonder whether any personal efforts of mine are meaningful. If humanity as a whole is determined to commit suicide, why should I spend my life trying to stop it? The forces pressing for a sane and sustainable strategy seem to be far weaker than the forces that promise instant gratification today, with little consideration for whatever consequences follow.
Normally, this is where I would try to write an uplifting closing about how doing the right thing is appropriate, even when the odds are hopeless and when other people will actually resent you for making the effort. The noble course combines self-sacrifice (reducing your personal impact) with determined political action to try to produce a better outcome. While I still think that is true, and know my conviction will eventually return, it is feeling thoroughly sapped at the moment, partly by the way voters everywhere continue to make their political choices largely on the basis of their own short-term economic self-interest.
Humanity is very clever in a micro sense – when it comes to solving small problems in ways that benefit the solvers quickly and materially. When it comes to macro issues, it seems to be dumb luck and the sheer durability of nature that explain why we haven’t wiped ourselves out already. That isn’t much comfort though. There are limits to how much abuse nature can tolerate, and we have been beating it pretty harshly with a wrench lately (with still-worse abuse promised for the future). Perhaps humanity has no future, and perhaps the thing to do as individuals is choose whatever life seems most tolerable with that possibility acknowledged.
The term ‘values voter’ is usually linked with social conservatism in the United States – people who want to stop the scourge of gay marriage, and so on. At the same time, the phrase is a useful and concise way to describe those who care much more about moral issues than economic self-interest, when choosing which political parties or candidates to support.
I care a lot more about whether a political party supports meaningful action on climate change than I do about what promises they make about the level of taxes I will pay or transfers I will receive. Even if a party offered to cut the income tax to zero for people making exactly the amount I do, I would not vote for them if they advocated intolerable policies in areas like minority rights or free speech.
Of course, we can only choose from among the candidates and parties on offer and there is invariably a serious problem with each of them. Still, in choosing the least of the evils on offer, the main considerations concern values rather than personal welfare.
Voting for moral reasons is an act that conforms to the golden rule. It is better for everyone if people refuse to be bought off with the promise of tax cuts or special spending. When people accept such vote-winning strategies, they become commodities to be bargained over by power-broker political factions rather than engaged citizens that care about the kind of society they inhabit.