climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet
350.org is looking to hire a Canadian organizer. I hope some exceptionally qualified and energetic candidates apply.
As a decision gets made one way or another on the Keystone XL pipeline, attention will shift toward other ways of keeping as much as possible of Canada’s massive stock of fossil fuels safely underground.
Yesterday, a friend and I visited Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada, a new privately-run aquarium located beside the CN Tower in Toronto. I have uploaded some of the photos already, with more to come.
It’s certainly a spectacle, both in terms of the species on display and the layout of the facility. A big portion consists of tunnels of plexiglass through large underwater habitats, allowing visitors to see many species arrayed around them at once.
I am, however, left somewhat divided about how to feel about the place. Their website says that they have a “Comprehensive Environmental Purchasing Policy”, but it remains the case that the facility is an artificial hotspot of biodiversity, drawn together from around the world and presented for the entertainment and education of paying guests.
I’m open to the argument that people need to see nature and biodiversity in order to value them, and the aquarium does make some allusions to the harm humanity is doing to the global ocean through over-fishing, pollution, and climate change. It’s plausible that some aquarium guests will come away from the experience with a greater appreciation for marine biodiversity, and perhaps a greater willingness to play a role in protecting it.
At the same time, there is a degree to which the aquarium is nature in a box for the privileged. The habitats are full of artificial coral and kelp, and ecological themes are mentioned more than emphasized in the surrounding documentation. The “[p]olicy banning staff use of plastic water bottles on site” seems inadequate compared with the main environmental impacts of the facility, both in terms of the acquisition of so many species – some explicitly labelled as endangered – and in terms of the huge power and water usage the facility clearly requires.
The aquarium was full of beauty and biological novelty and I was grateful to go. I would encourage others to do so as well, though it is probably worth thinking about what such places imply for the human relationship with the rest of nature, as well as the contrast between the energy and expense we are willing to devote to showcasing the diversity of life, at the same time as our large-scale choices are rapidly causing that diversity to diminish in the wild.
Tomorrow, Toronto350.org will elect its fifth executive at the termly general meeting.
The group is also likely to create its first formal committees: with divestment committees focused respectively on building student engagement and interacting with the school administration, and an institutional innovation committee focused on how the group should grow and develop its governance structure.
It’s necessary for us to create a structure that shares out work more effectively and deals with some other governance issues, but we don’t want to get stuck in a trap of spending too much of our time and our energy on internal matters, neglecting the campaigns that are the purpose of the organization.
Especially in comparison with energy conservation, carbon capture and storage, and nuclear power, much of the debate about renewable energy as a climate change solution concerns cost. Which forms are most and least affordable? How do they compare to other energy options? How should intermittancy and energy storage issues be incorporated?
Another set of questions concerns the rate and scale of deployment. How much of the carbon challenge can renewables address, and how quickly can they do so relative to the timescales necessary to stabilize emissions safely?
Unfortunately, the climate-change-induced melting of the north polar icecap is making it easier to drill for oil and gas in the arctic. Large amounts of fossil fuels are expected to be found in the region, adding to the world’s already dangerously large supplies.
The enthusiasm of companies and governments to exploit unconventional sources of fossil fuels is starkly at odds with the reality that we can only control climate change if we choose not to exploit such reserves – while rapidly scaling back production of conventional oil, gas, and coal.
I have written a number of times before about the unsustainable nature of global fisheries and the sorts of policies that might help combat that.
Marine protected areas have an important role to play in that effort. They constitute sanctuaries in which fish are protected from the hugely destructive fishing technology that is now deployed. Their more extensive establishment could play an important role in maintaining the viability of many important species.
As he headed upstairs for lunch in the private dining room at Massey College today, I was able to hand a short letter about climate change to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He accepted it very graciously and suggested we pose for a photo. I also gave a copy of the letter to Master Fraser, who was accompanying him.
Yesterday, I was part of a panel discussion and film screening at Hart House. They showed Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, which I found to be ambitious and engaging. It combines footage from Suzuki’s 75th birthday lecture with a biography of his life, including his family’s internment by the British Columbia authorities during world war two, his work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, his biological research at the University of British Columbia, as well as his activism and personal life.
The film involved a great deal of travel and one-on-one time with Suzuki, as they visited most of the important places in his life. It was also skilfully mixed with archival footage, though a bit of it may have been misleading (notably, the cut from the Hiroshima atomic explosion to footage of the totally unrelated Castle Bravo thermonuclear test, and the footage of the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, which had nothing to do with Suzuki’s biological research at Oak Ridge).
All told, I definitely recommend seeing the film if you get the chance. It says very little about precisely what should be done to address the world’s environmental problems, but rather a great deal about why we ought to be making the effort.
Much of this seems applicable to the movement to keep climate change under control by shifting away from fossil fuels:
Any serious answer, to borrow the well-known phrase from William Faulkner that then-Senator Obama used in his remarkable speech on race during his 2008 campaign for the presidency, must begin with the recognition that “the past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past.” On that view, abolition may be regarded not as a passing episode but as a movement that crystallized – or, as we might say today, channeled – an energy that has been at work in our culture since the beginning and is likely to express itself again in variant forms in the future. If, in fact, there is such a current in American life, surely we want to know why it is sometimes active and sometimes dormant, and why – improbable as it seems to us today – some people of good will and liberal sentiments have resisted it. To ask these sorts of questions is, I think, to broaden our inquiry beyond the kind of documentary texts on which I have so far relied and to include works generally assigned to the category of literature. It is to construe abolitionism not only as a historically specific movement but as an ahistorical category of human will and sentiment – of what we might even dare to call human nature. It is to suggest that we have not seen the last of it, and probably never will.
In this broader view, an abolitionist is not a member of this or that party but is someone who identifies a heinous evil and wants to eradicate it – not tomorrow, not next year, but now. Prince Hamlet of Denmark, who sees “time… out of joint” and believes himself “born to set it right” is an abolitionist – albeit a reluctant one. Don Quixote, who tells Sancho Panza that he was “born in this age of iron” with a duty to restore “the age of gold”, is an abolitionist. Karilov in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed (also translated as The Devils), who is prepared to commit suicide to usher in the millennium, is an abolitionist. Indeed every millenarian dreamer who has ever longed for the fire in which sin and sinners are consumed is an abolitionist – and sometimes the purification will include his own self-immolation. (Andrew Delbanco, p. 22-23 hardcover)
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Perhaps it is not true that “sacred rage” may have been a hindrance to abolitionism after a while. Nothing gets started without the rebels. They are the ones who light the way for others through the illumination of their transcendent feelings. What courage was needed to oppose a system sanctioned by the Bible and seemingly confirmed by history as being permanent. That is why abolitionists, black and white, will continue to speak down through the ages, in some place like China, which badly needs another revolution and the example of the abolitionists. Maybe somewhere a young Chinese person, a twenty-first century leader, is encountering the story of Frederick Douglass. Good news, chariot’s coming, old blacks used to say. (Darryl Pinckney, p. 132-3)
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The problem is perhaps accentuated by the fact that the abolitionist style, by definition, tends to emphasize overarching legal and structural change rather than a highly particular and gradual process of cultural amelioration. Its chief focus was on abolition of the institution of slavery and all its legal and moral supports, not the manumission and uplift of individual slaves, let alone their economic or social empowerment. This approach to reform has the advantage of being bold and comprehensive, buoyed by a sense of crystalline moral clarity. It has the deficiency of being abstract and narrow, tending toward formalism, most concerned with the category of victimhood than the conditions of actual victims, deaf to the thousand complexities of actual human circumstances, and susceptible to the prophetic urge to say, in the accents of Max Weber’s ethic of ultimate ends: “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall!” It is, to use the jargon of moral philosophy, apodictic and deontic rather than empirical and consequentialist. (Wilfred M. McClay p. 141-2)
Delbanco, Andrew. The Abolitionist Imagination. Harvard University Press. 2012.
Related: Daniel Carpenter and Andrew Delbanco on abolitionism