The outdoors – Page 26 – a sibilant intake of breath

Shipping and invasive species

Globalization has been profoundly associated with massive sea freight shipments. Primary commodities flow from states with rich resource endowments to others with processing facilities. Labour intensive goods are shipped from where labour is cheap to where the goods are demanded. In the process of all this activity, a lot of oceanic species have been able to move into waters they would never otherwise have reached. This unintentional human-induced migration has occurred for two major reasons: the construction of canals and the transport of ballast water. This brief discussion will focus on the latter.

Each year, ships carry 3 – 5 billion tonnes of ballast water internationally. The water is taken on in port, once a ship has been loaded. This is necessary to make the ship balanced and stable at sea. The water taken on can easily include hundreds of marine species of which many of which are capable of surviving the journey. If they get expelled in a suitable environment, these creatures can alter ecosystems and crowd out local species. Sea urchins that have arrived in this way have been extinguishing kelp beds off the west coast of North America, destroying sea otter habitat in the process. Zebra mussels are another infamous example of a problematic invasive species.

Efforts to prevent the transmission of species through ballast water take a number of forms:

Ejecting the water taken on in port in the open ocean: most of the species expelled should die, and the new waters taken on should be relatively free of living things
Poisoning the creatures in the ballast water: this can be done with degradable biocides like peracetic acid and hydrogen peroxide
Transferring ballast water to a treatment facility at the arrival port
De-oxygenating the water in ballast tanks: this kills most species, if the deoxygenated conditions are maintained for long enough

None of these approaches is completely effective. Each retains some possibility of unintentionally introducing invasive species. Several also have other environmentally relevant effects.

That said, simply making an active effort to prevent species transmission between ecosystems marks a big change in human thinking. Not long ago, species were often introduced willy-nilly into entirely new environments: for aesthetic, practical, or whimsical reasons. Infamous cases include those of Eugene Schieffelin – the man who introduced starlings to North America because he wanted to continent to contain all the birds mentioned in the works of Shakespeare – and Thomas Austin – the British landowner who introduced rabbits to Australia because he missed hunting them. Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of such introduced species.

Snow falling on Milan

Walking home from work today, I was immersed in a light Canadian snowfall for the first time in years. During the trek, I decided that the combination of office clothing, Ottawa weather, and twenty minute walks to and from work is not sustainable without the gradual addition of wardrobe items.

It is not as though I don’t have the necessary gear to deal with wind and temperatures significantly below zero Celsius: I was well served by my layers of MEC outerwear through underwear when I was in Tallinn and Helsinki in December 2005. The problem is that such things do not integrate well with office clothes, making me look like a mountaineer until I transform in my cubicle into a diligent office worker.

As a true West Coaster, my experience with long woolen coats, scarves, and such is primarily the result of films and comic strips. Given my lingering uncertainty about how long I will actually spend in this place, I will continue to play the part of the temperate forest dweller assuaged and perplexed by startling variations in temperature.

Lunchtime update: slightly pavement-battered

Last night, a car heading east on Rideau Street decided that it was a good idea to make a right turn at speed without signaling or checking if there were any cyclists behind them and to the right. On the positive side, I learned that the brakes on my bike are very effective. On the negative side, the forward momentum of my bike, body, and panniers was more than enough to throw me over my handlebars: feet still set in the cages on my pedals. Naturally, the car didn’t even slow down.

I actually managed to land pretty well, taking the bulk of the force with my right arm. Still, I managed to bruise my arm and ribs, as well as give my elbow joint a painful knock. My wrist and jaw are also somewhat sore, as a result of their contributions to the nullification of my forward and downward momentum. A group of drunken men dressed as Smurfs gave me a round of applause when I stood up (it was 8pm on Halloween).

I was impressed to see how durable my MEC Aegis jacket really is: despite my entire weight and that of the bike and despite scraping along for a few feet, it is not visibly worn. Irksomely, my bike no longer shifts properly into higher gear. Making it do so requires much more force than before, and sometimes requires shifting twice, waiting for the first shift to actually happen, and then preventing the second shift.

I will take it to the bike store over the weekend to see if they can return it to normal functionality. The uber-smooth gear shifting was one of my favourite aspects of the new bike.

[Update: 3 November 2007] I had my ribs checked out and the obvious was confirmed: they are not broken but may be fractured. If they still hurt in a month, the latter possibility will be confirmed. They could hurt for as long as six months.

The shifting on my bike seems to have largely been fixed simply on the basis of riding around. It isn’t perfectly smooth, but it is adequately reliable. Nonetheless, I will take the bike in for a tune-up soon.

Best Ottawa bike shop

When I moved to Ottawa, I didn’t know where to go to buy a bike. With the benefit of experience, I can tell other newcomers that their best bet is to go to G.M. Bertrand Cycles in Gatineau. They are at 167 Wellington Street. I recommend them because they have the most knowledgeable and helpful staff of any of the ten places or so I visited. Many of their staff members are bilingual and the rest have been happy to put up with my broken French. They have good products at reasonable prices and they stand behind them. When the front light they sold me failed after three weeks, they replaced it with a better one with no questions asked.

The Bike Dump seems to be the Ottawa bike shop that gets the best press. While I may not have had a representative experience, I saw no reason for which that praise is justified. Their bikes were overpriced and not in terribly good condition. They have bad hours, only accept cash, and have an indifferent staff. G.M. Bertrand is a much better choice.

Bikes and stop signs

Riding eastward across Ottawa from Booth Street towards Sandy Hill, it is far wiser to head north to the river and follow the riverside path than it is to push straight through Centretown. The most obvious reason for this is aesthetic, since the path offers a beautiful view of the river and Parliament Hill. A more technical reason has to do with traffic dynamics. As this paper on bicycle commuting explains:

Bicyclists can work only so hard. The average commuting rider is unlikely to produce more than 100 watts of propulsion power, or about what it takes to power a reading lamp. At 100 watts, the average cyclist can travel about 12.5 miles per hour on the level. When necessary, a serious cyclist can generate far more power than that (up to perhaps 500 watts for a racing cyclist, equivalent to the amount used by a stove burner on low). But even if a commuter cyclist could produce more than 100 watts, she is unlikely to do so because this would force her to sweat heavily, which is a problem for any cyclist without a place to shower at work.

With only 100 watts’ worth (compared to 100,000 watts generated by a 150-horsepower car engine), bicyclists must husband their power. Accelerating from stops is strenuous, particularly since most cyclists feel a compulsion to regain their former speed quickly. They also have to pedal hard to get the bike moving forward fast enough to avoid falling down while rapidly upshifting to get back up to speed.

For example, on a street with a stop sign every 300 feet, calculations predict that the average speed of a 150-pound rider putting out 100 watts of power will diminish by about forty percent. If the bicyclist wants to maintain her average speed of 12.5 mph while still coming to a complete stop at each sign, she has to increase her output power to almost 500 watts. This is well beyond the ability of all but the most fit cyclists.

In addition to stop sign frequently, terrain is also an important factor:

These problems are compounded at uphill intersections. Even grades too small to be noticed by car drivers and pedestrians slow cyclists substantially. For example, a rise of just three feet in a hundred will cut the speed of a 150-pound, 100-watt cyclist in half. The extra force required to attain a stable speed quickly on a grade after stopping at a stop sign is particularly grating.

This is especially true when there are drivers behind you freaking out because the time it takes you to accelerate will make them three seconds later in reaching the next red light or stop sign.

The whole article is worth a look. One fact most people will not know: Idaho allows cyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs, allowing them to cycle through at normal speed if no other vehicles are near the intersection.

The World Without Us

Around the globe, every natural system is being affected by human behaviour: from the composition of deep oceanic sediments to mountaintop glaciers. As such, the concept behind Alan Weisman’s extraordinary book The World Without Us is both ambitious and illuminating. Using a combination of research, expert consultation, and imagination, he projects what would happen to the Earth if all 6.7 billion human inhabitants suddenly vanished. Within weeks and months, all the nuclear power plants will melt down; the massive petroleum refinery and chemical production complexes will burn, corrode, and explode; and nature will begin the slow process of reclaiming everything. Over the course of decades and centuries, the composition of all ecosystems will change as farmland is retaken and once-isolated patches of wildlife become reconnected. Cities will fall apart as bridges stretch and compress with the seasons and foundations fail on account of flooding. In the end, only bronze sculpture and ceramics are likely to endure until our red giant sun singes or engulfs the planet in about five billion years. More broadly, there is reason to hope that radio waves and some interstellar space probes will endure for billions of years.

Weisman uses his central idea as a platform from which to explore everything from material science to palaeontology and ecology. The book is packed with fascinating tidbits of information – a number of which have been shamelessly plagiarized in recent entries on this blog. A few examples of especially interesting topics discussed are the former megafauna of North America, human evolution and migration, coral reef ecology, lots of organic chemistry, and the history of the Panama Canal.

In the end, Weisman concludes that the human impact upon the world is intimately linked with population size and ultimately determines our ability to endure as a species. As such, he concludes with the concise suggestion that limiting human reproduction to one child per woman would cut human numbers from to 3.43 billion by 2050 and 1.6 billion by 2100. That might give us a chance to actually understand how the world works – and how human activity affects it – before we risk being overwhelmed by the half-glimpsed or entirely surprising consequences of our energetic cleverness.

Whether you accept Weisman’s prescription or not, this book seems certain to deepen your thinking about the nature of our world and our place within it. So rarely these days do I have time to re-read things. Nevertheless, I am confident that I will pick up this volume again at some point. Readers of this blog would be well rewarded for doing likewise.

[4 November 2007] I remain impressed by what Weisman wrote about the durability of bronze. If I ever have a gravestone or other monument, I want the written portion to be cast in bronze. Such a thing would far, far outlast marble or even steel.

The coming cold

Presenting the mean monthly temperatures of Vancouver, Ottawa, and Oxford on the same graph generates an interesting image. Vancouver is basically Oxford plus a couple of degrees in the winter and about five degrees in the summer. Ottawa is much more variable. In the zones where the lines intersect (around April and October), the mean temperatures for all three places are fairly comparable. That may partly explain why I have been finding the weather so pleasant recently.

I wish I had some data that included standard deviations of temperature on a month-by-month basis. I really have no idea which of the three places would have the most intra-month variability, though my suspicion is that it would probably be Ottawa.

The data for Oxford is from the Radcliffe Meteorological Station. The data for Vancouver and Ottawa is taken from the Meteorological Service of Canada.

Cycling in southern Ottawa

This was an ideal day to explore the Ottawa environs par velo. It was bright and pleasantly cool, and the fall leaves are changing colour. Mostly, I explored the paths south of Centretown on the side of various watercourses: the Rideau Canal, Rideau River, etc. I found Carleton University by accident, and discovered a very nice 10km loop that begins and ends at my house: you head north through the Lebreton Flats to the Ottawa River, then take the riverside paths to the Rideau Canal locks beside Parliament. Ride up that hill (it is good that it is near the beginning of the route), then follow the path alongside the canal until you reach the point where it widens to a well-sized lake. At one end of that lake is a kind of grey floating pavilion, which is actually at the southern foot of Preston Street. Returning to the road system there, you can cycle through Little Italy and back to my flat in a few minutes.

All told, I went a bit more than 46km. The bulk of it was excellent, though my hill-climbing muscles definitely need some re-conditioning after more than two months of bikelessness. Another well-learned fact is that it is foolhardy to cycle along most of the major roads in Centretown. It’s just one red light after another, with irate drivers all around you furious that you seem to be delaying their arrival at the next stopping point by up to three seconds.

I think a bit more random wandering in in order, before I get a cycle map. As with the lake pavilion / Preston situation, it is quite satisfying to have two pieces of your mental map of a city click together on the basis of exploration, rather than the consulting of a pre-prepared guide.

Bike helmet debate

I had no idea there was such an active debate about the utility of bicycle helmets. My assumption had always been that they provided unambiguous protection from direct contact between hard materials and the skull and had a limited secondary value in diminishing momentum at the time of collision by crushing.

Some of the arguments against helmets linked above do seem to have some merit. If it can be demonstrated that they significantly reduce bicycle usage, the general health benefits lost may well be more significant than the avoided injuries associated with unhelmeted crashes. It would also be interesting to see a properly controlled experiment on whether helmet wearing decreases the caution employed by both riders and cyclists.

Walking to and from work every day, I spend twenty minutes beside a noisy six-lane road. That road has certainly increased my aesthetic opposition to private automobiles. Along with the carbon emissions, cost of roads, need to stay cozy with oil producing governments, and other standard externalities associated with the automobile, all the space they take up and noise they produce should be considered as well. There is no uglier element in most cities than the various bits of infrastructure that cater to cars (some bridges excepted).

Wheels and muscles

The new bike and I did Critical Mass tonight. This is the third city where I have participated, along with Oxford and Vancouver. This one had the narrowest demographic; every person there looked like they were a stereotypical leftist undergraduate. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it would be good for the event to represent a wider cross section of the bike-using community.

In any case, I am planning to put some kilometres on these wheels tomorrow – perhaps heading along the river until I get bored and/or completely lost, then finding my way back by GPS. Suffice it to say, I am thoroughly excited about this new mode of transport.