Here’s a very simple ‘Good Habits’ calendar that I made for 2010
If you’d like, download and print on 8.5″ x 14″ paper.
visit: http://www.rabideye.com/Enviro2010Calendar.pdf
or click below to see the pdf file (it’s 12 pages)
2010 Calendar: download and print on 8.5″ x 14″ paper
Published December 31, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
The UN Climate Change spectacle ends 2009 with a requisite whimper: a blank stare in the face of urgent need for international reforms in the face of climate calamity. The results may even be worse than a stalemate. In Copenhagen, we witnessed the refusal to even address the possibility of a concerted world-wide response to the climate problem.
The hope that was to define year one of the Obama presidency found over-industrialized countries like the US and Canada bringing little or nothing to the table, while so-called developing economies suggesting the “you broke it (for all of us), you bought it” model to us, with good reason.
The part of the huge boil on our national face was played by a recent massive Canada/US deal to build an oil-delivery pipeline from the Alberta Tar Sands. The massive destruction of land, water, wildlife and culture that define this ‘unconventional’ way of retrieving fossil fuels seems to dwarf any attempt to individually curb our consumption patterns. Besides, according to the TV, our shopping habits are returning to pre-recession levels.
Reframing the population problem as a matter of consumption makes a lot of sense to me. We have collectively put ourselves into a place where there are so many of us consuming so much, that it’s hard to imagine how shifting our buying habits even just a bit – replacing what we buy with more so-called ‘sustainable’ products – will make any real difference; it’s just more stuff, after all. 56 tonnes of paper bag waste as opposed to 56 tonnes of plastic bag waste*, is nothing to celebrate.
We need to prioritize what we consume on a personal basis, and decide what we can do without, and then happily do without it. The key is to think of it not as sacrifice but as clarifying and simplifying our lives, getting rid of things that don’t serve to make us happier.
It’s a simple solution that you won’t find advertised anywhere because it runs contrary to the consumer culture we’re steeped in that assures us that we can buy our way out of anything using carbon offsets and credits, and see them for the stalling tactics they are. The revolution will not come until it becomes painfully obvious that we can’t continue to live like this, and I would much prefer the price of oil skyrocket and wake us up than the other option of having the sky fall on us.
*estimated weight of thin film plastic bags used by residents of the Powell River area in one year.
I'll be smiling for the next 1,000 years. And you?
my t.v. doesn’t listen when I give it pieces of my mind
it keeps making everything the same size
pain is pleasure when it’s televised
plastic is forever
artificial florists
sell you flowers that will never die
they cut down the real forests
for paper petals engraved with borrowed liesLyrics to Sam Phillips' "Plastic is Forever"
Some thoughts on plastic…
- production
- transportation
- recycling
- elimination
So, what to do?
Here’s a 4-part series from Eco Debt : Dorset England series Parts 1-4 (about 8 min. each) on their model of greening their community. Part 1 addressed plastic bags.
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b7Gf3Qw0VY&feature=channel
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C__tAh7ljE
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DLBpqmPF8U&feature=channel
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxaWSg8mc9U&feature=channel
And a Fashion-TV-like look at the issue… with some questionable results without addressing consumption!
Big Daddy Overlord, Our Corporate All-Around Saviour
Published November 15, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
“Technology will save us if it doesn’t wipe us out first.” Pete Seeger
“It’s not going to stop, till you wise up” -Aimee Mann
Last Friday (Nov. 13, 2009) my current employers at Powell River’s Pebble in the Pond Environmental Society hosted a one-hour meet-and-greet in their new digs. The event was designed to bring together local progressives working toward a “Green Economy” to an informal discussion with Liberal MP/Official Opposition critic for International Trade and 2006 Federal leadership candidate Scott Brison.
On relatively short notice, around 30 people gathered at 4 pm on a Friday in what used to be the old Powell River Credit Union (BC’s oldest Credit Union) to talk about what constitutes a “Green Economy”. Brison — who ran on a sustainability platform in 2006 — got to meet some of Powell River’s most active members who see true sustainability as a necessary goal for the near future. The group attending ranged from local farmers, restaurateurs, publishers, Transition Town and 50-mile Eat Local Challenge advocates, employment service providers, Green builders, educators and those with a general interest in a ‘Green Economy’.
As the dozen or so speakers voiced their concerns over topics like the new strict meat regulations that will make buying local meat — and soon, even vegetables! — much more difficult to obtain locally, as well as more costly. And to think: this, in an age where we need to be encouraging local agricultural economy in a big way.
One other topic that was addressed was the high cost of energy in terms of money spent to buy it as well as the costly effects of using it (as on the environment), and the Climate Change Treaties, Protocols and Carbon Tax. Mr. Brison replied to questions of sustainability with the often-heard refrain that ‘technology will save us’, including a call for a reevaluation of the role of nuclear power where he invoked the French experience with this form of energy.
When asked why the government throws money at Shell Oil as it ‘develops’ the Alberta Tar Sands for profit and environmental destruction, as opposed to providing small grants and loans to people ‘on the ground’ who are trying to develop the new Green Economy, he suggested that a government needs to listen to all sides. That the huge corporate side has armies of lobbyists and endless supplies of advertising cash and time to internationally sway governments at every level, was addressed. But that necessarily lead to a cul-de-sac, as it always must. A true democracy is always at odds with a Big Daddy corporate state of mind. We know that. We complain about it. We see governments lagging way behind us, and yet we see little alternative to the Big Daddy Syndrome: looking up when we should look sideways to our neighbours and fellow citizens. That’s where the revolution must start; it’s the only way anything will ever change, and stay attuned– it’s happening now. (Look to Vandana Shiva on this and more.)
The Big Daddy Techno-Saviour theme runs very deep in this old one-industry town, as it does elsewhere to some extent. One facet of this arose last week when I was alerted that the Malaspina Art Society (MAS) 2010 fund-raising calendar to which I happily and voluntarily submitted a piece of artwork (image above) this year, was very openly “sponsored by The Plutonic Power Corporation“, without my (and at least one other submitting artist’s) knowledge. The sponsorship by this very controversial corporation named (ha!) after the God of the underworld and its riches (aka ‘ Hades’) is announced very firmly with a stand-out logo on the front and back covers, as on two inner pages.
Of course, being a small city with an underfunded arts community and loads of competition (even calendar-wise), I acknowledge that some sponsorship comes in handy when putting cash up front. The MAS fund-raising calendar was also sponsored by several other small businesses in town, but the only logo on the front is Plutonic’s. Communicating the fact that the calendar would be very openly ’sponsored by’ this controversial corporation, which is repeatedly thanked throughout, would seem to me to have been at least appropriate. By the way, no mention of thanks that I could find to the artists who freely submitted their souls, sans tax right-off incentive.
Time is short, and volunteers are over-worked, and the easiest route to take is to accept money (reportedly $500) from a corporation looking to whitewash any ill will whilst allying themselves with the artists mentioned, as ‘good corporate citizen’ and ’supporter of the arts’ here in Powell River. That’s just one of the ways a company manages its Public Relations, and I don’t fault them for it. That said, I don’t need to be associated with them, especially through my artwork and without my consent. My understanding is that the goal of the calendar is to raise funds for the non-profit MAS. How well the calendar will sell with “Plutonic Corporation” on it in this town, is maybe another matter; and maybe it doesn’t even matter. Next year, maybe MAS will choose another product to sell. May I suggest a logo-encrusted toilet brush?
It’s time to wise up.
Pete's Draggin'
Last night, I watched British writer-director Franny Armstrong’s most recent film The Age of Stupid. Armstrong previously co-directed the 2005 doc McLibel (1997, 2005) with Ken Loach, on the famous 10-year McDonald’s libel trial in the UK. A long-time environmentalist and a self-proclaimed vegetarian at the age of 11, Armstrong read zoology at Camden College, where her thesis was ‘Is the human species suicidal?’ She recently told The Guardian “I read it again recently. It was the blueprint for this film.”
The film in question is the new, provocatively- titled “The Age of Stupid”. The documentary on the topic of climate change, has been in some stage of planning and production for the last six years. It was financed largely through 228 investor shares ranging between 5,000₤ and 35,000₤ in a bank-skirting “crowd-funding” scheme, and with an immense crew of 108. It also had a very dramatic opening screening, as it was simultaneously beamed via satellite to 65 cinemas, making it technically the largest opening screening of all time. Couple this with an innovative self-distribution process, and the film looks perhaps more interesting behind the scenes than in front.
The feature-length film consists of interviews with people in seven locations around the world, including India, France, England, Nigeria, Jordan, Iran and the US. The interviewees range from an 83-year old French eco-tour guide, to a young entrepreneurial Nigerian nursing student, a frustrated British wind farm engineer (he has trouble selling the idea of wind energy to people who value ‘the view’ and ‘property values’ over sustainability), a recently-retired American geologist who worked for big oil, two pre-teen Iraq War refugees play-acting war games, and Jeh Wadia, an Indian low-cost airline magnate. The recurring, fast-paced snippets of interviews and tv news reports are book-ended by 3-d animated sequences as well as straight live-action fiction sections that set the film as coming from the perspective of a media archivist (played by actor Pete Postlethwaite ), in the year 2055. Apparently, this futuristic framing device was added rather late in the film-making process. Armstrong conceded in the same Guardian article that “we had a pretty much finished the film about a year ago, but when I watched it, I wasn’t happy. I’d taken all these people’s money and it wasn’t good enough. So we brainstormed and decided to introduce a fictional element.”
Unfortunately, while the film’s main aim is admirable, and while it does ‘work’ in its chosen look — the whole film is infused with an internet searchbot aesthetic — spectacle overtakes content. And this, starting from the first frame: the explosive computer-animated Big Bang, with all of evolution following a sped-up timeline ranging from 13 Billion years ago to the year 2055, forming the 90-second title sequence. As the apocalyptic archivist surfs his intranet’s historical documents from inside his lighthouse/oil rig Museum of Mankind, the 3-d computer animated dystopia around him is revealed to be in ruins, flooded, or on fire. While maintaining a somewhat crazed and alarmed look on his face, the well-kept archivist channel-surfs and fast-forwards his way through various news reports on the causes and effects of climate change. The film-maker feels it’s necessary to advise us in the pre-credit sequence that whereas “[t]he future climate events portrayed in this film are based on mainstream climate projections”, ” [e]verything from the present day and the past is real news and documentary footage”.
The poignant interviews with the French Fernand Pareau living near Mont Blanc, who laments the glacier’s shrinking seven meters each year, are greatly diminished and rendered cartoony themselves through their juxtaposition with other 2-d computer animation and simulated computer game-like interactivity sequences throughout the film. That said, those cartoon sequences do in themselves effectively explain the magnitude of the problem of climate change due to overuse of fossil fuels, and nicely illustrate the Global Cap concept, depicting the plan to reduce and finally bring an end to fossil fuel use in a socially-equitable way, by the year 2065. The film’s closing credit sequence quickly presents more emission equivalencies between nationalities, while addressing the urgency of public pressure, as the important agreement may be signed in December 2009 in Copenhagen. The overloaded frame also provides a link to this film’s web-activist persona at http://notstupid.org/
Most of the characters interviewed, like the now-retired American geologist Alvin DuVernay , are shown trying to make a living in a world that values only money, and only money right now. Under the surface, though, the well-heeled Indian entrepreneur Jeh Wadia, the Hurricane Katrina survivor geologist joins Piers Guy, a British wind farm engineer, and Layefa Malini a Nigerian nursing student who “wants to be famous” and “live like an American”, all reveal aspects of our individual attempts to work within the unchanging top-down socio-economic structure, while at the same time the planet itself dramatically changes before our eyes. It’s not very surprising then, that Ms. Malini finds relative financial success only when she starts selling petrol as opposed to petrol-polluted fish. It’s not shocking that geologist Alvin DuVernay ‘would do it [work for the oil industry for 30 years ] all again’, because, hey– you have to work! It’s also very logical that the residents of Cornwall reject even a reduced and less obtrusive plan for a wind farm with a 10-to-1 vote against it.
There is a real crisis in value and social responsibility here that is subtly addressed through most of the interviews, but they get lost when dropped amidst the film’s rampant pace and eclectic visuals. There is really no time for contemplation on why humanity is doing what it does. The supposedly over-arching thesis: ‘Is the human race itself suicidal?’ is in the end partially revealed to be just another way to maintain an irresponsible business-as-usual attitude. While on the practical side of things, of course, one imagines that the film’s special effects and framing devices were added to increase the entertainment value that have become a part of the financially successful ‘pop-documentary’ canon, as seen through the recent works of Michael Moore (Sicko, Fahrenheit 9/11), Davis Guggenheim/Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth), Peter Joseph (Zeitgeist, and its addendum) and Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden). In the end (or as the film shamelessly posits it: “The End?”), I feel that despite the innovative attempts to finance and distribute the film in a way that by-passes the dominant financial systems, in a world where the media has been ‘dumbed down’ enough, it looks like, if anything, The Age of Stupid reveals that it too is caught in that same crisis. But maybe the documentary film is as suicidal as the rest of us.
Rabideye: encaustic on wood panel. 2008 Always-already inspired by the environment
Last night I attended the first Malaspina Land Conservancy (MLC) Annual General Meeting held at Vancouver Island University’s Powell River Campus. As a guest, I learned a lot more about the non-profit (and soon-to-be charitable) organization that started up about 15 months ago. They are now affiliated with the better-known The Land Conservancy of British Columbia (TLC), which covers all of BC. The MLC’s President, Janet Alred, displayed their new logo (below) and reviewed their wide-ranging goals that include wanting to provide a way for land owners and conservationists in the Powell River region to access their assistance in order to donate or bequeath land to them, and to allow the Conservancy to purchase of land that they feel is environmentally, agriculturally, historically or socially valuable. Another aspect to their important work is their assistance to land-owners who want to place Conservation Covenants on their property, and that’s what I’ll focus on below.
A Conservation Covenant or Easement: “restricts real estate development, commercial and industrial uses, and certain other activities on a property to a mutually agreed-upon level.” The land in question remains the private property of the landowner, and this legal restriction on the land can be maintained perpetually, if that is what the land owner wishes. The owner can choose to protect the land for specific uses only (i.e. as a park, or as a protected fishing area, etc.), so the range of possibility there is great! Some cool folks came across from Texada Is. where they are figuring out whether to start their own homegrown land conservancy or join an already existing one. This is another side of conservation that I rarely see: where people who already own land, choose what will happen to it while they are living and beyond, for the good of present and future generations. In a time when people concerned for the environment are largely trying to deal with the many, many battles over the (mis)use of private, Crown and corporately-owned lands and the effect on the surrounding ecosystem, it’s refreshing to see that there are other — and in many ways easier — ways to preserve land as well. Of course, not everyone has the financial ability to own environmentally valuable land, but the MLC now provides a way to jointly purchase land, and place covenants on this, together.
Oh, and what a great example and incentive for all our levels of government, too! One imagines that it wouldn’t be such a stretch to ask for governments to conserve Crown land that happens to rest between two privately-protected plots with covenants on them.
One way people will care more for the land is for them to become more familiar with it and how it affects our well-being. Lesley Thorsell was another guest at the AGM last night. She revealed her “Naturally in Nature” 2010 Calendar project featuring amazing photos of local people in the buff in local natural settings, taken by local photographers. Profits from the tastefully-done calendar will go both to the MLC and also to help fight breast cancer. This would make a great Christmas gift, no? You can buy the calendar online or at Breakwater Books and elsewhere in and around town. Check it out:
Naturally In Nature 2010 Calendar
2010 Calendar
spectacle
It comes up often enough, but lately less so: my so-called ‘TV rant’. Maybe it was the (by now-viral) report that came out two weeks ago regarding the statistic that Americans on average spend more than 8 hours a day watching television. This apparently always-increasing figure doesn’t include internet and computer-based gaming. But while it could be argued that with the financial climate as it is, the west is looking for consolation in the escapism and spectacle, it remains unnerving to me that at a time when taking care of each other and nurturing community while acquiring useful practical skills in the face of environmental, public health and financial doom is more important than ever, we’re stuck on the ‘tube’. There are probably many causes that feed into this statistic: joblessness and lower levels of disposable income, being two factors that are keeping people at home more (assuming they still have a home). But the overwhelmingly upward trend in TV viewership in the US and Canada has been discussed for years by media critics and organizations. One important figure named Guy Debord, in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle*, presented a manifesto against what he saw as the encroaching dumbing-down of culture through the proliferation of commercial mass media. Much like his predecessor Walter Benjamin in his 1935 essay “The Word of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Debord poetically rails against the dehumanizing aspects he sees as inherent to the automation of everything in society, where value is reduced to spectacle due to its ability to generate capital.
so, what are YOUR cumes? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cume)
Many others, including Mark Crispin-Miller and Jerry Mander added their voices to the argument in the 1970’s and 80’s. Mander’s provocatively-titled book “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” presents his case that:
[...] the technology of television is not a neutral, benign instrument or tool. The author argues that in varied technologies and institutions such the military, automobiles, nuclear power plants, mass production, and advertising, the basic form of the institution and the technology determines its interaction with the world, the way it will be used, the kind of people who use it, and to what ends.
- The author’s first argument is that while television may seem useful, interesting, and worthwhile, at the same time it further boxes people into a physical and mental condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control.
- The second argument concerns the emergence of the controllers. That television would be used and expanded by the present powers-that-be was inevitable, and should have been predictable at the outset. The technology permits of no other controllers.
- The third argument concerns the effects of television upon individual human bodies and minds, effects which fit the purposes of the people who control the medium.
- The fourth argument demonstrates that television has no democratic potential. The technology itself places absolute limits on what may pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from a very narrow field of possibilities. The effect is to drastically confine all human understanding within a rigid channel. What binds the four arguments together is that they deal with aspects of television that are not reformable. -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction
Taking these ideas a bit further, one stumbles across the social conditions that have caused television and/or spectacle to become so successful, such as (sub)urban planning that keeps people apart and community-enhancing activities distant and hard to get to without cars. Plus, it’s getting really expensive to get your spectacle fix elsewhere these days. Another aspect of this situation is the inability for many to distinguish between real artistic expression and what is basically advertising fodder, largely due to the homogeneity of mass-produced TV (and increasingly, film) culture.
More recently, the Vancouver-based non-profit magazine Adbusters along with others like Screentime (aka tvturnoff.org) have helped keep up a pro-active protest against the media tsunami. Adbusters’ “tv-turn off” and “digital detox” week campaigns and media toolkits help address the insidious and environmental aspects of television. The methods and visual language used by Adbusters is not unproblematic in its mimicking the methods of that which it critiques. That said, it is arguable that using methods to communicate that do not approach the slickness of for-profit mass media, can even enter the current consciousness.
As an experiment, you can try the ‘detox’ method anytime you like. Turn it off and leave it off for at least two weeks. Throw a nice piece of fabric over the screen and unplug your tv all together. You may notice how much tv affects your moods and temperament, and how much more free time you have. This can translate into walks outside, visiting or making new friends, reduced mindless TV-snacking, more conversation in the home, more winter gardening, increased arts and craft production, and more reading! Never mind how much more peaceful your life can be without TV’s clownish, violent and hyper-real influence.
*(read an English translation of Guy Debord’s entire book online here for free).
Huge amounts of material critical of television can be found at http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/ as links. Also, check out their podcast: http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/radio/
Doing the walk
I was in Montreal for almost all of September trying to attend to my parents’ needs. My father had a small heart attack that happened to also exacerbate his advanced dementia/Alzheimer’s-like condition. Apart from the alarming mental degeneration, the attack affected his ability to walk, for the first time. My father is a walker, having come to this pass-time rather late in his life, he’d walk daily, and for hours on end. To see him unable to get up and walk by himself was difficult for us all. No matter how much we wished that the day wouldn’t come when he couldn’t walk, it came anyhow. The signs were all there, and we were told to prepare for the inevitable, but we hoped it would turn out otherwise. Of course, it’s human nature to put up with things over which we feel we have little or no control, until we just can’t anymore. Along a not dissimilar vein, I was listening to the C-Realm Podcast the other day, when an idea I had encountered before somehow gained new resonance with me.
In episode 173, the program’s host (KMO) was engaging in conversation with James Howard Kunstler (he also has a podcast) when the idea came up: The real possibility of a massive human, animal and vegetable die-off due to the effects of dramatic climate change or any of the other doomsday scenarios, is starting to gel for some people. The value in engaging in activities that reduce the amount of energy we use and waste we produce will not really effect any real change to the cultural mindset or to the environment right now, because the great masses will do what they are doing until they can’t anymore (and not by choice). But rather than despair at the ineffectual and even cynical ‘green’ efforts around us, maybe there is some transitioning value in, for example, learning to do without plastic bags. The value in conservation, reduction and repurposing as well as in setting up new social infrastructures like community gardens, intentional communities, co-ops and barter systems may simply be to provide working models. These small-scale functioning examples or patterns of ‘another way to be’ would serve as templates for the remaining society after the ‘great fall’. What might seem like tiny steps when measured against the task of reversing the ill effects we’ve inflicted upon the environment and humanity, might actually be large shifts in consciousness that will make us more resilient to dealing with the damage ahead.
Revolution: It's what's for dinner
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died-excerpt from Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows”
It’s often heard that we live in a ‘culture of consumption’. And yes, as we all know in North America, we consume more per capita than anyone else, ever. But the ‘culture’ part of the term also implies that our identities are linked and maybe even formed by consumption. Even our self-value as derived from employment as producers is ever-diminishing, while what we can call ‘consumption-enabling’ and service jobs that can’t easily be outsourced, are always increasing.
The world-wide free trade environments necessarily feature products emerging from dramatically different settings where standards of living, minimum wages, work ethics, education, labour, environmental and health laws that are essentially impossible for the average shopper to navigate. The system’s complexity serves its purpose, whether intentional or not: when faced with what’s presented as basically unknowable, we lose interest and measure value by price alone. Everybody knows it. Most of us in (over-)developed nations are managing to attain a lifestyle unrivaled in history, and as such, we have logically become the model for every so-called ‘civilized society’ in the world today. The idea that we are still using the colonial model, but as applied to finished products coming from abroad, instead of the more traditional import of natural resources, is rarely addressed. The genius of the capitalist status quo is that it’s able to accommodate, repackage and sell even critiques of the system itself, to itself.
So, having outsourced the actual production of almost everything we use, many of our resulting jobs are geared towards trying to covertly and overtly sway, coerce and (at worst) swindle each other into paying the asking price for products or services we decide as a culture that we need and even deserve. We have had to even become experts at generating need where none exists naturally, selling things to each other and devising legal structures whereby we are able to use realize our fullest potential for consumption, as via credit. Of course, the mass media has always expertly adapted to our expanding tolerance for the reshaping of our value system, and we have arguably attained such synergy with corporate goals, that we have almost completely transformed from citizens with responsibilities, into infantilized consumers.
What does it really mean to our system of self-value, that we are ‘consumers’ first? How do we really feel about being willing versions of factory farm animals, meant to consume as much as we are given, and in turn feed the corporate machine in which we blindly invest? From the looks of it, we’re pretty comfortable with this closed system, largely because the real ill effects occur elsewhere in the producer countries, or are imposed upon our natural environments that are sacrificed to the mantra of increased employment. That is, we’re happy except for that ill-defined, nagging feeling that we’re unhappy: that ‘broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died’.But what if deep down, we all know we have made ourselves expendable, that we’ve lost confidence and pride in our ability to take care of our most basic needs for food, clothing and shelter in favor of our designing high-tech ways to market foreign-made products. Our disconnection from what we eat or use comes from an ambivalence toward its quality, anonymity, uniformity, its real usefulness and ultimate value in our lives. The result is a rupture between what we buy and who we are, and once we recognize that we are most certainly not what we buy, the better off we will be. In the meantime, we’re caught in a crisis of value through which we are compelled to either self-medicate, or (ironically) further buy our way out of. But if we see the economic environment for what it is: an artificial construction built over many years and through hundreds of hours of value(s)-generating media exposure, we can begin to learn to recognize our neighbours and revaluate our very existence: maybe Buddhahood is just around the corner from MacDo.
Buddha di Tante Belle Cose (Buddha of so many nice things)
Typical Plateau Alley
I have just returned from a trip to Montreal, and in the spirit of James Howard Kunstler’s weekly podcast (subscribe through http://www.kunstlercast.com/) I tried to re-examine my hometown to see what is it that makes that old Mile End/ Plateau Mont-Royal area “so different, so appealing?” (to coin Richard Hamilton). Montreal, like most large and older cities, is a city of neighbourhoods that range from the ultra suburban to the nitty gritty downtown experience. But even the poorer areas tend not to be as slummy as most cities this size for various reasons including the fact that it’s in Canada. One of the nicest aspects of this particular naighbourhood is its lanes and not overly-wide tree-lined streets. It seems to be a constant in Urban Design that this design pattern is just naturally pleasant, but it remains a sad mystery to me why the concept is consistently set aside in favour of extra-wide streets providing two lanes of two-way traffic as well as another two lanes of parking, with no room for trees. Today, we seem to design streets to enable views, to accommodate the grossly unsustainable one-car-per-person model, and to further alienate ourselves from the environment and from our neighbours.
This older, dynamic neighbourhood is a cultural mix of Hasidic Jews, French Canadians, Anglos, newer Spanish-speaking immigrants, and (to an ever-decreasing extent) Greeks, Portuguese and Italians. Mile End was where Mordecai Richler grew up, and the area he often wrote about in his books. Both my parents worked in the now-decimated clothing manufacturing industry in this area. They clearly remember buying live chickens on St. Laurent Boulevard (a.k.a The Main) and having the famous smoked meat sandwiches or bagels for lunch on special occasions. Yet this area was seen by their generation and culture as somehow just a landing point for immigrants.The goal was always to move into suburban areas. And when that area also became ‘urban’, to keep moving farther and farther away to areas advertised as country-living; sub-divisions that ironically took on the area’s former natural splendor and used it as a moniker to help sell the now-treeless land. Think “Emerald Lane”, “Twin Pines”, etc.
Front view of the street
One way the streets in the Mile End area and much of older Montreal got to maintain the intimate tree-canopied street life with large numbers of pedestrians, was through the existence of backyard lanes. This provides an additional informal street to help locals better navigate the ‘hood by bike or even (small) car, while also providing backyard access and trash collection, keeping the mess off the streets. And, as you can see in the image above, it provides a quiet, green area for kids and cats to wander more or less undisturbed. Strict parking permits on the street side help to dissuade residents from even owning cars, as the built up area was constructed during a virutally car-less time the parking is very limited. Instead, bikes are used extensively, and by some brave souls, year-round. The city has for several years been actively developing bike paths that run alongside the mostly one-way streets in this area, making the bicycle a great cheap and healthy choice for residents of all ages who have the physical capacity to use them. Older residents tend to walk instead, which again adds to the vibrant and friendly street life. Walkers beware of the overly-friendly cats– they can steal hours away from your schedule as they lay there belly-up just begging for a rub.
It's Bixi!
One new development on the bike front is Bixi (see: http://www.bixi.com/home) , one of two new ventures this year whereby visitors or residents can rent bicycles both short and long-term, and use the numerous Bixi drop off points to ensure the bike’s safety in a city where bike theft runs rampant. This European model really helps to shift the perception of a neighbourhood, and if you do visit this mostly level Plateau Mont-Royal area from May-October, it’s a great way to see the city if you don’t have the time and energy to walk. When you consider the very efficient and easy-to-find subway stops in the area, as well as frequent buses that are often given dedicated bus lanes, this part of Montreal quite car-unfriendly, so do watch out for the frustrated drivers as they slowly come to accept the new reality.
