Who’s to blame? And does it really matter?

The manager at my residence’s cafeteria just posted this story on Facebook. It’s good, but I thought it left a few things out. Here’s the story, followed by the comment I left.

This is a bit long but worth the read. A little something for our Environment students to think about!

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Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."

She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books. But too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Certainly worth the read -- lots to think about here. I agree with the basic message of this story, but I think it sort of depends on which generation we're talking about. For example, our grandparents' generation, who I think are the protagonists here, knew from growing up during the Depression and/or the War that nothing should go to waste -- they didn't have to see it as a "green" thing, because responsible resource use was (and still is) common sense. This seems to describe the world that our parents were born into, the one they inherited.

With that in mind, I'd love to be able to walk to a grocery store like they did, but it wasn't my generation that decided that maze-like suburbs and box stores were a better idea. I'd love to be able to rely on public transit in Sarnia, but it wasn't my generation that decided to tear up the trolley line to the beach, cut bus lines, or cut half the VIA trains. It also wasn't my generation that decided that plastic bags and TVs the size of Montana were the way to go, that designer clothes should be marketed towards 10-year-olds, or that decided to ban outdoor clotheslines.

The world that the protagonist is describing sounds awesome, and I'd love to live in it, but between now and then, something went wrong. I don't know which generation caused things to go wrong, and I also could never prove that it was an entire generation's fault, or that they did it out of malice for our environmental welfare as opposed to plain old greed or scientific advancement. Plastic bags probably seemed like a good idea at the time because of their durability, but it took us a while before we realized that there were environmental implications. Hindsight is 20/20, and we need to learn from our collective mistakes.

After all, our generation has been born into some shiny, sexy habits that are going to be hard for us to kick since we can't remember a time like the one described here. We need the wisdom and memories of our elders as we reclaim a lifestyle that got thrown away.

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What do you think?

EV3, Starbucks, and Consumerism

There’s been a fair amount of consternation in the Waterloo parts recently over the plans for the new Environment building (EV3) to contain a Starbucks. This decision was reportedly made by the university honchos and/or food services management, and not by the Faculty of Environment – but the idea of a Starbucks in an Environment building has been controversial because of a lack of consultation with the student body, the harm it will likely cause to the student-run coffee shop in EV1, and the faculty’s commitment to ideals such as Fair Trade.

Recently, the Environment Student Society sent out a survey asking for students’ opinions on the matter, which they’ll use in their discussions with the Faculty and with Starbucks reps. My response took a different tack from the others listed above, though an equally important tack, if not more so.

(For the curious, I think I was channelling my inner James Howard Kunstler when I wrote this, with perhaps a dash of Jack Cafferty thrown in.)

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1. What faculty are you in at the University of Waterloo? Environment
   
   
2. How do you feel about having a Starbucks franchise in EV3? I don’t support it
   
   
3. Please state specific factors that led to your decision in question #2.
   
   The way I see it, Starbucks is a powerful symbol of the excesses of our consumer culture. Whereas, say, Tim Hortons (or Country Style, etc.) takes pride in its everyman image, Starbucks seems to take pride in having a hip, stylish image -- turning a cup of coffee into a status symbol. Of course, both images are just marketing ploys, which makes the suggestion of a cooler-than-thou cup of coffee all the more ludicrous. With their relentlessly trendy image, their irresponsibly high pricing that gives the illusion of a "boutique" product, and their sheer ubiquitousness, Starbucks contributes to Western society's faux ideals of owning the smartphone, camera, and HDTV du jour; living in a McMansion with a three-car garage; driving the coolest cars; and wearing the latest fashions.
   
   When was the last time you heard of a movie star drinking Country Style or Dunkin' Donuts? I'm not saying that all movie stars drink Starbucks, but this is more easily imaginable since it's the image Starbucks creates, the delusion they want the public to buy into and adopt for themselves. If you're a middle-class Canadian envying a piece of the high-class lifestyle, Starbucks is right there on your doorstep; it's more accessible than Gucci. This sort of marketing and media-induced peer pressure plays a huge role in turning citizens into consumers, never content with what they have and seeking more than they *need* -- which, in turn, causes resource exhaustion; urban sprawl; overworked and overstressed families; the inequitable distribution of resources; an ever-growing hunger for energy, whatever the source; and all sorts of other stuff that the Faculty of Environment seeks to reduce. It seems ironic, therefore, that the faculty would willingly share its space with an organization that contributes to these very problems.
   
   
4. If you don’t support the Starbucks franchise in EV3, what food outlet would you suggest instead?
   
   That's the thing; I'm not sure I could recommend any particular brand, for the reasons stated above. I'd be most likely to recommend Tim Hortons, but there are enough of those on campus already. This being the case, I'd like to see some sort of independent coffee shop in EV3 -- not one of those hipster-calibre indie coffee shops, but one that is what it is, doesn't try to be anything but wholesome and genuine, and serves environmentally and socially sustainable products on principle and not because the faculty is forcing it to. In particular, I think it would be great if the ESS Coffee Shop could expand into this space, giving the Faculty a proper C&D. It's got a pretty good menu already, but its current ordering area is cramped to the point of being uninviting. Nonetheless, if an established brand sets up shop in EV3, the ESS Coffee Shop will likely need more than a renovation in order to stay competitive.

A brief history of the past few months, Part I

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now. When I learned about my brain tumour, a friend from church suggested that I write about my experiences. That didn’t happen, but I still think it’s worth chronicling, if only to have a record of it for myself.

Since I wasn’t really keeping track of this stuff as it happened, what follows is, as Margaret Atwood’s heroine Offred would say, a “reconstruction”. I’ll try not to recount every detail of every doctor’s appointment I’ve had, but even so, my condensed version will require a lot of text, so I’ll spare you the eye strain and do this in chunks. Think of it as episodes in a serial medical drama.

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PROLOGUE:

• 2007:
  • I’m talking with friends in the TDCH Commons at lunch, and I realize that it’s hard for me to hear them. I cup my right ear in their direction, and it seems to help.
  • I realize that I’m having a hard time hearing the people who sit to my left on the schoolbus.
  • It’s the TDCH talent show, and I’m working as a stagehand, helping the acts with their microphones as they go on and off the stage. The people working at the sound booth gave me a headset so I could hear their instructions. Except that it was one of those headsets that only has one ear, and it was made for the left ear. By this time, I had a slight suspicion that my left ear was a bit weaker than my right ear ("Just like being left-eye- or right-eye-dominant," I told myself at the time). And sure enough, I could barely understand their instructions, leading to some embarrassing misunderstandings (really embarrassing given that one of the guys on sound – a friend of one of the teachers – was a Juno-nominated producer).
• 2008:
  • I noticed that I was having problems swallowing dry foods like bagels. The stuff seemed to get stuck in the upper part of my throat until I washed it down with water. I had a barium swallow at a nearby hospital, but the images didn’t show anything suspicious.
  • One day, I talked with my grandmother on the phone, and, trying to multitask, I held the phone against my left ear. I could barely make out the words she was saying. I spent the rest of the afternoon lying on the couch – I suppose I was stressed out by it at the time.
• 2009:
  • On the way to a band practice with Dad one morning, I mentioned how I definitely thought my hearing was getting worse; my estimate was that I had lost 15-20% of the hearing in my left ear, and gained a strange hiss in its place. I had a hearing test at the doctor’s office – the most basic hearing test you can imagine. It showed no hearing loss.
  • I was still having problems swallowing, so I was referred to an ENT (ear/nose/throat) specialist in Sarnia. While I was there, I mentioned about my hearing loss, and I had a more sophisticated hearing test there. My estimate of 15-20% turned out to be pretty accurate – but the hearing loss was mainly in the lowest and highest frequencies. Based on this characteristic and the hissing, the ENT specialist suspected that my auditory nerve was damaged, and he sent me for a CT scan at the local hospital.
  • The CT scan didn’t show anything suspicious. So, since it was nerve damage and not eardrum damage, it was the sort of thing no hearing aid could fix – make the sound as loud as you want, and it still won't make it to the brain. I was just going to have to live with the nerve damage and hope it didn’t get worse. I imagined myself walking from class to class at Waterloo that fall, messenger bag slung over my shoulders, trying to be a hip university student, and still having this annoying hiss in my ear.
  • During the early part of the summer, I went for acupuncture to try and fix my hearing. Didn’t work.
  • Oddly enough, once I stopped the acupuncture, my hearing got worse. To the point where I told my classmates at Waterloo that I was basically deaf in my left ear, so if you’re going to walk beside me, walk on my right side if you want me to hear you.
  • My hearing loss didn’t go unmentioned when I would phone my parents from Waterloo. Shortly before Christmas, Mom called the ENT specialist to get me in for another hearing test while I would be home for Christmas. Being the only ENT clinic in Sarnia, they were booked solid, but they said they could squeeze me in when I would be at home for Reading Week.

NEXT TIME…“SWEET! I had forgotten about that!”

"The Right Man For the Job": A Short Story

In Grade 11 English class, we were shown this photo, without being told who the subject of the photo was. We had to imagine who he might have been, and write about him, relating his story to our interests in some way. This is who I made him.

It's certainly the best piece of fiction I've ever written, though of course that's not saying much since I tend to stick to non-fiction. Here it is, with a couple minor word changes:

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THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB
By Jonathan Van Dusen

EDINBURGH, 1894.

Click, tap, clack, thwump. Click, tap, clack, thwump. Click, tap, clack, thwump.

It was a sound that grew monotonous, but Reynolds knew that the process took patience. He watched the gears turn, the steel output rods dancing up and down to the mechanical beat, and the stack of punch cards that the analytical engine swallowed one by one. He crinkled his nose as he watched the translucent puffs of steam fly out the window into the Victorian winter.

It had been two weeks since his consultation with the local Science Council. His analytical engine was the sort of phenomenon they had only heard about in their yearly conferences in London, when Charles Babbage had introduced his machine, and Ada Lovelace her visions for this invention. But Babbage had been dead for decades now, and his visions for these mechanical mathematical machines had never been truly realized.

This is where Ronald Reynolds came in. He had spent thirty years of his life teaching logic and mathematics, which led to an interest in these analytical engines. His machine was but his hobby, something that he worked on simultaneously with the garden behind his city house. He saw logic as another aspect of the beauty he experienced in this garden, and it was this rustic nature that him from shaving a beard that was turning increasingly grey, and kept him in the sort of unpretentious clothes one would not expect from someone in the Edinburgh city centre.

The Council had said they would send a carriage to transport him to their weekly lunchtime meeting. Noticing on his pocket watch that the time was growing nearer for his departure, Reynolds placed a piece of plywood in the machine’s gears to lock them, and left the house. The carriage arrived at exactly the specified time, and took him to the building the Council had been renting. He was escorted upstairs to their spacious boardroom, where twelve men, seated at a long oak table, were regarding him with a mix of curiosity and excitement.

“Good day, Mr. Reynolds,” came the greeting from a smiling, portly man at the head of the table. It was Higgins, their leader, who had taken an interest in Reynolds' work due to an acquaintance with Babbage himself. He motioned for Reynolds to sit across from him, at the other end.

“We have reviewed your application for a grant. We recognise the usefulness of your discoveries, the potential uses by the military. To this end” – Reynolds shifted nervously in his chair as Higgins began to smile – “we are prepared to invest £5000 in this project.”

Reynolds grinned. “My deepest thanks, gentlemen! I am convinced that this will be of benefit to us all.”

“As are we,” nodded Higgins, who then took a sip of his tea. “However, our grant comes with a condition. Mr. Burton?” He pointed to another seated man.

The young man named Burton stood and nodded towards Reynolds, smiling.

Higgins continued. “Mr. Burton’s current field of study is that of electricity. We assume you are familiar with, for instance, the current studies of Edison and Bell?”

Reynolds gave a small sigh and nodded. He was familiar with the field and found it intriguing, but he had always wondered if such applications would ever truly enter the mainstream. After all, no households owned telegraphs, did they?

“Our friend Mr. Burton is experimenting with such things, and is spending a particular amount of time on the concept for an electric version of your math machine.”

Reynolds raised his eyebrows as Burton, still standing, cleared his throat.

“My training lies in electricity, Mr. Reynolds, and yours in mathematics. We have seen many advances in electricity lately, and we have come to the decision that much of the coming century will involve further advances, possibly to the demise of the mechanical trades within the next few decades. But with electricity, the possibilities are endless. Imagine your logic, contained inside a box the size of a loaf of bread!”

Higgins regained control. “As such, we will give you the grant on the condition that you use your logic skills and experience to aid Mr. Burton with his research; a fusion of sorts between the two areas of study.”

Reynolds leaned back in the padded chair and took a slow drink of tea. It was an avenue he had never considered and didn’t know how to respond to. He would have been perfectly content, oh yes, to use a grant on his beloved apparatus, and then present it to interested clients. He frowned slightly, all eyes on him, as he wondered if it was possible to teach an old scholar new tricks.

He sat up slowly. “It if is possible, gentlemen, would you grant me some more time to consider this proposal?”

Higgins took a look around the table, his face showing both disappointment and irritation. “Very well. You have until our meeting next week to reach a decision.”

Reynolds stood up, put on his coat, and said thank-you. He used the carriage ride home as a chance to gather his thoughts. As they approached the house, however, he could identify the bitter smells of a steam engine, but a smell far stronger than he was accustomed to. Minutes passed, and he noticed the wafts of not just steam, but smoke rising from a corner of his house.

He realised his mistake at once: prior to leaving, he had locked the machine’s gears in place, but had never turned off the steam engine. The machine had overheated, and he entered the workshop to find a warped rack of steel, with gears fused together, and ashes for punch cards.

The fabled analytical machine, the object of Reynolds’ devotion, was no longer.

But its successor was needed, and as Ronald Reynolds sorted through his surviving notes on the fundamentals of logic, he realized that he was still the man for the job.

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The Right Man For the Job by Jonathan Van Dusen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Run XP programs within Windows 7!

Did I just say that Paul Thurrott was getting on my nerves?

I take it back.

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/04/24/secret-no-more-revealing-virtual-windows-xp-for-windows-7.aspx

I just wish it weren't limited to the higher-end versions. But on the other hand, how many home users are willing to set up a Virtual PC in order to prevent old programs from crashing? Either way, this is seriously awesome.

Why I don't use Twitter...

I've started reading ZDNet (partly because Paul Thurrott has been getting on my nerves lately). Found this article today: this basically sums up why I've never actually joined Twitter, and I'm glad I'm not alone in feeling this way.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=1540

OK, so what is sustainability, really?

In honour of Earth Day.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=top-10-myths-about-sustainability

Points #4, #7, and #8 are particularly awesome.

I'm a firm believer in the theory of global warming through CO₂, but I'm not really the apologist I once was. Thing is, as one scientist interviewed in The 11th Hour put it, global warming is not the entire problem. Global warming is a symptom of our inability to live sustainably.

What's more, even if you don't believe that we're warming our planet, sustainability is still a valid topic. Example: whether or not you believe that your Hummer causes harmful emissions, you probably won't be driving it as much when gas is scarce and expensive.

David Suzuki illustrates this well:

While filming a special program on forestry for The Nature of Things in the 1990s, we arranged to interview loggers working in a cut block near Ucluelet on Vancouver Island. When we arrived and set up the camera, the loggers came out of the forest and began to cuss me out as an environmentalist who was threatening their jobs.

The confrontation made for good television, but I was frustrated at our inability to find common ground. Finally I told them, "I worked as a carpenter for eight years, and to this day, I love working with wood. No environmentalist I know is against logging. We just want to be sure that your children and grandchildren will be able to log forests as rich as the ones you’re working in now."

Immediately, one of the men replied that he’d never let his kids to go into logging. "There won’t be any trees left!" he said. And there it was. Those men knew that they were cutting the trees down in a way that ensured there would be no harvestable timber for future generations of loggers, but they saw the trees as the way to put food on the table day after day and make the house and car payments at the end of the month.

Here's the paradox: yes, learning to live sustainably will solve the problem of emissions. But when solving global warming means capturing coal emissions and pumping them underground, or putting loads of mirrors into the sky, we still won't be solving the root problem of sustainability.