Throughout our near-45-year existence, Alternatives Journal has published countless interviews about the Earth, but sadly none of them with the Earth. Better late than never, we say, and on a lovely sunny Saturday in June, A\J met up with our very own Pachamama as she was enjoying a day of rest. We had a lot of catching up to do, and Pachamama was happy to spin a tale.

A\J: You’ve had some, shall we say, rocky moments in your lifetime.
Pachamama: [giggles]

Can you think of one moment that has particularly defined you?
Oh yes. For a long, long time, you see, there really wasn’t much going on in my world. It was mostly just spinning around in circles. Millennium after millennium! After a while, a girl longs for something to happen! Then suddenly it felt like something just went click in the sea. Wriggly things and branching things and curly things, and doing all sorts of brand new things I’d never imagined. First in the sea, then all over me. Life became so interesting!

How will this defining moment prepare you for what lies ahead?
Well, it does seem that I’ve got a change of costume coming. This one’s getting pretty tattered, isn’t it? Too many rips and missing pieces. Some of the seams are pretty much ready to go. They’re coming loose already.

But you know, dear, this isn’t my first dress. For the longest time when I was younger, I wore nothing but a gauzy little number, nothing obvious to the eye unless you looked very closely. Then I had my hot period: all that oversize lush greenery and those fascinating creatures like your lizards today, only so much bigger and so many kinds of them. Then one day, bam! Most of the lizard life disappeared.

And then, my next dress was even lovelier! New flowers and creatures. The lizards became fantastic fliers, and so colourful. And there were altogether new things. Why, that’s when your own great, great, great, great – well, too many greats to count – grandparents turned up. It was quite an innovation, you know, the way they stayed warm even when it got cold and all the other creatures slowed down and almost stopped.

You’ve recently starred in a lot of postapocalyptic movies. How do you get into the role?
Oh that’s easy. I just pick a moment from my past that suits. Steaming hot beds of lava? I can do that. Howling winds and towering waves? Ice canyons? Sauna jungles? I can do those. Honey, I’ve played them all since long before you… well, you know.

Are there some days when you just don’t feel like supporting life?
Oh heavens, no. Do you have any idea how boring those first 700 million years were? And anyway, what else would I do with myself?

How do you get over your down days?
Oh, I’m always looking forward to what surprising thing you’ll all come up with next. Dragonflies, now. I never expected those! I don’t wish to be unmotherly, dear, but you bunch have taken over so much of me now that you’re getting a little tedious. I’m rather looking forward to a change. Although I do think I may miss you more than some of the others. So inventive. So much promise. Ah, well.

When were you happiest?
Oh, dear. You don’t want to know.

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When Robert and Brenda Vale published Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living in 2009, dog blogs lit up in fury. The authors had crunched the numbers and reported that a medium-sized dog has twice the climate impact of driving a gas-guzzling car 16,000 kilometres – mainly due to a dog’s carnivorous diet. They focused on what goes into Fido, but let’s consider what comes out. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the average dog produces 124 kilograms of waste per year. Canada is home to about six million dogs. That translates into more than 700,000 tonnes of waste each year. Just a week’s worth of that waste is enough to fill a regulation CFL field 4.5 metres deep. 

Of course, country dogs with room to roam distribute their waste like wild animal scat. But urban dog poo is concentrated around spaces shared by humans: yards, sidewalks, parks and waterways. Around 60 percent of it is picked up and thrown in the garbage to end up in sealed landfills where it slowly decomposes and emits methane gas – a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Anything left on the ground is unsanitary and can end up polluting watersheds.

How can we do better? Two dog parks offer ideas. 

Volunteers who maintained the dog run in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Park in Montreal successfully composted pet waste from 2005 to 2010. They installed one-metre-cubed plastic bins and encouraged owners to put their dogs’ doo in the bins and cover it with donated sawdust. The volunteers then turned the compost when visiting with their pets. Full bins were covered until the compost was finished. Then it was bagged and left as free garden fertilizer. According to Jim Fares, president of the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Dog Run Association at the time, the process was virtually odourless. The compost quickly became popular and, he says, produced “huge flowers.” (When volunteers dwindled after five years, the city took over park maintenance and discontinued composting.) 

Denali National Park, a wildlife preserve 190 kilometres southwest of Fairbanks, Alaska, has been composting sled dog waste for 35 years, keeping the area clean for over 500,000 visitors a year. The odourless finished compost is used in flower beds and gardens where it helps retain soil moisture and reduces the need for fertilizers and pesticides. 

An even simpler approach might be to dig open trenches in dog parks and provide some carbon matter like sawdust or shredded leaves. Visitors could simply scoop waste into the trench and cover it with some dirt and sawdust. When full, the trench could be covered with soil and landscaped with native perennials.  

Dog poo compost not tested for pathogens should never be used on edible crops. But with just a little more planning, our millions of furry friends could be providing us with some doggone good gardening richness.

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“Science insists that we can’t express particulars. But we love things in particular, not in general … and when you love something in particular, you’re not inclined to see that it could be replaced by anything else.”
– Karen Houle, writer-in-residence, rare Charitable Research Reserve.

In one of the oldest villages of Upper Canada, a hidden gem of ecosystem biodiversity rivals the Niagara escarpment looming above it. The rare Charitable Research Reserve is a 370-hectare plot of protected land at the union of the Grand and Speed rivers near Blair, Ontario. Nearly as large as Vancouver’s Stanley Park, the reserve is home to over 24 habitat types, 600 species of plants, 379 animal species, eight kilometres of public hiking trails and a community garden.

Hikers, birders, historians and field naturalists all use the reserve. Biologists, ecologists, archaeologists, geologists and geographers from universities both near and far have conducted nearly four dozen research projects there since 2004. But now, rare is blurring the lines between natural science and the arts.

One such new departure is the Eastern Comma writer-in-residence program, a joint venture with philanthropic arts organization Musagetes. Named after a black and orange butterfly that frequents the reserve in summer, the program aims to bring “an additional layer of meaning” to the hard scientific research commonly conducted at rare, says executive director Stephanie Sobek-Swant. 

Seeking someone to inaugurate the Eastern Comma residency whose insights might be “more accessible” to the general public, and whose work reflected an interest in the environment, rare and Musagetes chose Karen Houle. Author of two nationally acclaimed books of poetry, Houle is also a philosophy professor at the University of Guelph with a background in biology. This “tripartite expertise,” as Houle calls it, made her an obvious choice.

During Houle’s time at the reserve, she developed an idea about what’s missing in science, and what might help us care more about the loss of Earth’s many unique species and ecosystems.

For three months in the fall of 2014, Houle’s residence was rare’s North House. The high-tech, solar-powered prototype dwelling was designed by a team of students and faculty members from Waterloo, Ryerson and Simon Fraser universities as an entry in the 2009 United States Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, finishing in fourth place. Active and passive solar features produce twice as much energy as the building uses, with the surplus powering the nearby Springbank farmhouse.

With floor-to-ceiling windows on three full sides and glass panels even in the bathroom, Houle found the house didn’t satisfy her dual human impulses for, as she puts it, both “closedness and openness.” With no privacy indoors, she said “I needed to go outside all the time. Even though in a funny way, you already are outside in that house.”

North House \ photo by nik harron

Luckily, being outside suited Houle’s kinetic writing process. “Any poem I’ve ever written,” she explained, “I’ve first had to move my body,” whether through walking, biking or riding in a train or car. “Things around you are moving at different paces, so you get this syncopated feeling – I guess that’s called parallax. There’s a rhythm that can start happening, and ultimately, poetry is about words jumping onto that rhythm.”

Eventually a poem would start to “knit itself together.”

Still, Houle’s creative process had much in common with the more observationally meticulous, lists-and-measures science usually carried out at rare. She spent a lot of time walking the trails, often in company with scientists, absorbing as many impressions as she could from the environment: “the alvars and the deciduous forest and leaf litter; the boardwalks over the marshy parts; the rehabilitated fields of high grass prairie; the soggy parts of Cruickston Park and Bauer Creek.” She peppered researchers with questions, and read articles based on their work at rare. Once she felt fully saturated with information, she would go out and just walk. Eventually a poem would start to “knit itself together,” she says. “I think that’s what they call ‘the muse’.”

Back “indoors” at North House, Houle would reread scientific papers, “looking for a phrase or a claim that felt like it had a kinship with the pieces I had pinned down.” These she used to “scaffold” her poems with empirical insights. Speaking publicly in March 2015, Houle described her use of research this way as a fast-track to precision and detail, relying on “hands and eyes that had spent more time than I had” finding patterns in rare’s ecosystems.

But this, to the poet, seemed to overlook something. “Where’s the particular in this? Where’s the, ‘this is the branch of this river that I love’?”It was as she read and reread the science that has been done at rare, however, that Houle began to articulate long-held reservations about the value that science places on universality. “I was reading those articles,” she recalled, “and had in my mind that, ‘Yeah, this is the kind of approach that’s needed, because it’s neutral or objective.’” Indeed, both the language and practice of science are rooted in the desire to describe universal general rules: E=MC² or, in Houle’s example, comparing one stand of butternut trees to another to draw conclusions about all butternut trees.

“Because of this methodological demand to generalize or universalize,” Houle argues, there’s no room within science for a “confession about loving one tree, or one person, or one patch of gravel.”

“There needs to be a kind of complementary gesture, able to express the love of and concern for the particular without that seeming irrational.”
– Karen Houle

The point resonates in the practical realm, she adds. When the science used to rationalize development, innovation and political decision making is expressed in universals, it makes a false assumption about the perfect substitutability of elements: if all butternuts are similar, any butternut is as good as another – and can substitute for it.

This “thinking that something can be replaced by something else with no real loss or concern,” Houle argues, is “getting us all in a lot of trouble.” Some things are simply not substitutable.

This is hardly news to many environmental thinkers. As Houle observes, it’s a love of particular places and things that inspires much scientific work, yet that love is rarely able to shine through.

Houle doesn’t know exactly how to counter the imperative of universality in science, only that “there needs to be a kind of complementary gesture, able to express the love of and concern for the particular without that seeming irrational.” We need, that is, to let science appreciate both the big universals and the unique particulars. One approach, she suggests, is to cultivate an “historical sense” of our surroundings: producing not just a “snapshot of a river,” but an understanding of this river, and its story over time.

Only by infusing the scientific search for general truths with the sensibilities of the particular – honed in the arts, history, or by a poetic ear that can “hear past the language of science” – can we truly appreciate the unique and the irreplaceable. We must learn not only how to know things, Houle argues, but also “how to be moved by things.”

The 2015 Eastern Comma writer-in-residence will be First Nations (Stó:lō) poet and author Lee Maracle. raresites.org

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The “age of ecology” dawned at the end of the 1960s. Cold-war fears of nuclear fallout, warnings of a pesticide-laden silent spring and rivers so polluted they caught fire drove new attention to the environment. The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970. The US created its Environmental Protection Agency that same year and next the predecessor of Environment Canada was formed. Eager to seize the moment, some activists took up staging media events to direct public attention to the issues. Others tried to imagine what the economy might look like if that attention created real change.

Alternatives Journal stood at the centre of the second effort. Its groundbreaking, ground-laying work with the era’s visionaries, industry and government created a practical foundation for economic development that didn’t ravage the environment. What happened next, however, is a story of a savage turn of market forces, dashed hopes and decades of eclipse followed more recently by a long-overdue renaissance.

The magazine was created at Ontario’s Trent University in the same year as Environment Canada. Its founding editor, Robert Paehlke – still a member of its editorial board and board of directors – had the new publication take a reasoned stance between academia and activism. Eschewing simplistic wilderness preservation, it sought to illuminate links between the environment and social and economic issues.

Paehlke connected with environmental groups like Toronto’s Pollution Probe, and followed international developments such as the first global conference on the environment in 1972 at Stockholm. Shrugging off accusations from some activists that it was “unduly philosophical,” and from some scientists that it was too “sensationalist,” Alternatives became a forum where strategies for implementing a more sustainable economy could be thrashed out.

Then, in October of 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. In retaliation for American support for that country, a group of mainly Arab oil-exporting countries embargoed shipments to the US and unilaterally slashed their petroleum output. The combined measures sent world oil prices rocketing upward – and shockwaves through the global and North American economies.

Alternatives was already well aware of the relevance of energy to the environment. It was critical of megaprojects like the James Bay hydro development and proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, which promised energy at exorbitant environmental cost. In one article, economist Michael Goldberg chided government and industry for their “illusion of near Olympian knowledge,” and challenged them to provide credible evidence that such projects would not create “technological or environmental disaster.”

Its reporting resonated with others working at the time. Donella Meadows and co-authors had published The Limits to Growth in 1972. Based on modelling, the report projected overshoot in human demands on the planet followed by a collapse commencing in the early 21^st century. The next year, E.F. Schumacher published a response to that warning. Small Is Beautiful catalyzed interest in renewable energy, appropriate technology and localized supply chains.

In Canada, these ideas were catching on with at least some leaders. Prince Edward Island’s then-premier Alexander Campbell took the 1973 oil crisis as an opportunity to build a pioneering provincial policy on decentralization, renewable energy and the idea of a “conserver society.” Campbell’s program helped attract to Canada a young American soon to become a leading visionary of a sustainable economy.

A physicist from Washington, DC, Amory Lovins had become disenchanted with both academia and nuclear energy while studying at Cambridge in the early 1970s. A stint helping the British group Friends of the Earth draft a submission to the UN’s Stockholm conference had exposed him to Meadows’ highly quantitative analysis. Lovins merged this approach with his own knowledge of thermodynamics to pioneer a new, high-resolution analysis of energy use and transport across the economy. His specialty was matching the form that energy takes to its most efficient use. He memorably characterized heating with electric radiators as “cutting butter with a chainsaw,” and argued instead for capturing waste heat from power plants through co-generation.

Lovins spent the winter and spring of 1975-1976 in Canada working with the Science Council of Canada. The advisory body had become interested in the environment, efficient resource use and the conserver society. In early 1976, Lovins supported premier Campbell’s launch of his new policy by explaining how greater efficiency and local renewables fit PEI’s need for a low-cost response to the energy crisis

Through the Science Council, Lovins also met Canadian economist and energy analyst David Brooks – and through him, Alternatives Journal. Earlier in the decade, Brooks had led the Energy Conservation Branch at the federal Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, making it his mission to convince the Trudeau government that the Canadian economy could prosper using less energy and fewer resources. Writing for Alternatives in 1974, Brooks had presented economic arguments that a “human alternative” to megaprojects was not only feasible, but could also create jobs and reduce social inequality more efficiently.

By the mid-1970s, Brooks had left the government to join Energy Probe and lead Friends of the Earth Canada in Ottawa. He was also working closely with Alternatives to popularize a less-destructive course toward economic growth.

Now working together, Lovins, Brooks and Alternatives set about convincing Canadian environmentalists, public resource administrators and political leaders that the country didn’t have to remain over the oil barrel that the embargo had placed it on. The centrepiece of this effort would be a three-day workshop at Trent in October 1978. Its goal was to help environmentalists develop evidence and arguments for a “soft path” economy that would give policy makers a persuasive case for action.

The event attracted 20 leading energy activists, researchers and industry insiders from groups like the Maritime Energy Coalition, Toronto’s Energy Probe and Petro Canada. Led by Brooks and Lovins, attendees learned how to create rigorous plans for more sustainable energy and resource use. Their approach began by considering how consumers actually use energy in their daily lives – for heating, transportation, cooking or entertainment. Then it worked backwards from that need – and forward from a detailed technical knowledge of energy production – to determine the energy mix with the lowest “whole-system” costs.

The emphasis on gathering extensive data, careful calculation, and accurate and accessible conclusions had a political purpose as well as a practical one. Lovins, Brooks and their collaborators believed that their criticism of the inefficiencies of conventional energy flows would only be credible if they could give accurate examples, such as how much excess heat was produced in generating nuclear power, or all the energy needed to refine and transport its fuel. They hoped the ability to reveal such hidden costs, and more importantly to suggest ways to turn them to advantage such as by local co-generation, would catch the attention of policy makers. They persuasively demonstrated that “official forecasts of GNP are readily attainable by soft energy paths,” and drew pointed comparisons among the socio-political impacts of different energy scenarios.

Taking such calculations as a tool of environmental action, Alternatives sought to raise awareness of this promising path among Canadians. Again, it wasn’t the only voice pointing to different energy choices. The Canadian Renewable Energy News, appearing monthly, covered business, technical and political developments in the field.

As the end of the seventies neared, Alternatives had become the leading editorial voice articulating a coherent vision of energy and the environment. In 1979, it gave Chris Conway and Robert Crow space to argue that an aggressive program of investment and regulation could deliver nearly 70 percent of Ontario’s energy from renewables by 2025. The following year, William Ross urged Alberta to invest in efficient house construction and transportation, and to adopt biofuels. The combination, he asserted, would reduce Alberta’s reliance on fossil fuels, diversify its economy and buffer the bust cycles that typically follow resource booms.

With oil prices still stubbornly high, the message was beginning to resonate with politicians, analysts and more than a few businesses. In 1978, Energy Minister Alastair Gillespie announced that the federal government would invest more than $460-million (adjusted for inflation) over five years to create a market for solar energy in Canada. It was Canada’s largest-ever single commitment to non-hydro renewable energy, and remains impressive even today. Quoting advice from Brooks and others, Gillespie estimated that solar energy would create “15,000 [person-years] of employment” by 1990, on “$900-million in annual sales.”

The program briefly created a Canadian solar industry from scratch. It was almost instantly stillborn. Technical problems inherent to any new technology plagued the industry. In 1981, oil prices began to fall and kept falling for the next five years. Meanwhile, interest rates soared, crippling the nascent industry’s access to private capital. Government-wide spending cuts, instituted to rein in inflation, put the solar program under review and in early 1983, the government cancelled it.

That wasn’t quite the end of official interest in the soft path. Even as it cut funds for solar development, the federal government hired Brooks and Friends of the Earth to prepare a series of national and regional soft-path studies. These appeared in book form as Life After Oil – A Renewable Energy Policy for Canada.

But little made its way into policy. Oil was continuing its slide, and with it the apparent economic relevance of energy. The Canadian Renewable Energy News closed its doors. A new government elected in 1984 had its sights on free trade with the US, not soft energy.

For the better part of a decade and a half, the soft energy path went, if not underground, certainly to the margins of mainstream economic discussions. Alternatives persisted, keeping alive a network of citizens who saw the shortcomings of “cheap” fossil energy. Tinkerers and investors developed better solar panels, wind generators and low-energy building techniques. Lovins moved to Colorado and established both an institute and an ultra-low-footprint residence built on his soft energy path principles.

By the late 1990s, oil prices were creeping back up. In 1999, Lovins’ and co-author Paul Hawken’s global best-seller Natural Capitalism introduced the corporate world to the idea that its dependence on natural ecosystems and their services represented a type of capital. And as the century turned, a new breed of economist began to put hard numbers on this idea, finding that Toronto’s urban trees, for example, provide air-freshening and health-rejuvenating services worth $80-million a year to that city. The increasingly evident onset of climate change, meanwhile, put a new focus on both the untallied costs of fossil fuels and the economic impacts of ecosystem loss.

Municipal governments are on the front lines of many environmental impacts – from supplying clean water to garbage disposal. In Canada, many started to plan for a changing climate and mitigate their own contribution to it. Perhaps the most innovative was Vancouver.

The city took the first step as early as 1990, publishing a prescient report on climate change. Among the 35 recommendations in Clouds of Change, several drew deeply on soft path ideas. One was to tap methane from landfills to generate electricity and heat. Another was to pursue more energy-efficient land use, decentralizing industry and commercial development and encouraging more self-contained neighbourhoods. The ideas could have been lifted from Ross’ soft path vision for Alberta published in Alternatives 10 years before. Many of these ideas have since been implemented. Vancouver’s methane-burning power plant avoids greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those from 45,000 cars and saves money for greenhouse owners who receive its waste heat.

Another city on the soft path is Portland, Oregon. Like Vancouver, the city often called America’s greenest rejected expanded urban highways and in the 1990s launched development plans based around transit and increasing density. Portland’s famous local food and craft beer industries owe much to this decision, with nearby farmland protected by an urban growth boundary. 

Oil prices have slumped again from their latest peak. But this time, solar and wind development continues apace. Visionary businesses promote local renewable energy in developing markets to leap-frog expensive distribution from big fossil fuel plants. And just as a small journal and its visionary contributors foresaw in the 1970s, they’re doing it for a win-win situation of profit and a sustainable environment.

Photo courtesy of Robert Paelkhe

Photo by Alex McDonald

Photo by Alex McDonald

A\J Founder Robert Paehlke (top left circa mid-70s) envisioned a publication that takes a reasoned stance between academia and activism. He writes for A\J regularly and remains on the board of Alternatives Inc. in its newest iteration as Canada’s only national environmental media organization. Both Paehlke and David Brooks (middle circa 1993) are on A\J’s board of directors. Brooks filled his early A\J days with deep, innovative thinking about energy. He and Amory Lovins (bottom right circa 1990) lead a team of about 20 energy activists to create the Energy Soft Path – the first iteration of today’s renewable energy movement. Yes, that is the late NDP leader Jack Layton beside Lovins.

See our full A\J history at ajmag.ca/history and catch up on our most recent renewable energy coverage at ajmag.ca/renewables.

The post That 70’s AJ appeared first on A\J.

Naïve? Perhaps it was, but 15  years ago the public perception was that Canadians don’t die from drinking tap water. We certainly don’t die from drinking water from a municipal supply in Southwestern Ontario. So when the small town of Walkerton found its drinking water supply contaminated over the course of several weeks in May 2000, sending 65 people to hospital – 27 with acute kidney failure – and killing seven, the recriminations that followed quickly reached the provincial parliament and media offices in Toronto.

Walkerton’s water contamination was deeply unfortunate. But it also prompted invaluable change in Ontario’s water management. Justice Dennis O’Connor’s Commission of Inquiry reviewed decision making at farm, regional and provincial scales. This resulted in new source water protections, technical training requirements, water quality standards and monitoring. There has been greater funding for water-related research, more public engagement in water governance and a renewed recognition of water’s part in public health, farm production and government transparency.

But beyond the politics and policy, what happened in Walkerton can also help us better understand how our fears influence our behaviour, including our decisions about water.

Terror Management Theory (TMT) is a thread in social psychology that is used to understand the influence that our mortality awareness (our knowing we will one day die) has on everyday decisions. We are using TMT here to re-examine the extensive media coverage of Walkerton. True, media often exaggerate emotions, especially negative ones, to increase sales. But these stories from credible sources and multiple perspectives (see “Headlines,” below) have much to teach us about the relationship between our emotions and our responses to environmental crises.

We use cultural and psychological defences to temporarily block death reminders, and reassure ourselves of our significance. 

Early theories about how we think and make decisions held that people controlled their emotions and were capable of unbiased “rational thought.” This perspective persists. But cognitive science has shown that emotions have a powerful influence on our decisions. Emotions are biophysical reactions that are shaped by social expectations to allow us to recognize and express subconscious chemical signals. When someone we love dies, for example, our brains undergo a biochemical reaction that we recognize as sadness or fear. Social permission to cry at funerals validates those emotions and allows us to express them.

Even our “rational” thinking needs emotion, to help direct us to choices about everything from what we eat to what we believe. This influence may be especially powerful for negative emotions. Researchers led by Dan Kahan at Yale, for example, found that fear of holding views at odds with one’s peers was linked to denial of the science that demonstrates humanity has a hand in climate change.

Terror Management Theory

Our cognitive capacity has given us language and culture – but also an awareness of time and the perception of the “self” as an impermanent presence in time. Our ability to remember the past and think of the future creates an unavoidable awareness of our mortality. Ernest Becker in his 1973 book Denial of Death argued that the conscious and subconscious anxiety this awareness creates is a central driver of human behaviour.

That driver preoccupies TMT researchers. To clarify: Terror Management Theory isn’t a study of crazed fanatics doing terrible things under banners of religion or ideology. Instead, TMT is used to explore how mortality salience – reminders of our inevitable demise – affects everyday behaviour. A central insight is that we use cultural and psychological defences to temporarily block death reminders, and reassure ourselves of our significance and self-worth.

What some people call “immortality” or “hero” projects allow us to invest our identity in something that we believe will endure beyond our individual lives. Building the Hoover Dam, securing a change in the law or helping create new community institutions are all things that might give us that feeling. The Walkerton Clean Water Centre – established in response to the contamination, to train Ontario’s water operators – was one such hero project.

Psychological defences minimize our conscious awareness of mortality and help to reduce our anxiety. We may put physical or emotional distance between ourselves and other people’s deaths. We may avoid hearing or reading about environmental threats. Or we may try to suppress our thoughts of death by strengthening our sense of self: I believe that climate science is valid but you do not. This stronger Us-vs-Them identity response can turn negative if we do it by increasing our hostility to people we think are different from us.

We found all of these reactions in our review of Walkerton’s experience.

Walkerton’s Water Terror

For Canadians, water is bound up with our identity and daily lives. In summer we paddle, sail and swim; in winter we battle snow and ice but also break loose on skis and snowmobiles. Yet water holds risks and fears. These we don’t talk about so easily and the deepest of them is death. Walkerton’s water contamination brought the universal fear of death into our daily lives.

Walkerton’s crisis triggered strong emotional responses as people grappled with the idea that what was coming out of their household taps might kill them. Headlines were heavy with terms such as “sickening,” “disgraceful,” “scandal” and “grossly contaminated.” These reflected common feelings of disgust – a primary emotional response to things we find offensive, including the reminder that we are just animals for whom death is a natural and unavoidable event.

The fear of mortality may prompt us to make irrational choices, believing we are reducing our risk. In Walkerton, fear of tap water became so powerful that the mother of one ill child said, “I wouldn’t drink water again if my life depended on it.” Others responded by purchasing bottled water or installing water purification systems in their own homes, declaring that they would continue to use these “cleaner” sources even after Walkerton’s municipal supply was once again confirmed to be safe.

Some Walkerton residents simply distanced themselves from the threat. Psychological distancing – declaring, “it can’t happen to me” – lets individuals push the perception of life-threatening danger away from themselves. Some residents also distanced themselves physically: they simply left Walkerton until the crisis was over and the media retreated.

But putting mental or physical distance between ourselves and the problem, and letting others handle it, carries a price for society. It undermines local participation in community issues and can make achieving effective and sustained governance even harder.

In other Walkerton residents, fears erupted into public blame directed at perceived villains in the storyline: Stan Koebel, the Walkerton utilities manager; the town’s Public Utilities Commission; and the Ontario government. The accused then further redirected responsibility to others involved in the debacle.

Stan Koebel initially denied the E. coli contamination to Public Health inquiries, but then distanced himself by implying that the outbreak was a random event that “no one wanted, no one planned.” The Public Utilities Commission shifted the focus to an intermittent malfunction in the town’s chlorination system. Former Ontario premier Mike Harris blamed human error – putting responsibility back on Stan Koebel – not his government’s 40-percent cut to the Ministry of Environment’s budget or the reductions in staffing, pollution monitoring and environmental enforcement that followed.

Psychological self-defence explains the anger and hostility directed at individuals and organizations. We are all intrinsically motivated to defend our worldview, and our positions within that worldview, and react negatively toward people who undermine it.

Downtown Walkerton has many public artworks that evoke a positive relationship with water. \ Photo by nik harron.

Canadians normally don’t think twice about our water being safe to drink – it is a reflex within our larger sense of security. The belief rests in turn on a generally accepted worldview about the sociopolitical, economic and technical order supporting our national well-being. Abundant, clean and safe water, along with assumed traits like honesty and trustworthiness, has been valued as integral to Canadian identity.

When it took so long for the contamination of their water to be recognized and fixed, Walkerton residents felt those values violated, their national identity betrayed. Public figures were heckled in person and pilloried in the media. Those seen as champions for the worldview were praised. Dr. Murray McQuigge, the medical officer of health, was heralded as a whistle-blower for issuing Walkerton’s first boil-water advisory.

Emotions and Water: What Next?

We think the contamination of one small town’s water supply resonated deeply in Canadians’ public consciousness for three reasons.

First, it directly contradicted our shared national identity as inhabitants of a place with pristine, abundant water. Suddenly, images of tanker trucks and goodwill shipments of thousands of plastic water bottles arriving in Walkerton provided visible evidence that our water wasn’t always clean or easily available.

Second, the contamination struck close to home. This wasn’t a story from a distant, underdeveloped nation. It wasn’t even from a remote and under-served Northern community. It was about a place just three hours by car from downtown Toronto and people who could have been our neighbours.

Finally, there was death. “Seven people died and over 2,000 became ill.” The phrase was used so relentlessly in media coverage that we might wonder if a keyboard shortcut had been created. And on every hearing it brought forth those deep-seated, subconscious terrors of our own inevitable mortality.

Death, of course, is everywhere. We get reminders daily in our news, our entertainment and communities – even when we glimpse a strand of grey hair in the mirror. But failing to recognize our emotional response can set us off in the wrong direction, as individuals and as a society: buying bottled water needlessly, blaming others rather than accepting responsibility, and rationalizing inaction as we distance or distract ourselves from the problem. All these in turn complicate the collaboration that is necessary to solutions – especially with water, which affects us all.

Death may be inevitable, but our terror response needn’t be. Our continuing research will go beyond identifying how fears misdirect our behaviours. With more insight, we’ll identify specific tools that decision makers and the public might use to generate clearer thinking about the environmental threats we really do face.

The post In the Wake of Walkerton appeared first on A\J.

AIRPORTS EVOKE MIXED FEELINGS. Few of us enjoy serpentine lineups, running along moving sidewalks checking our watches, or unpacking our belongings for security personnel. Yet some of the most interesting spaces we’ll meet on our journeys are the airports we rush through.

From Japan’s Kansai airport built on the ocean, to Jedda’s state-of-the-art terminal for transporting thousands of pilgrims to Mecca, to Denver’s lounges adorned with apocalyptic murals, airports tell us a lot about cultures. They can also reveal a lot about our relationship with nature. Never mind the carbon footprint of flying; from location, to construction, to the people flowing through them, airports drastically change a landscape and the populations, human and wild, that live there.

Runways require enormous swaths of land. The average runway for commercial jets is around three kilometres long, and major airports have up to half a dozen. Denver International, mid-sized as airports go, is twice the size of Manhattan. To accommodate them, forests are felled, farms and wetlands paved, and communities relocated.

Take Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, whose name means “the golden land.” In the 1970s, the Thai government purchased 3,400 hectares of river floodplain to develop the city’s second major airport. Formerly known as the “Cobra Swamp” (Nong Ngu Hao), this wetland was an important way station along the East Asian migratory bird flyway. It was also home to white-eyed river martin, Siamese Bala shark and other endangered species.

Thailand’s government envisioned the airport as the nucleus for a new economic centre “as big as Singapore.” The imagined aerotropolis has been slow to emerge, but Suvarnabhumi has doubtless been a gold rush for Thailand’s economy as a gateway for commerce, ecotourism and beach getaways.

From location, to construction, to the people flowing through them, airports drastically change a landscape and the populations, human and wild, that live there.

Yet its site on a former wetland continues to haunt Suvarnabhumi. Bird-airplane collisions plague the airport. In 2009, a landing aircraft flew into a flock of painted storks; seven hit the plane, denting the nose-cone and damaging a wing. Thai authorities responded by trying to eliminate birds from the area. Concrete and artificial turf replaced grass. Nearby wetlands were filled in to eliminate avian food sources such as fish and snails. Chemicals and noise were used to deter birds from entering flight paths. The efforts had some success – as far as flight safety is concerned, at least. In 2006, 104 species of birds were found on airport lands. By 2014, the number had dropped to 79.

Exotic animals remain an unhappily familiar sight at Suvarnabhumi, however. The Thai gateway is a hotspot for illegal wildlife smuggling: 11 otters were found alive in a suitcase in 2013. Sadly, Suvarnabhumi isn’t the only air hub that facilitates trafficking of rare species, particularly in regions where their protection is lax. Airport gift shops give rural communities new sales outlets for handcrafts made from local woods, corals or shells – but seldom question the source of those materials.

Expediting tourism to exotic areas can also damage the ecosystems that attract the visitors. The Galapagos Islands saw about 1,000 visitors a year in the 1960s. After the addition of a second airport, the number jumped to 80,000 in the 21st century. After recovering from near extinction in the 1930s, Baltra Island iguanas are now often spotted as road-kill from increased tourist traffic.

Suvarnabhumi \ Anam Ahmed

The upside of “airside”

Airport researchers call all that flat land around runways “airside.” North American airports sprawl over more than 3,300 square kilometres of it – enough to cover half of Ontario’s Algonquin Park.  All this airside provides habitat for red-tailed hawks, blue herons, red-winged black birds and killdeer. Stormwater holding ponds attract waterfowl like ducks and geese. Field mice, jackrabbits and woodchucks, drawn to vegetation, attract foxes, coyotes and predatory birds.

While many North American grassland birds are losing habitat to urban fragmentation, airports may be providing alternative habitats. The authors of Wildlife in Airport Environments calculate that as little as 50 hectares of airside grassland may enrich species diversity in developed landscapes. Montreal’s largely abandoned Mirabel airfield has been turned into pasture for 350,000 managed honeybees. Advocates for threatened monarch butterflies point out that milkweed – an essential host for monarch larvae – could flourish around North American runways.

But bird strikes aren’t the only danger to people when wildlife and aviation meet. A few wasps may have brought down Birgenair Flight 301 shortly after take-off from the Dominican Republic in 1996, killing 189 passengers. Investigators concluded that mud-dauber wasps nested in the aircraft’s pitot tubes while it was parked on the tarmac, disabling the air-speed sensors. Unaware of their flight speed, the pilots lost control of their aircraft. (Ground crews are now supposed to cover pitot tubes on aircraft parked for any length of time.)

Anam Ahmed

Symbolic places

The airport terminal is unlike an earlier generation’s train station. Places like New York’s Grand Central Station draw visitors for their neoclassical architecture and accessible commerce. Suburban airports, by contrast, have become what Alistair Gordon describes as “vacuum-sealed” experiences, where passengers are funneled through “super-insulated” concourses (the average one runs nearly half a kilometre in length) into “shadowless holding tanks … oblivious to the outside world.”

This impression is by design. Airports are in the business of selling flying in a time when air travel is fraught with anxiety, inconvenience and climate guilt. Once past security, passengers enter a stateless transit zone. Lounges and cafes offer anonymous diversion on the way to the gates that beckon us to global escapes. Travel-themed ads reinforce the image of the universal globetrotter, with promises like “Your destination just got closer” (Boston Logan), or “We see tomorrow” (Vancouver International).

Nonetheless, airports also serve as symbolic gateways to their host cities or nations. No worries if you only got as far as shopping in Singapore. Before you board your flight at Changi Airport you can still “visit” a range of Malaysian ecosystems that include orchids, cacti, rainforest and butterflies, thanks to its air-conditioned indoor “Nature Trails.” Beyond the airport’s doors, of course, deforestation continues to chew away at the biodiversity of southeast Asia’s actual jungles.

As big countries develop, domestic air travel burgeons. While Brazil is still “a country of few roads,” observes Hugh Pearman, architecture critic for The Sunday Times of London, it has developed “a complex network of internal flights and is building to accommodate them.” Environmentalists may cringe at the thought of rainforest disappearing under taxiways, but Brazil is simply following other countries’ lead.

In 1972, Canada’s federal government expropriated 7,430 hectares of Ontario farmland to create a second major Toronto airport. The purchase turned the hamlet of Altona into a ghost town, removed some of Canada’s best farmland from family ownership, and forced the hasty (and ultimately unnecessary) excavation of a Huron ancestral site. Community resistance stopped the development, and 2,000 hectares in the Rouge River Valley were turned over to the province for parkland. But the rest remained in the federal government’s hands and in 2014, then-finance minister Jim Flaherty announced that it was again available for airport and commercial development.

So the next time you’re catching your breath after the hike from check-in to gate, take a moment to look beyond the UV-filtered glass, past the busy tarmac infield, to the landscape beyond. We’re unlikely to forgo air travel entirely any time soon. But we can work on ways to make its touchdowns and takeoffs less devastating to the environment. We can explore better ways to share airside space with wildlife. And perhaps as travelers, we can recall the impacts that ripple out from the boarding lounge before we book another flight to the far side of the world – or across the province.

You don’t need to hop on a plane to discover yourself. Learn more about the 100-mile Travel Diet at ajmag.ca/TravelDiet.

Visit ajmag.ca/GreenGetaway to learn about other planet-friendly options you can choose to see the world.

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