My ugly city, and Christie Blatchford’s contribution to it

I was still reeling from the way the media handled the recent TTC strike when I was subjected to a truly inane article by Christie Blatchford in the Globe and Mail. Comparing the Toronto 18, who I’ve written about before, to the gangsters in the Wire (which I haven’t written about though I did spend 60 hours over the past month or so watching it like the addiction that it is, and I suppose mentioned it during a talk I gave last month), Blatchford showed a spectacular ability to miss the point on both sides of the comparison.

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My ugly city

I live in Toronto. I live right in the city, and have no car. I get around using public transit – the TTC. Over the weekend, TTC employees went on strike, against a deal that wasn’t all that transparently presented in the media but the contentious part of which involved the increasing use of short-term contracts by the employer (that’s my understanding anyway). The strike took effect midnight on Friday/Saturday. On Sunday, the provincial legislature met and all three parties – the Conservatives (who trashed and looted the province from 1995-2003), the ruling Liberals, and the New Democrats (whose electoral base is pretty much the public sector unions) pushed through back-to-work legislation in about a half an hour.

I suffered some inconvenience from the strike but it was that – inconvenience. You can imagine that my instinctive sympathies are with labor in labor-management disputes. This is no exception. But what is bothering me about this is the way the whole thing is presented in the media – the sense of entitlement for users (consumers) and the utter lack of rights or any legitimate case by the TTC employees (workers) is assumed. The media is full of hard-luck stories of commuters. Take this Toronto Star story:

“I’m very upset with them,” Tameika Fowler, 24, said of TTC workers as she rode an eastbound train on the Bloor subway line this morning.“They don’t think of other people. It was a selfish thing for them to do.”

On Sunday, Fowler took a $43 cab ride from Scarborough to Bathurst and Bloor Sts., where she works as a cashier at a Tim Hortons restaurant for $9 an hour. She worked a double shift from yesterday afternoon through this morning because she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get home at midnight after her shift.

“My eyes feel so heavy, I had to drink a lot of coffee just to stay up,” said Fowler, who thinks TTC drivers should be declared an essential service. “I think these people should be grateful for what they have.”

A single mother with an autistic four-year-old, she said she was tuned into the radio all weekend for updates on the strike.

“It was so stressful,” she said, explaining how she had to arrange for her cousin to care for her son overnight.

With all respect for Ms. Fowler’s difficulties, and acknowledging the fact that it was the TTC strike that put her out of pocket for $43, the fact that a single mother with an autistic 4-year old has to make do with $9/hr and very little social support is not due to the TTC or the union. It does, however, have something to do with the Conservative destruction of public welfare in the province since 1995 and the Liberals’ continuation of it since 2003. It’s understandable that Ms. Fowler might get angry at the workers, but that kind of anger – the anger of a single mother towards unionized workers – was the kind of anger that the Conservatives relied on to rule. Seeing it exploited by the Toronto Star just now gave me a reminder of the politics of those days. It wasn’t just the economic policies, the privatizations, the cuts to social services, and the attacks on workers (and, it is very much worth adding, single mothers and people on welfare). It was the ugliness of the whole public (and private) conversation that was encouraged by these very filthy politicians. The head of Ontario’s Conservative party, John Tory, lived up to the repulsive traditions of his party by talking about horsewhipping union leaders. Such talk ought to be beneath decent people, but it is standard fare for Tory and his party.

The first few years after 1995 were full of this kind of poison, and this weekend offered a little taste of those years, for me. The anger of riders at losing a service could be balanced with a discussion of the implications for workers, and what it might mean that any strike action in any important sector can be met by back-to-work legislation of such incredible legislative efficiency and the full support of all parties (and, evidently, the public and the media).

They also never seem to go out to talk to single moms when TTC fares go up, as they have gone up several times over the past couple of years. I suspect that fare hikes put Ms. Fowler out of pocket by much more than $43 over the past year. But the anger of riders can only be told in the media when it’s directed at unionized workers, not at the legislative priorities that decide that user fees of $2.75 (and rising) are acceptable levels for minimum-wage workers, students, and single moms to pay to get to work.

It’s a bit sad that my province and my city don’t seem to be able to have that kind of conversation.

Some more audio

Some more audio tracks for those of you who listen to streaming audio.

I was on Chris Cook’s fine CFUV radio show, again, to talk about the KI first nation and Platinex and Ontario mining. The audio is here.

The other weekend I was in Texas doing some talks on climate change and environmental issues.

The talk I gave on Climate Change was posted to the New Texas Radical and reposted to ZNet. You can listen here.

The second talk from Texas will probably be posted some time soon as well. UPDATE (April 27/08): Yes, St. Andrew’s Church posted the audio from my talk on sustainability. Podcast here, with a five minute second part here.

Water’s not a human right, thanks to Canada

Just read that Canada maneuvered to ensure water wouldn’t be a basic human right at the UN. My first thought was: couldn’t Canada have just allowed it to become a human right, and then ignored it, as with all other rights? And then I realized that it is another element of abandoning hypocrisy, which the Harper regime seems particularly keen on: presenting the ugliest of Canada to ourselves and the world, as if to revel in it.

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Some environmental books

I gave a couple of environmental talks in Texas over the weekend, which have since been published on the web. One on sustainability in general. The other on climate change, science and politics.

To prepare for them and before and since, I read a bunch of environmental books, that I’ll discuss below.

Derrick Jensen, ‘Endgame’. Recommend this very highly. I came away with great respect for Jensen. It was just refreshing. I don’t agree with everything – I suppose I hope that he’s wrong about civilization being inherently unsustainable more than knowing that he is – but I agree with most, and I just found him to be honest, ethical, and serious throughout.

Chris Turner, ‘Geography of Hope’. Interesting reporting on alternative technologies in different parts of the world. Chris is a little breathless, I think too enthusiastic (though he acknowledges that his enthusiasm is strategic, because what’s needed is some breathless enthusiasm) and his framework is ‘Natural Capitalism’ by Hawken and Lovins (which I’ll also mention below), a framework I disagree with for various reasons. He also does an unfair and unhelpful swipe at Cuba, suggesting that their organic urban agriculture miracle occurred because it’s a dictatorship (as opposed to because their social process enabled them to accomplish things that capitalist societies cannot). But I like his style and I can recommend the book.

Paul Hawken and Amory & Hunter Lovins, ‘Natural Capitalism’. The idea here is that thinking only of financial and manufacturing capital and not of social and natural capital is a mistake. ‘Natural capitalism’ would value natural capital as capital and treat it that way, not as income to be spent. Interesting technology again. But my several problems are as follows. First, if the entire infrastructure created for the automobile is unsustainable, and I think it is, then even vastly more efficient cars are still an error, compared to more collective solutions such as rail and changes to urban form. Second, trying to put monetary value on what are called ‘ecosystem services’ invites tradeoffs for things that cannot be traded off. Jensen actually makes this point well – bringing something into the money economy almost certainly guarantees its doom. The authors of ‘Natural Capitalism’ don’t do too much such valuation, but the framework invites such exercises. Third, the pun of ‘natural capitalism’ implies there’s something natural about capitalism, and capitalism usually implies not just markets, but private ownership of the means of production and hierarchical class society. I can’t accept such things as natural.

David Suzuki and Holly Dressel, ‘Good News for a Change’. Good green technology stuff again.

James Howard Kunstler, ‘The Long Emergency’. Interesting work about how America’s suburban and industrial infrastructure depends on oil, how oil will run out before too long, and all the problems that will result. Kunstler says repeatedly that he isn’t prescribing, but predicting the future. But I disagree with this attitude towards the future. The one thing about the future that we like is that it is at least partly up for decision. Kunstler would probably answer that it is part of delusional fantasies to think we can decide on the future, which is true of some parts of the future but not of others. Kunstler also combines what I think is interesting technological and economic analysis with very conventional and I think off-base geopolitical and domestic political analysis. He doesn’t understand the motivations or the politics or the history of the people the US is fighting and killing in massive numbers in West Asia, nor very important elements of immigration in the US, nor very important racial and economic problems in the US. His analysis of these matters seems to rely on stereotypes, and I’d hoped for better from a contrarian. It’s almost enough to make me not want to recommend the book – but several parts of several chapters (especially chapters 1, 2, and 7) should be read regardless of the weaknesses of the other chapters. I’m prepared to elaborate on this, because separating where he’s right from where he’s wrong is, I think, important and worthwhile.

McDonough and Braungart, ‘Cradle to Cradle’. I really enjoyed this. The idea is that we redesign our industrial system to have no waste. Everything is designed to be re-used or re-incorporated into other products, indefinitely. If they are right and what they say can be done, then perhaps civilization isn’t inherently unsustainable. They are pretty agnostic about what kind of social system would accompany this technological revolution (they don’t seem to endorse capitalism, natural or otherwise, for example) but I really like their technology and their approach to it. Several of the others I’ve read (Jensen and Kunstler, for example) would probably say that ‘Cradle to Cradle’ can’t work.

I think there are others but I can’t remember them. There are also several more on my list that I’ll be reading too.