Plans made on sunny days, reality in the rain

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It was the end-of-school kids’ concert. Our three boys were in the front row, and they waved to us up the bleachers. Each class came up in turn to the front of the makeshift stage to sing their song. By the middle of the show fatigue was setting in. Five hundred kids were fidgeting in their seats. Some of the teachers were yawning; others were daydreaming. The audience worked hard to stay involved, but the applause became more polite as the event went on.

Of course it was raining outside. Even so, I couldn’t wait to get out there. I had a couple of business appointments on hold. And therein lies the dilemma of parenting, I guess. Even though we were bored and our kids were bored, this was one of those scrapbook moments of life—a photo op that, when we look at those pictures years later, we’ll imbue with fond memories.

Looking back, I'd have to say I’ve always been a dreamer. Dreaming up plans has turned out to be what I’ve done for a living. Every new plan starts with a fuzzy vision of what the new idea could be. There are several stages to the process. The first bit is identifying what it is you want to build or achieve. The big question around this is asking yourself (and others) why you want to do it.

That in itself is an interesting question, and too often not addressed by anyone. The citizens of the town of St. Stephen, for example, might ask themselves why they want to give up a very pretty park to put up a three-storey, vinyl-clad, and arguably unattractive commercial residence—when all three of the previous town development managers, including me, have come out against the idea. But perhaps the town really needs the whopping $135,000 from the land sale.

The next part of the planning process follows a predictable but loose process. The next steps are:

1. Information gathering
2. Organizing thoughts
3. Innovating
4. Vetting new ideas
5. Implementing ideas
6. Evaluating results.

Pretty much every creative project involves these basic processes.

The fun stuff happens around organizing thoughts and innovation. Part of organizing thoughts is a professional process. This can often involve engineering studies and social dynamics, such as how a new project is likely to alter the local culture, or its economy.

And then there’s the best bit. Innovation. Here, some lucky dude or dudette (or a small team of them) gets to come up with some wonderful inspiration for the rest of us to enjoy. But at the end of the day the innovators are usually the most frustrated people involved, because it’s impossible to realize any dream in its pure state.

The going begins to get rough around the “vetting new ideas” stage. Consultation is a tricky business. Often people are too conservative to “get” an unusual innovation. And sometimes the idea is good, but nobody likes the person delivering the message, so the good idea gets tossed out, or altered beyond recognition.

Alternatively, the idea may not be so good, but everyone likes the messenger, so a weak concept moves ahead—which is more often the case. An example of this might be the location for the new civic centre in St. Stephen. Good, likeable people are building it downtown. But the downside of this will be periodic traffic congestion, loss of potential small retail space, introducing a giant “big box” piece of architecture into an already compromised downtown context and more. Not to mention the fact that a downtown location also may not be conducive to creating partnerships with other communities and the outlying region.

Vetting new ideas can also be a rigged process. When the two towns in which I grew up were amalgamated into one, there was a public ballot to choose a new name. But the ballot was stacked. Two of the names were virtually the same: “Lakehead” and “The Lakehead.” These were clearly the favourites. But the third choice, “Thunder Bay,” won over the other two, which had cancelled each other out. So some honesty is an essential ingredient.

Where the rubber hits the road is implementation. Getting anything done requires people working together toward a common goal. Being a “comes from away” means outsiders may have a bit of a liability here. Every culture has its peculiarities, and local genealogy plays a much larger role than I would have expected when I arrived here six years ago.

And implementation is the ultimate “rainy day” process. It’s where things go wrong, projects go over budget, people go on strike, etc.

Even old WIlliam Van Horne, the railway builder, ran into these problems. When building the Canadian Sardine Company factory in Chamcook he imported Norwegian and Italian workers, who both raised hell with the locals and went on strike at least twice. The factory construction took longer than expected and went over budget, and never did make a profit after it was built.

So even Van Horne had trouble out here. It’s not an easy place when it rains. But that’s all forgotten when the sun is shining.

Another dog-eat-dog day in paradise

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Late one evening last week after all the people had left Ministers Island, Sharon and I were strolling across the sweeping front lawn to Van Horne’s big house. “What is that?” Sharon said, looking down. She stooped and picked it up. It was a dismembered baby fawn leg. Its hoof was the tiniest I’d ever seen.

We carried it to the car and took it over to the farmer’s cottage. We chatted about it for a few minutes, and figured that it must have been done by the eagles who’d been making a fuss in the trees that afternoon.

Life is a competitive event and sometimes hard. On the drive off the island I thought about the local Haley boy’s tragic ATV accident and a friend’s son stopping to pick up the other boy just minutes after the crash. Most of us know that gut-wrenching, dislocated feeling of shock. But more often life’s shocks come more gradually, unseen. Like aging or disease.

This weekend we met with the farmer again. We sat on the front deck of the cottage looking at the ocean and talked about sustainable farming, raising goats and crops. Our talk went from mechanized farming to using horses. Any kind of farming is no easy way to survive he said. But by hand? The best a strong man and his family with a good team of horses might manage is about 5 acres of crops. He’d seen it. A tall, rangy Czechoslovakian and his wife moved into the farm next door to him and managed to eke out a living somehow. His wife, who was now 60 looks more like 70, he said, is worn right down.

Farming always leads me back to post-fossil fuel thinking, of course. I can’t help dialing up new information on the Internet. A new guy popped up, an ex-cop named Michael Ruppert. He doesn’t think the end of fossil fuel will be gradual at all. In fact, he wrote a book called Confronting Collapse, outlining survival strategies. There’s also documentary film on him, which is only partially flattering, but you can get the full idea from Ruppert himself in the videoclip below. In the end we’re left wondering whether he’s a wingnut or a visionary.



One not so nutty expert is Sir Nicholas Stern, who wrote a landmark report on the economic effects of climate change for the UK government a couple of years ago. He came up in conversation last week in another leisurely chat on another front deck, this time with a retired friend. He pulled out a climate change article from The New York Review of Books and handed it to me. It was Stern reviewing “Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet” by Bill McKibben. Initially Stern thinks McKibben’s views are too pessimistic, but later points out that, “These are not small probabilities of something nasty, these are large possibilities of something catastrophic.” Which sounds pretty dire to me.

Stern goes on to say, “To deny the urgency of strong action in the face of all the evidence is unscientific, irrational and dangerous.”

But changing human behaviour ain’t so easy, as I keep relearning. Clearly, climate change is directly linked to our massive consumption of fossil fuel, which from most reports is now on the decline side of the production curve. So how do we wean ourselves from an 80-million-barrel-a-day habit when the global population is currently skyrocketing to 7 billion? It’s beyond me. Really. When problems get this big, ordinary human beings seem powerless to change. It’s the deer-in-the-headlights syndrome.

And a quick surf across the Internet suggests that there are a lot of doomsday folks out there, waiting for everything to collapse. I, for one, don’t find any appeal in living through a novelist’s post-apocalyptic nightmare like The Road. But maybe it’s not that bad.

On a whim I picked up a copy of Psychology Today. There was a small feature on ‘luck’ that caught my attention. Hey, we could all use some luck, what with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and whatever other bad news is out there.

So here are the five ways to increase your luck:

1. See serendipity everywhere
2. Prime for success through openness and flexibility
3. Slack off, let your mind wander
4. Say “yes.”
5. Embrace failure as a door for new opportunities.

Well, that’s nice. But I doubt it offers comfort to anyone who is truly depressed—psychologist Carl Jung comes to mind. At a low point in his life he decided to build a big stone tower by hand. It was a physical struggle as much as a rejection of the modern world and a return to a simpler of living.

Possibly a few of us might do something like that—if only we could afford the time to do it. But this mouse-wheeling business of making a living and spending at Wal-Mart keeps most us from doing more interesting things.

And maybe rightly so. Without the boilerplate of modern civilization, competing to survive in the wild wouldn’t be much fun at all. Here’s to hoping the world doesn’t get a lot tougher. We could still get lucky…

Looking gift horses (and sheep) in the mouth

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It really freaked me out. I’d climbed up the grassy hill to take photos of the pastoral scene—a lovely, but dung-filled field of cows, horses, goats and sheep grazing. The day was hazy, not great for taking pictures. As I got close to a group of sheep nursing their lambs in a spruce grove, a few of them started walking away. I followed, and before I knew it, I was surrounded by the whole herd.

I should have remembered a book someone lent me—“When Elephants Weep”— about how we humans grossly undervalue our fellow Earthmates. The premise is that animals—especially mammals—share highly evolved traits with us. But I was too preoccupied with the sheep consciousness right in front of me to remember that.

Trying not to panic I started talking sternly to the sheep, easing down the long path to the gate. The more I hurried the more the sheep blatted and crowded into me. In the end I was waving my arms around like a fool and making weird loud sounds just before ducking out the fence gate.

When I worked up the courage to tell the farmer about it, he laughed and said it was a good thing it was the sheep and not the horses. I took that to mean that the horses are a lot tougher.

Earlier in the week I watched a new horse being unloaded at the farm. As soon as it got out into the field it tried to join up with the herd of resident horses. The result was predictable. The new guy started scuffling with the other horses, and before long there were several encounters, until finally the new horse was sent packing, chased off by the others.

I remember going to four new schools before Grade 8. I got a good taste of what being a new arrival feels like. You get tested, get into a fight, usually with the tough kid in the class, and get accepted or rejected for the rest of the year. I did okay. I never lost a fight and always ended up with a few new friends.

My experience of moving here from Ontario six years ago follows a similar trajectory. And I shared some of my feelings about this with my editor last week. From his six-month perspective, this corner of the world can’t be as tough as some of the places he’s been, such as Prince Albert.

I’m not so sure. Since coming here I’ve gone the extra mile—like doing pro-bono development work for the Town of St. Andrews for over a year, and finding a patron to fund it. In return I asked the town for free office space, which in turn took me two months to renovate before being able to use it, as well as several visits to town council to explain what I was doing.

Then I adopted the Ministers Island project and moved it into the new office, triggering another set of meetings with town council, who wanted to know why I was providing them free space. “Well,” I said, “they don’t have any money, and it’s a good project.” The idea of incubating opportunities seemed to elude them.

During that year I also worked to build a knowledge-based economy here, bringing the arts organizations, science centres and tourism attractions into a single focus—to create a St. Andrews College of Arts and Sciences, and a demonstration site for sustainability.

I guess it didn’t work. The St. Andrews Town Council has just given me three weeks to vacate the office that I spent months and thousands of dollars renovating.

Now I could take this two ways. One, that there’s something wrong with me. Or two, that there’s something wrong with them. To figure this out, I turned to my old dead friend and mythologer, Joseph Campbell, who wrote that I should find a hero to inform me. And what I found was Prometheus, the immortal titan.

The name Prometheus means “forethought” and Prometheus was a visionary. He defied the other gods and gave humans woodworking, crafts and tools before Zeus caught him and forgave him. The second time Prometheus wasn’t so lucky. His punishment for stealing fire was to get himself chained to a rock and having Zeus’ pet eagle tear out his liver every day—only to have it re-grow overnight and to have it ripped out again the next day.

Of course the gods represent the elite control group, the status quo. And it’s especially true here on the East Coast—the original vertical society established by the Loyalists. The status quo doesn’t want some upstart handing over power to just anybody. If that happened why would we need the gods?

Which brings us to the biggest god Stephen Harper. Ironically, Steve got it right. Atlantic Canada does have a culture of defeat. But he missed the fact that we lag behind the rest of Canada at the hands of our own petty controlling classes.

Only out here can one hear it said with pride, “We eat our young.” Well to be fair, maybe only their livers.

We still drive but don’t make cars

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A game inside a dream: You’re car-pooling to work and your car gets 30 miles to the gallon. There are four of you in the car. The car runs out of gas and you’re 30 miles away from your destination.

There is no gas station along the way and the highway is deserted. No one has a cell phone. So you decide to push the car the remaining 30 miles. At a half a mile an hour, it will take you 60 hours to get the car to the office—or 240 person hours (60 x 4), not including time off for eating and sleeping. Or, in terms of 8-hour workdays, you’ll have done 30 days of work!

As much as this seems like a quirky surrealist dream, it’s exactly the equivalent amount of human energy we use when we burn through a single gallon of gasoline. There’s so much to modern life that we take for granted.

Just yesterday we took the kids for a drive. We weren’t going anywhere; just out for a drive. Out of curiosity we drove past the fire scene at Blue Moon Motel—which had burned just that morning—and looked at the twisted shell that was once half the motel. It’s now another reminder of the impermanence of life, of how things begin and end.

Later, we went for a bite to eat at a restaurant downtown, which we haven’t done for quite some time. We sat in a nice booth in a bay window looking out at the small garden soaking in the rain, and talked to the kids about things like their school play and the future—including some of my views on the looming post-fossil fuel challenges.

The two younger boys didn’t pay too much attention, but our oldest son takes these things seriously. He talked about how we might recover combustible carbon from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and about how we might use trees for fuel. We even talked about harvesting the geothermal energy in the earth’s core. He felt pretty sure that we’d be able to find some substitutes for fossil fuel by the time he was my age. I wasn’t so sure, and told him so.

In the end he figured that we had two choices: to stay on earth and become farmers, or to leave the planet and find a new one—a new frontier. I asked him which option he preferred, to which he said, “another planet.” That surprised me a little, since he’s a bit of a homebody.

Earlier in the week Sharon had been talking about a realization she’d just had, that human beings continually seek new frontiers, and that this part of the world is anything but the new frontier, having been combed over for resources for at least 300 years. She concluded, sadly, that we’re rapidly running out of both frontier and resources, everywhere.

As we sat and drank our coffee together this morning, she told me that I should lighten up on the talk about fossil fuel. I was scaring the kids she said, and our oldest boy was in tears after our discussion in the restaurant. Of course I didn’t want to make him feel bad, and told her so. But I do want to prepare our kids for whatever kind of future might be coming their way.

And I wonder why these kinds of discussions aren’t anywhere on the public horizon. As far as I know, our kids’ teachers don’t discuss—or teach—any of this resource-related material, even though our recent 150-year history of development and science is based entirely on fossil fuel.

Without directly connecting the dots to fossil fuel, my favourite cultural philosopher, Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism), identifies the disconnect between production and consumption as the main source of modern dissatisfaction. Over the past 100 years, we’ve moved from being a production-based society, in which we make most of its own goods, to a consumer society, in which we buy without producing anything. We drive the cars, but we don’t make them any more. In fact, I remember my mother making most her own clothes when I was a kid. She bought the patterns and the cloth and did the rest herself.

There’s a soullessness to this consumer society that Lasch correctly links to narcissism. We’ve come to believe that we deserve to have all our needs met seamlessly without considering the real implications of our own dependency on the earth. We live in a blissfully “me-centric” reality.

There’s little doubt that this will be a self-correcting situation. We’ll soon run out of easily-attainable hydrocarbons and materials such a lithium and platinum—the essential ingredients of modern technology. And we’ll soon have no choice but to tell our kids and grandkids they’ll have to learn to live with less.

The task, of course, will be relearning our deep dependence on the earth and its slow-working systems. Fossil fuel has allowed us to burn so very brightly for such a very short time—and that frontier is nearing an end. The car is out of gas and the Sunday drive is almost over.

Energy twilight and the new politics

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The headlights pushed hard into the void—the lights seemed too weak to do the job. I squinted my eyes, yes, there it was. The incoming tide, as inky dark as the black abyss, was flooding silently—almost evilly—over the gravel bar. We’d stayed too late to race the tide. For the first time we were stranded on the island.

“That’s Ministers Island,” I thought. I put the car in reverse, being careful not to spin the wheels in the soft gravel, and backed up onto the island. I looked at Sharon. She laughed. It was a good thing we’d set up the gardener’s cottage for the island farmers. There was an extra bed, so we’d at least get some sleep.

We got off the island the next morning at sunrise, and got started on a new week. I had some building supplies to pick up at Kent’s, and while there caught the headline of the day’s Telegraph-Journal: the provincial government had announced talks with Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to create a power tie-line between Churchill Falls in Labrador with New England—through New Brunswick. “What a great idea,” I thought, and one that occurred to me before, when the Shawn Graham government was wrangling with the public over the Hydro Québec deal. I’d even mentioned the idea to our Fisheries minister, Rick Doucet, when they were in the middle of the debate—and before they scrapped the Québec deal. Who knows how these seeds get planted, but it’s great when something good takes root.

Energy, especially alternative energy, will be the defining issue of this century. With the global consumption of oil at 80+ million barrels A DAY and growing, not to mention the consumption of coal for electrical generation, we’ll be needing vast amounts of the alternative variety before too long. Experts such as Matt Simmons and Matt Savinar think that we will fall off the top of “peak oil” curve as quickly as we went up.

According to one graph, we’ll be out of the bulk of our oil by the year 2050—just 40 years from now. If you’re a sucker for punishment or fear, you might want to check it out at http://www.oildecline.com/or http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/. Here’s a snippet from this last one:

“The issue is not one of “running out” so much as it is not having enough to keep our economy running. In this regard, the ramifications of Peak Oil for our civilization are similar to the ramifications of dehydration for the human body. The human body is 70 percent water… A loss of as little as 10-15 pounds of water may be enough to kill him. In a similar sense, an oil-based economy such as ours doesn't need to deplete its entire reserve of oil before it begins to collapse. A shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10 to 15 percent is enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its citizenry to poverty.”

In other words, we’re all going to feel the pain of oil depletion long before 40 years out. The next 10 years will be crucial. And that’s where it comes down to political foresight.

We need our politicians to begin thinking longer than their 4-year terms. The decline of fossil fuel will affect every aspect of our lives, from cheap food to the work that we do to the whole notion of a global consumer society. Without inexpensive fuel to power our transportation system, the global economy as we know it will grind to a halt. And then what?

There are two bets. The first is we will find enough alternative energy over the next 15 years to migrate our global economy from a fossil-fuel driven system to another system. The second bet is getting ready for the possibility that we won’t make the switch in time. That would mean relocalizing, retooling and reskilling our regional economies.

Well, the energy tide is going out, and from our behaviour, our heads are firmly planted in the sand. And our politicians are mostly concerned with getting elected. I met with one candidate last week, a good guy. He asked me what I thought about LNG projects across the bay in Maine. I told him, as I’ve written here before, that LNG is on the table simply because there have been so few economic opportunities in northern Maine, and people are desperate for decent jobs. Across the bay they see us as affluent, hypocritical NIMBYs who don’t want LNG in our backyards, but don’t mind having LNG in Saint John.

“So you’re a Maine LNG supporter?” he asked. I said, no, running tankers through our local waters is a bad idea, and there are better places and better ways to offload LNG, offshore, for example. That said, in the years to come, I think we’re going to want as much LNG as we can get—at least if we want to keep this lifestyle going.

And as politically popular as maintaining our current lifestyle may be, that may not be possible. There simply won’t be enough cheap energy to go around. We’re rapidly approaching the dark abyss.