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February 28th, 2010
February 28, 2010
“Students at other universities think we’re weird,” said the young woman with the long black hair and the ready smile. “They say, ‘Why don’t you just cut that class?’ And when I say, ‘I don’t want to cut it, I want to go to it,’ they look at me like I came from another planet.”
“That’s right,” nodded another girl. “When they find out that we have four-hour classes, they say, ‘Wow, four hours, how can you stand it? That would drive me crazy!’ And they don’t believe it when we say the time really flies by.”
I’m in a studio at NSCAD University, formerly the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I have a graphic design problem, and Denise Saulnier’s 11 design students are imagining possible solutions. I am so happy to be back at NSCAD that I can hardly describe it.
Twenty years ago I had the good fortune to be NSCAD’s first and only writer in residence. And perhaps what I remember most vividly from that experience is the energy, flair and dedication of the students and faculty, their passion for their work.
The students wanted to be great artists or superb designers. They wanted it desperately, and they worked at it obsessively. The faculty were mature, well-established practitioners, and they were equally obsessive. They were inspiring examples, working long hours, pushing the limits of their disciplines, gaining commissions and showing their work in exotic places like Germany, China and Ottawa. Day and night, the place just hummed. It was the most fierce and fertile learning environment I’ve ever seen.
The rewards of a life in the arts can be pretty meagre — but one of its great benefits is that artists wake up in the morning eager to get started, constantly learning and exploring and innovating. Every day is an adventure. They aren’t necessarily happy, but they know what they’re supposed to be doing with their lives.
“I love writing — it’s both a real agony and a terrific pleasure,” said the great novelist Margaret Laurence. “When I say ‘work,” I only mean writing. Work should be something that you love doing, and that you put everything that you have and more into it, and only that kind of work is really worthy of the name. So when I say ‘work,’ I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”
Work should be something that you love doing. That’s what the NSCAD students already know. But for too many people in our poor sad culture, “work” is what you have to do, and “play” is what you love to do. That’s what their friends, alas, already know.
If education should be about learning how to do what you love, most of what goes on in our educational system is, to put it kindly, beside the point. Indeed, mass education is really designed to train dutiful workers for traditional industries. Like steelworkers or meat-packers, the children troop off to the factory when the whistle blows, toting their lunch-pails, and dutifully returning when their shift is over.
Non-industrial societies rarely have institutions that look like schools — but their kids get educated anyway. In clan societies, in aboriginal communities, in rural Nova Scotia a century ago, kids learned what they needed to know mostly by hanging out with working adults. Girls learned domestic skills by helping their mothers and grandmothers. Boys learned to be hunters or blacksmiths or navigators by tagging along with men who did that kind of work.
This is not ancient history. When I was 18, I could have become a lawyer without going to university, simply by “articling” in a law office and taking the appropriate examinations. In effect, I would have apprenticed as a lawyer.
This is actually the way that most people learn most efficiently — by acquiring the skills in the course of doing the work, reflecting on the process, trying again, submitting to criticism, internalizing the standards, and practicing, practicing, practicing. That’s what goes on at NSCAD, and it’s exactly what we need in order to thrive in a fast-moving, inventive, knowledge-based economy. NSCAD exemplifies a pedagogy deeply rooted in our past. It’s also the pedagogy of the future.
– 30 —
Tags: apprenticeship, artist, education, NSCAD University
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February 23rd, 2010
February 21, 2010
Where does the vitriol come from?
Last week, I wrote about the implosion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and about what I called “the touching faith of some climate-change critics that if they can just convince enough people that the whole thing is a hoax, then that will be reality, and we can get back to business as usual.” Alas, I said, ‘t ain’t so. Natural processes are impervious to human opinions.
Some readers went ballistic.
An Annapolis Valley reader declared that he had previously “’sensed’ MAYBE you were one of only a few North American journalists to have the gonads to speak a little truth, among the foolishness that permeates our mainstream media…Alas, the editors at the Herald must have finally trumped you, and actually got you to state that there REALLY COULD BE truth behnd the concept of human caused climate change. Wow, what a sad sellout this was. Truely disturbing to the core… you are throwing support behind an idea created and perpetuated by international criminals… It is a sad day when Silver Don sells out.”
Gosh. Actually, I’m eager to sell out, but I’ve never found a buyer. If you know people that I might sell out to, please ask them to call. I prefer cash, but annuities, bonds, real estate, luxury yachts and fine automobiles will all be considered.
From another reader who similarly accused me — along with Gwynne Dyer — of selling out, I asked for an explanation of why Dyer or I would consciously promote untruth. Even if we were hopelessly corrupt, what were we getting out of it? A fat stipend from a windmill manufacturer? Secret cheques from Al Gore?
A third reader revealed that “a small group of politicians and scientists have forced a ‘false reality’ on the world and have thwarted (falsified, denigrated) the hard work of many responsible scientists (i.e. ‘the skeptics’) from even bringing these facts to light…. You are now on the same side as the false reality makers. Is that where you want to be?”
Ah. Once more, evil people are manipulating public affairs in pursuit of their own ends. But why? And what are those ends?
Look, I replied, despite the rot at the IPCC, many eminent and honest scientists do believe that climate change is real, that humans are responsible for much of it, and that its impact may be catastrophic. If they are right, and we don’t take action, many people will die. If they’re wrong, and we do take action, we’ll spend a lot of money on things that will still be useful, like restoring forests, reducing our fossil fuel consumption, and cleaning up our air quality which is already killing people. Is that bad?
Expensive? We spill torrents of money on failed banks and automakers, and on wars. Why cavil at spending on changes that would unquestionably be beneficial, whatever the truth about climate change?
My favourite reader response was this:
“Your a liar and full of sh*t, if you were with-in reach right now I’d slap you. Many names on the IPCC reports are there fraudulently, they don’t agree, many more have no more knowledge of Climate than my Cat and are not climatologists. It’s not just a few scientists either, it’s every single one that has any ties to this scam, they are all fraudsters. Sorry you fell for the scam., but buddy I’ve followed this since before Mo strong first came up with the scam to create the IPCC and gave the UN nod to WWF and others to spread the lie.
“Your an idiot or a fool, period. CO2 does not effect temps, temps effect CO2. IMO you should all be jailed and have your assets seized and sold off by the Governments to repay the citizens who have already been scammed out of billions.”
Wonderful. Imitating Stephen Leacock, I wrote:
Dear Sir:
I thought it would be a kindness to let you know that a lunatic is writing abusive messages on your computer, and is sending them out to people over your signature. You may want to take action to put a stop to this.
Best regards,
SDC
– 30 —
Tags: climate change, Gwynne Dyer, IPCC, James Lovelock, Stephen Leacock
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February 23rd, 2010
February 14, 2010
“It sounds silly when you say it out loud,” said Ram Myers, “but they seemed to have a notion that you could sit in Ottawa and make up reality. If you could enforce a scientific consensus, that would be reality.”
That’s Dr. Ransom A. Myers, Dalhousie University’s late, great, and sorely-missed marine biologist, talking about the federal bureaucrats who “gruesomely mangled and corrupted” the research of their own scientists, to quote an internal DFO report, and thus allowed three imperilled groundfish stocks to be fished almost to extinction.
Ram Myers’ comment has echoed in my mind since the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change began imploding in the blizzard of compromising emails that escaped from the University of East Anglia in December. That episode was followed by the disclosure that several findings in the IPCC’s report of 2007 were based on faulty evidence.
These were not trivial findings. One was the widely-reported prediction that, based on current trends, the glaciers of the Himalayas would melt away by 2035. Since Asia’s nine largest rivers arise in those glaciers, the result would have been a nightmare sequence of catastrophic flooding and lethal droughts for the one billion people who live downstream.
But the prediction was based on anecdotes, not on peer-reviewed science — and it was “so wrong that it’s not worth discussing,” says Georg Kaser, a leading Austrian glaciologist who flagged the error before the report was issued, and was dumbfounded to find it in the text. Maybe part of the reason is that the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, also heads a New Delhi research group that has scooped up millions of dollars in grants to study the melting of the Himalayan glaciers.
The IPCC’s scientists now stand accused of shabby science, selective reporting, naked self-interest and the intimidation of skeptics. And of course the climate change skeptics are all over the issue: See? These guys are liars and cheaters and thieves — and therefore, climate change is all humbug.
Not so fast, bub. To begin with, the IPCC report was written by 620 scientists from 40 countries, and only a few have been impugned. Georg Kaser himself was a lead author of the section of the report dealing with the physical science of climate change. Despite the furor, Kaser says the report’s central contention that climate change is an established reality and a major threat is absolutely sound.
What reminds me of Ram Myers is the touching faith of some climate-change critics that if they can just convince enough people that the whole thing is a hoax, then that will be reality, and we can get back to business as usual. I’d love to believe it, but it’s nonsense. Somewhere out there, beyond all the noise and clamour, the real world is evolving according to its own nature, no matter what we may hope, wish or believe.
I listen to Gwynne Dyer, who travels the world investigating the military implications of climate change. “When you talk to the people at the sharp end of the climate business, scientists and policy-makers alike,” Dyer writes, “there is an air of suppressed panic in many of the conversations. We are not going to get through this without taking a lot of casualties.”
I listen to Jim Lovelock, a towering figure in earth science, who concedes the possibility that the skeptics are right and that global warming is an illusion — but whose observations suggest that global heating is happening much faster than expected. For example, he says, the great global heat sink is the sea. When the sea gets warm, it expands, and sea level rises. Well, sea level is rising faster than predicted, so the sea is absorbing a lot of heat. That’s an observation, not an opinion.
How do we deal with all these uncertainties? In 2007, a young Oregon science teacher named Greg Craven reviewed the options in a little YouTube presentation called “The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See.” His conclusion? Acting to counter the risks of climate change will certainly cost a lot of money, perhaps needlessly. But failing to act could very well cost a lot of lives. How hard a decision is that?
– 30 —
Tags: Add new tag, climate change, Dalhousie University, Georg Kaser, Greg Craven, Gwynne Dyer, Interngovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, James Lovelock, Ram Myers, Ransom Myers
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February 23rd, 2010
February 7, 2010
On a windless night, where will the power come from?
Essentially, the earth’s energy comes from sunlight. For the past century, we’ve used mainly fossil fuels — coal, oil, gas — which are, in effect, frozen sunlight, sunlight that was initially captured by plants and animals and compressed into hydrocarbons over aeons of time. But we’ve used most of the readily-accessible fossil fuel deposits, and we’re wrecking the atmosphere by burning them.
All right: instead of using ancient sunlight, let’s harness today’s sunlight, which comes both directly and also in the form of moving air and water — wind, tide and wave. Capture it with windmills, photovoltaic panels, tidal turbines. Non-polluting, powerful and free. Great.
Well, yes, this is the future. But what happens when the air is still, the tide is slack, the sun is hidden — and everyone is still using their lights and appliances? There are only two solutions: find a way to store energy and release it when needed, or retain some form of back-up power generation.
We don’t yet have a way of storing power on a large scale. We have lots of ideas — fuel cells, molten salts and so forth — but they’re not here yet. In Cape Breton, Luciano Lisi proposes to use wind power to pump water up into a dammed valley, and then generate electricity as it flows back down. That’s “pumped storage,” and it works fine in Wales. But the Mi’kmaq are not happy about flooding the valley, and the scale is still pretty small.
The result of the storage conundrum is that in Europe, where wind and solar power are much farther along than here, the old generating stations are still operating. Renewables are wonderful — but without storage they only supplement fossil fuels.
That’s why the renowed scientist James Lovelock strongly supports nuclear energy. Its potential for damage, he argues, is hugely over-rated — and fossil fuel effluents in the atmosphere are far more lethal than any risk from nuclear power. If he could replace all the coal and oil generating plants with nuclear ones, he’d do it instantly.
The thought makes me gag — but in fairness, my opposition to nuclear power is 30 years old, and the industry’s safety record over the intervening decades has been much better than I expected. And, as Lovelock says, if renewables can’t provide a huge and constant supply of energy — and do it right now — and if you’re going to sustain an energy-intensive civilization like ours, what choices do you have?
I would never bet against Jim Lovelock — but I would argue that the first things to do are the obvious things. The energy choice that has no downside, and that can be implemented immediately, is simply to use much less energy. We haven’t begun to get serious about that.
Consider electricity. It ’s possible to power your life entirely with renewables — but not in an energy-hogging house. Cruising sailboats manage very well with wind generators, solar panels and husky batteries, and some people contrive to live that way ashore. In New Mexico, architect Michael Reynolds builds “Earthships,” innovative homes that need almost no power.
The key is reducing demand. But we have no incentive to conserve, because electricity pricing is upside down. The first kilowatts you buy are the most expensive, and the unit price drops as your usage increases. That’s nutty. The first kilowatts should be cheap, to ensure that everyone can afford the electrical basics, but energy gluttons should pay more and more. Penalize wastefulness, not thrift.
A similar policy would hike taxes on gasoline while investing heavily in cheap and efficient public transit. We could boost the price of heating oil, and subsidize the cost of such alternatives as passive solar and geothermal systems — and insulation, as we do right now.
If we want a habitable planet, and we don’t want to be forced into nuclear power, our first priority should be to get our demand back down. We can still live very well. We weren’t exactly living in caves in the 1950s, but our energy use then was just one-third of what it is now. Our real problem isn’t power generation. Our problem is vision and will.
– 30–
Tags: Earthship, energy, energy conservation, energy pricing, Michael Reynolds, nuclear power, renewable energy
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February 23rd, 2010
January 31, 2010
by Silver Donald Cameron
“Annie,” said Marjorie, “do you think hollyhocks would do well over there by the fence?”
Annie Hill laughed aloud.
“Marjorie,”she said, “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t had a home ashore since I was 19 years old.”
It’s true. At 20, Annie and her first husband, Pete Hill, sailed from England to the Caribbean and back on a 28-foot engineless catamaran. Back in England, they built Badger, a 34-foot junk-rigged schooner.In Badger they roamed the world — Brazil, Scandinavia, Greenland, Scotland, Africa, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Falklands, the Antarctic.
Living at sea, Annie Hill developed a philosophy.What do you really want from life? Decide that, and go for it and don’t be deflected by the economic and social noise around you. Annie is the consummate anti-consumer, a subversive philosopher, a living example of the rich and free lifestyle that’s available to anyone who understands the value of focus and discipline.
Radical simplicity is at the heart of Annie’s justly-famous book, Voyaging on a Small Income (1993). You can cruise full-time — or write, or pray, or paint, or back-pack — by saving and investing relentlessly. You can accumulate a pool of capital just large enough to yield a tiny investment income. Living carefully on their boat, with no house, car or utilities, the Hills slipped along for years on 15 pounds sterling weekly, well under $50 Canadian. As they continued to earn and invest, their income slowly grew. They achieved, in every sense, an almost fully-sustainable life.
Their philosophy was shared by an angular, bearded man from Western Australia who had built a 35-foot steel cutter named Iron Bark II in Queensland. Trevor Robertson is a geologist whose expertise is highly prized by oil companies operating offshore rigs. Living aboard, he worked a few weeks annually in places like the North Sea and Siberia, and spent the rest of the year voyaging to destinations like Antarctica, where he once spent an entire winter alone in his boat, frozen into the ice.
When he met Annie and Pete, he recognized in Annie the salt-water woman he had dreamed about. When the Hills separated, they were in South Africa, and Trevor was in Trinidad. He instantly flew to South Africa to pay vigorous suit to Annie.
She was not ready to marry, but she was willing to sail. She flew back with him, and in 2002 they sailed Iron Bark from the Caribbean north to Labrador. We met them that fall, just before they moved Iron Bark to Baddeck for the winter. Annie lived aboard, Trevor laboured abroad, and the following spring they were married at the Cape Breton Boatyard in Baddeck.
By now Annie had sailed across the Atlantic 16 times. Since she had things to attend to back in England, the two sailed again to England, then south to the Canary Islands, and back across to Trinidad for the winter. In the spring they returned to Cape Breton, stowed some gear in our shed, loaded the boat with provisions and sailed to Greenland, where they spent the winter aboard, frozen into the Arctic ice, their only company a curious Arctic fox.
Their many Nova Scotian friends saw them again for a few months after the Greenland adventure, and then they made sail for Trinidad, Panama, Tasmania, Australia and New Zealand. And there they may well remain. Annie wants to stop for a while, to see the same friends regularly, to end the constant process of saying good-bye which is the saddest part of cruising. Trevor, the only person in history to have over-wintered in the same boat in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, is still restless, and recently sailed alone to Patagonia. This time, Annie will fly out to join him. You can follow their adventures on her blog: http://anniehill.blogspot.com/
Trevor has now covered more than 140,000 miles under sail, and Annie more than 165,000 — and in March, in New York, they will receive the highest accolade in the sailing world, the Blue Water Medal of the Cruising Club of America. This is the Nobel Prize of sailing, awarded only to the greatest of small boat voyagers. The faint sound of applause carried on the north wind is coming from Nova Scotia, where Annie and Trevor will always be part of the family.
– 30 —
Tags: Annie Hill, Badger, Blue Water Medal, Cruising Club of America, Iron Bark, sailing, Trevor Robertson
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January 27th, 2010
January 24, 2010
“It’s important for Gaia that human beings survive,” says James Lovelock. “Our intelligence, if it can be integrated as part of the whole planetary system, would make ours the first intelligent planet in the galaxy, perhaps. What a wonderful future for humans!”
A great scientist needs great courage and a great imagination and Jim Lovelock has both, in spades. It is now 40 years since he rattled the scientific world and electrified the rest of us by publishing Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), which argued that the earth behaves like a single living organism that creates and maintains a viable environment for life.
The Gaia hypothesis — named for the Greek earth goddess– implied that the world was far more complex than modern reductionist science had imagined. It offered a coherent vision of the whole living world that echoed all our wisdom traditions, and renewed the human sense of wonder.
Mainstream scientists were horrified. Many still are. But Lovelock’s bold insights, and his continuing exploration of their implications, became the foundations of “earth system science,” the study of systems like the circulation of the oceans, the maintenance of the atmosphere and the relationships among the earth’s many systems. Noted author Gwynne Dyer considers Lovelock “the most important figure in both the life sciences and the climate sciences for the past half-century,” and compares his achievements to Darwin’s.
Slight, cheerful and white-haired, Lovelock is now 90 years old, though he looks decades younger. He published a new book last year, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. He and his American-born wife Sandy spend their summers in Devon, England, and their winters in her home town of St. Louis, Missouri, where I came calling one brilliant January morning.
Lovelock resembles a geologist in his easy navigation of the vastness of deep time, but he recalls the Enlightenment sages in his assumption that science is a single enterprise, artificially split into disciplines. He has been self-employed as a freelance scientist and instrument-maker for 50 years, largely because of “silly people who would say to me, ‘you can’t do biology, you’re a chemist.’ As if I didn’t have a brain.”
Freedom from institutional politics allowed him to indulge his preference for observation over computer modelling, and permitted him to follow the evidence fearlessly wherever it led. In 2007 he was “shocked” to learn that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had “reached a consensus on a matter of science.” Science is about nature. Consensus is about politics.
So where has the evidence led him lately?
Sea level, Arctic ice cover and ocean algae populations, he says, are the best indicators of global warming and they all reveal that the earth is heating up much faster than the IPCC’s projections. Furthermore, the evidence from the earth’s last hot period, 55 million year ago, shows that global temperatures don’t necessarily change slowly and evenly; they can flip fairly quickly to hotter or colder states. On that early occasion, most of the earth became a scorching desert. Life retreated to the shores of an Arctic Ocean with surface temperature of 21C, where crocodiles lived and bred.
Lovelock thinks that’s the kind of world we’re creating — and because of our essentially tribal politics, our efforts to avoid it will likely fail. Since a less habitable earth won’t sustain a global population of seven billion, populations will crash. Human beings should plan a “sustainable retreat” to the Arctic region. Canadians should prepare for hordes of people trying to relocate to northern Canada.
Is this inevitable? No, says Lovelock. Gaia is far more complex than we understand, and we do not even know the depth of our ignorance. A scientist can only say that this nightmare scenario is probable. But we should prepare for it now, while the world is still a reasonably civilized place. The real horror would be if our species survived, but its finest achievements were lost — science, art, culture. Lovelock believes we could be the evolutionary ancestors of an intelligent post-tribal species that will serve an aging Gaia as her consciousness.
This is a colossal vision of tragedy and redemption. Lovelock smiles.
“Gaia needs us,” he says. “What a wonderful future for humans!”
– 30 —
Tags: climate change, Gaia, global warming, Gwynne Dyer, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, James Lovelock
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January 19th, 2010
January 17, 2010
Taktshang Goemba - also known as The Tiger’s Nest - is a magnificent monastery plastered on the face of a sheer cliff 900 meters above the Paro Valley, and moored to the mountain by the hairs of angels. There are only three ways to reach it. The best is to ride on the back of a flying tiger, which was the method used by the great saint Guru Rinpoche in the 8th century. He flew into a sacred cave on the cliff face, subdued the local demon, and meditated there for three months before continuing his mission to establish Buddhism in Bhutan.
If you can’t find a flying tiger, you can ride up to the Tiger’s Nest on a tough little mountain horse. (You can’t ride down, though; the path is too steep.) Alternatively, you can walk, which is the way I got there last month. The hike takes three or four hours.
It is a steep and brutal climb in the thin Himalayan air, not easy for sedentary folk of ripening years. I was grateful for Tashi, the nimble young guide who took my little backpack. We got a break at a wooden tea-house halfway up, lunching on Bhutanese specialties like ema datse, hot chillies with cheese. Nearby is a rock with the footprints of Guru Rinpoche burned into its surface.
Then the climb continued. In the end, I didn’t get into the monastery. I reached a viewpoint at the same height - but between the viewpoint and the Tiger’s Nest is a deep gorge, negotiated via a 700-step staircase cut into the rock face. My knees were weak and I was slightly giddy from the altitude. The steps are uneven, there is no hand-rail, and a misstep would mean immediate reincarnation. Nope.
The landscape of Bhutan is peppered with sacred places. Above the Tiger’s Nest are several shrines or “chortens,” as well as temples and meditation huts. The many temples on the valley floor include Kyichu Lhakhang, one of 108 temples built in a single day in 659 by a Tibetan king aiming to pin down an ogress and liberate the Himalayas for the advance of Buddhism.
There are chortens along the trails, chortens in the fields, chortens on the banks of streams, where water-wheels turn prayer-wheels that ring bells and send off prayers as they spin. Thickets of vertical white prayer flags stand high on the mountains, and brilliantly-coloured strings of square flags flutter on buildings, fences and bridges. The land virtually pulses with visual testimony to Buddhist reverence.
Underlying Bhutan’s Buddhism is a much older animist religion known as “Bon,” which populates the landscape with innumerable demons, sprites, local deities, gods and goddesses of lakes and rivers, lords of the earth and air. The most famous of the many lucky charms to ward off evil from these omnipresent spirits is the image of an erect penis.
Even this is evidence of devotion, which you see constantly in Bhutan. But you do not see mines, quarries, clear-cuts, industrial smog, huge landfill sites, plastic bags (which are illegal), chemically-nurtured golf courses, mills and factories blowing smog into the air and waste into the rivers. The Bhutanese use only what they need. Houses and farms are built of rammed earth, straw, slate and wood, and they occupy minimalist clearings in the woods. They enhance an already beautiful landscape.
All of which raises a huge question
.
Bhutan’s sacramental attitude towards the natural world - that the world is literally alive and sentient - is the normal human view. It’s shared by my Celtic ancestors, by virtually all ancient civilizations, by aboriginal peoples worldwide. Industrial society, by contrast, views the natural world as inert, dead, a mere source of materials and a blank slate for industrial manipulation. It exists for us to pillage. That arrogance has led us to a crisis unparallelled in the history of our species.
The Bhutanese evidently don’t think they’re lords of creation. Their land is sacred, and because they treat it with reverence, it sustains and enriches them. Superstition? Or wisdom, clothed in poetry? Bhutan takes us back to the future, reminding us that our species cannot persist on the earth without understanding, in our bones, the genuine sacredness of the world that is our only home.
– 30 –
You can see photos of the Tiger’s Nest (and other Bhutan pix) here: http://picasaweb.google.com/silverdonald/Paro#
Tags: animism, Bhutan, Buddhism, environment, Guru Rinpoche, Tiger's Nest
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January 11th, 2010
January 10, 2010
“I wish,” said my friend Perry, “that someone would tell the public the truth about airline security.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“That it’s largely theatre,” said Perry, who spent a large chunk of his working life doing airline and airport security. “That the objective is to make people feel that their safety is assured, even though it’s not. There’s no way to make air travel really safe not at any tolerable cost in money and inconvenience.”
“So they’re lying to us?” I said, remembering the security procedures I experienced in four countries last month.
“Not exactly, but they don’t admit that you can’t ratchet up security beyond a certain point,” he answered. “We could insist that you get to the airport six hours early, and that everyone going aboard, and every bag, be subjected to an intensive search, including body cavities. We could do that again at every station stop, or at every change of planes. We could assign squads of air marshals to every flight. We could forbid people from leaving their seats during the flight, for fear that they might get up to mischief in the washrooms. Hell, we could remove the washrooms.
“Do you think that even the airlines are eager for that level of security? If we had it, would anyone fly if they could possibly avoid it?”
True. Already the security process has made flying unpalatable.
“You bet,” said Perry. “In that sense, the terrorists have already won. They’ve thrown sand in the gears of commerce. But the system is still quite porous, and everyone in the security business knows it. Every country challenges its security system by trying to get people through it with weapons and explosives and so forth, and every country fails. The Americans used to publish their failure rate, which was about 33%. So they don’t publish those numbers any more.”
Does that mean that of every three fake terrorists who attempt to get through security, one succeeds?
“Yep,” said Perry. “People also believe that the security folks are probably catching all kinds of would-be terrorists, but they aren’t telling us about the interceptions. Not true. They hardly ever catch anyone.
“Take this latest guy, who mainly managed to cook his own crotch on the flight to Detroit. The Americans are going on about ‘our’ failure, the failure of ‘our’ security systems, the terrorism attempt in ‘our own’ airspace. It wasn’t in their airspace it was almost all in Canada’s airspace. If the guy had succeeded, there would have been a rain of airliner parts over Labrador, not Michigan.
“And the failure wasn’t the Americans’, either. The guy boarded the plane in Lagos, Nigeria. Then he flew to Amsterdam and changed planes but he didn’t have to go through security again, which is normal when you change planes in any major airport. You don’t leave the secure area. You just go from one plane to the other.
“So the only security screen he ever faced was in Lagos. How tight is the security system in Lagos? If it’s not very good — and I suspect it isn’t — then what do you do about it? Does the United States want to start pre-screening every flight that might connect into the United States, from every airport in the world? Indonesia? Syria? Dogkhatistan?”
Perry, I said, what do you think the public really needs to understand?
“If you fly, you may die,” he said promptly. “It’s not likely — there hasn’t been a successful terrorist attack on an airliner since 9/11, and millions of people have flown perfectly safely. But it’s just like Presidential security. If someone is really determined to kill the President and doesn’t mind dying in the process, there’s a definite chance that the President will be killed. If someone clever is really determined to bring down a plane, there’s a definite chance that the plane will go down.
“I suppose everything would be perfect is everyone flew naked, without cabin baggage.”
“Bare Air,” I said. “Perry, do you fly, yourself?”
“Hell, yes,” he said. “I fly all the time. It’s far, far safer than driving.”
– 30 —
Tags: airport security, search
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January 3rd, 2010
January 3, 2010
Filled with educators and visitors, the bus climbs slowly out of Bhutan’s Thimphu Valley through terrain that looks increasingly like an Oriental watercolour — steep, heavily-wooded slopes covered with fluffy trees, farms made of up terraces stepping down the hillsides towards rushing rivers. Some terraces have rice stubble, a few have winter wheat, and a surprising number are orchards. The hillsides are dotted with white half-timbered buildings in the Bhutanese traditional style, which even new buildings are required to use.
Up, up, up, through tiny villages, past isolated farmhouses, along a one-lane road as twisted as a snake’s intestine. This narrow, winding track is Bhutan’s central highway, the only real highway in the country. Up, up, up — and as we go, Goenpo, our guide, a thoughtful and polite former Buddhist monk, tells us stories. That temple on that distant mountain top is near a particularly lovely village where the Fourth King, still living, found four congenial sisters, and married them all. Each now has her own palace.
We will soon arrive, says Goenpo, at Dochu-la, the first high pass of the journey, 3140 meters high. On this side of the pass, the forest is blue pine, oak and maple. All the land around the summit belongs to the Royal Botanical Garden. The Garden is part of the 50% of the land area of Bhutan committed to national parks, which are connected by wilderness corridors so that the wildlife can migrate undisturbed.
On the other side of the pass, the road will descend through — unbelievably — a whole forest of magnolias and rhododendrons. Of the world’s 1100-odd species of rhododendron, 46 are native to Bhutan, and the young Fifth King is trying to grow all 46 in his alpine botanical garden. Then, as the bus descends, bursts of brilliant red flowers will appear — poinsettia trees in full vivid bloom, growing as high as a bungalow. We’ll even see a grove of orange trees — a lusty variety, presumably, since trees are growing at about 8000 feet elevation.
But all of that is on the far side of the pass. At the summit itself, Goenpo says, stand 108 memorial shrines, also known as chortens, erected by the Fourth King in 2005 in memory of battle losses two years earlier. An Assamese separatist force had been raiding India from refuges in southern Bhutan, and India was pressing Bhutan to eject them — or face the possibility that Indian troops might do it themselves.
The Bhutanese made numerous fruitless attempts to persuade them to leave. Eventually the king himself went to visit the Assamese camps, bearing a gift of apples. He put his case to the Assamese directly, and personally gave an apple to every fighter. He also warned them that if they didn’t leave, his army would have to force them out. But they still wouldn’t go
So the king came home, added several hundred volunteers to his untested 9000-man army, and personally led his inexperienced forces into battle. He knew the Assamese strength and deployment, because he had seen their camps, and he had counted his apples. His army prevailed, with a loss of about 10 Bhutanese and numerous Assamese. Far from being jubilant, the king was so appalled at the loss of life that he forbade any victory celebration. Instead, he caused 108 chortens to be erected at the high pass to honour the dead on both sides, and speed them on their way to their next lives.
At Dochu-la, the air is alive with fluttering prayer flags — yellow, red, green, white, orange. And yes, there is a big shrine, a new temple — and, on a small hillock, 108 white chortens standing like ghostly sentinels.
Beyond them, the view is breathtaking. We stand on the crest of the mountain we have climbed, looking over narrow but fertile valleys, with miles of virgin forest in every direction. The land drops thousands of feet and then ripples across lower mountains to the horizon, where it sweeps upward again to a jagged rim of cruel, white-crowned mountains. That’s the Tibetan border. Those peaks include seven of the highest mountains in the world.
We’re standing, it seems, on the roof of the earth, surrounded by flags whose every motion sends a prayer upward on the wind. We may never get nearer to heaven.
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Tags: Bhutan, chorten, Dochu-la, Royal Botanical Garden, Thimphu
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December 29th, 2009
December 27, 2009
“Nature cannot continue to absorb the abuses that we are throwing at it,” the Prime Minister told me. “The world is finite, and economic growth cannot continue to take place except with considerable cost to this generation and generations in the future.
“It is time that the world understood that we should talk about growth with a different understanding — growth of the individual, growth of the mind, growth of happiness. What really constitutes wealth? What is prosperity, and what is being rich? I think these have to be understood more in human terms, in terms of relationships and in an ecological sense.”
The Prime Minister of Canada? Ah, I wish! But no: the speaker was His Excellency Jigme Y. Thinley, the Prime Minister of Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom smaller and less populous than Nova Scotia. Nearly 40 years ago, Bhutan’s Fourth King declared that “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product,” bravely setting his tiny nation on a unique path to development. In 2006 he abdicated in favour of his 27-year-old son. In 2008, ancient Bhutan became the world’s youngest democracy, its commitment to Gross National Happiness intact.
Gross National Happiness sounds like wide-eyed California mind-mush, but it’s as rigorous as most economic measurements — and far more useful. GNH rests on “four pillars” of value that almost everyone accepts. The first pillar is environmental conservation, caring for nature and others. Second is cultural promotion, preserving the wisdom of an ancient and cherished culture. Third is sustainable and equitable development that benefits all citizens, past and future as well as present. Fourth is “good governance,” the inculcation of active and responsible citizenship.
These “pillars” are divided into nine “domains,” which in turn are broken down to 72 measurable variables. One variable reflects Bhutan’s commitment to maintain at least 60% forest cover forever. In actual fact, 72% of Bhutan is forested, 52% is protected, and Bhutan presently absorbs three times as much carbon as it produces. Similarly, between 1984 and 1994, life expectancy rose from 48 to 66 years, while infant mortality was cut in half. The country now has universal health care and universal free education.
That’s solid data. And that’s GNH in action.
Bhutan has serious problems, including the controversial status of Bhutanese refugees of Nepali origin, a relentless rural-urban migration that has created a restless cohort of unemployed urban youth, and the advent of western-style materialism resulting from the introduction of TV and the internet a decade ago — all of which make GNH even more urgent.
To help entrench GNH values in Bhutan’s civic consciousness, Prime Minister Thinley turned to GPI Atlantic of St. Margaret’s Bay, the creators of Nova Scotia’s own Genuine Progress Index. Assembling educators and others from 16 countries, GPI convened a workshop in Thimphu, the capital, in early December, on “Educating for Gross National Happiness.”
So I found myself in Bhutan, listening to a sparkling five-day debate on education attended by both the Prime Minister and the Education Minister. What would the graduate of a GNH-infused education look like? How would you develop and nurture such a student?
After two days, Ron Colman of GPI made an amazing announcement. Overnight — literally — the government had adopted the workshop’s findings as government policies. Now, how should those policies be implemented? Two days later, the government had committed to an immediate GNH workshop within the education department, followed six weeks later by a workshop for all school principals in the country. Within a year, the new policies would reach every schoolroom in Bhutan.
As the workshop ended, I asked the Prime Minister how Bhutan would be different in 10 years, if the GNH education program succeeded.
“I would like to see an educational system quite different from the conventional factory, where children are just turned out to become economic animals, thinking only for themselves,” he said. “I would like to see graduates that are more human beings, with human values, that give importance to relationships, that are eco-literate, contemplative, analytical.
“I would like graduates who know that success in life is a state of being when you can come home at the end of the day satisfied with what you have done, realizing that you are a happy individual not only because you have found happiness for yourself, but because you have given happiness, in this one day’s work, to your spouse, to your family, to your neighbours — and to the world at large.”
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Tags: Bhutan, GPI Atlantic, Gross National Happiness, holistic education, Jigme Y. Thinley, Ron Colman, sustainability, Thimphu
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