das loft

Last night I went to my first Oakvillegreen meeting in a long time. The last time I saw the Oakvillegreen folks was at a party at Hank Rodenburg's house two Decembers ago. Since then I've been kind of all over the place, as most of you know, so I have an excuse for losing touch with them. Now I'm in Oakville again, so I thought I'd see what was going on with them.

Paul O'Hara, local ecologist, restorationist, native plant gardener, and - in my opinion - professional nature photographer, gave a slideshow of meadows, thickets, and forests around Oakville and the escarpment. Man, his photos were gorgeous. Not only were they beautifully shot, but they did an excellent job showing off the incredible natural beauty of this region. Alas, they also made me homesick. So many of the plants and wildflowers he photographed I recognized from the gardens of my ex-home on Holyrood. I do hope the new SUV-toting owners can find it in their hearts to appreciate them rather than pave them over with lawn, as seems to be the trend these days. (Paul shot the photo on the right; that's the Sixteen Mile Creek north of Dundas, which will soon be home to new utterly unsustainable suburban developments.)

Paul's talk was both poignant (for obvious reasons) and inspiring, because now I have this urge to go walk around in fields and forests and discover all the native plants for myself. I want to see first-hand the lovely wild asters and black-eyed susans and chokecherry and hawthorns and white oaks and pines. I'm so glad spring has finally sprung, so I can do that.

Liz Benneian of Oakvillegreen was really gung-ho in promoting The End of Suburbia. Lots of Oakvillegreenies apparently have already seen it, but she told everyone else to see it and to tell everyone we know to see it. Well, nobody needed to tell me that!

Just as I was leaving, I ran into councillors Renee Sandelowsky and Allan Elgar, who had just been freed from a town council meeting. Gosh, it was great to see them, especially Renee. She's an incredible person. She was the lively president of Oakvillegreen for a long time, but then last council election, she decided on a whim to run for town council. And of course, she won! (Everyone knew she would, she's very charismatic.) In fact, Mike Lansdown, another Oakvillegreen director, and Tom Adams, former Green Party Association president, also became councillors that election. And Oakvillegreen founder Allan Elgar easily kept his position as well. It was a very exciting time.

But Renee says life as a councillor is just really depressing and stressful. She now seems to regret having run for it and won - but now she's locked in for another two years. I think she misses being a fighter on the outside. And adding to the depression and stress are miscellaneous personal problems. Yet, she smiles cheerfully as she describes these awful things, and is always so interested to hear about my life and my family. What a strong person. It was nice to give her a hug.

This Saturday is the 5th annual Halton Eco Festival at the Glen Abbey Rec Centre (1415 Third Line). I'm going for sure, because there will be lots of keynote speeches and workshops on green energy, which I'm pretty interested in. I think Paul O'Hara will give another talk and slideshow if anybody's interested (I highly recommend it). I'm also curious to see if Whole Village has any interesting news, so I'll be attending their workshop too. Is anybody else interested?

Oh gosh... Here's yet another thing to scare you silly, folks: chemtrails. If you've been reading my dad's blog or Open Eyes, you'll already be familiar with them. Chemtrails are like contrails, except that the linger in the sky for a long time. We've all seen them, they're everywhere. I've always been somewhat suspicious that they had any real significance; I thought maybe they could be explained by a changing atmosphere (due to various pollutants and high CO2 concentrations, for example). There are many conspiracy theorists out there with some (suspect) theories as to what they might be, and I haven't been sure whether I should believe any of them.

But then I saw a these videos of a presentation by Will Thomas, an award-winning Canadian investigative journalist, and man, they're really eye-opening. I highly recommend watching them, available from this page. I'll include direct links to the videos as well:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3 ◄─ really good
• Part 4 ◄─ really good

Here is another great article on oil depeletion by James Howard Kunstler. I know, I know, you're probably all tired of this. But trust me! This one's really good. I want you to read it because I care about y'all.

The Long Emergency

What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?

By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that "people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it.

Continued here: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7203633

Happy Easter, everybody

Look what the Easter bunny left me!



The sun is shining, the birds are singing. In the words of Frank Niedermeyer, "What a wonderful feeling overtakes me when on Sunday morning I can say to my sweetie: 'Barbara, could you please pass me the Rhabarbermarmelade?' That just makes my day!" Unfortunately, I don't have any Rhabarbermarmelade today - just Aprikosemarmelade. But it will have to do.

Look what else the Easter bunny showed me it had in store for some lucky people:



Aw, what a thoughtful little Easter bunny. The Easter bunny said it hopes they like it. It spent hours on it, apparently. My, what lengths the Easter bunny will go to to make a family happy on Easter Sunday. You've got to give it credit.

Elyse and I took a walk in the park to take snophotos (today was probably one of the last snows of the season), but only managed to take one. Here it is.

I feel a bit embarrassed to mention this, but I have to say that Austin Powers in Goldmember is a really funny movie. As in, so stupid it's funny, and so funny it's stupid. I suppose many of you have already seen it by now since it's from 2002. I just got it from the library today. It's been a while since I laughed so hard.

I'm glad it's finally getting noticeably springlike now. I love the sound of dripping and draining water, spring birds in the evening, and the occasional gaggle drifting in yet another unlikely direction. In fact, this evening there was more than the occasional gaggle, there were dozens. And they were all heading for what seemed to be the other side of Lake Ontario. It was almost as if they were being drawn by the moon. Aren't geese supposed to migrate northwards in the spring? You can never quite get into the minds of those silly things. (Meanwhile, they're surreptitiously proceeding to dominate the world.)

My pushups are back on track. 31+26+31+26+31+26 now. And it was surprisingly easy, too. It's weird, for over a week I wasn't even able to maintain 29 pushups. I could feel the energy drain in my first set, and sometimes couldn't even begin the third set at all. I could feel my energy source in my abdomen just conking out really prematurely. Now I don't feel that at all. I feel fit as a whistle. I feel as if I could do four or five sets. But I won't, because I'm concerned that over-exertion may have been what induced that week-long low. (Just prior to the low I'd tried to increase my iterations by two instead of just one. Oh Paul, behave.) But I never took biology, so my attribution could be wrong.

Thanks for this link from Mee Ming. Check out the 2005 Bloggies for a long list of award-winning blogs. Man, there's just so much out there on the web to keep you busy! Beware.

I think it's an appropriate time to repost some of my favourite spring photos that I took last year:


I have to say, these photos really do make me homesick. We had such a nice little oasis back there on Holyrood, thanks largely to the work my mom (and dad) put into the garden. I really do miss the snowdrops, anemones, raspberries, crocuses, and all the other dozens of wonderful things that pop up throughout the year there.

Now all I have left is to visit this house right on Lakeshore near the funeral home for my snowdrop fix, and this other house a block closer to the lake for my crocus fix. It has become a ritual for me to visit these houses every spring, because their shoots always used to come up at least a week or so earlier than ours. The crocus house has quite a magnificent array of crocuses - more crocuses crammed into one tiny front yard than I've thought possible. And the snowdrop house has such a beautiful little yard fenced off from the sidewalk with broad, winding, sheltering trees that blossom stupdendously every spring. Maybe I'll take some pictures and post them when they're in full bloom to show you what I mean.

Sorry I haven't posted anything in a while. I've been in the mood to take it easy. Maybe because it's March Break. I've been watching various movies. I just saw one tonight, called He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not starring Audrey Tautou (Amelie). I really liked it. A romantic comedy, I suppose, but a little dark and full of twists. And some of those European women are really something else.

Anyway, as no doubt most of you have no interest in, I've been struggling at 29 pushups for about a week and a half. But I think I see 30 looming on the horizon. I guess it really is as they say: The road to fitness is full of potholes.

I bought an organic pineapple today. It's juicy and delicious, but I find that if I eat too much of it, it irritates my tongue. I have a feeling there is a mysterious chemical in pineapple that likes to find its way into your skin and tongue. Is there a botanist in the house?

There are too many books I want to read. I'm currently reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins now. There are tons of books coming out now about peak oil that I want to read, including The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg, Crossing the Rubicon by Michael C. Ruppert, The 2030 Spike by Colin Mason, and this one sounds right up my alley: The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century by James Howard Kunstler. That last one still hasn't been published, though. The only problem I find with reading is that it always puts me to sleep before I want to finish. It might have something to do with the fact that I like to read in bed...

My latest one:



Man... people are going to think I'm insane, no?! But it's funny!!

All the following are ink and brush on rice paper (my aunt gave me the brush and paper as a Christmas gift). Please be advised that all of these are kind of rough, and I don't know what I'm going to do with them, if anything.

Also please do not be frightened.

I should probably mention to my blog frequenters what I'm doing for a living now, roughly. Well, I'm not exactly making a living yet, but I will be. A few weeks ago I took on the job of tutoring calculus to students at OT (my old high school) about once a week, thanks to a suggestion by Mee Ming (my friend and neighbour who teaches Calculus there). It's not much, but it gives me something to do, and it's super-easy. :)

Then, recently, I was hired to work with Jon's step-mom (Elyse's mom) at George Brown College in Toronto to improve the student locker rental service that Jon developed last summer. This is how I imagine I'll be making a real living for the next little while. I probably wouldn't want it to absolutely take over my life, but I don't think I have to worry about that quite yet.

And finally, my friend Sean has asked for my help with a little web job he's got, and I'll probably get started on that by the end of this month.

I'm glad it's not hard for me to get work. In all of these cases, I wasn't even consciously looking for work; the jobs just landed on my doorstep. All I had to do was say yes or no. (And I'm sure some of you know how hard it is for me to say no...)

Here is some good literature on peak oil, especially for those of you who doubt that peak oil is a real threat. Don't worry, the first one is only a couple pages long. The second one is just a summary of a paper by Richard C. Duncan, since the full manuscript isn't available online yet.

• Hubbert's Peak Revisited by Eric Sprott
  
  
• The Olduvai Theory:
  An Electromagnetic Tsunami
  
  Richard C. Duncan
  2 March 2005
  
  Introductory note: The following update is taken from a longer manuscript that has been submitted for publication review. The research took some six months because of the vast amount of data that had to be analyzed. The Overview and Summary sections below are complete but the five intermediate sections are terse indeed. Graphs, endnotes, and references are omitted. The full manuscript will be available ASAP.
  
  OVERVIEW
  
  The Olduvai Theory states that the life expectancy of industrial civilization is less then or equal 100 years: 1930-2030. It is defined by the ratio of world energy production and population (e). Four postulates follow:
  
  1. The exponential growth of energy production has ended on this planet.
     
  2. Average e will show virtually no growth from 1979 to circa 2008.
     
  3. The rate of change of e will go sharply negative circa 2008.
     
  4. World population will decline commensurate with e.
  
  This paper accomplishes five goals:
  
  The first goal is to show that between 1893 and 1949 three distinguished scholars developed an Olduvai-like scenario. In doing this research, I discovered that what has been called "White's Law" for some 60 years is actually Ackerman's Law.
  
  The second goal is threefold and shows that: 1) electrical power is crucial end-use energy for industrial civilization, not hydrocarbons; 2) big blackouts are inevitable; and 3) the proximate cause of the collapse of industrial civilization, should it occur, will be that the electric power grids go down and never come back up.
  
  I first presented the Olduvai Theory at an engineering conference entitled, "Science, Technology, and Society" (Duncan, 1989). My paper was sobering and "more germane;" I had no data to support it at that time.
  
  Nonetheless the theory was well received and a lengthy discussion followed. By 1996 however, I was able to show that the theory held up against the world energy and population data from 1950 to 1995 (Duncan, 1996). Next tested in 2000, the theory was supported by data from 1920 to 1999 (Duncan, 2000). Continuing this series, the third goal of this paper is to extend the tests to world energy production and population data from 1850 through 2003.
  
  The fourth goal is twofold: 1) detail and describe the Olduvai Theory from 1930 to 2030; and 2) compare the Olduvai Scenario for world population with the Limits to Growth: the 30-Year Update Scenario 1 from 2005 to 2050.
  
  The fifth goal of this paper is to acknowledge the worldwide efforts now underway to establish communities-of-sustainability.
  
  THREE OLDUVAI SCOUTS
  They include Adams (1893), Ackerman (1932), and Hubbert (1949).
  
  THE ELECTROMAGNETIC BUBBLE
  Why permanent blackouts are inevitable.
  
  WORLD ENERGY AND POPULATION: THE BASIS
  The theory is tested against historic data from 1850 to 2003.
  
  THE OLDUVAI THEORY
  The Olduvai Cliff event has been moved earlier by 4 years (i.e., to 2008 from 2012).
  
  LIFEBOATS?
  Efforts are underway worldwide to establish lifeboat communities.
  
  Henry Adams in 1893 intuited that electric power would accelerate society into chaos and ruin. Frederick Ackerman in 1932 proposed that social change could be quantified by the ratio of energy production and population (e). King Hubbert correctly graphed the shape of the curve in 1949. Thus an Olduvai-like scenario existed before 1950.
  
  Electric power is by far the most important end-use energy for industrial civilization. Big blackouts are inevitable. Permanent blackouts will occur because the increasingly cash-strapped electrical utilities will not be able to service and maintain the power grids.
  
  World total energy production has not grown exponentially since 1970. None of the five major sources of primary energy has grown exponentially since 1975. Postulate 1 is verified.
  
  The average rate of growth of world energy production per capita (e) was zero from 1979 to 2003. Postulate 2 is confirmed through 2003.
  
  The Olduvai Scenario puts the peak of world population in 2015; thereafter population falls precipitously. In contrast, the 30-year update to Limits to Growth Scenario 1 puts the peak in 2027; thereafter population falls gradually. I conclude that this difference occurs because the Olduvai Scenario includes world energy production, but the Limits to Growth Scenario 1 does not. Postulates 3 and 4 remain to be tested.
  
  Embarking on lifeboat communities is timely and prudent, but also demanding and risky.

"Lifeboat communities." Interesting term.

Here's an interesting/disturbing interview with an Animal Liberation Front (ALF) activist. Argh! It's difficult to picture the ways Mr. Barbarash describes that animals are tortured, even today. Personally, I have no idea where to draw the line with respect to "animal rights." ALF is pretty extreme in that they believe non-human animal rights ought to be no different from human animal rights. What about plants, though, especially taking into account Cleve Backster's findings on plants?

I think Daniel Quinn sums up my feelings on this pretty well in his response to something a vegetarian said:

My objection to vegetarianism as a moral or political principle is that it finds eating a carrot to be morally superior to eating a cow. To me, this makes utterly no sense. The carrot is just as much alive as the cow. You've read my words ("The world is a sacred place and we belong in sacred place as any other creature") but haven't yet understood them. Is the lion that eats a deer engaging in a wicked act? Do you think that lions should "give up" eating meat? Do you think that evolution committed a moral error in allowing tens of thousands of species of carnivores and omnivores to come into existence? Are foxes a mistake? Are sharks a mistake? If these species aren't mistakes, why do you settle on humans as a mistake? Why should eating patterns allowed to other species be forbidden to us? Are we less sacred than they?

Elyse wants me to post this drawing I did of her. It wasn't supposed to be as accurate as it turned out to be, but whatever. I just need more practice drawing more of what I feel and less of what I see.

I went to see the Futureheads play on Sunday. They were opened by some band that I forgot and the Shout Out Louds from Sweden I think. It was pretty neat. There's so, so much that goes on onstage.. Each time a new band plays, techy dudes have to move back and forth all kinds of equipment, replace and adjust mikes, connect and disconnect things from here to there, test this and that sound, adjust levels and EQs and dynamics and effects and everything you could possibly imagine. And then there's constantly stuff going on behind the scenes while the band is playing.. I don't even want to know about any of that. I do wonder how much of all that gadgetry the band members have to be able to understand how to use. It's very intimidating. And I'm the type of guy who's supposed to be able to understand technical stuff!

But it still inspired me to continue this scary musical endeavour. I know I have it in me to play in some kind of band. I just wonder how difficult it will be and how long it will take to get there. I fear it will be a while. But I'll just keep listening to my heart, and my heart's telling me to keep going.

I've been doing a fair bit of drawing lately. I will post those creations as soon as I have a sufficiently interesting collection. I do wonder what many of you will think of them. I do not know what I will do with them.

I continue to make breads, cheeses, yoghurt, baked goods (and bads), and healthful dinners galore.

The snow was thick today.