Karen, who runs the CFUW's Movie Club, sent us the list of the movies we had seen and discussed this year, one a month since the start of our season last year. I'm adding the parts of the world they were made in. Nos. 2, 4, 5 and 6 were documentaries, the others fictional feature films. I watched all but No. 7 and thought them an excellent selection. The documentaries in particular provoked such lively debate at our Zoom meetings and in our email exchanges that I wonder whether CFUW-Ottawa might do well to form a Philosophy group also.
Wadja (Oct), Saudi Arabia
What is Democracy? (Nov), Canada, Greece, Italy, USA
Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Dec), New Zealand
Kiss the Ground (Jan), USA
American Factory (Feb), USA, China
My Octopus Teacher (Mar), South Africa
The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Apr), Canada
The Intouchables (May), France
For my own part, I don't watch films as often as do some of my friends, but I've recently seen and appreciated The Dressmaker (Australia), Ladies in Black (ditto, not so grim, set in Sydney), Pad Man (India), The African Doctor (France) The Walk (USA, France, about a tight-rope walker with a mission), Summerland (UK) and The Terminal (USA), an enjoyable Steven Spielberg movie starring Tom Hanks.
Here's a juxtaposition of books that have been absorbing me recently. I bought none of them and borrowed none from a library because they were all on our shelves at home. Some I had read before, some not.
At the moment I am discovering Xenophon's Anabasis (ᾰ̓νᾰ́βᾰσῐς): The March Up Country, in a 19th century translation from the ancient Greek. It was the (approximately) 2,400 year-old equivalent of a blog, the story recorded in short episodes. This book I have in the kitchen so that I can pick it up to read during our meals at the kitchen table. In the living room is a similar, fatter book entitled 50 Great Journeys, a British anthology of famous historical adventures compiled in 1968 by a chap called John Canning. I also started reading Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds which is so eccentrically Irish I have trouble digesting it. Anthony Burgess was from an Irish family too, but more cosmopolitan in outlook and experience. I reread his dystopian novel The Wanting Seed the other day, and some of his autobiography.
Otherwise, this year, there were these to take my mind off my usual preoccupations ...
Tolstoy's Anna Karenin
Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul
Margaret Atwood's relatively early novel, Surfacing
Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (long ago one of the "set books" I had to read at school)
William Golding's The Spire
A Reginald Hill whodunnit, Recalled to Life
Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Two of Bill Bryson's hilariously rude books: A Walk In The Woods and Notes From A Small Island
Steinbeck's East of Eden
A collection of Somerset Maugham stories
A collection of Robert Fisk's articles: The Age of the Warrior
Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter
Most of Kipling's Debits and Credits (short stories written shortly after the first world war)
Ustinov's The Old Man and Mr Smith. They are God and the Devil in disguise, on a rare visit to earth.
Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Hard to digest because of the long sentences, shifting time sequences and multiple points of view.
Without the crutch of a PowerPoint presentation, Elizabeth May, former parliamentary leader of the Green Party in Canada, spoke for an hour with great force and fluency at a webinar hosted by World Federalists, her subject being A Global Climate Accountability Act. This webinar has been posted on YouTube, so you might want to skip reading this blog post and just listen to the recording, here:
I took notes while she led her audience through the arguments for creating new international legislation to hold nations to their promises, starting with the history of previous attempts.
In 1972 the first UN summit on the Environment was unsuccessful, boycotted by the poorer nations because their needs weren't being taken into account.
She described how the nations then came together to solve the problem of ozone depletion in the stratosphere. Like the scientific advice on climate change, the science relating to the ozone layer was initially disputed, especially by industries with a vested interest in ignoring it. CFCs were lauded as miracle chemicals (one company boasted of "better living through chemistry") that seemed not to pollute our atmosphere, but they ate dangerously fast into the ozone layer. The Vienna Convention, reinforced by the Montreal Protocol of 1987, came up with a "treaty that actually worked". Industrial nations were obliged to cut their CFC emissions by 50% whereas the poorer countries (who needed refrigerants) were allowed to increase their emissions, but by no more than 15%. This was seen as a fair compromise. How was the legislation enforced? By means of trade sanctions.
Maurice Strong, a Canadian oil and mineral businessman and diplomat, the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, chaired the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, at which the north-south divide in the world was once again acknowledged, although there was still a big gap between perception and commitment. The Kyoto agreement in 1997 was the first international protocol to protect the climate. Again, we had responsibilities in common, and the industrialized nations had to act first because they were the ones who had created the problem. However developing countries also had to pledge to reduce their emissions.
To most national governments, trade is more important than climate, peace or social justice, so we must bear that in mind. We need to adapt the tools we use for enabling international trade to the climate crisis. When the World Trade Organisation was launched in 1995, it created a Committee on Trade and the Environment, asking the question, do environmental agreements damage trade? The Montreal Protocol had been abandoned because nations dislike having sanctions imposed on them, but this mechanism did work, Ms. May points out, and needs to be resurrected. We have to dust off those proven tools for the sake of a survivable, sustainable future. The requisite "workbenches and skills" are still there and should be used.
At present, the only means of enforcement of the Paris Agreement of 2015 appears to be by "public shaming."
So a global stocktaking is required. It seems that President Biden and his team in the USA understand the climate emergency in a way the Canadian government does not. Biden realizes that climate change is a national security threat for the developed countries and that if we don't act immediately, then we're in an "uncontrolled global experiment" the only equivalent of which is nuclear war. To Ms. May's amazement and admiration Biden is taking the matter seriously, actually starting to fulfill the promises he made before his election. The world hasn't sufficiently protected itself against either the nuclear or the global warming threat, but we could protect ourselves against both if we had the political will to do so. We should be dismantling both our nuclear arsenals and our fossil fuel industries.
She is "not comfortable" with the length of runway that remains for us to land on, and yet we are still promoting profits to the detriment of human well-being and survival. With all due respect, she says the COVID-19 pandemic is "a walk in the park compared with the global climate emergency." Net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 is the acknowledged goal, but this won't save us unless we act within the next nine years. For a start, we should tighten our existing international agreements, as recognized in Kyoto and Paris: they were good, but they "had no teeth"! It is worth noticing how fast the nations can move if a security threat is perceived, as for example after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She thinks China must surely understand the threat. If China's inland plateau dries up then its eight major rivers will dry up too. She says that we're in a Book of Revelation situation and we need to "fight like hell" in response to it, abandoning our dependence on fossil fuels as fast as possible for the sake of a livable future.
As a result of the COVID alarm, Ms. May is hopeful that perceptions and attitudes have begun to change, shifting in favour of supporting the essential workers of this world. Canada's policies though are still all wrong. The C-12 bill is hopeless; its "uniquely Canadian approach" (ironic quotation) won't work. She described it as a public relations trick to make us think we're doing something positive about the climate when we aren't. She joked that P.M. Trudeau's head must be spinning so much with the contradictory opinions he appears to hold that he's surely suffering from vertigo! In fact Canada is dragging its feet and now emitting 20% more greenhouse gasses than in the 1990s; by Canada she means Alberta and Saskatchewan, primarily, with their oil sands and fracking enterprises. People don't appreciate that "natural gas" is collected by means of fracking. The so-called "unconventional" extraction of bitumen (asphalt) is also very expensive in terms of energy units. The oil industry no longer makes sense. It is a sunset industry, a dead industry. All the same, we're making it very hard for India to move to the use of solar power and we're preventing the import of solar panels from China. A related drawback is that Environment Canada in the 1980s used to be a stronger body than it is now.
Last month the International Energy Agency (IEA) published a report, stating that the world's fossil fuels must be phased out as from now, in an orderly fashion. (It seems that the G7 Climate and Environment Summit delegates, this month, did take some notice of this.) Ms. May emphasized that Canada must commit to a just transition for its fossil fuel workers and that a proper schedule is needed for this process. They are kind, smart, decent human beings in the Trudeau Cabinet, but what is wrong with them? She wishes they would follow the example of the UK and New Zealand in making the climate laws work.
"We are in a race," she said. "Let's see which country can move the fastest."
A Canadian gentleman calling himself JPR came to a meeting I attended online to talk about a "disappearing landscape" in the Amazonian rainforest. In the 1960s he participated in an international project to study the topology, geology, archaeology, ecology, demographics and agricultural potential of this region and has kept returning since. In 2009 he published a book about it, in Spanish: La Ceja de Montaña - Un pasaje que va desapareciendo: Estudios interdisciplinarios en el noreste del Peru. He is an "unabashed" supporter of sustainable farming and forestry.
The Ceja de la Montaña, "eyebrow of the mountain" is a ridge that lies near the equator between the eastern lowland forests (selva alta) and
the highlands of the Andes. It is an area where the only dry season in the year lasts for a mere two weeks; otherwise a tremendous amount of rain falls. The vegetation is consequently luxuriant and the unsurfaced roads, on which small pack horses constantly slip and often break their legs, are deep in mud. The virgin forest supports the richest biodiversity in the world, but to grow crops sustainably in this environment is a tremendous challenge.
Crossing the ridge is a day's journey along the upper tributaries of the Huallaga and Tonchimilco rivers. This expedition is not for tourists, although the region has a history. 600 years ago the Chachapoya people did live off the forest in sustainable ways; they were exterminated a century later by the Incas; then came the colonists who just wanted to cut down the trees and use it as farmland. This is still happening. They grow bananas, catch and sell wild pigs, use the timber of the larger trees to make houses with sloping roofs to shed the rain (one tree is enough to build a house from) and gaps between the slats of the walls for aeration, where poisonous spiders lurk. The farmers have over-fished the streams, so only rodents, mostly guinea pigs, are left to eat. There are decent schools up there but perhaps an hour's walk from where children live. Their parents work 12 hours a day, six days a week (not Sundays), making the most of the brief pauses in the torrential rain. The Indigenous people marry very young and acquire their own cabins.
Coffee growing is the main source of income here, with three harvests a year from the steep upper slopes. The farmers can't afford the time or the money to make terraces so landslides are a constant hazard. In the 1960s, President Fernando Belaúnde wanted to alleviate the overpopulation of Lima by opening up the forest areas, constructing roads. Since then, waves of country people have been rushing into new areas in an attempt to improve their lives. They discovered that the higher they went, the more coffee could be harvested, sometimes ten times as much as in their home villages, but what happens is that when coffee prices drop, labour costs triple. People prune the plants incorrectly, leaving them improperly ventilated so that bugs infest them, and the degraded soil erodes. In 2013 coffee leaf rust hit the weakened plants, wiping out whole fields because of the level of humidity and the strict monoculture. In the lower lands papayas too have been wiped out by fungus and in any case are impossible to transport.
There's a huge gap between the existing practices and what is required. JPR reckoned it would take up to 50 years to repair this damage and reclaim the exploited land. It would take perhaps 200 years to build terraces.
Peru must find new opportunities in agro-forestry. Cocoa plants won't grow at high altitudes and cocaine production is not the answer! Maintaining conservation areas seems to be the best option for the rainforest, as it reduces the county's carbon emissions and protects fragile ecosystems, but some previous attempts to establish these have failed. The farmers ought to stop planting on 70-deg slopes. Fertilisers can't be used because they just wash away.
Forestry management is problematic, with illegal slash-and-burn areas. People aren't allowed to cut the trees down but they do, using the new roads through the mountains to transport the lumber. Because it is so difficult to monitor such activities, many get away with breaking the law, and new bridges are often destroyed by flash floods.
Recovery is costly. Where will the money come from? Peru has good leadership and a promising Plan Nacional de Acción del Café Peruano. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) is a mechanism developed according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Farmers participating in these schemes can redeem some credit by planting fast-growing trees. JPR mentioned the son of a Peruvian forester who has won a scholarship to university, with whom he is keeping in touch. Encouraging more of the young people in such ways might make a difference.
Stories from other Amazonian countries are much the same. Ecuador is apparently doing a little better than the others.
On May 5th our daughter Emma spoke in the EURAMET policy debate, hosted in Portugal, with members of the European Parliament participating, and Portugal's Deputy Minister for the Economy gave the vote of thanks at the end. This event was entitled "Climate neutral by 2050: the role of measurement science networks in delivering the EU’s Green Deal." It was another opportunity for her to advertise the metrology network she launched, and to explain its importance. Someone at that debate said that by 2050, it's expected that 80% of Europe's energy requirements will be supplied by wind and solar power. As an observer at this meeting, I was also impressed by a representative of the Research and Development wing of a Portuguese company called EDP, may write a separate post about what he had to say.
Our son George has been busy completing a paper on the role of pulsar observations in a cyber-security context, which Chris and I have helped to proofread. I had better not reveal more as it is not yet published.
And the grandsons?
Alexander, now in his mid-teens and so tall that he almost bangs his head on the top of the door, has acquired tooth-straightening braces that he's valiantly trying to ignore. He had friends round at his house today, two girls and a boy. Meanwhile, his brother Thomas, having learned to program in Python, with Chris giving him a little online tuition for this to which he responded enthusiastically, is now busy creating a large-scale diorama containing all the vital elements of Ancient Egypt: the Pyramids, a mummy in a sarcophagus, amphorae complete with lids, heiroglyphics, stretches of sand, the Nile, crocodiles, palm trees and, of course, his pièce de résistance, the Sphinx, sculpted from papier-maché and elaborately painted. Ancient Egypt takes up the whole of the dining table, so I hope the weather's been fine enough for the family to eat outdoors, this weekend. Thomas' parents have no idea how they will be able to transport the creation to school when it's time for displaying it there.
Our other grandson Edward (Eddy) has turned eight and had a birthday party in the park to which twice as many children turned up as were invited, because the gatecrashers among them spotted the large cake on the picnic table. They were a wonderfully multi-racial bunch of kids. This weekend Eddy had his first experience of horseback riding (on a stubborn horse, said his dad) and has also been playing duets on the recorder with his father, and building a fabulous Minecraft world, both on the computer screen and from purpose-bought Lego. When we had our video chat with Eddy last night he put on a conjuror's outfit and performed a magic show for us with collapsing wands, disappearing balls and scarves and unexpectedly appearing white rabbits.
My latest obsession is my birthday present from Chris. It's the Jardin, by Vegehome, an opportunity to grow salad ingredients and herbs year-round, hydroponically, which means their roots grow in water, enriched with nutrients. The LED lights positioned above it stay on for 14 hours a day. All the seeds I "planted" here have germinated nicely so far: dill, chives, bok choy, basil, mustard. I bought a lettuce with roots at the supermarket to sit alongside it and have a couple of sweet pepper plants starting to grow in pots as well. Just outside my kitchen on the deck are tomatoes and onions, with sage, lemon-thyme and bee balm alongside. Nearby, chives and mint are thriving, and there's a row of savory in my front garden. Outside the kitchen window are thyme, parsley, oregano, basil and onions. There's mint in that container too, which may overwhelm the other herbs when it gets going. The onions were propagated in my kitchen from the root-ends of green onions.
I've been talking to a keen gardener (Jourdain) who lives round the corner from us; he'd picked up some raspberry canes at the new Farmers' Market on York Street. I'd love to try growing those but it might not be wise; they spread like crazy. He also offered me some bee-friendly asters, but warned me they'll spread too. Another neighbour (Sandra) gave me a bag full of rhubarb stalks grown on the farm she helps to run. I have chopped and frozen those.
Garden Footnote
As usual we're getting more than just birds on our bird feeders. A red squirrel keeps coming who loves the sunflower seeds! Black squirrels, grey squirrels, raccoons, juncos, American robins, chickadees, cardinals, goldfinches, house sparrows, chipping sparrows and white-crowned sparrows are other frequent visitors. Never a dull moment.
The seventh and last of the invited speakers at my Environment Action meetings since we started this series last autumn was Natasha Jovanovic of Ecology Ottawa, whose Living City Program she manages. I hosted this meeting on May 10th.
Natasha told us that Ecology Ottawa is proposing nature-based solutions to the problems caused by climate change, this approach being largely based on traditional, indigenous knowledge. Thinking of the worldwide decline of biodiversity keeps her awake at night, she confessed, and in the national capital region alone, she's aware of some 60 species at risk of extinction. Cities play a special role in the conservation of ecosystems, trees and waterways being particularly vital to this mission. Ottawa's official Urban Forest Management Plan was initiated in 2016 and ought to be updated.
In managing ecosystems, the planning for our future needs to integrate nature-based approaches. We need a "greener" infrastructure and a rewilding of the urban environment, because "diversity is life". Our food supply depends on the survival of pollinators.
Rewilding Ottawa, she hastened to add, didn't have to mean letting our back yards and boulevards become overgrown. There are ways by which we can find a balance: we shouldn't rake our lawns, for example and we should let the leaf-litter stay on our flowerbeds in early spring, so that small creatures are not disturbed. A water feature in our gardens can be as simple as a flat receptacle with stones in it, filled with water, for animals and birds to drink from. (I have one like that!) Manicured lawns should be transformed into eco-friendly pollinator gardens. She gave us tips on what to plant and how to design such a garden. In those neighbourhoods and community gardens where people are doing the right thing, passers-by can read the signage and pick up handouts about this. Areas of land to be left wild, like the area within Champlain Park (see this report published last year), where Chris and I went exploring a few weeks ago, will only need mowing once every three years.
We suffer from a lack of resources, but more naturalization of the flora in city parks must become a priority; the City's present targets cannot be reached otherwise. At our meeting, people asked about invasive plants, and Natasha recommended they contact the Fletcher Wildlife Garden for tips on getting rid of them.
The mandate of Ecology Ottawa is to make this city the Green Capital of Canada by whatever means of persuasion it takes. There must be more education, better protection of green spaces. It's not feasible to work with school during the lock-downs, though. Ecology Ottawa has launched some ongoing campaigns. Their initial sale of native plants was so successful that they sold out, this spring, but a few more species are being offered soon. Check the website.
How else may we champion biodiversity in and around our city? By installing the iNaturalist app on our smartphones we can take part in a citizen science "Bioblitz", helping to monitor and catalogue the wild species in our midst. Doing this requires some thought and preparation. For example, any time we plan to visit Petrie Island, we should first research what we could do there.
Each year, Ecology Ottawa organises a tree giveaway, and this year's is the biggest yet, with 15,000 saplings available. Coniferous trees will be distributed first, starting in June, and fruit shrubs later in the summer. We should get in touch with our Community Associations to organise such events in our respective neighbourhoods.
