Extreme cold, continued

Clear. Wind up to 15 km/h. Low minus 28. Wind chill minus 21 this evening and minus 36 overnight. Risk of frostbite. So says Environment Canada again, and meanwhile, a possibly record-breaking snowstorm is brewing on the eastern coast of the USA. 

In Ottawa, a convoy of truckers from western Canada and their supporters arrived to protest against restrictions of every kind and vaccination rules in particular. 

As an Englishman, says Chris ironically, he wants the freedom to drive on the left when everyone else is driving on the right. 

I personally think the truckers' demonstration is an attention-seeking howl against loneliness.* This evening, not mentioning that, I sent a very short letter to the Editor of the Ottawa Citizen, commenting on the pollution and greenhouse gas emissions created by this huge demonstration. I know someone who intends to brave the crowds and the police in order to carry a placard with the slogan Stop Air Pollution. Protect the Environment! I hope she won't get into trouble. Another acquaintance of mine, sympathetic with the truckers' cause, says she is going out to offer them hot drinks.

Interesting times.

I persuaded Chris to drive us (on the right) to Wakefield, this afternoon, where we walked for an hour in the minus 20-something windchill. We must be getting hardened to the cold because we couldn't have borne that a couple of weeks ago. We walked through the village to the covered bridge and back, the sidewalks strewn with sand, under a very blue sky, as you can see from the photos, with seriously long icicles hanging from the buildings.

We love the peacefulness of Wakefield.

On a video chat with George, Sha and Eddy in Australia where it's tomorrow morning, they were complaining about the heat, Eddy making balloons (blimps, he called them) drift around in the downdraft from their air-conditioner.

* Footnote, Saturday: I had a new insight into this, on reading reports of why some of the truckers and their supporters are taking part. These are first-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the recent COVID-related government restrictions remind them too much of their youth in Communist-controlled countries. In another article it is revealed that a fifth of Canada's truck drivers are from south Asia. These people do not support the protest but fear that our food-supply systems are breaking down and that could lead to more unrest.

My friend survived her solo demonstration on Parliament Hill without mishap, carrying her homemade placard saying STOP AIR POLLUTION, PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT. She sent me an email afterwards: 

I received a lot of thumbs up and smiles for the most part. Five pickup trucks put on the gas and bumped out the fumes. Two people cussed me out. [...] the organizer of the group from the west said that he was the inventor of a catalytic converter that many of the big rigs had on their engines. I said that the area still smelled and he said maybe it was my breath because I was wearing a mask. Most people were not wearing masks. 

So I got my protest out of my system. Glad I made my statement.

Reusing our resources

January 25

A fascinating panel discussion on The Circular Economy was presented by the Globe and Mail, with Ryan MacDonald, senior editor of Climate, Environment and Resources, as the moderator.

Tima Bansal, Canada Research Chair in Business Sustainability at the Ivey Business School, spoke first.

Current linear economy allows what we use to keep accumulating in the earth, in the air, in the water. In the circular economy of the future, we shall be able to keep reusing our resources. The Council of Canadian Academies has published a report on the "state of circularity" in Canada that reveals how far we have to go. Canada lags behind. At present only 6% of the materials we use are circled back into use, in comparison with 30% of materials in the Netherlands and 19% in France. This difference is partly because it is more expensive to collect and move stuff within Canada. Our three layers of government are another challenge. How do we make the system more harmonious? How we we get our supply chains lined up? Canadians are great consumers. We "love our stuff" and there's so much demand for plastics! So some education is needed. Canadians are good at extracting mineral resources but we ought to understand the value of re-manufacturing byproducts into something else.

Recycled plastics can be reintroduced into the economy. The right to repair should be paramount (although if consumers repair their own goods it may invalidate the warranty). Packaging should be up-cycled into multiple-use containers.

Julie Poitras-Saulnier, CEO and co-founder of Loop, that "repurposes the outcasts of the food industry," claims that the food industry discards huge amounts of fruit and vegetables which can be turned into new products: juices, smoothies, sauces, crusts, even gin! Loop's trick is to pay money for the rejected products, so as to encourage food companies and retailers to get rid of their waste productively. However, to avoid too much delay and to keep the supply of food consistent, the distribution model needs to change. It takes three days to press 50 pallets of grapes, she said, so timing is crucial. 

How are Loop's products marketed? The right words have to be chosen; people can be educated to appreciate "up-cycled" food.

As everyone should know, there's a difference between "best before" and "use by" dates on products. Another panellist, Bilal Jarmakani, representing Solar X, said that home-owners and business owners were asking "Is solar sustainable?" Solar panels that are past their prime and ready to be replaced by more up-to-date models are usually "still fully functional" in fact, and, until Covid restrictions put a stop to this, were being shipped to Nigeria. More recently the northern communities of Canada have been making use of them, via a social enterprise called Indigenous Clean Energy, ICE.

Another interesting contribution to the discussion was by Tim Faveri, VP Sustainability and Shared Value at Maple Leaf Foods. Because his company is famous for its meat products, and meat-consumption is questionable these days, they are doing their best to come across as eco-friendly. He said their goal was to be "the most sustainable protein company on earth!" That's a big ambition. Circularity in the case of Maple Leaf Foods starts with the production of manure from animals raised for meat. He mentioned their "hog operations in Manitoba" in this context, where they are doing their best to eliminate wasted energy and wasted water. The energy generated by their "processes" is used for heating the water that cleans and sanitizes the animal pens. Then he spoke of the company's packaging goals. They need better infrastructure to bring this about, but the eventual objective is to make all packaging from recycled or biodegradable materials. The waste generated from their food processing can be repurposed as by-products: pet foods, oils, soaps, fertilizers. Anything organic can be turned into renewable fuel. This does require some collaboration with other companies.

Sheri Hinish, a spokesperson for IBM, wants environmentalists to add another R-word to the usual Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose / Redesign, Recycle options: ReTHINK. There will have to be shorter supply chains in the future. Tim Faveri agreed with that, saying that 82% of the emissions generated in his business come from the supply chains and it's important to keep measuring and recording this. 

A question from the audience led to a discussion of how consumers can be persuaded to change their spending habits. This is an important question; we are "feeding the machine" and it's up to us, when we go shopping, to choose the right brands. Consumers do want to make a difference as is evidenced by the popularity of the Thank My Farmer initiative, enabling people to make donations to coffee farmers, for example.

Of course, consumers also ask "What's in it for me?" If people are made to feel they are part of something larger, they become "empowered by purpose" and spend their money on the right things. Julie Poitras-Saulnier of Loop advised, "Don't talk down to your customers. They're smart." Transparency builds trust.

Circular products don't have to be more expensive. Initiatives for change are mostly at the local level, for now.

There's inevitable resistance from the traditional natural resources economy in Canada. We could upgrade our own oil and gas rather than shipping it elsewhere; this is something we'll have to think about. Because our natural resources are relatively cheap, we ought to put a higher price on carbon and disposal fees should be higher. 

We should embrace the shift to renewables, and build locally. Decision makers must anticipate the transformation, asking "what about jobs?" We're going to need more minerals to reach a net-zero GHG emissions target, hence more jobs. So that communities become more resilient in the face of change, we should think in terms of redeployment rather than unemployment. Here too, transparent decision-making is important, more effective than offering subsidies! Banks should be encouraged to support companies that have a positive environmental impact; this added value must be integrated into the business model. Data collection is a low-hanging fruit, but it requires a process imposed by the government.

Alan meets Elizabeth

Alan Neal of All in a Day on CBC-Radio (Ottawa) donated some of his precious after-work time last Tuesday to engage in a public conversation with the author Elizabeth Hay. This meeting was a fundraiser for student scholarships, hosted by a CFUW-Club in our vicinity, CFUW-Kanata. I know the person who designed the publicity poster, who was nervous before the event, hoping it would go well. She needn't have worried.

The guest speakers, two professional "wordsmiths" as someone put it, knew how to make their dialogue compelling. I felt I was eavesdropping on a private conversation, so exclusive and personal did it seem: an illusion, deliberately and skillfully contrived.

Elizabeth Hay's book All Things Consoled is about her relationship with her parents. Although she's primarily a writer of fiction, she considers the real world to be more interesting. 

Her father, like Albert Camus, was a man who spurned fiction in favour of non-fiction. A high-school principal, he ruled the roost. Her mother was his "counterpoint".

"I keep track of things," says Elizabeth Hay, constantly taking notes; All Things Consoled had originated as an unpublished series of short stories. ("I'm always looking for stories.") Her editor had persuaded her to make the book biographical instead, and advised her to "start with the crisis!" Elizabeth realised in any case that she was incapable of giving her parents fictional names. "I couldn't pretend they weren't who they were."

Her goal with these family memoirs was simply to end up with a good book. Alan Neal probed further: did her siblings mind?

She laughed. "I don't ask [their] permission!" She warned her brother and sister she was writing this book and sent them a copy once she had finished. "Happily, they're all still talking to me."

She hates talking on the phone; it makes her feel "cornered". She likes being left alone.

While her father was still alive, she felt unable to write about his anger. Her mother was a gentle soul, an artist, whose studio was her true home. Elizabeth called her death from pneumonia an escape. ("Pneumonia, the old person's friend!") For Elizabeth too it was an escape, from the pain of looking after her mother. When they were younger she remembers how her mother's creative drive was thwarted, how she was not happy until she had work to do as an artist. The two of them handled rejection and disappointment in the same way. "I just wish we could get a little recognition," her mother used to say. In the end, both of them did. In 2007, Elizabeth won the Giller Prize, and has other awards besides. The room we saw in the background on the Zoom webinar was decorated with her mother's paintings and other artwork. She calls it the Mumsaleum.

When Elizabeth was 15, the family moved to England for a year where she went to school, clearly a formative experience. She says she has "muscle/joint memory" feeling emotion through her knees, always going shaky in the knees when something overwhelms her.

"I thought I was a poet," said Elizabeth. "It surprised me to write novels; I was always drawn to stories." 

She appreciates honest reactions to any work-in-progress and gets her husband and son to act as editors. "What I try to do is hit something real ... and surprising. Then I hit the ground and keep going."

Alan gently pressed her to divulge what sort of book she is working on now, but she refused to say. He managed to extract the admission that it is based on something she published before, resuming the narrative in 2008. He startled her at the end of the conversation by holding up a copy of four poems she had written long ago. 

"Wherever did you find those?"

"Dig deep enough," he answered, "and you find stuff!"

Learning about the landfill

Meike Woehlert at the meeting

Environment Action, again.

Last Monday, January 17th, two very cooperative ("outreach") representatives of the City of Ottawa's waste management services, Ashley Cheslock and Meike Woehlert, gave us the latest news of the Master Plan For Solid Waste and answered our questions about garbage disposal and recycling. 51 people attended this meeting, a record for the Environment Action group; nearly half of the audience were people from outside of our Club. As part of the presentation we watched two well-made videos, What Happens To My Garbage? and What Happens To My Recycling? This was at my request, perhaps too ambitious an idea, because there were a couple of embarrassing technical hitches while we were trying to get the videos to work. I had practised without any problems, but on the day, the audio settings let me down. No matter, we kept going as a team, and the meeting was well received.

One worrying takeaway was that if we carry on disposing of non-recyclable rubbish at the present rate our landfill will be full by 2038 or thereabouts. So between now and then we ought to give more thought to what we throw away.

The speakers encouraged us citizens to engage with the city on its plans for the future because our opinions count, so they say. A public survey on how waste should be managed in Ottawa starts next month; by the way, there's a nice photo of Ashley on that page.

Since then, many a follow-up email to send, read or reply to, so it has been a busy week. I compiled a reference list of places that will accept the stuff we want to dispose of, and this morning I heard that my counterpart at the CFUW-Nepean Club has been doing exactly the same thing for her group and received her list. Rather than put it all in our bins destined for the landfill there are numerous "take it back" options in the city and better yet, worthy organizations that will either hand things over to people in need or re-purpose them for a good cause. My contacts keep contacting me to tell me of more such opportunities. Once the spring cleaning season starts, and with decluttering a trendy pastime these days, especially for our generation, such lists will be a great help, both for us and for the environment.

Old style literary French

A few diplomats and Diplomatic Hospitality Canadians read the story about Le renard from Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince, this morning, with emotion and appreciation, but we became rather bogged down in the verb tenses. The book, banned by the Vichy régime in France during the 2nd World War, first appeared in 1943. This style of writing seems rather archaic nowadays, but I vaguely remember having to learn the verb forms in my school days. I need to revise them now, so am noting this link sent to us afterwards by Marie Danielle, that elucidates the difference between the tenses and 'moods' of verbs in written and spoken French.

Extreme cold

There was a record snowfall followed by a spate of "Extreme Cold" warnings. 48 cm of snow in a day on Monday, the rest of the week clear and bright, but giving us wind-chill temperatures in the minus 30s. Strangely enough a smog warning was in effect too, yesterday, caused by particles of pollution trapped beneath an inversion. 

We didn't venture out on last week's snow day; we braved the nippy air on the other days, though not for too long at a stretch. The snow crunches with a squeak underfoot; I've heard it said that Inuit people don't need thermometers because they can tell the extent of the cold from the sound made by their boots as they walk along.

Last weekend we walked near the airport with Benoit, the trail by the river particularly chilly because it faces north. It was a relief to come up the hill to the sunnier area near the airfield, where we could feel the sun's warmth on our faces.

This morning Chris and I did two laps of "the Chelsea loop" aka "Sugar Bush trail" with Elva and Laurie, glad to walk under such a bright blue sky. Laurie was sensibly wearing his down-filled ski-pants. I must find a pair of those for Chris.

The wildlife huddled up somewhere during the worst of the weather, but we've seen the squirrels and birds emerge again at this end of the week, the squirrels' furry noses and tails dusted with snow, the chickadees, white breasted nuthatches and juncoes flitting across the garden to a tray of seeds that Chris put out for them near our kitchen door. Today I was amazed to see a flock of American robins in by the Minto Bridges. I thought those birds flew south to avoid the cold.

Coyotes are apparently on the rampage in some parts of town (I haven't spotted one yet) and there's a dancing bear in the Byward Market as usual, unusually snow-coated, not a real one.

Ça continue ...

A French conversation again tomorrow; Marie Danielle will introduce the group to a passage from Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince. At a previous conversation, she got us reading extracts from Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hémon, a book I didn't know, but I bought it from the Librairie du Soleil in town last week and am reading the whole of it now. Wikipedia tells me ...

Aimed at young French and Quebec people, the book had been included in school curricula, translated, and has been extensively analyzed and adapted.

What I'll remember from this novel will be the descriptions of people's struggle for the basic necessities, food and warmth, through the harsh winters of the old days, in the northern forests. The story is set in the Lac Saint-Jean area near Saguenay where we flew in the spring of 2013. Spring comes late to those parts of Canada.

Blockflöte

Another cultural pursuit at home this month is learning the keyboard accompaniment for JS Bach's aria Schafe können sicher weiden in preparation for Chris' Tuesday singing lessons. Although I remember the voice part from school lessons (with my dad as the music teacher) more than half a century ago I had no idea then of the subtlety of the accompaniment with its opening in thirds, originally meant for a pair of Blockflöten, and the trudging bass line. There's something tremendously satisfying about playing it now, so long as I get the notes right. Chris feels the same about conquering the challenges of the melody line. We're still practising our romantic Schubert, Schumann, Vaughan Williams repertoire, but aiming to branch out into Bach and Handel as well, lately.

Everyone in the Movie Club I belong to was asked to watch The Lost Daughter on Netflix this month, set on an island in Greece. The film stars Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley (as the main character's younger self) and then share our reviews of it. This was mine:

I wasn't quite sure which person the lost daughter is supposed to be. The doll in this story is particularly disturbing; there are too many films where dolls turn out to be horrific, harmful objects. Do you remember the science fiction satire Barbarella (1968) that included man-eating dolls?

I keep thinking about The Lost Daughter. This very well acted film forces us to consider our relationship with our own children. The younger Leda seems to have been in her mid-twenties when she had her children. So was I — uncomfortable memories surface of the times when my parenting skills were none too good.

The film is all about girl children and their mothers, but surely boys can be just as sensitive to tensions in the adult world and in just as much need of reassurance; in my opinion, sons deserve sympathy too, and so do fathers, even if societal norms allow men more licence to do what they want, when they want. Another omission was the role of Leda's mother, the grandmother. When the little girls have been abandoned by their mother, their grandmother (just mentioned in passing at one moment, never shown as a person in the drama) must have become a very important person in their lives, and how did she feel about Leda's bid for freedom? Another thought: did Leda's frustrations stem from her own upbringing? Was she influenced by her own mother's desire to be more than just a mother? That would figure — the grandmother would have been of that unfulfilled, postwar generation of women who had limited options.

It seems to me that this film is all about frustration. The little girl on the beach, howling in distress at not being able to find her doll, is just one example of this. The main characters all suffer from frustrations of one sort or another and keep losing their patience. For the younger Leda, never to have a moment to herself when her young children are in the house, is a privation similar to being in prison. For a bookish and sensual person this lack of privacy becomes unbearable, hence her decision to escape. The academic conference with its opportunities for "liaisons dangereuses" has given her a taste of freedom. She's craving adult company, sick of the childish dialogues with her demanding daughters and obviously tired of her husband's company. She is fond of her family but they whine when she doesn't give them her full attention. She tries, but doesn't know how to control her pent-up emotions, and when she slams a door the glass breaks.

I particularly sympathized with the older Leda at those moments when she had her precious holiday ruined by rowdy people behaving badly and was helpless to do anything about it. Her temper tantrum in the cinema (brought on by frustration again) conveyed that so well!

The Nina character (played by Dakota Johnson), the other young mother in the film, is physically attractive but turns out to be an unpleasant, untrustworthy character. Why is Leda attracted to her? How badly is she injured at the end; is she killed? The orange peeling scene was food for thought: is it an imaginary orange (so unlike the symbolic, rotting one, that she picked up earlier in the film)? Does Leda feel that the stabbing has been a punishment for her failures as a mother and that now she has paid the price, she can move on with her life, if there is any life to follow (is there?), with more serenity?

In summary, I didn't like the film at all, but it's a good one.

And I've just remembered that we heard a podcast that was a lively discussion of Homer's The Iliad. I took notes on that, to help me follow the speakers' train of thought. Chris is now reading The Iliad and finding it depressing, page after page about people doing stupid things, he says.

Third and last shot?

For the record ...

This morning I received the third of my Moderna vaccine injections and let's hope that's it, to keep me safe from Covid, which as far as I know I have never yet caught. 

I enjoyed my early half hour walk into town, a slightly further route than my normal beat these days, with the sun trying to shine through light flurries of snowflakes on a more or less deserted city. NCC employees were removing the Christmas decorations from the lampposts on Sparks Street which reminds me that I ought to un-decorate my Christmas tree at home, today, now that Twelfth Night has come and gone.

My appointment was at the drug store in the basement of "240 Sparks" a government office building that used to be crowded with civil servants on their way to and from work; an empty place today. There was no delay at my appointment other than to wait my turn after a lady who was about to receive her shot as I arrived. The pharmacist kindly treated me to a mere half-dose, although my age (though not by much) should have meant getting the full third dose. In her opinion, since I had "reacted" to the first two doses (April 13 and July 6 last year) in an obvious way, this meant that my immune system was obviously in good working order and the smaller vaccine boost would be sufficient for me.

Celebrating with a flat white take-out coffee from Bridgehead on the way back I crossed paths with Chris at the market who had been in another part of town, taking the car for a software update (another sort of booster service), and coming home by train.

Sandra's project

I have an artist / activist friend, Sandra Marshall, who posted this on Facebook yesterday. I feel that her extraordinary posts, that she makes public, should be widely shared: 

This is the last day of 2021 and I thought I would look back on my sketches of remarkable community minded women and men over the past Covid years. I filled 6 and more small sketchbooks, around 300 daily sketches and tried to provide short resumés of their ideas and work. 

They include nature, climate and civil rights activists, healthcare workers and firefighters who put their lives on the line, politicians, scientists and researchers looking for new solutions to old problems, people in housing and urban planning domains who are suggesting new environmental ways forward, people who trying to improve our justice system and who are fighting in court now for justice for others, especially indigenous justice, people who work for world peace and peace of mind, singers who have touched the chords of my heart, visual artists, women who fought for rights in our legal system, people who made me laugh, people who worked for food equity. 

Thanks to the journalists and writers on a whole range of subjects who helped me see the world in a sharper way. 

Thanks also to Wikipedia and Youtube for providing backgrounds and the ideas of those whom I wanted to know better.

In case you wonder whom Sandra has chosen to sketch, she included the list in this post:

Nellie McClung, Emily Murphy, Irene Parlby, Louise McKinney, Henrietta Edwards, Carrie Derick, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Alice Wilson, Kenojuak Ashevak, Mary Two-Axe Early, Chika Oriuwa, Donna May Kimmaliardjuk, Donna Strickland, Viola Desmond, Marie Lacost Gérin Lajoie, Thérese Cascrain, Myrtha LaPierre, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, Doris Anderson, Mary Travers La Bolduc, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Eugenia Duodu, Adelaide Hunter Hoodless, Violet Milstead, Tanya Talaga, Jane Jacobs, Bobbi Gill, Marilyn Bell, Brenda Milner, Molly Lamb Bobak, Sima Samar, Beverley McLauchlin, Elsie MacGill, Gina Cody, Maary Majka, Emma Marshall, Mary Riter Hamilton, Moly Stoichaet, Roberta Bondar, Annamie Paul, Cheryl Rockman-Greenberg, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Franklin, Rosemary Brown, Sue Johnson, Sallly Armstrong, Lucia Kowaluk, Deborah Cook, Hoda Elmaraghy, Annemieke Farenhorst, Diana Beresfor-Kroeger, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Judy Lamarsh, Amanda Lang, Betty Fox, Louise ArbouMcClintock, Jack Andraka, Maya Penn, Sojourner Truth, Eleanor Roosevelt, Maya Angelou, Nadia Murad, Lillian Petersen, E. Donnall Thomas, Donald Henderson, Jonas Salk, Robert Kosh, Joseph Howe, Emily Carr, David Keith, Murray Sinclair, Chanie Wenjack, Christie Blatchford, Malala Yousafzai,Catherine Dion, Dominque Anglade, Chris Hadfield, Matt Galloway, Michael Enright, Oliver Sacks, Alexei Navalny, Martin Luther King and Coret ta Scott King, Nahlah Ayed, Amanda Gorman, Bob Dylan, Charles Darwin, Maude Lewis, Kamala Harris, Chika Oriuwa, Kevin Page, Joe Fafard, Andrea Stroeve-Sawa, Charlie Angus,Chrystia Freeland, Mark Carney, Miranda Wang, Peter Bryce, Bill McKibben, Wangari Maathai, Agnes MacPhail, Frank Oz and Jim Henson (with Miss Piggy andKermit), Naomi Klein, Randy fobister,Marie-Pierre Iippersiel, Margit Hideg, Catherine Abreu, Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, Kim Campbell, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Michael J Fox, Zoé Yunker, Kate Raworth, Peter Juni, Elizabeth Bagshw, Hana Fatima Syed,NaHeed Nenshi, Irwin Waller, Holly Johnson, Gwen Madiba, Dianne Saxe, Judson Brewer, Birgit Umaigea, Patrick Archambault, Ian Waddell, Aalan Rusbridger, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Joan Harrison, Edward Burtynsky, Matt Landos, Farley Mowat, Zobai Jawed, Ford Doolittle, Stacey Abrams, Kara Lavender Law, Allan Savory, Katie Alumba, Elisabeth Logue, Dalai Lama, Loujain Alhathloul, Nauset, Karjann Aarup, Barry Pinsky, Joe Baker, Julia Gillard, Katherine Hayhoe, Mike Flannigan, Parlika, Olivier Trecases, Dennis Fotinos, Elizabeth Royte, Dr. Kwadwo Kyeremanteng, Robb Barnes, Brené Brown, Annie and Bernard Leiffet, Tim Flannery, Leonard Cohen, Kim Pate, David Koliski...and more to come!

Sandra's sketch of palliative care doctor and researcher Dr. Kwadwo Kyeremanteng, newly appointed director of the Ottawa ICU.