[Bid-Matching] If China can do it, why can't Canada?

Let's do a little comparison:

The distance between Windsor and Québec City, with a slight detour to hit up Ottawa on the way is approximately 1250km. The Québec City- Windsor "corridor' is not only Canada's busiest transportation corridor, it also is one of the busiest transport routes in the world, and the cities along this route contain over half of Canada's population.

The route between Beijing and Shanghai, in China, is also a very busy, popular transport corridor for goods and people. It contains over a third of the country's population and connects the capital city with the country's trading hub. The distance of this corridor is about 1250km. 

In Canada, VIA Rail can bring a passenger from Windsor to Québec City in just over 15 hours (due to a two stops of over 45 minutes in Toronto and Montreal). The average travel speed is about 83km/h - even though the train can reach travel speeds of approximately 180km/h.

In China, the new CRH-380 train connecting Beijing and Shanghai can reach speeds of 468km/h (nearly six times faster than VIA). It has brought the travel time between these two cities down to five hours. The average travel speed is thus about 250km/h.

Whether or not you think Canada could use/needs high-speed trains, it sure makes one wonder why China is capable of making this happen, while Canada is not.

After all, it's not a matter of technology: The CRH trains are based and designed by Bombardier and thus considered a Canadian-Chinese joint venture.... when is that joint-venture going to come to our neck of the woods?

[Hermeneutics] Understanding the Understanding of Understandings

For too long the word "hermeneutics" has suggested (in my mind) something along the lines of the study of fictional hobbit communities. Needless to say, this is not really what the term means. Luckily, some of the readings that my colleagues and I looked at this week have enabled me to transcend (at least to a small degree) my former ignorance on this matter!

We were reading about the turn from the 'quantitative revolution' to the 'cultural turn' in the field of human geography (and economic geography in particular). The quantitative revolution came about in the 1950s and 1960s when numerous geographers began to adopt "both inferential statistical techniques and abstract models and theories" which led to "a new nomothetic geography conducted as spatial science" (Barnes, 2009). By contrast, the cultural turn arose in the 1980s, seeing an increasing focus on culture in many areas of human geography and an appreciation of more 'qualitative methods' (Barnett, 2009).

As Trevor Barnes (2001) has argued, the nature of theory and theorizing is substantially different between the two 'eras'. Theorizing during the quantitative era is best characterized by an 'epistemological' approach, wherein "the central task of theorizing is to develop abstract vocabularies that mirror - albeit approximately - an external and independent reality" (546). Put most simply, epistemological theories are abstract models that help us understand 'reality'. Now, as you might surmise, Barnes argues that the type of theorizing characteristic of the cultural turn is 'hermeneutic', which he defines as theorizing that "has an openness both to a wide range of theoretical sources and to the very definition of theory" (547).

Barnes (2001) has a number of statements which are very helpful in further defining hermeneutics:

• "[Hermeneutics] recognizes that no vocabulary is perfect and that a vocabulary that provides for commensurability... does not exist" (550);
• "Hermeneutics... always tries to negotiate a knife-edge between... the hope that there can be full agreement about a vocabulary and the suspicion that a better alternative is available" (551);
• "Hermeneutics conceives theorizing as a creative and open-ended process of interpretation that is circular, reflexive, indeterminate, and perspectival" (551; Barnes references Bohman 1993, 116);
• "Hermeneutics rejects fixed and final foundations" (551);
• "Hermeneutics promotes experimentation and engagement with radically different vocabularies, pressing them as far as they will go..." (551);
• "Hermeneutics cultivates critical self-awareness of social and historical location and recognizes its influence on knowledge..." (551);
• "Hermeneutic theorizing shuns disembodied vision as a metaphorical bluebrint" (551);
• "Hermeneutic tradition is not only about understanding the world; it also concerns itself with understanding understandings of the world, including that of the author herself or himself" (549)

In reading about hermeneutics I recalled how I had previously known about an association between hermeneutics and the Frankfurt School, but I didn't quite know what that association was... and so this recent exploration of hermeneutics has provided an opportunity to learn more about that connection.

As it turns out, hermeneutics has an incredible philosophical history dating back to the Ancient Greeks (etymologically the term comes from the Greek god Hermes, who was the "tutelary divinity of speech, writing and eloquence"). The tradition and evolution of the term (and debate surrounding it) has been carried-out by the likes of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, von Humboldt, Heidegger, and yes - the Frankfurt School's Jürgen Habermas (Ramberg and Gjesdal, 2005).

And what was Habermas' contribution? Well, in short, he came up with a critique of Heidegger's 'ontological hermeneutics' and the latter's student - Hans Georg Gadamer's 'hermeneutic humanism'. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, until Heidegger, hermeneutics was really about understanding linguistic communication. Yet "as far as Heidegger is concerned, hermeneutics is [actually about] ontology; it is about the most fundamental conditions of man's being in the world"(Ramberg and Gjesdal, 2005). Gadamer adds to Heidegger's hermeneutics by "exploring the consequences of [ontological hermeneutics] for our understanding of the human sciences," arguing that there are limitations to understanding human 'being' - human tradition and our selves - because we can never really master the texts of the past.

Habermas, however, argued that Gadamer did not fully considered his own political and ideological presuppositions:

In Habermas's view, Gadamer places too much emphasis on the authority of tradition, leaving no room for critical judgment and reflection. Reason is denied the power of a critical, distanced judgment. What is needed is therefore not just an analysis of the way in which we de facto are conditioned by history but a set of quasi-transcendental principles of validity in terms of which the claims of the tradition may be subjected to evaluation. Hermeneutics, Habermas argues, must be completed by a critical theory of society (Ramberg and Gjesdal, 2005).

In short, Habermas wants to use hermeneutics as a tool to understand where our understandings are coming from, in order to work towards social justice and emancipation. As Nickelson (2009) explains:

What Habermas aims to demonstrate through his own work, however, is that traditions can contain what he calls ‘systematically distorted communication’, a type of communication that falls short of an ideal of how communication should function and produces a response that is somehow tainted. This less-than-ideal type of communication can reinforce relations of domination. Accordingly, Habermas argues that systematically distorted communication precludes any necessary relationship between the prejudgments inherited from a tradition and knowledge, and that insofar as a tradition reproduces relations of domination the prejudgments upon which it depends are illegitimate.

If your head is not spinning yet, you're probably not normal or have some kind of predisposition towards political philosophy. Nevertheless, I think you'll agree that it is possible to see some strands of Habermas' critique in Barnes' contemporary understanding of hermeneutics as an understanding of understandings... Understand?

References
Barnes, Trevor. "Retheorizing Economic Geography: From the Quantitative Revolution to the 'Cultural Turn'," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 91, No. 3, 2001, pp. 546-565.

Barnes, Trevor. "Quantitative Revolution" in Derek Gregory et al. [eds.], The Dictionary of Human Geography (Fifth Edition). West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Barnett, Clive. "Cultural Turn" in Derek Gregory et al. [eds.], The Dictionary of Human Geography (Fifth Edition). West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Bohman, J. New Philosophy of Social Science: Problems of indeterminacy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.

Nickelson, Dylan. "Habermas's Objections to the Politics of Gadamer's Hermeneutics," The Lydian Mode, http://thelydianmode.com/2009/12/habermas-gadamer/

Ramberg, Bjørn and Kristin Gjesdal. "Hermeneutics," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (November, 2005), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/

[Mapping] Janus: God of Maps?

Over the weekend, a friend who I hadn't seen for a while poked fun at me when he learned that I was doing a PhD in Geography: "So, you just sit around and look at maps all day?" Despite the antagonistic jibe, the reality is that most people out there associate geography with an intensive study of maps... yet in reality, most geographers (both in the human and physical streams) tend to be less interested in maps, and more interested in explaining and understanding either human or natural phenomena and/or their interactions. In short, true to it's broad and literal meaning - 'geo-graphy' (from the Greek words meaning 'Earth description') includes a vast array of works in which this planet (and/or any of its component parts or social elements) is further explored. Maps are just one of myriad ways to 'describe Earth'.

That said, today is Geographic Information Systems (GIS) day, and last week in our doctoral seminar we read a whole lot about maps, and so alas, I am compelled to write a word or two about maps. I have two things I want to say. Or more accurately, it's one reflection on the Janus-faced nature of maps: On the one hand, maps have an incredible 'democratic' potential to store and impart useful knowledge to be used by anyone; on the other hand, we should never forget that maps are subjective tools which have all too often been used for tyrannical purposes.


As David Harvey once put it, throughout the imperial (capitalist) era, the human experience has been largely shaped by "the absolute authority of the clock and the tyranny of the cadastral map" (1996: 224). Although Harvey's sentiment is somewhat alarmist, it is possible to see the tyrannical nature of maps upon closer observation. Among other things, maps have been used to parcel up land; justify expropriation; deny the existence of indigenous peoples; erase history; enclose the commons; mark forbidden territories; foster racism, Orientalism, and other 'othering'; uphold the status quo; excuse plunder and invasion; and enable fascist conquerors and greedy colonists. In short, maps have been used by the rich and powerful for the maintenance of wealth and authority. The act of mapping is - like any other form of 'scientific' observation - an act in asserting one's (presumably superior) knowledge over a place, space, or social setting. It wasn't until the 1980s that philosopher and historian of cartography Brian Harley helped problematize and contest the dominant cartographic paradigm at the time, which saw maps as 'objective', 'scientific', 'representations of the world'. As Denis Wood explains, "Brian [Harley] insisted on resituating maps as political documents inculpated in the creation and maintenance of social power" (2002: 140).

Harley's lesson is that maps serve a purpose; their [map]makers have both an internal and external audience for whom they are making the map, whether or not this is explicitly shown on the map's surface. For example, the Gall-Peters Projection map of the world, shown above (upside down), brands itself as a map which 'accurately' displays the earth's area in a rectangle. When Arno Peters released this map in 1973 it caused a firestorm of controversy. Peters intended the map to correct the Mercator projection, which inflates areas further from the equator (this makes Greenland look bigger than Africa on the Mercator map, when in fact Africa is 14 times larger). The Peters map also moved the lateral center of the world map Eastward (making the Bering Strait line fall down the middle rather than the Greenwich line, which implicitly favors the British Empire a position at the metaphorical top and center of the world). But the Peters' map is not without its own problems. Detractors point to problems with distance fidelity and other distortions caused by trying to match spherical area into two dimensions. While defenders of the Peters' map say it offers a fairer depiction of the relative sizes of continents, thus offering more agency to the 'developing world', one might ask why this maps has failed to challenge other conventions of institutionalized power, like why the Northern Hemisphere gets to go 'on top', or the presumed division of the continents (note the varying choices of colour to denote separate and distinct spaces), or the magnetic orientation of the planet, etc.

However, if we can get over the tyrannical nature of maps, keep it in mind, put it in our back pocket, then we can surely appreciate the benefit of maps in this day of advanced computing technology. Today, with a simple internet connection, one can take a virtual tour of just about any street in North America and visualize from one's own home what the world looks like elsewhere. Today, thanks to popular mapping technologies, we have relatively up-to-date geographic information available for the average computer user, almost instantaneously. Some have termed this the 'democratization' of GIS, and aside from the problems of internet accessibility faced by the majority of the world's inhabitants, this term is somewhat apt in its characterization of the new 'everybody-rules' nature of maps ['somewhat' because one might say that rather than the people ruling GIS it is actually one mega-corporation ruling the people through tools like popular GIS... but this is a whole other can of worms]. Part of the 'democratization' of mapping comes from the ability of individuals to contribute to what Goodchild (2007) calls VGI - volunteered geographic information. Thanks to Web 2.0, Goodchild explains, we can all take part (and many of us have taken part) in voluntarily mapping the world - by uploading pictures and tagging them to places, by building our own maps and correcting information on GoogleMaps, by designing buildings for Google Earth, mashing up the new and old maps, and volunteering all types of cartographic information as private citizens. In short, people themselves have become the sensors used by the big map-maker(s) of the 21st Century.

Already, as noted by Goodchild et al. (2008), the capacity of GIS has far surpassed what we expected was impossible only a decade ago, thanks to the ability to store ever larger quantities of digital information. Four dimensional maps (showing the element of change over time) are now commonplace in certain domains. For example, I can track changing weather patterns in my community and log on to to the internet to see how traffic is flowing across town.

But we have a long way to go before the next generation of 'digital earth' is arrived. In this era of climatic and environmental change, the ability to better map biological, atmospheric, topographical and human land use changes could play an instrumental role in motivating human/political action on the presently sad state of ecology. Just imagine the ability to log into Google Maps and with the click of a few buttons isolate a time map of the world's atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from 1600AD to 2020AD. NASA has already built some models that allow you to do such a thing, and it's is only a matter of time (and of course, new innovations in 'cloud' computing) that anybody and everybody could design their own 4-dimensional [or higher*] maps.

Maps are here to stay, but despite the tendency of catographic democratization, we should be ever wary of the map's second face of tyranny.

* Through VGI, individuals may one day be able to upload complete virtual streetscapes, enabling map-viewers to encounter not just the sights of other places over time, but sounds, smells and physical sensations such as temperatures - hey, it sounds crazy, but then again, it wasn't that long ago that the 'internet' itself sounded pretty crazy.

[Musing] A Brief Foray Into the Name of Political Ecology

When Piers Blaikie wrote The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries in 1985, he helped lay the groundwork for what eventually would come to be known as 'political ecology' (so argue Raymond Bryant and Michael K. Goodman, 2008). Before then, explain Bryant and Goodman, the assumption in geography and other disciplines was that the environment could be understood and managed through natural science models. But with Blaikie's 1985 book, political economy became a defining factor in interpreting environmental change and degradation. At this point, political economy was already a well established term, but political ecology was not. Thus, in part, the latter can arguably be seen as a play-on term stemming from the former.

In English, the term 'political economy' dates back to Sir James Steuart’s An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (1776). Following Steuart, political economy became a well-established field of inquiry, practiced most famously throughout the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries by Adam Smith, David Hume, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Malthus, and of course, the field's biggest critic - Karl Marx. For the most part, these authors saw themselves as 'political economists' - hence the title of Marx's formative Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (1858).

Yet the foundational authors of political ecology may not necessarily have interpreted their project in those terms. As Blaikie has explained (2007), most of the authors who, like himself, were associated with political ecology (PE), were associated ex post: "By the end of the 1980s PE as a self-conscious reference point began to appear and authors such as Blaikie and Brookfield (1987), Bassett (1988), Black (1990), Bryant (1992), Neumann (1992), Moore (1993), Escobar (1996), Muldavin (1996), Bryant and Bailey (1997), Scott and Sullivan (2000) amongst many others, began to use the term and thereby proclaimed themselves as operating in and thus defining, the field" (Blaikie, 2007: 766). In the 1990s key texts (by Zimmerer and Basset, 2003; Peet and Watts, 2004; and Robbins, 2004) helped to further add definition to this 'field'.

Nevertheless, the term 'political ecology' originally dates back to the 1935, when it was oddly used as a heading for a column by Frank Thone in The Science News Letter discussing the role of grass as a cause of war. Then again the term was used (in somewhat of a different context) by Albert Lepawsky (1936) in an article in The American Political Science Review about political reforms then being carried by the German Reich ("State boundaries and state sovereignty can be liquidated, but can the Nazis transform the political ecology of a country which... is the most urban in the world...?")!

Throughout the ensuing decades the term 'political ecology' is used in a variety of contexts, but it is not until the 1970s that it begins to take on something akin to its contemporary meaning of "an approach to... the complex metabolism between nature and society" (Eric Sheppard, The Dictionary of Human Geography, 2009). Outside of the academy, the term was used to refer to the politicization of environmental problems - in short, it came to be associated with the environmental movement itself! In the academy, political ecology seems to arise from a confluence of three subfields: cultural ecology, ecological anthropology, and Marxist-inspired political economy. These influences finally come together in Piers Blaikie's seminal book, and the rest is history.

[Methodology] Historical Materialism as a Geographical Method

I've been reading a lot of David Harvey lately. In particular, I've looked at some of his earlier works when he more closely identified as a Geographer (today Harvey is technically a Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center - but his formal training was in Geography). It may strike some readers as 'news' that Harvey is a geographer. After all, today his work is studied within most disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. In fact, Harvey is one of the few living social theorists who has ranked amongst the top twenty most-cited authors in academia (a list that includes the likes of Foucault, Weber, Kant, Chomsky, and Freud).

Harvey has long been deemed a leading 'Marxist' theorist because of his close reading of Marx's texts - in particular Capital and the Grundrisse. However, as he has said on video, he's less interested in how he is identified by others and more interested in reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of Marxist analysis to see if it offers both explanatory and practical power to contemporary life. In a recent interview with Hector Agredano in the International Socialist Review (Issue 73, Sept./Oct. 2010), Harvey showcased this self-reflexive interpretation of the Marxist method:

"Within Marxism we also have to look back and be very critical of what I see as some very conservative, rather dogmatic understandings of the world... What a good Marxist does is to look at the conventional situation and do an analysis all over again given Marx’s method to try and understand the dynamics of the situation and therefore try to intervene in a way which is going to push society toward more democratic and more egalitarian solutions, and ultimately to solutions that are entirely non-capitalistic. I think that Marxism as a revolutionary theory and as a revolutionary practice has much to teach. There is a tremendous historical record, but we have to approach that historical record with some critical perspectives on what we did wrong as well as what we did right."

But what exactly is this 'Marxist method' that Harvey has helped to refine? The term 'historical materialism' has come to characterize what Marx and Engels called "the materialist conception of history" - a method of analyzing societal transformation through uncovering the dynamics of productive forces and social relations. In the preface to Marx's 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx explains the concept of the 'mode of production' - the combination of both a material, economic, foundational structure which relates in dialectical form* with a subjective, political structure [* NOTE: Interpreting the relationship between these two structures as 'dialectical' is important and is somewhat at the heart of a disagreement between 'historical materialism' and 'structural Marxist' analysis (as showcased in the works of Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas). The latter is ahistorical, largely theoretical, and has been accused by some as containing an essentialist epistemology (see Robert W. Cox's essay "Social Forces, Sates and World Orders: Beyond International Relations")].

In his analysis of civilizational history, Marx found that periods of social transformation (in which old modes of production were replaced with new ones) occurred as a result of conflict between these two structures (material and subjective). Along these lines one could say that today we live in a global capitalist mode of production. At a material level 'capitalism' clearly characterizes the nature of current productive forces. However, at the level of social consciousness, while capitalist subjectivity is dominant, there is arguably some level of contestation of neoliberal capitalist ideology, particularly in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. Where that leaves us as far as opportunities for future transformation is an important topic for political strategizing...

Now, there are a couple of ways in which this conception of history stood Marx apart from other political economists of his time (such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus):

• Unlike the classical political economists who saw the mode of production as fixed, or given, Marx saw it as an impermanent mode of social organization which would ultimately change one day, regardless of whether statesmen wished this or not.
  
• Marx broadened the realm of political economy from a study of interrelated components or inputs (such as land, labour, resource, etc.) to a totalistic study the material and subjective structures of society.
• While hitherto the classical political economists appeared to work towards interpreting and consolidating existing relations of production and property, Marx saw such relations as unequivocally unfair and sought normatively better alternatives. Thus while the classical political economists saw statesmen as those whose responsibility it was to help define and sustain an everlasting capitalist mode of production, Marx was beginning to spell out a materialist conception of human history (now known as ‘historical materialism’) in which the statesman and other capitalists who owned the means of production were exposed as the culprits of an attempt to stop the transition to fairer modes of social organization.

Now, as the above quotation by Harvey suggests, at times this method has been misused and misunderstood (brutal self proclaimed 'Marxist' regimes come to mind). However, at other times historical materialism has served as a foundation to rich and foundational analyses in a variety of scholarly disciplines. For example, influential scholars employing historical materialist analysis can be found in the obviously-applicable fields of history (key examples would be Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson) and economics (as exemplified by Paul Sweezy's work), sociology and political philosophy (exemplified in the works of John Bellamy Foster, Jürgen Habermas and Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, among others), international relations (see the work of Robert W. Cox, for example), criminology (Willem Adrian Bonger and Thorsten Sellin), feminism and gender studies (Lise Vogel, Margaret Benston and Peggy Morton, among many others), psychology (Joel Kovel), and so on... Of course, David Harvey fits the bill as perhaps the most influential geographer who has employed the historical materialist method.

So what exactly does this method mean in the geographical context? As GeoDataZone: The Earth Encyclopedia aptly notes: "Historical materialism in geography attempts to explain patterns and processes of spatial and environmental change as the result of the specific social relations of capitalism or other modes of production". In other words, it attempts to ground both material and subjective changes to space and environment within existing political economic structures. To illustrate: If it bothers you that common spatial and socio-ecological 'issues' such as urbanization, poverty, and climate change are typically discussed (in the media and by political leaders) as fixable problems that could be 'solved' through new technologies and band-aid solutions, all of which fail to address the structural causes of said problems in the first place - then you may be the type of person who would benefit from an historical materialist analysis!

The encyclopedia entry goes on to suggest that "historical materialist research has more recently integrated with broader social and cultural theory. Historical materialists rejected in particular the self-proclaimed objectivity of logical positivism, and more generally the intellectual hegemony of 'bourgeois geography' [read traditional geography], mainly because both have been complicit more with oppression, imperialism, and racism than with any substantive form of social emancipation." In other words, an historical materialist geography must normatively work towards change for the better, and envision new ways of social organization that are more just. Harvey's article "On the History and Present Condition of Geography: An Historical Materialist Manifesto" (in The Professional Geographer 36, 1984) can be credited with bringing this critical, normative vision to the discipline.

Finally, international relations scholar Robert W. Cox (in Keohane's Neorealism and its Critics, 1986) has identified four key tenets of the historical materialist method which may also be of interest to the historical materialist geographer:

1. It's concern with the dialectic, defined at the levels of both logic and real history: "At the level of logic, [dialectic] means seeking truth through the explorations of contradictions... At the level of real history, dialectic is the potential for alternative forms of development arising from the confrontation of opposed social forces in any concrete historical situation" (215).
2. It's focus on hegemony and the locus of political, economic and ideological power, which adds new dimensions to the understanding of power, as showcased in "the dominance and subordination of metropole over hinterland, center over periphery," and one might add capital over labor (215-16).
   
3. It's concern with the relationship between state and civil society, which "recognizes the efficacy of ethical and cultural sources of political action" and interprets a "reciprocal relationship between structure (economic relations) and superstructure (the ethico-political sphere)" (216).
4. It's focus on "the production process as a critical element in the explanation of the particular historical form taken by a state/society complex", which enables it to be "sensitive to the dialectical possibilities of change in the sphere of production which could affect the other spheres, such as those of state and world order." (216-17).
   

So there you have it - the beginnings of an attempt to sketch out and identify the historical materialist method, which if done right, in Harvey's conception (1984):

• will enable Geography to become a popular, reflective project, "which opens new channels of communication and common understanding";
• will "create an applied peoples' geography unbeholden to narrow or powerful special interests, but broadly democratic in its conception"
• will "accept a dual methodological commitment to scientific integrity and non-neutrality";
• will "integrate geographical sensitivities into general social theories"
• will "define a political project that sees the transition from capitalism to socialism [or other just modes of production] in historico-geographical terms"
  

[Questioning] Is it time for legislation yet?

It's truly amazing. The day Syncrude is fined $3 million for failing to prevent the deaths of 1600 migrating ducks that landed in one of the company's tailings ponds, CBC reports that more dead ducks have been found in other Syncrude, Shell and Suncor facilitites! See the CBC story here (or copy and paste this URL: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2010/10/26/edmonton-more-ducks-tailings-pond.html)

This just goes to show that fines are totally fucking meaningless in Alberta's oil patch. They are especially joke-worthy when we consider who's paying the fine - the richest goddam companies in the country! These 'fines' are not deterrents in any way, shape or form. They have hardly, if at all, influenced the behaviour of oil sands operators, nor caused any major change in operations. Most importantly, the ducks (and other animals) are still dying. What do the fines do, other than raise money for the very governments that are currently working to protect the tar sands? How many dead ducks does it take for Fisheries and Oceans Canada to wake up and realize that they are completely and utterly failing to enforce legislation for which they are responsible? How many times does Stelmach's government need to mess up before Albertans revolt?

It's time to take this issue seriously. It's time for legislation and regulation of this industry, and a reevaluation on the real costs of this endeavor. It's time to ditch meaningless fines and start thinking about prosecuting the useless fuckheads who run these companies and the moron politicians who claim that they're "frustrated and disappointed" but have nothing to show for it. If anything, Renner and Stelmach should be frustrated and disappointed that clodpate, excrement-spewing, Big-Oil-apologist imbeciles like themselves have the political power to do something about this and yet fail do to so.

[Reflection] On Reality and the Academy

Before reading on, watch this brief video (in short, test your "awareness" by keeping track of how many times the white team passes the ball):

OK, so you've watched the video. You've tested your awareness. And hopefully, you've had a similar reaction to mine (and now you'll be extra vigilant when driving a car)!

However, I bring up the video for a different reason: I find this video helpful in illustrating the multifaceted nature of reality. Ever since I first watched this video I haven't been able to shake off the implications of being 'duped' by the moonwalking bear. For had I not been told by the good people at London Transport after the first scene that there is in fact a man in a bear costume dancing ridiculously across the screen, I never would have considered this to be a material 'fact' in this video, despite having used my own eyes and ears to decipher what is happening on the screen. 

This raises a philosophical question: Is the bear actually really there? For those of us who have been told of the 'trick' at the end of this video and have gone back to verify this claim, the bear is part of our conception of reality - it is has become a material fact. We have gone back to make sure that we see the bear, and sure enough it is there - the bear is real. But for those who aren't told to look for a bear, the bear may as well not exist. If you were to ask them whether they saw a the bear in the video, they would think you were crazy. So, again, one could make the case that the bear does not exist... at least for this latter group - they could go on forever thinking that the video has nothing to do with a dancing bear, and that they 'passed' the awareness test because they accurately counted the number of passes made by the white team. To complicate matters, I have shown this video to friends and some of them have still failed to see the bear on the second and even third showing, after being told to look for a moonwalking bear! It just goes to show that reality is muddier than we think.

If we were to gather people who have only seen the first part of this video with others who have been told to look for a moonwalking bear and have verified this as reality, we would have trouble coming to agreement as a group about the what really happens in the video. This is because we have different presuppositions. In other words, we can ask people the same question after watching the first half of the video (did you see a dancing bear?) and yield different results because there are multiple versions of reality out there.

OK, I've belabored this point... After all, it's just a YouTube video with an optical illusion, you say. But it's the broader implications that we can tease out and apply to more relevant issues that makes this important. Here's another example:

Recently I was listening to a CBC radio interview with Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk about a perplexing issue he's recently explored in Northern Canada. Inuit elders were claiming by the dozens that the earth was beginning to 'tilt' away from the sun. Whereas for decades the sun was known to rise and set at certain locations at certain times of the year, and whereas this had proven to be empirically true year after year after year, the elders discerned that something had gone awry because the sun was no longer where it was supposed to be at the given time of the year. It seemed to be drifting 'south', and not just by a small margin. The moon and the stars also seemed to be out of place. And so it was decided that the earth is in the process of tilting.

Western scientists were equally perplexed, because when they were told of this phenomena it did not fit their understanding of reality. This type of Earth tilting as the Elders described would be impossible according to the natural laws of geophysics. And so Western scientists have sought a different explanation. As it turns out, the Western scientists claim, high-paced human induced climatic changes have caused a change in the major wind patterns in the North. This has caused a hot air inversion layer, which causes light to bend differently. In turn, this creates an optical illusion in which the sun moves across the sky. The sun, moon, and stars appear 'out of position' because of the way light is being refracted differently through our changing atmosphere. But, they confirm, the sun, moon, and starts really are where they are supposed to be.
 
We can pose the question again about reality - has the earth tilted, as the Inuit Elders suggest, or is it merely an optical illusion caused by a changing climate? Aren't both 'realities' possible? Does it matter which reality we conceive? Or does what matter have to do with what we do about it? Does it help the Inuit to 'know' that the sun is where it is supposed to be, when in fact it appears elsewhere? The Inuit are adapting to their new reality, explains Kunuk, while the Western scientists are using it as further evidence that we need to do something about climate change.

Reality is subjective. And since most of us have different conceptions of reality - one might say we have different 'ontologies' - this poses a basic problem when it comes to communicating, discussing and debating various issues. For if the very ontology through which we interpret reality is divorced from the reality of the people with whom we are discussing, the possibility of reaching understanding is challenged. For those academically inclined, particularly in the field of Geography, R.T. Harrison and D.N. Livingstone (1980) offer a 'presuppositional' approach as a means to explore the very foundations of reality and the process of knowledge creation as a starting point to overcome the "pervasive influence of presuppositions in all scientific and philosophical thought" (25). It is useful! The following chart which they have offered helps us to uncover the multiple levels at which presuppositions are built, which is the first step in becoming aware of such presuppositions and trying to overcome them:

References:

R. T. Harrison and D. N. Livingstone. "Philosophy and Problems in Human Geography: A Presuppositional Approach," Area, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1980), pp. 25-31.

[Reflection] What about the Phytoplanktocene?

The term 'Holocene' - roughly translating to "recent whole" - refers to the geological era in which we currently reside. The Holocene began approximately 12,000 years ago, which means that by geological standards it is so young it's practically still a fetus. Despite this, the Holocene has seen geological transformation at an incredible pace, and a new force of change has prompted some to argue that we have entered a new era. While geological change is natural and constant - volcanoes erupt, tectonic plates shift, the chemical breakdown of the atmosphere fluctuates - something is different about the pace of and scale of geological change in recent centuries. As Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer pointed out in a 2000 article in the IGBP Newsletter, human activity has fundamentally altered the Earth's systems to such a degree that homo sapiens can now be considered a geological force. Thus they proposed the term 'Anthropocene' to characterize the fact that humans now play a leading role in shaping the planet.

But how useful is this term? From a geopolitical perspective, I think it's helpful. As Simon Dalby argues, the term and its constitutive academic outcome - Earth System Science - "requires us to rethink assumptions of our living within an external environment" (2007: 103). Forget the age-old dichotomy between 'man' and 'nature'; the "Anthropocene" tells us that man is nature. No, this is not a new idea... but the term is food for thought for the planet's future prospects. It raises the question of how we humans will continue to shape the Earth's experience - after all, unlike volcanoes and shifting tectonic plates, we (theoretically) have consciousness to guide our awareness of our own actions. And so the term has its place, particularly if it is used as a tool to get people to realize the role we can play in protecting the environment.

And yet I am compelled to speak on behalf of the phytoplankton: After all, humans are not the only species that behave as a geological force, let alone the only species that fundamentally alters the atmosphere. As it turns out, phytoplankton are responsible for the production of over half of the world's oxygen! Not only that, they seem to be an essential component of ocean ecosystems. In a recent study by Daniel Boyce published in Nature (2010), phytoplankton are said to be "the fuel on which [marine ecosystems] run". Further still, phytoplankton play an essential role in seeding clouds across the planet (by producing dimethyl sulphide, which then reacts with seawater to form sulphur particles in the atmosphere around which water droplets form). In short, phytoplankton are a geological force without which much of the life on Earth would not be capable of survival - and there may just be other geological forces out there of which we are less keenly aware. And yet, the seeming absurdity of referring to a geological age as the "phytoplanktocene" makes me question whether the other term - the Anthropocene - really carries any (geological) weight? Theoretically, we've always lived in the phytoplanktocene - the era began when single celled organisms started photosynthesizing and converting carbon dioxide into oxygen. I'm not a geologist, but I can see why some geologists are skeptical about the extent of the human impact. Perhaps their big picture perspective reveals how in the long run, humans are just another species that has - like all species - simply altered their environment.

On the other hand... the interaction between humans and phytoplankton gives us reason to appreciate the term "Anthropocene" in a new light. As the Boyce study mentioned above has reported with some measure of despair, the global population of phytoplankton appears to be shrinking by 1% each year! In fact, since 1950 the Northern Hemisphere has lost 40% of its phytoplankton. Needless to say, the loss of phytoplankton would be catastrophic for many of the planet's living inhabitants. And the cause? Boyce explains, in a somewhat ironic twist, that it is anthropogenic climate change itself that is causing ocean currents to change (as a result of warmer temperatures), which in turn is not circulating adequate amounts of nutrients to the areas of the ocean where phytoplankton reside. In short, human activity appears to be reducing the relative power of phytoplankton to serve as a geological force which in turn makes life on Earth possible! If we're not careful, the "Anthropocene" may come to take on a new meaning: the epoch when human beings lived!

[Reflection] Environmental Education

The most recent issue of Alternatives Journal (Vol. 36, No. 5, 2010) focused exclusively on environmental education in Canada, and provided a list of 54 university programs related to 'the environment'. Skimming the cross-Canada directory, it is interesting to see the range of programs considered to fall under the broader category of 'environmental education' - whether it's the Tourism and Outdoor Recreation program at Capilano University in British Columbia, the Sustainable Agricultural Systems program at the University of Alberta, or Planning at the University of Waterloo. At many universities, environmental studies is offered by the Geography Department (at Carleton, for example, it is officially known as the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies). In other institutions, environmental studies is a stand alone department, distinct from Geography. In some cases environmental science is offered in place of environmental studies - and needless to say the focus in such institutions is more on the biological/geological/ecological processes of the Earth's system than on the relationship between human social structures and the natural world.

So who cares? Well, as I've discovered this week - it's a bit of a sore spot for (some) geographers. Despite the pop-cultural 'common sense' belief that geography is the study of maps, or at best unique places, and that it's leading association is the National Geographic Society, in fact one of the discipline's most important underlying themes has been the study of humans and their environment, at all the complex levels you can interpret the dialectic (and this theme long outlives the rise of popular environmental awareness in the 1970s and the growth of 'environmental education' programs in the last decade). Hence you have within one department a spectrum of scholars - from those who study ice cores in Antarctica to others who write about ecofeminism in small Indonesian communities. But as the environmental movement ramped up, and demand for environment-based courses popped up in universities, the geographers who didn't manage to take ownership of environmental studies felt, well, dissed (for lack of a better word). Rhetorical questions were asked: If they don't think environmental studies is fully enmeshed in geographical studies, well then what do they think we actually do here in Geography - look at maps all day?

While on the one hand it's easy to see how it's a sore spot for geographers, on the other hand, it's something geographers should learn to get over. In acclaimed geographer Ron Johnston's words: "We should just get on with it" (10). That is, we should keep doing the work that we do, and strive to do it well. In doing so, we (that is, geographers - a group I'm learning to refer to self-referentially) should worry not about other disciplines 'stealing' environmental awareness from us. Rather, we can embrace the opportunity provided by a unique discipline with a rich history of anthropo-ecological awareness, and just get back to it.

References
Johnston, Ron. "Critical Review: Geography (or geographers) and earth system science," Geoforum, 37 (2006): 7-11.

[Reflection] On the Academy and the Public Good

The acclaimed American geographer Gilbert F. White always believed that "the role of higher education and research is to serve the public" (B.L. Turner II, "Contested Identities," 2002: 59). It is often suggested that academics play a role in changing the world by serving the public. We hear it all the time, and for the most part we don't disagree. Serving the public is a humble, perhaps noble, cause. It sounds right, and it feels right. But upon further thought, it is not entirely clear how higher education and research accomplishes this goal... especially in this day and age. Do professional academics really serve the public by publishing articles in journals catering to the distinct needs of a small research community? Is the public good really served when throngs of first year students trudge in and out of the lecture hall each week, to sit amongst hundreds of peers whom they view as competitors for those few 'A's the professor has promised to dish out?

Those of us in the academy who think we serve the public need to take some time to consider how it is that we do so. It may be important enough to continually revisit this question: How is it that we are contributing to the public good? In doing so, I believe it is inevitable that we will come across various structural pressures stemming from our contemporary political economic setting that cause us to go about the motions while losing sight of our goal of serving the public. For students, a university education is more and more becoming a commodity. For academics, teaching and researching is more and more becoming merely a means to an income and a semblance of job security. In this way we often feel powerless when we ask ourselves how we can do a better job of serving the public. We'd like to attend that community event, but we don't have time; We'd like to write that meaningful opinion piece, but it's not recognized as a respectable, refereed publication; We'd like to spend one-on-one time with our students and have them work in partnership with local organizations, but the university has implemented rigid grading standards with hopes of beating other institutions in the annual post-secondary rankings - not to mention we have multiple classes to teach. There is pressure to treat our roles in the academy as just any other day job, and oddly enough that pressure seems to correlate with rising tuitions...

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but it seems that the more private our universities become, the harder it is to see how academics are able to serve the public. In this way, perhaps the best way to ensure that researchers and educators in the academy serve the public is to focus their efforts on keeping the influence of privatization out. Perhaps the answer is to make our universities truly public spaces - welcoming places with distinct attainable goals of societal contribution. Perhaps we should make tenure dependent upon the impact academics have in their communities, not how many publications they have ... just a (heretical) thought. Either way, the suggestion that academics play a role in the public good shouldn't be just another meaningless and hollow mantra - it would be nice if it was the truth.

[Reflection] Between Reproduction and Contestation

I started a PhD in Geography today. While the next four years are certain to offer numerous opportunities to expand my knowledge and scholarly abilities, I will undoubtedly also be faced with tremendous challenges. One worry that I have about taking on a doctorate is the possibility of getting sucked into the permanent meta-coma of academia. In this nightmare I become just another ‘head-in-the-clouds’ academic; I live in a theoretical world of utopias and dystopias; I play into the structures of power and dominance that exist in society rather than actively work to contest them; I lose sight of the responsibility that comes with a degree from an institution of higher learning.

As a Master’s student I experienced similar anxieties. It’s easy to live the sheltered life of a student, to get sucked into the daily humdrum and processes of academia. But it can be a vicious circle: In order to spend all your time as a promising scholar, you need the funding do to so. In order to get funding, you need high grades, publications, and conference presentations, and so you spend all your time trying to fulfill the role of promising scholar (both intellectually and esthetically). Yet the circle is just that – a circle. There appears no end to the road. You keep going and going unless you realize the only thing tying you down is gravity. The other roads only exist once you decide to take a step off the beaten path.

My worry is that in pursuing a doctorate I will forget about the other roads. This would have severe implications for the (acknowledgedly romanticized) images I have of being an activist academic. In the very first reading for our doctoral seminar (an article titled “Learning to Become a Geographer: Reproduction and Transformation in Academia,” by Harald Bauder), I was struck by a sentence in the opening paragraph: “By the time academic geographers assume faculty positions, romanticized ideas of being a knowledge-seeking scholar or Gramscian-style intellectual who changes the world may have been dashed by the realities of academic practice” (671). Is it ironic that I maintain a blog dedicated to the idea of the Gramscian-style intellectual? Or is this a sign that I am conscious enough about the possibility of becoming what P.E. Willis calls an “unconscious foot soldier” (2004: 390) that I will be able to stay conscious after all?

Our political economic trajectory isn’t helping. The academy is changing along with our society. More and more we are being trained as machines, taught to complete tasks that will work to facilitate economic growth. In her latest book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Martha Nussbaum refers to this problem as “a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance”. The neoliberalization of the university may be working to squeeze out the activist in us academics, slowly converting the ivory tower into a prison watch tower, where thinking outside the box is akin to a jailbreak.

All this to say… so much as I am looking forward to taking on the next step in the academic ladder, I’ll have to remember that I’m climbing along the boundary between the reproduction and contestation of contemporary academic structures. If I can hold onto this thread, I may be able to make it out of here with the ability to think and act critically still in tact!

[Survey] Cycling in Ottawa

I wanted to pass on a link to the City of Ottawa's Cycling Safety Evaluation Project. It's an on-line survey they've designed to help identify the most dangerous cycling areas in town (and thus to identify areas for improvement). As you know, there have been a number of cyclists killed in the Ottawa area in the last year - so this is an important tool initiative:

http://www.ottawa.ca/residents/onthemove/travelwise/cycling/csep_en.html

[Billing] Vote in C-311 Tomorrow!

Tomorrow, (Wednesday, May 5th), the House of Commons will conduct its FINAL VOTE on Bill C-311, The Climate Change Accountability Act. This Bill has been on the table for nearly four years, but has been subject to stalling pressure, death by election, and prorogation! Yet the Bill has been resurrected and survives! It is essential that all three opposition parties pull through and support this bill tomorrow.

Why?
- Because you may have noticed that last year (2009) was the warmest year on record; that the last decade is the warmest decade ever recorded; that within the last 12 years we have experienced the 10 warmest years recorded!
- Because the world now consumes 86.6 MILLION Barrels of Crude Oil EVERY DAY!
- Because the global atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases is presently at 391 parts per million (far above the widely recognized upper limit safety threshold of 350ppm).
- Because glaciers, arctic sea ice, coral reefs, and countless species are disappearing!
- Because the world's poor are extremely vulnerable to global warming and lack the financial capacity to adapt to climate change.
- Because the Harper Government has done NOTHING to mitigate or adapt to climate change.
- Because Canada is quickly gaining a reputation as the 'asshole of the world' at global climate talks (the bully of the business as usual approach).

Will Bill C-311 change any of this?
Likely not. However, it does force the Canadian government to at least fall in line with the basic international agreements on reductions. It will tell Harper that he can't continue killing the planet with impunity. Most importantly, Bill C-311 could foment new regulations and public infrastructure projects to help us reach the carbon reduction targets set out in the Bill.

So what should you do?
Send an email TODAY to Iggy and the leaders of the three opposition parties letting them know that you expect them to vote in favour of C-311 tomorrow! The Green Party has already set up a letter template and will automatically the letter for you: Go to http://greenparty.ca/action/C-311

[Clip] Carleton: Divest from Apartheid!

This is a fantastic clip made by students at Carleton University's chapter of Students Against Israeli Apartheid. The request to divest from five corporations profiting from war is logical and straightforward, but most importantly, it's the right thing to do.

[Devastation] Haiti Suffers at Two Levels

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that shook Haiti on January 10th, 2010 has resulted in tremendous damage to the country, and in particular the capital city of Port-au-Prince. The deathtoll is said to be over 50,000. Countless more have lost their homes and are struggling to acquire the basic necessities of life, like water, food, shelter, and medical treatment. By all means, a humanitarian relief effort must be supported in full right now. If you have money, don't wait to donate.

However, there is another dimension to Haiti's suffering. I couldn't help think about this in the last two days, as images of suffering in Haiti dominate the international news reports. Luckily, Peter Hallward of the Guardian has done a fantastic job of characterizing this second dimension, so I'm posting his article and linking to it here. It's a very good analysis of the situation. It means in addition to short term solutions like humanitarian aid, we need longer term solutions like reparations which might have the affect of reducing the scale of damage and suffering the next time there is a disaster in Haiti.


"Our Role in Haiti's Plight"
By Peter Hallward (originally published at the Guardian Website)

Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti's capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it's no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.

The country has faced more than its fair share of catastrophes. Hundreds died in Port-au-Prince in an earthquake back in June 1770, and the huge earthquake of 7 May 1842 may have killed 10,000 in the northern city of Cap ­Haitien alone. Hurricanes batter the island on a regular basis, mostly recently in 2004 and again in 2008; the storms of September 2008 flooded the town of Gonaïves and swept away much of its flimsy infrastructure, killing more than a thousand people and destroying many thousands of homes. The full scale of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for several weeks. Even minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the long-term impact is incalculable.

What is already all too clear, ­however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the "poorest country in the western hemisphere". This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.

The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.

Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.

Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.

It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.

As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, points out: "Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses." Meanwhile the city's basic infrastructure – running water, electricity, roads, etc – remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government's ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil.

The international community has been effectively ruling Haiti since the 2004 coup. The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to Haiti now, however, have during the last five years consistently voted against any extension of the UN mission's mandate beyond its immediate military purpose. Proposals to divert some of this "investment" towards poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked, in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the ­distribution of international "aid".

The same storms that killed so many in 2008 hit Cuba just as hard but killed only four people. Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neoliberal "reform", and its government retains a capacity to defend its people from disaster. If we are serious about helping Haiti through this latest crisis then we should take this comparative point on board. Along with sending emergency relief, we should ask what we can do to facilitate the self-empowerment of Haiti's people and public institutions. If we are serious about helping we need to stop ­trying to control Haiti's government, to pacify its citizens, and to exploit its economy. And then we need to start paying for at least some of the damage we've already done.

*****
Peter Hallward is a Canadian-born professor of philosophy at Middlesex University in London, UK. His Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment was published in 2008 by Verso. That year, he made a four-city speaking tour across Canada to coincide with the book's publishing, organized by the Canada Haiti Action Network. This article first appeared on The Guardian website.