-
Environmental law: not even satire
Published by
on
An article from Fatima Syed at actual news site The Narwhal, “‘We’re incredibly responsible’: Enbridge Gas president dismisses Canada’s emissions cap,” reads like an article from satirical news site The Beaverton.
The Gas President’s complaints include that government incentives being paid out to their for-profit, ecosystem-destroying industry are insufficient (“tepid, fragmented”).
The threat is to move business to the US unless Canada does a better job at capitulation. “The goal should be clear, well-designed regulatory frameworks that offer certainty to investors,” she says, referencing the only “stakeholders” whose interests matter, I guess.
“‘More nuclear and more oil, more renewables, more carbon capture, more efficiency, more innovation and more natural gas,’ she says.” More consumption, more!
And it’s not even satire.
In environmental law in law school, I formed the opinion that the Earth can’t win.
Maybe, improbably, someone has the time and money to prove to rigorous legal and scientific standards that So and So Corp did the polluting that directly caused a quantifiable harm. There are a surprising number of legal hurdles to defending the planet, but let’s assume a case gets to the remedy stage.
Here are the types of remedies I observed:
(a) a fine that’s a minor percentage of profit (also known as: the cost of doing business),
(b) a fine that’s large enough to trigger corporate shapeshifting that ensures the polluter doesn’t have to pay, and
(c) a fine the size of which is irrelevant because the government retroactively indemnifies So and So Corp.
That is an actual thing in environmental law, the Doug Ford government’s decision to overrule the Ontario Energy Board to protect corporate profits reminded me.
After law school, working in regulations, I formed the impression that present day Canadian environmental law for corporations boils down to basically: “do what you want, as long as you keep records.”
That sounds cynical, but it’s consistent with the critique that Liberal governments’ primary concern is generating paperwork, not helping citizens. See also, the proposed federal oil and gas emissions cap to which the Gas President objects:
Senior government officials said their modeling showed the industry’s production levels would grow 16 per cent between 2019 and 2032 with their proposed emissions cap rules in place, versus 17 per cent projected growth without a cap.
Over a hundred pages in the Gazette for a one-percent difference in industry greenhouse gas emissions eight years from now.
No wonder more overtly capitalist governments don’t want to wait for environmental assessments to finish before starting construction projects, if it’s pointless paperwork and a foregone conclusion. I’d be annoyed too.
My preference would be for governments that prioritize a planet with breathable air and drinkable water over corporate profit, but that doesn’t seem to be on offer.
|
No comments on Environmental law: not even satire
-
History
Published by
on
I’ve complained before about how history was taught to me in school. Most of the time it was extremely dull. I didn’t want to memorize the dates of battles far away in time and space that had no clear significance to my life. Surely there is a better use of everyone’s time.
I don’t recall anyone attempting to teach me about residential schools. A field trip in grade 7 or 8 to la ville de Québec was presumably intended to teach about la Bataille des plaines d’Abraham but I mainly retained that the phones au Château Frontenac were fun.
The closest I ever got to actually learning history involved a mandatory independent study resulting in a presentation and q&a. I was assigned Stalin, and my recollection is I paid more attention to the psychology than to the “history” per se. Because why are we learning about monsters if not to understand how to spot and avoid them in future?
Where I think the education system really failed me (us?) is re: what exactly it is we’re supposed to have collectively learned re: authoritarians and human rights. I think about this every November, as people put on poppies and attend elaborate ceremonies where everyone agrees “Never Again.”
I don’t understand what it is many people are remembering. How fun it is to persecute people? That genocide is a topic for debate?
Maybe we’d have gotten here anyway if more history teachers had been more explicit about how fascism sneaks up and is bad, actually.
But an apparently legitimate vote, for a second term? When a smart and well-funded woman was the alternative?
It’s hard to go through. Again.
-
Time
Published by
on
And you run, and you run
To catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
And racing around
To come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way
But you’re older
Shorter of breath
And one day closer to death— Pink Floyd, “Time,” lyrics via Genius.com, where I have now created an account because it’s an excellent site for music nerds and I hope one of them will answer whether Gilmour wrote that verse (as attributed) or Waters did (as annotated). … Part of my ongoing performance series, “Which is correct?”1
That verse from “Time” really affected me this morning. I’m doing a lot of waiting, in a lot of areas, and it’s not my favourite thing. It’s stressful. And I don’t feel I (we) have time to waste.
I’ve been throwing out a lot of big ideas to people and waiting to see who grabs on. I don’t know, for example, how many people I’ve suggested should go into business with me. This might sound unusual / haphazard, but it’s actually a testament to how many smart and thoughtful people I’ve met that I would happily analyze the meaning of “professional” with.2
But it’s also an observation about how many smart and thoughtful people are dissatisfied with how they’re being treated at work. And, I think, it’s a further comment on how unsafe they feel with something as basic as saying “no, that’s my free time” to their employer.3
I suppose it’s also a comment on how safe my friends feel telling me things, which is nice, especially if they tell me angering things knowing I’m going to start throwing out ideas for pushing back.
Art
There’s a new piece of art on my fridge, from living artist Amaan Jahangir, who does a series that combines technology (text message records) with devastating emotional art that really speaks to me.
The one I bought is the “Never been better!” print, which depicts a short iPhone exchange:
hey, how have you been?
I’m good
accompanied by the image of a knight who looks invincible except for two red arrows piercing through metal to the heart.
It makes me think about how often we speak in the most superficial of ways, and how we can do everything possible to isolate and fortify, but there is always a vulnerability. It makes me think about what matters.
Many of Amaan Jahangir’s other prints in this series evoked similar strong responses from me, including more optimistic pieces. Also, the Metal Gear-looking dude fighting through wake-up alarms is hilarious. (Support living artists.)
Time
“Time” seemed like an especially appropriate launching point today, in re: clocks, since it’s the autumn / easier version of the two annual time changes, imposed for no apparently valid reason even though it increases health risks and confuses pets.
I have a medical appointment this week that I’m not looking forward to. It’s also a big week for American politics / the future of fascism.
I don’t want to just sit around waiting. I’m older. Shorter of breath, one day closer to death. I can’t catch up with the sun but to be honest I always liked the moon better anyway.
- A footnote to update Minor Campaign #2: Dropout TV. I have now sent a third email, with screenshots rather than links, to the two email addresses I already had plus a guess at the address for their legal department, which did not bounce back undeliverable (!). Summarized: it has now been over a month without reply or resolution. Your advertising contradicts your legalese. Please don’t be gross. In the meantime, here is notice that, contrary to your terms of service, based on principles of legal interpretation, I will be sharing my password with a friend because I think she’ll like Dimension 20. ↩︎
- I have not, in any of these instances, had an idea for how we would make money. ↩︎
- My former union has continued to ignore my creative ideas that would have the costs of the 3-days in-office policy be borne by the employer who imposed it unilaterally and without cause instead of by employees. I encourage employees to echo these ideas to others, including to their unions, which seem to have forgotten where labour’s strength lies. (Hint: it is neither in court nor in Parliament.) ↩︎
-
Dance like nobody’s getting COVID
Published by
on
A few things happened over the past week.
- I had another spell of feeling dizzy and faint, which may be attributable to Long COVID. (The health care system gave me COVID about a year ago.)
- COVID-19 Resources Canada released their latest forecast. The scientific estimate is that about 1 in 34 people are currently infected (~157,097 infections/day); infections are higher than average in Québec and Ontario (pages 4 and 5).
- I took my CO2 monitor on a half-empty bus with closed windows and the readings peaked around 1350 ppm, just shy of the 1400 ppm “red” zone, well beyond the “green” zone that suggests adequate ventilation (<1000 ppm).
- Someone expressed unhappiness to me about an 80-minute unpaid commute on a crowded bus for a job that can be done from home.
Which means it’s time to get angry again about the federal government’s return-to-office mandate.
I don’t know how much plainer it can be that it’s not okay for employers to unilaterally impose the requirement that employees donate their free time and risk their health for tasks unrelated to productivity.
I also don’t know how unions think they’re helping by telling employees to continue to comply en masse while they spend years making a case through various bureaucratic channels.
This is not time that employees will ever get back, and health doesn’t always return after repeated COVID exposure either. Per this federal government return-to-office GBA+ analysis that got released via access to information (pages 12 and 26):
- recent evidence suggests that COVID-19 has been a “mass-disabling event,”
- the threat of COVID is “still present,” and
- public transportation increases risk of exposure.
These are known facts.
And my former union is… throwing a dance party tonight (Tuesday night), apparently believing the problem is that employees aren’t spending enough of their free time downtown.
I’ve registered to participate in Science Journal Club tonight, with guest speaker / whistleblower Dr. David Fisman. I’m hoping to ask if any research has been done or could be done about infectivity on rush-hour buses.
This seems like something that ought to be known, by the employees whose health and wellbeing is being sacrificed, by the unions who purport to represent them, and by the governments and employers who are eventually going to discover that mass disabling their human resources was, in fact, a bad policy.
-
The hope of seeds and gardens
Published by
on
I’m sitting in the Centretown condo of my good friend Élizabeth Powles. Outside are signs of construction and autumn. Inside are her loudly purring cat and what she describes as a fuck-ton of common milkweed seeds. (I correctly guess the size of the container they fill: 8 cups.)
Our plan is to pack seeds, a heaping eighth of a teaspoon at a time, into the paper envelopes she already folded, for distribution by the Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library. Scoop, insert, fold, tape closed with explanatory label, repeat. It is useful work to do with your hands while watching TV or chatting about nature and art and community and the future.
The Butterfly Meadow, generating seeds
As one aspect of her volunteer work, Élizabeth now runs the Butterfly Meadow in the Fletcher Wildlife Garden (near Dow’s Lake in Ottawa). She chose to run the meadow as a drop-in, so that volunteers who have a bit of time during the season can show up and do some weeding or hauling or whatever needs to be done. “The intention is to be accessible for anybody who doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing and doesn’t have a lot of time.”
The goal of the meadow itself, she says, “is to demonstrate, if you have a big rural lot, what you might want to do with that land. It’s not managed-managed like a backyard garden would be. It runs semi-wild, but we have paths and we intentionally planted a lot of native plants, but they’re kind of all over the place, and there are still a lot of invasive plants.” This includes her eternal nemesis, Dog-Strangling Vine.
“There’s so much less than there was, there’s areas where there’s hardly any, where you can really see the impact that we’ve made, so that’s really satisfying, but again that only works because we’re managing [invasive plants] every single year and we’ll have to keep managing it indefinitely or it will all just go back to the way it was. But I’m okay with that because it’s a very harmonious job. I love just having a reason to be out there in the sunshine and it’s great exercise and all the plants smell really nice and there’s the earth and the green things and you hear the birds singing and it’s lovely and I’m very happy to spend as much time as I can possibly squeeze out in the summer working away.”
This is her first year volunteering with the Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library as well as the Butterfly Meadow. Élizabeth had originally been interested in the idea of guerrilla gardening (planting flowers or edible plants in neglected private or public spaces), but it turns out the germination rate is low. Then she attended a workshop for making seed envelopes.
“We sat around, a big group of people at the community centre, and we just folded seed envelopes and it was very soothing. You just sit there and do something kind of rote with your hands, but talk to a bunch of like-minded pleasant people and feel like you’re doing something useful and it’s lovely.”
Next up was a seed-packing workshop, and it occurred to her that the Butterfly Meadow is effectively a seed orchard (where native plants are grown and can be harvested for seed for restoration projects). She’s already planning to use the seed library’s four-tier priority list to fill up some bare patches next year, so the meadow can generate the native seeds that are needed most.
“Some plants have hyper-abundant, easy-to-collect seeds and those ones very quickly the seed library is like ‘we have enough, thank you.’ Other seeds will always be high priority because they’re more rare, they’re harder to collect, etc.” Milkweed, she says, is highly valued because it supports monarch butterflies.
The technology and art of seed envelopes
We talk about the concept of technology, how to some it means only shiny engineered gadgets with moving parts, like the energy-intensive air conditioning that becomes a necessity when you build a giant glass tower in a desert. Élizabeth instead conceives of technology as “information applied in an appropriate way,” such as “a building that’s essentially self-cooling because it’s modelled on termite mounds,” or other types of thoughtful design with lessons learned from nature.
We talk about solarpunk, a genre of science fiction and a style of art and a social movement about sustainability and finding a balance between nature and technology. “People who don’t think of themselves as science fiction people are putting out ideas for sustainable building practices, sustainable urban planning and urban design, and yes, okay, that’s all solarpunk. [And] a lot of people create art that’s like the cities you’d like to see in the future – idealized cities where it’s clearly high tech but there’s also a ton of greenery incorporated, for a sustainable green city. None of this ‘we’re going back to the stone age because that’s the only way we can save the earth,’ it’s sort of accepting that technology is here to stay, and offers a lot of benefits, but we have to use it wisely.”
Solarpunk, she says, is about “a better society, decapitalism-izing society, and better community bonds and low consumption.” Plants in particular are “gloriously anticapitalist. They make their own food, they do their own thing, and they produce, like, 50 million times more propagules than they actually need for replacement, so they’re just ‘here is some food’ for all the wildlife and the people who want to share seeds.” (A propagule, she explains, is a plant term for anything that propagates a plant, such as a seed or a cutting.)
The seed envelopes themselves are low tech and efficient. Each is a little square of paper folded in such a way that there is a pocket for seeds, and each gets taped shut with the relevant explanatory label printed off the seed library’s website.
The envelopes we’re packing are also art, because they’re made out of paper left over from Élizabeth’s surreal but naturalistic collaging projects.
“I cut up so many books for collaging and used the leftover paper for seed envelopes. A lot of them were art books or nature books – the paper that’s left over was actually very pretty – so as I was folding the seed envelopes I was looking at them and thinking ‘ooh ooh, let’s make the prettiest side available to the person who gets the seeds, it’ll be cute, it’ll be a little bonus!’”
I packed envelopes that were medieval line drawings; paintings, dark or colourful; short, inscrutable passages of text; sheet music. The seed envelopes don’t have to be beautiful to perform their propagation function, but a little extra art in a gloomy world doesn’t hurt.
Doing what you can do
All told, we pack 504 envelopes with common milkweed seeds for the Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library.
These and other types of native seeds will be given away for free at in-person events in November and December, and what is left over can be ordered for mail-out starting in late December.
“There’s ultimately 8 billion people in the world and it’s not on you to do 8 billion people’s worth of work to save everything,” Élizabeth says. “I cannot control the world, I can’t control human nature, but what I can do is whatever little small things I can that will make a small amount of positive change. Yes, we’re trying to put more native plants out into the world, but one of the side benefits of this is to support this notion of communal endeavours, working together on a thing, and I do think that stuff is contagious. There are people out there who may be feeling woeful, and looking for something that they can latch onto, and this could be something good that they can latch onto.”
504 little artful, joyful, anti-capitalist bundles of hope for a future with more butterflies.
-
-
About the author
CKirkby
- earned degrees in language / literature and law (but is not currently a lawyer or a journalist);
- worked for over a decade on Parliament Hill;
- misses writing; and
- appreciates thoughtful comments, en anglais ou en français. (Email addresses are not published.)
Categories
Archive