…this image is pretty funny. Produced by GOOD Magazine, it moves countries’ populations around to so that size and population followed the same progression. Take a look:
Given Canada wants to get out of Afghanistan…
Author: corey.burger
Sanity restored, Victoria votes for new bridge
Despite some people’s predictions to the contrary, Victorians voted yesterday to allow the city to borrow the money to replace the Johnson St. Bridge. It was a pretty decisive win too, 60 to 40. The interesting question is why?
Why didn’t the No side (johnsonstreetbridge.org/) win? After all, they collected all those signatures. I suspect because those that signed the petition break down into three major groups
- Those that actually wanted to save the old Blue Bridge
- Those that wanted a vote on the issue
- Those that were offended at the amount of money being spent
Note that only group 1 is actually a lock for a No vote. The 2nd and 3rd groups can be convinced to vote yes, which given that 9872 people signed the petition and only 6,522 voted No, may have just been what happened. After all, take a peak at one of the johnsonstbridge.org posters:
That poster will get all three groups to sign the petition, without revealing that the people behind the petition actually want to save the bridge. So all in all, a slightly surprising result, but from my perspective, a good one. If you want to get another perspective, Bernard von Shulman, a No voter, has run followup pieces at his Victoria Vision blog: 2010 Election and Wow I was wrong… Both are good reads. Now let’s see what the latest controversy regarding the bridge the johnsonstbridge.org people can stir up…
UVic seeks input on Cedar Hill X Rd lands
UVic Sustainability has finally decided to develop a plan for the Cedar Hill X Rd. lands. Yes, those same lands that the CRD considered for a Saanich East/Oak Bay sewage treatment/pumping plant earlier this year. (For reference, it is outlined in yellow to the right). Like most areas, there are a lot of interested parties, including dog walkers, UVic Facilities, UVic Forest Biology, and the local community. Some of those users don’t see eye to eye, so balancing those conflicted needs should be interesting.
This isn’t the first time a plan has come up for the site, although it seems that everybody but UVic has been involved. Proposed for the site in 2009 was a “UVic School of Agriculture” by the Campus Urban Agricultural Collective (Facebook page). At the time the draft plan under discussion was but an apple in the eye of then-UVic (now CRD) Sustainability Coordinator Sarah Webb, as she mentioned the Marlet in a story about the CUAC. Earlier this year the Food Not Lawns Collective co-opted that idea and dumped it into their manifesto (as they dug up the lawn in front of the library, possibly killing all their credibility in the process).
Disappointingly, the plan doesn’t talk at all about the road immediately adjacent, which includes parking in the area, or of better pedestrian access. Currently Cedar Hill X Rd. has a number of problems: too wide, lack of sidewalks on the north side, lack of bike lanes, and its use as overflow parking from UVic, the Rec Centre, both golf courses, and Emmanuel Baptist Church. Yes, the road is under the control of Oak Bay, but that shouldn’t stop UVic from making a stronger statement. And Oak Bay should listen. After all, they are the adjacent land owner and we go to great pains to query other adjacent land owners when we put in improvements like bike lanes. Observe the recent bike lane work on the other side of Cedar Hill X Rd.
However, I am cautiously optimistic. The drop dead date for getting your comments into UVic is November 26th. You can read more at the UVic Sustainability Planning site.
Tune-up your transportation with SustainableU
The SustainableU people (an interesting mix of the CRD, BC Hydro, Walmart, and others) are hosting a series of workshops this fall on transportation and how people’s choice affect the environment and their community. As they say
Leave with the tools and information to deliver presentations and spread the word to your peers. We equip you with a toolkit and the knowledge to capture any audience – from drivers to walkers – in any sort of setting.
The seminars, two hours long, are free, and there are a lot of them. Take a look:
| Tuesday, November 2 | Camosun College Lansdowne Campus – Young Building, Room 310 | 4-6pm |
| Thursday, November 4 | Uvic Campus – David Strong Building Room C103 | 12-1:50pm |
| Tuesday, November 9 | CRD Headquarters, Room 107 | 12-2pm |
| Wednesday, November 10 | 620 View Street, Room 517(Victoria Car Share Co-op) | 5:30-7:30pm |
| Saturday, November 13 | Saanich Commonwealth Place, Cedars Room | 9:30-11:30am |
| Tuesday, November 16 | Camosun College Interurban campus, Liz Ashton Campus Centre Building, Room 122 | 4-6pm |
| Tuesday, November 16 | Gordon Head Recreation Centre, Feltham Room | 5:30-7:30pm |
| Sunday, November 21 |
Esquimalt Recreation Centre, 527 Fraser Street | 10-12pm |
| Tuesday, November 23 | CRD Parks Cedar Room | 2-4pm |
| Wednesday, November 24 | Learning and Career Centre (Naden 136) | 8:30-10:30am |
| Thursday, November 25 | Pearkes Recreation Centre | 5:30-7:30pm |
| Monday, November 29 |
Esquimalt Recreation Centre, 527 Fraser Street. Pioneer Hall A | 7-9pm |
The idea is to “teach the teachers”, as it were. The workshop attendees go out and get people in the community to voluntarily pledge to reduce the amount of driving they do, which isn’t exactly a new idea — albeit one that hasn’t been tried here in the CRD that I know of although I could be wrong — just search for “car diet pledge” or “drive less pledge” to get an idea.
Registration is free and is run through the CRD. Visit the Transportation Tune-up page to learn more. As an incentive, they have laid on a few prizes for participants, bikes, bus passes, and similar items. More you sign up, the more you win. As they put it, “Think of this as an eco-friendly pyramid scheme.”
(h/t to Rita Fromholt from UVic Sustainability for pointing these out)
Saanich is looking for a few good artists
With the new Cedar Hill Recreation Centre Arts Centre about to start construction (the centre was to be named for David Foster), Saanich is looking for some public art to fill it. The theme is rather ambiguously described as:
Reflection of the ‘Arts’ and the creative activities happening at the Arts Centre.
With a budget of nearly $30,000, There are three spots suggested, two outside and one inside. Artists get to choose which one they wish to use (or all of the). Check out the map below:
If you want to try out, come to the open house on October 27th at Cedar Hill Recreation Centre, 3220 Cedar Hill Road between 4:00 & 7:30 p.m. The deadline is Nov 22nd at 4:30pm. Full details in the [download id=”1″] (PDF) and [download id=”2″] (PDF).
GG2010: Vancouver’s Brent Toderian & the next Vancouver
(Yes, this is just a little bit delayed. Life gets in the way sometimes)
Although most Vancouverites couldn’t pick him out on the street, Brent Toderian, the City of Vancouver’s Director of Planning, is amongst the most influential people shaping their city (and indeed, through the recently in-vogue Vancouverism, shaping cities far beyond even the Canadian borders). On Thursday morning he came to Gaining Ground to share some wisdom and talk about the future of planning Vancouver.
Introduced as being from a “mind-numbingly dull & boring profession”, he led off by saying that he wanted to “deliver gorgeous public places” and that although he collects flack for using words such as gorgeous, “people in positions like mine get to decide what is flaky.” Beyond the quips, Brent had a serious message about sustainability and planning, claiming that there are too many easy (and unworkable) solutions in North America then publicly wondering if livability was enough.
So what is the next Vancouver? The 1970’s brought streetend views and the 80’s view corridors and the 90’s a streetscape with high towers. That future is bundled up in EcoDensity, described as “density done well”, which Brent said needs three critical components: movement (of people and goods), high design quality, and amenities. Given how controversial EcoDensity is
Beyond EcoDensity, he emphasized that the need for industrial hasn’t gone away and, if a city isn’t careful, it can end up with no “job space” whatsoever, which is one of the reasons the city recently protected some commercial space downtown, a move that wasn’t universally popular.
In parting, he said that “being the greenest city just isn’t enough”. Probably a good thought.
GG2010: Roger & Sara talk Metro Van vs CRD
Early yesterday morning two speakers with similar jobs but in very different regions stepped up to the podium to share just how different their regions, separated only by the Salish Sea (nee Georgia Strait) are tackling climate change and all the other attendant challenges these growing regions face.
Metro Van’s air quality head, Roger Quan, led off, talking about how the then-GVRD had being “doing climate change before climate change was cool”, talking about air as “our common ground” and how their mandate to control various aspects of air quality — which they have done for over 15 years — directly led in to the sustainability initiatives that the region has embarked on since then. Roger explained that part of the challenge lies in how little of the region’s emissions the region actually has control over. The two biggest sources of pollution are under the mandate of local councils or other agencies, namely transportation (controlled by Translink and the local councils) and buildings (controlled by local councils), leaving Metro Vancouver to “work around the edges”, as it were. What they control is a great deal of the utilities in the region, and are thus looking at heat recovery for their sewers and hydro from the Capilano reservoir, for example. They also do lot of advocacy work, both to senior levels of government to ask them to speed up the process and to local businesses on how to become sustainable faster. With the organization of regional district itself, they also try and model sustainability, having set a “shadow” price on carbon of $25/tonne and are working on embedding a sustainability lens in all the work they do.
The CRD’s Climate Action Coordinator, Sarah Webb, then brought the perspective of the capital region. Unlike Metro Vancouver, the CRD lacks the large utilities under their control, so more of their work is focused on the advocacy side, adding that they need to push local councils to make some of the hard changes they have yet to do. Partly the CRD can do this by adding capacity, both with systems and with people, of which Sarah is one of them (the other side of her office is a half-time person, so she lacks people power). But what does Sarah see as critical to allowing the climate change goals to be met? Vision of the possible, management processes and other systems, people (and champions), money, and possibly most critically, time to “steer the ship’s course”, as she put it.
With the loss of the regional districts major planning powers in 1983 and the challenge that they are only slowly regrowing that capacity and regulatory ability, both Roger and Sarah pushed how the regional districts can bring people to the table and be good models of what needs to be done, especially for mildly-reluctant councillors and mayors. And while neither regional district has the power or people required to do job, they can leverage other divisions within their districts (such CRD Planning’s Pedestrian & Cycling Plan) or other organizations within the region (such as Translink in Vancouver). Hopefully it will be enough.
GG2010: A morning of important people
Day one of a conference is usually the time for the big speakers to come and tell us about their grand ideas and successes and Gaining Ground is no different. As Mark Holland remarked in his opening comments, this is a fairly unique conference in that we don’t “disappear into a big building and come out when the sun has gone down”, rather we are spread across four venues and our lunches are out in the wider community, as places such as Steamworks or Wild Rice. It is a nice refreshing change, because SFU’s brand new campus in the Woodwards building is very shiny and new and it is easy to forget we are on the borders of the Downtown Eastside.
The host mayor, Gregor Robertson, led the day off, talking about the various accomplishments the city has seen through since the last Gaining Ground in 2009, including changes to the building code, a massively successful transportation plan for the Olympics, new electric car charging stations (they are planning for 15% of the fleet by 2020), and various green jobs initiatives, including one in the Strathcona neighbourhood. At that he had to run off to council, where they are deciding the fate of the proposed Hornby St. separated bike lane.
Easily the most dynamic speaker of the morning was Jared Blumenfeld, now of the US EPA, late of the San Francisco Dept. of the Environment. He had the whole audience laughing, talking about how we got to here (The Inconvenient Truth, the hockey stick graph, peak oil, BP spill, etc.). He had a few pithy comments, calling all the greenwashing “greeningless” and of the climategate scandal, where there’s a t-shirt, there is a problem.
One of his key points was the drivers of change need to be cities. While India and the US may disagree on climate change and how to tackle it, the mayors of New York and Mumbai have some pretty similar interests. One example he mentioned was the banning of phalates in the US, which went from a municipal ordinance in San Francisco, to California state law, to federal legislation, all in the space of 6 months. What was amazing is that both the city and state got sued because they didn’t have the right to ban it, but did it anyway.
The presidents of SFU and BCIT were up next, talking about the many things that both institutions can do. What grabbed was the Translink RFP out for a gondola (ala the Portland Aerial Tram) up Burnaby Mountain and Don Wright of BCIT pointing out that sustainability includes housing costs, and if those aren’t brought under control, all the others gains will be for nought as the young move away or become car commuters and change their views.
So far, so good. This afternoon is filled with various workshops and salons, which should be interesting.
Preston goes to a sustainability conference
That Preston Manning, late of the of the federal Reform party and more recently of the Fraser Institute, would show up at a sustainability conference is a bit of cognitive dissonance. After all, his old party barely believes in anthropogenic global warming and is a whole-hearted supporter of Alberta’s oil sands, a major cause of Canada’s rising emissions. But come he did, to talk about reconciling environmental and economic viewpoints, largely from a Christian perspective. Along side him was Paul Williams, Executive Director of the Regent College Marketplace Institute, and two gentlemen from A Rocha, a Christian sustainability outfit.
The talk was well attended, surprising given it was running into the teeth of Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Discipline – the Eco-pragmatist’s Manifest talk, a far more likely speaker and topic at a sustainability conference. I wonder how many people were here because they just wanted to see what Preston would say and how any actually were here because they believed in what Preston said or did. The room seemed evenly split between the suits and the hippies, so I suspect it was a bit of both.
Up first was Paul, who laid out the ground work, basically as thus: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Or stated differently, our economy is going great but we are driving off an environmental cliff and here are the two different stories in each city. He then invoked some stereotypes in telling his story, as seen from the table below:
| Economic | Enviromental | Christian | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assumptions | free choice of individuals & firms | ecological damage, human economy breaching limits | command (but failure) to steward Creation in community |
| Purpose | happiness through wealth creation as success | sustainable balance of ecosystems, survival | (restoration) maturation of right relationships, Shalom |
| Practices | maximization of profit/growth, consumption | minimization (of harm & damage), conservation | worship – god, people, creation – cultivation |
| Virtues | efficiency, diligence, selfishness, greed | efficiencty, care, anxiety, blame | thanksgiving, generosity, creativity |
| Unit of Measure | money | resources/energy | relational |
| Policy Paradigm | market deregulation | state regulation | local market scope |
It certainly is a neat little table, but I think large parts of it are wrong. Take the statement that the core assumption of economic development is liberty. Why is this wrong? There are the stellar examples of mainland China (or Korea and Taiwan to a lesser extent earlier in the 20th century). None of these economies sought out liberty in any sense, yet all strove for standard, 20th-century economic development – growth of GDP, productivity, etc. And all three succeeded, without much (initial) political freedom.
But at the core, I think he does have some good points. He did point out that there is no reason why the units of measure between the envirnomental story and the economic one need to be separated. In fact, for most of human history they were. (Insert conspiracy about abandoning gold standard here).
And while his ideas about thanksgiving being a good counter-point to the commercial consume message might be good, I think narrowly defining the Christian message as the one between the two “extremes” does a great deal of disservice to everybody. But he did give a great deal to think about and presents some interesting challenges to people of faith and not.
Up next was Preston, described as “one of Canada’s great political visionaries”. He digressed slightly at times, but overall he stuck to three core ideas: the need to create and manage non-political forums, the need to mediate between interests, and lastly but most importantly — at least in my mind — the need to model reduction.
It turns out Preston is actually pretty moderate when it comes to the oil sands. Just take at a look at what he has said: National Post story, Saskatoon Star Pheonix story. Guess being out of power, as it were, allows you to speak more freely.
Back to the idea of reduction. He said that people of faith should work on the demand side, because lots of work already being done on the supply side, with little done on the demand side. An example: electrics cars are great, but nobody is asking if a car is really needed. And faith can play a central roll here: jesus teaches accumulating spiritual wealth than real world wealth. (Luke 12:15 NIV – Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” )
Sadly I had to leave right as Preston ended (he had a much shorter talk than Paul) because I am up tomorrow at 6am to help volunteer for the conference. Hope to see you all there.
Thriving within Limits: Ecologically informed economics and the
sustainability ohttp://www.arocha.org/ca-en/g2/8396-DSY.htmlf cities
Come have your say next week
Two different projects are seeking public input next week, although only one really connects to Oak Bay directly.
The first is the Oak Bay High Project, which is on a crazily-tight timeline to have shovels in the ground by this time next year, so they have scheduled a series of open houses on a potential “neighbourhood learning centre“, a relatively new concept the province is championing for using schools beyond school hours. This is where the space for the full theatre may come from, or a host of other options. What is at stake? The NLC can add 15% to the space of the school — some 1500 sq m in total.
Also seeking input is the latest stage of the BC Transit Victoria Regional Rapid Transit plan, which continues to confuse me with regards to the West Shore. The premier recently announced at the UBCM annual conference that Victoria’s rapid transit project was getting funded (with unknown monies), and the text of his speech says this:
We need to get the rapid bus launched in the capital regional district,
Which leave me confused. Because they have decided to use the E&N rail corridor in Langford and I just don’t see the Island Corridor Foundation and CRD Parks giving up on their dream of an E&N rail trail to allow buses to run beside the rail line (and the rail line is not going away. The ICF owns it outright and only they — meaning the collective municipalities and native bands along the line — can decide otherwise). And their consultations this week include “a showcase of rail and bus options.” So is the premier wrong is the or is something unexpected in the works?
So if you want to attend all of these open houses and workshops, your week would look something like this:
Sun: Oak Bay NLC consultation, 1pm – 3pm, Monterey Rec Centre, 1442 Monterey Ave
Tues: BC Transit Open House, 2pm – 7pm, Ambrosia Event Centre, 638 Fisgard St.
Oak Bay NLC consultation, 7pm – 9pm, Oak Bay Rec Centre, 1975 Bee St.
Thurs: BC Transit, 3pm – 8pm, Langford Legion, 760 Station Road