Islands of the People

Queen Charlotte Islands officially renamed Haida Gwaii

Vancouver Sun: Scratch Queen Charlotte Islands off your maps, the province has officially named the Islands Haida Gwaii as part of a broad-reaching land use and economic development agreement with the Haida First Nation.

The agreement, signed by Premier Gordon Campbell and Guujaaw,

president of the Haida Nation, calls for the province and Haida to reach a power-sharing arrangement for land-use decisions, revenue sharing for resources and carbon credits and $10 million in cash for the Haida to buy forest tenures.

'The protocol will support the Haida in their goal of building economic and social well-being for members of the Haida Nation and their neighbours on Haida Gwaii, Campbell said in a press release.

Guujaaw added that 'after 100 years of conflict, we have set the ground for a more productive era of peace. We have already agreed to the care and protection of the land, and now we develop processes for more responsible management.'

Image sources: Google Maps

Dennis Meadows: 'I think we are too late'

'Copenhagen Is About Doing As Little As Possible'

Spiegel Online: With his 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, Dennis Meadows was one of the first to war about the looming environmental crisis. The US economist spoke about the need to drastically change our behavior and why he doesn't expect much from the global climate change summit in Copenhagen.

Spiegel Online: Mr. Meadows, you simulated the future of the Earth back in 1972 with less computing power than a Blackberry. How good was your model on the limits to growth?

Dennis Meadows: Amazingly good, unfortunately. We are in the midst of an environmental crisis, which we predicted then. The difference is that we have lost 40 years during which humanity should have acted... Copenhagen? I don't take it seriously... If we rely on conferences instead of changing our lifestyles then things look bad... If people were to come together there with a fresh mind to achieve something then it would look different. This conference is essentially about doing as little as possible, not as much as possible.

Spiegel Online: You ask people to make personal sacrifices in order to preserve the environment and resources?

Meadows: I don't ask for it but I say if we don't change our behavior then we will be in serious trouble. People are getting sidetracked if they think that new green technology will solve all the problems. There is no magic button... I think we are too late. It might have been possible to prevent serious climate change in the 1970s and 1980s, but it isn't any more. We have pumped enough carbon dioxide already into the atmosphere to cause global warming. We are on a roller coaster at the top of the hill and all we can do is hold on tight...

Spiegel Online: You don't have a recipe for saving the world?

Meadows: We don't have to save the world. The world will save itself, like it always has. Sometimes it takes a few million years until the damage is repaired and a new balance has been established. The question is much more: How do we save our civilization?...

Spiegel Online: How will the necessary changes come about?

Meadows: Through a series of crises. It is only when there are abrupt climate changes, unpleasant ones, that the willingness will come about to really do something... Our first book had 13 different scenarios for how the Earth and humanity would develop. Of these, eight or nine were catastrophic, the others were not. But no one was interested in the positive scenarios. They weren't reported upon and people didn't try to live them out.

Image source here.

'Unequivocal, global, and in one direction'

IGSP Climate-Change Index

IGSP: At the United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen, the International Geosphere-Biosphere programme launches the IGBP Climate-Change Index...

It brings together key indicators of global change: carbon dioxide, temperature, sea level and sea ice. The index gives an annual snapshot of how the planet's complex systems -- the ice, the oceans, the land surface and the atmosphere -- are responding to the changing climate. The index rises steadily from 1980 -- the earliest date the index has been calculated. The change is unequivocal, it is global, and, significantly, it is in one direction. The reason for concern becomes clear: in just 30 years we are witnessing major planetary-scale changes.

The index dips in just three years, 1982, 1992 and 1996 and looks effective at capturing major natural events that affect climate, and their knock-on effect on the planet. The dip in the curve in 1992 may have been caused by the massive Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in the Philippines in 1991. The eruption was large enough to affect temperature and sea level on a planetary scale. The other falls coincide with the El Chichon volcanic eruption in Mexico in 1982 and the volcanic eruption on the Caribbean island of Montserrat in 1996. If this link proves robust, the index is an excellent visual tool to show how external events can have rapid planetary-scale effects. Of course, the overall direction of change -- a climbing cumulative index -- highlights the extent human activities are having on the planet's climate system.

Watch a two-minute film of the index on YouTube.

Cosmic crash in Canada boosted life

Did life begin in Sudbury?

Vancouver Sun: The mountain-sized meteorite that struck Sudbury nearly two billion years ago -- already known to have made the northern Ontario city a global mining mecca -- may have also triggered changes in Earth's ocean chemistry that allowed complex life to begin evolving on the planet...

Scientists John Slack and Bill Cannon of the US Geological Survey say the colossal Canadian impact 1.85 billion years ago may have generated an unprecedented 'mega-tsunami' that stirred oxygen into the deep ocean and jump-started the evolution of organisms beyond their bacterial beginnings.

Prior to the massive collision, which scientists have compared to an object the size of Mount Everest striking primeval Canada, anaerobic bacteria living in the depths of the ocean left their traces in distinctive iron formations that can be seen at various sites around Lake Superior...

Then, following the cosmic crash that left a 200-kilometre wide crater in the area around Sudbury, the layer of 'banded' iron formations abruptly stops and is covered by a strata of 'ejecta' -- shocked fragments of rock blasted hundreds of kilometres from the epicentre of the meteorite strike.

A number of Canadian and American scientists have been documenting these Sudbury ejecta sites over the past decade, gradually producing a clearer picture of an event now believed to rival in scale the Mexican impact 65 million years ago that's associated with the demise of the dinosaurs.

But in a 'speculative' paper published in the November issue of the journal Geology, Slack and Cannon suggest the Sudbury meteor strike was so enormous that the super-tsunami and shock waves that fractured parts of the Earth's crust far and wide combined to permanently alter the oxygen makeup of the planet's oceans.

Other scientists, Slack told Canwest News Service, 'have invoked gradual processes in Earth's history' to explain the sudden halt to the bacteria-assisted iron formations about 1.85 billion years ago. 'We're suggesting it was a catastrophic cause' linked to the Sudbury meteorite strike.

The mixing of the oxygenated upper surface of the ocean with oxygen-starved deeper waters may have doomed iron-loving bacteria and created a 'niche' for other microorganisms better suited to a marine environment evolving to favour oxygen-dependent life forms.

Image source here.

For kids of all ages: Lanterns to Copenhagen

Earth Hour Lantern Project:

Send a lantern to Copenhagen

Canadians don't want to go down with the ship

The forecast: Warmer, with a chance of survival

Debra Black, The Toronto Star: Tim Flannery believes the biggest challenge of the 21st century is to create sustainability for the human race. That's par for an environmentalist, and the consensus of a majority of scientists. But the quest is no small task given the resistance and denial in many circles, including among power players in the realms of politics and business...

'If we fail, all of our species' great triumphs, all of our efforts, will have been for naught,' he writes in his latest book Now or Never. 'And perhaps the last 4 billion years will have been for naught as well.'...

Is it as simple as people don't see it? I don't think it's as simple as that. The Europeans see it. They have fostered a whole lot of global energy technology. It's just that North Americans are much closer to a frontier society where business grabs whatever it wants without having to be accountable for the consequences. Canada, the United States and Australia are three great frontier societies. It's not an innately human thing. I think it's a cultural thing.

Would people got down with the ship rather than adopt change? I think if you were a person from a society that had done well from the 20th century then it's hard to let that go... For those people they would rather go down with the ship than adjust to the new world that is emerging.

What would you say to convince people who are naysayers? We're going to have to reach sustainability sooner or later, otherwise we won't have a civilization. This century we're facing some tough barriers. The climate crisis is the most severe. What it actually means in the end is we have to develop business and political models that don't take from society but add something to it.

Canadians, Conservatives differ on climate: poll

The Toronto Star: A new poll suggested most Canadians don't agree with one of the Conservative government's key tenets on climate change. The federal Tories say they won't sign any deal in Copenhagen to replace the Kyoto Protocol unless developing countries also adopt tough targets. But 64 per cent of respondents to a Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey said rich nations have a responsibility to commit to higher and harder targets than developing countries. Most also want to see a binding agreement come out of Copenhagen, and 81 per cent said Canada should act independently of the United States... The Harris-Decima survey shows that 46 per cent of respondents would like to see Canada play a lead role in Copenhagen.

Image: An ark on Turkey's Mount Ararat built by Greenpeace in 2007 (Photo: Manuel Citak / Greenpeace); source here.

H2oil

This is a screenshot. For the animated sequences, go here.

For all the women then, before, and since

National Day of Remembrance and Action On Violence

Against Women

Now you see it, now you don't...

... and look out, here they come:

NATO allies pledge 7,000 more troops for Afghanistan mission

Washington Post: In addition, the US government hopes to dissuade two other major contributors -- Canada and the Netherlands -- from their plans to pull out within two years.

US hopes Canadian troops 'stay as long as they possibly can'

National Post: Barack Obama's national security adviser... Gen. Jones said the July 2011 withdrawal date 'was picked based on the recommendations of what our military commanders thought would be possible to achieve.' He emphasized it was only 'a transition point.'

Different Meanings for 2011 Withdrawal Date

Slate: The Obama administration appears to be saying one thing to lawmakers and another to foreign officials... 'The emphasis on drawdown is for domestic consumption, to appeal to [Obama's] liberal constituency at home,' said a senior official from an allied nation. 'We were told in no uncertain terms that there will be no withdrawal.'

'No Afghanistan withdrawal in 2011'

BBC: 'It's very important that people in Afghanistan hear this very clearly: this is not a withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan in 2011, it is a decision to turn over to the Afghans some of the responsibility where they are ready to accept that responsibility. But in no manner, shape or form is the United States leaving Afghanistan in 2011.'

Image source here.

Crown of Thorns

An image featuring a water flea's 'crown of thorns' -- the snaking ridge at top left -- took top honors in the 2009 BioScapes microscope imaging contest... If water flea parents sense that their habitat is shared by their main predators, tadpole shrimp, the flea offspring sport their pointy crowns -- which are unappetizing to the shrimp. Zoologist Jan Michels, of the Christian Albrecht University in Kiel, Germany, added a dye to reveal the tiny animal's exoskeleton (green) and cellular nuclei (blue smudges). The blue-and-red dots are one of the animal's compound eyes, like those of a fly.

Image source here.

'A president needs a war, or so they say'

The Afghanistan Parenthesis

David Bromwich, Huffington Post: Half of the president's logic believes in the urgency of this mission and half perceives no urgency at all. Since people who fear for their lives tend to err on the side of self-protection, we may infer that something other than the imperative of national self-preservation drove the West Point speech and is driving the new policy. Several possibilities are obvious: President Obama's cautious relationship to the military; his wariness of the ambitious general, David Petraeus, and the commander of forces in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, who is an emanation of Petraeus. By leaking the high-end figure for the numbers of troops he would have liked, McChrystal threatened to outflank the president, and that threat has been quelled only for the moment. Meanwhile, Obama's fear of being called weak on defense by Republicans, and thus seeing his stature in foreign affairs diminished for the rest of his term, was doubtless a motive as well. A president needs a war, or so they say...

President Obama closed his speech by offering his large American audience a warm bath of self-love about the American way of life... This long peroration was ordinary and at the same time reminiscent of the war speeches of George W. Bush. By contrast Obama did not talk about the abstract issue that would have taken some courage to broach: the danger that war is becoming an integrated part of the American way of life...

Barack Obama is the most convincing person he knows. He can convince himself of a proposition 'A,' and a second proposition, 'Not A,' and come to believe that the two may be combined. At West Point, he seemed to want to declare a policy and take it back in a single breath. But there are circles that can't be squared; and it is with war as with other fatal commitments: the way in is not the way out.

Obama's war of necessity

Paul Woodward, War in Context: Among the many unanswered questions about President Obama's approach to the war in Afghanistan, there is at this point one thing about which we can be certain: He does indeed regard this as a war of necessity. But necessary for what?... Necessary for re-election?

Maybe. The answer to that question might well be contained in the genesis of July 2011 as the date US troops will start pulling out of Afghanistan. As CBS News reports, that date is 'locked in.' The president told press secretary Robert Gibbs, the date -- (contrary to assertions from US senators) IS locked in -- there is no flexibility. Troops WILL start coming home in July 2011. Period. It's etched in stone. Gibbs said he even had the chisel.'

The Pentagon doesn't like firm dates. It cleaves firmly to the line that everything is provisional, depending on the current conditions. So it's hard to believe that General McChrystal or General Petraeus would have volunteered this timetable. Did it come from David Axelrod? Does July 2011 fit as a 'necessity' into a 2012 campaign calendar?

Meet the Commanded-in-Chief

Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch: On Tuesday night from the US Military Academy at West Point, in his first prime-time presidential address to the nation, Barack Obama surrendered... From today on, think of him not as the commander-in-chief, but as the commanded in chief. And give credit to the victors. Their campaign was nothing short of brilliant. Like the policy brigands they were, they ambushed the president, held him up with their threats, brought to bear key media players and Republican honchos, and in the end made off with the loot...

Obama is not a man who appears in prop military jackets with 'commander-in-chief' hand-stitched across his heart before hoo-aahing crowds of soldiers, as our last president loved to do, and yet in his first months in office he has increasingly appeared at military events and associated himself with things military. This speech represents another step in that direction. Has a president ever, in fact, given a non-graduation speech at West Point, no less a major address to the American people? Certainly the choice of venue, and so the decision to address a military audience first and other Americans second, not only emphasized the escalatory military path chosen in Afghanistan, but represented a kind of symbolic surrender of civilian authority.

Image source here.

US Afghan escalation: Indifference to reality

America's undying faith in war

Paul Woodward, War in Context: In one of the well-known Sufi stories about Mullah Nasruddin, the mullah has just returned from the market with a basket of red hot chili peppers. He is sitting in a room eating one after another and his mouth swells and his lips bleed and a student finds him and asks in bewilderment why the mullah is punishing himself. Nasruddin replies, 'I keep on thinking that the next pepper will be sweet.' ... This is the pathological shadow of the American can-do optimistic spirit: faith in a future uncolored by the past.

Going beyond necessity

Paul Woodward, War in Context: America's foreign misadventures now, as so often in the past, are spurred by a missionary zeal. However cynical a policymaker's motives might be, there are plenty of young Americans on the ground who sincerely believe that they are in Afghanistan to help... The Pottery Barn Rule was invoked to underline America's moral responsibility for the fate of Iraq... What we should instead keep in mind is what might be called the Rear End Rule: If you slam into the back of someone else's car, don't expect the owner of the other car to be grateful when you solemnly promise to repair the damage yourself.

Mullah Omar Demands Western Departure

Informed Comment: Afghanistan is our home and nobody negotiates with anyone about the ownership of their home and about how to share sovereignty and management responsibilities of their home. Nobody will give up their right to be the owner of their home and nobody will willfully lose their authority in their own home. The foreigners have taken over the home of the Afghans by force and cruelty. If they want a solution to the problem, they should first end their occupation of Afghanistan. Full text is here.

Karzai's Fall

TNR: 'Karzai knows very well that the United States is not going to pull out its troops,' said Afghan political analyst Waheed Mojda. 'He does not have to comply with their demands; there is nothing they can do. They are in Afghanistan for their own strategic interests, not for him.' Those strategic interests are coming under increasing scrutiny, but the administration, and numerous commentators, are bending over backwards to make the case for the US military presence in Afghanistan. They conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda and argue confidently that a loss in Afghanistan could trigger a regional collapse. Those who remember Vietnam and the Cold War experience a shudder of recognition.

Digby, Hullabaloo: The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the standoff with Iran and all the other obsessions with the mideast are at least informed, if not entirely motivated, by larger geopolitical efforts to maintain stability at a time of impending competition over resources and access to them... We don't talk about any of that because it might lead us to get serious about changing our way of life... And frankly, maintaining a military presence everywhere is necessary to preserve American global dominance. Period.

George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism (1945)

Indifference to Reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts... Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them.

Image source here.

Full Moon over Vancouver

'The real villain is Canada'

Canada's image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is to whaling

The tar barons have held the nation to ransom. This thuggish petro-state is today the only obstacle to a deal in Copenhagen

George Monbiot, The Guardian: When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world's peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again...

Here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada... It is now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations... The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren't worth the paper they're written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.

After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008 it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done the most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world's 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th, Canada came 59th.

In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by this bullying... A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth...

The tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada's politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place... Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of Neanderthals to trample over it... Get-rich schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world.

I will not pretend that this county is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?

Image; Syncrude oil sands, mine and refinery; source here.