Land Value Taxation

This video briefly explains an alternative concept for taxation. Setting the relative values of land would of course be a complex detail of such an idea, but no more complex than the underpinnings of our existing tax labyrinth. It would be a very big software model to test before delivering the news! Nonetheless, the central notion is very interesting and more details are available at the Earthsharing site.

Santa's Carbon Footprint

Sadly, it seems Santa is just another net contributor to our cultural conundrum.

Kirk has paddled on

Kirk Wipper, a truly great Canadian, died two days ago. He gathered hundreds of canoes at his Canadian Canoe Museum and was awarded the Order of Canada. I had the pleasure of spending some time with him on the final day of the 2008 David Thompson Brigade thanks to the efforts of Linda and Eric Williams.

Play nice

This photo sequence is not from a zoo or staged or photoshopped. The three fully fed young cheetahs were photographed for 15 minutes as they licked and petted the baby impala before it rejoined the herd. Of course on some other day it will be a different story ending.

Invasive earthworms

I have been catching up on some reading this week. An article in Scientific American (March 2009) might be interesting to those who fish or garden. The article's author has a copy at:
www.michaeltennesen.com/pdfs/sciam_worms_tennesen.pdf

Essentially it explains that after the last ice age the forests around the Great Lakes developed without earthworms. And now that people are moving earthworms around as fish bait, in vehicle mud and in compost it has been discovered that certain non-native worms (such as the "night crawler") eat up the dead leafs which are needed for new trees to grow. The article says, "As a result, some northern hardwood forests that once had a lush understory now have but a single species of native herb and virtually no tree seedlings."

Needless to say, it is impossible to eradicate worms so if you fish with worms, you now need to know if the species is foreign or native, or at the very least, don't let any escape. The article also points out that the idea of a community compost sounded like a good idea but now it is just a highly effective way to disperse the problematic critters.
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Travel decision

There are a lot of countries in the world that sound interesting to visit. Norway and Japan are two that have been on my list for a long time. But every now and then I read that Norway and Japan continue to hunt whales. If you have seen the movie The Cove, you will also learn more about Japan's hunt of bottlenose dolphins. Those that aren't sold for 5-6 figures to commercial aquariums are herded around the corner and killed. The meat is toxic so it tends to be mis-labeled and then sold as whale meat. Lovely.

The Great Disruption ?

In his NY Times column Thomas Friedman, author of the books The World is Flat and Hot Flat and Crowded, recently hypothesized:

What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”
For more from Friendman check out his NY Times columns and videos.

Acceleration

Isn't it strange that we live in an era that has seen such a spectacular use of information and communication technology and yet it all sits on top of a comparatively archaic system of extracting and cracking hydrocarbon molecules? What do you think it is going to take to move away from the hydrocarbon economy?

Global hydrocarbon-released CO2 grew 3.1 percent per year between 2000 and 2006, more than twice the 1990's rate. I predict equal or greater growth for another 10-15 years. After that I imagine we will experience some unbelievable polar ice events. The industrialized world will have a collective "holly crap!" moment that will even produce a massive shift in U.S. and Canadian policy to drive solar, geothermal and other non-carbon-based power production and a renewed power distribution infrastructure. And then over an agonizingly slow period of 10-20 years, carbon consuming technologies (power plants and transportation systems) will be forced out of operation. I predict Canadian governments will fail to help companies develop core technologies and we will buy virtually everything from abroad and further hollow out the economy.

The Earth Policy Institute newsletters have periodic reports on this stuff worth reading. But it may scare the crap out of you. If it does, write a short letter (or an email if you are only somewhat alarmed) to every politician you can think of and tell them to show some leadership and backbone and to steer our society towards a consumption model that is sustainable for a century from now, not just another decade or two. If you have kids, do you think they will want to have kids?

Necessary Journeys - Finding Farley

I know people who have gone for multi-month road trips or walked the Appalachian Trail and even some very long canoe trips. Cool. Exciting. And clearly well beyond my travel vitae. But I am in awe of that elite group who qualify to be what I would call Great Modern-day Explorers - GMEs.

At the very top of the GME pile is the Gluttons For Punishment category presently dominated by Colin Angus and Julie Wafaei. Colin did the first human-powered circumnavigation of the world. We heard some of their stories last year when they spoke at the University of Waterloo. Somehow they were able to spend five months together rowing across the Atlantic and still get married. Their videos and books will amaze you.

My other favourite adventurers are Karsten Heuer & Leanne Allison. They are just finishing a cross-Canada adventure journey - Finding Farley . Leanne won several awards for the brilliant video Being Caribou - imagine walking across the tundra in Yukon and Alaska following a caribou herd, without having a dozen porters or helicopters dashing ahead to tell you where the herd went while you were asleep. Karsten wrote a book of the same name as well as Walking the Big Wild which describes his Yellowstone to Yukon walk (virtually no trail by the way). Y2Y is an important conservation project worth supporting.

GPS, synthetic fiber clothing and airplanes have fundamentally changed the challenges of undertaking adventurous journeys. These folks have redefined adventure and exploration. Someday I hope to accomplish a fraction of one of their journeys.

Ecological overshoot

"Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot-and-collapse phenomenon. One of their favorite examples began in 1944, when the Coast Guard introduced 29 reindeer on remote St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea to serve as the backup food source for the 19 men operating a station there. After World War II ended a year later, the base was closed and the men left the island. When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist David Kline visited St. Matthew in 1957, he discovered a thriving population of 1,350 reindeer feeding on the thick mat of lichen that covered the 332-square-kilometer (128-square-mile) island. In the absence of any predators, the population was exploding. By 1963, it had reached 6,000. He returned to St. Matthew in 1966 and discovered an island strewn with reindeer skeletons and not much lichen. Only 42 of the reindeer survived: 41 females and 1 not entirely healthy male. There were no fawns. By 1980 or so, the remaining reindeer had died off."

From Lester R. Brown's Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble