An Adventure into the Great Bear Rainforest (Part 2)

This trip into the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR) was rich in learning. It would be impossible to describe all the knowledge and experiences gained through it. Two experiences stand out in my mind and may help me illustrate.The first experience was the opportunity to observe wild life in the GBR environment. I had mentioned the many encounters with whales in my previous post. But this time we were on land in a stand overlooking a creek. We were fortunate enough to see a number of black bears hunting fish in preparation of their hibernation.[All photos courtesy of Mike Robbins].

One of the three black bears that we were able to observe was an older one, getting slow and less successful in catching fish. It fed on the leftovers of the other bears. It was not certain to survive the coming winter. Watching it was sad but reminded me of the immutable realities of life.

The ultimate experience was to be able to see the very rare Spirit Bear and to observe it for over half an hour relatively close. The Spirit bear was the most successful in catching fish. Apparently he has an advantage because of its white fur; fish don't get alarmed as much as with black bears. Another amazing fact I learned from our guide is that bears artificially constipate themselves ahead of hibernation by eating sand with the fish. In spring they then consume a specific plant that gets them normalized again. In the first photo below you can see the Spirit Bear looking for the fish hiding under a tree fallen into the creek .

In the second photo you can see the Spirit Bear finishing a large fish it caught a minute earlier.

Until very recently Gitga'at people were forbidden to speak about any sightings of Spirit Bears in order to protect them from hunters. But with support from Tides Canada the Gitga'at people have set up a watch program that has significantly reduced hunting and poaching in their territory, though not completely eliminated them.

The second experience that marked my memory of this trip was the visit to Whale Point. We landed on the southern tip of Gil island at a rugged rocky coast (no docks of any kind) and climbed a steep hillside of slippery black rocks. There we found two wooden buildings. A house in a small clearing and at the cliff overlooking the sea, a barrack. It turns out these are the home and workplace for Janie Wray and Hermann Meuter for the last 11 years! The house was built without cutting a single tree, using mostly drift wood, we were told. Power is generated through 2 banks of solar cells, one tree-top wind generator, and a run-of-the-river generator all charging a bank of 12 volt batteries. The batteries in turn feed a DC/AC inverter that provides 110V AC for the house and the barrack.

The barrack houses a lab (part of what Janie and Hermann call their Cetacea Lab) with electronic gear to listen and record whale signals from hydrophone (underwater microphones) placed at strategic points around Whale Point. Over the years Janie and Hermann have not only accumulated an extraordinary collection of recorded whales vocalizations but gained amazing insights into the whale songs construction. Janie told us about their observation of a whale adding a "sonnet" or segment to the pod's song, which then gets picked up by the rest of the pod. They also developed a number of catalogs for the different whales observed in the region.

 You can learn more about this amazing story of commitment at forwahles.org where you can read about Janie and Hermann work and even try to listen live to whale signals.

Of Permaculture and the Second Renaissance

Through a tweet by my friend Mat Milan (@mmilan) I got to read Robert Paterson's interesting post "Is this the time for a New Renaissance and Reformation", in which he discusses Permaculture vs. industrial food production and extrapolates to other areas of human civilization.

While I agree with Paterson's analysis on how we got ourselves into this mess and was thrilled to learn about Permaculture as an alternative, his post triggered a number of questions in my mind, mostly about why we developed industrial production methods and if the transition to a Permaculture society is reasonably possible.

Root Causes

Let's consider the first question. Yes, human ego is still at the center of the universe and we still largely subscribe to the notion that we are masters of nature and we can form it to our will with our technology. But the continuous drive of labor division and specialization had started long before medieval times and is still going strong. One of it's roots is the consumerist culture that has become the expression of this iteration of human civilization. Another is the unchecked growth of population, which demands ever higher productivity in goods and services, and particularly in food production. This in turn leads to industrial-type agricultural and animal production with high-yield single-crop/animal multiple harvests requiring high levels of energy input (fertilizers, machinery etc.). This need for continuous productivity improvements drives the necessity for specialization in knowledge and skills.

As the population and consumerism pressures continued unabated, further productivity gains could only be achieved by expanding the level of specialization from local to national, to regional, and ultimately to global scale; hence what we refer to as Globalization. The structures that developed for this labor division and specialization were mostly hierarchical in nature with the unavoidable centers of wealth and power that are integral to hierarchies. As Ronald Wright describes in his book "A short History of Progress" these civilization structures emerged in a particular location of Earth, grew rapidly until their natural resources were exhausted and then faltered or moved to a different location.

As long as these structures operated at the local level they had a possibility to move to a different location. As the structures became global in scope they had less and less options to relocate. hence the current global crisis. The central hierarchical system is reaching its limits because it cannot consolidate to less than one center!

The Emerging New Structures

As the old system reaches it limits a new system with a fundamentally different structure must emerge, which most probably will not be hierarchical. Recent events seem to confirm this trend: traditional global systems are failing while decentralized, peer-to-peer, and local systems seem to succeed overnight: Skype, Twitter, Craig's List, micro financing, eat local, open source concepts, creative commons, community initiatives etc.

The catalyst in this transformation seems to be the Internet. At the recent Toronto Planners Unite 2009 event Mark Earls author of "Herd" spoke about the crucial role of copying in human behavior. Copying requires seeing what's to be copied; and if nothing else, the Internet is making all sorts of new ideas and initiatives visible to a global audience. The flock behavior can only accelerate and the importance of communities will explode.

Values Convergence

Interestingly, the values embodied in these emerging new structures seem to be converging. In a recent Twitter conversation with Alexander Osterwalder, Peter Jones and others about how a sustainable business model can be defined, we converged that it is the sustainable value that an organization provides to its "stakeholders, the community at large, and the environment". I was pleasantly surprised while reading about Permaculture to find out that its core values are "Earthcare, Peoplecare, and Fairshare". Do you recognize a pattern?

We could be at the cusp of a major transformational step in our evolution, which we usually call a revolution. The changes coming are going to be radical and difficult, possibly violent. I hope they will lead to a New Renaissance and Reformation!

A New Celebration of Christmas

Around the same time two years ago, I found myself completely overwhelmed with demands of business, social obligations, and the holidays season. It was so bad that it started me thinking about what kind of life style I wanted and how much control I really had over mine. I observed at the same time that everyone in my family, and in fact in my circle of friends and colleagues, was whining about the stress of the holidays season.

Something in my brain reached a critical threshold and I suddenly had the strong desire to change my situation. Before my resolve could falter, I gathered my wife and three daughters and submitted to them an idea: what if we all agreed that we did not want nor need presents for Christmas; and what if instead we (individually or collectively) estimated the amount of money we usually spend on such presents and donated such amount to the charities of our choice?

I was expecting some resistance or a discussion. To my surprise everyone approved of the idea. And although we weren't sure how this would impact the whole holidays experience, we decided to go with it. We made one exception: Children under 12 years still get presents.

Christmas morning in our household is usually for opening presents. That year we just spent joyful time together. The girls decided to prepare rolled grapevine leaves, a middle eastern specialty. Everyone had to chip in. The hours spent together around the kitchen table made for the best Christmas memories we ever had. One by one I started hearing comments on how wonderful it was to escape the shopping frenzy and shed the season's stress. We all also felt that giving more to charities was much more in line with the spirit of Christmas.

This year is our third celebrating Christmas in this new way, and we're still loving it.

Season's greetings!

Wind beneath your wings...

City News reported today on the battle between the pro and against camps for the planned test wind turbine in Lake Ontario near the shores of Scarborough. This was not the first time I hear about such controversy. A few months back a friend of mine, who is a councilor in a municipality near Wasaga Beach, was telling me about similar lines of battle drawn in his community regarding a wind mill farm being considered in his area.

Watching footage from the Scarborough meeting I felt like being in a sinking boat with people in it arguing whether they should use sails or oars to change direction. A lot of the arguments were driven by emotion, fear of the unknown, and also ideology. Many local residents were concerned with the impact on their property values, hazard to birds, possible noise pollution etc. Proponents argued about the planet, CO2 emissions, footprint etc. Supporters were bussed from afar. What a mess!

If there is anything we should learn from the emerging World 2.0 it is that we cannot solve any issues of significance without collaboration. What would have been a much better approach for conducting such meetings would have been to do the following:

• Listen carefully to the concerns of the local community. Allowing people to air their concerns easily makes them more willing to listen in return to other points of view.
  

• Make sure the facts being used for the various arguments are correct and non-ambiguous. In the case of Scarborough reports were initially talking of wind towers of over 100 feet height. That was later explained to be the total tower height; the wind mills would be much lower over the water surface.
  

• Prepare replies to the concerns that are based on facts (data) not opinions and ideology. The questions asked are legitimate and the concerns seem to be very similar in all communities where significant structures are planned to be constructed. Investing in well researched answers would provide an efficient, respectful, and constructive response to the concerns.

• Consider the impact from alternative solutions when discussing wind mill or solar panel farms. Would residents prefer a gas power generation plant instead? A nuclear reactor? A modern coal fired plant? Without considering the alternatives we would be deciding between the environmental solution and doing nothing, which is not really an option.
  

• Admit that massive renewable energy generation is still a new field, particularly in Canada. No one has all the answers. Remember the euphoria about nuclear and hydro energy few decades back, and the reckoning of their environmental long-term impact later. We all have to learn in this new process and we can't do it in confrontational battle lines. Only good constructive conversations can help us learn how best to proceed.

The loss of Natural Capital

Economist Pavan Sukhdev in a recent interview with Deutsche Welle (DW) provided some interesting numbers on the value of "natural capital" being lost compared with the financial capital lost during the current financial markets crisis.

While the losses to financial firms were estimated to be $1 Trillion to $1.5 Trillion, a task force called "The Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity" (TEEB) headed by Sukhdev has looked at the cost of deforestation and degradation of the environment and estimated the loss in human welfare as capital item to be $2 Trillion to $4.5 Trillion yearly for the past several years.

Sukhdev asks "Why is it that a one-off loss of $1.5 trillion in financial capital to a group of Wall Street firms attracts so much attention, whereas the ongoing loss per annum of twice this amount of natural capital is barely reported?" He offers two main reasons: First, natural capital is public property whereas financial capital is mostly private. Second, the losses in natural capital are ongoing and gradually increasing, so they're not as noticeable as a big loss over a short period of time.

TEEB has also estimated the investments needed to address the loss in natural capital. They seem quite modest when compared with the trillions of dollars invested in the bailout of the financial system. I liked Sukhdev's crisp way of presenting fundamental facts. He articulates what many people have been feeling instinctively around the world or have been attempting to put into perspective. The full text of the interview can be found here.

One dark thought that Sukhdev's data triggered in my mind was that unless something else forces change, it's going to take a catastrophic natural capital loss over a relatively short period of time for our governments to recognize the urgency and act as decisively as they're trying to do in the current financial crisis.