Remember the joy of Cycling

I enjoy riding my bicycle. I find it gives me, in the words of Alice Monroe, "the freedom of a great unemotional happiness." I enjoy feeling the exhilarating freedom of moving on my own power so quickly, quietly, and nimbly through city streets and country roads, liberated from the metal cages we so often ride in, experiencing one of the great passions of my life, movement, wandering and change through my own body. I can think of few things more rewarding than seeing the world up close, feeling its streets and walkways, its sunshine and shade, smelling its smells. Few things make me feel so alive and connected as the simple act of riding a bicycle.

So why do we so often fall back on joyless ideological arguments for cycling? Why do we insist that such a pleasurable thing must have the added benefit of saving the world? A cycling web-log I read recently claimed the city could cut 20% of its greenhouse gas emissions if everyone cycled to work one day a week. Alas, given the actual sources of greenhouse gases, cycling to work one day a week would only reduce our greenhouse emissions by about one percent. Now, even a one percent reduction in greenhouse gases matters, so by all means cycle or take public transit when you can.

But I don't feel any need to justify my enjoyment of cycling. I love to ride. If you want a reason to take up riding a bicycle, I can tell you that you will quite probably find many pleasures, including ones you did not expect, on a bike, whether you first came to cycling to escape outrageous gas prices, get fit, or make a statement on the environment. I hope many other people get to experience the pleasure of a bike ride (particularly Rob Ford and Case Ootes, who seem sadly determined to deprive themselves of it).

If you enjoy cycling, never forget it. Never forget to remind other people of it, either, particularly if they don't cycle themselves (yet). Never fall for the temptation to think or write about cycling as a sacrifice, some grim ecological duty. I don't believe painting the bicycle as a duty attracts very many people to cycling, and worse, it ignores the sheer joy that (thank the Creator) some of us find in cycling.

Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace opened in Canada this Friday to some surprisingly bad reviews. I suppose this should not surprise me. Maybe an important story will always appear dull if you judge it by the standards of the profitably trivial fare that washes over movie screens every day of the year. Perhaps you have to fly into a rage at the film industry, and stay away from the theaters for months at a time, as I have done, in order to appreciate a beautiful film such as Amazing Grace.

But Susan Walker, who reviewed the film for the Toronto Star, expressed an opinion that astonished me when she wrote that Wilberforce's life did not "merit a 111-minute theatrical feature." Excuse me? This man stood at the center of one of the most important movements of history. However you apportion the credit, the anti-slavery movement in Britain overturned a blot on civilization which had existed throughout all of recorded history. And the anti-slavery movement did it first. The title has a supremely appropriate allusion: by an Amazing Grace, we believe, we know, that we as a society, a people, even a species can free ourselves from the most deep-rooted of evils. Thanks to Wilberforce, thanks to Granville Sharpe, thanks to Olaudah Equiano, to the Religious Society of Friends, and to all the people great and small who stood up against it, slavery no longer enjoys legal sanction in our world.

That means more than some reviewers seem to think. Rick Groen, who reviewed the film for the Toronto Globe and Mail, wrote that it left him "emotionally untouched". I don't know what would touch him. This movie requires the audience to bring to it some imagination of their own, an appreciation of what words mean. It shows us the chains, shows us the hold of a slave ship, shows us the exact dimensions of a slave berth. If the abolition of that horror leaves you untouched, consider this: for those of us working to end other horrors which have persisted from the dawn of human history until the opening of the twenty-first century, the name Wilberforce means hope. Three hundred years ago, reactionaries could argue that human nature, in its essentials, would never change, that no reform could ever have a lasting effect. After William Wilberforce, that argument has lost much of its force. People tell us that we will never see a world without war, that humans carry conflict encoded in our genes. They said the same thing about slavery, too, until 1833. The great emancipation tells us that the worst of our history need not shape our destiny. And that does bring tears to my eyes, because it seems to me a truly, deeply, wonderfully amazing Grace.

Rob Ford

Toronto city councillor Rob Ford said:

I can't support bike lanes. Roads are built for buses, cars, and trucks. My heart bleeds when someone gets killed, but it's their own fault at the end of the day.

I like Rob Ford. He's always struck me as an independent individual who stands up for what he believes. He doesn't take his convictions out of any standard package that I know of. I probably give him too much credit for not following the consensus of the "left/arts" crowd in this city. But I do respect the man.

That said, in this case, he's made a mistake. The law which defines the purpose of public roads in Ontario, the Ontario Highway Traffic act, defines a vehicle this way:

“vehicle” includes a motor vehicle, trailer, traction engine, farm tractor, road-building machine, bicycle and any vehicle drawn, propelled or driven by any kind of power, including muscular power, but does not include a motorized snow vehicle or a street car; (“véhicule”)

The Province of Ontario, which has the authority to build public roads and set the rules for their use, says that bicycles do belong on roads. The people of Ontario speak through that law, and until those who disagree change the laws (anyone has the right to try), cyclists by definition have the right to use the roads.

I have to go further; I think Councillor Ford should apologise. As a public servant, he has a responsibility to uphold the law. The law defines the public road as a space where people have a right to ride our bicycles. If someone dies in a crash while exercising a legal right, the blame does not rest with them. Any driver who carelessly hits a cyclist will quickly discover that. Nothing says Mr. Ford has to approve of spending city money for bicycle lanes, but out of respect for both motorists and cyclists, I urge him to retract his comments.

Drivers...

To the driver in a long stream of cars who let me turn left on Saturday from Dundas on to Gilmour Avenue... thanks.

To the driver who let me turn left from Annette onto Runnymede Road... thanks.

To the drivers who took extra care passing me on a snowy day... thanks.

Everyone who cycles in Toronto has plenty of stories of rude, impatient, or just plain psychotic drivers. Many of us find the sight of someone shrieking curses at us while operating a two-ton battering ram so alarming that we forget something: most drivers in this city, most of the time, behave with courtesy, respect, and responsibility. We remember the worst of the drivers we meet, and we remember the worst things they do.

I want to highlight the best: the drivers who let us in, the drivers who wait behind us for a safe place to pass, the drivers who stop to let us go. The polite drivers. The majority of people, and the majority of drivers in this city.

To all of you... thanks.

Bike repairs

I recently had occasion to take a car in for its biannual drive-clean test. The engine emissions passed the test comfortably, but the car needed an oil change, which meant an inspection, which uncovered problems with the ball joints and the brake pads and rotors. It all cost over two thousand dollars.

Last week, I rode my bicycle to the Loblaws, and noticed that the ratchet in my rear hub had started slipping badly. On the way home, I found myself in the middle of a road with a car approaching, pedaling furiously, and getting nowhere. Alarmed, I went to the bike shop. The proprietor cleaned and greased the wheel ratchet, then gave me the bad news: back gears of my bicycle came riveted to the hub, and the shop owner could not take it apart to fix it. After a decade of service, my faithful steed needs a new back wheel. The bill could run as high as sixty-five dollars.

Aside from taking less space on the street, not adding to the Earth's warming or my waistline, and (most important) making getting around the city a pleasure, my bicycle costs thirty times less than the cars I pay to maintain and insure. Buying, fueling, and insuring a car can cost up to half the after-tax income of many workers. A cycling colleague of mine once put it this way: drivers spend more time working for their cars than they save by driving them.

Mr. Wilkins and Civil Aviation

David Wilkins, the United States ambassador to Canada, has scolded Stockwell Day, Canada's minister for public safety, for raising the case of Maher Arar. In 2002, the United States deported Arar, a Canadian of Syrian origin, back to his country of origin based on a suspicion that he had links to terrorists. The Syrians jailed and tortured him. This week, in response to an inquiry that cleared Mr. Arar of any wrongdoing, the Canadian government compensated him. Stockwell Day then lobbied the United States government to take him off their watch list. Apparently on behalf of the Bush administration, the US ambassador, has described Canada's advocacy for Mr. Arar as an unjustified interference in American affairs.

In a less connected world, Mr. Wilkins would have a perfectly good point. However, not only do we live in a connected world, we live in a connected world where the United States government policy promotes connections in the form of free trade agreements, and undermines them by imposing national security restrictions. One of these restrictions looks set to undermine a basic foundation of the current international system: air travel.

The Bush Administration has not merely forbidden Mr. Arar to enter the United States, but have banned him from American airspace. This inconveniences Mr. Arar a lot more than simply denying him the delights of holidaying in Disney World. Very few commercial flights across Canada can guarantee they will not at any time enter sovereign US airspace, so Mr. Arar will find it difficult to find a commercial flight within Canada, to say nothing of the problems he will face should he wish to visit Mexico or points south. It also violates a principle of cooperation in air space and in maintaining the safety of flight that Canada and the United States, as well as most other countries, have shared for a long time. A series of treaties in force since 1944 govern access to national airspace by international flights. These treaties make provision for aviation safety, and enshrine the principle of equal and reciprocal access to national airspace. At least in principle, asserting that the United States can ban Mr. Arar from traveling in their airspace for any reason or no reason brings this principle into question. It undermines the understanding upon which international civil aviation depends.

If Canada decided to retaliate by picking an American at random, say Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, and making him persona non grata in our airspace, Senator Lieberman would find it very hard to find a commercial flight from most parts of North America to Europe. But that kind of retaliation, or really any kind of retaliation, would undermine the cooperation upon which aviation safety depends. The international air travel system depends on people and nations making their choices based on safety, not what they happen to feel like doing. In that sense, the banning of Mr. Arar belongs to that class of acts, like counterfeiting, that people can only get away with because most people don't do them.

Credibility versus Relevance

In Balloon Juice yesterday, John Cole linked to a story in the New York Sun by an associate of Ahmed Chalabi, arguing that the insurgents in Iraq have started to collapse. Cole titled his post The Credibility Gap, which in my opinion misses the point. We have certainly seen so many breathless announcements that American efforts in Iraq have "turned a corner" that claims such as these merely remind us of a long record of disappointment and death.

But when I read about claims that the insurgents in Iraq have begun to despair, I do not look for errors or distortions in the facts. I welcome news, any news, that anyone anywhere has grown tired of killing people, and if even one insurgent in Iraq has given up planting improvised explosive devices, good for them. But in relation to overall American policy, this argument looks more and more like one element in a shell game. Put simply, the measures that many Bush partisans use to claim success have little to do with the goals they hold up for the project.

When the proponents of George Bush's policy in Iraq want to justify the invasion, they hold up the hope of a viable liberal democracy planted in the center of the Middle East and the Arab Muslim world. When they measure success, they speak of insurgents losing steam. But it seems quite clear by now that it takes far more than the end of an insurgency to bring forth a democratic government capable of dealing with the inter-ethnic conflicts in Iraq today.

Given the history of inter-ethnic conflicts, given the dismal success rates of democratic regimes implanted from outside, and given the record of overly optimistic claims of impending success in Bush Administration policies, I can only hope that this time, the insurgents have begun to put down their arms. But the winding down of the insurgency does not necessarily presage the emergence of a liberal democracy in Iraq, articles such as the one John Cole links have little relevance to the larger prospect of success for Bush in Iraq.

We need a better vocabulary

Every cyclist regularly meets seriously rude drivers. Faced with a driver honking, screaming, or cursing at me, I have two bad choices: I can say, and do, nothing, and give them the impression that I agree they have no obligation to share the road with me, or I can use the one gesture universally recognized in traffic. Unfortunately, that one gesture does more than ask a driver to back off, or reconsider their actions. It communicates hostility, disrespect, and aggression.

We need a gesture that tells the driver we think he or she should smarten up, pay attention to the road, and stop honking or cursing at us for doing things drivers on four wheels do all the time. But we need a way to communicate that without getting aggressive or nasty, and escalating tempers further.

The OMB Makes a Decision

Among other things, OMB stands for Ontario Municipal Board, a court of last resort for scuffles between developers, city councils, preservationists, neighbourhood groups, and affordable housing advocates. Recently, the OMB handed down their decision on an appeal launched by a group of developers who want to build in the Queen Street West triangle. The OMB decision essentially gave the developers everything they wanted.

The Queen West triangle, so-called because it sits in a triangle formed from the street grid and a railway that cuts through at an angle, has come into prominence as a fashionable area for artists and designers. Attracted by its convenient location, access to public transit, and hip reputation, developers wanted to build there. The developers, naturally, wanted the highest possible density. The community had other ideas. They formed a neighbourhood association, called Active-18, and fought the development plans tooth and nail. They called themselves YIMBY (yes in my back yard), and claimed they did favour development, just not the high density the builders had in mind.

Nobody doubts that Toronto will grow, or that it has to grow; indeed, very few people claim that Toronto's population should not grow. But the Ontario government has wisely ordered a green belt around the Greater Toronto Area, checking the sprawl that leads to choked congestion and smog. That means we have to build more and higher buildings in the city, and that, inevitably, means we need more tall apartment buildings. Everyone in Toronto will tell you that as a general rule, this makes sense. But many of them will also tell you that nobody should do it where they live. Everyone supports intensification; nobody really wants sprawl. But most of us have really good reasons to intensify somebody else's neighbourhood.

Either out of genuine support for affordable housing downtown, or else out of a desire to look good, one of the firms developing in the Queen West Triangle, one of the builders arranged with St Clare's Multifaith Housing to build 199 affordable housing units, including lofts suitable for artists' live/work spaces. Unfortunately, in order to build these units, they must demolish an old industrial building in which a number of artists have illegally established lofts. The neighbourhood group has rallied against this, despite a consultant's report, which notes, among other things, that the lofts in the old building not only violate zoning laws, but my also violate fire codes: ...fire protection of the existing structural elements may not meet the requirements of the Ontario Building Code." Opposition to the replacement of 48 Abell with expanded affordable housing also ignores questions about the affordability of the existing artists' lofts, and does not address the plans to more than double the number of available affordable housing units.

Someone who only read the comments on this project in Toronto's local press could easily get the impression that a tyrannical OMB had sided with money and profit over community. I did not see a single comment which mentioned that, whatever the problems with their decision, the OMB backed a plan to create 100 affordable housing units in a city starved for them. Nor did the many protests against the OMB decision address the real need for intensification in the Greater Toronto Area. Toronto politicians, commentators, and civic leaders have so much invested in the "neighbourhood" paradigm that they fail to note that sometimes, local interests must make some sacrifices for the greater good. As long as many influential people in this city refuse to condemn any NIMBY position, no matter how harmful or heartless, the city will need the OMB to provide adult supervision.

Catfish recipe

I recently discovered the pleasures of cooking and eating American farmed catfish. Fish experts consider catfish farming one of the most sustainable ways of raising fish for human consumption; the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program rates farmed catfish as a best choice for our health and the health of the environment. The Endangered Fish Alliance recommends farmed catfish as a sustainable food choice.

For this recipe, you will need to buy fish without marinade. For some reason, all the catfish available at supermarkets in Toronto come with marinade on them, so you will have to seek out a fish market. The fish shop in the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto sells excellent catfish. If you live outside a major city centre, you may have trouble finding catfish. When I went shopping for catfish in Kenora, I could only buy apologies.

Spicy baked catfish, for two:

1 fillet catfish (300 grams)
4 tbsp ketchup or tomato paste (59ml)
1/2 tsp ground cayenne pepper (2.5ml)
1 1/2 tsp ground cumin (7.5ml)
1 tsp soy sauce (5ml)
1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce (2.5 ml or 2 drips)

1. pre-heat oven to 450 F (230 C)
2. mix ketchup or tomato paste with spices, soy and Worcestershire to make a sauce with a thick, slightly gummy consistency
3. brush it on one side of the fillet, and place on a wire rack in a pan
4. bake for 15-18 minutes, or until fish flakes.

You can serve the fish on a bed of rice or couscous.

For a less spicy version, reduce or omit the cayenne.

Off on the right wheel...

I have one New Year's resolution this year: drive less, cycle more. Thanks to a warm start to the year, I had ice-free roads and a chance to cycle on the first day, going to a party put on by a colleague in Christian Peacemaker Teams. I found that a sedentary fall had not left me unfit for cycling, and that I still enjoy it.

I would like to emphasise that most of all. Cycle, if you must, because bicycles do not contribute to global warming; cycle, if you choose, because it offers an easy and useful way to burn fat from your waistline. But if you want a reason to bicycle, do it because it offers more pleasure than most other forms of transportation.

See you, I hope perhaps more often, in the New Year.

The Tassé Report

The Tassé report on the Toronto Port Authority has come out, and it has dashed the hopes of Toronto City Centre Airport opponents in nearly every particular. Mr. Tassé states clearly that the disruption to business plans that companies, particularly REGCO, had made in good faith quite legitimately created liabilities for the city and the federal government. He found that the Port Authority and its negotiators did an acceptable job of containing the liabilities at $35 million. But Mr. Tassé goes further: he asserts that Toronto City Centre Airport (Toronto Island Airport) plays a useful role in Canada's transportation system, and he tells us closing it would involve unacceptable costs.

Obviously, the critics of Toronto City Centre Airport, and the allies of Mayor Miller, have no intention of accepting this report. But their reaction has three interesting omissions. First, they provide no actual evidence to refute the Tassé report. Second, they say nothing about any possibility of an alternate plan for waterfront development, which might actually accommodate the existence of the airport and still develop a vibrant, multi-use neighbourhood. Indeed, I have never seen an opponent of the airport explain precisely why we cannot build a working mixed use area, and they have yet to address the possibility that we might try. As a third omission, airport opponents have not addressed the question of whether the city and region can come up with a transportation plan that would eliminate the need for this airport.

I have no direct knowledge from which I could comment on why Mr. Miller and his allies do not provide evidence to refute Mr. Tassé, or why we have seen no waterfront plan which could accommodate the airport. But I do have some experience with the question of regional transport planning. At a public forum in this election, I asked Mayor Miller if he would agree to have a task force review the regional planning for long-range transport in the Greater Toronto Area, taking into account road, rail, and air, and report on the options available for the future, together with their fiscal, social, and environmental costs. Jane Pitfield said yes. David Miller said he didn't think he could get the civic leaders of Durham Regional Municipality to go along with it.

So there you have it. Our current mayor has shown no indication he intends to even ask the residents of Toronto for ideas about building a vibrant, multi-use neighbourhood which could accommodate an airport on Toronto Island. He doesn't think he can get an agreement to study the issues of long-range transport that we face, and lay the costs of the possible options before the people of the Greater Toronto Area, so we can make an intelligent, informed choice. And if he and the other opponents of Toronto City Centre Airport have a solid, fact-based argument to refute the Tassé report, they haven't shared it with us.

Under these circumstances, I have to ask: how long do our mayor and his allies intend to hold their (and our) breath on the waterfront issue?

People not planes?

Our current mayor, or his campaign workers, have decided that "a waterfront for people not planes" has the mindless appeal of a good political slogan. Except that if you stop to think about it, the slogan has some pretty offensive implications.

Personally, I'd like to make my neighbourhood a place for people, not musical instruments. I'd like to make my house a place for people, not art. And I'd sure like to see the city turned into a place for people, not law offices and courts. I could go on, but I hope I have made my point: people come with art, music, law, justice, and we also come with travel and technology. And it doesn't do to call planes things, from which we can easily separate people. If I take the art from the artist, the fiddle from the musician, the law books and courts from the lawyer, I have effectively undermined their freedom to express themselves; I have diminished their humanity. And if I take the plane from the aviator, I have done the same thing.

Now, I suppose you could make an argument that planes harm the downtown environment; but that slogan says nothing about the environment. And if you did try to make a case that Toronto City Centre Airport harms the environment, you'd have to address a huge body of evidence that moving traffic from Pearson to Toronto City Centre Airport actually reduces pollution in the Greater Toronto Area overall. And in any case, the mayor's campaign can hardly argue against aviation with any consistency, since he's started pushing a plan for an expo in 2015, which will depend on air travel to succeed, in the unlikely event that it does.

Aviation Dreams

One summer day, as I wandered Ontario Place looking for friends I didn't find, I looked up and saw a small high wing aeroplane descend to the runway of Toronto Island airport. Out of the haze of my late adolescence, and (let's face it) too many intervening years, the memory looms absolutely clearly: the yacht harbour of Ontario Place, with its colour and movement, the bustle of the amusement park, and the quick path of the plane's descent. And I remember what went through my mind, as vividly as I remember the sights and sounds of the day. One day, I thought, I will do that. I will fly a small plane into Toronto Island.

It took me over twenty years to make the dream of flight real. Several years ago, as my wife studied for a PhD at the University of Michigan, I took the opportunity to learn to fly. I remember, as all pilots do, my first solo. Everything began as I had expected. My instructor wrote the necessary endorsements for solo flight in my pilot's logbook, then had me taxi to the flight school ramp, got out, and told me to fly three times around the airfield. As almost every pilot ever to solo has done, I quailed at the yawning emptiness of the seat beside me. And then, as I took off, something happened that I had not expected. In a revelation that truly astonished me, as I climbed into the sky, the fear stayed behind on the ground. I had wrestled with fear many times, usually fighting it to a truce. For the first time, I simply left the fear behind me.

Shortly after I earned my pilot's license, I had occasion to take my father to Toronto, where he had a presentation to give at a church. On a grey Sunday morning, I kept the promise I had made to myself more than twenty years before, and flew an aeroplane over Humber Bay, past Ontario Place, and down to the runway of the Toronto Island airport.

Since than, I have flown into the Toronto Island airport many times. I have flown there for family visits, and business. On one memorable Christmas flight, my wife and I flew from Ann Arbor with a friend and fellow student. We calculated that we had taken nearly every form of transportation that trip: car, bus, boat, and plane.

I have taken great pleasure in flying, and it has served me as well for business. I have flown to business conferences, and I have flown my wife on research trips for her academic work. Many other people do not use their dreams of flying merely to support their career; they make flying their career. The airlines we depend on for transportation, the air ambulances our very lives may depend on, and the many essential services aviation provides for agriculture and industry, all begin with someone looking up at the sky, and resolving that one day, they too will follow that road.

Yet the value of a dream does not lie only in its fruition. My dream of flight served me well in the twenty years I waited and worked to make it come true. Harry Chapin's moving song "Taxi" reminds us of the importance of holding on to dreams, and not settling for substitutes. In "Taxi", Chapin tells the story of a taxi driver who dreamed of flying in his youth, "took off to find the sky", and then, in his disappointed adulthood, settled for "flying" on drugs. My own dream of flight made the dream that Harry Chapin's taxi driver allowed to slip away very real to me. It also made the song and its message about the importance of holding onto dreams an important inspiration to me through easy and hard times. Dreams and goals, both large and small, anchor a life. It takes perseverance to make a contribution, and nobody can persevere for long without direction and a sense of what personal achievement means.

Some people, who find the Toronto Island airport a nuisance or an impediment to their desire for a park, have called for the government to close it. This will certainly lead to a debate on the merits of the airport. As we begin the debate, practical questions will probably dominate the discussion. We will have to address questions about the feasibility of operating flight schools in the proposed single runway "commuter" airport. We also have to ask whether two airports, both well outside the city, suffice for the transportation needs of Toronto business as well as the educational needs of local flight students.

As we address the practical questions, let us not forget the importance of dreams. In our haste to banish everything noisy and dirty from the environs of the Toronto waterfront, do we run the risk of putting the dream of flight literally out of sight and out of reach of the next generation?

Nuit blanche sur nos bicyclettes

Allison and I went out on our bicycles for Nuit blanche, Toronto's public art night. We actually started with a trip to take photographs for one of Allison's art projects. We found Queen and Dunn a delightful place, with (among many other charming features) a small Caribbean takeout which offers the dish that for me epitomises Toronto's open multicultural society: Halal jerk chicken.

We went on to 48 Abell Street, where a friend of ours wants to replace a superannuated factory full of illegal artist's lofts with a mixed-use development containing 199 units of low-income housing. Then we rode on south through Liberty Village, down Sudbury Street to Wellington, where we stopped for coffee at the charming Olde York pub. Despite its name, the Olde York actually features fifties modern decor, and a menu directly from the multicultural Toronto of today. After that, we cycled into the center of the city, did some shopping, and had dinner.

After dinner, we headed off to the Royal Ontario Museum and Philosopher's Walk for the art installations there. We found the weather cooperated perfectly with the "white night" theme of the evening, with a white sky and the kind of cool humidity that makes the fall air near the Great Lakes feel like velvet. Michael Snow had projected a video of grazing sheep onto the dome of the McLachlan planetarium; in the dark with the white sky behind we could not tell where the dome began or ended, so the field of sheep loomed eerily out of the semi-dark, like a window into a more peaceful reality.

From the front of the ROM, we went back to philosopher's walk, visiting first the silver tree. The silver tree exhibit consisted of a tree wrapped in silver paper or Mylar, with strips of paper containing hopes (peace, etc.) hanging from the branches. With numerous participants grouped around it, it had the feel of a pagan ritual. It left me thinking about the nexus between the the beautiful and the spiritual; how religious rituals so often consciously aim at beauty in their surroundings and execution.

From the tree, we went south to the fog installation. Again, the weather cooperated perfectly; in the damp air, the fog generators put out a barely penetrable haze, out of which a throng loomed in eerie twos and threes. I turned off my bicycle headlight as we cautiously walked our bikes along the path, but I left my tail light on.

Afterwards, we rode over to an opening at the Spencer Gallery, an excellent little gallery on Markham Street specialising in contemporary international art. A friend had recommended the opening to us, and we enjoyed it very much.

Afterward, we rode home, an adventure in itself. A ride to West Toronto presents an interesting challenge. The streets that offer the best bicycle route to Bloor West and Old Mill, Dupont and Annette, can prove tricky to turn on. A Toronto Councillor once likened cycling in Toronto traffic to swimming with sharks, and I rather like swimming with sharks. The adrenaline rush I felt hanging nose to nose with a BMW in the left turn lane of Dufferin Street at Dupont capped a wonderful evening.

Don't worry about your enemies, worry about your friends

To paraphrase a comment attributed to Warren Harding: politicians generally have the power to deal with their enemies; the job gets tricky when they have to worry about their friends. Mayor David Miller has to worry about his friends in Community AIR, the lobby group which agitates for the closure of Toronto City Centre Airport, a small short-range airport on Lake Ontario near Toronto's downtown. Community AIR backed Mayor Miller vigorously in the last election, and he promptly gave them what they wanted in return: a request from Toronto City Council to the Canadian government that they cancel a lift bridge to the airport. The opponents of Toronto City Centre Airport hoped that would lead to the closure of the airport, but it did not. Instead, an airline entrepreneur made plans to operate a short-haul airline from Toronto City Centre using advanced, Canadian-made turbo-prop aircraft. Community AIR goes into this election frustrated, with a victory under their belt that did not get them what they wanted. They have begun asking Mayor Miller for things he can't possibly deliver. And they have begun asking it in public.

Community AIR, and their allies, subscribe to three linked myths. The first, the myth that their anti-airport group has political strength, they believe because the mayor of Toronto regularly supports their position in his rhetoric. However, if the airport issue could really tip election results city-wide, the mayor would have a clutch of council resolutions in his pocket, demanding that the federal government ground Porter Air (the airline about to open service at Toronto City Centre Airport), that the government close the airport entirely to commercial traffic, or even that Transport Canada (which owns the airport, and operates it through the Toronto Port Authority) close it altogether. Mayor Miller has never done so, and he certainly has the intelligence to understand that a city council resolution makes a stronger statement about the position of the city than press interviews by the mayor alone. If he hasn't put a single resolution before council since the first announcement of the plans for Porter Airlines, a period of over nine months, it implies that he could not get such a resolution passed.

The myth of political strength rests on a myth of moral strength. Community AIR stakes out claims heavy on rhetoric about a “clean green waterfront”, but in the end their position amounts to a demand that one privileged neighbourhood (where most of the members of Community AIR live) get all it wants, indeed all it could possibly ask, and that others (people who live near Toronto's main airport, Pearson International) pay the environmental costs.

That leads to the third myth, the myth that Community AIR has a strong factual case. They have made a number of claims that make their position look good, but which have no validity. Their analysis ranges from deeply flawed (such as their claims about the suitability of the runways and taxiways at the airport) to outright fiction (such as their claim that commercial flights will go up the Don River Valley, right through the city, when in fact flights from Toronto City Centre Airport turn south, over Lake Ontario.

Phantom strengths, like phantom wealth, have the baneful effect of inducing people to overspend. In political terms, this usually means they refuse compromises and demand exactly what they want, nothing less. A single quote characterizes the position of Community AIR: “We'll only be happy when we see bulldozers ripping up the runway.” A position such as that doesn't leave a lot of room for negotiation and compromise, the soul of politics. It leaves Mayor Miller with neither the political strength to make demands, or the flexibility to make deals.

Going into the fall municipal election, after a term characterized by disappointed expectations, David Miller needs to have the voters see him as effective. That won't happen if supporters who badly overestimate the strength of their position make impossible demands of him.

What I May Do with a Square Piece of Canvas

I have a basement office at home and I've been trying to make it more pleasant and organized. There is a space over one bookcase and I was thinking, "Since I am an art historian, I would like something there that will really say 'Art.'"

But how can you say Art with just one piece? Should it be a collage of art from all eras and places? Should it be the word "Art" rendered in a stylish way?

Finally I decided to make something myself. I bought a piece of stretched canvas, 12" x 12" square, and I will divide it into quadrants. An attractive border will be part of this, and along the middle horizontal divider I will write "what is art?"

My plan for the four squares is mainly inspired by the amazing painter Ben Reeves's Surrey Suburbs Project. As he explained in a talk that I heard last year (and in another talk reported online in the Klondike Sun ), Reeves "[chose] his subject matter wisely: by throwing darts at a map and painting at every location the darts hit."

So, I decided to put my local map book on a kitchen turntable (aka a Lazy Susan). I asked my dh to spin it as (with eyes shut) I first chose four numbered squares on the large-scale map. I then turned to each of those numbered pages and, with another magic spin, found a precise intersection where I will photograph and/or paint.

It is with considerable trepidation that I reveal this project. I am emphatically not an artist, I just want "something nice for over the bookcase" and to explore some corners of my city that are unknown to me. However, I do promise to reveal to you, dear reader, the results of my undertaking.

The Smiley-face method of motivation and time management

Suppose that you need to write something: a manual of cake-baking, a novel, or a Ph.D. dissertion. Are you despairing that you can't keep at it, day by day, week by week, month by month?

Here is what to do.

Take a small piece of blank paper: 4" x 6" or smaller. Keep this piece of paper on your desk, right near your elbow.

Each day if you manage to accomplish something--anything--on your project, write it down on the piece of paper. Examples:

"Signed four books out of the library."

"Read fifteen pages of Lloyd's book and took notes."

"Wrote to the cake museum in Dusseldorf."

"Wrote three pages."

"Revised seven pages."

"Sent draft of Chapter 3 to my thesis supervisor."

Now the important part: each day, when you have written down your wonderful accomplishments, draw a little smiley face on your piece of paper. Colour it with a yellow highlighter or coloured pencil. Well done!

As you fill these pieces of paper you will see that you have made progress. The work done on a single day may seem tiny, but it all adds up. When you fill a page, file it in the place where you keep your treasured mementos (mine is called "Letters and Souvenirs") and start a new page.

I followed this method to complete my Ph.D. and I have told some of my colleagues about it. May it help you also. Good luck!

Another View of the Public Interest

Warning: Local Toronto Content

Asked by a reporter what he would like to say to Robert Deluce, the CEO of Porter Airlines, a start-up set to provide service from Toronto to a variety of cities through Toronto City Centre Airport, David Miller, the Mayor of Toronto, said this:

...it's time that you put your private interests aside and let the public interest prevail, and the public interest is in a revitalized waterfront.

The mayor, of course, has the same right as any citizen of Canada to his opinion. I take a different view. As a member of the public who lives in Toronto, I think I have an interest in the larger issue of environmental justice. I want to see a solution that serves everyone in the Greater Toronto region, not just an articulate, relatively wealthy and privileged neighbourhood on the Toronto waterfront.

Should Porter Air succeed, passengers who might otherwise have taken a car or train to Pearson International Airport can instead take a bus or light rail from the downtown to Toronto City Centre Airport. That change has the potential to reduce both overall noise and atmospheric pollution in the GTA region. It has the potential to reduce the human impacts of noise and pollution even more. Comparison between the Q-400 aircraft which Porter Air intends to fly with the Boeing 717 type of aircraft, which Jets-Go flew out of Pearson, before they went out of business, shows the differences. Based on the published fuel consumption figures, the Q-400 which Porter intends to use will get at least 7% more passenger miles to a gallon of jet fuel than the Boeing 717, and over the distances Porter intends to fly, the advantage of the Q-400 increases to as much as 23%.

The structure of Toronto City Centre Airport will help to further reduce the local pollution produced by flight operations there. The short taxiway and small airport reduces the amount of taxiing and holding the planes will do by 50% or better, and figures published for Midway Airport in Chicago by the US Environmental Protection Agency suggest that taxiing and idling aeroplanes produce over 70% of many of the local pollutants emitted by airport operations, including volatile organic compounds and benzine.

Measurements of sound levels of planes taking off from Pearson and TCCA make it very clear that while jets taking off from Pearson produce severe noise spikes, the Dash-8 aircraft taking off from TCCA barely register over the noise levels of traffic on the Gardiner Expressway, or the streetcar on Queen's Quay. The noise exposure forecast (NEF) contour map (produced by Shawn Morgan, used by permission) confirms what the recordings tell us; that Pearson operations subject Rexdale and Malton (a total of 150,000 people) to a barrage of noise from which the Tripartite agreements protects the waterfront neighbourhoods.

As the recent withdrawal of CanJet from scheduled passenger service shows, airlines respond to competitive pressures. If Porter succeeds, it has a very good chance of diverting passengers from noisier and dirtier jet flights out of Pearson. That, in turn, will reduce noise and pollution in the city and region as a whole.

So Porter's success offers us one way to reduce the noise, reduce the pollution, and reduce the human impacts of both, while serving environmental justice at the same time. It does not offer the only way. Mayor Miller, and his supporters, have had three years to promote alternatives: everything from high-speed rail to reduce the passenger load airlines carry, to some form of direct compensation to the communities that carry the main environmental burden. They have done nothing, except promote a plan for a world's fair, which will put seven million more people (according to the official estimates) into the air over the long-suffering children of Malton and Rexdale; that works out to one takeoff or landing every two minutes for the period of the fair. Only Robert Deluce and Porter Air have a plan that stands any immediate chance of reducing the noise and pollution we subject the children of Rexdale and Malton to. Only Deluce and his backers have put their money and their energy into a practical course that will, if it succeeds, reduce the environmental burden while improving environmental fairness.

I invite anyone with an interest in the issue to check my sources. If I've made an error somewhere, by all means, tell me. But don't tell me, yet again, that the people who live in the condos on Bathurst Quay somehow matter more than the people who live in Malton; I've lived my whole life on the premise that no one person matters any more than any other person. Don't tell me that I don't care about reducing pollution as long as it get shared; I've already said that the Deluce proposal actually has a chance to reduce pollution. If the waterfront crowd have a great idea for reducing pollution and promoting environmental justice (that means reducing pollution for everybody, not just them), tell me; I'd love to hear it. If I've made some error in my calculations, let me know that, and I'll gladly correct them.

To love your enemies, you have to know them

If I had to list the columnists I admire least, Mark Steyn would rank high. However, give the man his due, he has a point when he decries the conspiracy theories about 9/11 that have gripped much of the public. Many of his arguments betray a woeful lack of imagination: he quotes a web-logger who asks why people who believe in the grand conspiracy don't pack up and leave the United States, without telling us where someone who wanted to get out of bomber range of the White House and its current occupants could go. But he makes a solid argument; it simply does not make sense, at any level, that any conspiracy within the United States government to bring down the twin towers and bomb the Pentagon could have succeeded and remained hidden to this point.

Such a conspiracy would have had to find several thousand people, many with very specialised skills, willing to commit high treason and mass murder. If they hoped to involve an expert on explosive demolition, the conspirators would have had to approach one of only a few hundred with the required expertise. If even one person they sounded out had talked to a grand jury in the five years since 9/11, the conspirators would have found themselves on a gurney at Terre Haute, following in the footsteps of Timothy McVeigh.

By Occam's razor, if nothing else, the simplest explanation applies: Al Qaeda, a terrorist organisation formed in Afghanistan and Sudan, led by Osama bin Laden, hijacked four planes. They flew two into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, one into the Pentagon, and one crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers overcame some or most of the hijackers.

The increasing popularity of conspiracy theories that purport to offer alternative explanations challenge the Left and the Right alike. To the Right, the popularity of even the most improbable conspiracy theories indicates an clear, if unpalatable reality: huge numbers of people have so lost faith in the "War of Terror"® (now the Global Struggle against Violent Extremism"®) that they will believe almost (literally) anything of the people charged with conducting it. And why should that surprise anyone?

Perhaps the time has come for members of the right to admit the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan created Al Qaeda, and the policies of the Reagan administration bear some responsibility for that. If the Bush administration has completely lost the confidence of millions of Americans and others, perhaps they accomplished that by informing us all that we faced a struggle for survival, then voting their wealthy friends a huge tax cut and telling everyone (except the long-suffering soldiers faced with stop-loss programs) to go and shop 'til they dropped.

The Bush Administration has piled up a sad record of blundering into Iraq in search of non-existent weapons, and with an incoherent plan for democratising the Arab world. Maybe the people who believe the Bush administration rigged the towers with explosives would rather believe anything but the obvious and frightening conclusion: the events of the past five years really represent the Bush Administration's best efforts at a strategy. The Right might reassure some people, even capture some of that lost faith and trust, if they would acknowledge the problems, and perhaps even apologise for the many mistakes of conservative governments in the past.

The Left faces a different and tougher challenge. The basic premise of the anti-war left holds that we have to learn not to make war, because without an end to war, we do not have much of a future on this planet. To do that, we have to learn to love our enemies. To love our enemies, we have to face the reality that they exist, that they really hate us, and not all for good or understandable reasons. We have to look our enemy in the face, strip off all the explanations and excuses, and face the ugly truth about the Salafist Jihadists, in the same way, and with the same courage, that we face ugly truths about ourselves and our own civilisation.

Members of Al Qaeda want to kill millions of us, and enslave the rest. We have to love them anyway. The Taliban wants to impose a medieval patriarchy on the women of Afghanistan, and they have allied with Al Qaeda. We have to love them anyway. After twenty centuries in which the Christian world recited Jesus's words in the Sermon on the Mount in church, and then went out to do battle on the field, we have come to a point when heeding those words has gone from a matter of morality to a matter of survival.

In war, the biggest weapon wins. In an advanced technological society, the biggest weapons can raze cities, poison huge areas, and trigger epidemics that will kill millions, even billions of people. If we do not make and end to war, war will make an end, if not of the human species, then of our civilisation. In Christian terms, that means we have to look past the ugly horror of the ideology that motivates our enemies, and find a way to reach, and love, the human beings who hold that ideology. Evading and escaping the face of that ideology, not facing the ugly truth, will do nothing for us. Mohamed Atta took over a plane and used it as a flying bomb. The passengers on the planes hijacked that day included children too young to walk. The Al Qaeda jihadists had to know this, so they had to believe that God would reward them for child murder. Evading that fact with fantasies about some elaborate government plot will not do us any good at all. We have to look into the cold eyes of men prepared to commit any depraved act, face the anger they provoke, and then, somehow, find a way past the anger. Otherwise, their anger justifies their flying planes into towers, and our resulting anger justifies our dropping GPS-guided bombs on women and children, which justifies some other outrage, until someone feels justified in doing something which makes the whole sorry history irrelevant.

We will never break this chain of horror if we comfort ourselves with fantasies. We will have to look honestly into the face of it. We will have to forgive. We will have to return good for evil. We will have to do all the hard, hard things involved in making real and lasting peace. And we will have to begin with the truth.