northern communique

Grand Strategy: Quit Marketing, Start Communicating

2009-09-21T10:29:00.005-04:00

Since I spend a lot of my professional life working with environmental and other non-profits to improve their communications, their campaigns, and their fundraising, I get to see up close the way that many of them are captured by the received wisdeom of the marketing profession - circa 1980. What I'm referring to is the commitment that most of our NGOs have to branding and market differentiation, both factors that lie behind successful fundraising.

But these factors do NOT lie behind successful social change, or at least they do not necessarily contribute to it. Instead, what makes effective campaigns and movements that change the world is a vibrant, rich, and dynamic relationship with the people who are affected by your cause and who support you the most. It's not about whether you are differentiated in the marketplace, but whether you offer a believable response to the oldest question in political discourse, 'what is to be done?', and that you engage those people in doing what you say should be done.

How credible is a movement whose main direct communication with its consituency is fundraising appeals packaged in myriad competing brands rather than a united program to change teh world?

Some individual organizations are doing a better job than others (see, for example, FarmStart, an important innovator in the sustainable food movement), but the lack of what most people in most eras of the modern industrialized world would recognize as a coordinated program with political, legal, and social dimensions hampers our efforts.

But this griping on my part isn't getting me very far with my green friends. Most of them are worrying about revenue shortfalls as a result of the recession, which is making them redouble their efforts in what I consider a secondary direction.

So, as part of my quest to see things in a new light, I offer here a perspective labeled 'radical collaboration' which I found in a post by Adele Peters on worldchanging.org. This approach offers insights from big business on how collaboration between organizations can be made to work even when competition remains an important context in which they must operate.

A recent initiative of Creative Commons is a case n point -- Green Xchange brings together a number of major consumer products corporations (including Nike and BestBuy) to share research and practice in energy efficiency, waste management, and 'greening' their supply chains. This field -- referred to incorrectly as 'sustainability' in the corporate world -- is now seen by some mainstream analysts (see July/09 issue of the Harvard Business Review) as the most important driver of technological and business process innovation in market economies today, so there is evidence that some of the biggest economic entities on the planet are moving past greenwashing to actual behaviour modification.

A certain amount of cross-pollination goes on between the larger environmental groups, obviously, and grassroots groups are always flowing into and out of one another. But a systematic effort to collaborate through matching competencies for a more powerful agenda of social change? I don't see it, I'm afraid.

Yeah, right

2009-09-18T10:32:00.006-04:00

The Starbucks in the departures lounge at Ottawa Airport gets my vote for corporate wanker-ism. I ordered a 'short' coffee (that's a small size in old-speak)and the woman at the cash told me that the register "doesn't have a key for short - so, uh, I have to charge you for a Tall." So I took a pic of my - literally - overpriced coffee, and here it is.

Fish in my backyard

2009-07-07T21:56:00.005-04:00

A fantastic event has taken root at my neighbourhood community centre in downtown Toronto, and it involves a swimming pool, children, worms, and a lot of trout. That's right, every June a fishing frenzy takes place in the Scadding Court swimming pool, where the chlorinated blue water is replaced with freshwater grey, stocked with fish.

My kids love it. My son even landed the biggest fish in the pool, after an hour of fruitless casting, but I was so excited I forgot to snap the moment on my cellphone camera.

Originally started up to help immigrant Chinese families 'get back in touch' with their angling roots, the Gone Fishin' event now pulls in all kinds of people from the intensely multicultural downtown-west community in which the Centre is located - Jamaican and Haitian families join the older Anglo population alongside the Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese folks, incongruously assisted by half a dozen teenagers in red-and-white LIFEGUARD outfits and a phlegmatic middle-aged white fisherman straight out of central casting ('you want a worm? Alright, alright...')

For 2 dollars you can fish for an hour and if you catch something, 75 cents will get your fish cleaned by a friendly young man in the basement kitchen. You can even take it upstairs to the snack bar in the main lobby, opposite the gymnasium, to have it fried up with rice and beans.

Our Great Lakes are still vilified and feared for their toxic menace, which means that very few Torontonians have any relationship at all to the unique local ecosystem we live in. This community fishing event is a good way to start teaching us about our natural heritage, one morsel at a time.

Will Nuclear Free Thinking Spread to the Arctic?

2009-07-06T15:52:00.019-04:00

President Obama announcement today that he has reached agreement with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to further reduce the two countries' nuclear weapons stockpiles. Weapons of mass destruction have no place in a world that calls itself 'civilized' and we are seeing again in this announcement the sea-change in political life that now allows us all to think such rational thoughts.

Disarmament campaigners have for years made the case that until the 'official' nuclear weapons states (Russia, the US, UK, France and China) control their addiction to nukes, no one else who covets them (Iran, Iraq, Isreal, India, Pakistan, etc) will be the slightest bit interested in even talking about, let alone actually, getting rid of theirs. You say we can't have nuclear weapons? how come they formt a central pillar of your foreign policy? (Beyond this rationale, the 'official' weapons states are also bound by the Non-Proliferation Treaty to move toward total nuclear disarmament, and unless they do there are concerns that this treaty will simply collapse for lack of legitimacy in the global South.)

Now Obama and Medvedev are applying that logic, and explicitly hoping to influence discussions in the Middle East, where constant flareups of violence look ever more ominous as the 'unofficial' nuclear arsenals of the beliigerents (including Isreal) grow.

Let's take this another step though, and not just put pressure on Mideast nations, but actually model steps to total nuclear disarmament. Russia and the US can take the lead on a treaty to impose a permanent ban on nuclear weapons (and nuclear-powered vessels) in the Arctic region. This area is turning into a geopolitical hotspot in its own right, what with all that oil under the ice and that ice disappearing faster than you can say 'catastophic climate change'.

Our own Canadian hawk, PM Stephen Harper, has repeatedly rattled his little sabre about Canadian sovereignty in the North, and a major public debate about the future of this region is long overdue.

Michael Ignatieff, are you listening?

Here's a major foreign policy angle for you to outflank Mr Harper (as you've failed to do on the Arctic since you won the Liberal leadership earlier this year) - Canada pressing for a nuclear free Arctic would be credible internationally, it would strengthen, not weaken, our claims to the North, and it would prove difficult for Mr Harper to follow suit since his own base finds that kind of policy shift both unappealing and untenable (they still think that Harper's Arctic rhetoric is based in military thinking).

It would also give Mr Ignatieff the chance to speak truth to Mr Obama while at the same time directly engaging the other Arctic nations (in addition to Russia and the US - Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland), and making a practical proposal that would echo very powerfully in the Middle East. Obama would then have another international plank to build the scaffold around Isreal and Iran, pressuing THEM to consider a nuclear-free Middle East.

This would be a big improvement on Mr Ignatieff's ridiculous preening about Arctic issus so far, which have been a laughable imitation of Harper's hawkishness (see the 23.1.09 Arctic post here on NC). As such, such a move by Ignatieff would raise all the right sentiments about the Liberal Party among centrist Canadian voters - nuclear disarmament is not a leftwing issue, after all.

As we've all been saying, that Obama sure does open up possibilities, doesn't he? If only the rest of the geopolitical class was as bold.

Shocker! Local food movement sideswiped by free markets!

2009-06-11T10:48:00.009-04:00

'Locavorism' and Slow Food and the whole effort to decouple our quality of life from the ever-growing risks of globalized industrial capitalism cannot survive in open free-market conditions.

It is no surprise that this reality affects entrepreneur-cum-activist chef Jamie Kennedy as much as anyone else. The Toronto restauranteur and champion of the local food movement recently told The Globe & Mail newspaper, “I'm losing money because embracing the local food movement where costs are inherently higher, is challenging" (go here for the Globe & Mail's breathless take on his business fortunes).

That is the nature of the marketplace - it will systematically undervalue environmental integrity, human health, and all forms of exchange that do not produce profits at some point in the cycle. That is one of the keys to lower prices, which itself is a key to consumer behaviour.
It's a myth and a misleading canard to think that changing our world is mainly a matter of consumers being more 'ethical', or that only cultural change will do the job - the regulation of markets is critical as well. Parmasan cheese does not survive in Italy as a way of life because consumers are so motivated about it (though they are) but rather because protectionism around the cheese producers is coupled with attentiveness to local tastes and preferences to create a 'sheltered' food oasis.

Once we recognize that the free market will not deliver what we want and need in our food system, we can then turn our attention to crafting fair and reasonable constraints that will support local producers and benefit consumers with healthier, sustainable alternatives to the global food industry.

Here at home, we only need to look at how excellent community organizations like FoodShare manage to do what they do - with middle-class engagement around social needs, to be sure, but also with government subsidies to deliver the services Torontonians want. No free market will do that on its own -- not here, and not anywhere.

What's with all this &#$@!& stuff?!?

2009-05-27T21:01:00.005-04:00

Activist and educator Anne Leonard, who I knew in my early-'90s Greenpeace days, has been getting some major press lately on her excellent little video 'The Story of Stuff'.

This rip-roaring overview of the dark side of consumerism has been a popular online tool since it launched in December, 2007. I use it in my courses at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) where its cheerful, opinionated style matches the psychic energy of the students.

Since the crisis of international capitalism struck last fall, it has powered its way into the mainstream culture through mass media coverage. Which may go to show that the hunger for 'content' (stuff to push through media channels) sometimes serves the hunger for substance (in public policy and culture).

Now Annie is preparing a book version of the project and she has already launched numerous non-English versions of the video. Check out her blog as well, for an ongoing discussion of how to reduce our bruising impact on Mother Earth.

Torture Us No More America

2009-04-26T20:53:00.001-04:00

How much scarier can America get? Now there's a partisan fight breaking out between Democrats and Republicans over treatment of top Bush Administration officials who authorized 'coercive' interrogation techniques in their 'war on terror'. Many of us are worried that this political storm could engulf Obama's ambitious agenda, knocking desperately needed action on climate, healthcare and banking regulation off into a second term (aka The Wild Blue Yonder).

The torture issue could also have an impact on Obama's foreign policy if he sidesteps what many view as a clear case of illegality by some agents of the United States. Spanish prosecutors may end up doing what he will not - prosecute the decision-makers behind these misdeeds, and in the process undermine the amazing amount of goodwill he has inspired around the world.

Americans need to grapple with the political meaning of the torture allegations, just as much -- or more -- than the legal and moral implications. The deep-rooted sense of 'exceptionalism' that teaches many in the United States to see their democracy's laws as inherently superior to international law lays traps for the nation's foreign policy into which even President's of Mr Obama's intelligence can fall.

A nation that valorizes, even reifies, individual liberty to the extent that America does has to extend those liberties universally - not because it is a moral affront to say that American liberties are more valuable than those of an Egyptian, or a Canadian -- but because if America is an exception to the rule of international law, praise be the gods, so are we all. Like the legitimation of nuclear weapons because you're The Good Guys, believing it's okay to take away liberties of life and limb because you are the defenders of liberty negates the political legitimacy that is at the root of your claim. In the international sphere, political claims are increasingly founded on moral consistency, a fact that is a fact no matter how exceptional you may think you are.

It would be more valuable to Americans, and to us all, if the country spent time deliberating on the meaning of this fact as it pertains the country's foreign policy. How are one's particular interests to be advanced if one cleaves to a strong moral code of universal human rights? This is an interesting question for a superpower, an edifying question.

And a question that would, in all likelihood, be submerged and silenced if a show trial of the 'Bush Six' were to proceed. For Mr Obama - the right path is probably political and historical inquiry, not legal mumbo-jumbo.

(For a legal interpretation from the international standpoint, check out this article from The New Yorker in which the views of my old friend (and QC) Philippe Sands are featured. He is spearheading efforts to charge members of the Bush administration with war crimes under international law.)

The New Action Orientation

2009-04-15T10:20:00.000-04:00

The appointment of Phillip G. Radford as the new Executive Director of Greenpeace in the United States marks a critical and decisive step toward constituency-based activism for the iconic green group. It also marks a move to empower a younger generation of campaigners who are fired up by the climate crisis and who were central to the Obama victory last November.

Radford, 33, is credited as Greenpeace's top grassroots organizer in the US, an experienced fundraiser and political activist with a reputation for focusing on measurable campaign outcomes. His arrival in the organization is recent -- 2003 -- but his impact has been significant. When I took over as Chair of the Board in 2000, Greenpeace in the US was a shadow of its former self: Self-absorbed, drifting, shrinking in stature, and bereft of strong, effective campaigns. Radford was part of the team (which included outgoing ED John Passacantando, Campaign Director Lisa Finaldi, and Ops Director Ellen McPeake, among others) that rebuilt the street-level presence and credibility that Greenpeace has always depended on to make its daring high-profile protests resonate in the living rooms of the nation. Into the bargain, the group has doubled its fundraising and invested heavily in the new American youth movement (through fellowships, mobilizing drives, and a quasi-militaristic foot canvass in dozens of cities). (Go here for the NYT story on Radford's appointment)

Among the big international green groups, Greenpeace takes the strongest stands, and -- contrary to the expectations which that might elicit -- gets the most done. That has been true around the world but hard to claim for the American wing since the early 1990s -- until now.

Old-timers in the rest of the Greenpeace world (and they are legion) may be nervous that the direct action roots of the group are disappearing under the thicket of grassroots lobbying tactics that Radford represents. But in America today, power is the sound of millions of feet on pavement, and that is where Greenpeace USA is finding its strength and inspiration.

(Go here for a vast compendium of high quality images of Greenpeace's past work.)

BlinkThink/NYT

2009-04-14T21:05:00.001-04:00

A quick update on our first posting. David Brooks had a good little synopsis in the NYT last week of the link between morality, evolution, and the kind of 'snap judgement' that Malcolm Gladwell documented in Blink (and which I denounced). He argues that 'moral' behaviour -- cooperation, altruism, selflessness -- are hard-wired because evolutionary pressures makes them advantageous over the long run. That competitive individualism is not the only 'natural' urge is not news -- Marx noted this in response to the rip-off artists who wanted Darwin to be the mouthpiece for social privelege, and anyone who's been on a movie set knows that life as we know it halts without a division of labour -- but the insight here is that over time, our brains have moved this understanding deep down into our involuntary reactions, so morality is more like an instantaneous aesthetic judgement than a chain of logical inference. BlinkThink is not so bad after all, according to this way of looking at it.

Interesting, but we still need to respect the findings of the Rwanda genocide study first noted in this blog on January 21, 2009.

What makes some campaigns tick better than others?

2009-03-20T10:30:00.000-04:00

Okay try this powerpoint about the sources of effectiveness in advocacy campaigns, and please let me know your critical thoughts and ideas on it. It dates from 2006, so I have not doubt my own understanding has changed, but it was a genuine 'stab' at analyzing why advocacy works sometimes and not others. cheers.

The Coming Change in Climate

2009-03-10T09:54:00.000-04:00

During the US election, novelist Ian McEwan mused in The Guardian that Barack Obama may be our world’s last hope for significant action to avoid catastrophic climate change. But Obama’s powers are fleeting, McEwan says, because they rest on a sort of ‘collective dreaming’ by millions of hopeful citizens in America and around the world: ‘Obama may succeed in tipping the nations [involved in climate change negotiations] toward a low-carbon future simply because people think he can... Having persuaded everybody else, he may be doubly persuaded himself. This aura will be his empowerment, as numinous as good luck, as permanent as spring snow.’

McEwan concludes that Obama must ‘move decisively’, lest our collective dream of his immense power end, and we awaken to find our civilization already pitching forward into a deep chasm.

We would go further here at NC: if Obama is to succeed there must be a determined application of practical wisdom from other governments, including Canada’s. And for that to happen there must be widespread engagement of citizens, both politically and in daily life, and a ‘revaluation’ away from consumerism and endless accumulation of material wealth towards collective fulfillment and happiness even when that means lower growth or fewer luxuries for the wealthiest among us.

Unfortunately, our recent federal election threw into high relief just how disconnected our national institutions are from the imperatives we face. Dion's 'green shift' debacle, the worst communictions effort since Joe Clark tried to sell higher gas taxes, put carbon taxes off the agenda for years to come.

Focusing the mind of our bankers, CEOs, and politicians is no small task, but it is not just a matter of reaching them with 'better information' (as our mainstream environmentalists have preached for too long). This challenge is fundamentally political: The concentration of power at the top of our social pyramid is a key reason that the ecological crisis continues to deepen. As archaeologist/novelist Ronald Wright notes of every civilization’s top dogs: ‘They continue to prosper in darkening times, long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.’ (A Short History of Progress, House of Anansi Press)

As for our ‘creative class’, on whom so much of our practical future depends, many artists, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, planners, and designers are fascinated by the challenge of finding a sustainable way to live. It appeals to their moral code and requires great things of them, so it naturally feels like a 'fit'. See, for example, Massive Change ("it's not about the world of design, it's about the design of the world").

But, for this all-important caste, solidarity with the powerless and with future generations vies with 'top dog-ism', the well-known tendency of people who have priveleges, but little power, to think of themselves as brethren of the really influential Masters of the Universe.

A lot will hinge on the credibility of whatever economic ideology emerges from the wreckage that Wall St. has brought upon us -- if American Republicans and their ilk succeed, we will dive deeply back into the one-dimensional 'new economy' in which winners take all and being poor is a sure sign of moral weakness. In that world, we only measure success by the size of your bank account, and ignore the clearcuts and wasted oceans like we ignore street people outside the Metro. If NC and it's ilk get their way, we will take a much richer view of what progress is, using measures such as those outlined by the Canadian Index of Wellbeing or the Happy Planet Index. In that world, equity and ecological sustainability will underpin a society bent on the welfare of its children and grandchildren.

So keep dreaming the dream of Obama's power, but look forward to big changes in your waking life too.

Carbon Capture Sucks the Big One

2009-02-19T21:45:00.000-05:00

Everyone loses with carbon capture.

First, you and me Joe Taxpayer lose because Stephen Harper just announced he's going to plough millions into this speculative technology (for sucking CO2 out of fossil combustion) without bothering to give any economic value to carbon emissions. Duh. Without cap-and-trade or a national carbon tax, carbon emissions are still free, so how can carbon capture move from being an interesting lab experiment to a scaled-up, economically viable technology? It won't (see economist Mark Jaccard on this point). So research divisions of the fossil fuel companies, floating on fat public grants, win big, and... uh... you lose.

Meanwhile green groups like Greenpeace rail against carbon capture as the 'new nuclear debacle' -- by which they mean a pointless exercise in expensive technology when efficiency and renewables would do a better job. They happen to be right -- a coal-fired power plant outfitted with carbon capture would, for example, use up 30 to 40 percent of its energy output just to run the damn carbon capture process, so this technology actually has the potential to pointlessly increase carbon emissions. But.. I can't help thinking that a) Harper and his friends in Alberta (and, sigh... Washington) are going to fund experimental gizmos in this direction no matter what, and b) the world really needs Greenpeace to be focusing on the main event. Hello! You've got the tarsands in the bull's-eye in Canada and coal exports on the agenda in Australia, and you've got Barack Obama using the words 'carbon footprint' -- FOCUS my friends! FOCUS! Press the case for pricing carbon -- which every intelligent economist and policy wonk agrees with -- because it's the single most efficient, effective, and rapid way to stop carbon emissions from growing and start the necessary reductions.

But note: when we finally win policies to put a price on carbon, there is bound to be a plethora of viable ways to reduce emissions -- and that may just include carbon capture, which makes it even harder to stop because the very policies we need to protect our fragile atmosphere will give it the logic it needs to succeed. So there is very little mileage in building up public angst about it right now.

So to my friends in the green movement: Stick with actions to hurt the biggest, baddest, climate horrors, but don't get sidetracked by the built-in capitalist impulse to pour our wealth into new technology - after all, that's the impulse we want to harness for renewables, which are far more interesting to the public anyway.

The upside of global catastrophe: A long-term strategy?

2009-02-15T12:14:00.001-05:00

The people of the United States now own more than a third of the world's largest bank, Citigroup, and the shrinkage of the US GDP was revealed to be near an an believable 7% in 2008. The Dow-Jones index is now hovering below 7,000 -- half the value it had only two years ago -- the possibility of all-out collapse of the US stock market is on some minds, I kid you not.

And here I thought that the collapse of global fisheries within the next 30 years, coupled with catastrophic climate change that will flood a third of the world's cities and cut European food production by more than half, was a serious threat to our way of life. Now I know the real problem is that our money is disappearing.

Just ask Labour MP Ed Balls in the UK. He caused a political stir when he said on February 10th that the global economic downturn is "the most serious global recession for over 100 years." Harkening back to 1909 is indeed strong stuff, considering that this period encompasses the British recession after WWI, the German crisis of 1920s, and the Great Depression. According to The Guardian, he warned that events were moving at a "speed, pace and ferocity which none of us have seen before" and banks were losing cash on a "scale that nobody believed possible".

This international crisis may not be the end of free-market capitalism, but it sure as hell is a pause in the action. And it will be the political frame of reference for at least the next 15 years, maybe 20. Is this a problem for those of us who are pushing for climate policies that would see the total 'decarbonization' of OECD energy systems by 2040? Is environmental concern now a thing of the past?

Hardly. Fifteen years of economic downturn is enough time to move ahead with 'sweeping change' (as Barack Obama termed it) -- to 'revalue' what is 'normal' for our society, both in domestic and foreign policy. And the backside of a financial crisis is a good moment to be questioning the real value of consumption in wealthy societies -- just the kind of debate that deep ecology has implied but that environmentalists themselves have eschewed for fear of being shut out of government roundtables and industry consultations.

In short, this crisis will last long enough to allow a whole new way of thinking to take root, making equity and sustainability the touchstones of progress, and 'gross domestic happiness' the measuring stick of civilization. It isn't long enough to achieve all of what we strive for, but it is enough to lay healthy soil for new developments to take root.

Worldwatch Institute President Christopher Flavin puts it this way:

“We should be practicing a sustainable approach to economics that takes advantage of the ability of markets to allocate scarce resources while explicitly recognizing that our economy is dependent on the broader ecosystem that contains it.”

But do we have the skills or the guts to plan and implement a strategy over that timeframe?

Many of the 'progressive' advocacy groups in Canada, whose job is to dramatically change our frame of public discourse on key issues, have resolutely stuck to the lessons of the 1980s, focusing inordinate resources and energy on their organizational capacity and reputational capital. This may be a good strategy for reactionary times, but with everything to play for now, it can only be described as the 'feet of clay' approach -- 'we'll get there eventually'.

No, actually, you won't. Without significant rethinking by the leadership of popular groups, and much more alliance building across a broad front of social, economic, and institutional reform, Canada will remain a laggard in progressive politics.

More to come in future posts, including some points on how the US situation is more hopeful.

Toddlers Worth More Than Their Weight as Economic Engines

2009-02-06T11:06:00.000-05:00

What the heck is going on in Dalton McGuinty's office? I expect the federal Tories to be unapologetic about eliminating daycare spending - they have a social agenda and they are implementing it. Mums, back into the kitchen! And you kids, shut up and enjoy your povery, it build character! But McGuinty's non-committal response in the Leg to the resulting loss of 15,000 childcare spaces speaks volumes about where we are going in Ontario. His recent pronouncement that Ontario spends too much on social programs now looks more like a key plank in a deliberate right-wing platform rather than befuddled musings of a panicked Premier.

The trouble is, those toddlers and mums who will now fend for themselves instead of having quality early childhood education and a chance to work for their living are critical players in the economic recovery that both levels of government want to spur. Childcare subsidies -- like increased unemployment benefits -- go right into local goods and services, right away. Unlike the massive dolops of infrastructure spending to 'shovels in the ground', those dollars do not top up balance sheets at overstretched municipalities, but instead pay wages for people who buy coffee, diapers, and tickets to Ontario Place.

Those toddlers are worth a lot to us in this crisis, and this is no time to cut them out of the equation. I detect a social program in McGuinty's new direction, and it smells worse than a diaper-pail.

Goodie 2 News for February

2009-02-02T13:56:00.000-05:00

This should cheer you up:

Seattle, San Francisco, January 29, 2009. The toxic trade watchdog group Basel Action Network (BAN) declared victory today after a U.S business involved in sending hundreds of ships to the infamous shipbreaking beaches of Bangladesh and India was forced to pay $518,500 and certify that they would not undertake such actions again. BAN warned, however, that there was still ample opportunity for unscrupulous operators to exploit loopholes to export very toxic U.S. ships to the South Asian beaches where some of the worlds poorest laborers are forced to toil without adequate protections against toxic substances, asbestos, explosions and accidents. BAN is a member organization of the NGO Platform on Shipbreaking, an international coalition seeking to ban beaching and unsustainable ship scrapping.

In February of last year, BAN and the Save the Classic Liners Campaign tipped-off the United States Environmental Protection Agency when they discovered that Global Marketing Systems, Inc. (GMS), headed up by a world famous cash-buyer of obsolete ships, Mr. Anil Sharma, had taken ownership of the SS Oceanic (former SS Independence) and had the old passenger liner towed out of San Francisco Bay with the intent of scrapping the vessel on the beaches of South Asia. BAN demanded that the U.S. government take action to have the ship returned to a U.S. port, but the EPA claimed they lacked the authority to have the ship recalled. Nevertheless, the EPA took legal action against GMS for violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the law which prohibits the exportation of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a persistent toxic pollutant used in the paints, insulation and gasketry in older ships.

For more info, Basel Action Network

See the EPA News Release from January 29, 2009.

Arctic Sovereignty -- But Why?

2009-01-23T15:29:00.001-05:00

After the ignominious failure of the Liberals' 'Green Shift' under former leader Stephane Dion, we should expect the party to take a step to the right as new leader Michael Ignatieff waltzes onto the dance floor with intentions to cut into the Harper Tories' centrist positioning. How else to dispel the down-market leftist Eau d'Ion that clung to the party during the fall election campaign?

Right on cue, and with Barack Obama still only President-elect, Ignatieff polished up his tough guy credentials by assuring a hooting, cheering audience of more than a hundred Young Liberal that he will keep Yankee hands off our beloved Arctic regions.

"This is sovereign Canadian territory, okay?" he told his audience, referring to the Northwest Passage.

"And let me remind you, Mr Obama, that Canada exports more petroleum to the United States than Saudi Arabia [does] -- so I suggest respectfully that you listen very, very carefully when the Canadian Prime Minister soeaks."

So from Dion's embrace of a significant new economic policy (carbon tax coupled with broad income tax reductsions) the party is poised to embrace the dramatic loss of sea-ice in the high Arctic as a segue to preserving the old petroleum economy and the bellicose rhetoric that goes along with it. Take that, Stephen Harper.

The metaphorical temperature ins the Arctic has been rising dramatically eve since it became clear around 2005 that the actual temperature is rising so fast, as a result of global climate change, that the whole vast region is turning from impenetrable ice sheet to open water. Again this year, scientists report record-breaking open water where there should be cool, sunlight-eflecting ice. Not only does this phenomena create a positive feedback that accelerates global warming, it also stirs the aquisitive spirit of every nation encircling the Arctic because it raises the possibility of a huge mineral and oil bonanza.

The Americans touched a nerve with Canadians (who fantasize that they really do care about the Arctic as a kind of 'missing child' of Confederation) when they sailed an icebreaker through the Northwest Passage in 2005 without asking Canada's permission. The Danes pissed us off with their assertion of sovereignty over an obscure island off of Greenland.

But it is the Russian government that has made many in the diplomatic community nervous. Grandstanding events like the 2007 planting of a Russian flag at the North Pole are one thing, but Germany's Der Spiegel mag reports this week that the most recent iteration of the country's National Security Strategy states that

"It cannot be ruled out that the battle for raw materials [in the Arctic] will be waged with military means."

But it is precisely such a confrontation that we must rule out, and soon. Hunger for raw materials is driven by economic growth and competition, two forces that humanity must get to grips with if we hope to stop the global slide into the ecological trashbin. Mr Ignatieff is hardly helping the situation.

There are more sensible voices speaking up to give the Arctic a fighting chance at sustainable co-existence with human beings - especially that made by aboriginal activist and Nobel Prize nominee Shiela Watt-Cloutier:

"We [Inuit and other northern aboriginal people] are Canadians, and we can continue to assert sovereignty for Canada if Canada would build sustainable communities here."

That's the catch - what is sovereignty for? What end is served by one country or another controlling a vast part of the Earth's lands and seas?

That's the question we must ask and answer, together, internationally. Luckily we have international law and we have civil society organizations ready to take up the challenge, and to those actors we will return in future posts.

See the latest detailed map of the disputed territories, drawn up by UK researchers.

See a recent CBC documentary 'Battle for the Arctic'.

(with thanks to Remi Parmentier - chezremi.blogspot.com)

Thank you America, we can THINK again!

2009-01-21T14:27:00.000-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell's book, 'blink' is "about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye" according to the author's notes on www.gladwell.com. 'blinkThink' is my term for making a fetish of the 'blink', and blinkThink took a well-deserved drubbing in Barack Obama's Inauguration Speech yesterday. Obama proposes -- and, most importantly, he symbolizes -- a spirit of deliberation, of considering different points of view and different facts, which is nothing less than a pivoting of American discourse away from the harsh moral certainties of Bush and Reagan toward the nuances of political virtue.

Gladwell himself signals the valorization of the blink, claiming on his site that "we live in a society dedicated to the idea that we're always better off gathering as much information and spending as much time as possible in deliberation." Huh? Where do you live, Malcolm? Oh right, the offices of the New Yorker mag and the international lecture circuit, I forgot. I'll tell you something, MG, where I live -- and I daresay most of us live -- we are under constant and unremitting pressure to make snap judgements, to act on impulse, and generally to equate deliberation as a sign of ineffectiveness. In the mall, and in the public discourse, we are encouraged to slam shut the gates of thought. Political mavens tout the idea that values drive voter choice; the framing of key messages supposedly explains public receptiveness to policy ideas; and marketers ramp up the emotive or sexual quotient at every so-called 'touch point' (but, actually, don't TOUCH me!)

The blink way of making judgements lends itself to moral judgements. In its rapidity, it relies on pre-established ideas and frames of reference. As Decision Research has recently shown (www.decision research.org) many of us will prefer to help one 1000 people out of 5000 escape violence in a place such as Darfur, instead of helping 1000 people out of 100,000. It seems we value the larger slice of the pie represented by 1000/5000 even though it is exactly the same number of people. This isn't reasoning - this is 'blink', and blinkThink is the tendency to value this sort of snap judgement more highly than the sort of deliberation that would reveal just how wrong-headed it is.

Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Mike Harris, Stephen Harper -- these fellows have urged us to blink about each other in a myriad of ways -- now hate public school teachers, now unionized pilots, now the artistic 'elite' -- the better to wrap themselves in a homogeneous sheet of public approval.

But Obama asks us all to be more deliberative, to think more, take more time before making judgemetns. And this may be among his greatest contributions to 'remaking' America, for it opens the way to considering every individual on their own merits, every situation for its inherent possibilities, every outcome for its actual contribution to human progress. Above all, it takes us back to the idea that politics is about public virtues -- doing the right thing at the right time -- not absolute right and wrong.

An appropriate moment to launch this blog, the day after he offered us this gift at his Inauguration. Here at northern communique we will consider just about anything that's interesting, with an inevitable political and Canadian spin -- and welcome all your feedback.

Here we go, thank you America, we can THINK again!