Adaptive Capacity

Doubtful Species and Gingerbread Men

2012-01-21T10:17:00.000-08:00

Same species of Gingerbread Men? Different Varieties? (Photo: Jude Isabella)

While Darwin is a product of his times — in the first chapter he writes that only women and children value cats — he lays down sentences that can still launch a graduate student's career.

"I have been struck by the fact, that if any animal or plant in a state of nature be highly useful to man, or from any cause closely attracts his attention, varieties of it will be almost universally recorded." (Origin of the Species, 6th edition, p. 67.)

Again, as in the previous reading, Darwin goes into the arbitrariness of categorizing species, sub-species and varieties. And until naturalists agree on what a species is, any discussion of how to categorize a plant or animal is "vainly to beat the air." In this age of creating synthetic DNA, it's hard to imagine how difficult it was categorize the natural world during the 19th century since so many explorers were coming back to Europe with so many familiar plants and animals. And sometimes wildly different. But, back to Darwin's observation, every culture has a taxonomy.

Taking this a step further is the study of folkbiology by researchers like Scott Atran and Douglas Medin. If every culture has this proclivity to categorize the living world, do they approach taxonomy in the same way? Yes. They rank living things, with anywhere from three to six ranks. If the Gingerbread Men in the photo were alive, they might be ranked in this way: Christmas Cookie/Gingerbread/ Cookie. And then depending on what's important, categorize them in further detail according to Button Number/Smiling or Unsmiling/Melted Cuffs or Unmelted Cuffs. The idea of speciation is there — we all recognize living things as separate from non-living. Basic levels of categorization are knowledge dependent, which is exactly what Darwin is saying. To someone who has no conception of Christmas cookies, the assortment might be something like Men/Gingerbread/Cookie. But to an "expert" (let's say across religious cultures) in Christmas cookies, they would get the first categorization. In other words, an "expert" in fish is likely to rank fish the same way as a someone who lives intimately with fish and is an expert strictly through experience and not formal education. Or to continue with the metaphor, a professional baker and a hobby baker would both classify the cookies in the same manner.

Another commonality across cultures is what Atran and Medin refer to as teleological essences — meaning people believe that a living thing evolves or behaves or has certain characteristics to ensure its survival. (Maybe the Gingerbread Men with the Melted Cuffs look unappetizing so they don't get eaten. I dressed the first batch before putting them into the oven. Oops.) The thing is, genetics have allowed scientists to tease out the differences between genotype and phenotype, but this has not altered the psychological perception of what is the "essence" of a living thing. I can't improve on Atran's and Medin's example of the heart as the essence of a human in Western thought. While we know it's the brain that's responsible for who we are, why do heart transplant recipients feel they're acquiring more than just a heart? (I don't personally believe in cellular memory, but what if a person who receives a new heart does? Couldn't it change his behaviour?)

A couple of other characteristics humanity shares is an inability to turn off their smarts (we're constantly trying to organize our worlds); and we'll rapidly transmit culturally how to survive in the natural world (more evident in cultures less industrialized.)

Research into folkbiology makes a compelling argument for a "perceptual system to be tuned to this same level of biological reality, and we suspect that this is the default condition for human beings who depend directly on nature for survival (i.e., without the intermediary of supermarkets and shops)." Emphasis mine.

Chapter Two: Individual Differences: Darwin underscores variation within a species

2012-01-13T15:10:00.000-08:00

Weaver Creek sockeye salmon, October 2011/From one...

In Chapter II, Variations under Nature, Darwin starts by acknowledging that it's tough to pin down what a species is and what variety means. He defines the problem naturalists have always had: at what point is a deviation from the norm just a deviation from the norm, or a new variety? Categorization is based on observable traits — phenotype, a word only coined about 50 years after The Origin of the Species. Observable traits, Darwin notes, can vary widely within a species. He points out an observational bias of the "systematists" (taxonomists) who are too devoted to the idea of the intransigence of an organism's important characteristics, sometimes even ranking the importance of individual organs. The same taxonomists ascribe variation only among non-important traits. Non-important being something that has nothing to do with an organism's ability to reproduce successfully.

Darwin got me thinking about observer bias.

...Many, Dry Rack Fishery, Fraser River, July 2010

To a certain extent "observable" depends on what an observer believes is important. Some characteristics are obviously important — a bat without echolocation abilities is a dead bat.

But importance is often tied up with context. Take the the two-barred flasher butterfly from Central America, for example. The Tzeltalpeople in southern Mexico have a number of names for the butterfly. Tooutsiders, there appears to be no differences to warrant multiple species names, unlessyou look at the butterfly’s larvae — the caterpillars. Different types oflarvae eat different crops, which is important to the Tzeltal people, and they reflected that importance in their own taxonomy of the butterflies. The different names for what appears to be the same butterfly puzzled Western scientists for years because they never considered the butterflies' relationship with crops.

You could say the same about settlers to the West Coast of Canada and their encounter with Pacific salmon. Hudson's Bay Company men wrote about salmon all the time in the Journals of Fort Langely (men in charge of HBC trade posts kept diaries, in this case for Fort Langley, 1827 to 1830.) Yet they rarely mentioned any of the five species of Pacific salmon. European settlers would have been used to Atlantic salmon. But to the inhabitants of the West Coast, the five salmon species, the different populations within a species, and the healthy numbers of individuals within a population were (and are) extraordinarily important.

In all fairness, any settler living long enough on the coast or along the Fraser River probably quickly realized Pacific salmon were a very different breed of salmon from Atlantic. Just as likely, however, they failed to understand the implication of variety, especially among the species most sought for canning — sockeye. A sockeye is not just a sockeye, no matter how alike they look. Some sockeye are powerhouses with a physiological toolkit that propels them over a thousand kilometres upstream, in fluctuating temperatures, to spawn in their native river. Other sockeye could never make that journey — they're adapted to short journeys within a tight temperature zone (like the Weaver Creek sockeye in the photo.) And within each population will be individual differences.

In Individual Differences, the first subhead of Chapter II, Darwin writes: "These individual differences are of the highest importance for us, for they are often inherited, as must be familiar to everyone; and they thus afford the materials for natural selection to act on and accumulate, in the same manner as man accumulates in any given direction individual differences in his domesticated productions."

Darwin goes on to shoot down this rigid adherence to the intransigence of important traits by bringing up dimorphism and trimorphism. Species, an arbitrary concept in some ways, are not fixed and variation is the norm, and without it, well, life would not evolve.

Darwin, Strawberries, and Downton (Abbey?)

2012-01-06T09:27:00.000-08:00

Down House Kitchen Garden, July 2011

Charles Darwin ends Chapter One with "Circumstances Favourable to Man's Power Over Selection." For all of Darwin's clarity, his writing is formal, and a disembodied English voice from a British period drama seems to be narrating this blog. (Right now the voice sounds like Hugh Bonneville. A pity considering Maggie Smith has all the best lines.)

Darwin focuses on variability in this subsection on domestication. The most important circumstance for successful selection, Darwin writes, is the sheer number of individuals in a population.

Plant and animal breeders have valued variability for a long time. In part, it made them wealthy. As Darwin remarks, the poor people in Yorkshire can never improve their sheep as they only own small lots. Another circumstance favourable, in regard to animal selection, is the ability to enclose them. And, of course, you need money and land to enclose grazing animals. It's easier to play God with pigeons, since they generally mate for life.

At Down House, Darwin kept pigeons and a large garden for his selection experiments. Darwin manipulated garden plants — notably potatoes — but probably strawberry plants too. He wrote about strawberries in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. He uses the fruit (not truly a berry) in The Origin of Species to show how quickly humans will domesticate a crop if they value it. Only three kinds of strawberry varieties were known, in France, in 1746. Twenty years later, there were five varieties, and by the time Darwin writes, strawberry varieties were "inumerable." Part of the reason, Darwin writes, lies with the promiscuity of American strawberries as noted by horticulturist T.A. Knight writing in 1818. "...there is abundant and additional evidence of the extent to which the American forms spontaneously cross. We owe indeed to such crosses most of our choicest existing varieties." (pp. 351/352 The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication.)

The question begging to be asked: were the "wild" strawberries of North America "unconsciously selected" by people living there for thousands of years?

Knight successfully crossed dozens of strawberry varieties. One selection was named "Downton" and he published a colour plate of the delectable fruit, described as "exquisitely rich far excelling any other ever tasted." Which is also a good description of Downton Abbey (not so much the series itself, but the setting. No idea if the creator and writer of the series Julian Fellowes knows that, and from the Wikipedia page, there is no indication that he has horticultural leanings.)

Darwin ends acknowledging that variability is governed by many unknown laws. By this time, scientists know variability is crucial to selection and that they're slightly clueless as to what ensures variability, aside from great numbers of individuals within a population. It's all the more tragic that today, knowing what we know, we fail to protect variability in wild food through habitat protection — salmon on the West Coast, being a prime example.

Principles of Selection, Anciently Followed/Unconscious Selection

2011-12-30T10:33:00.000-08:00

Now that I have a Kindle Touch, reading The Origin of Species is easier. Lugging around the hardcover is challenging, which means I've spent more time reading Harry Potter in Spanish than Darwin's ideas about the domestication of species. (The first HP book, Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal, when editors were unafraid of editing JK Rowling.)

Where was I? Right. Chapter I -- Principles of Selection. I learned quite a bit. One being that the thistle that threatened to overtake my garden a few years ago (blown over from a neighbour who planted it consciously) is not a thistle. It's a teasel. Fuller's teasel is cultivated in British gardens and occasionally escapes to places where they're unwanted. There's also a wild teasel (and other varieties). Darwin writes that the Fuller's teasel with its hooks -- "unrivalled by any mechanical contrivance" -- is probably a variety descended from the wild teasel. The hooks, he surmises, could have arisen suddenly from a seedling. When humans notice a trait in plants or animals particular useful, Darwin says, humans cultivate the trait. Teasel, for example, was used for carding wool and for brushing wool material. (Today, some people tout it as an effective treatment for Lyme disease, though no studies give it a thumbs up.)

To Darwin, however, humans also breed organisms unconsciously and his example is the "savages and barbarians," particularly the ones he met in Tierra del Fuego during his Beagle years. The indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego throw their scraps of food to the dogs that possess characteristics useful to the humans, unconsciously allowing the desired dogs to breed more. (And he writes in The Voyage of the Beagle, that the dogs were more valued than old women when the community was visited by famine. The dogs helped them hunt otters and other animals.) And this is where you start to understand how modern science stepped off the path of unbiased observation. Reading Darwin, it's easy to conclude that selection, conscious or unconscious but always natural (since humans are part of the natural world), is always an improvement. It plays into the Victorian era's preoccupation with progress, socially and scientifically: the more you methodically change something the better it is.

"If it has taken centuries or thousands of years to improve or modify most of our plants up to their present standard of usefulness to man, we can understand how it is that neither Australia or the Cape of Good Hope, nor any other region inhabited by quite uncivilised man, has afforded us a single plant worth culture."

And here I'm waiting for Darwin to say that "uncivilised man" selected plants for his own use, in his own habitat, etc. Instead, this follows:

"It is not that these countries, so rich in species, do not by a strange chance possess the aboriginal stocks of any useful plants, but that the native plants have not been improved by continued selection up to a standard of perfection comparable with that acquired by plants in countries anciently civilised."

Wow. No wonder when settlers arrive in places like Canada's West Coast, they're dismissive of the way the indigenous population tends their plants and animals. Or rather, dismissive that the people tended anything at all. Over 150 years later, and we're finally understanding just how managed the land- and seascapes were on the coast and managed with biodiversity in mind. We're learning that methodically manipulating our biological surroundings is not all good, all the time. And some societies might do it better than others, depending on the overall goal.

But what other choice did Darwin have than to use an analogy -- domesticating wild species -- to speak to his audience? The scientist can never be separated from his time period. Writing on natural selection today, what would Darwin change? Hopefully not the clarity of his writing. It's astonishing how unreadable academic publications can be these days.

Another tidbit I learned from these two passages was that Eurocentric societies love books about dogs. In 1845 William Youatt wrote what would be his most famous book, The Dog, which was part of a series called The Library of Useful Things (essentially modern day textbooks.) A mostly self-taught veterinarian, Youatt wrote handbooks on farm animals for the Library. He had such a good reputation that he was hired to treat the late Lord Byron's favourite pooch, Lyon, a great big black and white Newfoundland. It seems Lyon died shortly after Youatt got his hands on the him. Whoops.

Photo: The Sand Walk at Down House, Darwin's home. (Jude Isabella)

Introduction and Variation Under Domestication

2011-06-15T07:59:00.000-07:00

"I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision." So says Charles Darwin at the end of the first paragraph in the Introduction. Let's see, it occurs to him in 1837 that something might be made out of the mystery of mysteries — the origin of species — and he sets out to accumulate evidence. In 1858, he presents a paper (On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties) with naturalist Alfred Wallace because the latter is about to inform the world about natural selection even though Darwin's been working on it for over 20 years. In light of Darwin's caution, the speed at which people accumulate research and publish seems wrecklessly fast. And really, considering the science news cycle — new study says blah blah blah, which means another scientist sets out to prove those findings false, publishes, and the whole cycle starts anew. It's a strange and exhausting dance between media and scientific research.

In his introduction, Darwin lays out what he'll cover in each chapter, and he's prescient enough — or maybe he already had a private discussion with someone — to acknowledge that explaining transitions will be tough. "..how a simple being or a simple organ can be changed and perfected into a highly developed being or into an elaborately constructed organ..." Read "eye" in that line, the argument given by many creationists, an argument that made it into the movie "Paul", about an alien that escaped Area 51, is picked up by two British scifi geeks, and their road trip, made complete by an evangelical that tosses aside God after her bum eye is fixed.

Chapter One, Variation Under Domestication starts with "Causes of Variability" where Darwin muses on an individual's nature versus environmental conditions as a key to variability in a species. "...as I have incidentally shown in my work on 'Variation under Domestication,' there are two factors: namely the nature of the organism, and the nature of the conditions. The former seems to be much the more important...." The nature versus nurture argument, right off the bat, with Darwin giving nature an advantage. It's easy to see where Social Darwinists got their ammunition. Darwin uses species like wheat to illustrate his point, but you can see where political theorists would seize on this idea of genetic determinism. And wild to think that "The Origin of Species" was published in 1859 and Gregor Mendel conducted his pea plant experiments from 1856 to 1863.

Historical Sketch, The Origin of Species (The One Darwin Wrote)

2011-04-02T11:03:00.001-07:00

Today is the day I started reading The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, sixth edition. It seems fitting to read it over the next year as I work on my book about Pacific salmon. This morning I read "Historical Sketches" where Darwin explores the lineage, so to speak, of evolutionary thought. He cites 34 authors — English, French, German, and American — who believed in the modification of species, or at least did not believe each species sprang to life in separate acts of creation. He even begins with Aristotle, who had foreshadowed natural selection in his writings though Darwin notes "but how little Aristotle fully comprehended the principle..."

If anyone studies biology, the history of science, or anthropology, the usual names come up: Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, Buffon, and Saint-Hilaire writing in the late 18th century. But it was Dr. W.C. Wells in 1813 and Mr. Patrick Matthew in 1831 that Darwin actually gives some credit to for coming close to articulating the principles of natural selection. Darwin wrote of Matthew: "He clearly saw, however, the full force of the principle of natural selection." It seems Matthew's writing, like so many others, was too tough to follow at times.

Some of the writers insisted they came up with the idea of natural selection before Darwin and Wallace. Maybe the worst offender — to Darwin, at least, because he mentions him in the book — was Richard Owen who wrote to The London Review editor to claim that he came up with the theory of natural selection before Darwin. "It is consolatory to me that others find Professor Owen's controversial writing as difficult to understand to reconcile with each other as I do." And besides, Darwin writes, Owen, himself and Alfred Wallace were all preceded by Wells and Matthew.

My favourite, however, is the Irish doctor Henry Freke who published the "Origin of Species by Mean of Organic Affinity" in 1861, following his insistence that he was ahead of the game in 1851 when he wrote about animals and plants descending from a "single filament," which was pretty much what Erasmus had said much earlier. The London Review wrote that Freke's 1851 article was notable for its "verbose, elliptical, repetitive diction."

Darwin finished the Historical Sketch with the reading of his and Wallace's paper before the Linnean Society in 1858, giving Wallace full marks for clarity — what writing is all about.

As for that image of the seal: will the Oak Bay Marina seals eventually becomes a subspecies? A subspecies twice the size of other harbour seals?

The Anthropologist: Why Guidos Are Good, Really

2011-03-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

Okay, I've just noticed that Rolling Stone has a member of Jersey Shore on its cover and I have something — okay, a LOT — to say about that show and many others featuring Italian Americans as stereotypes. The following is a much shortened version — snappier too, I hope — of an anthropology paper I wrote on the Italian American stereotype. (Below I've listed references used for the paper.)

Being of Italian descent, Italian American stereotypes — most recently MTV’s Jersey Shore’s guidos — always made me shudder. Surely the homeland that inspired Americans and Canadians to sip espressos and nibble biscotti had nothing to do with creating The Situation as well?

Then one day, like the apple hitting Newton’s head, the cannoli hit me in the face — we need the violent, the seductive, and yes, the pathetic guido stereotypes, to give ourselves an identity. Italian Americans are a completely assimilated ethnic group that creates and consumes false cultural stereotypes for two reasons. The first is because we’re not crazy about being like every other white, middle class American. No stereotype means we’re boring. The gangsters, the Italian stallions, the fessos (clowns) are perfect foils against blandness. MTV’s Jersey Shore gives us our fessos. Thank you MTV.

The second reason has to do with our history, which is intertwined with southern Italy, a place where the people have had a strong sense of self-reliance and a general mistrust of authority.

Most Italians first arrived in the U.S. after the First World War when over four million of them entered as legal immigrants — the largest number of immigrants from one ethnic group in the shortest amount of time. Eighty percent of those post-unification immigrants were southern Italians. They left because the unification of Italy, completed by 1871, turned southern Italy into an American south, with a plantation economy providing cheap labor and raw materials for the north, which had industrialization goals. The future was bleak for Neapolitans, Calabrians, Abruzzeze, and Sicilians. And they were also still reeling from the violence of unification, which was particularly hard on the southern rebels and their families. In fact, acts against the southern Italians were frequent in history and the stories of peasants melting into the hilly terrain to escape persecution from invaders are well known.

Unification was just another affirmation for southern Italians that the only reliable people were family. (The next affirmation would be the fight against the fascists during the Second World War.) It reinforced a distrust of authority and clannish behavior the southern Italians were to bring with them upon immigration.

This attitude permeates Italian Americans stereotypes and it’s at complete odds with reality. Italian Americans are mostly of mixed descent and many occupy positions of great authoriy: two Supreme Court justices and the former speaker of the House of Representatives are Italian Americans. The first woman to run on a Presidential ticket was an Italian American (Geraldine Ferraro). Should we mention the Cuomo family? Rudy Guiliani? And on a personal note, my brother is a judge. Let’s neglect the fact, for a moment, that one of my uncles was a union leader and my aunt used to answer the phone: “Do you want money or a job?”

See? I don’t know if that’s actually true, but I can’t help myself: I buy into this dualism — a mythical Italian American versus reality. Why? That goes back to the first reason, we need the stereotype to avoid being like every other “white” American because we are not a visible minority, most of us speak no Italian, and again, most of us are of mixed-descent. About 80 percent of children with Italian ancestry in the U.S. born during the 1980s where reported to have some other ancestry as well. (Of course the Italian Americans in Jersey Shore aren't really Italian American.)

Luckily for us, our ancestors had impeccable timing, otherwise we might not have a stereotype. The development of cinema coincided with the mass exodus of Italians from the southern part of the country whose only unifying identity was one of self-reliance and anti-authority.

When they got to America they often met, for the first time, paesani from other parts of Italy. Homogeneity took shape only over time, mostly in the second and third generations. But the myth was important, and for a myth to work it needs repetition, hence the endless films and television shows.

While myth helps define our culture, cultural meaning often springs from identifying what you are not. That’s why Italian Americans complain about the stereotype, which is almost always created by other Italian Americans. It’s like a loud dinner conversation in public that non-Italian Americans believe is an argument. See, see, we’re Italian, we’re fighting about it! When Italian Americans criticize the stereotypes in the media, it reminds the public at large that such a thing as "Italian American" exist.

We started complaining early. In 1932, Scarface (which was about the life of Al Capone) showed 43 murders. It was denounced by the Order of the Sons of Italy, founded in 1905. The group even has an anti-defamation arm called The Commission for Social Justice that polices unflattering images of Italian American and promotes Italian heritage in a more positive light. From “The Untouchables” television series in the 1960s to the “The Sopranos”, the group has protested stereotyping on television. They endorsed “Canvas”, a film about a “real” Italian American family in 2007. Ever heard of it?

The National Italian American Foundation, founded in 1975, also keeps tabs on the Italian American image, constantly. Their latest protest is against “Jersey Shore.”

And if those two groups were not loud enough, The Italic Institute of America (Guardian of Italian Heritage), founded in 1987, commissioned a study of Italian Americans in film from 1928 to 2002 and found that in 1,233 movies, Italians were perceived positively in 374, and negatively in 859. But who creates more cultural awareness, “Canvas” or “The Godfather?” It makes no difference if the latter is a myth because it has no negative impact on us socio-economically or politically.

Italian Americans actually have the best of both worlds: a riveting stereotype and social mobility.

In one generation the Italian laborers of 100 years ago made great strides documented in a 1938 study, “The Italians of New York: A Survey.” Statistics show that soon after arriving Italian Americans moved into more skilled occupations and the image is one of an upwardly mobile immigrant class. The study concludes, “whatever may separate the Italian American from the rest of his fellow citizens disappears in the third generation.”

It’s no accident that it was these second and third generations of Italian Americans who, losing their heritage, took up what non-Italians in Hollywood began, and started to create, produce, and sell Italian American stereotypes. Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather (published in 1969) admits he wrote with the intention of creating a myth. In the 1970s, it was Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola who successfully exploited the stereotype. The list of participating Italian American actors is practically endless.

By the 1970s the Italian Americans had moved to the suburbs and when that generation of kids grew up, the mythical Italians moved too. The Soprano family could have lived in my neighborhood (the creator, David Chase, grew up in Clifton, which borders my hometown) and the Jersey Shore is where we went — and still go — to play. So, Jersey Shore is bad for Italian Americans?

No, it’s just publicity, and you know what they say about publicity — it’s all good.

References:

1) Alba, Richard D., and Victor Nee 2003. “Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

2) Bondanella, Peter E. 2004. “Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos.” New York, New York, Continuum Publishing

3) Bromberger, Christian 2006. “Towards Anthropology of the Mediterranean, History and Anthropology.” Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 17, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 91–107.

4) Briggs, John 1978. “An Italian Passage: Immigrants to Three American Cities, 1890 -1930.” New Haven and London, Yale University Press.

5) Casillo, Robert 2007 “Gangster Priest: The Italian American Cinema of Martin Scorsese.” University of Toronto Press.

6) Cavallero, Jonathan J. 2004. “Gangsters, Fessos, Tricksters, and Sopranos: The Historical Roots of Italian American Stereotype Anxiety.” Journal of Popular Film & Television, 32 (2): 50-63.

7) Cortes, Carlos E. 1987. “Italian Americans in Film: From Immigrants to Icons.” MELUS, Vol. 14, No. 3/4. Italian American Literature, pp. 107-126.

8) Gambino, Richard 1974. “Blood of My Blood; the Dilemma of the Italian Americans.” Garden City, New York, Doubleday.

9) Italic Institute of America, accessed April 18, 2010:

10) Klein, Herbert S. 1983. "The Integration of Italian Immigrants into the United States and Argentina: A Comparative Analysis." American Historical Review 88, no. 2: 306. Military & Government Collection.

11) Leider, Emily W. 2002. “Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino.” New York, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

12) Levi-Strauss, Claude 1955. “The Structural Study of Myth” The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 68, No. 270, Myth: A Symposium (Oct. - Dec., 1955), pp. 428-444, University of Illinois Press on behalf of American Folklore Society.

13) Mintz 2007. Italian Immigration. Digital History. Accessed April 18, 2010:

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/italian_immigration.cfm

14) National Italian American Foundation, accessed multiple times March 31 to April 19, 2010:

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15) Order Sons of Italians in America, accessed multiple times March 31 to April 19, 2010:

http://www.osia.org/

16) Roediger, David R. 1994. “Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, politics, and working class history.” London and New York, Verso.

17) Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Paolo Giordano, Fred L. Gardaphé, 1998. “From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana.” Indiana, Purdue University Press.

18) United States Census Bureau, “Ancestry 2000: Census 2000 Brief”, Issued June 2004, accessed April 18, 2010:

19) United States Census Bureau, “DP-2. Profile of Selected Social Characteristics: 2000”

Data Set: Census 2000 Summary File 3 (SF 3) - Sample Data

Geographic Area: Nutley township, Essex County, New Jersey, accessed April 18, 2010:

20) Weibel-Orlando, Joan 2008. “A Room of (His) Own: Italian and Italian American Male-bonding Spaces and Homosociality.” Journal of Men’s Studies 16, no. 2: 159-176.

21) Wildsmith, Elizabeth, Myron P. Gutmann, Brian Gratton 2003. “Assimilation and intermarriage for U.S. immigrant groups, 1880–1990.” The History of the Family, Vol. 8 (4): 563-584.

22) Workers of the Federal Writers’ Project, Works in Progress Administration in the City of New York 1938. “The Italians of New York.” New York, New York, Random House.

23) The World Book Encyclopedia 2007. Updated regularly, accessed March 31 to April 19, 2010:

24) Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia 1977. “Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930.” London and Ithica, New York, Cornell University Press.

25) Trailer, Jersey Shore Trailer, accessed April 18, 2010:

Greenhouses, Tomatoes & Blueberries

2010-08-06T21:32:00.000-07:00

The greenhouse -- built out of old French doors. Many things you can do with old windows and doors, and we have many old windows and doors and many projects to tackle. The greenhouse is a little dark, but hacking off a few limbs of the Manitoba maple worked wonders. The plants did grow a bit spindly at first but we have plenty of tomatoes and they're ripening, mostly the cherry.

And breakfast this morning, blueberries from the two productive bushes out of four (behind the bowl, the nasturtiums are the boisterous extroverts of the garden, climbing all over the blueberries.)

Pretty Drunken Woman, Garden Dog, Tomato Guy

2010-04-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

This is one of our six Drunken Women lettuce. (To the right of Garden Dog.) She's pretty happy, slugging back the seaweed fertilizer imported all the way from landlocked Langley, 77 km away. Below the DW lettuce is the tomato guy. The tomatoes are from the tomato lady who lives 202 km away. We suffered tremendous tomato losses last year. Tomato guy's fruit had succumbed to The Blight so he is creating a greenhouse — out of old French doors and glass from an old greenhouse. The bricks for the floor come from a chimney out of the house next door. It's in the construction phase.

The Garden Dog is resting after walking through all the clean laundry, licking off any drops of fertilizer clinging to the Drunken Women's leaves, and trashing the onions. Gardening is hard work with cataracts and no opposable thumbs.

Honeybees in the Backyard

2010-04-11T09:31:00.000-07:00

Bees like a home facing southeast. I'm guessing my backyard is about 9 metres by 12 metres. (Since I'm fluent in imperial as well, that's about 30 feet by 40 feet. For comparison sake, a full-size school bus is about 12 metres. That means if I were so inclined, I could park a full-size school bus in my backyard and maybe convert it into a greenhouse. That sounds like a lot of work, not to mention unattractive.)

Where to put the bees is the question but the answer can wait; I have a month until I get my bees and equipment from backyard beekeeper

John.

John lost half of his six hives over the winter — not bad considering Island beekeepers lost 90 percent of their hives, mostly mid-Island in the Nanaimo area. A meeting of Island beekepers this past February was sad, John said. "I've never seen grown men crying. One fella lost 500 hives. He had none left. So I didn't feel so bad about losing three."

John navigated me through the bee world from the beginning:

the set-up to hive maintenance to market. Sure, he sells a lot of honey but wax, pollen, vinegar and mead are all part of John's product-line. (Little did I know you can go online and find the Meaderies of Canada. What a relief.)

When he lifted the lid on a hive, he intoned that it was like whipping the covers off someone in a warm bed. "It's 65˚F (18˚ C -- summer on the Island) in there, what do you say when someone whips the cover off you?" John asked. Well, something along the lines of: "Holy Cow, and I thought you loved me." At least the outburst doesn't lead to death. One bee was particularly averse to the cool air and stung John. Not sure it was worth dying for but talking sense to a eusocial insect is best left to science fiction.

To be a successful beekeeper, John's advice is "Act like a human; think like a bee."

Of Bees, Chickens, and Vegetables

2010-04-09T10:17:00.000-07:00

Always willing to stretch my adaptive capacity, it's time to get serious about growing food in the backyard.

First, the vegetables: transplanted lettuce, leeks, shallots, onion, endive, and rapini last week just before the big windstorm hit and knocked out power to thousands. It was dicey even without the storm: a warm February meant the seedlings placed next to southside windows grew like, well, weeds. They were leggy when it was time to harden them off. And the hardening off weather was cold and wet. It's still cold and wet (frost on the back porch this morning.) The endive looks like a victim. And any lettuce named "drunken woman" is bound to have problems. Maybe six seedlings made it from the 20 seeded, and the six in the ground are barely standing. They are Italian heirlooms so expect bad behaviour to be tolerated, I suppose. The shallots and onions will be fine. The leeks — meh. They're not convinced this is the life for them. And the directly-seeded carrots prefer the dark, thus far. The rapini is so enthusiastic about one day being simmered in olive oil, garlic, and scallions that it's practically screaming "eat me!" already. (Another batch of seedlings ready to go. All photos enhanced.)

I have a call in to BeeKeeping HQ about acquiring bees. (Although it may be too late.) And we've got to get on the chicken thing. And the tomatoes? Shock. This is not their natural habitat. One has already crossed into the Great Garden in the Sky, where bees are plentiful, tomato blight is but a myth, and they can happily go to seed.

Evolution for Kids

2010-01-19T21:07:00.000-08:00

A colleague, Daniel Loxton (editor of Junior Skeptic) is the author of a new book "Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be" from Kids Can Press and released today. It's good; I've already seen it. (Loxton worked with editor Val Wyatt — work with Val and presto chango, you're instantly transported to a higher writing plane.)

Loxton also illustrated the book (he is an artist, after all) with help from cartoonist and 3D-modeler Jim W. W. Smith.

What's particularly striking is how the book is organized. Loxton uses a question/answer technique kids will understand (as well as the big kids in your life who have trouble accepting that they too are animals and like all life, evolve.) So for all the people in your life who need a better handle on a central tenet of biology, buy the book.

Irresistible....

2009-11-18T12:55:00.001-08:00

One of my favourite blogs! And wow, the opinion piece is from 1980 -- this is not long after the energy crunch of the 1970s. I'd like to think of commuter cyclists then as early "adapters" -- which in some ways is still the case.

Speaking of adaptation, the coming months will focus on species that failed to adapt to change fast enough (either because of a swiftly changing climate or human interference.)

Any How to School But Car

2009-09-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

"Why Can't She Walk to School," a piece published yesterday in the Sunday New York Times, has elicited a fair amount of opinion lobbing. Commuting to work by bicycle in the summer is a fairly relaxed experience, compared to how busy the roads get when school begins in September. You have to wonder at one of the illogical motives for driving kids to school — too much traffic. Hmmmm. So YOUR car doesn't count?

The other illogical reason is abduction fears and the NY Times article points out the vast difference in numbers between how many kids get abducted annually in the U.S. and how many die in vehicular crashes: "About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents." We can control random abductions but not car crashes?

One way to get around this is to bike to school, you can supervise your kids AND reduce traffic making it safe for everyone. Yet communities in the U.S. have seen an increase in bike bans in school districts . (A Saratoga, NY student and his mom challenged a bike ban on the first day of school.) It's like the residents on a busy street who say no to a bus because....the street already has too much traffic. Hmmmm. Compare this attitude with a district in Amsterdam that wants to encourage even MORE people to bicycle.

Crosstown Cycling

2009-08-25T21:02:00.000-07:00

Anyone who rides a bicycle as a primary form of transportation has a day where they pick up way too many groceries, library books, whatever, than they can handle on their bike. Lindsey Kettel and Cory Minkhorst, two McMaster engineering students, understand this problem and invented a collapsible bike trailer — so collapsible it stows on your bike rack when it's not in use. Called the Crosstown, the trailer made the semi-finals for the James Dyson Award, an international design competition. The lucky winner(s) receives £10,000 cash for a design that solves a problem. The winner will be announced September 7.

Bixi Crosses Borders

2009-08-12T20:37:00.000-07:00

Montréal's bike-sharing system, Bixi, is going to Boston, Mass., London, England, and there is talk of of the bicycles (made by Devinci, a Quebec company) finding a home in Manhattan. It was foresight on the Montréal's part to just dive in and do it when Stationement Montréal (the parking authority) told city officials they could create a bike-sharing system that would ultimately pay for itself. I interviewed Alain Ayotte, Stationement Montréal executive vice-president last January for an article I wrote for Reader's Digest. Here's what he said about how Bixi got off the ground:

"We [Stationement Montreal] already had the technology — we had a technology co-platform for the pay-and-go parking system that we had developed and worked with for the past six years. It was easy for us to develop the bicycle sharing system based on that platform. So we went to the city of Montréal and said, 'You want a public bike sharing program, we can provide you with one. And it will be cost neutral, it will be funded by membership and corporate sponsorship, so there’s no charge.' The city did not spend one penny."

More importantly, the parking authority (isn't that ironic?) had created a turn-key operation, which made it easy for other cities to buy into Bixi. Why re-invent the wheel? My favourite part of the interview was what Ayotte said at the end of the conversation. He expressed a real passion for the concept:

"I’d like to see a Canadian system like the train in the 19^th century: a public bike system across the country. A user from Vancouver can use a bike in Edmonton, Montreal, wherever — you’re a member of a national system. That would be great."

More cycling in the Arctic..

2009-06-25T21:45:00.000-07:00

2009-06-21T01:44:00.000-07:00

Solstice in the Arctic...and I got to go for a bike ride on the Dalton Highway, alongside the Alaskan Pipeline. Cool. Ha ha. Get it?

The Carriage Trade

2009-06-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

Tom Vanderbilt's blog How We Drive had comments about a book The Horse in the City and how automobiles impacted the horse and carriage business — talk about disruptive technology. Did anyone document what happened to all those trades people? Did they start making automobile parts? Did unemployment soar?

Published in 2005, the book The Carriage Trade took a look at the vibrant industry of horse drawn carriages. From author Thomas Kinney: "The legendary Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company in 1880 produced a hundred wagons a day — one every six minutes." And the carriage trade did not look like the highly industrialized automobile trade — it was built on small scale businesses.

You can read more about horses in the city here.

Bike Month(s)

2009-05-07T18:54:00.000-07:00

May is Bicycle Month in the United States. In Canada, most provinces and cities host a Bike-to-Work week in May, and reserve June for bike month. Although Toronto's Bike Month runs May 25 to June 25. Vancouver celebrates carfree in June with its Father's Day Carfree Day. In Edmonton, Bikeology coordinates a festival for the month of June. Sadly, however, Edmonton's People's Pedal has announced it's cancelling the bike sharing program in the city this summer. Why? Theft. They lost 95 percent of their bikes to thieves. That was 90 bikes. The idea of every city buying into Montreal's Bixi (scroll down the page if clicking that link) plan is very appealing.

Wouldn't it be neat if during Bike-to-Work weeks business ditched the car/truck if possible and tried for one week to do business by bike. The photo to the right is from India, where bicycles are transportation and a business tool. Worldbike is a non-profit international organization of bicycle designers, industry people, and development professionals who work together to come up with income-generating ideas that involve bicycles. While we don't see a lot of that in North America, some people do marry their passion for bicycles with business. In Portland, Oregon, Charlie Wicker of Trailhead Coffee Roasters delivers his coffee by bicycle. Other people incorporate the bike into their lives in other useful ways — the other photo was taken not far from my house. This cyclist hauls his garbage and recycling by bicycle and trailer. I have 60 empty 2-litre milk cartons to haul to an elementary school tomorrow so I can make bird feeders with 60 Grade 5 students. I'm wondering if I can borrow that trailer...

Bicycles, Futurama, and Shrinking Cities

2009-04-22T20:06:00.000-07:00

On Earth Day, the US Secretary of Transportation brought up cycling again (he addressed the Bike Summit on March 13 to talk about the importance of bicycle infrastructure) in his blog "Welcome to the Fast Lane." Ray LaHood said, "Bike-friendly development also has the potential to contribute significantly to the revitalization of downtown districts and offer an alternative to sprawl and automobile-focused commuting." He goes on to talk about funding and new opportunities for the DOT to feature bicycling as part of a new American mobility within livable communities. Hey, what we need is a another 1939 World's Fair and a new Futurama, but this time with miniature bicycles and high speed trains. The top photo is an image of the GM exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair.

What is interesting about this nod to the bicycle as viable transportation, is that at the same time another nod to change is going on — the shrinking cities movement. It's about how to transform — in an ecological way — cities that are losing people. Take Flint, Michigan — this company town has lost almost half its population since 1965. City officials are talking about condensing the city to a few viable areas and allowing nature to take over the rest.

Bike Blessing

2009-04-19T22:14:00.000-07:00

Saturday was the Blessing of the Bikes at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City. It was year 11 for New York cyclists, of whom the only belief required is to believe in the bicycle.

Going Dutch

2009-04-16T08:33:00.000-07:00

Thank you New York Times for the article on fashion and bicycles. Which is impossible to write without mentioning the Dutch and Amsterdam. (In fact, NYC is getting 200 Dutch bikes for its 400th anniversary, fitting for New Amsterdam.) But it would be nice to note there are pockets where people get bike culture, Vancouver being one — every visit to Van I notice people on their Townies, no helmets, regular clothes, drinking coffee while riding, even smoking (it's the only time I don't get too grossed out by a smoker). Visit Rain City Bikes off West Broadway, just down from MEC and the Bike Doctor for cool bikes, accessories and clothes. Did I mention before how much I want the Biomega? I have to mention Momentum Magazine too, which is also out of Vancouver. Read it.

Smaller Car - Bigger Injury?

2009-04-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons giant SUVs became popular was our obsession with safety (hence, the rise of The Hummer: it's a war out there on the highways.) Safety, however, was largely an illusion and the presence of SUVs on the roads meant people in smaller vehicles became more vulnerable. So what to do about a report from the Institute of Highway Safety that confirms the idea you're less safe in a smaller car? And that's not even against an SUV or truck — the IHS crashed cars like the Toyota Yaris into a mid-sized car like the Camry. The researchers ask a very good question: "Would hazards be reduced if all passenger vehicles were as small as the smallest ones?" The answer is, that in vehicle-to-vehicle crashes, yes, but in single vehicle crashes, no. But it is useful to note that less powerful cars have lower crash rates, and when the 55 mph speed was adopted and enforced in the U.S., fuel was saved, but so were lives. While highway driving might call for something with a bit more heft, you can sacrifice muscle and bump up safety, and still travel at 55 mph (90 km/h). Speeding is a huge factor in injuries and death. And city driving is already such a slow endeavor, maybe the IHS report is the first step in a bid to champion lower speed vehicles (the photo is of a P.U.M.A.) in places where the average speed is already very low. In a city like New York, traffic moves at about 9 mph. I won't even get into the problem with fast cars meeting pedestrians, a lot of whom are kids.

Carfree Days in Reader's Digest

2009-04-10T10:25:00.000-07:00

My article "Love the City? Ditch the Car" is in the May issue of Reader's Digest Canada. I interviewed a lot of people for that piece including Hazel McCallion, the 88-year-old mayor of Mississauga. She cycled seven kilometres from her home to city hall for World Carfree Day last year. Vancouver is already gearing up for their carfree celebration slated for Father's Day. Portland, Oregon is going further (as usual) implementing Ciclovia-style events — carfree days scheduled for three Sundays this summer in June, July, and August. If you're looking for something new to pedal, Biomega is currently my favourite bike to dream about.

Peapod Mobility

2009-04-03T08:52:00.000-07:00

Anything that inches us away from hauling ourselves -- solo -- around in two-tonne hunks of plastic, metal, and whatever else goes into a car, is a good thing. So on Earth Day you can order a Peapod, from Chrysler. It's a GEM car, the kind of neighbourhood car used in gated communities, souped-up golf carts. (At the Alternative Fuels and Vehicles Expo in Florida April 19 and 22 you can check out a GEM, booth 611.) It's great how Peapod Mobility's director calls it "an appliance" in the New York Times Wheels Blog. Why? Mmmmm, it assumes a usefulness, that it has a sole function -- like a washer machine -- and should be used accordingly. You got garden waste? Not easy to haul on a bike (although I do so with a bike trailer). Want to stock up during the grocery store's case lot sale? Okay, I get the grocery store to deliver to my house. Um, gotta haul your kid to school with an unwieldy project, haul their gear to a gig, get your very old dog to the vet, sick grandpa to the doctor? Sometimes you need an appliance for that. In Canada, at least three provinces have OK'd the use of mobility appliances on some roads: Quebec, British Columbia, and Ontario. Quebec has its own mobility appliance, the Zenn. But Peter Arnell, Peapod Mobility's director, also called the Peapod an iPod on wheels because this newer GEM model is a design improvement over the older models that looked like golf carts. "We want to evolve the design language to an eco-iconic one. The idea is something that is charming and brings joy," Arnell told the NY Times. While it might not appeal to everyone, the Peapod is joyful in the way Volkswagen Beetles used to be. And good design can change people's habits -- just look at newspaper redesigns in Eastern Europe. And it is what makes Apple so successful (and expensive.)

Future of Cars...As Giant Weathervanes?

2009-03-31T10:32:00.000-07:00

I'm always astonished that newspapers still have auto sections. I'm thinking it has something to do with advertising dollars, but it's worth noting that the mainstream media is getting more bold about criticizing car culture, even hinting at its demise. Consider the New Yorker commentary this week written by David Owen Economy Vs. Environment. And consider a commentary from the New York Times on March 18, 2009 that explores the cost of car ownership (Wheels blog with a smart subhead: The Nuts and Bolts of Whatever Moves You. So would Julie Payette blog about the space shuttle? Cool.) And a timely book, slated for publication in 2011 by Canadian writer Taras Grescoe, Straphanger: Surviving the End of the Automobile Age (Publisher: HarperCollins.)

Kuruma Banare

2009-03-27T09:08:00.000-07:00

This is not necessarily news but as we watch auto companies implode, and some of us wait and wait and wait for our teens to decide to take the test for their learner's permit, it strikes me that what the Japanese call kuruma banare -- demotorization -- is the beginning of a cultural change in North America too. I have nothing to back this up other than what I've noticed as a trend among cyclists in my community: they're starting to forgo helmets (most cyclists know that a helmet is going to do little when we meet a semi-trailer on a narrow road, we need better bicycle infrastructure) in a place with a universal helmet law and a $75 fine if you're caught without one. (The people I know who ride sans helmet, if stopped, have yet to be fined.) As a commuter cyclist for 14 years, it's noticeable to me that from teens to middle aged women, fewer people wear a helmet. I see more women wearing nice clothes while riding and more diversity in bicycle styles. So, why do I think kuruma banare and less helmet use, nicer clothes, cooler bikes are linked? It's about expression. That emotional attachment we have to cars is eroding and some people are transferring that attachment to another vehicle. Sure the majority of North Americans still express themselves by choosing a Prius over a Range Rover, but there is a cultural shift, most notable in urban centres where it's becoming easier to cycle -- with buses that can carry bikes, more bike lanes, more choice in bike styles. (And of course we all know that high-density urban centres means a lower carbon footprint -- from the US Dept. of Transportation.) And yes, I wear a helmet.

Cars: on their way out?

2008-10-17T11:34:00.000-07:00

In August, the US Department of Transportation released some information about the driving habits this past summer of Americans. Look at the graphs: the price of gas and the cost of travelling by car for summer vacation has more than doubled for everyone, no matter what they drive. (And yes, most people travelling by car for vacation are families with young children, who also fit into the category of making less than $40,000 a year. So yes, we can talk about the socioeconomics of gas prices, but that's beyond the scope of this blog).

The latest data from the Federal Highway Administration's "Traffic Volume Trends" reports that since 2006, the U.S. has seen a drop in vehicular traffic on all public roads. In the National Household Travel Survey, it says: "In fact, since last November, Americans have driven 53.2 billion miles less than they did over the same period a year earlier. This is greater than the 49.3 billion mile decline seen during the energy and oil crisis of the 1970s."

Getting around is getting more difficult for drivers — but easier for others. In Montreal, Bixi public bike sharing was introduced in September. The Bixi group is giving a demo in Toronto on October 24. And in Vancouver, another company is looking to launch similar program. Like Paris's Velib program, people rent a bike for a reasonable fee (in Paris you need a credit card with a computer chip) from one station and they can return it to another station.

As for further evidence that cities, at least, are re-thinking the car, New York City had its first carfree Sundays this past summer, the Prague Critical Mass bike ride reached 4000-plus riders in September for that city's carfree celebration, and Harrogate, UK held its first carfree day on World Car Free Day. They did it, councillor John Fox said, to send "a very clear message to those who hold the transport purse strings at central government, that people do want to see investment in other forms of transport."

Key word, "transport." No one really cares how they arrive at a destination, if it's painless for most people, it works. That's why the car has ruled, so far.

The Commute and the End of the Love Affair

2008-07-26T20:41:00.000-07:00

On Friday, the US Department of Transportation sent me an update on the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). I had contacted the department a few months ago when working on YES Mag's petroleum issue. I was trying to find out more about commuting trends. They emailed me the statistics on telecommuting between 1995 and 2001. The more money you have the more likely you are to telecommute (no surprise really, flipping burgers from home would be mighty tough.) The NHTS is currently in the field surveying 150,000 households across the US. What will the numbers look like?

If the New York Times article is any indication, people have an inkling that the driving life will change sooner rather than later. Aside from the expense, the guilt factor is driving some young people to mass transit — read the last couple of sentences. Plus, in the last few months, the mainstream media has fed readers article after article about the changes in real estate prices and the rise of the urban centre. Yet five years ago had you asked any financial analyst about buying property and the answer was, don't bother, but if you're going to, buy urban. (Although that had more to do with Boomer empty-nesters unloading big homes and rediscovering the urban lifestyle.)

In purely aesthetic terms, where would you want to live?

Motown Becomes Growtown

2008-07-11T16:43:00.001-07:00

The BBC dubs Motown "Growtown" in a news story about the growing urban farm movement in a fading city. The idea is an old one, but for an urban centre that has bled citizens for almost 50 years — Detroit's population has shrunk by about half since the 1950s — planting food crops is a productive use of abandoned land.

Urban Farming, a charity started by Detroit singer Taja Sevelle in 2003, is reminiscent of the Victory Gardens of the Second World War. In response to food shortages caused by the war, citizens in Allied countries planted gardens to feed themselves and their communities. Other cities are digging into the action too, last month in Portland a depaving project broke ground for an urban edible forest (mentioned in an earlier post.)

The idea works for Prince, he supports the charity, which aims to grow food and feed hungry people. About one-third of Detroit's population lives below the poverty line.
The photo above shows Urban Farming's collaboration with Starbucks to transform an abandoned two-acre city lot into a mini-farm. Detroit is adapting: a wilting motor city transforming itself through the solar power of plants.

Samsø, Carfree, and Adaptive Capacity

2008-07-04T10:46:00.000-07:00

Have five-month-old will travel...by bicycle. Finnegan gets carted around Vancouver, B.C. with this gadget. Is it safe? Well, mums and dads use them all the time in the Netherlands. And if your initial comment is, "That's the Netherlands" — doesn't someone in a place like Vancouver have to lead the change? Whatever country manages to adapt the best to a changing climate wins.

Wikipedia has a good definition of what adaptive capacity is: the ability to adapt when your environment — either physical or social — changes. The 8th Annual Carfree Conference held in Portland, Oregon last month was about how humans can adapt to — and adopt — more ecologically benign ways to haul themselves around. Read Steve Jones's (city editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper) wrap up of the conference. By building bicycle-friendly infrastructure, Portland has galloped ahead of other North American cities in terms of getting a city's "indicator species" (that would be families) out of their cars and dancing on their bike pedals.

But right now, the place that has accelerated the pace of human adaptation to climate change is Samsø, a Danish island in the North Sea. Beginning about 1998, the population of 4300 deliberately changed how they used energy. They converted cars and trucks to run on rapeseed (canola) oil, they built wind turbines, they got rid of their oil furnaces and installed Finnish fireplaces and heat pumps. By 2001, they had cut their fossil fuel use in half. This year, they became officially carbon neutral. The island has got a lot of press, most recently in the New Yorker. They even have their own song. (Karoake version available as well.) As writer Elizabeth Kolbert points out, Samsø is a conservative farming community — they're not dreadlocked druid crusaders.

Which brings me back to being carfree or at least car-lite: it's probably the easiest and cheapest way to make the first adaptive move. Let's say you want to replace your furnace with geothermal energy, it's daunting because the costs is in the tens of thousands of dollars depending on where you live. But start walking, cycling, or taking transit, and you've suddenly made an enormous difference with little effort or cost. In fact, you save money.

Carfree Day 8: Bike City

2008-06-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

Fifteen kilometres, over 15 cyclists, and over 15 degrees (Celsius) — a nice day on the west coast for a bike tour to wrap up the conference (for me, I head back tomorrow.)

After riding through Washington State and the city of Portland, you notice something lacking in most places: drivers and cyclists respect each other. They seem to have negotiated a peace. Cyclists are on the streets here because it's comparatively safe. (It's not all sunshine and lollipops — I did pass a ghost bike on the way into town on Sunday. Ghost bikes memorialize a spot where a cyclist has been killed. It's meant to remind drivers to share the road.)

And after four days at the conference, one thing is clear: it's not about being carfree, it's about being mobile. Bicycles — engineering perfection — are the easiest way to give citizens of all ages freedom to move. But most importantly, if you get families cycling, you can create a bicycle culture, a safer city, and lighten your carbon footprint.

Fuel for Thought: England announced its first cycling city — Bristol. The U.K's transportation secretary made the announcement today. To make the city a safe place for cyclists ages 8 to 80, the government plans to spend over $22 million (USD). The city's press release says the effort is to make "cycling a real alternative to the car."

Carfree Day 7: Social Justice and Livable Cities

2008-06-18T21:52:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, with my super-mini-camcorder, I filmed people tearing up a parking lot. Street Films (part of the Liveable Streets Network) from New York was there too, and today they showed their video. Much better than mine. I didn't see it posted on their website, but look at some of their films. Their videos show how cities around the world create space where people can rest, talk, and play — and it always involves reducing traffic.

Aaron Naparstek, editor-in-chief of www.streetsblog.com, echoed what is another emerging theme of the conference — in the last year city governments are interested in reducing traffic, getting people on bikes, and using their own two feet. Call it a collective epiphany.

But maybe one of the most forward-thinking presentations was from Jill Fuglister of the Coalition for a Livable Future in Portland. Wow. They put together an Equity Atlas. The atlas illustrates how equal or unequal transportation choices are for the region. Like most places, the poorer you are, the less you're served by transit, bike lanes, even sidewalks. Jill gives a brief explanation about transportation equality in a video I'll post later. The equality issue goes back to what Gil Penalosa said yesterday about mobility as a human right — when you make mobility important, you reduce the carbon footprint. Suddenly cars are squeezed out of the equation.

Two videos below show a bicycle fitted to carry a child, in this case it's 5-month-old Finnegan who came to Portland from Vancouver with his parents. (This particular bicycle is borrowed from friends, although mum and dad use the same model to wheel around Vancouver.) The second video is me riding around downtown Portland. I wanted to get Portland's free streetcar in the video, so the end is wonky as I had to grab my brakes so I could stop for the red light.

Fuel for Thought: Cycling is fun — Paul Adkins (Kidical Mass) with his four kids.

Carfree Day 6: Carfree Families

2008-06-17T20:10:00.000-07:00

Is it possible? Sure. Christine and Kent Peterson of Issaquah, WA talked about how they manage as a carfree family — let's just say no one is hauling around kids and hockey gear. Most families at the Carfree Families session were car-lite. Portland resident Olivia Rebanal, co-founder of Urban Mamas, is honest about being a two car family and she's uncomfortable going carfree. But her family of four also has eight bikes for grown ups, six bikes for kids, five pairs of roller blades, and sundry scooters. Her family cycles, buses, or walks most of the time.

The message from the panel, and Olivia stressed this, is that cycling is normal. Cycling belongs to everyone. That it's a way to strenghen the idea of "slow families." What better way to create a bicycle culture than through kids? Paul Adkins (president of GEARs) a father of four, is one of the masterminds behind Kidical Mass. That's right, not Critical (as in the cycling movement around the world where hundreds of bikes take over select city streets the last Friday of every month and drivers get mad), but Kidical. It's about families on bikes having fun. Make biking a normal way to move around and suddenly everyone is doing it. Listen to Paul talk about Kidical Mass below. A Kidical Mass ride is scheduled for Toronto, June 20.

Gil Peñalosa was the keynote speaker. Peñalosa, executive director of Walk and Bike for Life, lives in Toronto. But he's famous as the former parks commissioner for Bogotá, Colombia — the city that started Ciclovia. Think of a Sunday street party where cars are banned, and thousands of people come out to play. "It's an experience in civility," Peñalosa said. "Ciclovia allows people to meet on an equal setting." Bicycles level the playing field. One-third of the residents of any city don't drive: that would be the young and the elderly, Peñalosa pointed out. "Mobility is a human right. At the end of the day, cycling has to be safe for an eight-year-old and an 80-year-old." Check out a brief bit of Gil's presentation below.

Fuel for Thought: Money makes a difference. With the price of gas climbing, American drove less in March 2008 than they did in 2007. They drove 11 billion miles less. That's the first drop in March since the 1979. And it's the sharpest year-on-year drop for any month since the Department of Transportation starting reporting in 1942.

Another couple of thematic words kept popping up today: tipping point. Unlike the 1970s, this oil crisis, climate crisis, energy crisis won't be swept away — it's here to stay and cities that welcome cyclists are the cities everyone will want to call home. Peñalosa said he met with the CEO of Ford, Alan Mulally, and when the head of a major car company utters these words, you know change is coming: we're not in the car business anymore, we're in the mobility business. Hallelujah Alan. Although, what happens when a major corporation changes its focus....

Carfree Day 5: Depaving Project

2008-06-16T21:10:00.000-07:00

The frogs came back to Portland once residents took up crowbars and shovels to dig up a parking lot to make way for an urban edible forest. Well, they were humans on stilts dressed up as frogs with pretend jackhammers but they got the point across. To kick off the Carfree Conference (see video below of Ellie, one of the organizers) members of an organization called Depave, invited volunteers to help them dig up a 3000 square foot parking lot owned by Angela Goldsmith. (See video below.) The edible forest is Angela's vision. Depave has projects all around the city, this particular site is the biggest and most ambitious. Angela was initially going to develop a triplex.

Fuel for Thought: Americans commute, on average, for a total of 100 hours annually. Compare this with how much vacation time most people get annually: 80 hours. Canadians commute for about 12 full days annually. That's bad. Unless of course you like commuting by car, and some people do. It's time alone. But, Statistics Canada also reported that cyclists are more likely to enjoy their commute, 59 percent of cyclists compared with 37 percent of drivers. Walkers were higher than drivers with 46 percent enjoying their daily commute. Okay, sure, the people who walk or cycle do it because they enjoy the activity in the first place. (Only about one percent of workers in Canada commute by bicycle. In Victoria, B.C., that number rises to almost five percent.)

We spend a lot of time and energy on transportation (see tables below). And while this conference is called carfree, it's really about being multi-modal: do what you can, when you can. Every little bit counts. Check out the video of everyone pitching in to liberate that parking lot, a few power tools got the job going, but almost the entire surface layer of concrete was gone in a few hours with just a bunch of people working together.

Transportation's Share of U.S. Petroleum Use: 1975-2006:

U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Energy Use: 1985-2006

Carfree Day 4: Longview to Portland, Oregon

2008-06-16T00:32:00.000-07:00

After about 90 kilometres we arrived at the International Youth Hostel in Portland, Oregon. The Hawthorne neighbourhood. (Nice Italian restaurant down the street: mmmm, mozarella and tomatoes.) We had one flat tire, much chocolate (well, I did) and a good lunch at Scappoose with Milla the Mooch, a neighbourhood cat that begs for kibbles. Even coffee. Outrageous for a feline really. But she is pretty.

We took route 30 all the way from after the Longview Bridge to Portland. Lots of traffic. Not terribly scenic although we did see Mount St. Helens for a while and Mount Hood. But it's a Sunday: where are all those cars, trucks, and motorcycles going with their humans?

Fuel for Thought: The U.S. National Household Travel Survey has these great statistics about Americans and their personal vehicles. Their 2008 survey should be out next year but the 2001 survey is still illuminating. From 1969 to 2001, the number of household vehicles almost doubled. It was six times the increase in population, percentage wise, 181 percent. Okay, you want more numbers? In 1969, there were 72.9 million household vehicles for 197.2 million people. Zoom ahead to 2001, and you've got 203.9 million household vehicles for 277.2 million people. That's a lot of gas.

Even if you travel a lot you have options. Bert Hill just bought his Bike Friday a year ago and he's already been on a number of trips. Check out the video below, along with video of Milla the Mooch, and another of Mount St. Helens (in the distance, we were fixing a flat on route 30.) Oh, and don't let Milla fool you with the sweet act, if she doesn't get her way she bites.

Carfree Day 3: Centralia to Longview, Washington

2008-06-14T22:20:00.000-07:00

After 90 kilometres we arrived in Longview from Centralia. Rolling hills, great taco stand in Winlock, and one flat tire, me, about 6 kilometres outside Longview. A young employee at Bob's sporting goods store in Longview made sure to drive home along the road we were biking to see if we needed a ride. We had patched an already patched tube and were cycling when he found us. People like to help.

Fuel for Thought: can we help ourselves out of our reliance on oil? It's tough. But when the benefits of something begins to outweigh the costs, people take action. Take Juneau, Alaska. An avalanche destroyed major transmission towers in April — those lines delivered 80 percent of the city's power from a hydroelectric dam. Electricity rates reportedly rose about 400 percent. Moving was not a solution. In that damp environment, people started hanging clothes on the line, among a bunch of other conservative moves. The community saw their megawatt hours fall from 1006, the day of the avalanche, to 625 megawatt hours a couple of days later.

People adapt when they have to — gas at over $4 a gallon in the U.S. has, at the very least, affected truck sales. In May, a car was the country's best selling vehicle, not the ubiquitious Ford F-series pick up trucks. The last time that happened was December 1992. Now how can we get some of those people out of their cars and on bicycles? In Longview, most people drive to work, and they don't have far to go. Check out the graphs up on the right. Now check out the videos below, doesn't the highway look like a mobile jail? The lambs are cute. And that Bike Friday is enticing. On the Clipper from Victoria to Seattle were two cyclists travelling from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego on bicycles that folded into a suitcase, just like the one in the video. What freedom. A Bike Friday is only about $2000, a new small car about $18,000. I'll post another video of the Bike Friday tomorrow. The bike has its limitations, but Bert Hill, our riding partner on this trip, has no trouble keeping up with our touring bikes!

Carfree Day 2: Sumner to Centralia, WA

2008-06-13T22:57:00.000-07:00

Big, loud trucks, a flat tire, a nasty hill were some of our challenges today cycling 101 kilometres from Sumner, Washington to Centralia. Met up with Bert Hill from San Francisco.We're at the halfway point between Seattle and Portland. Met two young women also cycling to Portland to visit a friend, they were going at a relaxed pace. Not sure they even had a map, but they were having fun.

Cycled the Tenino-Rainier-Yelm trail — a bit like the Galloping Goose in Victoria, BC, wholly paved, not as well used. Looks like a Rails to Trails project. Check out the videos below. Although the day's highlight was the Blue Bottle Cafe in Yelm. The food was made exactly how they said on the sign: with love and gratitude. Being at Michelle's cafe was like being home. And the food was delicious too. So was the coffee. And the blue bottles scattered around the house, look as if they're waiting for an artist to come paint them. I have photos I'll post later.

Not sure price of gas is making much more than a dent in people's driving habits. Ros and I stopped at an intersection near Spanaway and a woman driving a van rolled to stop, hit her automatic window button and called out to us: "I wish I could do that." Ros replied, "You can sister! You can do it." She just shook her head.

Fuel for thought: Gas prices go up, and cops get on bikes. Really. Some police departments are resuming bicycle patrols to help them out of the gas crunch. What's better, at least in urban areas — a cop on a bike or a car? High gas prices can be positive in ways that may surprise us.

Carfree Day 1: Victoria to Portland

2008-06-12T22:32:00.000-07:00

Yippee! After 72 kilometres we arrived in Sumner, Washington. The receptionist at the Sumner Motor Inn called us athletes! She is watching The Terminator.

Here's some fuel for thought: a report from Australian scientists, entitled Cycling: Getting Australia Moving, estimates that currently cycling saves the government $227.2 million per year in health costs alone. The study's authors say, "Building cycling into everyday transport is an easy way to sufficiently physically active without having to re-structure your whole life or find time to exercise."

Check out some of our trip. (The drivers are overwhelmingly courteous here.) The only near miss we had was a hawk bursting out of the bush — it almost took Ros out.

Gotta run, can't post the video of Ros breaking into Spanish (who knew?) with the woman from Yakima selling cherries by the side of the road. Reception is closing and there's no wifi in the room.

Victoria to Portland — On a Bike

2008-06-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

I'm attending the 8th annual Towards Carfree Cities conference, traveling 322 km by bike to Portland, Oregon from Victoria, British Columbia.

Carfree, fantasy or future?

Click on the video above and Leo will tell you a little bit about oil consumption and oil use. See you on the road!

CSWA in Whitehorse

2008-05-26T22:28:00.000-07:00

The Canadian Science Writers' Association's AGM is wrapping up in Whitehorse, Yukon. We had panel sessions, visits to the Beringia Centre, listened to lectures on programs like the Cape Farewell project, and lots and lots of talk about climate change. No change there: it's happening and real progress has yet to be made. All the energy it takes to discuss climate change science is obviously quite ironic. Still, this meeting is a good place to meet scientists, other science journalists, and get to know the locals, like this friendly gent.

Plastic Bag Ban

2008-05-19T18:47:00.000-07:00

Are plastic bag bans a red-herring when it comes to cleaning up the environment? Some people think so, including British recycling and waste expert, Professor Chris Coggins. The ban on plastic grocery bags goes into effect in China on June 1. The China Daily reported in February that the country's largest plastic bag factory was closing and throwing 20,000 people out of work.