Letter to Ukee council

Here’s my (uncharacteristically restrained) letter to Ucluelet council, put in the mail yesterday. Thanks to the apparently defunct Ukee Tattler for the borrowed pic, and for reminding me what year the logging happened.

Dear Mayor Russcher and Ucluelet council,

I recently had the opportunity to drive to Toquart Bay, past the Maggie Lake timber block that was logged back in the summer of 2006. I see that it has still not been replanted, and is growing wild with brush and alder.

As I recall, this cutblock was an initial step, after much negotiation, in creating a permanent “community forest” for Ucluelet. I believe the UEDC was the driving body behind both securing this piece of land and (in conjunction with Interfor) in logging it.

“Community forest,” in most people’s minds, speaks to a notion of stewardship, of a piece of forest being under the care of a neighbouring community, as opposed to being a mere entry in an account book in some faraway city.

A burden on my friends

Gads, i believe i am becoming a burden upon my friends — the ones, especially, with whom i stay during my frequent perambulations through the geography of no-fixed-addressedness.

H. and R. (in Vancouver and Victoria) bear the brunt of it. Strangely, it seems that what is most obnoxious about my presence in their lives is less that i’m sleeping on their floors for so many nights running. (I try, at least, to be helpful around the apartment and maintain a low profile.) Rather, it’s that i am (gasp) not working. I can sleep in when they head off in the mornings (though out of practicality and respect i try not to); i can head off to indulge my curiosities during the day; i have energy left most nights to do (cheap) things that they may not have. Hell, i’d be pissed off if i bunked with myself for more than three days.

It seems the seductions of the self-unemployed life are rather a taunt to those who choose to, or have to, head off to work five days a week.This may be a demon that will come home to roost eventually (a la parable of the grasshopper and the ant). We shall see.

I take it more as a reflection on what work has become: a burden that many (most?) people would prefer to escape, or at least lighten.

Any way i cut the cheese, it’s a burden coming my way sometime soon!

The other porn addiction

Hal Niedzviecki in The Other Porn Addiction, from Walrus Magazine, April 2009:

British social theorist Nikolas Rose talks about the modern individual as an “entrepreneur of him- or herself” who is “to conduct his or her life, and that of his or her family, as a kind of enterprise, seeking to enhance and capitalize on existence itself through considered acts of initiative, and through investments.” The modern individual, then, seeks relationships that are essentially “parasocial” — the term social scientists use to describe the one-sided relationships we have with celebrities, in which we know everything about them, but they don’t know we exist. Social networking scholar danah boyd [sic] has argued that this flow of detailed information is creating a new class of people in our lives — people we follow closely online and come to know intimately but voyeuristically, without any need for genuine interaction. [emphases mine]

Much as i appreciate, at times, the product of “the other porn addiction” (subtitle: Why are ordinary women exposing themselves online?), the article provides some thought-provoking issues as to the social health of the people involved.

I’m a big admirer of Niedzviecki, one of Canada’s most astute social commentators. Hal’s website: www.smellit.ca.

Why economists fail (per the Druids)

Worth a read, though i never thought i’d be following an “archdruid” with some avidity. And not just any archdruid: John Michael Greer is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA).

Shows how desperate i have become, here in a once-proud country now ruled by an economist.

…[T]here’s a case to be made for discussing economics from a standpoint distinct from that of today’s economists – in fact, from nearly any imaginable standpoint other than that of today’s economists. That case could draw its initial arguments from many points, but the most obvious one just now has to be the near-total failure of contemporary economic thought to provide meaningful guidance to the macroeconomic challenges of our time.

Full post is here at The Archdruid Report. It’s getting so dang hard these days to tell straight from satire. Case in point, from later on in the archdruid’s post:

[It was announced] a few days back that the world derivative market has now reached a total paper value in excess of one quadrillion dollars….  (If you have the sort of fashionable lifestyle that costs you $2000 a day, for example, and you started spending it when multicellular life first evolved on Earth, you wouldn’t yet have spent one quadrillion dollars.) Still, it’s important to grapple with such figures if only to grasp the fantastic absurdities that have created them.

In thinking about this particular version of the unthinkable, two things should be obvious. The first is that there isn’t a quadrillion dollars worth of nonfinancial goods and services anywhere on our planet….

And the economists are the wizards in charge of this fantasy-land!

My letter to Rich

To:
Rich Coleman, Minister responsible for Gaming;
Kevin Krueger, Minister of Tourism, Arts & Culture
Premier Gordon Campbell

cc: Scott Fraser, MLA

Dear Honourable Members,

It’s finally sinking in, just what your BC Liberal government has done to arts and culture in B.C. Your most recent kick in the teeth will cripple the creative life of this province for decades.

Your unprecedented, sweeping and brutal cuts display an astonishing ignorance of what holds a society together. As government, are you merely the manager of our economy? Or are you the stewards of our society? Because a society requires much, much more than a balanced till at the end of the day. Exactly what else could be the topic of an interesting debate, but one ingredient every side would agree on is that a functioning society requires a strong culture as the glue that holds it together. This is harder to count than dollars, which is why it takes wisdom and vision to properly lead. The cuts you have just affected, I’m afraid, put you out of that club.

In an economic downturn, interest in culture expands. There’s a reason visionary leaders, like President Obama in the U.S., have increased cultural spending in these recessionary times.

Go out and get hurt

God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.

(attributed to American writer Elbert Hubbard)

A pithy quote from Firebase Seattle — The Executioner #21,, by Don Pendleton. Who says pulp trash is unenlightening?