The Geography of Hope

Last spring, I attended a conference here in Calgary called Gaining Ground. The most memorable - indeed epochal - presentation there was a stat-dense headspinner by a retired geologist named Dave Hughes.

Almost exactly a year later, my profile of Hughes and his crusade to spread the word about the dawn of an age of energy scarcity has been published in The Walrus. If I do say so myself, I think this is one of the most important topics I've ever had the opportunity to address in a single magazine feature, and I'm tremendously pleased with how it turned out. I'll step even further beyond the bounds of humility to say it's essential reading for anyone who plans to be alive and in need of fuel in 2020 - not because I'm so brilliant, understand, but because the implications of Dave's research are that staggering.

UPDATE: In addition to the lively online discussion at The Walrus' own website, my Hughes profile has earned a mention over at the Freakonomics blog at the NY Times. Inspiring another lively discussion, which Dave Hughes himself eventually joins.

Time for a sort of update - an excuse, really, for neglecting this blog in the last few months. I've actually been more active than ever online and off, but much of that work has gone down elsewhere on the internet. I'll explain why.

Back in the spring of 2006, when I was neck deep in Geography of Hope research, I attended a ridiculously exclusive and informative conference in the German countryside. One of the most compelling participant-presenters at the conference was Jeremy Leggett, whose name was not too familiar to me but nearly a household name in the UK. Leggett had once been a fossil fuel geologist, but his distaste for the impact of his work on the planet had convinced him to defect to Greenpeace UK in the 1980s. As the organization's chief scientist, he'd become one of Britain's most prominent and effective voices for action on climate change.

At the German conference, however, Jeremy talked mainly about his newest role - the humblest, he said, but maybe the most important. After 20 years on the front lines of global climate activism, he'd become, as he put it, "the proprietor of a small South London roofing company." What he meant was that he'd moved from awareness campaigns to a kind of direct action: he'd founded a company to begin installing solar panels far and wide as quickly as possible. Much of that activity, though, as he self-deprecatingly noted, had been in his backyard, in South London. And what it really came down to was the workaday world of wiring and tile, contracts and installs, the stuff of just another roofing company.

I've been thinking about Jeremy's move a lot lately, because I've been consumed for most of the last two months with helping to found a small Calgary civic engagement organization. We've dubbed the thing CivicCamp, and if for some reason you find municipal politics on the Canadian prairie endlessly fascinating, I'm posting quite a bit at the CivicCamp blog and throwing up short links and notices at Twitter under the guise of @civiccampyyc. (Believe me, I never thought I'd be a Twitterer, but such is the nature of my passion for this stuff. I refuse, however, to call my posts "tweets," because it's the plug-dumbest term for a form of everyday communication ever.)

This was a long time in coming - I knew when I started research for The Geography of Hope that eventually I'd have to switch from reporting to action, and it was actually at that German conference where I met Jeremy Leggett that I fully realized that what I was doing wasn't just writing a single book but pursuing my life's work.

I've done something like 70 public lectures and such since the book came out, and each time I'd return home and think: I've really gotta start putting this stuff into action in my own backyard. Finally, through my work on the board of Sustainable Calgary, I saw a way to move from rhetoric to real action.

Along with a couple of other board members who agreed that Sustainable Calgary was insufficient to meet the pressing local need for effective civic engagement on sustainability issues, we rounded up a handful of local organizer/policy-wonk/politico types with a loose goal of getting something together before Calgary City Council met in June for an open session on a vital piece of long-term planning policy.

I somehow convinced this crew to abandon all traditional hierarchical organizing strategies in favour of the BarCamp/democamp/unconference model favoured in digital communications circles, and we sent out invites. We hoped - we thought rather over-optimistically - for maybe 100 attendees. Our 125 spaces were filled in less than a week, and in the end 160 people attended the inaugural CivicCamp.

I have no idea what we've launched, but it feels . . . right. It feels true to my book's core message and in line with the lesson I saw again and again in the research, a message perhaps best summarized by Mari Hollander of the Findhorn Foundation:

Pause where you are, reflect on what you’ve got, be grateful for what you have, tune into what you need to do next, build support around yourself to enable you to do that. This will make your life a happier life and probably the world a better place.

Thanks, Mari.

I've finally found the time to write another column for Worldchanging. It's roughly about the idea of green, carbon-sequestering concrete (and why that's a more important thing than a plastic water bottle ban). Fun story, and some of the science behind it has emerged from a lab at McGill where my good friend (and one of my wife's oldest and dearest pals) Sean Monkman toils. I finally understand what concrete engineering is and why it matters - sorry it took so long, Sean!

A few pieces of nifty news here at GOH HQ . . .

First, I've just learned that I've been nominated for a National Magazine Award in the "Essays" category for a story on nuclear power in Alberta that I wrote for Alberta Views last year. Even more exciting, the good folks at Alberta Views are on the shortlist for Magazine of the Year!

In other news of more immediate import, I am appearing on The National on CBC tonight to talk about Earth Day. Alas, I don't think I'm being interviewed by The Dude himself (which is our household nickname for Peter Mansbridge, in honour of his consummate pro news guy's inflappability). Still, if you're looking for something to watch after the hockey game, why not surf on over.

Back to you, Peter.

Colour me surprised - and delighted! This weekend's Globe & Mail Canadian bestseller list features The Geography of Hope in the No. 9 spot. (See for yourself for as long as the Globe keeps their content public these days.)

I've got no idea why I'm back in the saddle all of a sudden, and I have even less clues as to how I could be No. 9 on the "Canadian Bestsellers" list of all nonfiction titles - four spots ahead of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, for example - and yet nowhere on the paperback "National List" (where In the Realm occupies the ninth spot). If "national" doesn't refer to Canada, whose nation is the Globe listing?

Anyway, I don't mean to hairsplit. I'll take what I can get when it comes to bestseller status.

The final two installments of the four-part "Field Notes of an Accidental Eco-Tourist" are both now online over at Worldchanging.

Part 3 talks a lot about the finest meal to be had on Costa Rica's Pacific coast, which also happens to be a sterling example of sustainable eating.

Part 4 is about some books I read on vacation. Books about how not to win hearts and minds.

The first chapter of a three-and-a-half part series on recent travels in Costa Rica - which I'm calling "Field Notes of an Accidental Eco-Tourist" - is now posted at Worldchanging.com.

This first one is kind of a broad overview of the eco-tourist scene; future chapters will look at the Central American aftershocks of America's housing bubble and the emergence of a truly sustainable tourist economy on one quiet stretch of the Costa Rican coast.

Update: Part Two of "Field Notes of an Accidental Eco-Tourist" is up at Worldchanging.

So it's not quite a Daily Show-esque "senior energy analyst" credit - not yet - but keen-eyed readers of the Edmonton Journal (is there any other kind of reader of the Edmonton Journal? I'd say Oiler fans, but we know they don't read too good) . . . ahem . . . keen-eyed readers of the Edmonton Journal will notice I'm quoted at the bottom of an article about a new Pembina Institute report recommending my home province switch from coal to renewables inside 20 years.


Snoopy is the world famous beagle.
(See bottom of post for further context.)

It always amazes me what sticks from one of these things where the reporter calls you at 7pm while you're wiping noodles off your kid's forehead and you babble semi-coherently for 45 minutes in about 20 directions at once, and then the next morning it sounds like you calmly noted the German experience in switching to renewables and warned readers to be wary of vested interests in the energy industry. Before retiring to the den with your pipe and slippers to read a little Proust before bedtime, surely.

Anyway, the real gem in that story is this line from the spokesman for Alberta energy giant Epcor, which holds the No. 7 spot on the list of Canada's biggest corporate emitters of greenhouse gases:

And given our push for environmental, cleaner power, we're looking at developing opportunities to utilize that resource in a way that reduces the environmental footprint.

Read it twice. Read it three dozen times. It won't get any clearer. Here's a sort of schematic to help you parse it. When he says "that resource"? He means coal. When he says "utilize"? Burn. "Environmental" and "cleaner"? A formidable buzzword bingo entry, but it could've used a random, utterly hollow "green" or "sustainable" for greater impact. (Or rather it would impact readers more proactively if he'd utilized key terminology from the vision statement.) "A way that reduces the environmental footprint"? Magic clean coal pixie dust (still in development). "Our push"? Our reluctant acceptance of scientific reality and consumer demand, which has thus far manifested itself mainly in empty, newspeaky platitudes like this one.

Still, full credit to Journal reporter Hanneke Brooymans - she did a far more thorough job than my local rag does at presenting the full case for renewables.

And while we're on the topic, I should note that the Edmonton Journal is responsible for my first professional publication. When I was 12 years old and living in Cold Lake (300 km northeast of Edmonton and aptly named), the Journal used to publish a reader-drawn cartoon on the front page of their Sunday Comics section. I drew one of Snoopy dressed as the Red Baron, holding aloft a bullet-ridden copy of the Journal and bellowing, "Curses, Red Baron! Now I can't read my Edmonton Journal Comics!" Or words to that effect. Below the cartoon, they ran my Grade 7 school photo, in which I looked like quite the cleancut, bright-eyed youth. I believe the sort of bio that ran alongside noted my enthusiasm for the heavy metal music of Iron Maiden and Twisted Sister. Damn, wish I had a scan of that clipping, it was a beaut.)

(Props to John Hodgman for inspiring this post's title, and props to my old pal Jason Lapeyre for showing me a picture of an ultra-hip Tokyo teen he once took in which said teen was wearing a t-shirt which read, in giant letters, "Snoopy is the world famous beagle." No need to parse that - it is unassailably true.)

The Mystery of the Sudden Re-Appearance on Amazon's Bestseller List (which, incidentally, would make a really very dull Hardy Boys book) has been solved!

My sleuthing began with a voicemail from my sister-in-law around New Year's (which I didn't get around to listening to until last week), notifying me she just heard me on CBC Radio. Funny, I thought, I don't remember . . . oh -- ohhhhhhhhhhh . . . riiiiiiiiiiight . . . that interview . . .

See, back in November, I was in Toronto for a sort of publicity/public service event set up by my publisher called "Talking About the Planet." It was sort of a serial lecture series, beginning with Ecoholic author Adria Vasil, then the dynamic duo of J.B. Mackinnon and Alisa Smith (of 100 Mile Diet fame), then me, then Thomas Homer-Dixon batting clean-up. Really a crazily informative afternoon - I've been borrowing talking points from my fellow panelists in my lectures and private conversations since - and it was hosted and moderated by Carol Off. She mentioned almost in passing that some portion of it would be spliced together for a later episode or three of As It Happens, CBC's justly beloved nightly current affairs institution.

The edited segment featuring my spiel aired on the night of December 30, directly precipitating my weeklong return to the top heights of Amazon's Current Affairs list. Never ceases to amaze me just how influential CBC Radio is on Canada's reading public.

With the incomparable thrill of hearing Barbara Budd intone my name, I've now completed the full CBC cycle: Sounds Like Canada and The Arts Tonight during my Planet Simpson tour, The Current and As It Happens for The Geography of Hope. If I can just get Stuart McLean to mention me in passing while he's introducing his backing band and/or Rex Murphy to feign blustering offense at something I've written, I believe I get a free CBC Radio hoodie.

You can listen to the whole broadcast here (click on Part 3 for my spiel, just after an interesting discussion of free eyewear for the developing world).

And for the record, it would appear the As It Happens Bump is roughly one week in length; my book's back to kicking around various four-digit numbers on the Amazon.ca rankings these days.

There are few blessings more mixed in the contemporary writer's life than Amazon rankings. On the one hand, you can check on the sales of your book hour to hour. On the other hand, you can check on the sales of your book hour to hour . . . and then wonder what it means that it fell 14,263 places in just one afternoon. Where'd everybody go? Was it something you said?

Like any recovering junkie, I do my best to stay away from the Amazon-ranking smack except right around book-release time. (My first book, Planet Simpson, briefly resided simultaneously in the Top 50 in the US, UK and Canada and even had a blinking stay in the Canadian Top 10, and it's tough not to get hooked on that kinda drug . . .) Still, I do check in every now and then out of morbid curiosity. (Is #8,229 a lot less sales than #4,910, or is that just like one less over the past week or something?)

So imagine my surprise, this bright New Year's Day, to find this little greeting at Amazon.ca:

We're No. 1 (in Current Events)! We're No. 44 (overall)!

As far as I know, nothing significant happened between, say, mid-December's ranking in the mid-four digits and January first. I conducted no interviews, appeared on no Oprahs, didn't even click on that byzantine "Improve Your Sales" link right there at Amazon. And yet there it is: Back in the Top 50 on New Year's Day!

I'm liking this whole 2009 thing quite a lot so far.