Genocide: Of Mice and Men

Blunt tools have their place in the world.

Lately, I’ve been locked into the role of reluctant mouse trapper.  I am the killer of the family of mice who have made winter refuge in the house.  It’s not yet winter, but mice are a careful lot, being prey to life’s assortment of hungry hunters and born killers.

If you were wondering, I’m no hungry hunter and even less of a born killer, though as a child I was pretty good at lopping off the fresh shoots of plants along woodland paths, imagining I was mowing down sprites.  Setting the old fashioned wood and spring traps felt ok at first; some form of nostalgia about it all, “just me setting the ol’ traps, dontcha know.”

Then, of course, I was a successful hunter (owing more to the well designed trap than to my meager skill).  The trap each morning would hold a new victim, a cute little guy, eyes bugging out, back broken, and no cheese in the trap.

A note on the cheese I used: two year aged Gouda for two days, then I moved over to the Irish whiskey cheddar leftover from a family visit.  When they finally succeeded in clearing the trap without getting caught, I switched to organic peanut butter and my winning ways returned.

Each morning, a dead mouse was tossed into the corners of the backyard, the body disappearing as some other creature made lunch of the little body, stuck in the tragic form of rigor mortis.  The last mouse I caught was only pinned on one leg and after twice trying to drown it, I let it go into the yard and felt better for my clemency, though really, I was copping out.

Part of me also felt satisfied that I was doing a good job, clearing the house of rodents, true pests, and making the house sanitary.  On the other hand, I was abhorred by my own hand of death, and it made me reconsider the fact of genocide.  Here I was, thinking, ‘Man, these mice must be getting worried: it’s an Agatha Christie murder, with a new victim every day and the remaining living are all worried stiff about who is going to get offed next.”

It also made me think about genocide of the human variety.  Supposing the Hollywood engine ever got over the Holocaust storylines, there would be a few other major purges of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that could be turned into dramas, action films, and tragic heartbreakers.  The key point is that there are a lot of dead people who have been killed by still-living people.

Not so long ago I read “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families” by Philip Gourevitch (1998).  It was a landmark book that described the circumstances of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the first popular account of the atrocity as recounted through the experiences of its survivors.  While the figures vary, somewhere around eight hundred thousand to one million Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus (the two major tribes) were killed during a short period of time.

Making your way through the book, you feel that Gourevitch did two things in writing this: he opened up the tragedy to the world beyond the international circles that were involved or implicated in the genocide.  This was achieved, unfortunately, in a borderling sensationalist and dramatic style, with too much self-importance written into his tone–a bit too rich for my blood–but which apparently didn’t bother too many other people who read it.
Beyond my own stylistic concerns (and those relating to Gourevitch’s depth of knowledge about African culture, history, and the continent as a whole), the book does detail the intimacy of genocide very well, almost too well.  What comes across is how it takes a hands-on approach to slaughter other human beings, about as intimate and as challenging as it was for me to catch and kill mice.

To avoid belabouring a point made by thousands of Holocaust authors, historians, and others affected by the nature of genocide, I would finish by stating I hope I never again have to drown a mouse first thing in the morning.  At least not until I’ve had some coffee.

Oein Colfer

Last night I made it to the International Festival of Authors for the first time and saw the author Oein Colfer speak.

It is an annual event held on the shores of Lake Ontario, at a mixed bag of a place called Harbourfront–a large complex that attempts to do many things at once.  For example, as a child, I attended day camps hosted here and learned the basics of paddling a canoe in an outdoor artificial concrete pond, the irony of which was apparent to me even as a seven year old.  The absurdity of paddling in a big fake pond three feet deep that situated right next to one of the biggest bodies of fresh water in the world always irked me: when were we going into the real thing?  Wasn’t this the whole point?  Why am I here?

Over twenty years later, I now pity the camp counselors, who probably dreamed of the overnight camps north of the city, where they would be paid next to nothing but would at least have the mixed rewards of wonderful nature, potential sexual liaisons with their co-workers, never ending gossip about their potential sex life, and a cabin of hyper children.   The upside of working for the day camps in the city?  Better money, I hope, the opportunity to live in the city during the summer–a pleasure in itself, if you’re a city type–and the opportunity to work with kids who don’t necessarily make it out to the cottage, or camps, in the great north.  Nonetheless, it was a daycare and we had all of Harbourfront’s concrete and white painted steel architectural utopianism to call ours.

Harbourfront is indeed a funny place, a mix bag of artists’ work quarters, high end boutique shops, a performance plaza and concert hall, some expensive condominium apartments, and designed in a low slung way with lots of finesses that, I guess, are meant to reflect sails and boats given its proximity to the lake.  Geographically, the complex is also notable for being isolated from the city by the towering expanse of the Gardiner Expressway and the Lakeshore boulevard immediately north of it.  Toronto long ago built these two major arteries along the lake shore, effectively cutting off the city from the lake, which is of course a terrible shame.  That being said, the lakeside is nice, with parks, walkways and boardwalks, and a spattering of places to eat and drink, and so it is only physically disconnected, but not physically empty.

Even so, the recent development of the city has been towards masses of condominium towers along the water’s edge, which in turn further isolates the lake from the city, except for those who live in the condos.  It’s been a few years since I was last at Harbourfront, and in this time a whole new city has grown up around it–where it used to be a kind of small satellite community to the downtown core, it is now a large satellite community.  Though I am no fan of most condominiums or of the type of development processes that they embody–and social economic force they engender–it is nice to see more people down in the once desolate stretches down there.

Oein Colfer is best known for his works Artemis Fowl and was presenting last night his recent work, the sixth book of the famed Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  The estate of Douglas Adams decided that Colfer, a small, soft-spoken Irishman with a penchant for fart jokes, to take on this dubious task.  It’s been a long time since I read the entire Hitchhiker’s series, but it made an impression on me and the old school text-only game frustrated me for several years, if you can believe my pre-adolescent game playing habits (and game-playing cum problem solving intellect).

What struck me most during the entertaining and funny reading, interview, and question and answer period with the audience was how congenial the man was.  I’ve only been to one other serious book reading and this was way back in 1997, when I saw Martin Amis deliver Night Train; as much as I admire the author, the man was an intimidating force despite his reserved style and apparently shy public reading persona.   He had the audience transfixed–and terrified–of him, which is both a reflection of his stature as an author as well as his style as a person.

Moreoever, the audience last night was a gentler crowd, far less black and intellectual ball than Amis’ affair, and younger, too, reflecting Colfer’s main literary audience.  As he admitted, “I don’t usually write for adults.”  That being said, the nature of the author and audience was much more interesting and fun than what I remember of sitting through Amis’ talk, where my neighbour perspired throughout the reading, fretting the moment when he would present the great author his fledgling manuscript, which he had shown me before the talk started, and then stuffed back into his bag immediately after.  The MC was also reduced to stuttering when introducing Amis and when he led Amis through the questions, both which had a lessening effect on the overall presentation.  Amis was nonetheless agreeable, and gave a commanding reading.

Funnily enough, I now recall that the conjunction between these two readings was more than just books: I had made it to both through friends who had tickets, which just goes to show how deep my love for books really goes.

A love of literature is more than what links Colfer and Amis together; as authors, they both tip their hats to their fathers as literary influences.  Amis’ father was, of course, the well-known Kingsley Amis. Colfer’s father also wrote, albeit in his spare time, something that “really impressed me”.

Pamela Anderson and the Native Canadian

One of Canada's quintessential natural vistas: proving that there is more to this land than just big boobed blond women. Too bad we killed almost all of the indigenous people who lived here before us.

Thanksgiving weekend just gone by, I went for a short walk in Algonquin Park to take in the fall colours on display.  In years gone by, the colours have come and gone by the time us city dwellers can make it north to enjoy the show.  This time around, perhaps due to climate change, the leaves were in their prime and few yet littered the ground.

It was an interesting walk, with the weather perfect, pleasantly cool, and the air crisp,  leaves crunching every so often under foot.  Autumn is my favourite season, without doubt because there is this obvious transition to another season.  While not so fecund as spring’s almost overpowering outpouring of life renewed, the fall at its best is a gradual handover to the iron grip of winter.  In the fall leaves there are the deep greens from the heart of summer; the light fresh greens of spring; the flame colours of glory in death; the browns and purples of the night.

After living in Kenya, where seasons change is marked by rainfall or the lack thereof, there are the two periods of fertility and two periods of lessened fertility.  Even during a drought, there is still green found on the land–acacias evergreen–as all the native plant life is resistant to these spells of intense aridity, better able to wear the bad times, unlike the people who, desperate, must make drastic choices in order to survive.  East Africa is a rich land, where only a small amount of water changes it overnight, only that water there is a sometimes rare commodity.

While walking the lake-side path, I read about how the lake ecology was less rich than I had previously assumed it to be.  The vast majority of the minerals and nutrients that enter the lake come from the surrounding rock; the rock in the area is hard and does not easily erode, and so lakes in southern Ontario can hold a hundred times more fish per water hectare than lakes in the north, due to the surrounding, softer, rock there.

Moreover, as my companions and I walked, we were struck not so much by the overwhelming number of other hikers on the path–it being Thanksgiving Saturday–but by the type of people.   During the walk, we came across three  anglo-saxon families, a dozen Chinese families–parents speaking Mandarin, their children speaking both Mandarin and English–and two southern Indian families.

In the parking area, it seemed like the reverse Chinese restaurant: in many  Chinese restaurants in Toronto, there are often large tables of white people having a meal, with one or two Chinese friends with them, showing them the way.  Here, it was the reverse, large groups of Chinese with a single foreign devil showing them around.

This struck me as a great indicator of the changing face of the country–at least this part of the country, as Toronto receives the large part of Canada’s new immigrants–but it did reflect the nature of Canadian society at large.  Of course, my own walking companions represented this change as well: my mother, a full-blood Chinese (“Han,” as she would well mention), and my sister’s boyfriend, a full-blood Pakistani, and myself, a very tall half-half Chinese-Irish.  I suppose that our group drew its own fair share of attention, too.

The main difference between our group and the others is that our group has likely been in the country for a slightly longer period of time.  Sister’s boyfriend has been here since he was an infant, well over thirty years now; my mother first came here in 1969.  I was born in central Canada nearly thirty years ago.  From what I could glean from our fellow path-walkers was that they were more recent arrivals, perhaps ten to twenty years, maybe less, maybe more.

In any case, the general assumption is that these people represent the later and more recent waves of immigrants who have come to suffer winter hardship and snow shoveling, the poor suckers.  It’s just great that they are also coming out to see a bit more of the country other than the ever growing, poorly planned, urban space of Toronto.

Leaving the park, I thought of the native people who once roamed this land,  namesake to this giant park, unfettered, free of the European blights–pest, gun, and alcohol–and the present prejudices against them.  Native peoples and native Canadians, new and otherwise, and the ironies of history.  Autumn is both the end of the fruitful season and the beginning of winter–but to me, winter’s a favourite time, and it always brings with it the promise of the new to come.

Norwegian Holidays

Not as big as Dahl's childhood breakfast table, but this breakfast was only for two--he was eating with eight others.

“Breakfast was the best meal of the day in our hotel, and it was all laid out on a huge table in the middle of the diningroom from which you helped yourself. There were maybe fifty different dishes to choose from on that table. There were large jugs of milk, which all Norwegian children drink at every meal. There were plates of cold beef, veal, ham and pork. There was cold boiled mackerel submerged in aspic. There were spiced and pickled herring fillets, sardines, smoked eels and cod’s roe. There was a large bowl piled high with hot boiled eggs. There cold omelettes with chopped ham in them, and cold chicken and hot coffee for the grown-ups, and hot crisp rolls baked in the hotel kitchen, which we ate with butter and cranberry jam. There were stewed apricots and five or six different cheeses including of course the ever-present gjetost, and tall brown rather sweet Norwegian goat’s cheese which you find on just about every table in the land.”

Norwegian brown cheese: candy disguised as food.

Taken from Roald Dahl, Boy.  Here Dahl recounts his summers spent in Norway, which from the sounds of it were nothing short of idyllic.  Having had breakfast with one or more Norwegians, I have a good idea of what he was on about.

Dutch Lesbians

Ladies and horny boys, this is the real deal. And these are my friends, too, so keep it to yourself.

Having spent the last two weeks in Western Europe, birthplace of the West and a bastion of Western culture, it’s an appropriate moment to reflect a bit on the differences between Kenya, Europe, and Canada (this last being my place of residence).

Sharing initial impressions are a funny thing; they say a great deal about the viewer and they are a gateway to their life experiences.

Knowing this, here are a few things that really made their impression on my while I walked, rode, and flew around the continent that some call “the best”.

What first struck me in Amsterdam was the convenience store.  You walk in and the food is well-packaged, chilled or heated, fresh, healthy, unhealthy, and it floods the senses.  There’s options; and not that there weren’t convenience stores in Kenya–Nairobi has them aplenty, as well as the major towns, the minor towns, new gas stations, and so forth–but the difference is that they were less well stocked with healthy options and, more importantly, they didn’t have half as many clients.

Danish beers with a Danish buddy. Denmark, I've decided, is a very cool place with cool people in it. They're both tough and sensitive, intelligent and wild. I at first used the word thuggish, but this is incorrect: it's Viking.

The clientele in the European convenience store is the everyman; the everyman in Kenya, the wananchi or kienyeji, will never be caught buying potato chips from the gas station, for this is the domain of the small number of urban petit bourgeoisie, expatriates, and tourists.

Next is the general healthy nature of Europeans; I’m not referring to the lack of individuals missing limbs, beggars with rotting flesh on street corners, or fact that Kenyan health services are too expensive, too limited, and generally unavailable to most Kenyans.  What I ended up paying most attention to was that most all Dutch, French, Danish, and Germans I saw fell within the norms of their body mass index.

While this isn’t a new observation for me–it’s obvious to most North Americans that Europeans don’t eat the way we do and shows in the way that they don’t carry extra weight, on average, that we do–but this time, moreover, I noticed also the shining general good health of all people, especially of the well-to-do.  Kenya’s over thirty who are successful and well-educated tend towards the unhealthy side of the spectrum, both men and women being overweight and under exercised.

Look: no dust. Only rental bikes, bike paths, and lots of water. Why can't this also be the case (in terms of the rental bikes and bike paths) in North America?

Kenya’s successful individuals are all too often workaholics and they eat well because they can afford it–and it’s also a sign of status that they can afford the luxury of expensive meals.  Unfortunately, they also look like they need sleep, less red meat, and more exercise.

Last is the lack of dust.  There’s little dust in Europe–or in the West, period–in the cities or even the countryside.  There’s water everywhere; it’s still shocking to have so much of it fall from the sky and be just about everywhere.   Water extravagance is a luxury that I know well–it’s an environmental connundrum: where there is an abundance of fresh water, the local population always uses it inefficiently; where there is little fresh water, the population uses it with great efficiency.

Running taps and flush toilets weren’t shocking or novel–they’re a fantastic concept that I am familiar with as my earliest memories and as part of living in upscale Nairobi–but I had forgotten how moist air feels against the skin.

Native trees in East Africa are beautiful, but they are not as a whole as lush or verdant as the trees of Europe or Eastern Canada.  They have dust on them, they preserve their moisture carefully by having hardier leaves, and they protect themselves from drought and pest in a way that disguises their fertility.

The South of France: what more needs to be said?

On the last section of the trip, traveling from Copenhagen down to Hamburg, I sat on a bus next to a Gambian who lived in Denmark.  He was traveling to Germany to visit his German girlfriend, and we spoke along the way.  It was an interesting conversation, because I realized how much I was used to this style of conversation–at once casual and yet very intimate–and realized then that this is what I would miss, also, in coming home.

In Toronto, big city that it is, and where I have grown up, the harshest moment has been when I fumbled with my change at the subway booth and the man in the kiosk banged the change receiver at me to call my attention and said in a baleful manner,  “Put the money in!”  It was shocking because it was so blatantly rude; and yet it was also typical behaviour in the North American context.  I looked at the guy and he avoided my eyes, and here I felt caught between two worlds,  like I was back home and yet I was reacting as I would if I were in Kenya, telling the guy to calm down and that there’s no hurry.

Copenhagen COP15

Approaching Copenhagen, the sky was lit by cloud storm and sunset, an ominous yet beautiful welcome: it seemed as if the wing of the plane was tearing a fiery hole in the sky. Which, in a manner of speaking, it does.

Looking at Copenhagen in the light of the upcoming massive global conference on climate change, better known as the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or in the muddled internationalists’ industry lingo, the Copenhagen COP 15, there’s been a few changes going down in town.

In Christiana, the free town within Copenhagen, police presence has been all but eliminated.  The police resources have been stretched by preparing for the onslaught of foreign dignataries, protesters, activists, and, well, just about everyone in the world who cares about keeping planet Earth a happy home for humanity.

Christiania is on Christianhavn, the island just next to Copenhagen city central, and was a military base that, once abandoned, was occupied by squatters who made this space into their own.  As it proclaims on the main entrance, exit-side, “You are now entering the EU,” and the people show a certain esprit de vivre which is increasingly being squashed by the aseptic quality of modern life.

Best known for the fact that pot and hashish are sold here, it’s also a haven for artists and musicians, alternative people, and non-conformists in general.  The squatters who live here decided from the beginning that they were a free town, their own state, with their own laws and regulations which, of course, frustrates the civil authorities of the greater city.

In normal times, the riot police patrol this little area of houses, converted warehouses, and wild gardens in large groups.  There are bars and music halls, families, children, drunks from Greenland, and tourists–it’s one of the major places to visit when in the city.  The architecture is also incredible, as many of the thousand or so residents have invested a lot of time and energy into building beautiful homes that reflect their eclectic tastes.  Enlightened hippies with architecture degrees, one suspects, but nonetheless a beautiful spot.

Winding up to the climate change talks is a big deal, but the issue with climate change is that it requires a readjustment in how people choose to live life, and having their choices heard by the industries that serve them.  What is seen in Christiana is individualism and the wild element of anarchy, where people are as people wish to be, and much of all is an organic development and outgrowth of  laissez-faire community development.

The problem with climate change talks is that there is a set of preconceived standards that nations subscribe to–industry performance, economic indicators, and subscription to the mantra of continual growth–which most individuals may not agree with given their environmental costs.

Industry and finance, however, have the most powerful set of lungs in the world, and they are careful to holler loud in the ear of policy setters, clear in their message.  It’s a kind of conformity which is at once productive, useful to those involved, and unfortunately successful; and at the end of the day, it is the most harmful sort of narrow-minded thinking that we could ever fear as the long term impacts of climate change are of a habitat hostile to human life as we know it.

Hello Europe

What makes the Netherlands is the Dutch attention to small details at the coziest of levels. The country is a cozy place, exemplified in Amsterdam, once outside of the major tourist drags.

As a short interlude before returning home, I extended my flight stopover in Amsterdam to a near two weeks.  The last time I flew home from Kenya, I had a first-time case of culture shock, which surprised me tremendously, given that I had spent most of my time living in Nairobi, a city of very Western qualities.

A layover in Europe allows for a few options that aren’t otherwise available in East Africa or Canada; it’s also a vacation where the object is to take it easy and take some time to organize myself for the months to come, which will undoubtably be busy, given the time I’ve spent away.  There’s preparing for living abroad, and then there’s preparing for returning home–neither is necessarily simple.

I left Toronto in May of 2008 for what was to be a three month internship; this has now turned into fifteen months of time in East Africa, which is at once a long and short period of time.  Coming home is a good thing, but it’s also wrought with subtle intricacies.

In Europe, my stops have been straightforward and economical.  The trip has been built around friends who have opened their homes to me in their respective  cities.

The French country kitchen: my kind of love.

I first flew into Amsterdam, where I spent two nights before visiting a friend in Rotterdam.  After which I flew down to Montpellier, in the South of France, and where I’ve been the last five days.  Today it’s off up to Copenhagen, again by plane, which shames me.  From there, I’ll pass by bus through Hamburg for a night before ending up once again in Amsterdam, where I’ll catch the second leg of my flight to Toronto.

The original plan had been to take a train or bus down from Amsterdam to Montpellier, but my inexperience in organizing this trip (by internet while in a small town in Kenya) and the cost itself prohibited this option.  It’s a terrible admission for me to make, given my active interest in reducing my carbon footprint; the flight from Kenya is large enough without this added extra being dumped into the atmosphere.

The view from Geraldine's parents' home in Caveirac, just outside of Nimes, France.

Without a doubt, I must now commit to a carbon offset scheme; my wish is that there was a mandatory scheme one had to buy into when flying by airplane (Virgin, I think, has such a scheme, but it is optional).

Mandatory offsets would, of course, increase the price of flying dramatically. However, it would be an additional cost that would force more travellers to view the high-speed trains in Europe as a positive alternative, as the train prices would then be comparable to the flights.

Air carriers make their margins by placing the true costs of air travel on the environment: a leviathan-sized amount of carbon deposited in the highest reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere, which also happens to be the most vulnerable to pollution.

Onward then today to Copenhagen, where the December meeting on Climate Change will be hosted, a hope for the future of humankind or a lost chance.

Goodbye Kenya

Good times with good people, good weather: this is Kenya at its best.

A traveler makes his way through Jomo Kenyatta International, anxious and tired. The drive to the airport had been slow, the evening traffic congested despite the late hour.

Once through the airport’s entrance security screening, the check-in had been smooth, and he had avoided paying a heavy surcharge on his checked-in baggage, smiling with his helpful agent. With the plane slated to fly out in only a few minutes, he stepped into the nearest duty free.

Selecting two bottles of local cane liquor, he chatted with the cheery store clerk and discovered his purchase limit. Still tired but relieved that the worst of the trip was over, he handed over his money to pay and took back his change. When he counted the bills, he realized that he’d been shortchanged by six dollars, fifty percent of the actual purchase.

Having been in the country for a time, he asked for a receipt. The request prompts the clerk to ask him, slowly, for his ticket; name; and home country. Prior to this, the clerk had assured him that his ticket and personal details were unnecessary, as many official steps sometimes are in Kenya.

The receipt is printed and the clerk hands it over, triumphant, to the traveller: it now shows a difference of seven dollars in favour of the clerk. The traveler points out that his two bottles cost a total of twelve US dollars, as marked on their neck. “Ah yes, the printer made an error,” says the clerk, and hurries to cross out the total and hand write the correct figure.

Now annoyed, the traveler collects his change and, expressionless, counts it once again, noting that now the clerk had given him four dollars too much. Uncaring and unabashed, concerned with the flight and less with the yo-yo morality of shortchanging clients, the traveler stuffs the money in his pocket and starts to leave.

When the clerk punches in the next sale and looks for change, he realizes his mistake and calls the traveler back.   When asked if his change was correct, the traveler shrugs–and he then takes his time in pulling out the bills, moving his lips as he counts. The surplus bill is noted, returned and, for the final time, the correct change is given.

A knowing look passes between the clerk and the traveler before they turn to go their separate ways.

Kwa heri Kenya

Kenya in Crisis

The microscale of environmental solutions: an erosion controlling microdam, and also only a single stitch in the bigger wound.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the severe drought conditions that had come to rest on the large part of Kenya’s land.  To myself and all others who are living in Kenya, the story is old news and what I had to say had nothing particularly revelatory about it.  Kenya’s had bad drought in the past and will again in the future.

It’s the way of life here; prior to colonisation, most people would move with the cycle of droughts, abandoning farms to move temporarily to wetter areas, returning with family and herds when the cycle once again moved into a more favourable phase.  The exceptions were those who did not live in the Arid-Semi-Arid-Lands and were based in and around the major watersheds and other wet zones.

In yesterday’s New York Times, this article was published and describes the current scene across most of the country.  Unhappy stories about Africa are not unusual in the Western press, and to make these stories more palatable is to keep the descriptive narrative of human suffering to a minimum.  It is well-packaged “Bad News Lite” and, like most watered down stories, does little to give any background on the issues it addresses.

The modern state of Kenya is of a country that is heavily populated both in its wettest areas and in the areas inbetween them.  In the NYT article, the feature photograph is of the north-west of Kenya, the Turkana region.  People have lived there for time untold; the people who now live there, the Turkana, are a very hardy bunch, adapted to the harsh near desert conditions…or they once were.

Still a very hardy bunch, the Turkana people are now near year-round recipients of aid.  An impact of the aid is that infant mortality has dropped, a laudable accomplishment.  However, the traditional fact of family planning has changed: having only one of many children survive to adulthood has disappeared.  At first glance, this may not seem to be an issue, but the problem is that the many children who now grow up to be adults do not possess the same refined survival skill-set of their forebears.

Though less skilled, these adults still live close to the traditional lifestyle, except that they receive food when in the past there would have been none.  Their population, as a consequence, has doubled from its estimated pre-colonial levels.  It is not without surprise that they have exceeded the carrying capacity of their land.

The story is not unusual; the Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic have also lost a great deal of their traditional and acutely developed survival skills because of colonisation and external influence.  Where they used to subsist entirely of local foods, they now heavily rely on expensive air shipments of processed goods that need to be subsidized by the federal government.

Around Lake Turkana is a land of extreme conditions; it is not ideal for human life, but life can thrive there, provided a balance is maintained.  The issue is that by introducing an outside lifeline–food aid, in particular–the traditional balance is upset.

In parallel with this line of thought, the south-west of the United States of America is a desert, in essence, but with a fast rising population.  The buttress of the cities, farms, and millions who live there is water that comes from hundreds of kilometers away and from local aquifers.  It is an unsustainable way of life: the once mighty Colorado River runs low to dry most of the year as water is siphoned off to near and (mostly) distant parts;  the aquifers are dropping to great depths and these take decades, if not centuries, to slowly fill up.

Behind all three examples–Turkana, Inuit, Sun-seekers–is a failure of policy.  In the case of the Turkana, there should be a long-term examination of whether food aid should be distributed and whether this serves their interests as a people and a culture.  For the Inuit, the same; the issue is, of course, the debt owed to both groups incurred over the colonial period, when their traditional way of life was ruined with malicious precision.  There is no going back in time; but there is the possibility of a better, more sustainable, future.

As for the sun-seekers of the United States’ south-west, the local powers are interested in shipping water from the Great Lakes, several thousand kilometers distant, to allow life to continue on.  It is the very acme of artificial; life evolves to adapt to current conditions; humans can adapt the world around them to suit their needs, even when these needs are at odds with their long-term interests.

And so the government of Kenya looks to act to improve the lot of its people. Kenya’s Daily Nation print edition today proclaims “Crisis teams prepare for season of death”.  This, not in reference to the famine and drought of present, but of the potential El-Nino enhanced rains expected to start in a few weeks.  Kenya’s land is ill-suited to drain and absorb months of torrential rain: flooding is a certainty.

The situation of the Turkana and the Inuit is complicated by history and the changes to their ability to integrate with their land.  Kenya has many such stories in it, layers of complicated colonial history, inter and intra-tribal allegiances, customs, and laws that run face-on with the modern world of high-risk mortgages and housing bubbles.   Land, said Kenya’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta, is the bedrock of all Kikuyu culture, essential to understanding the people and essential to their way of life.  From a survival point of view, are any other people any less different?

Of Blogs and Bloggers

Send this blogger here, please

Although I don’t consider my own blog to play more than a minute part of the internet’s development, it nonetheless does just by its presence, three hits a day on average.  Odd to say and even odder to think it, this blog means that I’m part of the growing continuum of the world wide web.  To be generous, let’s look at this blog as we would the Milky Way, which is nothing if not for the individual specks of light that make it replete.

In the novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson describes a future internet that contains every single output of the human race; a growing daily mass of information–be it photos, diary entries, student papers, jotted notes on beer coasters, official documents, art, literature, news, ad nauseam–that on first glance, is a dazzling array of light.

Where ancient Alexandria’s famed and former library contained the best of recorded human thought, Stephenson’s untamed internet database is its reverse, a mosaic of all thought and all output from humanity, documented online by CCTV footage, individual’s cameras, and professional production.  In this sense, it isn’t much of a library per se, as there is no discriminating curator who distinguishes what goes into the collection.  The phenomenal output of humankind gets dumped into this reservoir: imagine a mountain of amateur pornography washing up on the shores of Gauguin’s Tahiti.

The revelation of Stephenson’s idea, now seventeen years old, was that it came across as perfectly plausible.  The implication is that the raw database is in part an involuntary reflex of the age imagined, a period when it is impossible to escape the digital eye and thus little if anything of the individual is secret, sacred, and private.

Any power of this mass of data comes to the most efficient searcher; the lone tree that hides in the jungle of information is the prize.  The librarian’s filter only comes alive in the search parameters; the results being the searcher’s library of Alexandria.

At the time of the publication of Snow Crash in 1992, the internet’s capacity was not half of what it is today.  The abundance of brute information on the internet has changed its appearance and content; the question now is not of getting information, but of getting the right information.  In the blogger’s world, this means that every Tom, Dick, and Harry has their chance to air their view, but how to first distinguish the content?  There’s no good filter for detailed written content–not yet, at least–and so the only way to know is to read.

Even as an involuntary part of the growing continuum of the world wide web, I haven’t and don’t spend much time paying attention to others’ blogs.  There are exceptions, and here are a few blogs I’d like to present.  These are the ones I check on a regular basis; what I like about them is that they demonstrate the forms a blog can take, ranging from the whimsical to the self-promotional professional; from the beat sports writer to the political insider; from image heavy content to only a volume of words.

The first is http://jeffjohnroberts.com/

This blog is run by one Jeff Roberts, and falls into the category, not really a blog.  However, like a blog, this site contains Robert’s output as a burgeoning  journalist, showing all of his published material to date, along with a bio and his contact details.  I count this as a blog as it doesn’t fall into any other strict category that I can think of.  Perhaps I’m being a bit liberal–or unimaginative–with the use of the word blog, but the point of a blog is that it can take on almost any form.

I got to to know Roberts through an eccentric neighbour I once had, who I took to be an unemployed, generous Quebec welfare, type.  The neighbour was an unshaven, heavy drinking, chain-smoking, pot-smoking dude; and as far as I could hear through my walls, he would have fist fights with his guests after too many beers.

As things go, my old neighbour and Roberts still do have the occasional fist fight on empty stretches of highway during road trips, to the chagrin of their traveling companion.  Fortunately, heavy drinkers with strong opinions also manage to get ahead in life, hangovers and swollen lips taken in stride: Roberts is a lawyer of some kind and my old neighbour is a theoretical physicist of some kind, employed to think, drink, smoke, and fight by a university.

The next blog is http://amypagnotta.blogspot.com/

Amy Pagnotta’s blog is a whimsical, fun, and introspective account of life.  It acts as a long-standing online journal, made up of a collage of personal thoughts, ideas, poetry, drama, ramblings, photography, and updates.  It’s located at the neat end of the blog sphere, as it verges on the self-indulgent without being so; taken as a whole, it is a kind of Impressionism of the Gauguinesque type, without the topless island ladies.

What it puts on display, like Robert’s blog, and my own, is Pagnotta’s free-thinking, creative, world view.

I first met Pagnotta ten years gone by; my first introduction to her personality was at a large bar that was split between three stories indoors and a massive outdoor courtyard.  We were in the courtyard, enjoying our drinks when she decided to go walk in the bar’s fountain, a beautiful thing located in the centre of the courtyard.  She declared that she wanted to walk in the fountain, and so, shoes off, into the fountain she went, all to the great delight of the general public sitting around it.  The bouncers were not amused–but did nothing–and upon her return to the table, we received several rounds of beer from the appreciative crowd.  The thing is, Pagnotta wasn’t yet drunk; it was an innocent whimsy and this sense of unfettered fun is carried over into her blog.

Next up is http://inkskratch.com/blog

Eric Kim is a freelance illustrator and comic book artist.  His blog–and the website as a whole–is the most comprehensive of all the blogs listed here.  It has several dimensions, serving at once as portfolio, weekly online comic (which was discontinued just a short while back), artistic update, and arena for personal updates; in general, it serves as platform for his creative and personal output.

Early in his career, he worked for a video game company and his job there was to draw the heads of professional sports players for a video game.  The catch was that he had to draw a two-dimensional representation that would be scanned and then stretched onto a digital three-dimensional frame.  In other words, he had to draw an accurate face that was compressed around the eyes, nose, and mouth.

I met him one day for coffee during his lunch break and was a bit late in arriving.  When I did sit down with him, he showed  me what he had been drawing over half a cup of coffee.  It was a semi-erotic Japanese manga-style image, high in detail, realism, and style, all drawn with clean lines and very well done.  It demonstrated his speed as an artist and his ability to draw in different styles; it was also done on his lunch break, which speaks to his compulsive work habits, and his current interests as an artist.

This brings me to http://glenpearson.wordpress.com/

I don’t know Glen Pearson, but I would like to.  This is a very recent addition to my blog roll and his is a very good political blog.  Pearson is a Canadian parliamentarian, former firefighter, and comes off as one of those all-round good guys.  I was pointed to his blog by a friend and it was very interesting to see that he shares many of my own political concerns and interests.

While I’m not a great fan of the Liberal Party of Canada, it has as much to do with their conduct in office as it does with my concerns with the underlying issues of a political parties, period.  Individuals like Pearson seem to recognize the problems of partisanship in politics and how it does not serve the interests of the public at large while also undermining the political process.

Pearson’s is a thoughtful and political blog, an insider’s view of Canadian national politics, and isn’t partisan heavy, which is a relief.  What it does is open up the doors of a political party and reveals that an individual within it is a clear thinker and a reasonable type.  The issue is why this level of mature, informed, discourse is absent from the daily political process.

Moving on, here’s http://www.raptorblog.com/

Often, the best writing in a newspaper is found in the sports pages.  Beat writers have are given the opportunity to write often and have a subject that deals with public figures of fame and high public recognition.  Between balancing reporting the facts of the game and balancing the egos of the sports star, the sports writer has an opportunity to write about life as played out in a game.

The subject allows freedom to the writer, and so the skill of the writer is allowed a lot of room–provided the writing skill exists.  Unfortunately, many newspapers today do not allow for the sports writer to write as expansively as they did in years gone by.  And so the blogs  fill the gap.

Clarefoot is not a newspaper journalist, but he is a good blogger and his posts are entertaining, irreverent, often crude, and taps into the tremendous world of professional sports blogging.  What amuses me about Clarefoot is that his information is well presented, his opinions unfettered, and he posts regularly , which is the professional bar for any blog.

The issue of professional writers versus bloggers is one that Clarefoot often brings up, both out of insecurity and good reason.  His argument is that serious bloggers deserve at least the same credibility that is accorded newspaper and magazine writers, most often when it comes to releasing a breaking story first.

This segues to http://thestar.blogs.com/raptors/

Doug Smith is a newspaper sports writer and a rock-steady blogger.  As far as I’m concerned, he writes too much and in doing so, satisfies the needy nature of obsessive sports fans while also showing a bit of the blogger’s unfortunate tendency towards written diarrhea.  Unaffected, polite, thoughtful, and down-to-earth, Smith posts daily, often twice daily, and is as dedicated to his fans as he is to covering his sports interests.

I once wrote him to ask him where I could watch a basketball game on the television.  My basketball team, the woeful Toronto Raptors, have a strange television contract that has their games split between four broadcasters, which translates into the practical frustration of having to cherry-pick a sports bar to catch a given game–it’s no longer possible to go to the same ol’ bar to catch the game.

Tangentially, I emailed Doug with a query one desperate day and he recommended a place within an hour of receiving the message.  Lo and behold, he too was there to watch the game, tapping away the whole game.

Smith is one of Clarefoot’s favourite to lambast when he criticizes the perceived superiority of newspaper writers; Clarefoot’s point is that their sources are no different than his and they only receive the lion’s share of the kudos is because of their medium.

Finally, for now http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/from-deep/

Michael Grange’s blog is the best written sports blog of the three mentioned here.  Like Doug Smith, he’s also a newspaper journalist and his blog serves as personal complement to his professional columns.

His blog is also the one that is least updated and shows the strain of writing well, regularly.  Thoughtful, insightful, personal, and professional, Grange doesn’t go for quantity and aims for quality.  His output is strong and consistent–when it does appear–and well worth reading.

What Grange recognizes is that the blog is only as good as the content that is provided on it.  While Clarefoot has a rabid interest in Toronto Raptors basketball, Grange is more intellectually passionate about the subject and his intellect–sorry, Clarefoot–prevents him from ranting and raving, or doing what Smith does, which is to answer almost all of his mail and post his responses online.

On the whole, this brief of blogs is very limited, yet also hints at the potential range and scope of the medium, notably their shortcomings as well as their advantages over the formal publishing sector, which, in its own right, is a very constrained, nepotistic, and conservative industry on the whole.  If we are to say that blog writers and print writers are of equal skill, then the real difference is the money: capitalism does have negative influence over the freedom of speech.

Returning to the idea of the spiraling, labyrinthine, library that was discussed at the beginning of the post, my own search filter is fairly specific–restricted to friends, politics, and an unhealthy interest in professional basketball–but this also brings to mind Borges’ conception of the library.  An intellectual space that reflects the best and untoward tendencies of the individual and the society around them, infinite and ever-intriguing.