Category: The Environment
Truth in environmental assessment
As long as the Harper Government is hell bent on reforming Canada’s environmental assessment process, a Contrarian friend thinks we could save a lot of time by making this the first step:
Yachts, tight squeezes, and rust in the eye
The video of a clever mariner squeezing his 80-foot mast under a ’65 bridge on the Inter-Coastal Waterway reminded Chris Lambie of sailing across Florida’s Lake Okeechobee with his father.
We weren’t sure if our mast would clear a bridge on the eastern edge of the lake, as the water level was pretty high. But my dad did the calculations and figured we’d squeak through. As we slipped underneath the span, the VHF antenna ticked gently against one of the girders, and dad got a speck of rust in his eye.
I also remember running gently aground somewhere in the silt that collects everywhere on the southern end of the Inter-Coastal Waterway. I hung off the boom—which we cranked out as if we were on a dead run—to tilt the boat to starboard. My dad then jumped in the water and pushed us out of the soft mud. Not as much fun as it sounds, as we saw lots of water moccasins and alligators in that portion of the trip.
I’m just thankful Chris wasn’t in a kayak.
In support of $200 fill-ups
Yesterday, I succumbed to self-pity about a gastank fill-up that edged perilously close to a C-note. Contrarian regular Denis Falvey offers a dose of reality:
We will never get off our dependance on gasoline until the cost of a gallon of the stuff is through the roof. That’s what makes the alternatives affordable.
I am told that Quebec is currently building the infrastructure necessary for electric cars, and has an $8,000 allowance for each person buying a Volt. Whether that is good or bad, do you think it would happen with gas at $0.50 a gallon?
As long as fish caught off our coast can be shipped to China for processing and then sold on our market two things are true – gas is too cheap, and so is Chinese labour.
Smile! This is change happening. Local may become important again.
Reining in environmental assessments
Here’s another placemarker for an issue I’ve wanted to write about for some time. I have not read any details of the Harper Governments plan to rein in federal environmental assessments, but in principle, I believe such an exercise is long overdue.
It is a dirty little secret of the environmental movement that federal environmental assessments are a massive scam. They take far too long. They cost far too much. They do not focus on important issues.
Everyone in the system knows this, but no one complains, because almost everyone benefits. Engineering companies get tens of millions of dollars to carry out the studies; environmental groups get hundreds of thousands in baksheesh for their participation; the Environment Canada and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency get a level of featherbedding that would make John L. Lewis blush. The process does little to protect the environment that a much simpler, more focused approach could not do better and more efficiently.
Walking the climate change dog
Climate change deniers like to seize on instances of unusually cold weather to debunk the scientific case for climate change. This video, from the Norwegian infotainment program Siffer, explains the fallacy.
H/T Nathan Yau
Rosa goes birding
Last Friday, Rosa’s school had an in-service day, so Rosa went birding at Point Pleasant Park. She brought the cardboard binoculars she got for Christmas.
She spotted a Common Loon trying to swallow a whole crab:
Way off the tip of the park, she spied a Common Eider Drake:
A Northern Pintal was hanging around First Beach. Notice his blue bill?
Here he is again, standing on one leg:
A Pintail-Mallard hybrid was resting on the sand:
A Red-Breasted Merganser was drying his feathers in the sun…
…but when Rosa got too close, he headed for the safety of the water:
The trip was exciting, and fun, but also exhausting:
Photos: Joshua Barss Donham
Nova Scotia from space
A view of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and parts of Maine and Quebec, taken from the International Space Station. Click the image for a larger version.
The bright spot at the left side is Montreal Quebec City;* that on the middle right is Halifax. Other bright spots include (left to right) Bangor, Saint John, Moncton, and Charlottetown. Close inspection reveals Truro, New Glasgow, Antigonish, Port Hawkesbury, and Sydney. The St. Lawrence River appears as a string of lights heading northeast from Montreal, and the Gaspe Peninsula is outlined in light. I believe the aurora borealis accounts for the greenish hue on the horizon.
A Contrarian reader supplied the image without identifying information, and I’ve been unable to pin down its source precisely. Based on a similar image taken a few hundred miles to the southwest however, I believe it was taken on January 29 by Expedition 30, the current crew of the International Space Station.
H/T: Shine boy.
*[Correction] Contrarian reader Bill Swan thinks the light blob on the left is Quebec City, not Montreal. He’s probably right.
Feedback: bikes, books, and automobiles
Contrarian reader George Gore liked the video if Guillaume Blanchet, The Man Who Lived On His Bike, because:
I lived for four months on a bicycle in the fall of 2006 and spring of 2007, riding from Chester to Ciudad Victoria, in Mexico, and then up the Rio Grande valley from Matamoros to Alpine.
Gore also shares my non-hostility toward Amazon:
In 1961 I was a twenty-one year old college freshman partially supporting myself by working in a bookstore. The store manager was Bobby Berg, who was the best bookseller I have ever encountered, and I shared that opinion with a lot of people, including Robert Oppenheimer and Erwin Schrodinger. The store had the most complete paperback inventory west of Chicago. I felt privileged to work there at minimum wage. I have a deep and abiding love for bookstores.
Now I am an old man who still has an insatiable hunger for reading. The nearest bookstores are an hour away, and I am frustrated in them because I can’t read titles on the bottom shelves without kneeling down, which gets more and more difficult. So Amazon.ca has rescued me. But I miss my youth and bookstores.
Finally, Alicia Rius’s photos from the back seats of abandoned automobiles reminded Salem, SD, Contrarian reader Gregg Drube of The Future of Automobiles, a even more dystopic collection by autophobe Douglas Coulter on the crazyguyonabike website.
Thanks to all. Readers can write Contrarian at this address.
Taking a dive in the Barra Strait
On December 12, Harvey Morash and Michael Gerhartz went diving at Grand Narrows, Cape Breton, where the two great basins of the Bras d’Or Lake* converge amidst the treacherous currents of the Barra Strait.
Those currents make the water in this video disturbingly murky, but the fecundity of the sea life—the profusion of urchins, anemones, not to mention perch, lobster, and cod—is something to see.
The aerial photo at right shows the two bridges, highway and railway, that span the strait, from Iona on the left to Grand Narrows on the right.
* Lake? Lakes? An eternal argument. The Bras d’Or Lake Biosphere Reserve Association has settled on ‘lake,’ and I will take my cue from them.
Donham’s Law of Fisheries Conservation reconfirmed
In an almost perfect illustration of Donham’s Law, the New York Times reports this morning that New English fishermen are pooh-poohing calls from fisheries scientists for greater restrictions, or even an outright ban, on cod fishing in the gulf of Maine.
The scientists point to new data showing cod stocks in much worse shape than previously thought; the fishermen say there’s an abundance of fish.
“Fishermen will almost always tell you that, and it’s not that they’re lying,” said Mark Kurlansky, whose 1997 book, “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” documented how Canada’s once-abundant Atlantic cod were fished almost to extinction. “Landing a lot of fish can mean the fish are very plentiful, or it can mean the fishermen are extremely efficient in scooping up every last one of them.”
Donham’s Law of Fisheries Conservation states that All fishermen resolutely support conservation measures, except those targeting the species they fish for, and the gear types they fish with.
