AUROVILLE, INDIA — Forty years ago, this was desert. The topsoil had been stripped and washed by the monsoon rains into barren ravines; livestock had consumed the greenery; and the villages could grow little else but millet. Yet in 1968, this site in Tamil Nadu was chosen for a new township. Called Auroville (meaning “the city of dawn”) and founded by Mirra Alfassa, known as “The Mother,” it would be an experiment in human unity. And it would be green, sustainable, and open to all who were seriously interested in such an experiment.
As explained by the Aurovilians:
The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity – in diversity. Today Auroville is recognised as the first and only internationally endorsed ongoing experiment in human unity and transformation of consciousness, also concerned with – and practically researching into – sustainable living and the future cultural, environmental, social and spiritual needs of mankind.
Today, the experiment continues: about 2,000 Aurovilians from over forty nations are living on the land they have greened. What have they learned about sustainable living? What challenges do they face today? (more…)
This time of year in Bhutan is chili-drying season: nearly every house we pass has bright red chili peppers drying on their tin roofs, or hanging from their windows. I am traveling by road out of Bhutan towards India. The gravel road hugs steep mountains, and is just big enough for two cars to inch past each other at a slow crawl. No guardrail. This is the main avenue for goods from India and beyond to flow in — the tiny plastic cars and cartons of Appy fruit juice available for sale in the capital come up this difficult track.
We stop for granite boulders to be cleared from the road. This road is being widened with the help of the Indian government and legions of Indian workers, who seem to be widening the road largely by hand, pounding the stones into smaller stones. Young women work chipping away the mountain, with babies tied to their backs, sarees covered in white dust. I watch faces: an old man’s weathered face gazes back from the edge of the “Strong and High Bridge.” Children drag bamboo poles several meters long to who-knows-where, their faces turned towards the ground. The young Bhutanese guy I am traveling with slides his mix CD into the car’s player. It’s the Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Californication.” Another old man drags a yoke for his oxen along behind him through his harvested rice field, the wood of the yoke curved and weathered by perhaps centuries of use. Tidal wave won’t save the world from Californication. (more…)
“We love our King,” proclaims Kingal, a Bhutanese man I am chatting with. I have heard this sentiment throughout Bhutan. The people here keep pictures of him in their homes, in their businesses; they say prayers for him. It is as if he is a part of their lives, and “love” is not a casual, metaphorical term. It seems to accurately describe the emotion they have for him.
This year is momentous for this tiny Himalayan kingdom: they are celebrating 100 years of the Wangchuck dynasty, and the fifth King, Druk Gyalpo Jingme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, was just coronated on November 6th — the date deemed auspicious by “three enlightened astrologers.” Thursday was the eighth day of the ninth month of the earth male rat year. But just as notably, Bhutan had its first election in March 2008. The Kings deemed it important that Bhutan transition to a parlimentary democracy, with the king in a background role, much like the royal family of England. (more…)
When I was a kid, I sat every day in a concrete block without windows. The prevalent theory at the time was that windows were distracting (this wasn’t in the Dark Ages, but the 1980s). I like to think I turned out okay, despite my windowless education. But how much better could I have evolved if I had experienced a living classroom? A place where I could have hands-on experience in permaculture, and where I was educated in sustainability? What kind of education do our children need to meet the challenges of this century? More basically, how do we instill environmental values in our kids?
These were a few of the questions sparked in my mind as I walked through the campus of the Green School in Bali. Constructed largely in the past year, and just opened this fall, the Green School is one of the few places in the world that is making a calculated and passionate effort to tackle these kinds of questions.
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If several smiling farmers offered you the choice between a drink of “brown rice coffee” or some “bacteria juice,” which would you choose?
I first tried bacteria juice during an afternoon tea break at Konohana Family, an organic community in Japan near the base of Mt. Fuji. At Konohana Family, over fifty people live cooperatively, sharing housing, cars, finances, child care and food. For fifteen years, they have been farming organically; they now have thirteen hectares of land on which they grow all of their own food, plus plenty of vegetables and rice which they sell and deliver over Japan. They were kind enough to welcome me and teach me about how they managed to create a self-sufficient, sustainable lifestyle. (more…)
“Do you feel, you know, some vibrations, under your bed?” This crewman on this ocean liner was clearly trying to seduce me.
“Of course, from the engine,” I sad.
I have been sleeping for the past thirteen days within a great machine. I can feel the mechanical throbbing all night long, and the intermittent hum through my pillow. Several hundred workers, mainly from Indonesia and the Philippines, dwell in the bowels of the ship—on the numberless decks below level one. Long, white corridors; no windows.
“Well, the problem is the boiler,” the crewman told me. Yes. It cannot be much fun to live for eleven months at a time next to a boiler. What does one say to that? This is what modern ocean travel has come to: driving across the ocean in what is essentially a giant luxury car.
When you think of the word “ship”, what images come to mind? It is an inspiring word, a positive word; it speaks of adventure, of passage, of potential. Of harnessing the elements for motion. Voyage, freedom. Or sometimes, slavery. What are the realities of twenty-first century ships? (more…)
Flying is becoming socially taboo. The tide of anti-airplane sentiment is still relatively low in North America, compared to in the UK, where nearly half of the citizens are vowing to fly less for environmental reasons, and one in eight teenagers supports the idea of a ban on “travelling by air for leisure purposes.” Are we, as David Beers in his July/Aug 2008 Walrus piece suggests, at the end of an era?
Common predictions suggest that even if it isn’t totally socially taboo to take a plane, it still may be financially impossible to do so for the majority of people in Canada and the US, due to the dwindling supply of fossil fuels. The languishing airline industry will continue to merge and shrink (albeit with a few companies supported by government, according to the “too big to fail” principle). Flying, many forecast, will be the exclusive privilege of the elite once more.
At present, though, many of us still do fly. How can we fully appreciate this gift? We have tapped nature’s reserves of millions of years, billions of hours of sunlight, in order to skip across the globe. No generation in history has been able to experience this on the current scale, and it’s possible that no generation will again, at least in the way we enjoy. What have we learned from our time in the air? Can we, as a global civilization, get something out of this experience besides increased CO2 levels?
WASHINGTON D.C.—What happens when corporate leaders and academic experts on energy, climate change, and geopolitics sit down and brief the United States Senate on how the US can “achieve a more secure, reliable, sustainable and affordable energy future”?
Just how does a country go about ending an addiction to oil? Are people actually working out the solutions to this? Curious about what the dialogue around energy policy in America actually is, I headed to the Senate Energy Committee’s September 12 summit on Capitol Hill to find out what it sounds and feels like to have these figures gathered in one room, dreaming up the future. You can watch the webcast or read about the testimony before the Senate Energy Committee from the major news bureaus (Reuters UK, The Guardian, Globe and Mail, Associated Press)— but for an in-depth analysis beyond what most news organizations are reporting, read on. (more…)
Last night, I watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, streamed over the Internet to my room in Toronto by Al-Jazeera. I was thinking of my younger sister, who lay in a delivery room in America at that moment.
She gave birth to her first baby girl at 9:51 p.m. last night, nine minutes before Obama took the podium at Mile High Stadium. I was thinking about how this man will have a disturbing amount of influence on my newborn niece’s life. That 8-pound-6-ounce baby girl doesn’t have the power to mitigate carbon emissions, find alternative sources of fuel, or repair a broken financial system. Opening her eyes for the first time, she has no idea what she’s being born into. She’s relying on Obama and his promise of genuine leadership to create a situation in which she can live a decent life. It’s the current policymakers, more so than her hardworking parents, that are going to decide how bad climate change gets and where our energy comes from and which wars, if any, we are embroiled in. Of course, the US is ostensibly a democracy, so it is impossible and unfair to put the burden on Obama’s leadership alone: it requires all US citizens to support him, influence him, challenge him, and go beyond him. (more…)
Would your country ever steal a colour from another country?
Granted, from a twenty-first century perspective, the question doesn’t make perfect sense. One pictures a team of graphic designers pitted against another team, in some skyscraper in Shanghai or Mumbai or New York, concocting trademark colours for branding purposes. (Canada’s pretty much got the red-and-white scheme cornered, but did Mexico and Italy ever have a design conflict over the red-white-green of their flags?)
However, colour used to be more of a physical commodity than it is today. The raw materials used to produce colourants were costly: costly to produce, costly to transport, and costly to the environment. And, like any precious substance, they were subject to conflict, contention, and theft. Red was one of the most precious colours during colonial times, so an intense rivalry grew up between England and Spain over the mysterious red substance called cochineal. (more…)
Why did Igor Kenk keep more than 2,800 bikes in storage?
That was the question posed by last Saturday’s front-page National Post article. Buried within the article was a possible answer: preparation for the apocalypse. “Det.-Const. Dennis says ‘Mr. Kenk told him ‘the apocalypse is coming.’ In the future when we have run out of oil, we will all need bikes to get around, the logic goes, and Mr. Kenk will have a few in storage to offer us.” (more…)
Last Saturday, Toronto was enveloped in muggy greyness. I was riding my bicycle along Bloor Street West, after being doused in unspectacular rain in High Park, and the street was less appealing than usual. Two women were yelling at each other outside a store with sad appliances in the window, the kind of appliances that break when you get them home; the police were cordoning some building off; and the whole street—which occasionally vibrates with a kind of transglobal charm—was entirely charmless.
“Amazing knowledge!” a man called from the sidewalk as I rode past. I laughed, and kept on down the block to the Salvation Army, where all the summer dresses were polyester testaments to humanity’s ability to create dreadful fashion; the kind of fashion that evokes a physical response, a shiver or a cringe. Stepping back out into the humidity, I followed my curiosity, and walked my bike up the block.
“What kind of amazing knowledge?” I asked the man.
“No, a maze of knowledge. Entry five cents.” There was a table on the sidewalk with a smiling woman and a yellow piggy bank. They were positioned in front of a door with black curtains. I rummaged through my pocket for a nickel and the man waived me along. “It’s free for people with purple shoes today.” (more…)
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