“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?

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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?

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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…)

Hercules gets the initial credit for discovering purpura. He was strolling along the seashore with a svelte nymph, Tyros, and his dog was trotting along ahead in the sand. When they caught up with the dog, its muzzle was smeared with a brilliant, deep red-purple colour—a colour neither of them had ever seen before. Tyros begged Hercules to make her a garment with that hue (in fact, she told him she wouldn’t be with him unless he produced it), so he began collecting shells from the beach.

Shells? Yes, the famous Tyrian purple dye was made from snail shells: from the murex mollusk (shown above), a type of sea snail. It would take 250,000 murex shellfish to obtain one ounce of Tyrian purple, so the dye was highly valued. Purpura (its latin name) became the colour of royalty. It was produced in the city of Tyre, by the Phoenicians (whose name came from the Greek word phoinos, meaning “blood red”). They had been producing dyes in Tyre, and beyond, since 1000 BC.

“The Tyrian colour is most appreciated when it is the colour of clotted blood,” Pliny wrote, “dark by reflected and brilliant by transmitted light.”

By 400 AD, the murex mollusk was on the brink of extinction—a colour vanished from the world, perhaps.

Can a colour really go extinct? (more…)

“Legend has it if they ever stop playing the world will come to an end…”

These words appear on a flyer for the upcoming Master Musicians of Jajouka concert in Toronto (July 15 at the Phoenix); the flyer shows the Master Musicians in white robes, with their leader, Bachir Attar, front and center. Is he smirking? Pouting? Keeping a mysterious secret?

Legend certainly surrounds this group of Moroccan musicians, layers upon layers of it. To fully understand the legends, one would have to excavate beneath the recent bohemian myths surrounding them—beneath the mystique of the Interzone-Tangier scene in the 1950s, and the iconic writers and musicians like Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, Brian Jones, and William S. Burroughs, who brought the power of Jajouka music to Western ears. The deeper mystique is that of the music itself: it has been taught in early childhood and passed down from father to son, through the Attar family, for centuries. Master Musicians would travel with the sultans of Morocco as official royal musicians; in more recent times, the clan performed as royal musicians for the Moroccan king. Trance-like, hypnotic, this Sufi music is reputed to possess power. [Listen to the track "Memories Of My Father", written by Bachir.]

Listening to this music, I wonder: what is “powerful” music, really? Or: what can music do? Most of us would agree that it can lift the spirit. Some would say that music has the power to transport a person; others credit music with giving strength, or even with healing.

Through a stroke of luck, and the wonders of globalized communication, I was able to interview Bachir Attar via a shaky Skype-to-cell connection two nights ago. It was 1:30 a.m. in the village of Jajouka, Morocco, but he was awake and passionate, ready to discuss the power of his music, his musical heritage, and its possible disappearance.

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SIX MILE BEND, FLORIDA—The crop duster whined overhead, banking hard and swooping for another pass over the field. My impulse was to duck and cover, but it would have been a useless gesture. This was cane country: flat fields, straight canals, uncurving roads, all smothered with an eerie leaden haze. The only human being I’d seen in the area had been sporting a shabby plastic suit.

Cane country stretches for miles and miles, spreading across the Florida peninsula to the south of Lake Okeechobee from east to west, pierced by settlements with sugar factories: Clewiston, Belle Glade, South Bay. Occasionally, the green is broken by a rectangular parcel of a phosphate mine―a lunar landscape of bleached rock forms and strangely-colored pools, where rock dust hangs in the air. Closer to the eastern and western fringes, there are also occasional rectangular parcels of “Signature Collections”―million-dollar homes that boast elaborate fortress-like walls. The luxury homes are pressed up against the rock mines and cane fields in a bizarre patchwork of human intervention, which has blanketed the whole peninsula. You can walk down a road and have a coral pink fortress on your left side; a rock mine or cane field on your right.

This accidental quilt was pieced together only very recently. Much of this cane country was “reclaimed” from the Everglades by the sugar growers and the US Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s, who built the system of levees and canals that allowed the cane to be planted. Before that, the ecosystem was part of a “river of grass”—a unique bioregion that allowed water to flow between Lake Okeechobee south to the Florida Bay. The Everglades have since been reduced in size by more than half, and the national park that still exists is but a remnant of the actual swamp. (more…)