I’m generally not one to make Tragedy Of The Commons type arguments, largely because they tend to be used by right-wingers to justify private ownership of just about everything (although often neglecting the fact that government ownership often allows the benefits of private ownership, while still keep a resource in public hands). But the state of the automobile is exactly that, a classic tragedy of the commons where no one takes ownership of a problem because to do so would mean they would pay disproportionate consequences for everyone else’s dissipation.

So it is with the automobile. Reading this article I was surprised at the utterly dismal numbers of green vehicles sold, given all the hype. But what he describes is classic tragedy of the commons: why should I spend my hard-earned money on a vehicle to try to save the planet, while my neighbour goes out and buys this monster, a 426 hp Camaro, probably for less than my little electric buzzer? It’s impossible to drive a current electric car without the words “sucker” or “snob” firmly attached to your bumper.

The only way change will come is through government regulation, in which companies force automakers to adopt fuel and pollution saving technologies, rather than allowing the market to dictate. The market is a powerful force (the big automaker crash was caused in no small part by exploding gas prices at a time when manufacturers were churning out gas guzzling pickups and SUVs) but a lot of things affect the cost of a tank of gas, and those forces have little to do with what’s socially or ecologically frugal.

The easiest way to bring about incremental change is through new technologies. This allows manufacturers to try to do more within the same model, although as this article attests, it’s a very expensive (and in my mind ludicrous) process. The inherent problem is that all of us prefer, and demand, Victorian-era technology. While we jump at the latest technological innovation from Apple, we insist on the tried and true internal combustion engine that we grew up with, and the more power the better.

In my lifetime I’ve seen only three variants on this theme, and none have really commercially succeeded. The Wankel Rotary engine pioneered by Mazda, the diesel, and the electric. They all have shortcomings, but so does the regular gas engine, but it’s shortcomings have become so normal as to be invisible, the benefits becoming the mark that we use to judge all others.

I’ve been working on my Mazda6 over the last few weeks, getting ready to replace the engine. The original one is toast because of an unfortunate flaw in the design, where if the PCV valve goes, all the oil is quickly sucked out of the crankcase, and while going around a corner the engine runs out of oil. Before you can say “oh shit”, you’ve lost a connecting rod bearing. The cost of rebuilding the engine is much higher than replacing it with one out of a wrecker.

This is the most modern engine I’ve ever worked on, and it’s appalling. I’ve spent an entire week pulling the engine and taking off the parts that I need to transplant onto the new block. Hundreds of fasteners. It got so bad that I went out and bought an air ratchet so I didn’t have to manually remove so many nuts and bolts.

I can pull an engine on a VW Westy in a couple of hours. The reason for this new complexity? Trying to get a 19^th century design to meet the needs of the 21^st century. It can be done, but the problem is a resultant complexity and cost, both for manufacturing and subsequent servicing. Modern-day mechanics are called technicians for very good reasons; grease monkeys need not apply, and wise backyard mechanics stay far away from modern engines.

It need not be that way. One of the biggest problems we have both in terms of pollution and fuel mileage is the stupid, moronic, baffling demand for power that we in North America impose on manufacturers. Case in point: here’s a 1968 VW pickup I restored a few years ago. As far as I’m concerned it was the best utility vehicle made: all three sides of the pickup bed fold down for superb access. It has an enormous, lockable “treasure chest” below the bed for tool storage. It has a one-ton load capacity. And the best part was that it was powered by a 1.6 litre 40-hp beetle engine.

Now 40 hp for 1.6 litres is ridiculously inefficient, but back then neither power nor fuel economy was a big concern. But the point is that the truck did what it was designed for and I used it quite effectively as a work truck for awhile. It wasn’t fast, but power was adequate. With modern engines you could triple the power with a 1-litre engine, or even better, go with say 60 hp and put a 700cc high efficiency gas or diesel and enjoy a fraction of the emissions and 4 litres/100 km to boot. A truck like that would be fantastic in so many ways, but it won’t happen. Why? Watch pickup commercials: they are all about “toughness”. Power and the illusions of power are what sell trucks.

The VW was developed to be extremely effective and efficient, and although it looks quirky the manufacturer succeeded. But in North America male machismo is what’s important, and so our pickups are colossal, fuel sucking behemoths.

My first Westfalia camper was an 81 with a 60hp air-cooled 2.0 engine. That camper weighed around 3500lbs empty; add water, food, fuel luggage and people and it topped over 4500lbs. And they aren’t known among VW nuts as “bricks” for nothing, either. Yet with this underpowered beast I rumbled my way down the coast to California twice, without problem. Sure traffic blew past me on hills, but the rest of the time it was fast enough. The problem wasn’t that I was too slow, it was that everyone else was in such a gas-sucking hurry.

How many of us would love to own a slow yet reliable full camper that got us 6 litres/100 km fuel mileage? It would be easy with modern technology, but again it won’t happen because we won’t by it. We have to get to the campsite fast.

And that’s the crux of the problem facing us: with 426 hp sedans the leading edge of desirable, alternative engine designs simple can’t cut it. The problem with electrics is that we insist on a full, modern car –in terms of what we’ve come to imagine that is – but powered by a green alternative, and hopefully for the same price. And that’s impossible.

Diesels are close, but again, there’s a real price problem with diesels and the improvements in mileage nowhere near what they could be because we want as much power as we do with gas, and that will always limit efficiency. The Wankels were hard on gas, but that’s also because we only made huge, powerful engines (similar to V8s) instead of tiny ones. Personally, I love the idea of an engine with only three moving parts!

Everyone from government regulators to manufacturers and countless engineers are scrabbling to make complex, expensive changes, just to try and keep things the way they have been, and it’s a losing game. Oil is becoming scarce and expensive, and that will only increase. What’s needed is a new paradigm of looking at transportation in a new light and let go of this post-war America model. There are many great and fun ways of moving people around; it just won’t look like what our parents enjoyed, that’s all.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

 Check out the free audiobook of my most recent novel  A Dark and Promised Land here

So often we get an urge to do something outrageous, but the civil impulse, not to mention an instinctive need to keep a low profile, holds us in check. And yet, when we do risk approbation, it often leads to the very best of memories.

In this context, I’m talking about throwing cake. Some of my fondest memories involve tossing a handful of moist, squishy cake, the cool, sticky icing oozing between my fingers and the delightful wet splat it makes when it struck it’s target.

The occasion was someone’s birthday – I don’t precisely recall whose, but it might have been mine – and I was living with my partner who had a preteen girl of her own, and my own two kids were also staying with us. The cake had been dished out to everyone, and there was a great deal left, as it was a very abundant cake. Black forest as I recall.

On an impulse fuelled by a sense of birthday entitlement, I scooped out a chunk with a spoon and flicked the black wad at my son. It scored him in the middle of his chest, and he stared at me, shocked. You could see the gears in his head turning: normally, the primitive justice of tit-for-tat prevailed in this kind of thing, but cake was new ground, and potentially dangerous. Flinging food was obviously on the official list of things Not To Do, and yet his dad had just done it…

My position of alpha male had long given me privileged (and in his mind, unearned) rights, and could it be that this was one of those occasions? The hoots and laughter of those around the table, and most importantly my taunting leer, cried out for revenge: he scooped a tiny bit in his spoon and flicked it at me, the missile flying a graceful arc and landing on my hair.

It was the make or break moment. My partner had starting making the inevitable adult noises regarding self-control and decorum, all the kids staring wide-eyed at me. The unarticulated question hung there quivering: would everything go back to where it was supposed to, or would anarchy explode into our family? In response I yanked out a chunk of cake and threw it at my daughter. Score!

The gauntlet firmly and decidedly thrown down, permission had been granted for all to indulge in their own primitive cake-tossing urges. That poor, unassuming pastry was subsequently torn apart like a boar that had stumbled into the Amazon River and was being consumed alive by piranhas. There was no quarter asked or given, and the air was filled with sweet, sticky gobs.

Being the instigator and the largest authority present (both physically and politically), it was inevitable that a majority of ordinance was directed at me: my clothes, my face, my hair was pelted plop plop plop with wet lumps. But I gave as good as I got, and soon everyone looked like the Ghostbusters after blowing up the Sta-puff marshmallow man. The table and walls were splattered, the shag carpet inundated (much to the delight of countless mites, bugs and other hidden creepy-crawlies).

It was my partner who first threw in the towel, fleeing the room. The rest of us kids continued unabated until the cake was long gone and we were reduced to scraping gunk off ourselves for ammunition. The room was an awful mess of course and it took a great deal of work to get everything clean again, but it was the best birthday party I can remember. It was at least 16 years ago and yet I can remember it clearly, especially the joyous faces of those around me, the lives that had been given permission to be outrageous.

I was reminded of that party last night. A friend had invited one of our mutual buddies and myself over to my boat for dinner (as Tracy and I were house-sitting, I had offered the boat to him as temporary housing while he searched for an apartment). A lot of wine flowed, along with raucous talk and a little bit of weed. We watched a movie for a while and I noticed this cake that my buddy had brought along, sitting lonely and unloved in the middle of the table. We had gorged ourselves earlier with the great dinner, and had left little room for cake. I thought about that long-distant birthday, and what a hoot it would be if I suddenly started flinging cake around.

As the story on the screen unfolded, my mind kept going back to that damned cake, my fingers itching to fling some goo. I had never broken that particular social contract with these friends, and was unsure of how it would be received. But then Tracy arrived at the boat, and I was no longer on shaky ground: I knew exactly how she would receive a chunk of thrown delight (disapproval, a wagged finger, rolling of the eyes), and so with everyone’s attention turned elsewhere, I scooped out a fairly small bit consisting mostly of icing, and tossed it at her.

Alas, the soppy consistency of the lump made it a poor projectile, and it arched limply across the room, landing with a pathetic plop on my buddy’s pants leg. Of course protests and complaints erupted with additional approbation added by my other friend and Tracy. Yet the die was cast, and so emboldened, I tossed another small piece at the other friend. Complaints again followed, and to forestall further nonsense the cake was quickly handed to my wife, who put it safely out of my reach.

And so ended the second cake toss of my life, not with a bang, but a whimper. It’s unfortunate really; I can imagine the hilarity of a couple of middle-aged drunks furiously tossing cake around the closed confines of a boat: the carnage, the mayhem! But the impulse for order that burdens the aging heart overrode the childhood need to embrace the new, the unknown, the uncontrolled, and Apollo put his foot on the neck of Dionysus.

It’s a pity, really; I can only imagine the fond memories we could all carry if we had held the door to anarchy open a little while longer.  As Samuel Clemens noted: it’s the things we never do that will haunt us as we step into our coffins.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

 Check out the free audiobook of my most recent novel  A Dark and Promised Land here

This is a particularly odious example of bureaucratic head-up-the-ass syndrome: In 2010, the President of the World Bank committed an additional $750 million to basic education over the five subsequent years, with a focus on countries struggling to meet the education Millennium Development Goals, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. The funding was supposed to be channelled through the Global Partnership for Education, a development org operating in 46 countries, with an additional 16 seeking support to develop and implement their own national education plans

Those of us who follow such things waited breathlessly for this initiative, which promised to be a major effort to transform the world. We know that education is one of the most powerful means of improving the long-term ability of the developing world to pull themselves out of poverty. The old “teach a man to fish…” thing.

So it was a great shock to learn that the amount they now plan on spending is a fraction of that: two-thirds lower than what they promised. Given that the World Bank’s coffers were recently replenished to the tune of 49 billion, this is reprehensible and speaks to political manoeuvres of some sort.

This cannot stand. The one card we have to play is that like most powerful institutions they are extremely jealous of their reputation, and negative press has a big impact.

RESULTS is pressing on with a major initiative to shame them into doing what they announced they would, and we have subsequently been blacklisted by their spin doctors as a consequence. This is great. Speaking truth to power has an ability to make them tremble, and we all need to put their feet to the fire.

I ask that readers of my blog head over to the RESULTS website and sign the petition there.

Right now I’ve started on a new project – two actually. I’m finally moving forward with my novel after having let it stew for a year. I’m actively recruiting an editor to help my tidy it up. I haven’t decided if I’m going to self publish or seek out professional publication; a year ago I wouldn’t have even considered the self publication route, but the print world is changing so fast, the egotistical notoriety of self publication (once derided as “vanity press”) is quickly waning. At the same time, once professionally published, there can be no more arguments about whether one is a professional author or a hack.

At any rate, the manuscript needs an editor to go over it so I’m actively looking for one. There’s a lot out there but I want one who has a fat CV and lots of good references. I put several years into this book, and I want a very good editor looking at it.

I just finished selling this Westy: it was my son’s  bus that I had to take over because he went to university. It was in very rough shape. New interior, new paint, rebuilt engine, overhauled tranny, repaired tent. The most comprehensive restoration we’ve done and an enormous amount of work. I’m quite proud of it.

But I wanted a change from VWs so the second project is my 2004 Mazda6. The fellow selling it blew the motor: there’s a design flaw in the PCV system that when the valve fails it allows engine oil to be sucked into the intake. One day your dipstick reads full, and a few days later you are racing around a curve and the check oil light comes on. By the time you stop, you’ve spun a connecting rod bearing. This is what happened to this unfortunate chap.

The only solution is a $4,000.00 rebuild and he didn’t have the money for that, so he kept driving it for a year with a noisy con rod bearing. Of course it eventually let go. At that point the only option is to replace the engine.

But here’s the rub. Very few of these cars came with the big 3.0 V6, and so good replacement engines are hard to find, and when you do locate one, they are hugely expensive. I found one in Chilliwack for $3600.00 (plus tax) with 130,000km on it. Ouch.

With OEM engines so expensive, you pretty much have to give the car away, which he did. But this is where it gets quite interesting. Most people don’t know this, but Ford owns a large share of Mazda, and a lot of parts are interchangeable. As it turns out, several Fords share the same block as the Mazda. Doing a little research, I discovered that the Ford Fusion 2006-2009 shares the same block. Digging further, I found an engine with only 58,000km on it – for $700.00.

$3600 or $700.00 for the same engine. It’s a funny world, all right.

It’s a big job. In order to get this engine out the whole front end has to be removed – suspension, steering, frame and transmission. But it’s a gorgeous car and I’m looking forward to having it on the road. The pics don’t colour right; it’s a gorgeous tint called blazing copper. I’ll have a tough time letting go of this one.

All this automotive work is going towards a wild summer; we haven’t decided where we are going or doing yet but it’s a big one. Tracy is taking a few months off from work so we have to decide what to do: if we still have Fainleog it might mean sailing down to Cabos San Lucas or up to Haida Gwaii (in either case Tracy will fly over and meet me). Or we might go slow and happy in a VW bus and do the circle route around the coasts of North America  – across to the Maritimes, down the eastern seaboard, across the Gulf of Mexico, and up California and the west coast. If the latter I’ll have to pick up a bus for us one of these days, and start working on it (although I am getting a little tired of these old rusty, greasy, dirty old beasts).

It’s one of those big travel dreams. The only hesitation I have right now is naturally, philosophical. Although travel is the hallmark of the middle class (like mortgages and divorce), and nothing beats travel for mind expansion, I wonder how much of it isn’t simple voyeurism and distraction? Lets face it, although seeing new things is wonderful, isn’t it really about attitude? When we are in unfamiliar environments everything appears new; in our own turf it’s the same old same old. But perhaps the problem isn’t so much that we’ve seen it all at home, but that we simply stop seeing.

After we have passed the same spot a hundred times, human nature is such that we go on autopilot. We believe we know the place so the mind turns inward. We are hardwired to look for the new and novel (= possible danger) and tune out the familiar.

Yet when I have chosen to unplug and stop thinking about the future, when I stop driving and start walking or riding, when I slow down and really look, I see a fantastic, profound and beautiful world, just in my backyard.

Of course it’s not the Sphinx or Mt. Rushmore, but that’s the trouble: after a while we need the grand and profound to be able to see it. And yet if you stop beside a flower and look deep inside it, you’ll see an amazing diversity of colour and there will be little creatures crawling among its outrageously prominent sex organs. The complexity of shape and colour and light and life is spellbounding

Any square foot of beach is teeming with the lovely and amazing if you lie and your belly and look closely. Any industrial area is great playground of odd things scattered here and there, a riot of complexity amongst the overall order. To me, it’s fascinating to see weeds climb a fence that has equipment lying against it, the grasses in the cracks of pavement. It’s all banal, but dramatic struggles between civilisation and nature are all around us if we stop and look.

What it takes is the eyes of a child, to see the world from their vantage point. It’s not that we’ve seen it all, it’s just that once it’s familiar, we simply stop seeing it. As children it was all new, and so we stared at the world in rapt attention. It’s still as amazing as it once was, if we just start looking again.

So that’s the rub: spend thousands of dollars on an amazing trip or stay close to home, save the money and learn to see the majesty that constantly surrounds us? I know the latter is a more profound journey, but it’s hard to not just do what so many others do; after all what sounds more wonderful: sailing in Mexico or watching dandelions in the backyard?

But if there ever was evidence it’s all in the mind, notice how people come streaming from all over the world to visit BC, while we take off to the places where those others come from. It’s not the beauty that’s around us; it’s our ability to see it.

Update: I’ve pulled the restrictions on comments, but posts more than two weeks old will have comments disabled.  I don’t want to have to go back and manually lock 450 blog posts again!

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

 Check out the free audiobook of my most recent novel  A Dark and Promised Land here

Just a quick notice: some damned bot tried to hijack my comments section and I was getting tons of spam comments that I had to moderate. Each comment was sending me a notification email which got a little unwieldy after I received 39 of them, and then having to go into the queue on my blog and delete them. You probably have noticed that sadly, despite the traffic I get, I don’t get a great deal of comments anyway, so for now I’ve shut down comments until that bastard goes away. When I open up the comments section again, I will unfortunately require people to register and log on to comment. I know it’s one more impediment to free and easy exchange but without this kind of thing the sapm would take over our universe.

I do have an Akismet plugin but somehow it’s too stupid to detect these spam messages and automatically trash them. Personally I don’t see how it can’t tell, as the spelling is atrocious.

On one hand you could argue that doing production-line work is hardly the be-all of a meaningful life, and as society evolves, fewer and fewer people are willing to do physical labour for a living. Like other labouring occupations such as trades and agriculture, people tend to avoid it when they can, opting for the greater comfort, higher status, and lower physical stress of the office.

One could also make the argument that this is the natural progression of social evolution. After all, we were once hunter-gatherers and when we could, we opted for the security of agriculture, and when we could, we dropped that for industrialisation. And now we are dropping industrialisation for knowledge economies.

Looking at the developing world, we can see how they follow the same rough tangent, albeit a step or two behind. Certainly by all measures, standards of living have skyrocketed in Asia and the southern hemisphere, and rather than two solitudes we now share the same economic basket, even though there remains great disparity.

So while there are some very good aspects to this, I can see a few problems. The most obvious one is that half of the population has an IQ below 100, and not everyone has the intellect or aptitude required for the advanced education and training required for knowledge-based economies. Sad to say, but perhaps some of us will always be condemned to clean things or pick fruit or dig ditches, (although many more factors than intelligence alone often determine these things).

At any rate, it was only a generation ago that a simple willingness to work and seek out the best opportunity meant that an individual could reasonably expect a living wage, even if they weren’t the brightest or most gifted. But as manufacturing and labour jobs move offshore, well-paying union jobs are being lost, with service jobs growing in their stead. This in itself is neither here nor there I suppose; rolling resin on fibreglass cloth or washing dishes probably makes little difference, but manufacturing has a 100 years of labour activism to help make wages sufficient. Since service jobs have historically been the lot of women, they remain underpaid and low status.

Another problem is how to build an economy on ideas. This is an extremely complex subject, but what I witnessed and read about the economic collapse of 2008, was the deep and corrupt nature of the US economy. There’s a lot of blame to go around, but one of the most profound underlying problems was the fact that colossal sums of money were being generated for the inside few – from nothing.

The US was a juggernaut of production of tangible goods in the post-war era, but a few decades ago, some bright sparks discovered it was far easier to make obscene amounts of profit simply by shuffling money around in new and clever ways. Making things is a very complex, long-term business and involves so many stakeholders (like those pesky employees and unions) that the outcome is never fully controlled by those at the helm.  But once you get government to relax regulations enough that all you need to do is flip and shuffle and hide and repackage money, profit becomes far, far easier. So easy in fact, you can program computers to do it. A few signatures from well-placed people, press “RETURN”, and the money starts flowing in.

It’s a connected-enough world in the economic stratosphere that once one syndicate is doing it, the rest take note and next thing you know all the big banks are doing it. The minions at the bottom still struggle to do physical things, while those at the very top bleed the real money off their deposits and production. As we saw in the states, the economy becomes so top heavy and yet based on nothing, that sooner or later it has to collapse.

I don’t know if this is an inevitability. The whole process became so corrupt it’s hard to tell if the corruption alone was the fault or the nature of trying to make an economy based on intangibles. I suspect that all economies have always been based on the production and distribution of hard goods, but just because it hasn’t happened before, does that mean it can’t happen in the future? I just don’t know. At the very least, the disaster of 2008 reveals that we don’t know how to do it yet.

On a more personal note, I have a mea culpa to offer. As I have written in this blog, last November I attended the biannual RESULTS conference on the Hill in Ottawa. As part of that conference several volunteers met with a couple of dozen friendly MPs to ask their help with a few actions that our research showed could have a powerful impact on helping others in the developing world. The actions were very simple:

1)   Send a letter (provided) to the World Bank asking they release committed funds for education (more on this later).

2)  Send a letter to Bev Oda asking her to release funds promised by the Conservative Government to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS TB and Malaria. The Global Fund is in a crisis because wealthy governments have been reneging on promised funding. The Global Fund is the world’s largest and most effective weapon we have against these 3 greatest killers.

3)  Include a note about these issues with their regular mail-outs they send to their constituents.

Of the two-dozen MPs we met with – not surprising no Conservatives were willing or able to meet with us – all agreed to implement these actions. So far, only a few have done so, three months later. This pisses me off. While I do recognise that many of these MPs work very hard on the issue of foreign aid in the House and in committee, that doesn’t change the fact that these promises have been neglected.

Tracy, several friends and myself met with Elizabeth May, Jinny Sims, and Hedy Fry’s staff (Ms. Fry being ill at the time and unable to make our meeting). Since that time I’ve corresponded by email to all their local constituency offices and their House of Commons offices asking for progress updates. All these emails have been ignored. So the other day, I pushed into the social media ether several tweets about the above situation. Both Ms. Sims and Ms. May popped up to defend their support for foreign aid, but neither responded to my claim that they hadn’t followed through with their commitments.

So what’s the mea culpa? Well, the twitter handles I used were @ElizabethMay @jinnysims and @LibbyDavies. @LibbyDavies? Where did that come from? We met Libby at the conference, but I’m not sure if she was asked to do the actions or not. It should have been @hedyfry. So here I am venting my spleen about the cynicism created by politicians who don’t do what they say they are going to do, to hundreds of people, and poor Ms. Davies is reading this and saying WTF?

Well, she emailed to ask me what I was talking about. I related to her the above information, reminding her of her promise. It was only after I sent the reply that a friend pointed out I had the wrong MP!

Talk about feeling like an ass. I don’t apologise for the rather sharp tweets about Ms. Sims and Ms. May because they haven’t followed through with their commitment, like most of their peers. While they both do good work, that’s all hidden and behind the scenes; you would think they would be willing to jump at an opportunity to do good in a way that is visible to the public. Is it simply that we aren’t actual constituents of theirs? I refuse to be so cynical – so far at least.

Up to 2,000 people a day read my blog, so I hope Elizabeth May, Jinny Sims, and Hedy Fry see this and know that a lot of Canadians will know what they’ve not done, and finally act like they said they would. A lot is at stake here.

And again Ms, Davies, so sorry for flaming you on twitter.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

 Check out the free audiobook of my most recent novel  A Dark and Promised Land here

I wonder about the explosion of tats; is it yet another case of cultural monkey see, monkey do, or has the notoriety worn off to the point that we are now able to indulge in a need to express and decorate ourselves in a manner once forbidden? I suppose some people choose trivial reasons to get inked, but given the pain involved I suspect for most there’s a deeper meaning in it.  There’s likely as many motivations as there are individuals bearing them, although I must confess to feeling a little let down when I see a young man with yet another skull or a girl with a butterfly, and don’t even start me on the young girl I saw the other day with a guy’s's name inked across her chest.

For me, tats are markers of life transitions. I had my first done a year before we sold everything and moved aboard Fainleog; it was a marker of a new stage in my life and a new identity I was embracing. And it feels like change is in the air again.

So here it is: the tat I’m thinking of is yet another traditional sailor’s tattoo where the sailor has the text HOLD FAST written across his knuckles. I’m not at all a fan of textual tats, but this is how it’s done, and the meaning is inextricably linked to the tradition and the signifier of the words. HOLD FAST was a good-luck omen written on a sailor’s knuckles to help ensure he did not slip while climbing high aloft in the rigging of a square-rigged ship. He often worked hundreds of feet above a pitching deck, and losing a grip meant falling to one’s death.

There’s not much chance I’ll ever find myself climbing the ratlines of a 19^th century man-of-war so what’s the thinking? Over the last couple of years I’ve mused a lot on the importance of letting go, of not clinging to what we desire and hope for. My stint in Buddhism especially taught me the foolishness of thinking we control anything, and that clinging just increases human suffering. Experience has shown me that life is a constant stream of surrendering, releasing and letting things pass away.

But here’s the paradox. While it is utterly necessary to acknowledge or frailty, our helplessness, and our lack of control over that which we desire and love, at the same time, we must never let go. I can never let go of my dearest wife and children, and yet it is the absolute truth that one day I must lose them. I must never release my hold on my life’s spirit, my craving for one more day, one more moment of this extraordinary, wondrous life, and yet one day it will be gone.

Every woman I have ever loved I still carry in my heart, and I will never let go of them.  Many of my dreams will never come to fruition, but I will never surrender them. In a way, HOLD FAST is a profound manifestation of what it means to be human: to love knowing you must lose the beloved, to have faith in the new day knowing that one day there will not be another.

In the mid-20th century the American Field Painters tried to grapple with the existential problem of existing in the face of oblivion, creating works that tried to represent the void and the human struggle for being in the face of it. I’m not sure how successful they were nor how successful HOLD FAST will be, but as I continue on in years, I would like a reminder that despite the accumulated loss of so many important and worthwhile things, to never, ever, quit clinging to that which is meaningful, to that which I love.

Every one of us stands in the face of oblivion, and it’s important to concede that reality with grace and humility, rather than fear. Acknowledge it, accept it as our collective fate, and return to HOLD FAST as the best we can do.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

 Check out the free audiobook of my most recent novel  A Dark and Promised Land here

Bear with me; I’ve got a few technical points to make and I’m going to try to do so without being too pedantic. Recently there’s a lot of doomsday talk in the media; the environment and the economy especially seem to be deteriorating, at an increasingly rapid rate. There are many reasons offered for these two great concerns: the Occupy movement blames systemic income inequality, and David Suzuki blames environmental degradation on lackadaisical regulation by governments and large, insufficiently regulated corporations. What’s interesting is how closely tied these two Great Problems facing our world actually are. And the source of these has little to do with us as individuals and much more to do with what we call nature.

We tend to believe that human beings are distinct and removed from nature. Yet if by Nature we mean the natural world, there is nothing that is in fact not nature, because everything around us arose from some natural source or other, whether we are talking about species or condominiums. Even the oxygen we breathe had its synthesis in long-dead stars. Any delineation between us and Nature is simply the result of hundreds of years of Renaissance and colonial thought, heavily influenced by the Christian church, which saw nature as embodying humanity’s dark impulses.

But aside from how we choose to view nature, a good model for understanding ourselves and our place in the natural world is ecology. Both rigorous and elegant, ecology attempts to describe the complex relationships between life forms and all the myriad aspects of the environment that they experience. When viewed through this lens, much of the world’s troubles start making sense.

There are a few core principles of ecology worth looking at. The first is ecological exclusion, in which no two organisms can occupy the exact same niche, niche meaning all the aspects of the environment that the organism interacts with in some fashion. What this means is that if species A needs exactly the same things as species B, the two organisms with compete with each other, and the “superior” species will outcompete the other and eventually force it into extinction. So for any two species you care to observe, there has to be something different about their needs for both to share the same habitat.

Another principle involves the grow of species in the absence of controlling factors (i.e. predation, lack of food, breeding habitat). When not controlled, population numbers will climb at an exponential rate (x²) until it reaches the carrying capacity of the environment, after which there will be a precipitous falloff due to all resources being consumed or disease infecting the population, or both.

In a healthy ecological system, factors such as predation tends to keep population below the maximum carrying capacity provided by the physical environment. Dramatic exceptions occur when species are introduced in areas where they have no natural predators, and their numbers explode. Think cane toads in Australia.

As human beings have no natural predators other than themselves, their numbers have historically been limited by the carrying capacity of the land, war and disease. Advancements in technology have greatly increased carrying capacity and decreased the impact of disease, and so numbers have exploded according to well-known ecological principles.

What we call habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity is simply the principle of ecological exclusion operating. Part of human habitat need is for fallow soil, so we compete with amphibians such as frogs for fertile lowlands. We drain the swamp and wipe out the frogs. A lot of arguments can be made about waste and whether or not the swamp needs to be drained (the human notion of choice), but you cannot get past the principle that humans can adapt to any environment and so we will necessarily compete with other life forms in that environment. And the greater our numbers the more we will exclude other species as we compete for the resources that they too need to survive.

Given that the factors limiting our population have been greatly thwarted, ecological principles suggest that we will compete with other organisms for resources and force them into extinction. This principle has been shown in many population studies involving many other species, and we can see it happening as a result of human activities all over the world. We cannot avoid it because we are part of this global ecological system.

Some will say that such biodeterministic arguments don’t take into account our ability to choose, that we have agency and can decide our fate. The problem with this viewpoint it assumes that human beings have rational minds with instinctive tendencies, rather than the reverse.

There are many examples of our inability to regulate ourselves according to rational needs. The explosion of obesity across the world is an example of our inability to overcome a natural tendency to overconsume and regulate ourselves rationally. Having evolved in a world with a scarcity of natural resources, it makes sense that when we have access to essentially unlimited calories we would not be able to restrict ourselves – we are fighting our natures.

I think that innate need is also part of the consumerist impulse. To crave and desire is part of being human, and is the impulse that keeps us striving, moving, and exploring. If as a species we were easily satiated, we would still be living in the trees. This impulse keeps us acquiring, and explains the little thrill we feel whenever we purchase something: it’s like bringing home a boar to feed the family.

This impulse knows no natural bounds. Given a surfeit of resources, we have seen how many other species will overconsume and degrade their environment until their numbers are checked by some natural process. The explosion of the mountain pine beetle’s population in BC and Alberta, with the resultant loss of millions of hectares of forest, is an example of this phenomenon.

Only human beings know to preserve something for the next day or the next generation, and that idea flies straight in the face of millions of years of evolved instinct to live now, consume now, because there may be nothing tomorrow. The problem of course is that human consumption is more than just overgrazing or species exclusion; the instinct has been hijacked by commerce, and consumerism’s long reach is enormously and disproportionately destructive.

These kinds of ideas have been around for a long time and I’ve not seen a good refutation of them. There has been much theorising about the absolute carrying capacity of the planet, but these tend to ignore the consumerist/consumption impulse that degrades so much for so little return. The carrying capacity of a planet filled with agrarian peasants is very different from one filled with North American consumers, and we’ve probably all seen the estimates that suggest it would take a number of planet’s worth of resources to have everyone live like Western consumers.

If we accept the notion that it is a deeply ingrained human instinct to hoard and accumulate, the idea that we can use our individual will power to limit our environmental impact is hopelessly doomed. We simply have too many examples where human beings cannot easily control themselves, especially over the long term.

So what is to be done?

I’m not suggesting for a moment that we throw in the towel and all go out and buy a Hummer. Whether we want to admit it or not, those ecological laws apply to us as much as they apply to lemmings, and the predicted results will be the same.  But simply applying a moral argument will not redeem the species; something else is required.

It is my belief that only spiritual evolution will allow us to overcome these innate tendencies. Moral and rational arguments evoke the power of will for change, while spiritual practice allows us to transcend both will and our natural impulses.

To be very clear I’m not speaking of a religious proscription; since time immemorial we have witnessed the failure of religious edicts to prevent human beings from acting according to their basic drives. But true spiritual practice strives not to control or prescribe, but to acknowledge and let go, ultimately achieving a transcendence over the limiting aspects of being human.

People often have an idea of Buddhism as a kind of mysticism and a complex religion, and indeed it is; there are a variety of schools and practices all over the world. But from what I’ve learned, most of these are cultures overlaid atop a non-religious essential practice. When you strip away the religion (culture) at it’s essence Buddhism is a practice that teaches us how not to be ruled by our evolved reptilian brain. It does not use morals or threats of punishment and reward; it simply trains us to no longer be driven by instinctive impulse. The locus of motivation shifts from the archaic brain, that simple yet powerful engine that we share with all vertebrates, to the sublime neocortex, which is ours alone.

The transcendent human being no longer is controlled by his desire to consume and horde, but is free to live an abundant life regardless of how simple it might be. When we turn off the driving pressure of instinct, peace takes it’s place, and one’s footprint becomes soft indeed. One does not have to prescribe to a strongly ascetic tradition or practice to overcome excessive consumption; simply recognising our impulses, where they come from and where they lead us, will probably suffice.

Some would say that such a path is invalid because it’s ultimately a selfish one, and why should you be at peace in a suffering world? But the actual survival of our species is at stake, and the more of us who adopt an inward journey the better it is for those around us, and for the very planet itself.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

 Check out the free audiobook of my most recent novel  A Dark and Promised Land here

I want to talk about welfare, the money kind, what more enlightened folks call “social assistance”. I’m weary beyond belief at the ignorance out there when it comes to people who live off the dole.  Far, far too often I hear people use epithets like lazy, bums, scammers, cheats, and even worse. A disturbing number of Canadians hold these beliefs based on nothing but lack of information and prejudice –a kind of economic bigotry.  The assumption is that if you aren’t working and paying your way, you are at best a loser and whatever situation you find yourself in it’s your fault and only a reflection of a lousy character. In other words, you deserve your poverty, and don’t deserve the pittance the government gives you.

Never mind the fact that some of the largest corporations in Canada are giving free money (including the billions enjoyed by wildly profitable oil patch), and the whole host of tax privileges enjoyed by the economic elite. The lower the person’s status, the lower the value we ascribe to them.

Of course most of these condemning individuals can give an example of someone cheating the system, someone who obviously didn’t deserve government financial help, but got it all the same.  What’s interesting about these anecdotes is that it’s never about a person they directly know, but someone someone else told them about. It’s always rumour.

Of course there are some people scamming the government, but the biggest cheats are extremely wealthy individuals who find all kinds of ways of hiding money from the taxman. In BC, a single employable individual earns around $600 a month. That’s not chump change but compared to government budgets and other treasury loses, it’s insignificant. And even when the government did a major crackdown a few years back, very few cheats were actually caught. It’s just not worth all the hassle for such small amounts of money. Social assistance really is an option of last resort

Study after study examining those on welfare reveal a constant parade of misery.  The vast majority of those on government assistance suffer from some kind of affliction: mental health problems, drug or alcohol addiction, some kind of personal catastrophe. We should all be able to imagine situations in which we could simple lose our ability to care for ourselves, where our world comes crashing down on us and we simple cannot function as we once did, at least temporarily.

People who find themselves on social assistance almost never have other supports like family or friends they can count on until they get back onto their feet. And that’s another point: by far most of those on welfare are there temporarily, reeling from a situation out of their control.  Once their lives stabilise, they get off as soon as possible. Why? Because the process is so belittling and dehumanising.

When you apply for welfare, the first thing that will be reflected back to you, although not in so many words, is that you shouldn’t be there. The questions you have to answer reveal that the government assume you are trying to cheat them, and even if not, you shouldn’t be asking for help. The questions will be pointed and probing, not quite accusing you of not wanting to work, although that’s the gist.

Decisions will be made that you have no say on and although there are appeal processes, these are bureaucratic in nature and have little to do with actually supporting you or holding compassion. If someone in the assistance office makes a mistake on your file, tough luck. If your money doesn’t come, good luck getting your worker on the phone. When you go into the welfare office the energy is horrible: mistrust, anger, aloofness, detachment, and judgement.

Although I have no doubt that most of the front line workers care about their clients, they are caught in a system that is utterly malignant to those it serves, and the people coming in are at the end of their ropes and not exactly at their cheeriest best, either

As I mentioned in earlier posts, I was once on welfare for a couple of months after my breakup with Tracy.  In those days (mid 1990s) the process was far more human and generous and it really saved mine and my kid’s bacon. But that was before a decade of BC Liberal bigotry directed against the poor.

At the time I knew two women who were also on welfare, both middle-aged single moms, both university students. In those days, welfare would actually fund you while you went to school, knowing the student loan system was grossly insufficient to raise a family (such help as long since been curtailed).

Neither of these women had a career; previously they were employed in low paying, low status work. Given the funding limitations of the day, without welfare they wouldn’t have been able to afford university while raising their teenage kids.

So what happened to them? The one woman graduated from university with a double major and is social worker, and has been employed as a professional for almost 20 years. The other woman carried on with her studies and is now a university professor, having achieved her PhD.

Without the welfare they received neither of these women would have reached the levels they eventually accomplished (and the taxation they must now pay, which far exceeds what they received from the government).  Neither of them would have reached their human potential without government help. These stories  – which are NOT hearsay – are a far cry from how so many people view those on government assistance. But such is the difference between bigotry and reality.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

 Check out the free audiobook of my most recent novel  A Dark and Promised Land here

Being a writer really is a curse. For parents of young, prospective writers out there, I recommend the old medieval trick used to cure left-handedness and tie hands behind backs, but in this case both hands. It also has the advantage of doing away with that other scourge, self-pollution.

I have a lot on my plate today, but I’m determined to update this thing.

As readers may have noticed, Tracy and I have relisted Fainleog for sale, but this time on our own. I think we’ll have a better chance selling for less (which is what we would have got before, minus the brokerage fees.) Given the traffic I get on my blog, arguably the coverage will be greater anyway, not that most of you are in the market.

We are getting quite a bit of interest, and honestly, it has me in a bit of a funk. I find myself sniping at my wife more often, and suppressing an urge to wring her neck. Fortunately she is so lovely to me that I melt at the sight of her, so I’m reduced to passive-aggressive cheap shots.

It would be easy to blame her for my angst because after almost 5 yrs aboard she is the one wanting to move ashore, although she has in fact suggested some alternatives like renting a place for 4 months in the winter. But when I really examine my inner motivations and feelings, I know the problem is my own.

I’m getting old.

The thing is, I’ve reinvented myself so many times in this life, trying on different hats, different lifestyles, different ways of being. In part looking for something, in part simply because that’s part of living a full and meaningful life. But now, at the hale age of almost 51, I’m getting weary of it. After all I found something that really, truly works for me: living aboard a sailboat as a writer, making some money here and there, and cruising a few months of the year. What’s not to love?

I’ve been doing this since 2007 and these years have been the happiest in my adult life, fitting me so well on so many levels.

Of course it’s easy to blame Tracy for taking it away from me, but that blame hides a deeper truth. No matter what we have, no matter how good something is, we have to be willing to let go. Part of being truly alive is change and embracing change. No matter how good things are, we don’t have the option of grabbing onto it in an effort to keep it. When we find something wonderful we need to enjoy it, but if we decide to seize it everything fails. Life stops. Oh sure, the days carry on, but what you find is a kind is stasis, a suspended animation.

I would argue that’s the biggest mistake most of us make: finding our comfort place and staying there. We dismiss it as a “rut”, but it’s much deeper than that. Life means change and confronting the new that change brings with it. With each challenge we grow a little bit and deepen our wisdom. But as we get older, this becomes more difficult. We start to seek comfort over challenge, familiarity over the new. And we start digging our graves long before we enter them.

For myself, I have to admit I’m afraid of what change will bring and see only loss. I’m afraid of going back to that unsatisfying landlubber life I’ve known before. I’m afraid of being unhappy. And I’m afraid of the challenge of reinventing a new life yet one more time.

Living aboard or not living aboard is so much more than changing an address or housing style. These things are deeply symbolic and I don’t think just for me. Culturally, there is a great significance to whether you live in a car, a basement suite or a 6,000 square foot house on the ocean. I can’t begin to recall the number of times people have told us how impressed and admiring they were about our lifestyle.

And aside from that kind of meaning, the experience will be vastly different. I won’t deny the fact that living aboard can be challenging and living ashore is much more comfortable, hence Tracy’s desire to live ashore. But to me, that’s just the point: I want a lifestyle that by it’s very nature is a bit of a challenge, where every day there are some small things to overcome.

But in the end moving ashore is in fact an even greater challenge, because the paradox is that I’m most comfortable living aboard, and starting to get into my own rut. I’m like a lizard on a sun-baked rock, happily soaking in the rays; the problem is I’ve been sitting there for 5 years. If I truly want to embrace adventure in deed and not just according to the mythology of being a live-aboard writer, I have to push myself into places where I’m less comfortable, where I will be challenged by more than small spaces, inadequate heating and occasionally navigating shoally waters.

I have to confront that fact that I’m starting to be afraid of change. And that’s nobody’s problem but my own.

Here’s this month’s Pacific Yachting with my article From Calm to Calamity as the main article. The photo in the table of contents is also mine. It’s a good read; I highly recommend it.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

 Check out the free audiobook of my most recent novel  A Dark and Promised Land here

Despite the recent Occupy protests, I’m concerned that democracy in Canada is in trouble. Evidence for this is in each election we have recently experienced, and there have been plenty lately. Every time we are called to the polls the numbers decline, even though as an aging society we should see those trends reverse (older people tend to vote more). There is a lot of hand wringing among the pundits about what to do about it, and I think we need to start with the quality of existing governments.

Over the last 30 years, an increasingly hardened right-wing has replaced progressive governments in North America, culminating in the Harper American-style neoconservativism.

One consequence of this right is a more extremist public politic where decency and respect for others and other ideas has gone by the board. What was once unspeakable is now spoken, and voices once silent become loud and unashamedly shrill. Too often those voices are angry and at times hateful and prejudicial. We saw this in the last federal election when a reporter was questioning Mr. Harper, and a mob formed and started threatening him. Even simple questioning of his positions was seen by his supporters as intolerable.

The response to this by more thoughtful and moderate minds has been far, far too weak. Perturbed and even appalled by the deterioration of politics (given that participation is truly voluntary), many simply have chosen to not participate.

The problem is that that response, although understandable, is akin to pretending to not see the homeless man begging on the street; we fool ourselves that if we ignore it, maybe it will go away.

Statistics on both side of the border show that the gains of the right in the last US and Canadian elections was not due to a sudden upswell of preference for right-wing politics, but a staying away of more moderate voters from the polls.

More and more young people are choosing not to get involved in politics or participate in democracy. Given that the older one is the more likely you are to vote, the preference for far-right politicians represents a demographic trend, not a society-wide endorsement of their policies and beliefs. What it says about older people in society is unfortunate, as it supports the stereotype of the crabby, out-of-touch senior railing against the world and his diminished power in it.

The results however, speak for themselves: what we see now are the political choices of most people’s parents and grandparents, which is hardly the best choice to lead us through the 21^st century. What we have seen this last year is that angry, hateful and ignorant politics has alienated so many moderate citizens that angry, hateful and ignorant people have voted as a majority and delivered their choices to power.

You can argue the merits of disbanding the Canadian Wheat Board, but the omnibus crime bill? Crime in Canada is the lowest in 40 years, and yet we have a government toughening laws to punish rather then rehabilitate. We know that incarceration does nothing to improve crime stats or outcomes, yet we will now have minimum mandatory sentences, even for petty crimes such as pot possession. Prison guards no longer have to choose the least violent means to quell problems in prisons. Judges can no longer look at mitigating circumstances when deliberating sentences.

This kind of hang-‘em-high mentality arises in fear and hate, the belief being that once you cross a certain social line you are deemed dispensable as a citizen, having no intrinsic value.

I could go on with examples – there are a great many of them to choose from, especially in the areas of environment and climate change – but the point is made. Edmund Burke said all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, and recent events in Canada has borne this out. Human suffering will increase due to the complacency of decent people, and such is the road to hell paved.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

 Check out the free audiobook of my most recent novel  A Dark and Promised Land here