Hi All:

Certain administrative changes on my LJ accounts enable me to migrate back to my more comfortable LiveJournal, mylesk.

I don't think anyone will notice the change, except for bullfrog_hawker.

Bossy and Wrath’s two baby magpie chicks have matured and moved on so none of them are anywhere to be seen around the Vacant Lot of Eden. In their absence, we now have two dutiful crow parents watching over their single adolscent as he walks around the yard, stretching his wings and taking short, furtive flights from the boardwalk to the compost heap.

Like their magpie cousins, the two parent crows watchfully sit on the telephone wires across the alley and swoop in and cry like mad every time Hannah or I dare enter our own backyard. The impertinence of nature.

Hannah wondered aloud earlier, why these animals seem to pick our yard to rear their offspring.

“Abundant cover, and clear flight paths,” are the reasons, I imagine.

( images under cut for size )

How did it go?

I’m happy to post today in reply to a comment from geri_island who was asking about the June 9th “debate” on Edmonton’s Breakfast Television show on the matter of fluoridating our municipal drinking water.



It wasn’t at all what I was expecting, or told to expect. Not so much a debate but an 8 minute session of The View with four people who’ve never met before. And although I had 5 minutes of material to present, I think between the four of us in the segment (three speakers and the host) we each got to say about three sentences each. I don’t think it was a slam-dunk for any of us, although I now know how the meme that will end fluoridation will go.

The central question about adding fluoride to Edmonton’s water did take the stage. Not “is it harmful?” which the majority of the anti-fluoride activists argue, but rather, “Is it redundant?” which came up when a simplified version of this line graph comparing the trends in dental health between fluoridated and non-fluoridated countries was posted.


The 18 Countries Slide

This was a slide I’d asked for, but the producer had told me, seconds before it appeared, to prepare to speak to an image about brittle bones instead and I was off-guard. Anyways, the slide had the desired effect and I got to use my last sentence to say fluoridating our drinking water is redundant.

Dr. Soin argued that fluoridating our water has a significant impact on dental health, and we can’t say that it is redundant based on the 18 Countries slide because we don’t know what the natural levels of fluoride in their water was over this period.

I didn’t have the chance to rebut the glaring error in her reply.

Dentists argue that .7 ppm (parts per million) is the optimal concentration of fluoride in drinking water. Dr. Soin said that without artificial fluoridation, Alberta’s water would be at .1 ppm, implying that we would be stuck at the 1965 end of this graph with a population average of 4 decayed, missing, or filled teeth in all of our mouths. So, it could be the case that these non-fluoridated countries have naturally occurring fluoride concentrations of .7ppm. We just don't know.

But if natural background levels of fluoride in the 18 unfluoridated countries accounts for the commensurate improvement in dental health there, that means that over the past 30 years, there has been an uncontrolled, unreported, unaccounted for 700% increase of background fluoride in their water. This is a grave ecological issue. Somehow, most of the world’s water is being mysteriously contaminated by fluoride! So the new question is, will it stop? Or will nature keep increasing the natural levels of fluoride to .8ppm, or worse, the 1.5ppm level when it will no longer comply with drinking water guidelines? And why haven’t we heard about this global, spontaneously available fluoride? (I'll ask Dr. David Schindler, world water expert, if there has been a 30-year trend of increasing fluoride concentrations in the world's water, and if he says 'yes', then we have another ecological problem. But if there is one, he would have reported it by now.)

It was good, though. I can see exactly how this argument will end now. And no one will be able to deny that adding fluoride to our water is a waste of taxpayer’s money.

I guess it’s not going to be my first debate on CityTV’s breakfast television tomorrow morning ~ but it’s been a while. The all-candidate’s forums of the 2001 municipal elections had a definite debate-like quality to them. And one year Edmonton’s academic highschool debate champions challenged my MLA (member of the legislative assembly) and myself to a debate on climate change.

So, tomorrow at 9am, CityTV is going to air a feature story on water fluoridation in Edmonton and producers decided to accompany it with a live debate on the issue featuring a local dentist and me.

I actually think it’s going to be kind of fun.

I’m not an anti-F activist. All of the AlexJonesian idiocy about fluoride being a tool of the NewWorldOrder and it’s global depopulation project really annoys me. In fact, I believe that water fluoridation probably doesn’t hurt most people.

But just because something doesn’t hurt people isn’t an argument for public dollars being spent on it.

Topical application of fluoride is good for your dental health. I think that is a fact and it is undisputed. Applying fluoride to the surface of your dental enamel prevents tooth decay.

The issue is this: in a developed country like Canada, in a fluoridated community like Edmonton, we are paying three times for essentially the same treatment. I pay my dentist for fluoride treatments once per year. I pay for my toothpaste that I apply to my teeth twice per day. And I pay as a citizen for the extremely weak fluoride solution of that passes over my teeth whenever I drink tap water. The question is, is there any value to this extra water fluoridation expense that we’re all forced to pay collectively, when we already pay for more effective treatments individually.

I think a big part of the answer is found by looking at the last 30 years of dental health data for developed countries as gathered by the World Health Organization. This information looks at 18 countries, 12 that do not add fluoride to their water and 6 that do. What we see is a comparable improvement in dental health across all countries. So, I think this third payment is actually wasted money.

But then we should consider that there are some people who should not be drinking fluoridated water. American Dental Association and the Canadian Pediatric Society both advise that infant formula not be prepared with fluoridated water. So now we have people, the parents of newborns, who must in a sense pay a fourth time for fluoridation – this time to avoid it.

Then there are the people who wish to avoid fluoridated water because of the unanswered questions on how it might affect human health. There is really interesting research on the associations with silicofluorides in drinking water and human health effects. There are several – including cancer and bone health - but I’ll only mention the ones that I think are really interesting and that’s those are the associations between fluoridated water and IQ – where fluoridated water reduces children’s ability to evacuate lead from their bodies, and an association with hyperactivity and reduced impulse control – both of which would indirectly lead to learning problems.

Now Health Canada is correct – on a weight-of-evidence approach- there isn’t enough information in this research to make definitive conclusions. But we’re discussing a treatment which is probably inferior, definitely redundant, to things were are already doing so there is no reason to continue to run this risk while the research continues. And from an economic perspective, we’re spending $600,000 per year in direct costs on this probably inferior, definitely redundant activity. Which City Council could easily find other uses for that would be more appreciated by Edmontonians.

Last night Gil and I spent a fine July evening as guests on the patio of bullfrog_hawker's home, sipping Jim Beam and snacking on Salt & Simulated Ant flavour kettle chips. Typical in such company, the conversation was robust and ranged from how geographic information technologies are transforming cartography to how the British SAS survival book teaches that all ants are edible - and that they taste strongly of vinegar.

bullfrog_hawker is working on a master's degree in geography. As I currently understand his thesis, he is looking at interactive, web-based systems for the compiling and sharing geo-spatial data about the recreational trails in Edmonton's river valley. More specifics on Hawker's work is on his blog at http://wiserpath.blogspot.com/. I'm interested in this kind of geographic knowledge management for the kind of support it can provide to developing more sustainable community behaviour.

Reflecting on the evening, I'm struck by the teaching that went on. My knowledge of Hawker's work marginally increased. All three of us sampled some young wild lettuce that was growing in Hawker's backyard. And the importance of caning your raspberries in the fall, not the spring, was galvanized in my mind. In the fall you can tell the live canes from the dead ones. By caning in the spring, Hawker now has a patch of only first year raspberries. I think I knew this, but now it's really clear in my mind.

It was like a conference session. A very relaxed, enjoyable conference, characterized by a sense of fellowship.

In the aftermath of the RCEN AGA, I've been thinking about conferences in the age of the internet and the new world of increasingly available electronic communication. It makes less sense now to convene in-person meetings, at great expense, for the sole purpose of conveying information; sitting in rooms listening to experts talk content. Conferences today, if we are to have them, should capitalize on those things that being together in-person enables - fellowship and shared experience.

The parents of two of Hannah's congregation members regularly conduct tours of Japan with an emphasis on art and architecture, and we plan to avail ourselves upon this service in spring of next year.

It's a challenging idea to me, in part because touring Japan is said to be quite expensive, but also because, being of oriental extraction myself, local people in Asian countries always speak to me in the local language and I'm continually interrupting people to explain that I can only speak English. It's like when we shop at T&T, the local Chinese Superstore; I make Hannah pay so that I can avoid having to tell the cashier that I don't speak Chinese. (You might recall that Hannah is of Scottish/Ukrainian ancestry.)

But despite these fairly specific misgivings, Tokyo Disneyland and the electronics district beckon to me. And I certainly should visit my ancestral homeland at some point in my lifetime.

I'm going to try to learn three Japanese phrases per day, from various sources.

1. Kite kuri kaishte kudasai. It means, "please listen and repeat".

2. Ohayou gozaimasu. Good morning.

3. Hajime mashite Myles to moushi masu. Introducing myself.

One of my sources:

How Shell lost the goodwill of stakeholders.
By Matthew McClearn in Canadian Business

It is surely one of the most worn truisms of business: You’ve gotta live up to your commitments. It’s a throwaway line in stock speech at conferences and luncheons, and Shell Canada executives have long known when to employ it. To wit: “We accepted some years ago the need to respond to growing concerns on climate change and set tough goals to reduce our own greenhouse-gas emissions,” said Tim Faithfull, the company’s then CEO, in a 2003 speech. “Of course, we have to deliver on our goals to earn the trust and respect of our stakeholders.”

It’s difficult to argue with such logic. Yet Shell’s former friends believe the company is testing it.

Several years ago, the company signed two written agreements with an umbrella group of environmentalists known as the Oil Sands Environmental Coalition (OSEC). Under these accords, Shell promised to set ambitious targets for reduced greenhouse-gas emissions at two separate oilsands projects. Both projects are now under construction in northern Alberta. In April, though, OSEC accused Shell of repudiating the agreements. Shell, meanwhile, claims it’s always been in “material compliance.”

The squabble marks the bitter end of a long and fruitful relationship between Shell and environmental groups. It also lays bare the failure of Canada’s favoured approach to controlling industrial greenhouse-gas emissions of the past several decades. But will nascent government regulations work any better?
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The national conference to which I've been obliquely referring was the Annual General Assembly (AGA) of the Canadian Environmental Network (RCEN). A set of YouTube videos providing an overview of the event is posted at http://www.youtube.com/user/RCEN1.

In 1989, the last RCEN AGA to be held in Alberta convened at Nakoda Lodge, Kananaskis. I first began attending RCEN AGAs in 1990 or 91 and so missed that event exactly 20 years ago now. It was part of what was then a practice of the national network to hold its assemblies on a rotating basis in every region of the country. However, an organizational crisis (I'll have to look up the years) ended this practice for at least half a decade when the event became confined to the Ottawa region.

In addition to the 20-year anniversary of the last time it convened beneath the wide Alberta sky, the 2009 RCEN AGA also upholds a return to the practice of regional rotation. In 2010, we'll be in Montreal, Quebec.

Talk of moving out from Ottawa began in early 2008 when the idea for meeting in Alberta first arose. The then Alberta Environmental Network's (AEN) National Council member, Andrea Waywanko, pitched the idea and then accepted my friendly amendment that it happen in June 2009 when the ICLEI World Congress would convene in Edmonton. The amended idea was accepted at the 2008 RCEN AGA in Richmond Hill, where Amandi Khera, Josh Brandon and I had found the horse-race betting parlour in the basement of the Best Western. (http://suite-mck.livejournal.com/33735.html?mode=reply)

More later.

It’s fair to say that maintaining a web-log is a kind of craft. Which is to also say that it’s a kind of work. I’ve fallen out of the practice, out of the discipline, of blogging in recent weeks due to the overwhelming distraction of organizing the Canadian Environmental Network’s national conference earlier this month.

I was told again this weekend that there are a few people who check this site daily to see if it has been updated, which reminds me that there is a performance standard that I’m supposed to be maintaining here.

If you are a member of the Toxics Watch Society of Alberta, or would like to become one, please take note of this post.

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Grade 9 social studies is the year my generation of Alberta students were introduced to the governance of Canada. The curriculum left me with the impression that we are governed within an orderly system, by wise men who have our best interests at heart. And to whatever extent I may have noticed the activist groups of the day taking companies or government agencies to court (my father was employed by a multi-national oil company after all), I perceived these incidents to be rare, and I assumed their rarity to be the result of widespread compliance with whatever laws were in effect.

When I ultimately found myself in the position of pressing such litigations as a member of such an activist group I learned that the opportunities to litigate are actually so abundant that we are limited by our resources and forced to pick and choose which case we might want to press based on the fact-set, precedent-value, and media opportunity. In fact, ever since Toxics Watch began using litigation as a tool, I don’t think we’ve had a complete calendar year without a case in process.

Suncor Millenium. Genessee/Keephills. TrueNorth Fort Hills. TrueNorth Fort Hills Appeal. PetroCanada (was TrueNorth) Fort Hills Leave to Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. Imperial Kearl Lake.

I have a rule of thumb: no more than one court case at a time.

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The premise behind legal work as an environmental advocacy tactic is that judicial rulings can create lasting incremental change in the environmental performance of industry by enforcing or clarifying the applicable rules. That’s the idea. The presumption.
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My eyes are burning. I feel a mixture of complete exhaustion and astonishment.

I'm exhausted as the aftermath of four and half days of on-site co-direction of the Canadian Environmental Network's Annual General Assembly.

And I'm astonished that a file that has kept me from a complete night's sleep for the past 4 months and provoked such unmitigated frustration and true misery could have turned out to be such an acclaimed success.

I can't write anymore, but the AGA will be a source of several posts to come.

Bossy and Wrath, the magpie couple who reside in one of our spruce trees have another two juveniles hopping around our backyard this month. You might recall our introduction to them in this post from last spring. Consequently, whenever Hannah or I go out into the yard, or even appear in one of The Suite’s windows, one of the parent birds will take a perch about an arm’s length away from us and peck a branch, fence-board, or banister rail, all the while squawking some bossy message that we’re not to approach their adolescent offspring.

Yesterday, one of their moulty chicks was standing on our back deck. And at the same time, General Woundwort was lounging in his favourite spot in the Vacant Lot of Eden. There was a lot of wildlife traffic in our backyard yesterday.


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A draft of this post has been sitting on my desktop since April 4th. I just capped it off this morning to post.

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Under the terms of one of the side agreements of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the environment ministers of Canada, Mexico, and the United States make up the top-most echelon of an organization called the Council for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).

It was more than 10 years ago now that the CEC convened one of its public hearings in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Griz and I went down to testify about Alberta’s deregulation agenda that was underway at the time. Following the conference, I took a few extra days to visit some of the sites in the Oaxaca region.

A short bus ride from Oaxaca is Monte Alban, the ruins of an ancient Mayan city-state. Visitors were quite free to wander the dark, rough stone steps of the meso-American pyramids. I climbed the steps to the highest of the palace/temple rooms and paced the perimeters of the dilapidated domicile. I reckoned that the room of this Mayan god-king, a person who could command the life and death of human beings, was not much larger than my room in a shared house with three room-mates. And I had running water and electricity.

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In 1999, one of my longest-lasting files opened: particulate matter and ozone. Particulate matter (PM) refers to tiny, air-borne particles or droplets (aerosols). The most problematic particulate matter, from a human health perspective are those substances in the 10 micron and smaller size range. At 2.5 microns, these inhalable pollutants can reach deep areas of the lung and actually dissolve into our blood as though they were life-giving oxygen. Developing an approach to managing this type of air pollution was the job of a multi-stakeholder project team which included - among the upwards of a dozen people - myself, Geoff Granville of Shell, and Les Johnson of one of Alberta’s utility companies, EPCOR.

I think particular matter is an interesting pollutant. As I mentioned above, it can pass into the blood, so I imagine it as suspended grains of sand so small that they pass through the lung wall into the blood, making our blood into quicksand. In fact, the spike in deaths associated with high particulate matter events aren’t caused by respiratory distress, but cardio-events, as though weak hearts just give out from the effort of trying to pump thicker, quicksand blood.
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My leg hurts. I’ll get around to telling you why. You know, ellipses and all that…

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The Saturday after the revelation of the Las Vegas Cigarette at the Playboy Club, a medical nurse visited The Suite to administer another health questionnaire and take blood and urine samples for analysis. The results would be sent to the insurance underwriter to determine the disposition of our application for term life insurance. We had been quoted a monthly premium of $94 per month on the basis of Hannah and I being non-smokers.

Our insurance agent phoned this morning with the results.

“Hannah is elite premium,” the agent said. Elite premium is the best tier and plays the lowest monthly premium, so for her share of the cost of our insurance; it went down from our quoted price.

“You came back as ‘standard smoker’,” she continued. “So, your monthly premium will be $147 per month.”
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It has been tough finding the time to post lately. l am chairing the organizing committee of the annual national conference of the Canadian Environmental Network - a profoundly distracting endeavor. It's been affecting my sleep pattern and keeping most bloggable thoughts out of my mind. (Alternatively, I suppose, I could’ve been blogging about chairing the organizing committee of the national conference…)

But l experienced a bit of a break-though this week: two people in my life sompetimes counsel compassion to me :Hannah and Amandi. And for some reason this advice took hold of me Monday morning as l rode my bike to the Saffron office. Compassion: the emotion that moves us to spare others from suffering. Compassion First.

The Reverend K once counseled that we must first have compassion for ourselves. So, what first must l do to spare myself from suffering? (Suffering in the broadest sense of the word, however, as little of what I experience living in one of the wealthiest jurisdictions on Earth constitutes “suffering” compared to what many other people endure.)

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Perhaps there is no accounting for taste because even when you do, the account doesn’t really mean very much.

I’m pretty sure that I once read a story in school, written by a student, about his English teacher. The teacher was remarkable for having a crooked mustache which partially concealed a scar on his upper lip, and for the heart-felt way he taught “Macbeth” over any other topic in his syllabus.

We learn in the story that the teacher served in World War II as a crewman on a B-17, a large bomber aircraft with a bottom mounted gun turret. One mission, his plane took heavy enemy fire causing such extensive damage that the pilot could not lower the landing gear, and further, the damage trapped the gunner inside the armored bubble on the bottom of the plane.

As the B-17 flew in for a crash landing, the teacher struggled vainly to free his colleague. Just before the landing impact that crushed the turret beneath 15 tons of flying fortress, the gunner looked him in the eye and said, “Macbeth is the best play ever written.”

I’m pretty sure I read this story. Does it sound familiar to anyone? It sticks in my memory like a fond in my brainpan.

I see any version of Macbeth that I come across. It also sticks with me that Playboy produced Roman Polanski’s movie version in 1971. Last year, Hannah and I saw a mounting of Macbeth at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre which set the story in World War II with Macbeth as a Hitler-esque German officer.

But my new favourite Macbeth is Geoffrey Wright’s modern gangster version. So awesome!



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For over a year now, Hannah and I have been meeting with two representatives of World Financial Group. WFG is the Avon of financial services. They pitch their product at home visits. They host cultish, motivational parties for their associates. They employ a multi-level marketing compensation scheme. Much about the organization offends my sensibilities, but one of the two representatives we’ve been meeting with is a long-time associate of mine through many years of volunteering for the Edmonton Folk Music Festival, so giving her some business seems like a friendly thing to do. And they make house calls.

The product we have applied for is term life insurance to replace the unimaginably revolting mortgage insurance Hannah and I have been carrying since we financed The Suite.

Mortgage insurance is such a scam. For a premium of $80 per month, our mortgage provider promises that, in the event of either of our deaths, the mortgage will be paid-off – basically, written off by the institution. It’s scam-ish because the potential award of this insurance is determined by the amount owing on the mortgage. So if you owe $100,000.00 on your mortgage you’re paying for a $100,000.00 insurance policy.

But that same $80 per month premium would buy about $225,000.00 in term life insurance. In the event of either of our deaths, the survivor could pay-off the mortgage amount owing and still have $125,000.00 remaining for other expenses. Furthermore, as your mortgage is paid off over time, the value of your potential award declines while the premiums stay the same! Replacing our mortgage insurance with term-life insurance is our course of action.

( Part of the application process is completing a health questionnaire. )

My weed books refer to the white part of the dandelion that connects the root to the leaves as the “crown”, but the term is confusing. Crowns are at the top of things, where the blossom on a dandelion is. As I was picking dandelions this afternoon for both this post and for a side dish to tonight’s Cassoulet-style Chicken dinner, it occurred to me that this part of the dandelion is the dandelion ‘heart’, just like the heart of celery, or the artichoke heart.

So, from now on, I’m calling them “dandelion hearts”.

Pick, trim and clean as many dandelion hearts as you wish to serve. I halve or quarter the larger hearts so that they are all a uniform bite size.





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This is the traditional journal entry to record the first day of the year I've eaten something that was growing in the backyard.

Hannah and I were planting peas this evening and in the course of preparing the beds, I harvested enough dandelion crowns to serve alongside a grilled cheese sandwich for supper. Like last year, they were blanched, then sauted in garlic and olive oil. As I type this, I'm drinking the blanch water also.

Previous Yard Food post at: http://mylesk.livejournal.com/54114.html

Yea, Earth!