Two Tiers

Hurricane Katrina survivors_Aug. 05
(nationalgeographic.com)


My White Privilege by Naomi Klein
NOW Magazine - Dec. 06
(Excerpt)

I get sent to a ritzy hospital with no patients while poor New Orleans is left to die

I was in New Orleans during the flood with Avi Lewis, my husband, and my friend Andrew Stern. We were driving in a rental car, and we kept getting lost because all the streets were flooded. Andy started thinking he was in a video game, a post-apocalyptic environment, weaving the car around the debris. Then we realized it was five minutes to 6, and 6 o'clock was curfew.

We got into a collision. We spun out and drove right through the stoplight, which wasn't working because there was no electricity. We went through a wrought iron gate and landed in an independent coffee store, kitty-corner to a Starbucks. And someone said, "Did you want to hit the Starbucks?"

The other car was a cop car, and that's how we found out we were in the South. Andy was arrested, Avi was face down on the ground, being warned what happens when you hit a cop in the state of Louisiana.

I was strapped to a gurney in an ambulance, trying to convince the driver to please not take me to a hospital, because I'd been watching the news and seeing these images of what hospitals were like during the flood.

Charity Hospital had no electricity, and incredibly courageous health care workers were trying to keep their patients alive, watching helicopters airlift everybody but them. It's the only hospital that provides emergency services to the poor in New Orleans - or provided. They haven't reopened Charity Hospital, along with many public schools.

I'd seen the awful images and actually gone to one of these clinics where it was like Dante's Inferno, with elderly people falling out of wheelchairs and no one helping them. I was terrified about where they were going to take me.

So I was negotiating with the ambulance driver. I had a concussion and kept slipping in and out of consciousness. "Just drop me off at a corner - you know, I'll walk. No problem."

The next thing I knew, I was at, from what I could tell, a spa. Called the Ochsner Hospital, it's apparently quite a famous private hospital. That's where they decided to take us because we're white. I was in a private room in three minutes flat.

I was cared for by three nurses, a senior doctor and a medical intern. I have never in my life received such attentive care, nor have I seen anyone in my family get such attentive health care. This was in the middle of the largest natural and humanitarian disaster in American history.

The doctors were playing cards in the middle of this hospital, protected by an army of private security who were there, as they said, to keep the junkies out. I couldn't get out because it was past curfew, so after I got a few stitches I tried to interview the staff. I asked my intern, this young guy in his 20s, if he worked the hurricane, and he said, "No, thank god, I wasn't on duty. I actually live in the suburbs."
"Did you go to any of the shelters?" I wasn't trying to be a bitch, I just assumed that someone who'd just learned how to be a doctor would want to help.
He looked at me, confused. It actually hadn't even occurred to him to go to one of the shelters. Just as it hadn't occurred to any of the doctors and nurses in the hospital that, instead of staying in their fortress, dealing with three or four patients, they could be out there.

What we saw with Katrina was an apartheid state where the wealthy unite, where those with credit cards got into cars, drove and checked themselves into motels. This is a two-tier system. They had already accepted the idea that some lives are worth more. And once you do that in your health care system, you are mentally prepared to do that in a major disaster.

It's a heardening of hearts that's required on a daily basis to run a luxury hospital in a city like New Orleans. It's the same heardening of hearts that let people be abandoned on their rooftops by their country.

We Did Not Hate You

NOW Magazine (Jan. 1 - 7, 2009)
It was easy to miss, since the world's attention was focused elsewhere, but this week's aerial attack on Gaza is actually the culmination of a two-month-long assault by Israeli forces that started with the choking off of humanitarian aid and basic supplies to the Strip after ceasefire talks broke off. Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants have been reduced to bare survival ever since. An excerpt on the worsening situation from Amnesty International's December 5 report:

Most mills have shut down because they have little or no grain. People long deprived of many food items now cannot even find bread at times. Families never know if they will have food for their children. When people do have food, they generally have no gas or electricity with which to cook it.
Shortages of fuel, electricity and spare parts are causing water and sanitation infrastructure and other crucial services to deteriorate a bit more every day. Eighty per cent of the wells are now only functioning at reduced capacity, and water supply is only available for a few hours every few days.
Shortages of chlorine increase the risk of water-borne diseases. Routine blackouts disrupt every aspect of life for everyone.
Hospitals are struggling to power life-saving machinery. Patients in need of medical treatment unavailable in Gaza are often denied passage out of Gaza. Scores of people have died in the past year when they could have been saved.
Targeting civilians can never be justified, no matter what the reason.

QUOTE
We did not hate you. We did not want to harm you. We wanted to protect our family, our children.
-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert / Cease-fire press conference / Jan. 17 - 09

Conflict in Gaza: Day 21

Tough Bill to Swallow

by Wayne Roberts
NOW Magazine (Nov.20-26/08)
(excerpt)

If truth be known, Bush inherited, as Obama will soon, deregulated financial, agricultural, trade and social policies. Put in place by Bill Clinton and Al Gore, these were the achievement of the 1990s - a period that needs to be understood not, as greens once hoped, as the "turnaround decade," but as the "regression decade."

Clinton's government was the juggernaut behind this decoupling of national and human rights from food. "We blew it," Clinton admitted, speaking to a UN group in New York celebrating World Food Day on October 16.
"Food is not a commodity like others," Clinton said in a widely unreported speech. "It is crazy for us to think we can develop countries around the world without increasing their ability to feed themselves," he said, lambasting trade rules that forbid governments in poor countries to subsidize agriculture.

Another Clintonian icon, Alan Greenspan, also admitted to some errors of his ways. Greenspan, appointed chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve by Ronald Reagan in 1987, was regarded as the wizard of high finance until his retirement in 2006.

Greenspan confessed to congressional investigators in mid-October that he was "in a state of shocked disbelief." The "whole intellectual edifice" behind the paradigm leading to unregulated derivative markets "collapsed in the summer of last year," he said.
That was a mild confession compared to the thoughts he blurted out during a mini-crisis in 2002. "There's been too much gaming of the system. Capitalism is not working!" the wizard screamed at colleagues, according to author Ron Suskind.

Bush's final days may be the end of an era, but to become the end of an error, the wild capitalist days of the 1990s will also have to be tamed.

Lofty Plot Ousts Artists

by Paul Terefenko

NOW Magazine

Aug.21-27 2008

(Excerpt)

Think back, if you can, to the late 90s. Love Inc. was popular, & the intersection of Bloor & Lansdowne was not. The phrase "studio loft living" could be uttered without eliciting contempt. In fact, many artists & performers were creating live-work spaces in turn-of-the-century warehouses & factories.

That was the case at 221-227 Sterling Road, aka the Sterling Studio Lofts, which extends from Bloor to Dundas. The building, which was once a munitions factory with subterranean rail links to the lake, suited performers who needed the 14- to 25-foot vaulted ceilings to practise.

But nowadays Sterling is a mess of landlord/tenant antagonism, & a mystery is stalking the studios: why is the landlord trying to ignore the building's live-work rezoning & get current tenants to sign commercial leases?

Parkdale Community Legal Clinic lawyer Andrew Pelletier says any developer trying to turn the building into condos would have to deal with the fact that certain rights held by residents would make the project more expensive.

"In order to rebuild it, you would have to accomodate the current residents by building apartment spaces for them, or continuing to rent units to them at a comparable price," he says.

But if someone could make all the the rezoning headaches vanish, life would be a lot easier for the lofts' owner, Firm Capital.

"It's in [their] interest for the building to be considered commercial," explains Pelletier. That would presumably allow the owner to toss current tenants with ease.

Urbancorp (controversial developer of the Abell Lofts) denies it has a finger in any Sterling project. "There's certainly a lot of interest from buyers these days for that type of product," explains John Skalenda, project manager at Urbancorp. "The principles of the company are always looking to move forward & have interest in acquiring new sites," he notes.

Moral of the story: even the coziest symbiotic landlord/tenant arrangement can turn ugly at the first fistful of dollars.

(ad: NOW Magazine - Sept.08)

People Power (part 1)

I resolve to...share my knowledge
by John Mighton

People who find math easy don't always make the best teachers. The essence of math has become so obvious to them that they can have trouble seeing why their students are struggling.

I struggled at math myself. As a teenager I read a fair number of biographies of scientists & mathematicians. They always gave me the impression that a person had to be born with a gift to do math, & that someone who had this gift would never do badly on a test or have a hard time learning a concept. This was something I learned to believe deeply.

Like many young people, I would often give up on things because I was afraid I would meet my limitations. It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I had the courage to go back to school to study math.

Ten years ago I was looking for a way to give something back to my community. It occurred to me that I could do this by trying to help kids who were having trouble with the math I was finally able to grasp.

Because of my own background, I wasn't inclined to blame students or think they were stupid if they couldn't move forward. If someone didn't understand my explanation, I assumed there was something wrong with my explanation, not with my students.

Many of my closest friends are actors who often have time on their hands & will do anything for attention. So I convinced some of them, even those who had dropped math, that they could be math tutors. We started an after-school tutoring program called JUMP in my apartment.

The JUMP program was founded on a very lucky accident. I asked the principal of a local school to send me some kids who were having trouble with math. She misunderstood me & delivered some of the most challenged students in her school, including a number of kids in special education classes who were performing far below grade level.

Working with these students has been one of the most inspiring things I've done. I'm now convinced the brain can develop new abilities more readily than traditional theories of intelligence allow, & that even children who face severe challenges in subjects like math are capable of far more than we expect of them.

Many of the students from the first few years of JUMP moved into academic math classes by the time they entered high school. Thanks to the work of hundreds of volunteers & teachers, JUMP materials & methods are now being used in many schools in Canada, Britain, the United States & South Africa.

Most complex systems in nature show emergent behaviour: new & unexpected properties of the system can emerge out of nowhere from a series of small changes. If you add a reagent to a chemical solution one drop at a time, nothing may happen until suddenly, with a single drop, the whole solution changes colour.

I've seen this kind of behaviour in hundreds of students; they can appear to be at the limits of their ability, & then, with a single drop of knowledge, they leap to a new level of understanding.

Given the enormity of the world's challenges, I've often felt that nothing I did could make a difference. But thankfully, the world itself is complex & prone to emergent behaviour. If you're willing to take the first step, or add the first drop, the ripples may spread more widely than you could have imagined.

(John Mighton is a playwright & mathematician. He is the founder of JUMP, a charity whose goal is to reduce poverty by helping children succeed in math. CanStage is remounting his play Half Life at the Bluma Appel Theatre in January.)

I resolve to...share my knowledge
by John Mighton
NOW Magazine
Jan.07

People Power (part 4)

Queen of Green
Interview with Adria Vasil - Ecoholic columnist for NOW Magazine
(Excerpt)

As Adria Vasil reminisces about designing & selling sweatshop-free T-shirts, I'm thinking she might be the Martha Stewart of the eco set - chic, arty & rigorous.
She protests loudly, "Oh no, she's way too uptight. Don't categorize me that way, whatever you do."
Okay, then I'll categorize her as Canada's foremost expert on how to live your life, 24 hours a day, with complete environmental awareness. She does it without the hippie tinge thing that stereotypically accompanies that consciousness.

Her book, Ecoholic, takes the same name as her weekly column in NOW, which answers readers' questions with counsel on how to think about the issue & how to shop organically & locally to solve the problem. It makes eco living seem manageable, a major accomplishment when dealing with a vast set of issues that can be overwhelming.
Vasil says the key is to avoid thinking you can do everything at once.
"Let's face it. You can't achieve environmental purity unless you're Woody Harrelson & you have millions of dollars," she says.
Take things one issue at a time, she advises. Most people can't afford to overhaul their whole house at once, so if you're in the market for a new item, choose organic.
Not that it's always easy.
"The high-end items are a real problem. You can buy an eco-friendly couch made of latex in California, but then you have to ship it thousands of miles in a gas-guzzling truck. Believe it or not, Ikea is not a bad option. They don't use formaldehyde & stopped persistent fire retardants on their couches in 2002."

When NOW launched the Ecoholic column in 2004, even Vasil wasn't sure it would fly. Shortly after it debuted, she wrote an article proclaiming that environmental consciousness was dead, & a quick poll she conducted of activists in the field suggested they were prepared to say the same thing.
Nevertheless, Random House put out feelers a year later, suggesting there might be a book there. Nothing came of it at first.
"A sales guy told me there was no market," she says with a small smile.
But then the publisher came knocking again - loudly - when the world's collective consciousness seemed to turn on a dime.
More like millions of dollars, says Vasil.
"The first & most important factor was the rise in the price of oil in late 2004," she says. "When people have to pay, they'll consider change. I always applaud when the price of gas goes up, because people start making the connections.
"Then," she revs up again, "the tsunami happened, & Hurricane Katrina showed people what happens when storms get freaky. When whole cities are swallowed up in these situations, people start to believe that climate change is a problem."
There was also more science, she says, & it was growing more convincing. Polar bears starving in the Arctic & seals looking for an ice floe to birth their pups on - those images are powerful.

Though she insists that conservation is a money-saving strategy, she insists that people shouldn't be moved purely by financial factors.
"When people complain about the cost of organic food, for example, they have to be made aware that that is the real cost of food. Given what we put on our tables on a daily basis, food is ridiculously cheap in Canada.
"I'm always suspicious when someone promises cheap organics. When organic milk comes cheap in the U.S. you can be sure the cows are being rounded up & kept indoors - because that's the least expensive way of producing milk. Do we really want that?"

Adria Vasil was reading Noam Chomsky at 16 & that same year, she began volunteering at a women's shelter & getting active in the East Timor Alert Network.
She went into journalism because she was tired of sitting on the other side begging to get coverage for the issues that mattered to her, & came to NOW after graduating from Ryerson.
The Ecoholic column was the perfect fusion of her two major interests: corporate practice & the environment. When she began the project she was hurting for ideas, but NOW readers have flooded her inbox with questions, creating a backlog guaranteed to keep her busy for months.

But don't, whatever you do, consider her an eco ideal - she even has a bona fide eco vice: she loves travel, & takes those toxin-spewing planes.
"I really believe that seeing the planet helps drive our love for it & our passion to save it. I wouldn't be who I am without having had the experiences I've had camping through South America. Should we be flying twice weekly for business? No. Should we be flying to Montreal (from Toronto) for a vacation? No, but I still think a carefully chosen vacation - that is, not to a giant, all-inclusive resort that swallows the environment & culture around it - is not to be discounted entirely."
It's typical of Vasil's never-holier-than-anybody way of talking about the issue.
"Environmentalism can't be furthered by an elite club that knows the secret handshake & won't let you in if you're not doing the 150 different things you need to do to enter the club.
"I take a more welcoming approach."

Queen of Green: Interview with Adria Vasil
Conducted by Susan G. Cole
NOW Magazine
Apr.07

Sniffing out radioactive gases in your kitchen & basement

Q: I heard that radioactive radon gas could be coming from my granite counters as well as my basement. Should I ­worry?

A: Last time we were fretting about this odourless, tasteless vapour en masse, you were probably rockin’ an A-ha/Tears for Fears mixed tape. But as quick as you can say jumpin’ Jack Flash, radon gas is back, and it’s freaking out homeowners continent-wide, especially those installing fancy stone slabs in their kitchens and bathrooms.

What the hell is radon anyway? It’s a gas that comes from decaying uranium in the soil and rock under your feet. Yep, uranium isn’t just found in massive deposits in northern Saskatche­wan; it’s scattered pretty much everywhere, just in smaller quantities. Outside, not a big deal, but trapped in your house? Well, it depends.

We all have a little gas floating around the recesses of our homes, especially the basement (it seeps up through cracks in concrete, basement drains and piping gaps). It’s just that some of us have more than others. And when we start bringing great hunks of rock into our pads to tart up our counters, we’re potential­ly carting in even more radiation.

One physics prof at Rice University in Houston found that all 55 granite slabs he sampled had higher-than-background levels of radiation. Most were still considered “safe,” but a few were 100 times above background! The worst offenders included striated granites from Brazil and Namibia.

But there are a whopping 1,600 varieties of granite on the market from 64 different countries. Even if 85 per cent are safe, as the Marble Institute of America points out, what about the rest? The only way to know whether your counters are hot is to get them tested. (FYI, the Marble Institute is supposedly setting up a testing protocol as we speak. Renovators should start pressing their suppliers for certified proof that their slab isn’t hot.)

If I found high levels, personally, I’d rip it out. Better safe than sorry. Still, in a well-ventilated kitchen, you’re generally exposed to less ra­don and radiation than many basement dwellers.

Since last year, when Health Ca­na­da finally boosted its safety stan­dards to bring them closer to the U.S.’s (yes, they’re still ahead of us on this one), more homes have fallen into HC’s “action needed” zone (200 Bq/m³ vs. 150 in the U.S.). According to Mr. Radon himself, Bob Wood (one of the province’s only certified radon home inspectors and mitigation experts), one in eight of the GTA homes his company has tested exceeds those levels (see mr-radon.ca). No way to know if your home is gassy but to test it.

The biggest problem is that the gas decays and produces solid radioactive particles called “radon daughters” – or, since women’s libbers cleaned up the dictionary, “radon progeny.” Inhale these and they em­bed themselves in your lung tissue. When these devilish offspring in turn start decaying, they emit a little radiation into your lungs.

Just last week, Danish researchers released a study linking homes high in radon to acute lymphoblastic leukemia in children. Radon is also the second-biggest cause of lung can­­cer, next to sucking on nicotine, with radon killing over 22,000 every year in North America.

And if you’re a pack-a-dayer living in a radon-heavy basement apartment with poor ventilation? Let’s just say you might want to take out some life insurance. You know, for the sake of the family. Or try something less morbid, like, I don’t know, maybe quitting smoking? Easier still, reduce your radon exposure.

First of all, if you’ve bought one of those home radon testing kits (from Zellers or Mr. Radon) and found radon below the action level, there are a couple DIY remedies you can take on. Open windows whenever you can. Seal cracks in the foundation or at wall/slab joints. Seal raw cement floors with low-VOC epoxy paint. Track down openings around pipes and cables.

The Radiation Safety Institute of Canada also says you should make sure there’s water in the floor drain at all times and that any sump is covered and vented to the outside.

But really, if you turn up a readings of 200 (or even 150, if you follow the U.S. standard), you’ll need to call in a pro for remediation. Depressurizing the soil under your house and venting it to the outside should set you back $2,000. Renters stuck with high levels and cheap landlords can call the Board of Health on their ass.

Ecoholic: Sniffing out radioactive gases in your kitchen & basement
Adria Vasil
NOW July 30-August 6, 2008 VOL 27 NO 48
Got a question? Send your green queries to ecoholic@nowtoronto.com