A Brave New Iran

Fight till the last gasp
~William Shakespeare

Courage, my friends from Iran; The world prayers are with you.

Fight for your liberty, fight for your people, fight for your sons, and the great Persian Culture we all respect and admire.

آزادی آزادی خدا بزرگ است

آزادی آزادی خدا بزرگ است!

Of Pollution, Growing Up, General Motors, and Why I Miss the Bomb

 Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.
~Paul Graham 

I am a little concern about reading all the news about the dead of the car. Fiat buying Chrysler and General Motors closing the Pontiac line and declaring bankruptcy is given enough stimulus and energy to some neohippie pundits to go all the month without food or water. A refreshing reading on the matter is the right-wing Driving Like Crazy from P. J. O’Rourke. He is a huge car lover, and the reading of his book’s subtitle can explain his points of view. I do not agree on half of what he says, but it is certainly a entretaining lecture.

A lot of people feel a natural hate for cars, which is as logical as hating a blender or a toaster, since car are mere appliance. This hate is even harder to understand since cars pollute so little today. 30 years ago you could smell the sunset, now the cars run so efficiently that the pollutants are going down every year:

Cars produced 1997-	Hydrocarbons	0.26 grams/Km
	Carbon monoxide	2.1 grams/Km
	Oxides of nitrogen	0.63 gram/Km
Cars produced 96-86	Hydrocarbons	0.93 grams/Km
	Carbon monoxide	9.3 grams/Km
	Oxides of nitrogen	1.93 grams/Km

The problem is not only cars. Cows produce half a pound of methane a day, and methane traps 20 times more heat than CO2. Industry pollution, deforestation, the fact that some of us live in places that require a lot of energy just to keep us alive, all these factors are as important as cars when considering polluting and greenhouse gases emissions, but cars are an easy target because they are pervasive, because they are apparently politically incorrect, and because most car bashers do not own cars.

I do not blame the cars, I blame the cities.

Yes, the cities.

More specifically, city zoning in Residential, Commercial, and Industrial.

50 years ago everybody lived either in a farm or in a city. Not a city as we understand it today, but a close array of diverse buildings, neighbourhoods, and a mix use of soil. Farms were right outside the city, they fed the city, keep the air (somewhat) clean, and were an escape for the weekends. After World War II, in North America, and in a lesser extend in Europe, the city planners decided to create highways and suburbs. Gone were the neighbourhoods, the mix use of soil, and the liveable city. People of the likes of Robert Moses decided that cities must be divided in residential, commercial, and industrial areas, effectively separating people from the places they worked and shopped. The car became an appliance.

As the developers focused in Suburbia, the cities core languished. No main street could compete against the gigantic Shopping Centres from Suburbia. The price of downtown properties either plumbed and attracted the poorest people, or skyrocket and attracted banks and highly capitalized companies. There was not place for the middle class left in the city, and people moved to suburbs because they want to have their families in a better environment. Nowadays, people do not live in the cities, just students, bankers, very rich guys can afford live in the nice areas of the average North American city, while the rest is left to poor immigrants and commercial areas. Normal people live in suburbs, as much as they may hate it. Suburbs are designed to keep away people who do not live there, so everything is 40 kilometres of everything. You need to drive everywhere, and the windy roads keep public transit restricted to a few areas. Paul Graham makes an excellent read in Why Nerds are Unpopular, and the effect of suburbia and modern life in North American kids.

The car enables people to get out of the city and live in these places “as fake as a Twinkie”. If in a society you cannot get up, at least you can get out, and the car help you do so. We need to work in making our cities liveable again, but, contrary to Jane Jacobs who though that we all should live in high-raised buildings, I still think that you can live in a small house close to downtown and walk, bike, use the public transit, or why not, drive. To accomplish this, there are two major, major shifts on urban paradigms that need to happen:

1) Stop zoning. Houston is one example on how you can have certain urban restrictions (no slaughterhouse in a primary residential area) while keeping your neighbourhoods walkable. Midtown Toronto is also an example where residential areas all have a main street that can serve all the residents needs.

2) Decentralise. Megacities will be always problem-prone. Why so many people live in cities? Because they offer options that small towns do not; but a city does not need to be Tokio or Los Angeles to offer a reasonable amount of restaurant variety, theatre, festivals, and other cultural attractions. The middle city needs to be profit from. Places like Winnipeg, Austin, or Morelia are cities located in what could be boom areas in a future if we stop clustering all the services and companies in the same cities.

I understand that cluster happens and that they may be economically reasonable, but why we have clusters of clusters like in L.A. or Mexico City? A national policy should be created to populate areas outside the big cities to ease the impact on environment and the need of suburbs and one-hour commutes.

Suburbs have a negative impact on transit, on economy, on children development, and force us to live in our cars. They are boring places to live and to growth. Yes, they are safer for our children, but I remember growing up in a city, with all the excitement and the challenges, and still coming back to a small house with a backyard and a tower of tires that were used by a myriad of cats to sleep in. There is not need to chose between an apartment in downtown or a huge house, identical to the next huge house, 30 kilometres away from were your best friend lives.

Career Path

I believe you are your work. Don’t trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That’s a rotten bargain.
~Rita Mae Brown

Somebody asked me yesterday if I had lived in a Communist country, would I choose the same career that I did? I first answered yes, but then, a rapid succession of thoughts came to my mind and I change my answer to no.

When I was younger, it was Astrophysics or Archaeology that called my attention. I would devour in matter of hours any book on the matter, not important how big or difficult or technical it was. I would read adventure and science fiction books instead of Tom & Jerry comics (I was under 10); The Time Life collection was my (big) bedtable book. I also read Einstein, Hawking, Sagan, and I stopped shortly before trying to understand the complexity of Planck’s theory.

At 14 my father bought me my first computer and shown me how to used (How do you change a car tire? He asked*), I used BASIC to model maps of the space and planets full of archaeological treasures, but eventually a career path needed to be decided, and I have to chose between above the sky, under the earth, or the tool I was using to understand that.

“Contemporary career development theories have focused on person/environment fit, human development, and social learning as the foundation for Western models of career formation and counselling interventions. Chung (2003) awakened career counsellors to the reality that these theories incorporate the values and views of the modern industrial era and are established on a modelling characteristic of large organizations in the United States in the past century” (Whitmarsh and Ritter 2007) So I had to decided on do exactly what I wanted and die poor but happy, or find a compromise and live moderately rich and moody. Computer Science seemed to fit the bill, and up to today I have not regret my decision, since I were also able to mix it with Sustainability and still working in that path.

But had I lived in Romania or somewhere else, my decision may be different. Communist countries had strong restrictions on who could enter universities, since they were more interested in Labour and Agriculture, but still, 8% of students will gain access to College. You need to chose your path when you were 14 or 16, since at 18 you would be given once chance to apply to one university, and those were hard odds, but, “For students who gained successful admission to the competitive and selective university programs, the Romanian state provided generous financial support, including low-cost housing and meals, free tuition, book subsidies, and monthly stipends. The financial package awarded depended on various factors, like socioeconomic background and area of specialization”.

Downplaying the economic need that drove my career to Computer Science would surely tip the balance on astrophysics or archaeology (most likely the former than the later). Is not that economic rationale was not important in Eastern Europe, you still needed to put food on the table, but in those countries the mechanics was different, and I actually would be equally able to do so with any of those career paths. The fact that Eastern Europe saw a high level of women studying engineering and science (I. Ulescu 2005) would certainly helped my decision.

So, having growth up in a country were scientific research pays little and applied science pays way better influenced my career choice and make me decide for a compromise, while having lived in a country with a rich social safety net, more equal wage ranges, and a competitive environment to get in college would have the effect of me being now writing about the Sun Corona or Dark Mater, most likely, writing comic books… What career would you chose, if economic factors wouldn’t exist? I’d love to hear your answers.

Read More: The influence of Communism on career development and education in Romania.

Geoengineering

Strive for perfection in everything you do. Take the best that exists and make it better. When it does not exist, design it.
~Sir Henry Royce

This blog is about sustainability. We can define sustainability as the right balance of a triple bottom line: Economic profit, social profit, and environmental profit. I have been focusing in the environmental profit because it is the one that is more urgent to address; the other two can be closely related (social and economic development can go hand by hand) but usually the environment receives all the cost of this development.

Global Warming is, by far, the most urgent matter of all the environmental issues. It is urgent because:
Some people have not yet realised the long-term effects of a raise in average temperatures.
Some people do not even recognise that Global Warming exists.
Unlike other pollutant, CO2 remain in the atmosphere for hundred of years, while is reabsorbed at a very slow pace.

Victor, Granger Morgan et al compare the emission-reabsorbsion problem as having a bathtub with a huge faucet but a very small drain. The only way to reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses is to dramatically reduce the size of the faucet, but whatever measure we may take in reducing the greenhouse gases emissions, the result will come decades later, hence the urgency to take measures now. The United States has been incapable to even cap their emissions, let alone reduce them. China has surpassed the USA as the main greenhouse gases producer, and the developing countries are just not going to stop producing the relative cheap fossil energy.

While efforts need to continue to reduce CO2 emissions, we need to try to reverse the effects. Geoengineering could provide a useful defense for the planet, an emergency shield that could be deployed if surprisingly nasty climatic shifts put vital ecosystems and billions of people at risk. Geoengineering is not a new idea, since the 1940s the USA and the Soviet Union experimented in seeding clouds to make rain and to reduce hurricanes power (with very poor results). Volcano eruptions, like the one in Philippines in the early 1990s, reflected so much sunlight that global temperatures dropped 0.5C in less than one year.

It works like this: 70 percent of the earth’s incoming sunlight is absorbed while the remainder is reflected back into space. Increasing the reflectivity of the planet (known as the albedo) by about 1% could have an effect on the climate system large enough to offset the increase in warming that is likely over the next century as a result of a doubling of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is easier than causing rain in a particular location because it is not a fine tool: it is a blunt instrument that affects the whole planet, and that is exactly what we want.

Geoengineering techniques are divided in two: Removing the CO2 (e.g. fertilizing the ocean with nutrients that would allow plankton to grow faster and absorb more carbon, or scrubbing the air with cooling towers) and increasing the earth’s albedo. The latter are more promising: one kilogram of sulphur placed in the stratosphere would offset the warming effect of several hundred thousand kilograms of CO2, or seeding bright reflective clouds by blowing seawater into the lower atmosphere. “There is a general agreement that the strategies are cheap; the total expense of the most cost-effective options would amount to perhaps as little as a few billion dollars, just one percent (or less) of the cost of dramatically cutting emissions”.

This do not offset the importance of reducing C02 emissions, since reflecting the sun light does not reduce the already dangerous C02 concentration that is ending up in the oceans, killing coral reef and creating maritime dead zones. Altering the albedo will have some consequences, like changing the rain patterns (as learnt during volcanic eruptions), but the difference is that we can stop increasing the albedo, since Geoengineering requires constancy, Global Warming effects are, in the other hand, long term, and far more dangerous.

When you have Cancer you undergo chemotherapy, but you also take painkillers. Chemotherapy is the cure, is expensive, uncertain, and long term. Painkillers are a temporarily measure, cheaper, reasonably predictable, and a short-term solution. You need both to get cured, similarly, just trying to lower our present emissions is expensive, uncertain, and many nations just do not care. It needs to be done for sure, but in the meantime, they are options to reduce the risk and effects of Global Warming.

Furthermore, it only takes one powerful, decided nation to conduct a Geoengineering experiment. The literature and the scientifics studying this discipline is scarce, and further study may reveal that Geoengineering is just too dangerous; messing with the atmosphere is surely to be a shocking idea for the most of us, but we have already engage in a dangerous Geoengineering experiment by pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. The best and safest solution is to stop greenhouse gases emissions, but this will take time and consensus among countries with very different political and environmental views (remember, it is China and the USA talking about deep economic changes) As with particles accelerators, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering before, it is time to set regulations and rules to explore the idea that one day, the nations of the world may need to erect a shield to protect our mother land.

Welcome to BIXI

Are we building cities for people or for cars?
~Jane Jacobs

I have never totally agree with Jane Jacobs’s vision of what a city should be: Her vision of high-density, highly concentrated cities is like a living hell to me, and my impression is that, for her, all cities should look like Manhattan; people cramming in high raises.

What I applaud of her vision is the pedestrian city, the city of parks and walkable avenues. I also think that any big city needs to cater to cars, AND public transit, AND pedestrians, AND alternative forms of transportation. There is no need to chose one over another, and I always tough that the cancellation of the Spadina Expressway and its branches was a huge mistake driven entirely by political, but not economical, social, or environmental reasons (Please moderate your hate mail, I have children reading this!).

The mere fact that megacities exist is antinatural. Such high concentration of people cannot be healthy, no matter how much environmental precautions are taken. Toronto likes to call itself a Megacity, but thank God is not, it is a very livable city, 2.5 Million people (aroung 6 in the GTA), with plenty of parks, ravines, rivers, bike lines, a not so good public transit system, and a not so good street/highway grid, BUT you can chose between a very livable downtown, an exciting midtown, and a familiar suburb, after all, Jane Jacobs also said that “the point of cities is multiplicity of choice”.

That is why I am impressed with Montreal’s new program: Today, at 11:00 EST, BIXI kicks off. The program is simple: You go to one of the 300 BIXI stations (BIXI=BIKE+TAXI), pay for a bike (first 30 minutes are free), ride it to your destination, and leave it in the nearest station. With 300 stations and 3,000 bikes just for starters, you would really have options.

You can also pay an annual fee of $78, taxes included, and ride unlimited. The bike looks cool, feels cool, and surely will improve your health. No more waiting for the bus, no more trying to squeeze in the subway: Take your bike and go!

These kind of simple ideas are what make a city works: To offer options, to let you chose your lifestyle, where you will raise your kids, and cater to your needs. I will be parking my car more often now that I have a choice (My famous bike was donated to one of my wannabe neohippie friends), and I think that is the way to change a city and its environment: person by person, ride by ride.

An Angel’s Name

A small boy was about to be born, and he was scared at the experience in front of him, so he asked God: They are telling me that You are going to send me to earth, but, How will I survive, as small and vulneralbe as I am?
He told him: Between lot of angels, I chose one who will be waiting for you and will care for you.
But tell me, here in heaven I do nothing but sing and smile, and that is enough for me to be happy.
Your angel will sing and smile at you every day, and you will feel loved and you will be happy.
And, how will I understand when people speak to me, since I do not know the strange language that men speak?
Your angel will tell you the sweetest and tenderest words you will hear, and will your angel’s lot of love and patience, you will learn to speak.
What will I do when I want to speak with You?
Your angel will put your hands together and show you how to pray.
God, I heard that in the Earth there are some bad men…
Your Angel will defend you, even if that costs its life.
But I will be sad because I won’t see you again…
Your angel will talk to you about Me and it will show you the way so you can come back to Me.

In that moment, a great peace was felt in Heaven, the clouds started to open, and you could hear the temporal voices coming close to the child. The child in a hast, asked Him with tenderness: My God, if I have to go, at least tell me my angel’s name!

He answered: her name is not important; you will call her Mom.

The World at Your Door

if Muhammad doesn’t go to the mountain, then the mountain will go to Muhammad
~Variation of a Spanish Saying.

One of my fellow bloggers theme is travel, but not travelling as a tourist but travelling as a voyager, as a discovery destination, where you can be exposed at other people’s food, tradition, architecture,  culture. He often talks that is not how many pictures did you take, but what kind of person you become after travelling.

I cannot agree more with his points, but one downsize of travelling is that you require both time and money, and sometimes time and money are scarce resources. Even if you backpack and do not change your socks for three weeks, you still need to pay airfare (if you can get there by bus is not really travelling, right?), food, some kind of accommodation (even camping costs) and of course you need those three weeks off. So, the world is out there waiting for you, and you hear the call, but simply you cannot go for the moment.

I recently moved from Toronto to Montréal and yesterday I rediscovered something I longtime forgot, that if you cannot go to the world, the world may be already at your door. No matter if you live in a small town or in a mega city, chances are, in those places you never go because they are for tourist, there is a vibrant community of people who is eager to talk to you.

So, while waiting for my permanent apartment, I found a backpackers hostel. After be assured by the clerk that my liver and kidneys will stay with me if I sleep in his facilities, I took off the streets to get to know my new environment. The first thing that I need to check in a new city is if the pubs offer decent food and local beer, so, armed with a book (it is always awkward to dine looking at the ceiling) I went in a brasserie. I sat and after eight minutes, a group sat next to me and order a beer that looked better that the sludge I was having, so I asked them what beer it was; since I couldn’t understand a thing they were saying I though they were Montréalers and asked in French; they just stared at me. I asked again in English and then, at unison, they said “ah, dis iz cider, mayve too zweet for yu” -are you from Europe? -Finland! -Ah! Suomen Tasavalta! -Ah! ja! ja! ja!

From there I learnt that Stolishnaya is regarded as an inferior Vodka, real men drink Finlandia; that there is actually reinders in the forest and not just in Santa Claus workshop, and that Finnish, to my dismay, find Montreal winter to be “too cold”. That Finland does not have 10 but exactly 5.1 million people (where vould wee put tenn?) that they prefer cider to beer (!) and, sadly, Helsinky’s outdoor mixed, naked hot tubs are an urban myth.

In the hostal I learnt that French people hate living in Paris (another big surprise that I keep hearing from French expatriates that prefer the snow to the Seine), that a Paris lady is happy living 80 kms NORTH of Yellowknife and do not plan to return to France, that a lot of people take better pictures than I do, and that Québec cheese is consider “almost as good as our [French] cheese”.

I used to do this in Mexico, but in Toronto I never did it because I was busy adapting to my new home. I rediscovered yesterday that you can adapt to your local world and, at the same time, enhance your links to the Global Village. Juan will be proud of me.

Earth Day 2009

This is our home, We just want to keep it clean.
~Hannah McPhee, Grade 7 student, Toronto, Canada.

There is an increasingly and most welcome pressure to manufacturing companies for reducing the packaging of their products and the dangerous components in their final goods, i.e. in Europe, Apple Computer is required to produce computers without lead. The trend is called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), and I would pair it with the existing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

This is not a bone the companies are throwing at us because they like us, they are being forced to do it by regulations, market expectations, and recent scandals. Last year, Menu Foods had to recall 5,300 products, killed more than 100 pets, and had to paid $42M in damages. Mattel had to recall 21 million toys and lose $30M; some consequences were grimmer: Zhang Shuhong, the head of the company that put lead on the Mattel toy’s paint, committed suicide at a warehouse.

I wrote some weeks ago about Monsanto and the response was a fair skepticism about the organization’s bona fides, but the manufacturers are not really just talking, they need to follow strict standards like SOX, REACH, EHS, ISO 14001, and a long et cetera.

I will celebrate this 2009 year with a new commitment. I was working in a lovely environment in Toronto and for personal reasons I had to move, last week, to Montréal. Now I am working in a company that helps organizations to comply with environmental standards. Companies spend $22B a year in environmental compliance, with $8B going to technology support. Rightist with Heart: You can do your business and still follow a CSR policy and regulations, and Leftist with Brain: You can push for change, make the world greener, and actually have a job.

Happy Earth Day everyone.

175 Years of Toronto

~The Fire of 1904

The settlement of York was incorporated as the City of Toronto on March 6, 1834, 175 years ago, and taking back its original native name. The population was only 9,000, and the first Mayor was William Lyon Mackenzie, who led the unsuccessful Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 against the British colonial government. The city was severely damaged in The Great Fire of 1904, which explains the lack of XIX Century buildings in most of the city.

I am a Torontonian since 2001. The first thing I did was trying to make my new place of residence my home. In México I knew every story behind every corner of my city, and although I did have a Toronto address, I did not have any knowledge of my surroundings. The first thing I learnt about my new city is that Jarvis Street used to be a lovely, affluent neighbourhood with meridians and trees. This caught me by surprise given the deplorable state of the street nowadays, but then I start looking at the facades and beyond the neon light and I discovered such a beautiful architecture, revealing a proud past now lost but not forgotten.

As the months and years passed by, I learnt more and more stories about corners, buildings, parks of Toronto that made me love the city I live in.

Toronto has somehow an inferiority complex that makes claim of being a “World Class City”. Maybe because Toronto was no much of a town until the 1970s, and maybe because it still would be a medium size Canadian city if Montréal wouldn’t give up being Canada’s Economic and Cultural hub by enacting Bill 101, it would look like we are this teenager city trying to look for its identity.

I laugh when somebody try to compare Toronto with New York or when I heard a fellow Torontonian claiming the World Class City discourse, because I know that Toronto has an identity and a soul that we, somehow, take for granted; Toronto is a Garden City. It is vetted with parks, ravines, little rivers, little corridors of nature that have no comparison in any place I lived before (I am a veteran of half dozen cities). The lush of Sunnybrook Park and the path I can bike with my son to Edward Gardens or the paths from the Humber River at Lake Ontario to the Humbler Marshes Park and Étienne Brûlé Park (and the fact that I know Étienne Brûlé story) made Toronto my home long before I was a Canadian Citizen.

I also know that Toronto is a city of Neighbourhoods, each one with a distinct flavour, personality, and local characters. From Rosedale, Corso Italia, Greek Town, a Lilttle Malta!, Gerrard Street, too many Chinatowns to count, Queen West, to the shops in Bayview Av where I live. Those are my neighbourhoods, those are my people, and those are the reasons I feel home here.

What is you label?

Labels are for cans, not people.
~Anthony Rapp

I was having dinner last night with some friends, and the conversation moved to political stances, neo-hippies labels, and driving cars. One of them even told me that he can see who I am referring to when I write in this humble media.

I assure to my rich readers (breaking the 150 a day record!) that I never have someone in mind when writing, unless I actually say so. The interesting part of the conversation was when another friend asked me how do I label me. “I am above labels” I answered, “everybody has a label” she replied.

According to one test I took in Facebook, I am a class-3 liberal. That means nothing when you can be a Class-10 liberal, or even a Class-10 conservative (Horror!). But I find more often than not that lot of  people like to put labels on themselves, and those labels, though providing a sense of belonging, limit their ability to think (note: I stopped talking about my friends here, do not send me hate e-mail!). I find people in the streets that join causes just because they are liberal, or because they are perceived as “just”, without further thinking. Can you be a liberal and a conservative at the same time? Can you be a leftist with a brain, and a rightist with a heart? Let’s ask ourselves the following questions:

• Can you be pro gay marriage but against abortion?
• Can you be socially liberal but fiscally conservative?
• Can you support the efforts in Afghanistan but be against the Iraq campaign?
• Can you give money to the World Wildlife Foundation while hoping that the guys at Greenpeace get soon real jobs?
• Do you support welfare programs but are against a big government?
• Can you drive a car but at the same time be an ecologist?
• Do you think that a biker that rides on the side walk, run red lights, and go against traffic is actually worse person than a driver that obey the law?
• Can you support genetically enhanced crops and still think that organic crops have a place on the market?
• Can you be a meatarian but support vegans?
• Can you work on Bay St (Canada’s Wall St) and still support the ideals of Mohammed Yunus about banking to the poor?

If you answer to YES to more than three questions, I welcome you to the unease world of thinkers that do not know all the answers, but actually may make a difference. The world is more complex than simple labels make us think!