Posted: February 28th, 2010 | Author: James Glave | Filed under: Eco Shed, Food, Fossil Fuel, Global Warming, Habits, Housing, Transformational Change, Transportation, smart growth, sprawl | Tags: Bowen Island, OCP, Official Community Plan | No Comments »
Individual Submission
Bowen Island Official Community Plan Update Committee
February 28, 2010
Dear Members of the Committee:
My name is James Glave and I’m a father of two. Ours is a young commuter family, and my wife and I actively participate in many aspects of island life. I love this place, and I am proud to call it home.
My personal passion is climate change solutions, and the transportation, energy, and land-use strategies that have been shown to reduce per-capita greenhouse-gas emissions here in our region and around the world. We can talk about any number of issues, but in my mind, carbon is the ultimate deal-breaker. We simply don’t have an option other than finding ways to slash the stuff from our lives and community. If we don’t “act locally” on this “global” issue, it will eventually come home to our doorstop and find us where we live anyway.
The science suggests that climate change will, in the near-term, overwhelm our first responders and social services, exhaust our municipal budget, and place hardship on our population via skyrocketing food prices. In the long term (which is what community planning is all about, right?) it will ultimately result in waves of climate refugees flooding into Canada, and ultimately our community. This is not chicken-little stuff, it is exhaustively documented in reports by The Global Humanitarian Forum, the World Health Organization, Oxfam, and many other public agencies and non-government organizations.
Climate change is not an “environmental” issue, it is a civilization challenge. I believe we have a profound moral obligation to address it, wherever we live. I personally believe that we do not get an excuse or “opt out” pass to address climate just because we choose to live in a beautiful place that is “seen to be rural,” where fawns dance at the roadside and salmon thrash in the lagoon. We are not entitled to an exemption because we are surrounded by great natural beauty. This is not just “China’s problem.” We should see our emissions as an opportunity to lead, not barely squeak through our statutory obligations and hope nobody is noticing. That’s how we are not dealing with it now.
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Posted: February 25th, 2010 | Author: James Glave | Filed under: smart growth | 6 Comments »
“Rural.”
“Urban.”
Posted: February 7th, 2010 | Author: James Glave | Filed under: Transportation, autoculture | 1 Comment »
On Saturday, General Motors, invited me to test-drive a working prototype of the automaker’s potentially business-saving 2011 Chevrolet Volt electric vehicle. The company, an official 2010 Olympics sponsor, has wheeled a pair of the cars up to Vancouver for the biggest show on Earth.
GM cordoned off a generous section of the he HR MacMillan Space Centre parking lot and–with the car’s lead project engineer riding shotgun, plus my kids in the back seat–I ran about 15 laps around the perimeter. It felt a bit like a rat running around the outside of his cage, but since there are only about 80 of these cars in the world, I can hardly blame the company for keeping them on a tight leash.
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Posted: February 5th, 2010 | Author: James Glave | Filed under: Cities, Transportation, smart growth | No Comments »
One thing that frustrates me is that our low-carbon future is too-often depicted with slick architectural renderings that are designed to show how a certain infill development will make the world a better place. They’re populated with bus stops and stick figures on bicycles, but they don’t often adequately convey the potential flavor of a neighborhood, what it’s like to live there, how people will do things differently.
We have simple and powerful visualization tools out there. We need to be using them to show citizens what life might be like were we to embrace a range of better-living best practices and policies. And we don’t need any fancy CGI rendering to do the job.
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Posted: December 22nd, 2009 | Author: James Glave | Filed under: Media, Public Relations | Tags: freelance, journalism, Media, P.R. | 7 Comments »
Gratuitous unlicensed stock shot.
Every few months or so, I get an email or Facebook message from the younger brother of a long-disconnected friend, or a former colleague who worked down the hall from me three gigs or so back. It goes something like this:
Hi! it’s been a while… [insert chit-chat preamble] So I’m reaching out because I’m thinking of making some changes to my professional life, and I’m wondering about possibly getting into freelance writing. I’ve always been a total magazine junkie, and I’m wondering if I could buy you a coffee and pick your brain about how to break into the biz?
I’ve never been sure how best to answer these emails; “career” isn’t a word I would even tuck into the same paragraph as “freelance magazine journalism.” To best guide positive personal growth among such correspondents, I have developed the following eight-point checklist. Please feel free to share, modify, and adapt this for your own use.
Freelance Journalist Aptitude Self-Assessment Tool
Please check all that apply.
- Do you have a trust fund?
- Are you married or engaged to a lawyer, airline pilot, surgeon, petroleum or mining engineer, dentist, or pharmaceutical executive?
- If not, can you grow hydroponic marijuana?
- If none of the above apply, are you at least married or engaged to an individual with a “real job”?
- Are you are childless, or monastic, or both?
- Do you suffer from low self-esteem?
- Are you comfortable waiting six to eight months to be paid for two months of work even though your mortgage lender or landlord may not exhibit the same flexibility?
- Are you Malcolm Gladwell?
If you answer “yes” to at least three of these questions, then congratulations! You may be a candidate for a career in the glamorous and rewarding field of freelance journalism. You are prequalified to play a critical oversight role in our democracy. Please contact me to book a coffee meeting at your nearest convenience!
Ahem.
In the media world, a reporter who transitions to the world of public relations strategy—as I have done this year—is “going over to the dark side.” To be honest, it sure doesn’t feel that way. Instead, it feels like I have stepped into the light. I’m exercising new parts of my brain. I’m finally able to take a stand on issues that matter to me (journalists aren’t technically supposed to “join” causes). I’ve helped bootstrap a smart-growth advocacy group in my community. I’m presently working with a team of incredibly smart people, and pitching in on projects that support my values and passions. Even better: When they say my check is “in the mail,” it actually is.
If this is the dark side, then I’m here to stay. Wishing all my friends near and far a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2010!
Posted: November 24th, 2009 | Author: James Glave | Filed under: Academia, Global Warming, IPCC | No Comments »
Only days remain until world leaders meet in Copenhagen to hash out a new international climate treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol, and in recent weeks many world leaders have attempted to quell expectations that the world will emerge with a strong, fair, and binding deal. President Obama has hinted only that a “politically binding” treaty may be all we can hope for. And even though its citizens are embarrassed by a lack of federal leadership, Canada’s Harper government has all-but-declared that it intends to stand in the way.
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Posted: October 29th, 2009 | Author: James Glave | Filed under: Behavior, Global Warming, Habits, Transformational Change | Tags: dentist, greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide | No Comments »
I frequently parrot the message that a lot of small actions can add up to big change. For proof, look no further than this short video clip I did over the summer, one of a series of greener-living advice segments for a real-estate website called Cyberhomes.
There I am, proving the point that easy gestures—in this case, unplugging idle electronic devices—can all add up. It makes sense on paper, which is why the “everyone do their bit” credo is the basis of many behavior-change campaigns. And sure, it’s all well and good to unplug a few video games, or enjoy a healthy bike ride, or savor the vegetables and fruits you grew yourself.
But what about nitrous oxide? You know, laughing gas?
My dentist offers it to me every time I go in for a new crown or onlay which, given the pathetic state of my teeth, is pretty much at least once a year. And I usually turn it down, because despite its jovial nickname, the stuff is effectively two kinds of bad in one bottle.
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Posted: October 27th, 2009 | Author: James Glave | Filed under: Activism, Conferences & Events, Media Coverage | Tags: Activism, events, Media Coverage | No Comments »
Some 5,000 people showed up for Bridge to a Cool Planet, an event tied to the International Day of Climate Action–including me, my kids, and my parents.
More egregious exploitation of children.
My kids and I managed to hog the media cameras, we paraded through the background of Global Television’s live coverage of the event - check it out, you can’t miss us. It wasn’t entirely my idea: The reporter came over and grabbed us in advance of the segment — “we need kids with signs for the shot,” she said. We also popped up in an image in Sing Tao, one of Vancouver’s large-circulation Chinese-language dailies. Scroll about half-way down.
The lesson: Find a way to stand out from the crowd. In this case, I put my girl up on my shoulders. And know that my friends in the media will always seek out hand-lettered signs, easily-read signs with ultra-simplified messages such as STOP GLOBAL WARMING. It sure did the trick here.
Posted: October 14th, 2009 | Author: James Glave | Filed under: Published Work | Tags: carbon, IPP, Renewable Energy, run-of-river, Tzeporah | 4 Comments »
The original tree-hugger.
The November issue of
Vancouver magazine features my profile on Tzeporah Berman, cofounder of
ForestEthics and executive director of
PowerUP Canada. Links to both Web and PDF versions below.
Berman is a Canadian climate activist of considerable influence who has inserted herself at the center of a significant green-energy backlash here in her home province of British Columbia. A fierce public debate rages here over “run of river” hydro power projects, which temporarily divert river water to spin turbines. The resulting electricity is carbon-free, but opponents of the projects claim the schemes aren’t as green as they claim to be. The fight is getting very nasty. As the story documents, at one point Berman’s support for renewable-energy development led to a threat of professional blackmail.
Check out “Green Light,” published in the November 2009 issue of Vancouver magazine.
Green Light, [Web version at Vanmag.com]
Green Light, [2.3 MB .PDF FILE]
Posted: September 11th, 2009 | Author: James Glave | Filed under: 350.org, Conferences & Events, Global Warming, Influence, top | Tags: 350, bridge to a cool planet, climate events, International Day of Climate Action | 1 Comment »
Mixing up the ABCs.
On October 24, my kids Duncan and Sabrina, and my wife, Elle, and I will together march in our first-ever global-warming, er, “action.”
The occasion is Bridge to a Cool Planet, which will likely be British Columbia’s largest event marking the International Day of Climate Action. Expect drummers, people dressed up in polar bear costumes, dudes on stilts and unicycles, and lots of off-key improvised call-and-response singing and chanting.
It’s the kind of gaggle-of-people-holding-signs event that, once upon a time, I would have driven on past without even blinking. But this time, I’ll be on the other side of the windshield. And you should be, too.
After the jump: Five reasons why you should circle October 24 on your calendar—no matter where you live—and plan to join all the cool kids who will be calling for their leaders to finally get with the program.
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