http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/329459/copenhagen_in_60_seconds_key_facts_and_figures.html

Copenhagen in 60 seconds: key facts and figures
Ecologist

8th October, 2009

Do you know your COP15 from your CDM? Your UNFCCC from your REDD? If not, you need our 60 second guide to Copenhagen
What are the dates?

7th-18th December 2009.

Where exactly is it?

The Bella Exhibition and Conference Centre, Ørestad, Copenhagen, Denmark.

How many people will attend the conference?

Traditionally, the COP/CMP attracts several thousand participants. At least 10,000 are expected this year. Included in this number are government representatives, observer organizations, government officials, representatives of UN bodies and agencies, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, and accredited members of the media.

From how many countries?

Officials and ministers from 192 countries are expected to attend.

How big is the press contingent likely to be?

Previous COPs have attracted nearly 1,500 accredited members of the media. There will be a significant number of press conferences held during COP15. The program for these press conferences will be put together by the UNFCCC, and will be available during the conference.

What’s on the agenda?

The climate agreement for the period from 2012; specifically obtaining an agreement that combines respect for the environment (a reduction in man-made greenhouse gases that have a negative effect on our climate system), living standards and long-term security of energy supply in the best way possible. Concrete proposals will be set out for action by the EU and the rest of the international community.

What predictions have been made for the outcome?

Björn Stigson, President of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, has neatly summarised six very different possible outcomes:

1. A ‘real deal’: the US and China provide the driver for a new, ambitious and comprehensive agreement.
2. Business as usual: the various countries follow current national targets.
3. A limited deal: headed by for example the Group of Eight (G8) a deal outside the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is found.
4. A mere prolonging of the present agreement, the Kyoto Protocol.
5. A stretching of the Copenhagen conference (COP15) into 2010.
6. ‘Window dressing’: a grand declaration but no real deal.

What are the key discussion points?

The ‘baseline year’ against which specified reduction targets will be measured, the duration of the second commitment period, ie. 2012 til when?
The proposed greenhouse gas reduction targets themselves for both the second commitment period and beyond.
Whether the agreement will be expanded to include greenhouse gases that are currently excluded from the Kyoto Protocol, for example the international maritime industry and the international aviation industry.
Whether the rules governing the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) will be tightened to ensure environmental integrity and avoidance of greenhouse gas emissions, or whether they will be relaxed to encourage more investment.
Whether the CDM will include as-yet-unproven Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology to receive funding as a way of allowing coal-fired power stations to continue operating and new ones to be built.
An agreement to include measures to curb the rate of deforestation, especially of tropical rainforests in developing countries – otherwise known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD).
Discussing a framework to help countries adapt to inevitable climate change. All developed and developing countries should be required to develop comprehensive national adaptation strategies. Financial and technological support should be provided to the most vulnerable developing countries.
Boost to research, development and demonstration (RD&D) of low-carbon and adaptation technologies.
Source: sourcewatch.org and europa.eu

What are the likely stumbling blocks?

The United States in particular has refused to make binding commitments unless major developing economies, such as China, are included in an agreement. Developing countries – most actively represented by the G-77 block – have indicated a willingness to cut emissions, but only if developed countries take a leadership role.

Developing countries are reluctant to accept hard carbon emissions targets as they struggle to grow their economies. Richer countries don’t want to accept hard targets, or be responsible for funding mitigation, if developing economies won’t also accept limits.

Everyone is waiting for the other to act on how deeply to cut their emissions of gases that contribute to climate change. No one wants to standalone.

What key objections/proposals do nations have?

The United States in particular has refused to make binding commitments unless major developing economies, such as China, are included in an agreement.

South Africa won’t consider the next round of climate change talks successful unless rich nations set aside money to help them address global warming. It is calling for financial and technological support.

Mexico has tabled a proposal for aid to be made available to poor countries in their struggle to cope with climate change.

UK proposes each of the G-20 nations find their own way of funding their efforts to control climate change. The position is opposed by India, China, South Africa and Brazil. UK also suggests that all national plans, such as the Five-Year Plans for India, shoudl would be open to international examination. Again, India opposes the idea.

Norway proposes to use funding from industrialised countries’ emissions budgets to generate revenue for international cooperation.

Members of the Alliance for Small Island Developing States (AOSIS) propose increased risk management and risk reduction strategies, including risk sharing and transfer mechanisms such as insurance.

What greenhouse gas reduction target could we consider a success?

NGOs in many industrialised countries are calling for at least 40 per cent emission cuts by 2020, in line with the scientific evidence of the reductions needed to keep below a 2C rise in average global temperature.

See also

Copenhagen Counts homepage
Nick Stern: the US is the only obstacle to a climate agreement
Should the US scrap the Waxman-Markey climate bill?

http://www.utne.com/Environment/Environmental-Cost-Free-Canvas-Bag.aspx?utm_content=10.05.09+Environment&utm_campaign=Environment&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email#

The Environmental Cost of a Free Canvas Bag
When it comes to the environment, free canvas bags aren’t free

September-October, 2009 by Dmitri Siegel, from Creative Review

It’s difficult to pinpoint when the canvas tote craze really started. The concept isn’t new, of course. Public television stations have been giving them away during fundraisers for decades, and L.L. Bean’s “Boat and Tote” has been a New England staple even longer. Sometime during the past few years, how­ever, the environmental appeal of reusable bags and the easy application of graphics catapulted canvas sacks from health food stores to the runway.

Graphic designers embraced the form as a venue for messages on a par with the T-shirt. Design blogs became enthralled by the never-ending stream of totes—each one made unique by a clever or beautiful graphic. This glut of bags raises questions about the sustainability of any product regardless of the intentions behind it.

The ascension of canvas, after all, was fueled by the totes’ compelling social benefits. Not only is canvas a renewable resource, but the bags are biodegradable and sturdy enough to stand up to years of use. With global warming emerging as an everyday anxiety, designers and consumers alike latched on to the reusable tote as a tangible step they could take to help the environment. Reusing canvas bags could reduce—and eventually eliminate—the billions of plastic bags that are discarded every year.

The thought is noble, but it’s worth considering the irony: The plastic bag itself began as an environmental salve. Before the introduction of ultra-thin plastic bags in the 1980s, groceries were primarily packed in paper. Plastic was touted as a way to save trees. Within a few years plastic dominated the market. Comparing plastic to paper, it’s easy to see why; the plastic bag is a vastly superior design. It consumes 40 to 70 percent less energy to manufacture, generates 80 percent less solid waste, and produces 60 percent fewer atmospheric emissions. A plastic bag costs a quarter as much to produce and is substantially lighter (so it takes far less fuel to transport).

What is marvelous about an individual bag, however, becomes menacing when it is multiplied to accommodate a global economy. The low cost allowed merchants to give plastic bags away and, despite their strength, they’re routinely double-bagged. Their incredible durability means it can take up to hundreds of years for them to decompose. Although plastic bags are recyclable, in-store programs have barely managed to achieve a 1 percent recycle rate. It is simply too easy and efficient to keep making and distributing more plastic bags.

We could be headed for the same kind of catch-22 with the adoption of the canvas tote. I’m certainly an outlier in this case, but I recently found 23 of them in my house. Most were given to me as promotional materials for design studios, start-ups, and boutique shops; more than one came from an environmental organization; one even commemorates a friend’s wedding. A community group recently delivered a reusable bag to every house in my neighborhood to promote local holiday shopping.

This zeal for reusable bags is inspiring, but it also reveals the fundamental contradiction of the canvas tote phenomenon. Once this gorgeous flat surface presented itself, it quickly became a substrate for messaging, branding, and promotion—and the emphasis shifted from reusing a bag to having one that reflects status or personality.

Judging by the cost, producing one tote is equivalent to producing 400 plastic bags. That’s fine if you use a tote 400 times, but what if you just end up with 40 totes? The environmental promise of reusable bags becomes dubious when there are closets full of them in every home.

Designers are correct in thinking that making a more appealing bag increases the likelihood that it will be reused, but environmental benefit doesn’t come from people acquiring bags. It comes from people reusing them. Successful attempts to reduce the number of plastic bags have all focused (unsurprisingly) on depressing their consumption. In 2001 Ireland consumed 1.2 billion plastic bags, 316 per person. In 2002 the country introduced a PlasTax—at the time 15 eurocents for every plastic bag consumed. The program reduced consumption of plastic bags by 90 percent. This success seems to undercut the strategy of selling reusable totes as a way to help the environment.

In terms of actually reducing the number of plastic bags floating around in our world, programs like the one at U.S. Ikea stores (customers pay five cents per bag and the proceeds go a conservation group) are more likely to have an impact than selling a canvas alternative. The best thing for the environment is reuse—and that can be accomplished just as easily by reusing plastic bags.

This isn’t to trash canvas: The aesthetic power of a single design raised more awareness about the impact of plastic bags on our environment than any government or nongovernment organization. Every well-designed tote had the potential to replace some of the estimated 1,000 plastic bags that each family brings home every year. It is simply unclear if a consumable can ever counteract the effects of consumption. The designs that make each bag unique contribute to an overabundance of things that are essentially identical, while the stream of newness, in the end, discourages reuse. Best intentions are buried under an avalanche of conspicuous consumption.

Just as the remarkable efficiency of the plastic bag transformed a solution into a menace, consumer culture could turn reusable canvas bags into an environmental calamity.

Dmitri Siegel (www.dmitrisiegel.com) is a Philadelphia-based designer and writer. This essay first appeared on DesignObserver.com. We spotted it republished in Creative Review (April 2009), a British magazine that covers all aspects of visual communication. www.creativereview.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/sep/28/population-growth-super-rich

Stop blaming the poor. It’s the wally yachters who are burning the planet

Population growth is not a problem – it’s among those who consume the least. So why isn’t anyone targeting the very rich?

#

* George Monbiot
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 September 2009 21.00 BST

It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed. The brilliant Earth systems scientist James Lovelock, for instance, claimed last month that “those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.” But it’s Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational.

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for instance, sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world’s population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out only 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three percent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that about one sixth of the world’s population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees (£40) a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one seventh of the transport fuel of households earning 30,000 rupees or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.

Many of the emissions for which poorer countries are blamed should in fairness belong to the developed nations. Gas flaring by companies exporting oil from Nigeria, for instance, has produced more greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa put together. Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat and animal feed to rich consumers. The rural poor do far less harm.

The paper’s author, David Satterthwaite, points out that the old formula taught to students of development – that total impact equals population times affluence times technology (I = PAT) – is wrong. Total impact should be measured as I = CAT: consumers times affluence times technology. Many of the world’s people use so little that they wouldn’t figure in this equation. They are the ones who have most children.

While there’s a weak correlation between global warming and population growth, there’s a strong correlation between global warming and wealth. I’ve been taking a look at a few super-yachts, as I’ll need somewhere to entertain Labour ministers in the style to which they are accustomed. First I went through the plans for Royal Falcon Fleet’s RFF135, but when I discovered that it burns only 750 litres of fuel per hour I realised that it wasn’t going to impress Lord Mandelson. I might raise half an eyebrow in Brighton with the Overmarine Mangusta 105, which sucks up 850 litres per hour. But the raft that’s really caught my eye is made by Wally Yachts in Monaco. The WallyPower 118 (which gives total wallies a sensation of power) consumes 3,400 litres per hour when travelling at 60 knots. That’s nearly a litre per second. Another way of putting it is 31 litres per kilometre.

Of course, to make a real splash I’ll have to shell out on teak and mahogany fittings, carry a few jetskis and a mini-submarine, ferry my guests to the marina by private plane and helicopter, offer them bluefin tuna sushi and beluga caviar, and drive the beast so fast that I mash up half the marine life of the Mediterranean. As the owner of one of these yachts I’ll do more damage to the biosphere in 10 minutes than most Africans inflict in a lifetime. Now we’re burning, baby.

Someone I know who hangs out with the very rich tells me that in the banker belt of the lower Thames valley there are people who heat their outdoor swimming pools to bath temperature, all round the year. They like to lie in the pool on winter nights, looking up at the stars. The fuel costs them £3,000 a month. One hundred thousand people living like these bankers would knacker our life support systems faster than 10 billion people living like the African peasantry. But at least the super wealthy have the good manners not to breed very much, so the rich old men who bang on about human reproduction leave them alone.

In May the Sunday Times carried an article headlined “Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation”. It revealed that “some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly” to decide which good cause they should support. “A consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.” The ultra-rich, in other words, have decided that it’s the very poor who are trashing the planet. You grope for a metaphor, but it’s impossible to satirise.

James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust. It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven’t been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich.

The obsessives could argue that the people breeding rapidly today might one day become richer. But as the super wealthy grab an ever greater share and resources begin to run dry, this, for most of the very poor, is a diminishing prospect. There are strong social reasons for helping people to manage their reproduction, but weak environmental reasons – except among wealthier populations.

The Optimum Population Trust glosses over the fact that the world is going through demographic transition: population growth rates are slowing down almost everywhere and the number of people is likely, according to a paper in Nature, to peak this century, probably at about 10 billion. Most of the growth will take place among those who consume almost nothing.

But no one anticipates a consumption transition. People breed less as they become richer, but they don’t consume less – they consume more. As the habits of the super-rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers. Anyone who understands this and still considers that population, not consumption, is the big issue is, in Lovelock’s words, “hiding from the truth”. It is the worst kind of paternalism, blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich.

So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems? Where is the direct action against super-yachts and private jets? Where’s Class War when you need it?

It’s time we had the guts to name the problem. It’s not sex; it’s money. It’s not the poor; it’s the rich.

http://thestar.com/news/gta/article/701410

During his announcement yesterday that he will not seek re-election in 2010, Mayor David Miller cited a list of his accomplishments in the past six years. Here’s a reality check:

ECONOMY: THE CLAIM
“We’ve sparked a renaissance of investment in our city unseen in decades.”

Sep 26, 2009 04:30 AM
John Spears
City Hall Bureau

The reality: Although perceived as a left-wing candidate when elected, Mayor David Miller has seldom passed up a chance to talk about his policies to boost business and build the economy.

He did it once more yesterday.

“We’ve improved the environment for business in Toronto by lowering business tax rates every year since I became mayor, and by addressing the imbalance in taxes between Toronto and the rest of the GTA,” Miller said. “We’ve created Build Toronto and Invest Toronto to capitalize on the city’s real estate assets and attract new investment and create jobs.”

And freezing fees charged to developers, he said, has “sparked a renaissance of investment.”

Carol Wilding, chief executive of the Toronto Board of Trade, said it’s true that these actions have been taken, but the proof of the policies awaits. Rebalancing the tax load so business pays less is a good policy, but it’s being phased in slowly, she said. “We would certainly like to see it accelerate.”

While Invest Toronto and Build Toronto have been planted, they’re too young to have borne fruit yet, she said.

Wilding noted that his remaining time in office will be important: Miller still has to craft two capital budgets and an operating budget before he leaves office.

Clare Copeland, appointed chair of Toronto Hydro under Mel Lastman, but reappointed by Miller, said the mayor understands business.

Miller accepted the business case for selling off Toronto Hydro’s telecommunications assets, even though many left-wing critics opposed selling publicly owned assets on principle, Copeland said. The city earned $75 million from the sale and put the money into public housing.

“I thought he created a good business climate,” Copeland said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/11/china-forests-deforestation

China’s loggers down chainsaws in attempt to regrow forests
China’s massive tree-planting scheme masks disastrous deforestation and damage to biodiversity thanks to the country’s insatiable desire for wood
中文译文
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Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent in Tangwanghe guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 March 2009 14.00 GMT Article history
Link to this video Viewed from the snow-covered hills of Tangwanghe, the forests of China’s Great Green Wall seem to stretch out endlessly towards the horizon.

The man-made ecological barrier is designed to halt sand and dust storms, just as the original 2,500-year-old Great Wall was built to keep out the Mongol hordes.

But today as millions of Chinese people seek to reinforce the barrier on National Tree-Planting Day, the greater threat comes from within, as a result of an unsustainable demand for wood.

Every March 12 an estimated 3m party members, civil servants, model workers, and state leaders take up shovels for the country’s biggest green propaganda event. As well as raising awareness, they are fulfilling a legal duty for everyone over the age of eleven to plant at least three Poplar, Eucalyptus, Larch or other saplings every year.

Many are planted in the northern shelterbelt, also known as the Great Green Wall. Initiated in 1978, the tree belt is supposed to stretch 4,480 km from western Xinjiang to eastern Heilongjiang to protect cities and cropland from floods and the desert.

If the plan is completed as scheduled in 2050, trees will cover over 400m hectares or 42% of China’s landmass, creating arguably the biggest man-made carbon sponge on the planet. China overtook the US as the largest carbon emitter in 2007, although its greenhouse gas emissions per capita are still much lower.

But the mind-boggling statistics mask a calamitous decline of China’s forest quality, diminishing biodiversity and extra pressure on woodland overseas to satisfy an appetite for timber that has – until the economic crisis – grown enormously in the past 10 years.

At Yichun, a north-eastern city in Heilongjiang province close to the frozen river border with Siberia, the forests were once so dense that the area was known as the Great Northern Wilderness. But more than fifty years of unsustainable logging have taken their toll. Yichun was classified last year as one of China’s 12 “resource-depleted cities.”

“We are in a situation where we have no wood to cut. None of the forests are mature enough,” Dong Zhiyong, former vice-minister in the forestry administration said.

The dire environmental consequences have been apparent for more than a decade now. The loss of forest and grass cover has exposed the soil to erosion and led to dust storms. With fewer trees to retain water, Heilongjiang has suffered devastating floods.

The government has tightened logging restrictions and increased reforestation efforts, including aerial seeding of remote areas. Lumberjacks in Yichun have been told that they must soon lay down their chainsaws.

Hou Zhengkuan accepted change was inevitable. “The forests are thinning. There are fewer and fewer trees. The whole mountain will be closed off in two years.”

To create alternative jobs, the nearby town of Tangwanghe was named late last year as China’s first national park, loosely modelled on Yellowstone in the United States.

“We are pioneers. The idea is to protect the ecosystem on a large scale, develop seven tourist sites and to help local people get rich,” explains the town’s young tourist chief, Ma Shengli. But apart from a few small birds, there is little sign of wildlife.

The main attractions of the park are granite formations with colourful names, such as Kissing Boulders, Drunken Tortoise and Pine Teasing Golden Toad.

The decline of biodiversity is a problem across China. Although tree coverage has increased from 12% to 18% of the nation’s land area, many saplings are planted in semi-desert areas where they deplete water supplies. Even in Heilongjiang, the amount of life underneath the canopies is declining as a result of over-hunting, fungus-and-herb gathering and the tendency of foresters to replace old growth forests with blocks of fast-growing trees.

“China plants more trees than the rest of the world combined,” says John McKinnon, the head of the EU-China Biodiversity Programme. “But the trouble is they tend to be monoculture plantations. They are not places where birds want to live.”

The vulnerability of the new forest stock was evident last year when winter storms destroyed 10% of these thin barriers. The World Bank has advised China to concentrate more on quality than quantity.

But it will take decades. There is almost no old-growth left in China.

Until the economic crisis, the global demand for wood rose sharply. The biggest consumer was China. Since domestic logging was restricted in 1998, the volume of wood entering China has risen ninefold. Some is processed for overseas markets, but most logs are consumed domestically for construction timber. This demand has accelerated illegal deforestation in South America, Africa and Indonesia.

The biggest supplier by far is Russia, which provides 60% of the logs that come into China. As buildings go up in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing, the vast Taiga boreal forests of Siberia are being flattened. At current harvesting rates, the Russian far east could be logged out in 20 years, according to a study by the Beijing Forestry University.

The economic crisis could help. Forestry officials and processing firms say demand for wood is plummeting though it is too early to say how far. In the meantime, China hopes to ease the sand storms and its carbon guilt by mass campaigns.

At Tangwanghe, the ground is still frozen too hard for locals to join in National Tree Planting Day, but they will catch up after the spring thaw. This year, the local governments plans to plant 750,000 trees in the mountains and 1,500 in the town to spruce up the streets for the hoped-for influx of tourists.

Although tree-planting is a civic duty, the new National Park will pay former loggers to do the job. “Forestry is our business,” says the tourist chief Ma. “Voluntary tree planting doesn’t really work. You see that every year. It’s all for show.”

Biodiversity vs carbon absorbtion

Although it was initially conceived as a barrier against the desert, China’s Great Green Wall is increasingly used as a defence against accusations of climate change irresponsibility.

The mass tree-planting required for this and other projects has given China the biggest artificial forest in the world, covering more than 500,000 square kilometres, or twice the size of Britain.

While blocks of monoculture tree plantations are criticised as a disaster for biodiversity, the country’s forestry scientists argue they are far more effective at absorbing carbon than old, slow-growth forests.

Zhang Xudong, of the China Academy of Forestry, says fast-growing poplar and white birch capture as much as double the amount of carbon as Korean pine, larch and firs. He claims China’s 175m hectares of forests more than offset the country’s 1.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

The claim is likely to be contended given uncertainties about the amount of China’s emissions and definitions of forested land. The government includes nurseries and shrubland with very few trees. The balance between forest sequestration capacity and carbon output is also likely to change if China meets its goal to more than double the size of its economy by 2020.

“Given that China has large areas of forest, and trees absorb CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow, forest preservation and reforestation can clearly play an important short-term role in climate change mitigation. Of course, forest carbon sinks are no longer-term substitute for reductions in fossil-fuel emissions as there is not enough land in China or elsewhere to plant enough trees to mitigate emissions and avoid danergous climate change,” said Dr Simon Lewis, University of Leeds.

Chinese conservationists say the emphasis on forests as mere carbon sinks is wrong. “The west is too focused on carbon. People there have lost sight of the need to protect bio-diversity,” warned a prominent environmentalist.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/want-to-know-why-professors-dont-teach/article1293548/

From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
Last updated on Tuesday, Sep. 22, 2009 02:58AM EDT

I went to university back in the golden age. Our classes were small and many of our professors were creative and enthusiastic. They even marked our papers themselves. There was lots of scope for what is now known as “engagement,” which means that although we were undergraduates, some of them were happy to hang around with us drinking coffee, smoking dope and arguing about Blake and life.

No such luck today. Your kid will probably spend more time being taught by itinerant graduate students than by professors. Classes are held in giant amphitheatres, with multiple-choice tests instead of essay questions. Bull sessions with the prof? Not with 400 students in the course. Not surprisingly, student engagement is at an all-time low, according to numerous surveys.

Meantime, the dropout rate is at an all-time high. At the University of Manitoba, about 30 per cent of all students drop out in their first year. Only 56 per cent finish their degrees within six years. That’s not unusual. Universities are rewarded for getting bums in seats, not for educating and graduating them.

The universities say the problem is money. If only they had more of it, they could do a better job of educating undergraduates. There’s just one catch. Educating undergraduates is just about the last thing most professors want to do.

“My colleagues do everything they can to get out of teaching,” says Rod Clifton, who works in the faculty of education at the University of Manitoba. “They’d rather not have the students around, because they’d rather do research and stand around and sip sherry.”

Canadian universities now have about 800,000 undergraduates. But as enrolment soared, teaching loads – with the help of strong faculty unions – went down. In Mr. Clifton’s department, for example, the teaching load is six hours a week for one semester of 13 weeks, and nine hours a week for another 13 weeks. That adds up to 195 hours spread over just 26 weeks a year – less, if someone has administrative duties. Of course there’s prep time and marking and so on. But it’s still not much.

Mr. Clifton’s proposition is that universities are unaccountable for results, if, by results, you mean successfully educating students. That is because they are run for the benefit of professors. In the reward system of universities, it’s research, not teaching, that matters. Professors are rewarded not for turning out high-quality graduates, but for turning out books and papers – even if they are unread. This perverse system stubbornly persists, despite the fact that everyone knows it’s absurd.

Of course some research, especially in the sciences and medicine, matters a great deal to the advancement of society. But a vast amount of it – especially in the humanities and social sciences – does not. Richard Vedder, a leading U.S. critic, has argued that the higher education system has pawned off the responsibility of educating students “in favour of pursuing a whole lot of self-interested research (which the majority of undergraduates are not involved in) that for the most part, doesn’t matter.”

Take my old stomping ground, English Lit. When last I looked, nobody was clamouring for another book on Moby-Dick . Yet as demand goes down, supply goes up. Over the past five decades, the “productivity” of scholars in the fields of languages and literature has increased from approximately 13,000 publications to 72,000 a year. Who reads them? For the most part, hardly anyone. “The system has reached absurd proportions,” writes Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University. “Productivity demands in language and literary studies levy a grave cost on higher education. Students need mentoring, and when they don’t get it, many drift away permanently.”

Last winter, when the teaching assistants went on strike at York University, the public was outraged – but for the wrong reasons. The real outrage was not that a tiny band of strikers could shut down the university for weeks, but that so many professors spend so little time in class. Their job is now done by an itinerant class of ill-paid academic serfs, who cobble together a living teaching sessional courses as they strive to churn out yet another scholarly article that might help them land a steady job.

You can bet they don’t have time for mentoring. They have a miserable life. But the full professors whom they subsidize have a very pleasant life. They can make $125,000 a year, with a good pension and six months off each year to do as they please. Their duties include sharing their research at conferences in Italy or Mexico, whose popularity hasn’t waned despite the advent of the Internet. Meantime, what many of their students need most is remedial instruction in basic composition. But there’s no future in that.

The University of Manitoba, Prof. Clifton’s employer, has 27,000 students and an operating budget of $460-million. You would think that as a large, second-tier, regional institution, its primary job is to deliver a decent postsecondary education to the masses. Yet it, too, is extraordinarily devoted to research. Its professors typically devote only 40 per cent of their time to teaching. And the effectiveness, efficiency and productivity of that teaching are almost an afterthought. “I’ve been teaching for 35 years,” he says, “and not once has my department head or any other administrator come in and watched me teach. I’ve never heard of anyone being fired for teaching badly.”

Prof. Clifton believes funding and incentives need to change so that departments are rewarded for graduating students efficiently and fast. As it is, he does not believe that shovelling more money at universities will result in more students graduating with degrees.

Richard Vedder emphatically agrees. He argues that we should spend less time worrying about university access for all, and more time on the “scandal” of the billions we waste on unsuccessful efforts to educate students who fail to graduate. “The focus of higher education reform should be on increasing the quality of our college graduates,” he writes. And that will never happen until students count for more than articles in unread quarterlies.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/democracy-starts-with-the-rule-of-law/article1293607/

Dominique Moïsi

From Monday’s Globe and Mail
Last updated on Tuesday, Sep. 22, 2009 03:00AM EDT

Elections stolen in Iran, disputed in Afghanistan and caricatured in Gabon: Recent ballots in these and many other countries do not so much mark the global advance of democracy as they demonstrate the absence of the rule of law.

Elections that lead to illiberal outcomes or even despotism are not a new phenomenon. Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 through a free and competitive election. But problematic elections constitute a specific challenge for the West, which is simultaneously the bearer of a universal democratic message and the culprit of an imperialist past undermining that message’s persuasiveness and utility.

In a noted essay in 2004, for example, Indian-born author Fareed Zakaria described the danger of what he called “illiberal democracy.” For Mr. Zakaria, America had to support a moderate leader such as General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, even though he had not come to power by election. By contrast, he argued, populist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who was legitimately elected, had to be opposed.

In our globalized world, the potential divorce between elections and democracy has assumed a new dimension. With instantaneous communication and access to information, the less legitimate a regime, the greater will be the temptation for it to manipulate, if not fabricate, the results of elections. The “trendy” way is to manufacture a significant, but not too massive, victory. Today’s despots view near-unanimous Soviet-style electoral “victories” as vulgar and old-fashioned.

But another new aspect of this phenomenon are opposition forces that are willing to try to negate such machinations by the party in power. Confronted with this dual process of illegitimacy, the West often finds itself condemned to sit between two chairs, facing criticism whatever the outcome. Those in power (as in Iran) accuse Western governments of supporting the opposition, and those in opposition (as in Gabon) accuse the West of supporting the government.

So what lessons should we draw from the inevitably messy nature of electoral processes in countries where there is either no middle class or only a rudimentary one, and where democratic culture is, at best, in its infancy?

The time has come for the West to reassess its policies in a fundamental way. It cannot switch from “activism” at one moment to abstention the next. A refusal to act, after all, is also a political choice.

Of course, the temptations of isolationism are great, and will increase. But the West has neither the moral right nor a strategic possibility of withdrawing into an “ivory tower,” something that in most cases does not exist. It is impossible to say to Afghanistan, for example, “You have deeply disappointed us, so from now on, you must clean up your own mess.”

In many such countries, fundamental Western interests are at stake. In Afghanistan, the danger is that a terrorist haven could be reconstituted. The risk in Iran is an ever more hostile regime armed with nuclear weapons. In Gabon, France’s priority is to transcend neocolonialism without losing its important links to the oil-rich African country.

But in pursuit of these difficult objectives, the West must get both its ambitions and its methods right. Democracy is a legitimate objective, but it is a long-term one. In the medium term, the absence of the rule of law constitutes the most serious problem for the countries in question.

French television, for example, recently aired a terrifying report on Haiti, where a local judge, without bothering to hide his actions, was protecting a narcotics dealer from the country’s own French-trained anti-drug force. Corruption eats away at a society from within, destroying citizens’ trust in a future based on a shared sense of common good.

It is the West’s acceptance of corruption – either open or tacit – that makes it an accomplice to too many nefarious regimes, and makes its espousal of democratic principles appear either hypocritical or contradictory. On the other hand, setting the standard for rule of law too high will also misfire. A Singapore-style incorruptible one-party state bent on modernizing society is probably a far too ambitious goal for most non-democratic regimes.

The distance that separates the West from countries that rely on sham elections is not only geographic, religious or cultural – it is chronological. Their “time” is not, has never been, or is no longer the same as that of the West. How can they be understood without being judged, or helped without humiliating paternalism or, still worse, without unacceptable “collateral damage,” as in Afghanistan?

The West’s status in tomorrow’s world will largely depend on how it answers this question. It cannot afford to ignore the issue any longer.

Dominique Moïsi is visiting professor of government at Harvard University. He is the author of The Geopolitics of Emotion.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090918/no_impact_090920/20090920?hub=TopStories

Life without toilet paper is better than you’d think
Updated Sun. Sep. 20 2009 7:10 AM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

Anyone who decides to give up electricity for an entire year to draw attention to climate change has to be a little crazy, right? So how crazy would someone have to be to give up electricity and elevators and toilet paper, along with a million other comforts we take for granted?

Not that crazy at all, Colin Beavan would tell you. The author, blogger and self-described “guilty liberal” says he did the experiment not as a way to save money or “stick it to the man,” but to answer some fundamental questions.

“The reason for going all the way was that it was a way of asking the question: what do we really need?” Beavan told Canada AM earlier this week from New York.

“We imagine we should be going up to our necks in credit card debt and working two jobs to get all this stuff. But what makes us happy? And what can we have that makes us happy that won’t harm the planet.”

To find out, Beavan decided to see if he could go “off the grid” while living an otherwise normal life in downtown Manhattan. Forced to ride along on the experiment with him were Beavan’s wife, Michelle Conlin, and their then-two-year-old daughter, Isabella.

Beavan hoped his new asceticism would allow him not to just reduce his “carbon footprint,” but to make no negative impact on the environment at all. To document his experiment, he got himself a blog and a moniker: No Impact Man.

The blog was an instant success and soon sparked a book deal and a film. “No Impact Man,” the documentary, arrived in selected theatres last week.

Beavan is not surprised his blog led to a book; in fact, that’s what the already-publisehd author considered doing first.

“Back in 2006, when this started, I was hugely concerned about climate change and I was feeling like it wasn’t getting enough attention,” Beavan explained. “At first I thought I should write a book about how everyone else should change and then I realized I was contributing to the problem too, so I thought maybe I should figure out what I could change.”

His life changes were phased in slowly. First, Beavan and his Starbucks espresso-addicted wife gave up takeout and delivery food of all kinds, turning instead to organic and vegetarian food bought at local farmers’ markets.

Next, they had their TV hauled away from their ninth-floor Manhattan apartment. They then stopped using the washing machine and dryer. Soon, they had given up just about everything one associates with modern life: microwaves, makeup, shopping, plastic, even elevators and public transit, just to see if they could “locomote” themselves instead of depending on others.

Six months into the year, came the most dramatic step: they got rid of the refrigerator and switched off the electricity.

The family made a few discoveries they had probably expected, including that walking everywhere and scrubbing your own laundry can lead to a 20-pound weight loss.

But the family learned things they hadn’t expected to, including that slowing your life down brings its own rewards.

“What turns out to be good for the planet turned out to be good for people,” Beavan said.

“When we got rid of television and the processed food, what we ended up doing is getting more exercise and eating really good food, and spending time as a family. So what happened is we let go of this really fast-paced life and all of a sudden, all these subtle pleasures came into our lives.”

With the experiment over for almost two years now, Beavan estimates the family has kept about 60 per cent of the changes permanent.

They have a small refrigerator again and they take elevators again, as well as the subway when biking just isn’t practical. But they still eat locally grown food, they still don’t use air conditioning and they still don’t go on shopping sprees.

And they still spend time together.

“The best part of it was we ended up spending so much time with our little girl,” Beavan said. “And I think the year really set the tone for us as parents.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/feminine-trials/article1290326/

Hayley Mick

Wednesday, Sep. 16, 2009 05:26PM EDT

The case of South African sprinter Caster Semenya, whose sex came into question after she became the 800-metre world champion last month, has dismayed many academics and female athletes.

And it wasn’t because “a secret man,” as one British tabloid called the 18-year-old runner, may be in their midst.

They say the Semenya case shows that an old, ugly paradox is alive and well in women’s sport: The same giant quadriceps and bulky shoulders that can clinch championships make athletes look “unfeminine” in the eyes of the world. And that can be a difficult reality for many women.

“There is still a real image that women athletes should be tennis players wearing short skirts and braided pony tails,” says Kristin Gauthier, 28, a kayaker on Canada’s national team. “It’s a hard mould to fit into.”

A study published by the International Journal of Eating Disorders in 2008 showed that athletic, university-aged women tend to have higher rates of behaviours linked to eating disorders compared with those who do not regularly exercise. Insecurity over certain body parts is also common – even among the sporting world’s most powerful stars.

“I think they’re too muscular. They’re too thick,” tennis champion Serena Williams said of her ripped arms in an Aug. 27 interview with People Magazine. “I know that toned arms are in now. Look at Michelle Obama. … I’m like, ‘keep wearing strapless dresses!’ But I don’t like mine.”

Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
Jessica Zelinka, a Calgarian who competed in the heptathlon in the Beijing Olympics: ‘I’m lean and muscular … but I still have issues with wearing butt huggers.’

Experts say much of this stems from a media-driven portrayal of the “ideal” athletic body. Strong but lean athletes such as American swimmer Dara Torres garner exposure, whereas strong but bulky athletes are idolized less often, says Guylaine Demers, a University of Laval professor and president of Égale-Action, the Quebec association for the advancement of women in sport.

Sports officials also play a role in pushing a certain feminine ideal by mandating certain clothing – such as tiny bikinis in beach volleyball – in order to sell an activity, she adds.

“It’s always like yes, we are good athletes but we are feminine,” she said.Jessica Zelinka, a Calgarian who competed in the heptathlon in the Beijing Olympics, says she sees it play out on the track: The lean and muscular sprinters in their “butt huggers” garner plenty of attention from the cameras, while the bulky shot-put throwers in their baggy shorts perform virtually unnoticed.

“I’m lean and muscular … but I still have issues with wearing butt huggers,” she says. “They’re so short they actually go up your butt. I don’t want to go over the finish line with a huge wedgie and be thinking about that.”

Whether bulky muscles are viewed as feminine by society, they are perfectly natural, says Bernard Corenblum, a Calgary endocrinologist.

Women and men make the same hormones, just in different quantities. “Male” hormones, which are called androgens and include testosterone, help build muscle, speed and strength, among other things. (In Ms. Semenya’s case, Australian media reported testing found both male and female sex characteristics; these reports are unconfirmed.)

Woman who excel at sports that reward speed and strength – such as swimming or track and field – may be more likely to have naturally high levels of androgens, Dr. Corenblum explains. Those levels may also be why those women appear flat-chested, boyish looking, muscular, or don’t menstruate regularly, he adds.

Does that make such a woman a man? Of course not, Dr. Corenblum says, although in some cases it means she has medical conditions. For example, polycystic ovary syndrome, a hormonal disorder that affects seven per cent of all women, can elevate androgen levels.

But those traits can make a woman self-conscious, and in some cases, that can lead to eating disorders, lack-lustre workouts, and even a premature exit from athletics, says Vikki Krane, a professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Dr. Krane has interviewed dozens of college-level athletes about how they negotiate femininity and muscularity. In a 2004 study published in the journal Sex Roles , she found that most of the college-level athletes she interviewed found it difficult to negotiate the social expectations around femininity with athleticism. They complained that men weren’t interested in dating women with large, athletic bodies. They also engaged in many activities to enhance their femininity, such as braiding their hair and wearing ribbons.

“Initially they were shocked by the changes in their body,” she said. “Not fitting into clothes, or the typical styles that other girls are wearing – this is a constant reminder that you’re different.”

She interviewed one 5-foot-11 hockey player who explained: “I weigh 187 pounds and I look at the number on the scale and say, holy crap, I’m fat.”

But many of the athletes also reported that those same traits made them feel strong, capable, and powerful, she said.

Ms. Gauthier, who lives in Ottawa, is familiar with that duality. “When you’re in your element and you’re with your teammates it’s fine. But then you go out and you want to dress up and nothing fits.”

As she has matured, Ms. Gauthier said, she’s learned to accept that her muscular back is what she needs to excel on the water. Similarly, Ms. Zelinka says any pressure she may feel to look a certain way won’t keep her out of the gym.

“I would not take away from my performance to try and look more feminine,” she said.

Sorting out the boys from the girls is no simple matter

Figuring out a person’s sex can be wickedly complex. That’s why the International Association of Athletics Federations’ process for determining whether South African runner Caster Semenya is a woman called for a geneticist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist and others.

But even with all the tests in the world, the line that constitutes an “unfair advantage” is up for interpretation, says Alice Dreger, a bioethicist in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Figuring out who’s a female or male – or should compete as such – isn’t as simple as looking for XX or XY chromosomes.

For example, women with complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome have XY chromosomes but are actually less able to process androgens – male hormones such as testosterone – than the average woman.

Should they have to compete with men, just because they have a Y chromosome?

On the other hand, naturally high androgen levels may give a woman an advantage in volleyball, as Dr. Dreger points out. But so does being six feet tall.

As scientists discover more ways that our genes and hormones affect who we are, wider testing of athletes for physical advantages may become an issue. Dr. Dreger argues that those clear policies need to come soon, so athletes such as Ms. Semenya can determine whether they’re allowed to compete without the humiliation of a “failed” test after the medal has been won.

For more information on the history of gender testing and how it works, visit the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Hayley Mick

Peter Nicholson

From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
Last updated on Tuesday, Sep. 15, 2009 12:04PM EDT

Twenty-eight years ago, psychologist and computer scientist Herbert Simon observed that the most fundamental consequence of the superabundance of information created by the digital revolution was a corresponding scarcity of attention. In becoming information-rich, we have become attention-poor.

The three technologies that have powered the information revolution – computation, data transmission and data storage – have each increased in capability (and declined in cost per unit of capability) by about 10 million times since the early 1960s. It is as if a house that cost half a million dollars in 1964 could be bought today for a nickel, or if life expectancy had been reduced from 75 years to four minutes.

This has unleashed a torrential abundance of data and information. But economics teaches that the counterpart of every new abundance is a new scarcity – in this case, the scarcity of human time and attention. The cost of one’s time (approximated, for example, by the average wage) relative to the cost of data manipulation, transmission and storage has increased roughly 10-million-fold in just over two generations – a change in relative “prices” utterly without precedent. This, above all, is what is driving the evolution of online behaviour and culture, with profound implications for the production and consumption of knowledge. The primary consequence is the growing emphasis on speed at the expense of depth.

Behaviour inevitably adapts to conserve the scarce resource – in this case, attention and time – and to “waste” the abundant resource. Thus, for example, much of the new technology’s capability has been spent on simplifying interfaces and reducing communications latencies essentially to zero; both of these conserve precious time for users. The same motive has also spawned a plethora of indexing and searching schemes, of which Google is the chief example. These are all seeking to be attention-optimizers.

Today’s information technology is nowhere near its theoretical physical limits, though many engineering and cost hurdles may slow development after 2015. Nanotechnologies and quantum phenomena nevertheless promise to support a new growth path for decades to come. For example, a recently announced storage technology using carbon nanotubes may allow digital information to be held without degradation for a billion years or more – an innovation that would eliminate the major shortcoming of the digital archive.

We may think metaphorically of the production of knowledge as a function of “information” and “attention,” with attention understood as the set of activities by which information is ultimately transformed into various forms of knowledge. By virtue of its unprecedented impact on the relative prices of information and human attention, information technology is driving a correspondingly profound transformation of knowledge production, the main feature of which is a shift of emphasis from “depth” to “speed.” This is simply because depth and nuance require time and attention to absorb. So as attention has become the dominant scarcity, depth has become less “affordable.” Moreover, with information so abundant, strategies are needed to process it more quickly, lest something of vital interest or importance is missed.

THE 24-HOUR KNOWLEDGE CYCLE

Knowledge is evolving from a “stock” to a “flow.” Stock and flow – for example, wealth and income – are concepts familiar to accountants and economists. A stock of knowledge may be thought of as a quasi-permanent repository – such as a book or an entire library – whereas the flow is the process of developing the knowledge. The old Encyclopedia Britannica was quintessentially a stock; Wikipedia is the paradigmatic example of flow. Obviously, a stock of knowledge is rarely permanent; it depreciates like any other form of capital. But electronic information technology is profoundly changing the rate of depreciation. By analogy with the 24-hour news cycle (which was an early consequence of the growing abundance of video bandwidth as cable television replaced scarce over-the-air frequencies), there is now the equivalent of a 24-hour knowledge cycle – “late-breaking knowledge,” as it were. Knowledge is becoming more like a river than a lake, more and more dominated by the flow than by the stock. What is driving this?

Most obvious is the fact that the media by which electronic information is presented and manipulated permit it to be changed continuously and almost at no cost. Information products are therefore constantly evolving, for the simple reason that, faced with the option, who would not choose an updated over an outdated version? By the time information products eventually come to rest, they are very likely to be considered obsolete. In the cutthroat competition for attention, they are no longer “news.”

Consequently, there is little time to think and reflect as the flow moves on. This has a subtle and pernicious implication for the production of knowledge. When the effective shelf-life of a document (or any information product) shrinks, fewer resources will be invested in its creation. This is because the period during which the product is likely to be read or referred to is too short to repay a large allocation of scarce time and skill in its production. As a result, the “market” for depth is narrowing.

There is also under way a shift of intellectual authority from producers of depth – the traditional “expert” – to the broader public. This is nowhere more tellingly illustrated than by Wikipedia, which has roughly 300,000 volunteer contributors every month. The upshot is that thousands of heads working in parallel are, in an environment of information superabundance, presumably better than one, even if that one is an expert.

What makes the mobilization of “crowd wisdom” intellectually powerful is that the technology of the Web makes it so easy for even amateurs to access a growing fraction of the corpus of human knowledge. But while hundreds of thousands of Web-empowered volunteers are able to very efficiently dedicate small slices of their discretionary time, the traditional experts – professors, journalists, authors and filmmakers – need to be compensated for their effort, since expertise is what they have to sell. Unfortunately for them, this has become a much harder sell because the ethic of “free” rules the economics of so much Web content. Moreover, the value of traditional expert authority is itself being diluted by the new incentive structure created by information technology that militates against what is deep and nuanced in favour of what is fast and stripped-down.

The result is the growing disintermediation of experts and gatekeepers of virtually all kinds. The irony is that experts have been the source of most of the nuggets of knowledge that the crowd now draws upon in rather parasitic fashion – for example, news and political bloggers depend heavily on a relatively small number of sources of professional journalism, just as many Wikipedia articles assimilate prior scholarship. The system works because it is able to mine intellectual capital. This suggests that today’s “cult of the amateur” will ultimately be self-limiting and will require continuous fresh infusions of more traditional forms of expert knowledge.

With almost all of the world’s codified knowledge at your fingertips, why should you spend increasingly scarce attention loading up your own mind just in case you may some day need this particular fact or concept? Far better, one might argue, to access efficiently what you need, when you need it. This depends, of course, on building up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link with the online store of knowledge. How to teach this is perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity facing educators in the 21st century.

For now, the just-in-time approach seems to be narrowing peripheral intellectual vision and thus reducing the serendipity that has been the source of most radical innovation. What is apparently being eroded is the deep, integrative mode of knowledge generation that can come only from the “10,000 hours” of individual intellectual focus – a process that mysteriously gives rise to the insights that occur, often quite suddenly, to the well-prepared mind. We appear to be seeing fewer of the great synthetic innovations associated with names like Newton, Einstein or Watson and Crick.

THE AGE OF DIGITAL NATIVES

So we decry the increasing compartmentalization of knowledge – knowing more and more about less and less – while awaiting the great syntheses that some day may be achieved by millions of linked minds, all with fingertip access to the world’s codified knowledge but with a globe-spanning spectrum of different perspectives. The hyperlinked and socially networked structure of the Internet may be making the metaphor of the Web as global “cyber-nervous system” into a reality – still primitive, but with potential for a far more integrated collective intelligence than we can imagine today.

Those of us who are still skeptical might recall that Plato, in the Phaedrus, suggested that writing would “create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it.” This is a striking example of a particular kind of generation gap in which masters of an established paradigm can only see the shortcomings, and not the potential, of the truly novel. Today, the electronic screen, with its lack of linear constraint, its ephemeral scintilla and its hyperlinked multimedia content, portends a very different paradigm. How this may condition the habits of thought of the so-called “digital natives” – who, after all, are about to become both the custodians and creators of human knowledge – is one of the deepest and most significant questions facing our species. The challenge is to adapt, and then to evolve, in a world where there continues to be an exponential increase in the supply of information relative to the supply of human attention.

Peter Nicholson is president of the Council of Canadian Academies