The Locust Economy # 2 in a series

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Clive

Locusts propagate, proliferate and eat.  Locust economies function the same way.

No one develops a vision for a nation in office.  One arrives in Ottawa with it.  Once in Ottawa, the political pressures of Ottawa take over and there are no new thoughts, just the prosecution of old ones.  This has been true of all national political leaders from Sir John A to Tommy Douglas, Pearson and Trudeau.

Sir John A. vision came out of family compact Ontario,  Tommy Douglas, the west during the depression,  Pearson and Trudeau from Toronto and Montreal.  Sir John A. brought the railroad and the idea of a nation from sea to sea, Tommy Douglas, national health care and a more caring society, Pearson and Trudeau the idea of a bilingual and bicultural nation.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Harper’s arrived in Ottawa with his own vision. It was very clear and hadn’t changed since he was a student of Tom Flanagan in Calgary and ran for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance Party with Professor Flanagan as his campaign manager. Professor Flanagan is a Texan and has found in Canada’s oil province a great deal that has been congenial to him, but less so the nation and has set about changing it from his position as a tenured professor in Calgary and through former students like Stephen Harper.

Professor Flanagan’s vision is a Texas Ranger approach to life and nation building, the kind of view that would prompt him to recently proclaim that “I think (Julian) Assange should be assassinated”.  (CBC- 2010)  It has not been the Canadian way to assassinate dissenters, our own or others.  We tend to keep RCMP files on them and report to committees of Parliament, but back home he’s on solid ground.  Tea Party spokesmen have stated ‘their’ President should have the right to assassinate American citizens presumed to be a threat to the nation without any oversight of Congress or Judiciary.  Just point the finger and pull the trigger.

Another part of the Flanagan vision that Mr. Harper arrived in Ottawa with was: ‘Climate change was a socialist scheme to suck money out of rich countries’ and he announced he was determined to pursue the “battle of Kyoto – to block the job killing, economy destroying Kyoto Accord”.   He has won this battle and many others on his way to changing Canada into the kind of country Mr. Flanagan would be more comfortable with.

Public Health Care has never been welcome in Texas, nor is Tommy Douglas a hero there, and Mr. Harper is working steadily away at dismantling it.   Mr. Harper is a much more strategic thinker than Mr. Flanagan and couches his withdrawal from support for National Medicare by his obligation to respect provincial rights (aka ‘state rights’).  It is clear the withdrawal of federal financial support for health care but without any increased tax powers to the provinces will make the isolated provinces easy targets for the American Insurance corporations to pick off and this has already begun as services are privatized.   (Has anyone not got a Blue Cross card in Alberta?)

Aboriginal rights don’t exist according to Mr. Flanagan.  First nations are simply first immigrants and should be assimilated,  the Indian Act scrapped and so on.  Mr. Harper’s genius as the Chief Locust is that unlike Mr. Flanagan, he understands how to get there.  As he said to Indian leaders recently, we have to go slowly.  We can’t accomplish everything immediately.  What exactly he wants to accomplish though was never stated.  I’m guessing it’s assimilation.

In this regard and many others,  Steven Harper is unique in the western world.  There is no other, elected national figure quite like him.  He still believes that the locust economy is the best economy possible.  How else can one explain his government kissing goodbye 4 billion dollars in 21st century patents goodbye (Nortel),  millions in pensions, and thousands of jobs without lifting a finger, but calling it a national emergency if Canada can’t slurry tar to China?  A tar pipe line is a perfect locust economy project.  It creates no long term jobs, but costs billions, and has devastating environmental impacts.  This is the Locust Economy functioning at its best, but needs an adept Chief Locust in charge, fortunately, for Tom Flanagan, it has one.

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Club of Rome meet the Locust Economy

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Clive

 

 In 1976, world leaders met in Rome for an extraordinary meeting.  Canada’s Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau was part of that meeting.  It came to be known as the Club of Rome.  It’s remembered for the unexpected announcement the leaders made at the end when they jointly declared that national economies could not continue to behave as if the planet’s resources were infinite when they weren’t.

Unfortunately, none of those leaders lived long enough to see the outcome of decades of what has become a world wide locust economy.  We can now.  It’s all around us as world governance, financial and supply systems melt down.

There’s a school of thought, especially among journalists, that it can all be resolved if folks can just focus and sort out the Euro, finish the war on terror and get serious about political reform and so on -  that’s a comforting thought.  But the developed world now is utterly dependent on the locust economy and no one has the slightest idea what to do about it.  Canadian fishermen who once stayed home and fished, now commute to Fort McMurray’s tar sands.  No one seriously suggests they shouldn’t; they need the jobs.  The Canadian economy now depends on oil being pumped from tar in northern Alberta.  The Americans depend on deep water ocean drilling and both governments are prepared to go to war over Gulf oil.  This is what a locust economy does.  Locusts propagate, proliferate and eat.  Locust economies function the same way.

The locust economy has spawned its own political companion – grievance politics of which Canada’s present government is a star.  It runs from Kyoto complaining about third world countries’ carbon emissions, (the bottom 60 nations emit collectively less than Canada), fires Canadian environmental scientists and blames folks protesting more pipelines for ‘damaging the economy’.  Our foreign minister visits Haiti and complains about that poor nation’s capacity to prosecute an old villain (Baby Doc Duvalier).  The locust economy is comfortable with governments of panic and complaint, not reason and solution.

The countries doing the best are Germany and and the northern European countries which have moved the furthest to diversify their economies and get off the oil hypodermic, but the rest of the crumpling economies are slowly pulling them into the morass. Canada has become a world leader in the locust economy pact.  With each passing year our nation is fastened ever more securely to resource extraction and grievance politics and our cities are no different.  Toronto is suffocating in traffic and congestion with a Mayor who cries it’s all the fault of the pedestrians, cyclists and of course the trams.

In Ottawa, we have done Toronto one better, reduced funding for public transit by $20 million but are spending $57 million on a 1.5 kilometer road  – that’s what the locust economy does.

From coast to coast, Canadians are standing around while civilian public services are crumple because governments are obliged to spend more each year to keep the locust economy going – that’s what the locust economy does.

Worldwide people are moving across the landscape and populating any city or landscape that functions well, until it does not.  International money is invested wherever it can turn a profit and when it cannot, it does not – that’s what a locust economy does.

Pensions that were pre-paid are attacked and collapse – that’s what the locust economy does.  Society’s capacity to support itself becomes just another place to dine.  This is what the Club of Rome predicted in 1976 and forty years later we’re watching it unfold.

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Before the Gods of Osgoode Hall

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Clive

Historic photo of Osgoode Hall

Both outside and inside, Osgoode Hall, the law courts in downtown Toronto, has the materials and harmonious proportions of a building built before mass production sunk its teeth into every aspect of construction. Outside it is clad with soft yellow and red brick, tall hand made windows pierce the walls and inside the foyer is graced with columns and bold black and white tiles on the floor. Friends of Lansdowne were in courtroom ten.

Visually, the courtroom said it all, twenty-five ordinary looking people on one side, three lawyers for the city and the developers on the other. It couldn’t be clearer. Nor could the challenge for the judges be clearer once you listened to the lawyers present their cases for the people versus the consortia. It all came down to this.

Can the courts protect the public treasury when elected officials will not?

The presentations made it very clear; it was buddy politics versus the law. Common sense says you can’t cancel a competitive procurement process to give away public land, charge no rent, assume all the environmental and heritage liabilities, and protect the private consortium from football failure, and argue this adds up to responsible government.

This is an important case. If the appeal is upheld, it means that all municipal councils in future will have to be more cautious about cancelling competitive competition in favour of non-competitive deals. If the appeal is lost, the case law will support ‘buddy politics’ no matter what normal procurement laws require.

The week before the case was heard I held a fundraising evening, Occupy the Elmdale,  for the Friends of Lansdowne. 

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End of the Road

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Clive

Hay on Wye is a little village in Wales of about a thousand people just over the border from England. What has made it famous around the world and brought me to it, is books. About 30 years ago, an enterprising man named Richard Booth bought a falling down mansion on the hilltop of Wye which he grandly called Hay Castle and he proceeded to stock it with second hand books. It was an eccentric beginning but a very successful one. Hay-on-Wye now has 26 second hand book shops and hosts a world famous literary festival each spring where the Canadian likes of Margaret Atwood show up.

It seemed like the right place to end our long tour through Europe. Hay itself is a beautiful place with a couple of pleasant pubs, a small market place and a fine old church in the centre, but it is the books which make it. You can browse for hours through the stores. I found everyone from the autobiography of the Globe and Mail’s John Doyle to authors I’d never heard of like Ethel Mannin who had published 87 books over the course of her life, novels, memoirs, travel books. It was both fascinating and humbling to discover prolific authors who are as new to me as the day.

I bought her last book ‘Sunset over Dartmoor’ for fifty pence. It’s not often you read a book by someone who is 84 at the time of writing. Her observations of growing older were instructive and quite moving, not for anything that she said, but because of her quiet independence. This is a woman who didn’t make a big deal out of it, but lived to the beat of her own drummer, an accomplishment that the older one gets, the more one appreciates.

Through the miracles of modern communications, I also had the good fun of watching Wales battle it out with France in the World Cup Rugby semi-final in the Swan Hotel. It was a great game with all the drama and athletic skill the highest level sport can bring. It was tough, if you’re a Wales fan which I am, to see the boys lose by a single point, but what comes around, goes around as France would go on to the final but lose to New Zealand by the same difference.

Transit was, of course, a big part of our tour through Turkey and Europe because we travelled everywhere by tram, train, subway, bus, bicycle and foot and it was a big part of our trip to Hay-on-Wye. The only way to get to there is by a local bus that winds through the hills from the train station at Hereford. What I learned from shop owners in Hay was that since ‘petrol’ prices had increased in Britain, the number of visitors through the store doors had dropped off and they all bemoaned the fact that the Thatcher governments had not only shut the rail line down but had torn up the bridges and sold off the real estate making it impossible to ever bring back.
Again, I was struck with the difference between France and Britain. In a similar village, Limoux where we stayed in France, there was a twenty minute rail trip from the nearest large centre, Carcassonne and the service was being reinstalled further out into the hills. You simply walked across one track to the other, waited for a bit and off you went on a comfortable ride to Limoux. The Hereford/Hay connection was such that there were only locals and ourselves on it, not a single visitor.

The French commitment to small farmers and rural services contrasted with the English approach that small farmers are inefficient and rural rail lines be uprooted like noxious weeds couldn’t have been more vivid.

On a happier note, I found a leather bound, 1911 edition of Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for our youngest granddaughter, Evangeline and headed back for Canada with fifty pounds of books and no clothes.

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String Theory, the City of Bath and the Romans

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Clive

String Theory  proposes that more than one set of physical laws are possible and as a consequence different universes exist and can co-exist, a little like J.K. Rowling’s idea where Harry Potter can pass through a portal and enter a world where a different reality (magic) exists. It’s not a new idea among science fiction writers but it is for physicists sweating over equations.

Europe certainly has a shadow reality that is present everywhere you travel from Turkey to Britain. It’s not as difficult to understand as string theory but the extent and complexity of it is often hard to get your mind around. Right now, I’m in Bath, U.K. The entire city has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it’s easy to understand why, the completeness and perfection of its’ Georgian architecture is really quite astonishing. The entire city is a magnificent Jane Austen set.

This is the city Austen wrote two of her books and you can still walk down the same streets Jane did, have lunch at the Pump Room as she did and stroll by her houses, for over the years the family lived in several places. But it’s not Jane Austen or Georgian architecture that I’m thinking about as Europe’s shadow world. In the 1880s, when the city was doing some sewer work, they accidently struck ‘gold’, the lead lining for a massive Roman holding tank.

Years of archaeological research followed and gradually defined a massive Roman temple, bathing and administrative area. Most of this complex is under present day Bath and completely inaccessible, but the archaeologists were able to reveal the ‘great bath’ (the largest Roman pool) because it was directly under the modern pool where it was simply a process of peeling back the King and Queen’s pool to expose the Roman one beneath.

The picture we have of the Roman world is a very primitive one formed mostly by Hollywood films like Gladiator and Ben Hur where the centre of attraction are their most violent games. It’s a like trying to understand modern society though films about football or hockey. These things are real, but limited. Travelling through Turkey and Europe, you gradually begin to get an idea of is just how extensive and complete the Roman civilization was because everywhere you travel, every city you see, every Chateau you explore has beneath it or beside it or a couple of kilometres down the road, the Roman equivalent…and often it’s just as large and complete.

Twelve thousand ‘wishing’ coins were found in the pool at Bath from all over the Roman world. In the third century, Bath was an international centre as well, visited as it is today and while there weren’t visitors from Japan, Anatolia is not next door. In the Chateau countryside, throughout France, the Romans were there with ‘villa-chateaux’, great sprawling homes with in-floor heating, gracious gardens, magnificent frescos and floor mosaics and of course vineyards.

The more archaeological research that is done across Europe, the more the size and the extent of the Roman civilization is revealed until it is now beginning to be clear that there is almost no place the Roman civilization didn’t create urban and rural landscapes very similar in purpose to the ones we have and see today.

If there was a mountain in the Pyrenees that modern industry has mined for iron ore, the Romans did also. If there were a group of villages that produced industrial levels of pottery, the Romans had industrial kilns in the same place also. If you are travelling on a modern divided highway, the chances are it is not far from an older, Roman one which is smaller but just as straight. If a modern city has cisterns, the Romans had cisterns also as the city of Istanbul has discovered.

I have gazed out at the sea from the tranquil remains of the great Roman spa on the island of Cos where Hippocratus once taught and in the north run hot water from the spring at Bath across my face; seen great, silent cities like Ephesus with nothing left but magnificent bones. And it slowly becomes clear long before the modern European union, and millennia before North America was urbanized, there was a global civilization of cities. A world where cities and culture, trade routes and industry, politics and people prospered as they do today.

Yet all of this urban accomplishment literally sank into the earth and the thought cannot escape that while the coterminous multiple worlds of ‘string theory’ are difficult to imagine, sequential ones are not, because it has already happened.

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Griffons and Lions on Guard

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Clive

All of the roads into the City of London (the central core of the much larger metropolis) are protected by a rampant griffon. We tend to hear more about the congestion charges than we do rampant griffons, but they have a much older history than the charges. The griffons are there for more important reasons – to keep evil out of the city and they have been doing this job for more than 3,000 years.

The Hittites, in their mountain stronghold of Hattusha (as did the Assyrians, the Phrygians, the Babylonians), had great blocks of stone on each side of their gates with rampant, ferocious animals to keep evil out and impress visitors. Sometimes the animals were mythical, sphinx-like, half animal – half human forms, but lions and winged griffons were also used.

In London, when the griffons are not at work, the lion is preferred. You can find lions guarding the entrance of private homes as well as on public duty. The bronze lions at Trafalgar Square, keeping watch at the foot of Lord Nelson’s column are so impressive that visitors from the world over feel obliged to sit between their paws or climb onto their backs and have a picture taken. The lions are patient, polished and golden in the sun and don’t seem to mind at all. I have been told they approve of the congestion charges because they have reduced automobile traffic, the air is cleaner and their shiny coats less damaged, but that’s just what I hear, I don’t have the information first hand.

London hasn’t got 3,000 years of history but it’s got a couple of thousand. You can still find parts of the Roman wall that originally surrounded the city. There’s a Norman ‘keep’ at the Tower of London; a reconstructed version of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre a few meters from where it originally stood, the house where Samuel Johnson, creator of the first English dictionary lived, and the apartment block and neighbourhood where T.S. Eliot measured out his life out in tea spoons. The pub where Charlie Chaplin used to like to drink after performing still stands as does another where Vera Lynne used to drop in for a pint.

This is the city of my mother’s young life. She grew up in Hammersmith, just a block off the Broadway and her Dad’s pub is still there, as is the fish market although both have gone considerably upscale. She wouldn’t recognize the Lyric Theatre. It’s now no longer a Victorian stone building, it’s over a shopping centre with a rooftop garden but is more dynamic than ever.

Hammersmith has had its ups and downs over the years. It was a quiet, modest, middle class place in my mother’s youth and suffered a good deal after the Second War with traffic and highway construction. ‘A Clockwork Orange’, that paen to the pointless of existence, was filmed in Hammersmith and it was a good location choice. Fifty years ago, the High Street had all the charm of parking lot under an expressway. It had been dismembered by thoughtless, corrosive post war development.

But the Griffons have been at work here and Hammersmith is back. The old bus turnaround has been surrounded by a large and not unpleasing, commercial and residential development. The pedestrian underpasses have been torn up and replaced with street surface crossing. St. Paul’s my mother’s old parish church has a major renovation and extension underway. It looks happy and I’m pleased to say Hammersmith looks happy. Good work Griffons!

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Amsterdam Shock

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Clive

After the horse and cart, the first mechanical invention was the bicycle and its magical pedal, chain and gear system. It remains the most efficient human movement machine ever invented. Nothing else has occurred to the human mind that can move so much weight, so quickly with so little energy. A bicycle is a kind of a miracle machine, but it was a miracle that was soon displaced, after 1896, by the internal combustion engine. That was much less efficient, very expensive to build and maintain but it had one enormous advantage. It tapped into the largest supply of stored energy that the planet contains, the seas of oil left from the carboniferous age – millions and millions of years of decayed organic matter. The bicycle tapped into nothing more than two human legs and the food required to fuel them. There was no contest. Oil won.

I’ve discovered that there is one place in the west where the bicycle was not displaced by the automobile. I’ve heard about it all my life but never visited until this past week – Amsterdam. Fortunately, I visited Berlin first. I think if I had not seen Berlin first, the shock of seeing a city where 80 per cent of the population moves about on a bicycle would have overwhelmed my North American sensibilities. In Ottawa which is considered a bicycle friendly city somewhere between 2 and on a good day 3 per cent of the population moves about on a bicycle. Amsterdam is shocking.

I’m sitting in a café writing this on an Amsterdam street. It is busy. The bicycles flood up and down it like cars do on the busiest streets back home. There is no relief. I keep thinking the crowds of cycles will slow or reduce but they don’t. There are scarcely any cars at all. Cycles are the dominant culture. I can’t get over the variety of cyclists and their casual competence from the littlest child to the a silver haired adult. A child goes by sitting backwards on his mother’s bike, eating an ice cream with one hand, holding onto a cord attached to a suitcase on wheels with the other, all the time chatting away with his Mum. I almost rub my eyes.

It’s a different world. No one wears a helmet. The cyclists dress no differently than pedestrians or car drivers. There is none of the acres of special biker equipment that you see at home. The bikes are set up differently, so people sit very erect, almost straight up and down so they can see easily without any neck or back strain. Neither men and women have cross bars on their bikes so they can dismount and stop in literally the space of one human stride with just a quick forward flick of the knee. Their agility in traffic is nothing short of stunning.

There are lots of very talented cyclists in Canada, but very few are born on a bike and travel on one every day for every purpose, shopping, entertainment, work, visiting friends. In Amsterdam this is more common than grass. A mother passes me with two little boys sitting in a box on her front wheel, the little boys are sitting with their legs draped over the sides of the box, sunning because the day is warm and pleasant. The bike police would put the mother in jail if she tried this in a Canadian city.

I can’t decide what is hardest to adapt to and conclude that it is the density. The first day in Amsterdam Patty is hit by a motorized scooter which are also allowed in the bike lanes. She doesn’t realize the lane is two way and doesn’t look to her left. There is an explosion as the scooter piles into her and she is on the ground, holding her side, the scooter and driver are also down. The traffic moves around the bodies. The man on the motorized bicycle isn’t hurt and he immediately calls the police and the emergency response team on his cell phone. Within minutes, the police and paramedics arrive. Patty is bruised and scraped but appears to be okay. I am obliged to pay the scooter driver 50 euros for damage to his scooter which has the brake on one side twisted and the plastic housing broken. Lesson number one do not step into a bicycle lane in Amsterdam.

Stendhal described a shock he felt when he travelled in Italy of seeing too many beautiful things and being forced to retire to his hotel room to compose himself. It’s now called ‘Stendhal’s Disease’ and many travellers get it and do the same thing, retire from the fray of sight-seeing. I have another travel disease it’s called ‘Amsterdam shock’.

It is now the 4th day that we’ve been in Amsterdam and Patty, being the trooper she is, is back on her bike, but I still can’t get over it. I keep thinking if I close my eyes the scene will change. The floods of cyclists on the street will diminish. Cars will emerge from the shadows and replace them. The five story bicycle parking lots will become five story car lots, but no, it doesn’t happen. Cyclists and trams are the dominant culture in Amsterdam and have been since their invention, now more than a century ago. The automobile never ran the bicycle out of town.

Fortunately, I visited Berlin before moving on to Amsterdam and it gave me a chance to adapt. Berlin was a surprise in many ways. It’s more than sixty years since the Second War ended but you can still see the effects everywhere. Some of the museums have just recently been repaired. Nonetheless I found the city to be youthful and inspiring in many different ways. Not the least of which was fifty per cent of Berlin households do not own cars and you can certainly see this on the streets where cars and bicycles are about equal.

Berlin has a North American feel to it. The streets are wide. The city sprawls across the landscape. There’s plenty of open spaces. It doesn’t feel crowded. It’s a young city. You can imagine it is how Ottawa or Toronto might look if they invested in bicycle lanes on all the major streets and beefed up their transit. Berlin pleasantly surprised me but it did not overwhelm me. Amsterdam did.

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10 Reasons to Love Trams

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Clive
  1. Trams are a cheap date. For the cost of one bus tour you can buy a week of tram tripping.
  2. Trams are friendly. If you get lost, they will always take you back to where you started. No questions asked.
  3. There’s something about trams. People are friendlier on trams than on buses. Maybe, it’s because they not concentrating on hanging because trams are a smooth ride.
  4. I love how trams in the space of one narrow lane can carry 8 lanes of car people.
  5. I love how you can sit in a café beside a tram line and they don’t blow fumes in your faces.
  6. Cities with trams are cities with history. (Today, going to visit the tram museum in Vienna.)
  7. Streets with trams are cheerier than those without. They have more pedestrians, more cafes, more shops. In short, a hunk of moving metal on rails civilizes a city. Magical!
  8. The best ice cream in the entire world can be found at a tram transfer stop in Vienna.
  9. I feel virtuous on a tram because outside of my feet and a bicycle, trams are the cheapest, most enduring form of urban transit ever invented; that’s why North American car manufacturers closed them down. So when I ride a tram I’m participating in a little urban anarchy. I like that.
  10. A little disclosure needed here. I was seduced by a Wellington Street tram in Ottawa when I was ten years old . It took me to the movies downtown and the beach at Britannia….no questions asked.

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More “Sad” News from Paris

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Clive

Today, I tramped across the 12th arrondissement from Place de la Bastille to Varenne-Saint-Maur on an old, abandoned rail line. About half of it is elevated on stone arches, the other half takes up the centre of streets, tunnels under most and bridges the rest and generally makes its independent way.

In 1987, two Parisians, Philippe Mathieux and Jacques Veregley had the wacky idea to convert this eyesore, the entire route, arches, bridges, tunnels, streets into an urban park. City Council bought the idea and by 2,000 the conversion was completed and the ribbon cut. It now contains 6.5 hectares of greenspace and the bench I am writing this from is so buried in green, only a small glimpse of the sky peaks through the canopy. From here, it’s impossible to know you’re in one of the world’s larger city surrounded by buildings and streets.

The park itself is filled with joggers, cyclists, boulists (people who play boules), sun tanners and of course children. The adjacent streets seem to have been infected with the green virus for I notice balconies are awash in plants and the city has lined many of the streets there with trees. The canopy over the park itself is so thick in some places that the city has had to cut a viewing area so walkers, can stop and peer out at the buildings and see the life of the city itself.

Clearly, Parisians have made a mistake here. They already have a good number of parks, the Jardins de Luxembourg, the Tuileries, the Champs de Mars just to name some of the better known ones. They could have converted the old rail line into a wonderful new shopping area as we are doing in Ottawa with Lansdowne Park. Unfortunately, I think, they’ve lost the opportunity. The park is so well used now that the city is putting in signal lights for the cyclists this fall and the range of green investments, fountains, waterfalls, children’s play areas is such that I can’t see them rolling the clock back.

The long and the short of it is Parisians have their priorities in a different place than we do. You can see this everywhere. On one of the city sign boards in the park, I read a notification printed on official looking paper that Parisians were invited to a city wide event called Park(ing) Day. On October 16th, with the support of city hall, Parisians are encouraged to occupy a surface parking lot and replace the cars with a human activity – eating, drinking, dance, art work, child play and so on. Interested people are asked to register and describe their project at www.parkingday.fr

This is more sad news from Paris as clearly the greening of Paris is not slowing down. There are going to be more cyclists than ever, more pedestrians, more parks, trees. The fear is, of course that tourists may begin to turn off and stop coming for fear of growing roots themselves. It hasn’t happened yet but the day may not be far off. Tourists do have choices. There are other cities to visit (Baltimore, home of one of my favourite T.V. shows, comes to mind) and parking will be a consideration for people when they are making their plans and thinking ‘to Paris or not to Paris?’

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The Sistine Chapel of the Palaeolithic World.

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Clive

You quickly begin to recognize European Palaeolithic country. It’s high. There are cliffs rising straight up from a deep river valley. There is lots of water and deep verdant vegetation. For at least thirty thousand years this is the kind of environment where early men and women prospered. When you visit you can immediately see why.

I had previously had a cartoon image of Palaeolithic life – big ugly brutes sitting around a fire at a cave mouth with a couple of wall paintings at the back of the cave. The grotto near the village of Tautaval where one of our ancestors craniums was found that has been dated at 35,000 year ago overlooks a broad, high walled valley that served as a natural pasture and migratory route for animals. From the front ‘door’ of the cavern, Palaeo men and women would have had much the same view as we have today, except it would be teaming with wild animals, horses, wild cattle, deer, mountain goats. At the base of the hillside would have been the same beautiful river and swimming that people enjoy today, except it would have been better, cleaner, wider, more verdant.

When you see children frolicking in the water and flying easily up the hillside to visit the archaeological work with their parents, it doesn’t take much imagination to realize for children this was always a wonderful environment.

We’re now in the Perigord and have just visited Lascaux and the grotte de Gaume which is literally in the village. The quality of the art work is staggering in its placement as well as its form. Palaeolithic man didn’t decorate the caverns where families actually lived. The great caverns that he painted were used exclusively for art and they were as extraordinary as any modern gallery I have visited.

You can’t visit Lascaux without a feeling of profound awe. This is the Sistine Chapel of the Palaeolithic world. The paintings cover the entire arc of the cave from ceiling to eyelevel. They are beautiful. There are few artists who could create such art today. Picasso is one that comes to mind because it must take incredible fluidity of hand to carve out in one broad stroke the arc of the representation which is how it was done. These paintings are the absolute antithesis of paint by numbers. The artists knew how to read the rock perfectly and used the shape of the rock to highlight every part of their painting from haunch to head. By the light of a candle flame, the paintings seem to dance before your eyes and the colours become deeper, the detail sharper for this is the way they were painted and meant to be seen. Under electric lights, over the internet, they are nothing but pale imitations.

It is in Lascaux and Niaux and Mas d’Azil in the Pyreenes where I began to realize the transformative power of art and spirituality. For you cannot walk in these magnificent cathedrals of the Palaeolithic and not believe that the impetus for their creation was a deep and important sense of life larger than any individual. It is here that men and women began to differentiate themselves from the other species.

This art is not casual. The caverns are separated by hundreds of kilometers but the choice of species to paint and how to paint them clearly comes from the same vision and took the same kind of community effort. Scaffolding was necessary. Bowl lamps with wicks. The preparation of the red, black and yellow paints. The artists must have been carefully chosen for just as today, you can’t imagine these talents emerged casually from the community.

I’m always interested in sustainability. How do communities endure? What makes them fail? And it is clear Palaeolithic man never failed, but after thousands of years, (longer than our lifestyle will endure) his own lifestyle changed. He moved down to the river bottoms and began to cut trees and farm next to the rivers. The caverns along the hill tops became places for summer shepherds and herders to shelter their animals and it was forgotten that there were great paintings hidden in their deepest recesses.

To our good fortune, they have been restored to us and something of their magic can be felt again.

Read more of my articles from Europe posted on  Spacing Ottawa

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