The Art of Sinking

When it sinks in. 

When it sinks in that visiting artist Gregg Schlanger chose to focus his considerable talent on McMaster's Parking Lot "M" for his contribution to the Mapping Paradise show, it ignited a thrill in me: here is art speaking a new language on a current environmental issue.

That the issue is central to what I've been working on for the past several years felt like affirmation, yes, but more, like a new force has joined the cause, which has grown to include so many within just the last year.

Gregg's work entitled "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot" is the central defining artwork in a lively show of student work from Judy Major-Girardin's ART 2ER3 "Environmentally Responsible Studio" class at McMaster University.

The form is a low wood frame box filled with water in the middle of the gallery, with a raised, flat platform - like an oil rig in the sea -  standing over the water. The platform is at first unfamiliar, until we see it in the shape of McMaster's Parking Lot M in the west campus.

Water bubbles up and breaks through the flat platform like mini geysers or springs. The work reminds us that the parking lot is built atop the floodplain of Ancaster Creek, and that the ripples of this environmental degradation still flow outward, to actively reach out to us from below. Subconsciously perhaps, for some, and more immediate for those who know the story of how Coldspring Valley Nature Sanctuary became a parking lot. The paving of this bit of Cootes Paradise came around the same time that Joni Mitchell released her classic "Big Yellow Taxi" in 1970 with the refrain:

Half Capacity: Zero Problems

Usually, standing on the median between the northbound/southbound lanes of Cootes Drive would be an unnerving experience, due to the high speed traffic clocking in at 80km/hour and more.

But during road construction, the closure of the southbound lane of Cootes Drive has calmed traffic speeds and made the road quieter and safer.

With Spencer Creek and ponds to the left of the road, and Cootes Paradise Nature Sanctuary wetlands to the right, the inhabitants of the natural environment fare poorly when forced to interact with traffic. The huge distance between the shoulders of the road are a major barrier for amphibian and other wetland species, including species at risk like Cootes Paradise's turtle population.

When the road was built in 1936-37, it was built as an example of the new modern highway design: divided lanes with a grassy median, easy curves and low grades. These innovations were achieved in this instance by removing hills and then using the soil to fill in the marshy low ground, creating a dead-zone for wildlife. We have been paying the environmental cost ever since.

Radio Free School

This is a warning: there will be late nights, struggle, challenges missed and met. There will be satisfaction and joy, but no money for your efforts.

Creating a weekly half hour radio program on campus/community radio is like running down a train track with your pants around your ankles and a locomotive on your heels. It requires focus and energy and a dose of humility. It’s like raising children, like most things important, actually.

I can’t really complain, since I suggested combining our educational pursuits for our never been to school daughters-three with my love of campus radio: the adventure truly picked up steam the moment we were welcomed to the airwaves on 93.3fm at McMaster’s CFMU, and for the next six years Radio Free School was our learning juggernaut.

We touched fossilized mammoth excrement in the office of a world-renowned geneticist researcher, hiked forest trails with loving ecologists, belly-danced, scuba dived and searched the galaxies with a range of experts and doers who shared their knowledge and passion. Week after week, the shows we created were guided from the outset by our children’s - and our own -  interests. There were no boundaries about what we would study, the only constant was constant learning; that, and the weekly deadline to complete the show. 

We would take our video camera everywhere, recording field interviews then using the audio mixed and edited with music at home to produce the show, with a heavy dose of children’s voices, voices so rarely heard on radio. Not just heard, but in control, both of content, and simultaneously, their own learning. 

Using digital audio editing software meant we could prepare our half hour shows and then upload it from the comfort of home. Posting our shows to the very useful and alive radio4all.net where we were quickly picked up, to our astonishment, by an internet station in Japan, a pirate radio station in Santa Cruz California, then Fredricton, New Brunswick’s campus station CHSR 97.9 FM, and several other stations around the world over the show’s tenure from May 2002 until we folded shop in June 2008 with a last show on one of our favourite and oft repeated topics: Math!

We didn’t really stop there though, but gone were the weekly midnight editing sessions the night before the show aired. We kept our web presence, and of course our interest and growing experience with alternatives to what has become the standardized education system. In the process we had advanced our understanding and knowledge, and shared our progress weekly with our listeners and friends. We had, along the way, spoken to some of the best minds and commentators on the topic of learning outside of regular school.

Since we sidestepped schools for a different model of learning, we were conscious that we were not separate, not above, just different. We were trying our best to find out how to allow our children, and ourselves, to experience our own worlds, with our own unique minds and talents. It is in this spirit that we come to you now. 

Armed with over 200 shows - almost 7,000 minutes of material, we want to bring together some of our most challenging and insightful guests in book form. To bring the airwaves to your library.

Randy Kay

May 2012

WHITE AND WILD: Gearing Up

The sharp sound of scraping ice from windshields, the spine twisting toss of heavy snow to free your trapped vehicle, the smear of salt and sanded snow spray as your wipers drag and push, these joys of winter are unknown to the winter cyclist.

With frosty plumes of warm breath punctuating their progress, these most hardy of souls pedal year round, thumbing their cold noses at arctic temperatures and fluctuating gas prices.

A psychology professor at McMaster University, Reuven Dukas skirts his 2005 Corolla in the driveway as he settles onto his mountain bike for the 5 kilometer ride to work from his Dundas home. Matters not if the winds howl and the snow swirls.

“If it's not ski-able, it's bike-able,” is his motto. He puts on fresh “aggressive, off-road” tires in December to traction his way through the cold.

“Cycling enables me to be outside everyday, which I like, and I get my daily exercise”, says Dukas. So important is his daily ride, that he researched bike routes to his work when looking for a home.

Sure, it's not for everyone, pedaling through snow drifts and over black ice. Yet despite the perception of snow-bound Canadian winters, there are many days when roads are dry and clear, which leaves riding in winter largely a matter of bracing for the cold.

Daunting double digit drops below zero may strike fear, but novice riders may find themselves overdressing for the cold. Advances in gear technology mean keeping warm and dry on a bike is easier, and sleeker, than ever if you are willing to invest. And why not? A good waterproof, breathable, reflective cycling jacket and pants can keep the elements out, all for a little more than a year's worth of oil changes for your car. Throw in some extra protection with a thin fleece cycling balaclava to fit under your helmet, special “lobster claw cycling mitts, and maybe even some waterproof shoe covers to keep your toes dry, and you are practically climate controlled.

Hiking Hamilton to Dundas

Last fall, not long after I moved from Dundas to nearby Hamilton, I took a hike along the Bruce Trail from Dundurn Street in Hamilton to Governor's Road in Dundas. It was a sort of connecting pilgrimage that I felt I needed to do at the time, a way of saying, it's not that far, I can walk there. Well, that, and the inviting beauty of the trail that helps transmute the daily noise of living into a long, solitary, and highly enjoyable hike.

I did the same route today, this time a summer walk in glorious sunshine, and it took longer to reach my destination as I was able to linger without the threat of a chill. In all, I was walking for a little over five hours. Well, walking and snacking, taking photos, dipping my feet in a forest stream, stopping for lunch at Sherman Falls, etc., but alone, mostly walking, and trying to be present while letting the stresses of life fall to the wayside.

Not having anyone with me was just right today. Sometimes I just like to set my own pace, and not have to worry about talking or adjusting my response to another's needs. Being able to find your natural rhythm is by definition not a group activity.

The route takes me from Hamilton, through Ancaster, and into Dundas, with distinct natural habitats encountered along the way: deep forest streams, open fields, escarpment bluffs.

When I got to the end of my route through the woods, I went to a bus stop to wait for a ride back to Hamilton; after a few minutes a friend drove by, saw me, and pulled over to offer a ride. It was a great way to break the silence.

How far will you go to improve the city, yourself?

A rash of pedestrian fatalities should heighten the need for re balancing our transportation infrastructure - the physical space required for safe and enjoyable walking routes, for example – but without a forceful response from city hall, the fatalities instead reinforce a negative notion that walking is somehow not a safe option unless isolated on a treadmill.

It does seem that in today's adult world walking has become a specialized act more associated with pure exercise than an option for getting places. A glance at the local school reveals empty bike racks (if there are racks at all), and a generation who rarely walk or cycle to classes when a parent can drive them. Whatever the supposed advantages of a drive-through culture, healthy lifestyles is not one of them.

For successive generations utilitarian walking is fading from consciousness. Between 1969 and 2001 the percentage of students who would walk or cycle to school has dropped almost by 2/3 .

The move from active modes (cycling and walking) to driving have their impact. In her research “KidsWalk: Then and Now,” Christina Kober reports on some alarming trends: in a short 15 year span (1980 to 1995) childhood asthma rates risen from 45.1 per 1,000 to 82 per 1,000, while childhood obesity rates have quadrupled since 1963.

And for parents who drive their kids to school for “safety” reasons, take note: Kober's research reveals that half the kids hit by near schools are by cars driven by parents of students.

School Boards are not helping, the research suggests, as small neighbourhood schools are replaced by larger but more remote schools, increasing children's travel distance. This sort of decision is only thinkable in an automobile-saturated culture.

As the late cultural critic Ivan Illich noted “vehicles had created more distances than they helped to bridge; more time was used by the entire society for the sake of traffic than was 'saved'.”

A road diet for the city to cut the traffic

A man from Hamilton's traffic department is poised at a flip chart, marker in hand. He's frozen, not moving.

David Cohen, a member of the audience at the public meeting, is waiting for his comment to be added to the list on the chart paper.

The man at the chart refuses to move, his Sharpie wilfully restrained from touching the page. He will not, indeed appears incapable of, writing the words on paper.

The words he won't write?

"Hamilton needs more traffic congestion."

Recalling this event, Cohen infuses it with meaning, a metaphor for institutional resistance, resistance frozen in time.

"Since the 1950s, we've created conditions for automobile travel at the expense of other ways of getting around. Congestion was the issue then and is still the issue; so, are we going to do something to make it more convenient to use cars?" he asks rhetorically.

"If history has any meaning, we will only crowd up those streets and expressways with more cars."

In other words, catering to cars hasn't paid off, unless you consider the payoffs to be air pollution, traffic-related deaths and injury (more than 800 fatalities a year in Ontario) and frequently clogged major highways due to "accidents" and traffic volume. Most wouldn't.

To shift the emphasis to other modes of transportation, Cohen advocates creating conditions "more conducive to transit and less conducive to cars."

The way to escape congestion is, counter-intuitively, to take space from automobile traffic and give it to other uses: transit lanes, roadside parking, wider sidewalks, bicycle lanes. Call it a road diet.

Hamilton has a disproportionately high amount of arterial roads and expressways compared to other Ontario cities. We weigh in at second highest with 7.1 "lane metres" per capita. Toronto has 3. So a diet seems in order.

Taking a Robin Hood approach to existing roads, i.e. stealing lanes from cars to give to other modes, would serve to calm traffic (making things slower, thereby safer) while creating the kind of infrastructure needed for intrepid cyclists and transit users to get ahead.