Sammy's Dot

I’m going to venture a wild guess, here: if you’re a psychologist, or a psychology student, terms like collectivist and individualist are very, very familiar. (So familiar you may be sick of hearing about the explanatory power of these concepts. So familiar that it seems like everything is being divided up into these two categories.) If you’re not into psychology, you can probably still make an accurate stab at what the two terms mean, but might not guess that they actually do seem to be useful ways to categorize (and explain!) our values and beliefs and behaviours. Since I was a psychology student, and I’m very interested in why different people behave in different ways when it comes to environmental problems, I was really fascinated to hear about the work that Donald Braman has been doing, along with Dan Kahan and a number of colleagues. (Kahan looks to be the principal investigator and I’m citing it as such, but I first heard of it listening to an interview with Braman in the course of an Ideas podcast.)

Their paper on the results of the Second National Risk and Culture Study, publicly available (in PDF format) from The Social Science Research Network, reviews several areas of public policy in which people’s willingness to accept seemingly objective facts turned out to be strongly associated with their cultural orientation.

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I’m taking a class called Environment and Health right now. It’s a pretty fascinating class, but we watch a documentary in just about every session that leaves me shaking with rage. A story like this one illustrates why.

The article outlines the case of Ed Abney, who is suffering from Parkinson’s – along with 27 co-workers, all of whom were exposed to trichloroethelyne, which has now been linked to neurological damage similar to that seen in Parkinson’s. However, the conclusive link has only been demonstrated in rats, and it is not possible for researchers to reconstruct a history of Mr. Abney’s exposure to trichloroethelyne and possibly other chemicals over several decades of work.

I think that to most people, looking at the situation, it is obvious that Mr. Abney’s illness was caused by his documented exposure to trichlorothelyne. The clear evidence that it causes Parkinson’s-like symptoms in rats, plus the number of similarly exposed co-workers with similiar symptoms, suggests that trichloroethelyne is a dangerous substance. Mr. Abney and his co-workers should be compensated for the injuries that they suffered on the job, and use of the chemical should be eliminated wherever possible, and strictly controlled if it is too essential in some industries to eliminate immediately.

However, if you’re a scientist – and I have nothing against scientists or the scientific method – it’s not so clear that trichloroethelyne is causing Parkinson’s in humans, especially in humans who have probably been exposed to an entire cocktail of chemicals over many years. The study described in the linked article was a small one, and though the correlation is clear, it’s not unequivocal evidence of causation. It’s probable, but it’s not possible to say for sure.

If you’re a lawyer, particularly a lawyer for the companies that manufacture and use these chemicals, well, perfect: the scientists can’t say that exposure to this chemical definitely caused these symptoms, and in both Canada and the US, most laws follow the principle that a substance is safe until it is proven to be harmful, which is a difficult task.

In the meantime, workers will continue to be exposed to chemicals that are almost certainly harmful, either by themselves or in combination. Air, water, and soil will continue to be polluted with substances that are likely harmful, but not absolutely proven to be so, and humans, animals, and plants far from the industries in question will also be exposed.

Scientific standards are vital, but when it comes to making environmental and workplace policy, the precautionary principle should apply if there is evidence that correlates a substance with harm. That approach can always be reversed at a later date if future research findings do not bear out the correlation, but it is much, much harder to do a reversal if we continue to use chemicals that are probable, but not proven, toxins until the proof rolls in. We are running a very large and uncontrolled experiment on our entire population, and we cannot go back to the way things were if the results turn out not to our liking.

Better safe than sorry, as some like to say.

There’s a customer who comes in to my workplace regularly and likes to chat. She’s just a bit prejudiced. She’s been talking, loudly, for the past year, about how inexperienced and unelectable Obama is.

If I see her today, I may not be able to restrain myself from asking, “so how ’bout that John McCain, eh?”

As soon as I start to think about parks and conservation, I start to get all tangled up in guilt. Just about everything I’ve read this year that has discussed parks has raised this problem.

I suspect – or at least, I hope – that most of the people advocating for greater conservation in Canada are also wrestling with guilt, because setting aside land is not as simple as it sounds on paper.

Economic impact is an important problem, of course, especially in Canada, where there are still many towns based around a single industry, usually an extractive one. However, the questions about who can access designated parks, and what kinds of activity can be permitted in designated parks (leaving aside logging and mining, both of which are permitted in parks across this country), strikes me as more pernicious, because they are more forgettable. Nonetheless, the way we as a society answer those questions can have a major impact on how much land is protected, and where that land is, and how effective the protection is.

For example, I currently have access to a car, and the financial means to go camping a few times a year; it’s easy for me to visit Ontario’s parks (assuming my designated driver feels like roughing it for a bit, at least). I’m all for designating more lands strictly as parks, with restricted access for camping and hiking and no extractive industry. But I’m lucky, and it’s easy for me to forget that it’s a luxury to be able to agitate for more land to be set aside for me to pursue an activity I enjoy. If I didn’t have the financial means to consider leaving town for a weekend, and easy access to transportation, well, I doubt that it would be important to me whether or not there were public parks available.

Part of the answer to this is that we need to encourage people to think about the ecosystems that are around where they live. In this view, the David Dunlop Observatory lands should be understood to be as important as a place like High Park. Spaces that are in the middle of cities are always going to be more significantly impacted by human activity, but they can still serve as habitats and as nodes in a network of wildlife corridors; they can still be places where indigenous ecosystems can be preserved. The only difference between these two parks is that one is an official park and is not under threat, and one is owned by a developer, and the deer and birds do not pay rent.

It’s still important to agitate for strong protection of undeveloped wilderness, but I think that part of the answer to the problem of who is able to enjoy nature is to remember that nature is all around us, if we permit it to be. We need to petition for a policy to encourage large city parks with a range of natural habitats, linked wherever possible by greenbelts.

Now that the holidays are over, and the baking and preserving is finished, and I’ve splurged on a third bookshelf and rearranged my books to be layered two-deep instead of three (discovering a number of duplicates in the process), I finally have some time to settle in and read some of the new aquisitions. Two in particular are fascinating: Unbuilt Toronto and HTO. Both are worthy of a review, but I’ll concentrate on HTO in this post.

HTO (Wayne Reeves and Christina Palassio, eds.) is both a history and a geography of water in Toronto, but is also a collection of essays about local exploration, water use, engineering, and architecture. Among other things. I’ve been racing through it, but I’ll be going back to re-read it again.

The essays are full of interesting facts about Toronto (mammoth bones uncovered at Bathurst and Dupont? who knew?), but more importantly, in explaining and discussing the history of the construction of the city, the authors challenge their readers to consider how dramatically we’ve changed the land around us, and whether that can be sustainable. There’s no blanket condemnation of the watercourse diversions and burials that have taken place since the 1800s, but there is a lot of discussion as to how we can achieve the same goal of a safe water supply for humans while allowing space for wildlife to survive. Several of the essays are also concentrated on the interaction between humans and the waters we live around, both physically and culturally. This emphasis on the many dimensions of the value of water, whatever its form, seems like the right approach to me.

While reading this book, I was also struck by how little I know about the city I’ve lived in for years. I know the major streets and the neighbourhoods I’ve lived in pretty well – but on the other hand, I used to live only a few minutes away from the Riverdale Park, and I’ve been there only a couple of times, and I don’t know the Western waterfront at all. I’ve mostly seen the Don River from the Queen Street bridge and the subway. I think I’ll be using HTO as a guide for exploration (though I won’t go as far as the urban infiltrators who explored and photographed some of the city’s storm sewers – I do think that’s an activity that people should be cautious about) as much as an information source. If everyone who reads it feels the same way I do, the book’s most important effect is going to be the number of people who start really getting to know their home.

This is a book I’ll be coming back to for ideas and information on a regular basis.

Let me start by saying that this story is really a tempest in a teapot. Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale is a brutal depiction of an ugly future and this is surely not the first complaint about it; I do not think that the Toronto District School Board will be banning it in response to this one. In fact, every board in the country has probably had more than a few since the book was first taught in high school English classes. However, this particular parent’s complaint happens to be in the news at the moment; I happen to have strong opinions on limiting exposure to good books; and I don’t want to get sucked into the stupidity that infects the Toronto Star commenting system.

So: the gist of Mr. Edwards’ complaint appears to be that he finds the novel obscene, and is offended by what he perceives as condemnation of his religion. Both of these complaints are poor arguments for preventing children from reading the book.

Mr. Edwards seems to think that by telling his sons that there are words they should not say, they will choose not to say them; by telling them that there are thoughts that are wrong, they will not think them; by telling them that some actions are evil, they will not commit them. To a point, this might be true – though he might be shocked by the language he hears in the hallway of any high school in Toronto – but how deep does the obedience go? How will his sons respond if they are challenged to break the rules, and the only support for the rules is his word?

By challenging readers with a world in which some of the rules that currently exist in our society have become exaggerated and twisted and backed by overwhelming force, Atwood demands that those rules be questioned. The book also provides a depth of understanding for the reasons behind other, perhaps competing, sets of rules. Someone who reads The Handmaid’s Tale might conclude that it is wrong to accept a religious justification for the subjugation and abuse of women, and they might also conclude, having experienced Offred’s life as a Handmaid, that the laws that demand equality are necessary to prevent injustice. Perhaps, if they also read the afterward, they might see that the small injustices of sexism do their own damage. Perhaps, having read the book and empathized with the results of sexism, they might understand why some words are harmful and should not be used, why some thoughts are unjust and should be challenged, why some actions are evil. Perhaps, having read a book that challenges their own concept of morality, they will build a stronger base for moral action in the future.

I have never understood why some people seem to think that by refusing to challenge their beliefs, they will be stronger, and I have never understood why preventing children and young adults from thinking about their beliefs will make the world a better place. No one would throw a child into a totalitarian world and leave him to fend for himself to learn what will happen. Fiction allows us to explore the possible consequences of our actions, individually and as a society, without actual harm, and with that exploration we have the opportunity to apply what we’ve learned to our lives.