When you start poking around in 1970s history in Prince Edward Island as I have been, you can’t ignore the Comprehensive Development Plan, the 1969 federal-provincial agreement, negotiated by the government of then-Premier Hon. Alex Campbell, that sought to transform, with federal dollars, almost every aspect of Island life.

I arrived on the Island in 1993. The days of the Development Plan were over, but its wake was certainly evident. And being an “expert” from Upper Canada as I was – 26 years old and full of piss and vinegar – I had to work awfully hard not to get tarred with the Development Plan brush (Alan MacEachern, in his book on the Institute of Man and Resources, writes “To say that Islanders did not take well to the Plan is an understatement”).

In the Robertson Library Media Centre I came across a videotape of a 1978 CBC Television program on the Development Plan: an episode of the show Thursday Night hosted by Linden MacIntyre looked at the Plan ten years on, and MacIntyre interviewed people like MP David MacDonald, Eastern Graphic editor Jim MacNeill, farmer Walter Dingwell and Premier Alex Campbell.  Here’s a clip:

You can download the entire 28-minute episode (324 MB Quicktime) for the entire story.

I’ve known Hon. Richard Brown since he was a city councillor in Charlottetown in the 1990s; later on our work lives overlapped when he was working as a systems engineer in the public service and I was working with government on its website.  Today he’s both the Member of the Legislative Assembly for my district in downtown Charlottetown and the Minister of Environment, Energy and Forestry.

As part of my climate change blogging project, I sat down with Minister Brown yesterday at his office in the Jones Building for a conversation about climate change and renewable energy on Prince Edward Island.

You can watch the video of the interview, Energy and Climate Change on Prince Edward Island: Hon. Richard Brown; it’s long, and we ramble around a lot, but watch the whole thing and you’ll get a good handle on the current government’s take on climate change, renewable energy options for PEI, and how the Island is planning to work within the Atlantic region on longer-term energy projects.

The Iceland Tourist Board is using the upcoming closure of the country’s three McDonald’s franchises as a tourism marketing opportunity:

Iceland is set to lose all three of its McDonald’s locations, all in Reykjavik. Frankly, it always puzzled us why people would want a Big Mac anyway, what with world class gourmet restaurants on every block, the freshest seafood on the planet, and the water – don’t get us started on how crisp, clean and pure the water is.

When all else fails, play to your strengths, whatever they may be.

I moved into my office on Fitzroy Street in the fall of 2003; it wasn’t too long after that that construction on what insiders called the GOCB – Government of Canada Building – and what we now know as the Jean Canfield Building, got started across the street.  Watching the building’s pieces come together every day a little more gave me an unusual look at how a building comes together; the fact that the building was designed to be unusually energy efficient meant that this involved as much “watching solar panels get hoisted onto the roof” and “watching the green roof get installed” as “watching the concrete trucks in action.”

The building officially opened and 2008, but despite my daily proximity to it I’d never gone further than the lobby, and while I had a vague sense, from the news and from the obvious things like the solar panels, of its energy efficiency, I knew nothing of the details.

The building was designed by a partnership of local firm BGHJ and the multinational firm HOK.  Locally, architect Larry Jones was the lead for BGHJ, and as he’s been on the project for almost a decade, he knows an awful lot not only about the Canfield building specifically, but about what it takes to design a building with energy efficiency as a primary design goal.

Larry generously arranged to take me on a tour of the Jean Canfield Building last week – a “cook’s tour” if you will – and I was shooting video as we toured.  The result is Design with Energy in Mind: Jean Canfield Building. We start at the top of the building beside the solar panels, and then move inside to learn about the air handling and lighting systems and the green roof, and finish up at the “pocket park” outside to discuss how BGHJ got involved, and what it takes to make a “green building.”

I had an interesting conversation this afternoon with Mike Proud.  Mike is the Manager of the Prince Edward Island Office of Energy Efficiency, the provincial agency charged with helping Islanders reduce our energy consumption. Mike’s got a good handle on the Island’s energy profile, and way in which we can use our energy more efficiently. Watch the video of our interview.

As part of my Notes from The Last Time series I sat down last week with Kirk Brown for a conversation about Prince Edward Island, energy, the Institute of Man and Resources, and what lessons we learned from the 1970s energy crisis that we might apply today.

Kirk was the Director of Research for the Institute of Man and Resources, moving to Prince Edward Island after working with the Ontario Research Foundation and, before that, with Exxon.  He knows as much about Prince Edward Island’s energy needs as anyone you’ll ever meet.

Watch our interview in Notes from The Last Time: Kirk Brown and the Institute of Man and Resources.

As part of my work on my climate change blogging project I started to look at climate change policy here on Prince Edward Island. This led me to look into energy and sustainability policy on the Island historically, and this search inevitably led me to learn more about the Institute of Man and Resources and The Ark, two projects that arose, more or less, in reaction to the 1973 energy crisis that saw world oil prices quadruple in a single season.

I immediately found two excellent resources in the collection of the Robertson Library: The Institute of Man and Resources, and Environmental Fable, by Alan MacEachern, is a thoughtful history of the Institute and and the personalities behind it; A Safe and Sustainable World: The Promise of Ecological Design, by Nancy Jack Todd, provides a good summary of the work of The New Alchemy Institute, including its work on The Ark.

After making short work of these two helpful resources, I realized that many of the players involved in the two efforts were still here – indeed several of them are friends or colleagues, although in some cases I didn’t realize this – and I resolved to seek them out and interview them about that time, about their role, and about whether there are lessons about technology, design, political or organization that we might take from the Institute and The Ark and apply to today.

Fortunately, I found a receptive audience for my requests, and I’ve spent the last week fiddling with tripods, learning the ins and outs of my tiny video camera, and trying to learn how to conduct interviews and edit the results.  Several pieces are still in the editing room, but I’ve now completed the first two:

• Notes from The Last Time: The Architect and The Ark is an interview with architect David Bergmark, who, with partner Ole Hammarlund, designed The Ark.  As David says in the interview, he “came to Prince Edward Island for the weekend and stayed for 35 years,” and while I’ve known David for a long time, I’d never heard him tell the story of how he came to be involved with the project, nor his thoughts about it looking back on its wake.  I was happy to get the chance.
• In Notes from The Last Time: Andy Wells and The Institute of Man and Resources I interviewed Andy Wells.  I’d spoken to Andy on the phone several times over the years, and his wife Lynne Douglas has worked on projects with my partner Catherine, but this was my first face-to-face meeting with Andy.  As principal secretary to then-Premier Alex Campbell, Andy was a driving force in moving Prince Edward Island toward an exploration of renewable energy; as director of the Institute of Man and Resources he headed an ambitious effort to transform the Island’s energy economy.  I visited Andy in his beautiful pond-side home in Hazel Grove – Alan MacEachern quotes him as describing it as his “private bioshelter” – and we had a wide-ranging conversation about the Institute and its work, and whether the conditions that gave rise to it are likely to reoccur.

After a week of talking about “the last time,” I’ve come away with one overwhelming realization: our challenges responding to the climate crisis are not technological, they are social and political. 

We know all we need to know to be able to address our energy needs in a less climate-impacting way right now.  We’ve known it for a long time.  

The issue is not what we need to do, but how we’re able to do it. 

By 1980 The Ark project had come to an end and the Institute of Man and Resources hobbled along, poorly funded, until 1990.  Each owes its demise to a different set of circumstances; the lack of political will to keep these projects going, however, and the internal and external struggles each wrestled with, are cautionary tales for how we can best marshal our resources and talents to address climate change today. 

Similarly, the successes these projects did achieve suggest that, when the stars align properly, world-changing activity can happen right here in Prince Edward Island: for a all-too-brief time in 1976 the Island was a world leader in energy and sustainability research and the focus of considerable attention by all manner of influential thinkers in this area.

I’ve another week of interviews coming up, so stay tuned for more.

The Prince Edward Island media intelligentsia has been all aflutter for the past several weeks over the admittance to and subsequent expulsion of local blogger from the Legislative Assembly’s Press Gallery. Following on from the original story there’s been a column in the local newspaper and a panel discussion on the local morning radio show.

The common thread running through these discussions has been a tacit assumption that blogging is sort of “journalism lite.”

Guardian Editor Gary Macdougall used the phrase “hobby journalists” to describe what bloggers do, and underlying the CBC panel discussion was the notion that we all need to consume this stuff called “the news” and that there’s a battle between bloggers and journalists to see who’s going to deliver it in the future.

But these bloggers vs. journalists debates set up a false dichotomy: in straining to compare blogging to journalism commentators are making the mistake of assuming that because bloggers and journalists both “write about things,” they are, of necessity, somehow part of the same enterprise.  

Comparing journalists to bloggers is like comparing journalists to poets or novel writers or songwriters or graffiti artists or priests: yes, we all interpret the human condition in our own peculiar ways, but the blogger is no more treading on the domain of a journalist than the poet is.

I’m a committed and passionate blogger: it’s deeply woven into the fabric of how I live. But the exciting thing about blogging for me is not its perceived abilities to “recast the news landscape,” it’s the notion that regular everyday citizens have, in the Internet, a publishing platform the likes of which we’ve never seen: low cost, low barrier to entry, global distribution of words and images.

And what’s exciting about that has nothing to do with the product and everything to do with the process. 

What happens when, for all intents and purposes, everyone has a printing press and a television studio and is responsible to no entity but their own conscience when using it? How does that change public discourse? How does that change how people think about themselves in relation to society’s institutions? In a world where anyone can publish anything at any time, how do we attach value to our own small bit of the dialogue?

By obsessing on the “market for content,” we’re missing that the tranformational aspect of these “new media” isn’t about consumption but rather about production: what happens when we’re all free to create in ways that have heretofore been beyond the means of the common person?

Who cares what gets created – that’s simply the by-product – the heart of the matter is how it’s created, who is creating it, and what doing so does to them.

Obviously journalists need to be part both of interpreting this and considering its implications for what they do. But so do school children and portrait painters and guitar players and choreographers and ecologists.

I am not a journalist. 

The words I write in this space I write for myself alone, without consideration for their consumption.  I write about things that happen to me, things that interest me, things that happen in my neighbourhood and things that happen in the world. 

If you happen to read what I write here, that’s great, but I’m not writing for you, and while I may be interested in your reaction to what I write, this blog is not about you, or what I’m writing about. It’s about how my life is enhanced by the very fact of writing itself.

That’s not journalism.

And because you have to be inside it to truly understand it, it’s not something that’s easily hashed out in a David vs. Goliath-style morning radio debate or a journalist’s newspaper column.

Should bloggers be able to join the Press Gallery? That’s no more than a bureaucratic diversion: the real and profound questions concern whether an engaged population of producers actually needs a Legislative Assembly at all.

Mila May Rukavina, born October 26, 2009. 8 pounds, 3 ounces.  Mila and her parents [[Jodi]] and [[Johnny]] are all doing well. The plan to populate Prince Edward Island with little Rukavinas continues.

Simple Ideas that Make Sense: Borrow an Electric Meter from the Library.