When we moved into our house almost 10 years ago the bathing facilities were limited to a tiny closet-sized room with blue shag carpeting that contained a bathtub with a shower-head that came out of the side of the bath. 

Taking a morning shower was a complicated soggy adventure.

And so the first major renovation we made to the house was to punch out the wall between this closet-bath and the actual closet beside it and create an expansive new washroom complete with snazzy (and expansive) shower room.

The new shower is wonderful, but it has one flaw: every couple of months the shower drain gets clogged up, resulting in a week or two of quick-before-the-shower-overflows showers until we get around to clearing the drain.

Our traditional practice in this regard has been to employ Draino or Liquid Plumr: chemical drain cleaners that, while they create a toxic death cloud in the washroom for a while, and require pouring corrosive chemicals down the drain and into the watershed, do an awfully good job of clearing the drain and allowing for a return to languid showers.

Last month the drain clogged up on schedule and I headed over to True Value hardware in the mall to buy some drain cleaner. Given my new-found interest in ecology, I decided to actually read the labels on the drain cleaners, and in doing so got shocked into looking for an alternative: I just couldn’t conscience the idea of pouring that stuff down the drain. “What about the poor oysters?!” I said to myself.

So I returned home with bottle of Nature Clean Drain Cleaner, a product that said on the label it used “enzymes and highly active bacteria” instead of harsh chemicals to clear my drains.

The Nature Clean product worked. Eventually. While the chemical drain cleaners burn through the clogs in an hour or two, it took about 24 hours, two sessions, and some supplemental drain plunging to get the drain clear.  But in the end it was clear, and I was happy to have taken the additional effort.

But then I got to wondering: what exactly are “enzymes and highly active bacteria.”  And is it any less dangerous to pour them down the drain than it is to pour potassium hydroxide down the drain?

So I did some research.  I consulted with my science writer and biophysicist friend Oliver who taught me about what an enzyme is, and how you whip them up.  I consulted with the folks at Nature Clean who wrote back:

Our Nature Clean Drain Cleaner is based on naturally occurring microrganism - bacteria spore concentrate in high numbers. When applied or poured in your drains these bacteria will come in contact with starches, carbohydrates, cellulose, fats, grease and oils and become activated (feeding) thereby producing enzymes - which will gradually break down organic blockage. So it does take longer and it is a very good drain/septic maintainer and completely safe.

And finally I sent a note to the City of Charlottetown’s water and sewer department from which I received a thorough and very helpful reply about the relative merits of various drain cleaners.  What was most helpful, though, was their final suggestion:

The bigger question for me is why would you find it necessary to use such a product? Perhaps there is a problem in your plumbing system which is causing the flow to be obstructed. Is the plumbing that services the fixture visible? I wonder if there is a flat section or a section with reverse grade?

I’m embarrassed to say that it had never occurred to me to consider the issue from this perspective: I’d channeled all my efforts – and the time and energy of helpful others – into finding a better way to do the same old thing.  I never gave any consideration to whether the problem itself, and my approach to it, needed examination.

I thought of this last night when I sat in on the opening of the final session of the City of Charlottetown’s Integrated Community Sustainability Plan process.

Making an “ICSP” is a weird process: rather than something that flowed naturally from a local desire for a more sustainable approach to city governance, it’s part of a carrot-stick procedure required by the federal government for communities to be able to access money from the federal Gas Tax Fund.  Think of it as mandatory driver trainer for someone who’s gotten into a car accident.  Except the “accident” is “not acting in a sustainable manner.”

As is often the case with such exercises, an industry of ICSP consultants has emerged to help communities develop their plans, and last night’s exercise was conducted by consultants from the multi-national firm Stantec that the City of Charlottetown has contracted to lead the ICSP development process.

Last night’s session had all the elements from the modern consultancy toolkit: there were charts of the “pillars of sustainability,” references to “stakeholders,” videos of  a “green CEO” (from Stonyfield Yoghurt), sticky-notes all over the wall, and adhesive dots standing ready for what one participant referred to as “dot-mocracy.”  There was even a time set aside at the beginning for “quiet reflection.”

In other words, it had all the hallmarks of a charade, and none of the hallmarks of something that real people interested in real things might actually ever care about.  That the meeting was attended largely by politicians, public servants and advocacy groups only served to emphasize this.

The fundamental issue, though: the ICSP exercise was focused on finding a better way to clear the drain clog, rather than stepping back and considering why the drain was getting clogged in the first place.

If I’ve learned anything from steeping myself in the 1970s for the past two weeks it’s that sustainability is all about process, not product.

We know exactly what we need to do, technologically, to adjust our systems; the real challenge is the behaviour modification we need to go through to motivate ourselves to implement.  Installing solar panels and biomass-powered furnaces is easy; getting a community to the point where it thinks that’s an important thing to think about is really, really hard.

If Charlottetown is truly concerned about building a sustainable community, the plan should not involve closeting a narrow bunch of “stakeholders” in meeting rooms with “experts” to ferret out whether federal cash should be used to buy more buses, build artist kiosks, or improve storm-sewer quality: that’s simply trying to figure out how to run new programs on the same old operating system.

A truly sustainable community is one that considers how we plan as much as it considers what we’re planning to do.

And, apparently, that’s not an ingredient in the ICSP process: when I asked why all the sticky notes on the wall were about the what and not the how I was told that the “implementation plan” would include recommendations on that front: the consultants would write that up at the end of the process, and that it would be up to the City to figure out the rest.

So here’s what’s going to happen next: the consultants will write up their report and present it to the City and then pack up and go on to their next Gas Tax job.  The City will make a big show of how it’s gone all sustainable; there will be a press conference, and an article in the newspaper with the Mayor holding the new plan.  The Gas Tax money will flow and the money will be spent on things that the City was already planning to spend the money on before this whole process got started.

And while some eco-friendly infrastructure tweaks may results, the community will be no more “sustainable” than when the exercise started.

I don’t know what the path to a sustainable community looks like. 

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve consultants and sticky notes and stakeholders, though.

I suspect it involves a lot of hard work: city councillors fanning out to have real conversations with constituents, hundreds of small meetings in neighbourhoods to talk about actual problems and solutions, work in the schools to involve all ages in developing plans and ideas. It will takes strong, informed, passionate leaders to get out in front of the process and point the way.  It will take a long time and won’t involve a lot of money – qualities that take it outside the comfort zone of our traditional approach to planning – and a willingness to experiment with new ways of making plans, making decisions, and getting things done.

Sustainability isn’t a snap-on feature that you can add to a community, it’s an approach to living in community. 

Until we stop seeing a bunch of drains that need unclogging in every more inventive ways we’re never going to get there.

We need to step back and open our minds to the possibility that the solution might lie in rearranging the plumbing: re-framing the problems, not banging harder on the solutions.

Cross-posted to climatechange.thinkaboutit.eu.

Six months after the filming of Ten Days in September, the National Film Board came back to Prince Edward Island, in March of 1969, to film the follow-up The Prince Edward Island Development Plan, Part 2: Four Days in March.

Del Gallagher, who featured prominently in the first film, has now left his position at the Economic Improvement Corporation (EIC), the details of the Comprehensive Development Plan have been worked out, and the film opens with the reading of the Speech from the Throne by Lieutenant Governor Hon. Willibald Joseph MacDonald that announced that the Plan would be introduced during the session:

The centre of this film, however, is the debate over how the plan is to be implemented, and this focuses discussions at the Rural Development Council and an interview with a farmer-member of the National Farmers Union:

The film closes with an excerpt of a CBC Television interview with Hon. Alex Campbell, Premier, and Hon. Jean Marchand, minister in the Canadian government responsible for regional development:

It’s interesting to contrast the federal proposal to drop education from the Plan, that was hotly debated in the first film, became, in the final Plan, 60% of the spending.

You can order the film on DVD from the National Film Board or find it in the Media Centre in the Robertson Library at UPEI.

Digging deeper into Prince Edward Island’s Comprehensive Development Plan, I’ve come across The Prince Edward Island Development Plan: Ten Days in September, a 1969 National Film Board film.  The filmmakers set down on Prince Edward Island for 10 days in September of 1968 and filmed the players involved in the Development Plan, and what emerges is both a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the plan’s mechanics, and an uncommonly rich look into late-1960s society on the Island.

You can order a DVD of the film from the National Film Board; it’s also in the media center at the Robertson Library.  It’s a very well-made film, and required-viewing for anyone who wants to understand more about that era.

Here are some clips to whet your appetite; first, a look at the research process behind the plan:

Lincoln Dewar, from the PEI Federation of Agriculture, talks a Island agriculture:

Hon. Alex Campbell introduces Del Gallagher, the man hired to shepherd the Plan:

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.