A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

I'm seeing a pattern in my social media spaces right now, where I post some article or opinion piece on climate change and a climate-change denier emerges to comment in that way that the deniers always comment - which is to say, via distraction. It's a technique that people used regularly to try to shut me down back when I was writing newspaper columns and they didn't like what I was saying.  Men and women tend to use the strategy differently in my experience - a man typically diverts by repeatedly asking questions that have nothing to do with the matter at hand, while women will go to an emotional argument that is hot-potato-personal, like the weeping women who called me up after I questioned soaring Caesarean-section rates in Greater Victoria demanding to know if I was suggesting that their babies should have died. It can be surprisingly effective as a tool to completely divert an issue into an irrelevant and useless direction that ultimately ends with the respectiv...

Apart from the sunshine, heat, nice people and good food down here in Honduras, where we are vacationing until March 10, I am mad for the snorkelling. Utila is a small, rustic island (think Hornby Island, if you're from BC) on the Caribbean coast. It's the remarkably less touristy sister island to Roatan, and one of my favourite places in the world for chilling out for a few weeks in the dead of winter and letting go of all those dark thoughts that can plague a person who thinks too much in times like these. Here's a few scenes from the underwater world that I captured while snorkelling three beaches around the island in the last couple of days. The standard trade winds have died right off at the moment - a mixed blessing, because it makes doing underwater videos a little easier, but it also makes things way hotter above the surface, with a bigger chance that bugs are going to bite you. Join me for a flight over Fish City.

Here's a  must-read from the New Yorker on the strange and unsettling ways that social media and mainstream media interact in the modern world to take a thin story involving almost nobody and turn it into a viral phenomenon that actually looks like something big happened. The example of the moment: the uproar over those Covington Catholic High School students. With one side crying racism and the other side saying the Indigenous guy started it, the world quickly divided according to their viewpoints, and everybody got savaged. This think piece takes a step back to reveal that in fact, none of the participants came out looking good when you get beyond the massive media firestorm and take a look at the video footage. Perhaps more importantly, the analysis reveals that the world blew up over an event so small that the reaction is actually the story. Yet that reaction changed nothing, other than to push us all a little farther into our individual perspectives and away from e...

Listening to the conversations of sex workers talking about their work is a privilege for me that lifts me up no matter how low the ways of the world have left me. The dream of capturing those voices for the world to hear started a couple of years ago for me when I did a series of communications workshops for Peers Victoria with indoor workers and was completely captivated by their conversations. It got me wishing for a podcast. We did our first episode in June 2018 and learned a lot, most especially that doing the recording with a single mike in a room comfortable to sex workers is important. We wanted to do a podcast every month but life got in my way in the intervening months, but seven sex workers and sex workers rights activists managed to get together last week to record the second episode. Here it is! The topic this time out is "What do you want the world to know about your work?"  Please suspend whatever you think you know about sex work and have a listen to the...

Graphic credit: Cakeburger.com I'm in a heated Facebook exchange at this very moment with one of those people who don't want to be thought of as a climate-change denier, choosing to position themselves instead as brave challengers of fear-mongering and political correctness. Oh, please. Anyway, I've just been thinking that I'm now writing mini-blogs via my Facebook messages rather than here on my actual blog. While part of me likes the transitory nature of social media, it does make me worry that much of my writing these days is like so much dust in the wind blowing across a social media platform that I'm not even sure I like anymore. So I'm going to glue that Facebook exchange right here, for posterity. Also because I want to make climate change my No. 1 topic for 2019. What other issue possibly matters more than saving the planet from human-caused emissions so that future generations have a healthy, happy place to live that isn't tearing itself apa...

I am rooting like mad for British Columbians to vote in favour of switching our voting system to  proportional representation when the referendum gets underway Oct. 22. But I'm nothing if not a realist, and thus quite worried that people's resistance to change - especially when it requires taking time to understand something that appears dull and technical on the surface - will doom yet another rare opportunity to reform the tired and deeply flawed way that we choose our governments. Still, a person has to try. I want to  share with you here why I will be voting YES , in bolded capital letters and large font. If you're on the fence, I hope you'll have a read and see what resonates. If you support PR already, I hope this piece makes it easier for you to find the information you need to inform others. All of the information you need to understand PR is available on sites like Fair Vote Canada , Elections BC  and Vote PR BC , which is where I've gone for much o...

I like a good analogy for figuring out complex problems with moral overtones. I got to thinking about which one might work for understanding the opioid crisis after I saw the comments from my Facebook post today linking to the BC government’s announcement of a class action law suit against the opioid manufacturing industry. How’s this: Reimagining the issue as if it were the use of pesticides. Like the opioid manufacturing industry, the pesticide industry is both a help and a harm. It makes no sense to just demand the elimination of pesticides, or to expect that people who really want pesticides aren't going to find their way to them whatever you do. Besides, if there’s money to be made selling pesticides to desperate farmers, there are going to be companies selling it. But at the same time, you can’t just leave the industry without responsibility for the harms it causes. Corporations don’t innately have morals (you HAVE seen “ The Corporation ,” right?). Unregulated, un...