Don't Get Scared, Get Effective: A Linked-Up Guide to Doing Something About Your Personal Carbon Footprint

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The frightening realities of the global climate crisis have me looking for ways to reduce my personal impact. For those of you trying to do the same, this one's for you. (And for those of you still denying there's a problem, feel free to stop reading now and fire off an uninformed comment, and I will feel free to not read it.)

I was stunned to learn recently that there's a view out there that people shouldn't have to take personal responsibility for their carbon outputs, because the climate crisis is the fault of corporations and governments and must be left to them to fix.

Seriously? There is absolutely no way to mitigate the effects of climate change without taking personal action. Corporations exist because we feed them. Governments exist because we elect them. This one's all about us - collectively and individually. I am right there in rage with those who are fed up with corporate greed and government paralysis, but it's each and every one of us who has to step up to fix the damaging and damaged society we're becoming. (Did anyone else notice how much Boris Johnson looks like Donald Trump from the back?)

It's pretty damn daunting to even consider how to get a grip on this crisis, I admit. I would love to be able to blame this one on someone, and leave them to clean up the mess. But like that little cartoon possum Pogo used to say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." If you really want to end bad government and hurt evil corporations, then it's about getting a grip on rampant consumerism and electing better people (and with better electoral processes).

Where to begin? The first step is in finding the tools to help us understand our personal carbon footprint so we can take action to reduce what we can and offset what we can't.

Today's Guardian piece on that very subject is a good place to start, though go into this exercise knowing that many people are already trying to figure out how to make money from your privileged North American guilt. (You have to hand it to capitalism - it's always there first.) Do a lot of research before you start donating to a cause promising to use your money on projects aimed at making you feel less guilty about your carbon-heavy lifestyle.

Plus if we're actually going to get serious about reducing our individual footprints, we'll need to put more skin in the game than merely sending money to some random organization promising to plant trees or start a hydro-electric project in our honour. There is so much that we can each do that will have real impact. Take a browse through these telling emission charts to see that while Canada may not be topping the charts globally in our carbon emissions, we are right up there with the United States in our per-capita emissions. We only look good at the global level because we have a small population.

Travel that involves flying gives me particular guilt. Now I see why. Using the handy-dandy flight calculator in that Guardian story, I learned that my flight from Vancouver to London and back this spring meant I personally generated more than 1.3 tonnes of CO2 just from that trip. There are 67 countries where the average person doesn't emit that much in an entire year. Yikes.

Then I tripped on over to the Offsetters site to expand that search (I couldn't get the first search to identify Bucharest as an option, which was our final destination). Their calculator put me at three tonnes for the return trip from Vancouver to Bucharest, with a stopover in London. (You may need to calculate total distances for your flights for some of the sites, so here's a place to do that.)

Seeing as the global goal is to reduce everyone on Earth's average per-capita carbon footprint to 1.8 tonnes by 2050, the extent of the challenge is obvious. I'm well over my annual allowance just from one holiday flight, and I haven't even begun to add in all the other emissions resulting from my day-to-day life.

Fortunately, Columbia University has a calculator to help me calculate those emissions, and a list of 35 simple ways to reduce my carbon footprint. They suggest this site for calculating your footprint.

My partner and I have an bit of an unusual lifestyle in that we live in other people's spaces as permanent housesitters, so we're already doing pretty good on a lot of these. Moving to a new house every 3-4 weeks turns out to be an excellent mechanism for keeping your stuff to a minimum. We live in other people's spaces, which also serves to reduce our impact.

But we do love to travel. We still need to do better in all of these 35 areas if we hope to offset a joy that we aren't prepared to give up.

We adopted a "flexitarian" eating regimen earlier this year that for the most part eliminates meat. That was mostly because we realized we could no longer bear the hypocrisy of eating creatures made to suffer from their earliest days so that we can eat their deeply unhappy flesh and consume their breast milk. I'm happy that it also coincides with efforts to reduce my carbon footprint.

I've talked to a surprising number of people who are really worried about the climate crisis but at the same time kind of shrug their shoulders in a "What can one person do?" way when they talk about it. We can actually do quite a lot, and in fact will have to if we want to steer this Titanic away from the rocks. And it's going to hurt, because humans just don't change until it hurts.

We need to be priced out of our cars. We need to be regulated into improving the energy efficiences of our homes. We need development that accounts for changing climate and the energy efficiences of renovating rather than tearing down and rebuilding. We need to curb our rampant consumption, and quit buying vehicles that look like they're armed for the zombie apocalypse when we're really just driving from Oak Bay to downtown. (Read this strangely radical Globe opinion piece on making do.)

We need every level of government to get its act together and do what's good for the planet rather than take it easy on their electorate in hopes of another victory. We need to quit electing governments that pander to the completely unreasonable beliefs of uninformed people. (Fascinating that "conservative" is now attached to a social ideology that doesn't view climate change as a big concern.)

I was changed forever by a year and a half of doing communications for the University of Victoria. My work introduced me to a lot of climate scientists. What they knew scared the hell out of me, and shook me out of that paralysis that I think so many of us are in on this one.

The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions at UVic has some great research here, in accessible language. Through my conversations with climatologist Frances Zwiers at the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, I came to understand the challenges scientists face when trying to determine whether it's climate change or just a weird weather event, but that there's still a lot that can be done to mitigate the issues either way.

Francis also introduced me to this marvelous site, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction. They work on behalf of the insurance industry. I can get lost for hours in their fascinating and well-researched reports.

Good luck to all of us. It won't be easy. But who would you rather be, that person in the disaster movie whose reaction to the terrifying asteroid headed for Earth is to freeze up and do nothing, or the determined one who reaches deep and takes action? The Arctic is melting, for pete's sake. Do your part.

Things we saw: Road trip in Eastern Europe

Town square at Piatra Neamt, Romania

Loved, loved, loved our three-week road trip through Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria in May and June. I came home with hundreds of photos, but also a bunch of video clips that I had no real plan for but we collected anyway. Glad we did, because the resulting half-hour video really captures the trip beautifully. A lot of the shots are out the front window of the car as we drove along, and captured the scenes that really call up memories of a place but often don't make it into your photo gallery.

We used Google Maps to guide us. Mostly it was just plain wonderful to have that service, because otherwise we would have been constantly lost. (We learned right at the start of our trip that Priority 1 upon arriving in any country was to get a local SIM card in our phones.) But it also took us on some of the strangest routes - often not the big freeways, which I was grateful for, but sometimes true backwaters that looked like they weren't even real roads.  And every now and then on a big freeway, we lost serious time when Googleova couldn't figure out what to do about a detour or major construction at an interchange, and sent us down the wrong road with no way to fix the error until the next exit - which in some cases was 30 kilometres down the road.

This video is recommended viewing for anyone who loves road trips but hasn't been on one for far too long, for no particular reason but just because they kind of forgot how much they love them. Watching this made me want to get back on the road all over again.

Journalism 101: Winning awards is one thing, consistent and solid local coverage is something else

Advice to Phillip Crawley, or any other boss poised to cut $10 million in salaries, none of which involves their own job: Don't try to dress that up as a positive thing.

 Yes, the Globe and Mail's reporting staff of 250 does seem unbelievably luxurious in the eyes of any other slashed-to-bits Canadian newsroom. And yes, I'm sure those who remain after this latest round of cuts announced this week will still do their best to maintain quality journalism.

But Crawley - G&M publisher - came across as tone-deaf, insensitive and pretty damn unaware of newsroom realities in the J-Source story about the coming cuts at Canada's national newspaper. Defending the cuts, he chose to cite the recent National Newspaper Awards win of the St. Catherines Standard with a skeletal staff of five reporters (down from 49 after years of cuts) as an example of how quality reporting doesn't require quantity.

Here's the thing: Sure, a newsroom with almost nobody left to do reporting might still be able to win a National Newspaper Award once in a while. But can it cover the non-award-worthy daily grind of local news that readers actually care about? Not a chance.

I only have to reflect back on my own time as managing editor of the Victoria Times Colonist in the mid-1990s, presiding over a newsroom staff still large enough that we were able to cover all the regular council meetings of Greater Victoria's 13 municipalities, and even keep an eye on the three school boards in the region. Oh, those were the days.

Nobody wins national awards for the quotidian coverage of council and school board. But those kinds of stories are the lifeblood of a good local newspaper. Those are the stories that keep councils mindful of their actions, citizens aware of what their municipalities are up to, and maintain a general sense of news coverage that stays on top of the local scene.

What is being lost in the ongoing cuts to mainstream media is average "beat" reporting. It's the kind of reporting that keeps politicians on track and citizens in the loop. It's the unremarkable yet critically important foundation to democracy. And nobody has been able to figure out how to make it happen in the new age of digital media that no one wants to pay for.

What to do? Worry, I'd say. Subscribe to the daily newspapers that matter to you, though subscription costs seem very much out of whack with the sad-looking products that pass for daily newspapers these days. And I'm sure you'll have noticed already that local news coverage is a shadow of its former self compared to what it was back in what I now think of as the golden era (though cuts were already happening even 20 years ago), because it's the coverage that costs the most.

Do send donations to the digital news sources that you rely on, because quality journalism simply can't exist without somebody paying. The Tyee online newspaper fundraises to hire reporters for specific local issues - better than nothing for sure, but not able to sustain a fleet of reporters grinding it out on the unsexy but essential coverage of daily life in our communities.

So ignore guys like Crawley when they tell you that a $10 million cut in newsroom staffing isn't going to hurt the quality of journalism. He's wrong.

On sex work, 'trafficking,' and sloppy journalism that causes harm

Red Umbrella March - courtesy of Peers Victoria

This piece of mine started as a total rant that I imagined going on my blog or perhaps a BC newspaper. But for various reasons I ended up sending it to the editor of JSource, the website for the Canadian Journalism Project. And here it is, hot off the press today, rewritten into less rant-like style but better because of it.

***

The Edmonton Journal ran a series on sex trafficking in March. At least, that’s what the headlines said, even though none of the sex workers in the piece were actually being trafficked and nobody was charged with trafficking.

Some might say those two details kind of cancel out the premise of the series.

But I’ve been taking in news coverage of sex work for a long time, and dressing up a story to look like something that it isn’t is tragically common. It’s as if all the usual journalistic instincts to present a fair story and get the facts go out the window when somebody says “sex trafficking.”

Not that I’m in favour of sex trafficking, of course. But I’m an activist for the rights of adult sex workers. Their efforts to secure even the most basic human and workers’ rights in Canada are harmed immeasurably by an abundance of sloppy, biased reporting that lazily assumes sex trafficking and sex work are interchangeable terms.

It’s the kind of journalism that never asks the hard questions and denies sex workers a voice. It doesn’t do its homework. It knows how the story will go before the first interview has even begun. That story is always about shattered victims and evil exploiters, and the good police and earnest community people who rescue innocents from this awful work that no one in their right mind would choose.

And if the truth is something different than that? Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be something that journalists, as a whole, concern themselves with on this issue.

Our profession has a reputation for skepticism and doubt. Hallelujah for that. But something about issues with a moral aspect to them - sex work and trafficking, illicit drug use, migrant issues - shuts down journalists' normal way of approaching a story. 

We let people make outrageous statements with no proof. We make little effort to check whether there might be more sides to the story. We presume inaccessibility to anyone who actually works in or is directly affected by the story we’re looking into, and so we don’t even try to get their comments.

For sex work, the result of that is the perpetuation of myths that let our country keep on justifying the denial of basic rights to legal workers.

Myths that sex trafficking is a big problem in North America. (In 2017, more than 1.9 million crimes were reported by Canadian police. Forty-five involved sex trafficking  – down from 68 in the previous year, and 61 in the year before that.)

Myths that we have statistics proving claims that it’s a big problem. (The 2018 Trafficking in Persons global report notes that Canada “did not provide comprehensive data on investigations, prosecutions and convictions from all jurisdictions,” nor on the number of victims.)

Myths that any sex worker who denies being trafficked is just covering up to protect an exploiter. (Using the theory of a “trauma bond” that prevents victims from turning on their captors, the law in Canada can consider you a victim of trafficking regardless of whether you agree, and as such becomes a tool that’s easily turned against garden-variety adult sex work.)

Myths that police raids are an effective, efficient, respectful way of dealing with the sex industry. (After many complaints from sex workers of harassment by police, Vancouver’s Supporting Women’s Alternative Network took the unusual step in 2017 of writing to the RCMP to urge them to stop Operation Spotlight, an anti-trafficking campaign targeting sex workers: “This strategy is one that is based on deception and manipulation. These actions foster distrust and adversarial relationships with law enforcement. Pulling people out of the sex industry without their consent and penalizing those who do not agree to exit the sex industry does not ‘save’ or ‘rescue’ them.”)

The Journal’s series provides a recent and painful example.

The reporter was essentially embedded with the Edmonton police for the purposes of the story. Police posed as clients and responded to online ads placed by workers. They then showed up at the worker’s hotel room or whatever she was working – journalist in tow – to ask her deeply personal, intimate questions that ought to be nobody’s business once everyone is a consenting adult.

(It’s unclear what indicators police used to determine who to target, but for at least one worker featured in the story, it was because the photo she used in her ad made her look underage. She wasn’t.)

So there’s the worker, wearing a “tiny black silk robe” when she opens the hotel room door to what she thinks is a client and it turns out to be the police and a journalist.  “We’re here for your benefit,” Det. Dan Duiker assures her. “We’re not here to bust your balls. When you are co-operative with us, hopefully we can be of assistance to you if you ever need it.”

The journalist features Duiker’s comments prominently in his story. But there’s not a word given over to the young woman being humiliated and shamed in front of everybody. (Like, maybe I’d have asked, “Hey, does this feel like ‘assistance’ to you?”)

Imagine the public outcry if any other Canadian worker was subjected to this treatment – forced to be the voiceless, unwitting poster child for an issue that has nothing to do with you, because you’re not being trafficked. All is revealed to readers: what you’re wearing, where you’re from (this woman was from Quebec, an apparent “hotbed” of sex trafficking), how much you earn, who you contract with, whether you have a pimp.

The journalist then turned for external verification to the very organization that had not only partnered with Edmonton police for the raids, but takes the position that most people doing sex work are victims even if they don’t see it that way themselves.

The Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation, or CEASE, does not support views of sex work that would improve working conditions or ease stigma. It makes no secret of that. Yet without so much as a simple Google search on “sex worker organizations Canada” to see if anyone else might have a different view, the Edmonton Journal took CEASE and the police at their word that this campaign was needed to stop trafficking.

As it turns out, CEASE executive director Kate Quinn had her own concerns when she saw the Edmonton series. She and I don’t share the same views on sex work, but we do on reporting that observes and objectifies rather than treats people with respect and as having agency.

“My suggestion to journalists is to first ask the women for permission in situations like this,” says Quinn, who was uncomfortable that some women in the series had a journalist sprung on them and didn’t appear to have been offered the opportunity to talk without police in the room. (Edmonton Journal series reporter Juris Graney did not respond to my requests for comment.)

“It’s respectful to ask, ‘Can I write your words?’ Give people the right to say yes or no. Ask yourself how you’d feel if you were the person being written about.”

That trafficking is rampant is one of the myths most used to shut down debate on decriminalizing sex-work laws, as I explore in a July 2016 blog post on the dishonest rhetoric around trafficking.

Trafficking happens, of course, and every sex workers’ rights activist I know is totally onside with stopping it. But using that term to describe and regulate all sex work just can’t be tolerated. It’s not true. It hurts people and it helps no one.

In fact, we have scant statistics on trafficking. Really scant. And the stats that do exist show minimal evidence of sex trafficking. For the sake of people who are the most stigmatized, misunderstood and silenced workers in the world, we have got to quit hiding behind that offensive trafficking lie as an excuse for doing nothing about a vital human rights issue.

I don’t know why people can’t have a real conversation about sex work. I don’t know why we’d rather believe workers are being beaten nightly by their vicious clients than think that they might be happily doing work they mostly enjoy.

But as a journalist, figuring that out isn’t my concern anyway. My concern is to tell an honest, fact-based story that examines all sides of an issue. My concern is to treat everybody I talk to with dignity and equality, and to check my biases at the door and go into every story with an open and curious mind.

It’s not hard to find sex workers. Search on the hashtag #sexwork on Twitter and start there. Visit the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform website and explore their members’ web pages. Check out some of the pieces listed here. Get informed.

And when the day comes for you to write a story on sex work, do your job. Read the research. Question assumptions. Seek out the diverse opinions of people who work in the industry. Extend the same respect to sex workers as you would to any other worker. If you wouldn’t show up all sneaky-like with the police to ambush any other unsuspecting salesperson just going about their business, show the same courtesy to sex workers.

Get past any weirdness you’ve got about the industry and cover it like any other story. It’s not a reach to ask for that. It’s good journalism.

Suicide by car: On trauma, tragedy and ICBC policy

The tragic suicide by car of a 24-year-old on the Pat Bay Highway on Sunday takes me back to another similar suicide back in 2000 that I wrote about for the Times Colonist. 

There's a whole other set of victims when people kill themselves in the manner that these two young men did, 19 years apart.

Whoever is in the vehicle when a person randomly picks a moment to step into the road and be killed is almost certainly going to be haunted forever by that stranger's decision.

Here's my column on Ian Davidson's suicide on the Malahat in 2000, and a wish that ICBC does not play rough with the people involved in Sunday's tragedy like it did with the Coopsie family 19 years ago. 

***

Jody Paterson column in TC, January 2000

Davidson settled on death a long time ago. The only question was who would be the killer.

It turned out to be the Coopsie family, picked randomly from among the many travellers making their way north on the Malahat on that sunny afternoon two days after Christmas. Davidson, 25, waited beside his idling car just past the Spectacle Lake turnoff, waited until the Coopsies' truck was so close that there could only be one ending to this sad drama.

And then he jumped onto the road.

Dave Coopsie, driving to Duncan for a family dinner with his wife Dawn and their two youngest children, swerved toward oncoming traffic to avoid hitting him. But there was no room left to manoeuvre when Davidson lunged at the truck a second time. The young man died moments later, his years of suicide attempts finally over.

It took anguished minutes for the Coopsie truck to slow to a stop, anguished minutes more to walk back and try to figure out what had just happened. Dawn Coopsie cries every time she thinks of that young face pressed into their windshield, the sound of her two boys screaming at the sight of what her 10-year-old called ''the scary, scary man.'' He hasn't said a word about it since then; his mom found out only a couple of days ago that he'd been worrying that his dad was going to go to jail.

Greater Victoria Victim Services arrived soon after the accident to offer support, and the Shawnigan RCMP urged the family to consider counselling for their traumatized sons.

The Coopsies didn't have a clue who picks up the tab for the aftermath when your truck is written off by someone's suicide, when life goes sideways after an intimate involvement in a stranger's death. But they had car insurance and so did Davidson, and they figured ICBC would sort out the details.

ICBC had other plans, as it turned out. The adjuster spent all of five minutes with them the first time they met, just long enough to let them know that because they didn't have collision insurance, they'd have to pay for their towing charges and vehicle replacement themselves. Davidson wasn't actually driving his car at the time of the accident, noted the adjuster, so his insurance didn't come into play.

The insurance corporation had a bit of a change of heart a few days later after hearing from MLA Andrew Petter's office, which took up the Coopsies' cause after getting their desperate phone call. They'd get their towing fees reimbursed and a payout for their vehicle, ICBC told them, but no counselling. The adjuster wanted them to sign an agreement forfeiting their right to sue.

The family has already used up Dave Coopsie's annual health-plan allotment of six counselling sessions getting help for their boys after the suicide. They know it wasn't enough. But with five kids to raise, there isn't any money for more.

They were still trying to figure out how it is that a guy can kill himself on the hood of your car and you end up paying for the damage to your kids when ICBC had yet another change of heart late yesterday.

''There was a miscommunication between the manager and the adjuster,'' said ICBC spokeswoman Elizabeth Goldenshtein. ''The manager had advised paying for counselling, but the adjuster didn't know that. I'm going to be calling the family right now to tell them that.''

Maybe that will help counter Dawn Coopsie's impression that an adjuster's job must be to ''open and close a file as fast as possible.'' Maybe it will help a shattered family come to grips with the fact that there was nothing they could have done that day to get out of the way of a young man determined to die.

The coroner has yet to weigh in on the lonely death of Ian Davidson, whose long struggle with mental illness led him to try to kill himself several times in the past, once by jumping in front of a train. Dawn Coopsie wonders how he slipped through a system that apparently knew all about him, and her heart breaks for another suffering family whose own lives went sideways that day on the Malahat.

Victim services has sent a read-aloud booklet on suicide to the Coopsies to help them talk about it with their sons. Until 15 days ago, the boys barely knew what the word meant.