Escarpment Blues

Escarpment Blues is the Juno-winning documentary that tells the story of a current land-use conflict in Southern Ontario on the Niagara Escarpment. A 600-acre quarry mine operated by the Nelson Aggregate Company is being expanded by 200 acres, thereby engulfing the natural area around Mt. Nemo, the plateau near where Canada’s own singer/songwriter Sarah Harmer grew up. The site has been designated as a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve and parts of the proposed quarry areas have been designated as provincially significant wetlands by the Ministry of Natural Resources.

“I grew up on the escarpment on the farm where my family still lives, within a long green ridge corridor that is prized for its freshwater resources, its wetlands and forests, its endangered species habitats, and its prime agricultural soils. This Biosphere Reserve is under serious threat from the aggregate (sand, gravel, shale) industry. Large multinational aggregate companies continually apply to change “tough” environmental land zoning to open new quarries on top of the Niagara Escarpment. Extracting the rock (mostly to be crushed for gravel) below the water table results in headwater depletion and contamination and destroys the most biologically diverse ecosystems in all of Ontario.”

In June 2005, Harmer, along with her band, launched the I Love The Escarpment tour across southern Ontario in order to raise donations for PERL (Protecting Escarpment Rural Land), a conservation group she co-founded. The bandmates walk through the area, playing small venues along the way. Escarpment Blues documents Harmer’s fight to protect the remaining fresh water supply, save species such as the Jefferson Salamander and butternut tree, and preserve the ecological balance.

Watch the TVO video.

Source: TV Ontario: The View From Here.

Utopias

At the height of the Renaissance, Rabelais cleverly inverted the monastic ideal – a life of labour and prayer – to explore the other Utopian extreme: hedonistic leisure amid inexhaustible abundance. At his fictitious Abbey of Thelème, the inhabitants comport themselves in a regal spendour that was clearly the stuff of fantasy in the early sixteenth century.

But a century later, Francis Bacon decisively transformed the Utopian tradition. He raised the possibility that, given sufficient technological power over nature, the hope of a democratic abundance might not be unrealistic. Bacon’s New Atlantis holds its place as the first scientific Utopia, a bold prediction of good things to come based on unlimited proliferation of material goods. That vision has hovered in the background of the entire industrial process as one justification for the privation, harsh discipline, wrenching dislocation, grime and soot that this great adventure has cost. The concept of plenitude went into eclipse; the foundation of our contemporary ecological crisis was laid.

It was not until the waste, drudgery and filth of industrialism were vividly imprinted on the historical landscape that the plenitude formerly sought became a timely topic once again.

William Morris, the Victorian poet, painter and political philosopher, was among the first to take up the discussion in his Utopian novel, News From Nowhere.

Morris, a bitter critic of both the ugliness and injustice of the industrial system, laid his hopes for a balanced economic order upon a reformation of taste.

In Morris’ land of Nowhere, aesthetics is the context of economic life. The sensibilities of people have been schooled to value the quality, not the quantity of goods. For Morris, this meant a handicraft standard of excellence, as exemplified by his Arts and Crafts Movement, which he took to be of benefit for the soul as well as the body.

One need not endorse Morris’ doctrinaire anti-industrial stance in order to see great practical sense in his proposal. As a matter of environmental sanity, there may be a point at which industrial societies will have to revive the handicraft standard, emphasizing the value of fine design and durability as an alternative to disposability or wasteful turnover.

In her ecological Utopia Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy proposes another approach to plenitude. In the environmentally intelligent future she envisions – a worldwide society of well-kept rural communes – there exists a globe lending library of luxuries, from which jewels, objects d’art, fashionable clothes may be borrowed and examined by the entire population. It is an idea worth pondering.

In one of the mostly highly developed ecological Utopias, Ernest Callenbach deals with problems of necessity and luxury by imagining an economy that redirects the gratifications of high consumption toward a variety of cheap, non-material pleasures. The citizens of Ecotopia own little, but it is elegantly handmade; beyond that, the prevailing style of housing and dress is dropped-out funky. The workweek has been pared back to twenty hours; leisure becomes a value in its own right, used for the arts and crafts, for play, for recreational sports, espeically in the fiercely defended wilderness, which has come to be respected as Ecotopia’s principal public asset.

An economy of modest means makes possible a simplicity that allows other needs to be gratified. The goal is not cathartic suffering, but pleasure of a superior order.

~ Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth
Image: Dubai Lagoon

Treading Gently on This Earth

The garbage strike (OK, the strike of municipal inside and outside workers) continues into its eleventy-umpteenth day and there are two reasons that I care.

I am with the 70 percent or more folks in the Big Smoke who don’t approve of the union’s demands or tactics. Count me in with the smaller percentage who would privatize the goons that are punishing the beleaguered tax-paying public who are lining up for hours to drop off a bag or two at the transfer stations. Deliberately delaying legitimate drop-offs is nasty and childish. More recently, the union has railed against the public scabs who, proud of their neighbourhoods, have taken the initiative to cut grass and clean up trash at their local parks, arguing that it hurts the negotiations.

Who’s their PR genius who forgot who pays for shoddy or non-existent service? Sack them all and source these jobs with folks who would give their eye-teeth to provide us with some quality.

All this said with apologies to Len Wallace who Has A Point about the value of unions. No doubt about it: the rich (including the Fat Cat city councillors who took a raise) continue to get richer and if it weren’t for the unions…

But many of us taxpayers are drinking the Kool-Aid that the city is bankrupt in these Recessionary Times, and for sure we don’t have more spare cash to throw into the bottomless pit of city salaries. Would that everyone in the private sector could be paid a comparable living wage. But sadly, no, which is why we are not on the side of the entitled CUPE workers this time around. Although, we would cheerfully rescind the raises that certain councillors voted for themselves this year. (Bill Saundercook, this means you.)

Back to the subject at hand, those negotiations include entitlement to banking sick days. The City has offered a disability plan in line with the private sector, as an alternative to banking up to 18 days a year then collecting money for unused sick time at retirement.

The union is in a snit over the mayor’s airing of the terms of the latest offer to those of us who, after all, pay for the union’s services. Frankly, this would be the perfect time to consider the privatization option to the exceptional services that these folks perform.

Here’s a link to go figure what your sick day payout could be if you’d worked for the City.

The second reason that I care is that I see Concerned Citizens protesting the use of public parks to dump and store garbage, the latest news being that the Health Risk is being combatted with spraying with warfarin. That’s a nasty anti-coagulant used to give rats (squirrels without the fancy tail) a miserable death by internal bleeding, not to mention what it might do to local pets or kids.

So, am I suggesting that these folks eat cake by wondering why they can’t keep their refuse at home for a few weeks? Who are the folks that feel that their sh”t is someone else’s problem?

I don’t expect enlightenment from 98% of the population. I’m delighted that a few exemplary folks are taking pride in their neighbourhoods and doing what they can to keep things under control, not that the unions like that. Has it not occurred to some of our more benighted citizens that there is a strike, therefore do something proactive rather than spewing your trash?

Here are just a few suggestions from Toronto Environmental Alliance. I expect that 2% of our population has already figured this out.

Dog help the rest if there’s ever a war or rationing. Our economic setback apparently didn’t put a dent in our greed, apathy and stupidity.

Ted Roszak might argue that 98% is pretty high for mindlessness, and on a good day, I might agree with him. The antics of the union and those who can’t stuff it in a garbage bin for a few weeks do not make me happy today, however.

“Standard economics is right, however, when it reminds us that a flourishing supply implies an expanding demand. The Third World would not be producing frivolous junk if the First World did not provide so gleeful a market for it. The fact raises another, deeper issue. Ask anybody on the street if they really need a neon telephone; what answer would you expect to receive? Most likely a unanimous ‘not at all.’ But ask again after they have seen a neon telephone or two, and they might– some of them–sheepishly confess that, while they don’t actually need such a item, it just might be ‘fun’ to own one. ‘Fun’ covers a great deal of economic territory in affluent societies. It sells a lot of merchandise. Fun movies, fun clothes, fun cosmetics, fun food . . . why not fun telephones? Fun–meaning impulse buying relished as much for the impulse as for the buying–delivers a sense of well-being, a small touch of luxury. It makes shopping one of the staple entertainments of our time. Always another cute little novelty, another quirky gizmo, another fad or fashion to bring home and talk about.”

~ Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth

Répondez-moi

Francis Cabrel, looking like a chevalier cathare in the video, recorded this in 1981. Mais, c’est au courant, bien entendu.

Je vis dans une maison sans balcon, sans toiture
Où y’a même pas d’abeilles sur les pots de confiture
Y’a même pas d’oiseaux, même pas la nature
C’est même pas une maison

J’ai laissé en passant quelques mots sur le mur
Du couloir qui descend au parking des voitures
Quelques mots pour les grands
Même pas des injures
Si quelqu’un les entend

Répondez-moi
Répondez-moi

Mon coeur a peur d’être emmuré entre vos tours de glace
Condamné au bruit des camions qui passent
Lui qui rêvait de champs d’étoiles, de colliers de jonquilles
Pour accrocher aux épaules des filles

Mais le matin vous entraîne en courant vers vos habitudes
Et le soir, votre forêt d’antennes est branchée sur la solitude
Et que brille la lune pleine
Que souffle le vent du sud
Vous, vous n’entendez pas

Et moi, je vois passer vos chiens superbes aux yeux de glace
Portés sur des coussins que les maîtres embrassent
Pour s’effleurer la main, il faut des mots de passe
Pour s’effleurer la main

Répondez-moi
Répondez-moi

Mon coeur a peur de s’enliser dans aussi peu d’espace
Condamné au bruit des camions qui passent
Lui qui rêvait de champs d’étoiles et de pluie de jonquilles
Pour s’abriter aux épaules des filles

Mais la dernière des fées cherche sa baguette magique
Mon ami, le ruisseau dort dans une bouteille en plastique
Les saisons se sont arrêtées aux pieds des arbres synthétiques
Il n’y a plus que moi

Et moi, je vis dans ma maison sans balcon, sans toiture
Où y’a même pas d’abeilles sur les pots de confiture
Y’a même pas d’oiseaux, même

Et moi, je vis dans ma maison sans balcon, sans toiture
Où y’a même pas d’abeilles sur les pots de confiture
Y’a même pas d’oiseaux, même pas dans la nature
C’est même pas une maison.

But the last of the fairies seeks her magic wand
My friend, the stream sleeps in a plastic bottle
The seasons have stopped at the feet of synthetic trees
There’s no one but me

Francis Cabrel

Revolutionary Type: Ecofont

In the midst of all the printing companies offering recycled paper, vegetable-based inks and e-waste management, one firm in the Netherlands is backing up for a second and asking consumers to consider switching to a greener font.

Yes, we’re talking about the carbon footprint of Times New Roman, Helvetica and Gil Sans. But don’t roll your eyes just yet. Although it may seem silly, the new Ecofont, created by SPRANQ, could have major sustainable ripple effects and potentially kick-start a different approach to how we design typefaces, and why.

For instance, rather than ask a questions such as, “What makes a font look good?” this Dutch design team asked, “How much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability?”

The answer, deduced after many trial runs and much coffee: 20%.

“We started off looking at Verdana, the most-used font in Holland,” says SPRANQ co-founder Gerjon Zomer of the creative process behind Ecofont. The Ecofont is based on the Vera Sans, an Open Source letter, and is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

The team then deleted thin vertical strips within each letter to produce as much negative space as possible – doing this saved about 50% of the ink but also left them with a font that was unreadable on most computer screens. They tried cutting out a series of square shapes and even stars, but in the end, circles proved most effective.

Finally, the designers switched from Verdana to Vera, and declared they had a winner. It’s now available for free downloading at Ecofont.eu.

“I think the power of Ecofont is its simplicity,” says Zomer. “There are a lot of complicated technical solutions out there to save ink, but they don’t usually appeal to people. We decided it was important to see the effect, right there in front of you.”

Some environmentalists argue that if renewable vegetable- or soy-based inks are used, it hardly matters how much is printed.

“But those still require cartridges,” Zomer says, “which need replacing, and each cartridge can require up to three and a half litres of oil to ­manufacture.”

Another advantage to the Ecofont is that it’s free.

“We found that most things to do with the environment right now are still very money-related,” Zomer says. “If a business is going green, it’s usually just for publicity’s sake and for customer reassurance. If the cost is too high, it won’t be successful.”

Reaction to the Ecofont, which unfortunately isn’t refined enough yet for book publishing or other high-end printing projects, has been mixed.

For whatever reason, North Americans tend to embrace it, but the European community has been more cynical, claiming it’s nothing but a cheeky marketing ploy.

Writers at Treehugger.com, for example, gave it a test-run and had mostly positive results, but they also point out that one could simply adjust the printer settings – think options such as low-resolution, fast draft mode or grey-scale.

Meanwhile, in a Jan. 2 National Public Radio broadcast in the United States, the host quipped, “We’re doing something similar here in our offices – our printers no longer use vowels.”

Still, despite all the criticism, there’s something to be said for green initiatives taking hold in unexpected places. The Ecofont proves that a seemingly inconsequential, small white dot on the stem of a 6-pt letter F can have a positive effect on the earth, one that’s hard to measure in quantitative terms but that perhaps signifies something greater.

And a small leap forward is always better than standing around doing nothing, so at the very least, the Dutch deserve a pat on the back for tackling the green movement in a unique way, choosing to think small in a world of big problems.

Source: National Post, January 15, 2009.

Rethink the Economy

On Boxing Day, a Canadian phenomenon where shoppers go wild at the malls, it seemed appropriate to excerpt this excellent article on sustainability.

Boxing Day is a public holiday in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Hong Kong and countries in the Commonwealth of Nations with a mainly Christian population. In South Africa, this public holiday is now known as the Day of Goodwill. It is based on the tradition of giving gifts to the less fortunate members of society. Contemporary Boxing Day in many countries is now a “shopping holiday” associated with after-Christmas sales.

Amid the discordant clash of solutions being served up to address the global financial crisis, a common refrain can be heard: Most global leaders and their economic advisers key their policy prescriptions to “sustained economic growth.” The prevailing debate is how to get there most quickly. In Canada, how this debate plays out could bring down the government in a matter of weeks.

Unfortunately, it is the wrong debate. Neither the Conservative minority nor the opposition has proposed anything that will set Canada on a long-term path toward the kind of economy that will both provide for the well-being of Canadians and enhance and preserve the ecological community of which people are but one dependent part.

All eyes may now be on the kind of fiscal budget the Conservatives might produce next year, but a more essential budget also demands urgent attention: the global ecological budget. The financial crisis has brought into sharp focus the need to fundamentally change, not merely repair or rebuild, our economy. Because, quite simply, sticking with an economic model that is driving toward ecological catastrophe will kill us. So, it is essential to address the financial and ecological crises together.

The ecological budget, on which all life and, consequently, the human economy depends, is already in dramatic deficit.

Here are six steps we can take toward a truly balanced budget that will allow Canadians, and all people on Earth, to live fulfilling, healthy, yet more ecologically compatible, lives.

• Recognize that the economy is part of the biosphere. A comprehensive economic plan must be based on the scientific fact that the global economy is a subsidiary of the natural order. Economic policies should be attuned to the limited capacity of Earth’s biosphere to provide for humans and other life and to assimilate their waste.
• Acknowledge that we need new institutions. An economic renewal tailored to the 21st century would establish institutions committed to fitting the human economy to Earth’s limited life-support capacity. Canada, with its token efforts to address climate change, is far off the track.
• Acknowledge that unlimited growth on a finite planet makes no sense. Growth in consumption is a nonsensical response to the sharp decline in Earth’s biophysical systems that is caused by overconsumption. Our new ecological and climate reality demands new ways to live within the means of the Earth.
• Fairness matters. A “right” human-Earth relationship would recognize humans as part of an interdependent web of life on a finite planet. The economy must recognize the rights of the human poor and of millions of other species to their place in the sun.
• Expand the discussion. The new knowledge that will forever mark this period in human history is the overwhelming scientific evidence that we are overconsuming the planet and accelerating toward ecological catastrophe.
• Look beyond technological fixes. Bold new leadership is needed that will focus on all four policy “theatres” relevant to human ecological impact and provide the moral footing that will lead people, individually and collectively, to choose lifestyles with radically lower impact. Pushing technological solutions like hydrogen cars and genetically modified agriculture is much easier politically than asking people to consume less or have fewer children. Unfortunately, technology alone cannot solve the ecological crisis.

Economic policy must promote not more affluence as currently defined, but more sufficiency for all Canadians – so that all may live with self-respect, without overconsumption.

Lastly, we must greatly increase investment in educational and civic institutions that teach that we are not “consumers,” but citizens of the Earth, and guardians of life’s prospect on a small, beautiful and finite planet.

Full article at the Toronto Star.

Peter G. Brown is a professor at McGill University. Geoffrey Garver is an environmental consultant and lectures in law at Université de Montréal and Université Laval. They are co-authors of Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy.

Life After Humans

Picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.

Look around you at today’s world. Your house, your city, the surrounding land, the pavement underneath, and the soil hidden below that. Leave it all in place, but extract the human beings. Wipe us out, and see what’s left. How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow companions in creation?

How long would it take to recover lost ground and restore Eden to the way it must have gleamed the day before Adam, appeared?

On the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house.

In just decades, with no new chlorine and bromine leaking skyward, the ozone layer would replenish and ultraviolet levels subside.

Within a few centuries, as most of our excess industrial CO2 dissipated, the atmosphere and shallows would cool. Heavy metals and toxins would dilute and gradually flush from the system. After PCBs and plastic fibres recycled a few thousand or million times, anything truly intractable would end up buried, to one day be metamorphosed or subsumed into the planet’s mantle.

Long before that – in far less time than it took us to run out of cod and passenger pigeons – every dam on Earth would silt up and spill over. Rivers would again carry nutrients to the sea, where most life would still be, as it was long before we vertebrates first crawled onto these shores. Our world would start over.

Excerpted from The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, Virgin Books

Full story at Independent UK

Aftermath from National Geographic.

Timeline from National Geographic production, Aftermath.

K-9’s, Bullet and Glory, star in Aftermath.

Watch video excerpts from Life After People at History.com

Thinking Like A Mountain

Aldo Leopold (1887 – 1948) was an American ecologist, forester and environmentalist. He was influential in the development of modern environmental ethics and in the movement for wilderness preservation. He has been called an American prophet, the father of wildlife management, and one of most strongest advocates for conservation.

Thinking Like a Mountain , by Susan Flader, professor of environmental history and policy at the University of Missouri, was the first of a handful of efforts to capture the work and thought of America’s most significant environmental thinker, Aldo Leopold. This account of Leopold’s philosophical journey makes brings much-deserved attention to the continuing influence and importance of Leopold today.

Thinking Like a Mountain unfolds with Flader’s close analysis of Leopold’s essay of the same title, which explores issues of predation by studying the interrelationships between deer, wolves, and forests. Flader shows how his approach to wildlife management and species preservation evolved from his experiences restoring the deer population in the Southwestern United States, his study of the German system of forest and wildlife management, and his efforts to combat the overpopulation of deer in Wisconsin. His own intellectual development parallels the formation of the conservation movement, reflecting his struggle to understand the relationship between the land and its human and animal inhabitants.

Drawing from the entire corpus of Leopold’s works, including published and unpublished writing, correspondence, field notes, and journals, Flader places Leopold in his historical context. In addition, a biographical sketch draws on personal interviews with family, friends, and colleagues to illuminate his many roles as scientist, philosopher, citizen, policy maker, and teacher. Flader’s insight and profound appreciation of the issues make Thinking Like a Mountain a standard source for readers interested in Leopold scholarship and the development of ecology and conservation in the twentieth century.

“My own conviction on this score dates from the day I saw a wolf die. We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.”

Aldo Leopold Archives

A Dead Moose in the Room

Earlier, we blogged about Matthew Scully’s important book, Dominion, which condemns factory farming, trophy hunting and other activities involving animals. At the time, Scully was speechwriter for George W. Bush.

He is also the man behind last night’s Republican convention speech by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, which is interesting in light of Scully’s moral opposition to hunting and Palin’s love of the activity.

“We hunt as much as we can, and I’m proud to say our freezer is full of wild game we harvested here in Alaska,” she recently told Newsweek. Probably better than a short life in a factory farm, but there’s more.

Another report detailed the home where her parents “live amid hundreds of sets of trophy antlers and a taxidermy collection that includes a giant moose head and a full-grown mountain lion.” Then there’s the aerial hunting of bears and wolves. The AK Wildlife Alliance discusses the state’s pandering to corporate and special interests such as the Safari Club, which Scully lambasted in his book.

Time had this to say:

“But the story is more complicated than just the recycling of a Bush staffer into John McCain’s fold, and it tells you more about how McCain’s camp intends to use Palin than it does about the continuing influence of the current White House.”

“The clues are in the text itself. Scully started working on the vice-presidential speech a week ago, before he or anyone else knew who the nominee would be, and it’s not hard to pick out the parts that would have been the same regardless of who delivered it. Scully unspooled two centrist themes via Palin that have been key to the McCain message: the idea that the Republican nominee puts service to country ahead of career and the notion that he’s the true representative of Middle America. Both themes implicitly push Obama and Biden to the left, and Scully made them explicit with lines accusing the Democrats of élitism and talking down to working-class voters… Palin was shown as an average mainstream American looking to bring change to Washington, further bolstering McCain’s overarching message of reforming the wasteful Federal Government.”

‘Scully was a good choice to help moderate Palin’s right-wing image. A veteran of the early Bush White House, his specialty was crafting Bush’s pro-life message in a way that would not offend soccer moms or mainstream Catholics who get nervous around some of the more extreme Evangelical rhetoric.”

“Don’t be surprised, though, if the combination continues… If Palin was viewed as the most likely right winger to sell in the swing states, Scully is the right pick to help repackage her from a base pleaser into a bridge builder.”

Matthew, you got some ’splainin’ to do.

More on this story at The Statesman.

Caribou Barbie image from Mudflats.

Visit the Marking Time blog for an eloquent review of the Scully/Palin speech.

Some interesting observations on the Scully/Palin connection and hunting over at My Face is on Fire.

A choice of nightmares: Hunting and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

But Is It Journalism?

Kim Honey, a Toronto Star food scribbler, managed to generate readership for her employer this past week by regaling us with her dispatch of a little bunny at a foodie survival get-together.

Well, it wasn’t a survival course, exactly. It was a cooking class for locavores. That’s last year’s trendy buzz in these anxious days of global warming. Since it wasn’t rabbit hunting season, the writer bought a farmed one, although one not yet committed to a neat, square styrofoam package. So it was left to the writer to do the deed.

All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do? ~~ Buddha

After cuddling the creature to calm it, and telling us that grown men, soldiers even, broke into tears when faced with the choice of killing a defenseless animal, the writer failed to render the bunny senseless on her first try. She handed it over to the chef, who humanely clubbed it another three times.

We’re not sure what redeeming qualities Kim’s rambling article had. We doubt that it was intended to enlighten us on the obscenity of factory farms, slaughterhouses and speciesism. Was she advocating that Torontonians eschew the strip mall foodmart and, instead, trap raccoons for the stewpot because it’s somehow trendier? We think so. Why else would a locavore drive all the way from the Big Smoke to Hanover at today’s gas prices, to learn bunny bashing?

The city is overrun with cottontail rabbits. You can’t walk out the back door without staring down a couple of haughty raccoons, and Lake Shore Blvd. is like Canada’s Wonderland for geese. ~~ Kim Honey

We checked out a few of her other foodie scribblings for further clues. She’d written a couple of times about the orgasmic glories of foie gras, but she didn’t mention participating in the inhumane gorging of the goose. She just loves eating fat. And cake icing.

She also did a piece for the Globe awhile back about abusing animals in art for shock value. She mentioned some of the more notorious pieces, including the Toronto Casuistry incident.

At the crux of the controversy is the question: What is the definition of art? And who decides what is art…? Is it up to the individual who creates the piece to declare it as art, or should society decide whether the work has any validity? ~~ Kim Honey

We’re guessing her rabbit piece wasn’t a whole lot different.

Sadly for Kim, not everyone was in breathless agreement with her article. Her editor allowed her space the following day to whine about the emails she’d received. It was silly. We’re surprised the Star ran it.

Let’s hope she sticks to rhapsodizing over cake icing.

Read more at Taste T.O.