A weekend or two ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the Walk 21 Toronto Community Conference, organized by the City of Toronto, the Toronto Coalition for Active Transporation (TCAT) and Spacing Magazine. This conference was a one-day reprise of the longer Walk21 Toronto 2007 conference held last October, only where the 2007 event attracted mainly professionals and academics, this version was free and open to the public. The response to the conference announcement was huge: by March 1st, the organizers had booked and filled Metro Hall's largest public space. And this response was hardly surprising: there is considerable interest among Toronto's citizens for alternatives to car-choked commutes, for safe and accessible streets, for walkable neighbourhoods, and for a healthier and more sustainable city.

Conference speakers addressed multiple conference themes. The morning's speakers focused on health, physiology, and urban design, and included Dr. Gillian Booth, speaking about the Toronto Diabetes Atlas, Dr. Yue Li on Temperature and Pedestrian Walking Speed (a fascinating presentation using data collected along Toronto's University avenue), and Paul Young, connecting urban design and health outcomes. The afternoon's sessions turned to other walking-related themse. The 'Revitalizing Streets' session featured Chris Hardwicke discussing a plan for creating walkable environments along suburban arterial roads in the east end of the city, and Gord Brown talking about his group's advocacy of pedestrian-centred design as part of College Street's revitalization. During the 'Going Places!' session, researcher Jennifer Niece spoke about the influence of neighbourhood design on the rates of children walking to school (she found that even modest design improvements can encourage walking), and Smart Commute's executive director Brian Shifman reviewed challenges and successes of encouraging walking to work, even in the suburban environments of north Toronto and Vaughan. I closed out the afternoon by talking about the poetics of walking (see Youtube clip, above, created by conference-goer Himy Syed), followed by a literary walking tour of Kensington Market -- which I'll be expanding and reprising as part of Jane's Walk in early May.

Conference coordinator Matthew Cowley has indicated that conference slides, images and texts will soon be made available through the City of Toronto's Walk21 website, meaning that even if you weren't able to attend the conference, you can still view presentation materials.

[Amy Lavender Harris is the author of Imagining Toronto, forthcoming from Mansfield Press. She writes regularly for Reading Toronto about Toronto literature and the imaginative qualities of cities.]

[Youtube video clip created by Himy Syed.]

Despite every denial, Antarctica melts ever faster in the south. Greenland and the arctic melt ever faster in the north. Devastation of genetic diversity and natural habitat accelerates past every point of not returning. Biotoxic mercurial and other poisons contaminate lakes, rivers, streams and oceans to the molecular bone. And while some fish species “can continue to be enjoyed by consumers as part of an occasional meal” -- for how much longer? How much longer before there are no more species left to consume? Before oceans not just rise but boil off all trace of living? When we finally tip the Earth over the irrevocable edge to becoming like either Mars of Venus. Lifeless.

Rays of hope are dimming fast. While we keep believing ourselves entitled to slashing and burning every single food chain we’ve so unnaturally lurched to the top of since hefting that damn club of Moon-Watcher’s. While we keep acting like the Earth and its creatures were god-given us for indiscriminate consumption. To play with like every living thing was meant to be our food. As if the Earth was meant to be crushed beneath our feet and we were meant as lords of anything but false creation stories.

Rays of hope are dimming fast. Better get them while supplies last. For how much longer can we shop before we drop?

International emission targeting accords like from Kyoto or Bali might scratch some veneer off our unnatural habits and habitating. But not so as to brighten much hoping. Not even if the far greater part of greenhouse gassing -- just for instance -- were emitted by large scale economic activity. Rather than by the hordes of us personally. For even if the greatest part of greenhouse gassing were subject to carbon taxing, emerging economies must have every opportunity to emerge precisely as the G7 or 8 or 20 did. Despite how much worse each and all things ecological now are. Regardless how much better we now know. Like, what doom thus emerging entails. Totally regardless. Leading economies have had every fair chance to despoil the Earth. Emerging economies must get their chance as well. Fair is only fair.

And. Even were none of it so. Our hopes for the future -- for any future -- would still keep dimming. Dimming inexorably. Because we can’t even look to the future. We can’t pay attention to how we destroy everything natural. We are far too utterly distracted fighting amongst and against ourselves.

Neither our shared responsibility since 10,000 years B.C. -- ever since we got serious about extincting other species -- nor any collective future doom can mean anything while we so universally keep fighting amongst and against ourselves.

Do the leading edges and cracks of doom not approach precipitous enough? Then why, accelerating to collective doom, do we continue escalating fighting amongst and against ourselves?

Hard question. The roots of human conflict, we insist, lie in material causes. Whether in social, academic or diplomatic circles -- we insist on (...read more...)

The Great Lakes are a precious legacy preserved in geologic time. Formed by glacial ice over millennia, the lakes contain enough fresh water that if emptied they’d cover the entire Untied States to a depth of nine and a half feet (and there are certain groups who like that idea, and would make it happen a few million litres at a time). Not surprisingly, names for this liquid treasure range from the obvious “Great Lakes” to the more poetic “sweet water” and the explorer-daunting, “inland sea.” No matter what their name, the lakes have no equal anywhere on earth.

That’s why they are such an attraction, and such a target. In a recent interview Canada’s Maude Barlow commented

This notion that we’ll have water forever is wrong. California is running out. It’s got 20-some years of water. New Mexico has got 10, although they’re building golf courses as fast as they can, so maybe they can whittle that down to five. Arizona, Florida, even the Great Lakes now, there’s huge new demand.

The Sierra Club of Canada is a active protector of this precious resource. In partnership with other North American environmental groups, the club is acting to ensure our politicians do everything they can to preserve the lakes. But, as the Ontario chapter of the club writes, the fresh water is challenged by:

• cities dump untreated sewage into the Great Lakes in enormous quantities
• Canadian industries emit more than 1 billion kilograms of pollutants to the air, and on a perfacility basis, release far more than their U.S. counterparts
• ocean-going vessels are responsible for at least 65% of the now over 180 invasive species wreaking havoc on Great Lakes native species
• water levels in Lakes Huron, Michgan and Superior are well below normal, with Lake Superior surpassing its recond low set in 1926
• unsuitable urban development is destroying sensitive wildlife habitat. Projections are that by 2030, 3 million more people will live in Lake Ontario’s basin, which could greatly increase these development pressures.

In spite of these threats, as a species we seem to think that if we can see a thing in its entirety we also understand it. The overarching view from space in the above photo gives that impression. We control this thing is its unstated subtext. Yet, we know that the idea is absurd. The lakes are in many ways an expression of the complexity found in each one of us because as some speculate water molecules from, say, Georgian Bay, at some time have been part of everyone—no matter where on earth. This visceral relationship between water and humans cannot be understood simply in a means and ends way, as a resource to be commodified and sold off. The lakes are mythic truths about our evolution that wet Ontario’s shores every day. Those truths are beyond priceless, they are worth protecting anyway we can.

The Imagining Toronto book club founded by Reading Toronto contributor Amy Lavender Harris convenes this Saturday at perhaps the city's most legendary literary venue—the top of the Park Hyatt hotel at Avenue Road and Bloor. Their discussion topic?

The Torontonians, originally published in 1960, was re-released last September. Join us atop the Park Hyatt for a breathtaking view and lively discussion of Phyllis Brett Young’s international bestseller about a desperate housewife living between the tensions of Toronto's new suburbs and the city core.

In her Reading Toronto review of the novel, Amy selected this passage to capture the zeitgeist of an era that propelled the city to its modern destiny. The book's protagonist stands at the top of the hotel (shown above overlooking the ROM Crystal):

Beyond the museum, Karen could see the wide green circle of Queen's Park, and farther to the south the downtown skyline of the city, blurred a little by haze and smoke. Looking at that skyline, she was caught up by the quick excitement -- quite unlike any other -- that was the measure of her own spontaneous identification with its growth. A city with a future, like an individual with a future, could never remain static for long, could not afford to expand indefinitely along the lines of least resistance. The suburbs, as they now existed, were the city's lines of least resistance. The towering buildings to the south were the real yardstick of its stature.

For more details on the book club and this Saturday's event, visit Facebook.