New site

I'm going to experiment with a change of scene: Brooklyn Barricade, brooklynbarricade.wordpress.com.

My sister and the so-called "food crisis"

Look, clearly Madeleine knows her food. Just check out the witty blog she and her friends have: c is for kitchen. You'd never know she refused to eat anything coloured until she was 12. (Sorry M, but what one hand giveth...)

And now I've even used her hardened cynicism to open an article about the food crisis in the Nov/Dec Canadian Dimension magazine (a review essay about two great books, The Global Food Economy by Tony Weis, and--yup--Good Crop/Bad Crop by Devlin Kuyek) :

On the phone with my sister Madeleine recently, I told her I was doing some background research on the global food crisis. “Hunger’s never a crisis,” she said. And she was right. The more we learn about the roots of the latest spike in food prices, the more obvious it becomes that hunger is really a predictable feature of our agricultural system. At root, the question “How do we feed everyone?” is really the question “How should we grow our food?”

As it happens, two sharp and accessible Canadian books released in the last couple of years skilfully explain how we got into this mess, and how we can get out. Though it may be trendy for urban lefties to focus on urban agriculture and other small-scale projects that could change our relationship to food, these authors take a vital step back to consider the big, rural systems that actually produce most of the food we eat — and will keep doing so for the forseeable future.

[read on]

But seriously, urban trendies in tight jeans don't have it all wrong--some might just be too modest with scale. At least, this is the point I try to make at the end at the article. (Neither of the books actually mentions such creatures, but I rarely think about anyone else.)

Bolivia behind the headlines: precarious wonders of water

Here's a link to a piece I did that recently went up at The Walrus web site. Via encounters w irrigators, a senator, an NGO director, a political organizer, etc etc, it traces the amazing story of an irrigation law that could change the lives of millions of Bolivians, in part by banning privatization and finally recognizing indigenous peoples' uses and customs. It's also a key step in Bolivians redefining our idea of water as a human right. Not bad, hey? And a small Canadian development agency--the International Development Research Centre--played a big role in making it happen. A final point about this law--it's the first ever, in Bolivia, that was drafted more or less from below.

Of course, it has problems too. The fiercest, most effective critics come from Bolivia's academic left. I think it's also important to remember, as violence threatens to consume Evo Morales' government, that behind the headlines, a whole host of initiatives like this one--historic and revolutionary changes affecting people's everyday lives but don't always get a ton of attention--are at risk. There's more than symbols at stake. All right--enough rambling. The link: Bolivia's Water Fight.

Also, now that I'm at NYU pursuing graduate studies in various complicated matters requiring a lot of analysis, who knows what will become of this delinquint faux blog. But I may do something w my coca diaries from semi-tropical Bolivia when it colds out here.

Social service charities getting the shaft

My story on social service charities in THIS Magazine, called "Whose Burden?", is on newsstands this month, and also available online. It's about the way right wing governments (Conservative and Liberal) have caused us to rely on social service charities to keep a big chunk of Canadians alive and well, then undermined the very same charities with terribly designed policies. It's also about the way these social service charities, by virtue of being charities, have so far largely failed to resist this new regime. And, finally, it's about the potential for these organizations, after all the reflecting and renewing they've done over the past two decades, to help build a much more just and democratic society--if only the government would lift its obscene burden off their back, and if citizens rise up to demand a better deal. (Implausible as that might sound.)

Blogging Hot Docs

Just a quick note. For the past few days and until the weekend, I've been and will continue blogging Hot Docs for THIS Magazine, Toronto's documentary film festival. Check out the action at blog.thismagazine.ca.

New Year's Resolution: Be The Change

What do British imperialism and Leo Tolstoy have in common? Two things actually--Gandhi and armies in Asia. Intrigued? You should be.... 'Cause it's a little known fact that Tolstoy was Gandhi's major early influence, as detailed in my story below...

Sixty years ago this month, history's most famous pacifist was felled by an act of senseless violence. Just after 5 p.m. on January 30, a Hindu nationalist named Nathuram Godse shot Mahatma Gandhi three times in the chest. He died the following day.

Yet while Gandhi's life and message of non-violence are well known, a crucial chapter in his philosophy's genesis is largely forgotten. The story features the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, includes a bridge from Russia to Canada, and begins nearly 20 years before Gandhi's birth with the Crimean War (1853-56).

In his early 20s, growing tired of his (apparently) dull life of gambling and whoring, Tolstoy went to visit his brother, an army officer stationed in Central Asia. Tolstoy signed up and joined in imperial forays against the local Muslim population of the Caucasus mountains. He then moved on to the Crimean War, where he fought with an artillery unit during the Siege of Sevastopol.

Already a budding writer, he penned thinly fictionalized dispatches called the "Sevastopol Sketches" for a monthly literary journal back in St. Petersburg. "They were a sensation," says Professor Donna Orwin, a Tolstoy specialist at the University of Toronto. "Everyone was desperate for news from the front and here comes this great writer out of the blue."

As the world's first embedded journalist, he could accurately describe an officer's simultaneous vanity and dread of death: "At the instant the shell or mortar reaches you, you invariably think it will kill you," he wrote. "But pride keeps you up, and no one notices the dagger that is digging into your heart."

Read on...

Maude Barlow, and us running out of water

In this month's Walrus, my brief review of her latest book, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. I met Barlow in Bolivia, where she was in meetings with Bolivian and Norwegian ministers to get work on the right to water going, as well as touring an incredibly poor village on the outskirts of El Alto, where the residents had no access to clean water. As blogged here.