Ape Rifle

Cape Town, South Africa, March 2007

Montreal’s urban form, like many other North American cities, is been affected by two major forces of change. The first is suburbanization, a defining element of the 20th century so analyzed and debated that it needs no further discussion in these pages. The second is the gentrification of inner-city neighbourhoods, a process which has transformed many a derelict warehouse on this continent over the past twenty years or so. The latter, in particular, has hit a fever pitch in these parts, with long-standing vacant lots suddenly devoured by high-rise concrete skeletons and neglected post-industrial neighbourhoods being lined up for China-style radical transformation.  Add to this yet another large-scale project to overhaul one of the downtown area’s more lifeless sections, and you’d think the city was serious about dealing with its urban blunders of the 20th century (forgetting for a second that it was exactly these sorts of large-scale grands projets that got us in trouble in the first place).

The other day, however, a long walk in search of some picture frames led me through a stretch of Montreal’s urban fabric that has yet to experience either story of dynamic change. It was a landscape I have seen in many North American cities (particularly older ones in the northeast US and eastern Canada), a spatial no man’s land lost between the density of the central city and the mall-serviced sub-divisions of the suburban periphery. These are the areas not conveniently located enough to be a target for gentrification, yet way too engrained in the concrete urban fabric to be considered by those seeking suburban delights. They have seen scant construction or upgrading since the middle of last century, but are hardly abandoned- these are the forgotten landscapes, the negative infrastructural spaces in between areas that people want to be.

Often, these landscapes are a strange mix of industrial detritus from a bygone era, service garages and U-Haul lots. Space here is filled with low-rise sheds and cracked-pavement parking lots, and mostly devoid of people and life. Urban negative space is like the storage area for North American industrial society, its aging backbone that no one wants to see: train tracks and expressways, old warehouses, bargain furniture stores, ugly motels and graffiti-covered remnants of loading docks. Buildings here are cheaply built, purely functional, with an aesthetic that has decayed along with the passage of time since the 1970s. This negative space is unnerving in that it reveals the growing age of the ‘new world’, reminding us North Americans just how much of our urban space has been devoted to the needs of gritty logistics and throwaway commerce- the physical embodiments of which have not necessarily aged well since their heyday.

Wandering in such a space on a cold Sunday in November, it is difficult not to feel a certain quiet malaise, a sense of a society that is obliviously easing itself into an age of decline. Amidst the twisted metal fences overgrown with weeds, the idle boxcars and the fading billboards, contemplation of our great industrial experiment is all but essential. And out of it comes a fear that through our long-standing thirst for production and consumption, we have produced vast swathes of disposable built environment barely worth remembering.

Last June, a particularly interesting piece of news came and went without much fanfare: those who concern themselves with such things estimated that, sometime during the next year, humanity would become a majority urban species for the first time in its history. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that this milestone slipped by largely unnoticed, little more than a flash in the carnival of endless distractions that comprise our modern airwaves. The media rule of thumb seems to be that the less trivial a matter is, the less attention it receives- hence the amount of coverage devoted to inconsequential personal details in the American presidential perma-campaign, or the latest exploits of spoiled brats misspending their fifteen minutes of fame.

So in this time when long attention spans are de facto discouraged, it is tempting to dismiss this urban majority estimate as just another tidbit in a sea of information, filed under “Did you know?” alongside sports trivia and tech gadget statistics. I would argue, however, that this news deserves a different fate, one in which it is given more thought and consideration. It is one thing to casually acknowledge that more people might now live in cities than rural areas, but another to truly contemplate what this means and how this might affect the course of our species in the long-term.

Granted, an initial difficulty with this contemplation lies in the arbitrary definitions of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’. In such a complex and fluid world, is this division even relevant? As anyone who has spent time navigating the endless and ill-defined fringes of a mega-city could tell you, it is perhaps no longer even physically identifiable in many areas. On a conceptual level, then, the terms are left open enough for those who use them to do as they please: in China, for example, some ‘cities’ are in fact geographically vast regions comprising large rural areas where residents are ‘urban’ by legal fiat only.

And related to this is the tricky subject of rural-to-urban migration: when are rural migrants to the city considered urban? How are they counted? What if they spend some years in the city but ultimately go back to rural homes? Can they be considered urban and rural? It is quite possible, likely even, that the fluidity of social networks and migrant patterns render problematic any academic attempts to fit people into neatly defined spatial boxes.

Despite these somewhat semantic difficulties, it remains that large-scale urbanization as a force of change is one of the most important stories of our time. To expand on this, it is important to note at this point that a rural/urban divide should not be understood in any narrow physical sense (which leads to the problems mentioned above), but rather as a fundamental difference in lifestyle. A move from a rural, agrarian existence to an urbanized, industrial life is, above all, an escape from direct toil of the land. In the most rudimentary of rural environments, people survive through their own direct agricultural efforts; in any urban setting, people survive by accumulating virtual wealth that gives them claim to food and resources. The latter condition places urbanity at the very heart of industrial modernity as it is so often understood today: this reliance on complex production systems is considered advanced, while direct reliance on working the land is considered backwards.

Standard of living measures that are tossed around by governments and development agencies alike are, after all, doing little more than measuring the extent to which a society or region has urbanized itself (ie removed itself from direct toil of the land and built up complex industrial systems which can be understood through statistics). So as people the world over strive for a better life, it should come as no surprise that this process manifests itself as urbanization; after all, the very concept of the good life as many understand it today is inescapably urban, which is perhaps why the visualization of wealth is so often tied to city skylines. Perhaps also why informal urban settlements the world over swell ever more with new arrivals.

But enough of the academic meandering and back to the main point of inquiry: what can we expect from a humanity that is now in the majority off the land and seeking survival in an urban context? I believe we will see the growth of two related paradoxes- the first involving the environment and the second involving political stability and personal freedoms.

Regarding the environment, an increasingly urban humanity will be more mentally detached than ever from its reliance on the natural world- unfortunately, this at a time when our impact on the planet will be greater than ever. As people move from direct reliance on agriculture to indirect survival based on the accumulation of money, this drives the growth of complex industrial systems, be they transportation, commercial or utilities. Agriculture, somehow, just becomes another industry, no more or less than others.

So as these systems grow so complex that people can survive by trading financial derivatives or selling digital music, the reality that our whole existence is still based on the fruits of agriculture gets lost in a haze of economics and post-industrial drivel. Unfortunately, our physical impact on the land is as real as ever- it’s just that the urban human is less conditioned to understand its implications. Rather, we obsess with the survival of our industrial systems (the art of economics) as if they were self-contained entities disconnected from environmental limitations. And I fear that despite all the talk of environmentalism these days, the continued urbanization of humanity will only accentuate this trend with unforeseen consequences.

This development has significant implications, as all good environmental trends do, deeper inside the social and political fabric- and this brings us to the second paradox. While much is said about the freedom and vitality of cities and the opportunity they offer compared to agrarian life, what is less mentioned is that urbanization is also a process of disempowerment. A city dweller, unlike someone who can directly grow the means to their survival, relies completely on systems and services to provide for them. And for many, this is fine if not ideal- but only because they are well positioned to benefit and/or control these systems. In the dreamscape of development economists everywhere, this is the end state of paradise- everyone a productive, happy industrial consumer with the whole machine humming along nicely.

Of course, reality has a nasty tendency of getting in the way. The urban modernist dream falls apart with the realization that a transfer from an agrarian to an urban lifestyle does not always result in a nice condo with family trips to the mall. In many cases, it can mean a squalid existence in harsh slums, an urban density devoid of the services that are supposed to accompany it. This is detachment from the land as a means of survival, but without the access to the services or virtual wealth (ie money) that are supposed to replace it.

It isn’t much of a stretch from here to imagine, then, how increased urbanization might result in increased unrest and political stability. As agrarian beings, we associated our survival with nature- the quality of the soil, the constancy of rainfall, the scourge of floods or droughts. We were completely in God’s hands, so to speak- it is quite difficult to argue with a cloud, for example. As urban beings, however, we associate our survival with man-made systems (which, to be said, operate quite poorly if at all in many parts of the world). In this context, it is much easier to blame failures on governments, municipalities, corporations, etc. With mass urbanization, states are quick to grasp at the benefits- industrial development, large labour pools – without, perhaps, truly comprehending that they’ll take the brunt of the blame when large numbers of people feel the system doesn’t provide.

And, finally, this is why increased urbanization has the potential to lead to stricter state control at the very same time as it causes unrest and political instability. Just as those who are utterly disempowered and yet find themselves in dense urban environments will need to be contained, the industrial infrastructure that services the fortunate will need to be protected. When the ability to survive of the fortunate urban citizenry depends on the integrity of industrial systems (be they physical such as transportation or virtual such as finance), their protection against acts of terrorism and/or civil unrest becomes paramount.

In places where the large majority of urbanites are net benefactors of these industrial systems, this will be accepted without much thought or question- for example, think of the boom in CCTV surveillance in Western cities with London leading the way. As more people join the complex structure of the urban world, the more people need to be catalogued, counted and monitored. In places where huge majorities of urbanites are excluded from these systems, while at the same time increasingly depending on them, reaction is likely take on more violent undertones. One sure way to ferment protest is to strip people of their self-reliance and provide little or nothing in return- whether in the historically deprived urban townships of South Africa or the rural land gobbling industrial frenzy in China.

So detachment from the environment will deepen as the need to address our impact on it grows, and the potential for unrest is matched by the prospect of greater state control. I am not attempting here to romanticize the rural lifestyle; but rather, to temper the frothy narrative of economic miracles and growing skylines with the realization that there are some serious implications to urbanization. As more people than ever search for the good life in an urban landscape, it is important to contemplate what could happen if they find little more than exclusion and a denser version of the misery they left behind. As the human condition becomes increasingly defined by an urban lifestyle, as a majority of us come to rely on man-made systems for survival, it becomes ever more important that these systems be inclusive. Unfortunately, considering our current track record, this hasn’t exactly been a strong point in our evolution as a species.

Having recently committed myself to office-bound employment in a nondescript Montreal office tower, it’s little surprise that I’ve been struggling with the occasional bout of wanderlust. The thrill of travel, the awe and excitement inherent in experiencing new places, have given way to a routine of shirt-ironing, lonely food court lunches and windows that can’t be opened. This hermetically-sealed world can certainly feel stifling with its overabundance of plastic and artificial light. The decision to embark upon this road, however, is not one I regret: the time had come in my life when I needed to trade in the global wandering for a little more stability, both personal and financial. As a major bonus, the work I have taken on is both challenging and rewarding.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t find my mind wandering, on occasion, back to the road, back to those distance places I’ve lived- often, back to China. I struggle to keep my experiences there alive and relevant to my current life, perhaps out of fear that I will be consumed by routine and lessen my engagement with the world outside my own small circle of movement. I have heard it said that debt is a driving force behind the political disengagement of so many in the West, but it would seem to me that work-related fatigue is an equal, and not wholly unrelated, culprit. Who has time to ponder the state of the world when there are bills to pay?

Being geographically tied down for the time being, I thus satisfy my wanderlust through reading. In this age of up-to-the-second online news and more streaming video content clutter than you could possibly know what to do with, it is still hard to beat a Sunday afternoon nestled up with a good newspaper, magazine or book. I’m an avid user of the internet, granted, but I cannot help but be irritated by the attention deficit format of most major portals and news services- I tire of digging through all the videos and multimedia gimmicks to find something substantial that I can actually read. Put me down on the side of opinion which considers talk of the demise of printed media as greatly exaggerated; the internet still has a long way to go (and as an added bonus, books don’t burn out my eyes).

And so I regularly tear into Harper’s and The Economist (sure its economic dogmatism is a bit tired, but the breath of its coverage and the quality of its political and business commentary have me hooked regardless), and check out solid Canadian fare such as The Walrus and Maisonneuve. In terms of books, I put Amazon through the motions a few months back and ordered myself an eclectic little stack, ranging from Lullabies for Little Criminals to A Long Way Gone and Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (a great, nasty little anthology about the deep inequalities inherent in the world’s oft-celebrated urban development stories).

Needless to say, I couldn’t resist grabbing a few titles relating to China. I got China Shakes the World, China: Fragile Superpower- both of which I have yet to read - and China Road by Rob Gifford. This last one I tackled first, as it appeared more travelogue than armchair policy analysis, and that offered the chance to hit the road vicariously, to re-enter that strange world where everyone is mangling some dialect of Mandarin. It was the sort of book I felt would offer me some mental escape from the office and remind me of life in the back of bumpy buses, even if the cover hinted at some of the dreadful clichés so common in modern China punditry. I didn’t have many expectations beyond figuring it would wet my nostalgia for life and travel in the Middle Kingdom, and that was good enough. Anything to take me back for a while.

But the book was a very pleasant surprise, and I have to commend Mr.Gifford for putting together one of the more refreshing readings on China I’ve come across in quite some time. It isn’t that Mr. Gifford’s approach is particularly groundbreaking; a Beijing-based journalist moving on to the UK after spending a good amount of time in China’s embrace, he travels across the country from Shanghai to the Kazakh border and reflects upon the country and his experiences there. What makes China Road stand apart from so much China punditry is its disregard of the common economistic perspective in favour of a more deeply engaging humanistic approach. We are so bombarded with talk of China’s ‘economy’ that one could be forgiven for forgetting that flesh-and-blood people actually live there, and it is frightful how readily our economics-obsessed societies can reduce so many lives to a statistics sheet.

Rob Gifford, thankfully, puts the focus back on the Chinese people he meets, as he writes about their dreams, ambitions, fears and frustrations. He further complements this with commentary on his own experience as a foreigner in China, and some of these passages certainly brought a smile to my face as I remembered my own life circa 2002-2004. The writing is brisk and engaging, deftly touching on politics and history without getting weighed down in dense academic analysis. China Road is certainly rooted in a travel experience, but uses its accounts of particular lives and incidents to explore China’s complex history and wax cautiously on future implications. Gifford manages this in a manner that demonstrates his deep knowledge of Chinese history and politics and avoids getting lost in the theoretical ether. He also feels no need to shy away from the usual sensitive topics, but approaches them from a welcome perspective devoid of any condescension or sense of cultural superiority. It is clear that the author has a deep fascination with and respect for the Chinese people, but at the same time he doesn’t let that obfuscate his view regarding the serious problems inherent in the society they’ve built for themselves.

All in all, I think Rob Gifford has written a great book. While it certainly plays to the China expat crowd - which can identify with many of his experiences  - it also provides a balanced, realistic and accessible glimpse into life in the Middle Kingdom for anyone interested in going beyond the numbing economism of the mainstream media.

In particular, I find there is strength in Gifford’s refusal to offer any solid theoretical prognosis on China’s future. In a crowd where some warn of an imminent collapse while others trumpet an inevitable and untouchable rise to global domination, China Road presents the country (properly, in my opinion) as one of such contradiction that no one can reasonably predict how the whole thing will turn out. This is a theme that Gifford touches upon throughout the book, and is perhaps the best analytical tool with which to approach a society country empire civilization so huge, complex and convoluted that any pundit or hack can find ample evidence to support their particular view.

China is both a strong state and a decentralized, chaotic empire where the edges are held together by brute force; it’s bursting with optimism and festering with hopelessness, its greatest source of instability its obsession with stability; it’s a land of unrelenting grand-scale urban development and crumbling stagnation; it’s a society dripping with wealth where most people still fight for basic survival; it’s an unimaginably overcrowded country yet a land of vast, remote landscapes haunting in their quiet beauty; it’s fiercely nationalist yet rudderless and struggling for identity; it ruthlessly destroys its own history to restore its former glory, weighed down by the past while trying to escape it; it calls capitalism communism; it offers freedom yet crushes dissent; it inspires awe and derision; wealth, opportunity and the good life have never been so available to (some) of its citizens, and yet the land is careening precipitously towards environmental suicide. The Chinese have never had it so good- or so bad. There is a saying that the more time you spend in China, the less you should understand it.

China can be anything to anyone, given its size and turbulence- it’s would be no surprise, in the end, if the place simultaneously collapsed and took over the world. Thankfully, to Rob Gifford it simply provided the opportunity to write a thoroughly enjoyable book called China Road, which allowed me to travel once again on those kung fu movie bus rides through the desert, as my present life is increasingly reduced to hermetically-sealed office space. It brought me back to a time in my own life when I crashed through the deserts of Xinjiang or the backwaters of Henan, staring out the window and being wonderfully confused and conflicted about the Chinese world passing by outside.

Anyone familiar with the trials and tribulations of Montreal knows the intersection between the avenues of des Pins and Parc has had quite a rough ride over the years. Despite its central location linking downtown with bustling urban neighbourhoods to the northeast and some of the city’s major parkland, Pins-Parc has long been a neglected urban non-space, a quasi-derelict site solely for transitory purposes. This might have something to do with the city’s decision to make it a tangled mess of pedestrian-hostile concrete overpasses back in the 1960s, which turned the area into little more than a massive, ugly funnel for automobile traffic.

In 2004, even the City had apparently had enough of the crumbling infrastructure, graffiti and confused drivers. It launched a renewal project for the intersection and proceeded to tear down the whole structure over the next few years; by the end of 2006 the area was radically changed, with a straightforward intersection lying in the wake of mid-century modernist folly. The only problem was that by removing all the concrete, there was, well, literally nothing there (see photo above) . The road system had been rescued from its earlier excess, but as an urban space it was no less desolate. There is now a vast hole in the heart of the city.

As a result, the final phase of the renewal project entails actually doing something with all this newly available land. The spaces to the north of the intersection will be greened and joined to the adjacent parks; the two municipally-owned lots to the south are proving to be somewhat more of a challenge. In a refreshing turn of events, the relevant city authorities are planning a public consultation starting next month and citizens are invited to submit their own proposals for development of the area.

I, for one, salute this welcome exercise in participatory urban development, and as a self-declared city junkie cannot pass up the chance to contribute to the public sphere of my hometown. Since I found out about the public consultation, I’ve given this matter quite a bit of thought, carefully considering both the physical limitations of the area and the desire for a vibrant public space on a human scale. The nature of the two spaces in question necessitates creativity, as the are each only about 3000m² and surrounded by a constant flow of vehicle traffic. This in itself limits their attractiveness and demands a non-conventional approach if they are to be anything more than neglected open space. How do you get people to use this space year-round - keeping in mind that winter here gives Siberia a run for its money - and take into account that most people do not consider breathing automobile exhaust an attractive hobby?

After wracking my brain a bit and putting my education to good use, I think I’ve come up with a solution: Montreal should use the space to host the world’s largest Starbucks. Sure, there’s already a three-floor megastore in South Korea, and an even larger one on the way in some mall in Dubai (where else?). But I’m talking grand scale, like a fifty-floor glass tower- maybe even evoking the shape of one of their over-sized cups. This monumental addition to the city’s skyline would serve no other purpose than churning out endless coffee beverages with ridiculous names, 24/7. At the top, a massive illuminated Starbucks logo would announce the new landmark to Montrealers. The green logo would also take care of fitting the development into its surroundings, since it would be next to a park.

At this point, you might be wondering how the heck yet another Starbucks, let alone the world’s largest, would contribute anything to the betterment of the intersection and Montreal’s public space in general. Well, here’s my rationale.

Montreal, thanks to years of political instability, economic doldrums and restrictive languages laws, managed to stay largely mega-chain free until relatively recently. I guess having to translate everything into French scared more than one American food and retail conglomerate away (or limited their presence to a few locations). Sure there were always McDonald’s, BK, Dairy Queen and the like- there just weren’t that many of them for a city of three and a half million people. In recent years, as Starbucks eagerly gobbled up half the real estate in any human settlement with more than ten inhabitants, Montreal somehow managed to stay out of reach.

Alas, this was evidently too good to last. Like a caffeinated weed coming up through the pavement, Starbucks has taken on Montreal and managed to open 29 locations before many of us knew what was going on. Despite being an avid coffee drinker, this nevertheless makes me fear for my fair hometown. I’ve been to New York and London, I’ve seen what the chain can do when truly unleashed; in those cities, you can barely take a few steps without having at least two Starbucks in front of you. I can’t even imagine what Seattle or Vancouver are like. If it can get itself into the Forbidden City in Beijing, it won’t be long before I open my closet and find a franchise has opened in there as well.

So to save Montreal before it is too late, I propose that all Starbucks be concentrated in one massive structure at the Pins-Parc intersection and a ban imposed on locations in the rest of the city. The building itself should be designed for the regular addition of new floors, cause lord knows Starbucks likes to expand. In this way, instead of eating into the urban fabric of Montreal, all the new stores can just pile on top of each other and leave the rest of us alone. This would also ensure year-round use for the site, as all those claiming they “can’t live without it” would necessarily converge on the site whether it was 35c or -35C.

On second thought, my plan would perhaps make the intersection even worse than it already is. The world’s largest Starbucks is probably not what those hoping to rejuvenate the area have in mind. Nevertheless, the Pins-Parc intersection- no beauty to begin with - could take a hit for the team and thus contribute to the betterment of the city as a whole.

Just in case you haven’t heard, a certain city in China will be hosting a major international sporting event in exactly one year’s time. The press, of course, is having its usual contradictory field day, collectively slack-jawed by the onslaught of unthinkably large mega-projects while simultaneously trying to balance the story with the usual talk of politics, labour conditions and environmental degradation. The one-year countdown point is apparently the perfect time to bash our heads in with the latest China Rising stories, which are fulfilling their annual obligation to sensationalism by rediscovering- once again - that the country is undergoing tremendous change. At this point, I’m just confused: is China rising more than usual? Are they talking about a general rise or one that is specifically confined to 2007? Is Beijing transforming more now than it was in 2006? or 2004? Do they have someone on the payroll counting construction projects to decide whether the change is substantial enough to run another China Rising story?

And for their part, Chinese officials are busy insisting that the Olympics and its grand spectacle not be politicized- well, at least not by anyone but them. Unfortunately, history is not on their side: the Olympics of the past century have been nothing if not a stream of political statements (think Berlin 1936, Munich 1972) and boycotts (Melbourne 1956, Montreal 1976, Moscow 1980, Los Angeles 1984). In this context, the agitation surrounding the first Chinese games is hardly something out of the ordinary. In a way, the Chinese government did it to themselves by positioning the event as a declaration of success for their still-quite-shaky development model. Throw a little hubris onto the scene, and the usual critics will come running- or alternatively unfold a banner demanding freedom for a certain disputed western region.

For seasoned China watchers, however, this is all old news. The growing instability of the Chinese development model is hardly the story of these upcoming Olympics, much less the actual athletic events or medal count. Rather, the main questions are: Will Beijing manage to pull it all off? Will this event manage to impress the world as intended?

My answer to both these questions, which might surprise some of my regular readers, is a cautious yes.

Naysayers, I believe, are getting muddled on the question of scale. Beijing, or China as a whole for that matter, does not need to solve all of its problems before next August- it merely needs to figure out how to sweep them under the rug for two weeks while the global media spectacle is in town. For example, much fuss has been made about Beijing’s sickening levels of pollution and permanent gridlock traffic- alleviating the root causes of these woes will take years, perhaps decades if ever. But Olympics do not last that long. The event’s success depends entirely on drastic short-term and temporary interventions which gloss over deep deficiencies rather than fix them, a game of image-making in which China is second to none.

Thus, the Chinese government doesn’t need to reconsider its pollution-intensive industrialization or questionable encouragement of private car ownership, it only needs to order them out of existence just long enough to produce the desired effect. Beijing has invested way too much of its reputation in the Olympics to have it shrouded in smog, and I imagine its officials will resort to some pretty drastic measures to ensure gorgeous blue sky next August. There has already been much talk about plans to massively restrict vehicle use in the city, control weather with cloud-seeding and so on, but frankly I would not be surprised if a decent swath of northern Chinese industry suddenly goes quiet next summer. The only realistic way of ensuring clean air for these games is a complete lockdown on industrial emissions in the region, and they will do it if they have to.

Of course, some will scoff at the sudden mysterious improvement of air quality during the Olympics (perhaps secretly wishing the event went on longer for the sake of their lungs), but this cynical attitude will have little impact on the spectacle at hand. This brings me to address the second question: will Beijing wow the world? Definitely. Hold on a second, you might be saying: what about all the massive evictions, demolitions and labour abuse that have paved this golden road? Shouldn’t the questionable means employed affect our judgment of the glitzy end? Personally, I do have trouble appreciating urban spectacles anywhere knowing they have left a bloody trail of corruption, exploitation and injustice in their wake (and let’s face it, China is hardly the only place in the world where this happens).

But I would gather that most people don’t bother to read about this stuff, or worse some might just simply not care. As much as we go on about sustainability, justice and cultural sensitivity, we are still a species deeply in awe of raw power and its manifestation in monumental structures. It is no coincidence that China and Dubai are permanent fixtures in the gushing press. These places have got it right: treating people like human beings might be nice and all, but it doesn’t impress anyone. When was the last time you were awed by a community meeting or a small, tightly-knit neighbourhood street? And so we get a continuous stream of world’s tallest buildings, world’s largest malls and instant monumental skylines, of mind-boggling demolition to raise towers which exude might. In the face of such brute, structural power, any considerations for the questionable practices which made these monuments possible quickly fade away. After all, how were the pyramids made? Beijing will deeply impress with its enormous skyline and engineering marvels, regardless of how or why they were built, with those pushed out of the way nothing more than ghosts unheard in the roar of flag-waving and Olympics crowds.

I do still, however, hope these Olympics are a success; not as any vindication for all the megalomania on the part of the government, but rather for the pride of the average Chinese person. On a whole, they’ve had a pretty rough ride throughout the 20th century and the 21st is fixing to be interesting, to say the least. So hopefully it will be their moment to shine, welcome the world with their deep hospitality, to cheer on their athletes and bask in some national pride. After all they’ve been through as their government cleans house for the event, they certainly deserve it.

After several years as a Western media darling full of flashy skylines and get-rich-quick stories, it would seem that China has been having a bit of a bumpier ride as of late. First came the stories of tainted exports products, then came the uproar over slavery in rural brick kilns; now, a Dutch environmental group has estimated that China may have already overtaken the US as the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. This announcement comes at a particularly bad time for the Chinese government, what with the Olympics on their way and the public in many industrialized countries deep in the throes of global warning worry (well, at least in between driving their SUV to the corner store). China as the world’s top polluter is obvious ammunition for the anti-China lobby, but Beijing is not taking this loss of face lying down. The Foreign Ministry spokesman was recently quoted firing back this repartee:

“The developed countries move a lot of manufacturing industry into China. A lot of the things you wear, you use, you eat are produced in China,” he said at a regular news briefing. “On the one hand, you shall increase the production in China, on the other hand you criticize China on the emission-reduction issue.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. As a media junkie, I’ve always been a bit bewildered about all the accusations flying the Middle Kingdom’s way regarding Chinese-Western (well, largely American) relations. China, revalue your currency. China, clean up your act. China, jump through this hoop and do a somersault. Meanwhile, those of us in the more Western reaches of the globe might want to check out what our own multinationals have been up to over the past decade or so- there’s a good chance that if I ply the aisles of some suburban big-box warehouse, the junk filling my shopping cart is from everyone’s favourite East Asian nation. As much as we might loath to admit it, as eager consumers we are all responsible for the Chinese environmental meltdown and its growing effects on the world at large.

So it’s almost comical to hear members of the American political class, for example, taking China to task; I have some bad news for you guys. You know that military/economic/environmental threat you keep going on about? Well, it’s a lumbering Frankenstein largely of your own creation. While economists go on about about the genius of Chinese planning (a sequence of words that might seem rather strange to those who have actually spent some time in the country), an equal salutation should be given to the West’s voracious and guilt-free appetite for cheap consumer goods, without which the Chinese ‘miracle’ would never have been possible. Of course, as the few regular readers of this site should know, this does not mean I’m excusing China’s bulldozer-happy, growth-at-all-costs-including-your-life approach to societal change. The sustainability of this frenzy has yet to be truly tested, and the wholesale destruction of environmental quality might well be the first- and ultimate- manifestation of its limitations. Yet, I do not think it is constructive to pile the emissions blame largely on China, as the West has been just a bit complicit in its mad industrialization in the first place.

So where do we go from here? Well the Chinese government has released a climate change plan that promises to address the issue, but of course not at the expense of those cherished growth figures. And seeing how the Chinese approach economic development with an “All Smokestacks Go!” mentality, I suspect we won’t be seeing meaningful reductions in emissions anytime soon. As for the strategic waffling and delay of many Western governments on the issue, enough has been said already that I don’t need to remind anyone how pathetic the whole situation is.

While it is tempting to imagine that all of this is caused by cartoon-like villains at work, hellbent on planetary destruction, I propose there is something less sinister going on. A recent headline, equally as newsworthy as global warming but likely to garner much less attention, notes that for the first time in history humanity will be more urban than rural. Simply put, ever more people are joining the ranks of those already thoroughly alienated from their environment, through desperation as much as choice, and this is reflected in the actions (or inactions) of leaders of lands industrialized, rapidly industrializing or somehow hoping to industrialize. While the urban condition has provided much that is good to humanity, I would argue that its principal drawback is in the way it distances us from the relevance of the land on which we depend. We are so removed from the processes which sustain us that many of us urbanites no longer even consider them within the scope of our daily lives. Urban survival depends on the accumulation of a virtual wealth which designates who can do what with how much- with precious little regard for the ultimate physical effects this may have on our surroundings. The urban condition allows us to convince ourselves that we are above and beyond ‘nature’ and its whims- or that we can at least forcefully control it through engineering.

And so it is no surprise that environmental issues have to such a large extent been considered a societal niche, a compartmentalized matter alongside and equal to politics, business, sports and entertainment in the classification of our busy lives. Environmentalism can thus be portrayed as a luxury, a left-wing annoyance, something to get around to eventually so that things look nicer and smell better- this is what happens when we imagine ourselves as above and beyond our own environments, in no way connected to the particular lands which we occupy. In this sense, the ‘environment’ is some separate entity which can be preserved or destroyed without much relation to the compartmentalized urban spaces in which we increasingly conceptualize ourselves. Cities may set us free in many ways, but they also provide a very false sense of security.

This alienation of humanity from its environment, embedded so forcefully in the Western doctrines of modernism and industrialism and happily pushed worldwide under the friendly guise of ‘development’, runs so deep in our societal consciousness that it can even be found within environmentalism itself. Hence the talk of preservation, of conservation, as if there is some desirable ‘natural’ state of the world apart from human activity. Our environment becomes something to be managed, but from the outside. This is the sort of mentality that leads to the creation of large national parks from which people are cleared out, as if their presence on this landscape is somehow ‘unnatural’.

And then we get to that whole issue of whether climate change is natural or man-made. Well I would say this whole debate is completely pointless: this is a false dichotomy. Something can only be man-made or natural if you understand these as two mutually exclusive spheres, which I would argue they are not. Human beings are part and parcel of this earth as much as any other creature, as are our actions. So anything we do, including spew pollution into the atmosphere, can and should be considered a natural process. I think it is high time that we relink our idea of ourselves, our cities and our industries with the wider world around us.

So if climate change and pollution can be considered natural, does this mean they are acceptable? Well, I guess it depends on how you approach the issue. From the perspective of the planet, these are neither good nor bad: they just are. I do not believe we can attribute any moral state to the machinations of our planet; continents move, species come and go, weather changes, life goes on in some form or other. The one constant seems to be dynamic change. And part of this change is certainly the work of the particularly busy and industrious species that is humanity. Is it evil or wrong that we so fundamentally affect the way our planet works through industrialism? No. But what if we turn it into a barren, smoggy rock? Hey, shit happens. The dinosaurs cashed out, someday it will be our turn. But the earth will still be the earth and life will go on somehow- maybe it will be the age of cockroaches.

Of course, from a human perspective, we could be in a bit more trouble. We might not be destroying the earth in a cosmic sense, but we are most likely changing the earth in a way that is increasingly hostile to us. From a species-selfish perspective, I worry we are at the very least setting ourselves up for some serious pain in the standard of living department. The more we alienate ourselves from our environment, the more we gleefully allow its ability to sustain us to diminish. Climate change might not be bad for the planet on the grand scale of things, but I have a sinking feeling it could mean a pretty bumpy ride for us humans. Has anyone ever tried eating money or metal? I can’t imagine it’s a very pleasant or nourishing experience.

So while many would accuse our contemporary politicians and unelected autocrats of pandering to short-term interests and their cronies’ pockets, I would argue the opposite: it would seem that our pollution-happy politicians are adhering to a long-term view, perhaps too long, as in “we are all dead in the end anyways, and nothing more than insignificant blips on the grand scale of things”. While it is perhaps admirable to demonstrate such cosmic consciousness, somehow I don’t think these are the best guidelines with which to run governments and states.

But is this lack of real action any surprise, after all? While superficially panicked about global warming, most people are just as unwilling to affect any sort of meaningful change in their lives as their politicians are hesitant to put any hard-hitting policies in place. We can consider ourselves environmentally conscious, or maybe “worried” about the environment, but this often does not reflect at all back onto the habits of our daily lives. We can sit in a fume-belching SUV stuck in traffic while lamenting the crazy weather and threat of climate change- and not even recognize the lunacy in our position. Thanks to our complete conceptual separation from our environment- fueled by modernism, industry and urbanism -we can decry the state of the environment (not our) while not considering for even a few seconds how our own behaviour plays any part in this whole spectacle.

For argument’s sake, there is always the possibility that climate change and growing pollution are not the dire threat to humanity they are often made out to be. As a species, we have proven to be incredibly adaptable, and we could very well evolve to survive on a radically different earth. But then climate change and pollution become an even starker socio-political choice: do we want to live on a polluted planet? Do we truly accept that an industrial world and all its consumer goods mean an increasingly spoiled environment as we understand it? Do we accept that the number of smog days will keep rising? The trade-off for pursuing our current ideas of wealth, happiness and modernity- largely to be found in plastic and redundant packaging - is a planet that is dirtier, more unstable and likely much less beautiful. Are we willing to make that sacrifice? I would argue that many of us already have without even thinking about it.

I came across this scene on the street the other day and loved the juxtaposition. We want freshness. We want the taste, the attention and the care that only home cooking can provide. We want that perfect meal immaculately posed on a beautiful plate. We want the fruits of a vibrant earth. And yet we accept that it is conveniently delivered to us by a dirty world of asphalt, steel, concrete and toxic fumes. Just another episode in our long and steady alienation from the land which sustains us.

As far as I was concerned until quite recently, Pemba had only two seasons: hot and really hot. July, December, October, it really didn’t matter: the sun was shining, the weather was sweet and the beach was waiting. Coming from eastern Canada, where seasons are clearly defined, to say the least, by their ability to range from sweltering inferno to Siberian deep freeze, this took some getting used to. Here in Mozambique, as the calendar told my body the weather should be cooling, the sun continued to beat down with intensity and if the temperature went anywhere it was up. Of course, this might not elicit much sympathy from those living in more northern and currently freezing climes, but endless summer quickly became a menial norm, a casual afterthought. There were no brisk, beautiful fall days, no fresh snowfall on a crisp winter morning: just the heavy air of thick humidity basking in sunshine. And that’s the way the world was.

But while I was away in Tanzania over the Christmas holidays, something happened. Someone traded in this land of eternal sunshine for a darker, more brooding twin. Since January, the brilliant sun has given way to a dull grey sky laden with moody clouds. My comfortable worldview shattered, I was confused. Was this the same Pemba? I guess I had fallen complacent in the months previous, enjoying the endless rays of sunshine guaranteed at any daylight hour I cared to venture outdoors. I had often been warned about the summer months here (December to March), but these discussions centered on the nearly unbearable heat and humidity that descended on the area during this time. Mention of rain was a mere afterthought, as in “yeah it rains more, but this doesn’t cool things down”. I was led to believe that summer here would be a bit less sun, a bit more water and a lot more heat.

Well, I was right on about the heat but not much else. There has barely been any sun, replaced as it has been with regularly scheduled torrential downpours envelopped in overcast sky. Shaken out of my beach-loving stupor, I’ve been learning the real meaning of ‘rainy season’, courtesy of the tropics. When before outdoor fun was the norm, now the weather is guaranteed to ruin any attempt at a weekend outing. Of course this is all part of a perfectly normal natural cycle, and it’s great for agriculture in the area. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it- can’t it just rain during the week?

And the storms, oh those storms; they are something to behold. Any weak blue sky offering a faint glimmer of hope for a nice day is quickly and mercilessly consumed by angry, ominous clouds, ready to unleash their contents on anyone unlucky enough to be out in the open. On two occasions now, the avenue in front of my office has transformed into a rushing river of muddy brown water within minutes of the first raindrop. In the evening, when I’m at home on the fifth floor of my aged building, the storms announce themselves with howls of wind and clattering windows, sometimes accompanied by spectacular flashes of lighting on the ocean horizon. It can be less shower and more onslaught.

As my time in Pemba draws to a close, northern Mozambique displays a whole other side of itself. After too much fun was had on the beach, the weather gods got angry. Puddles as big as lakes swallow the roads, laundry takes days to dry (and then gets wet again when it does), and existence is steamy and rain-drenched. The booming number of mosquitoes are in heaven, as well as my office and apartment. News stories abound of the flooding and cyclone destruction in more southern areas of the country. On the one bright note, the inland bush has exploded with a lush, vibrant green that is both gorgeous and a far cry from the reddish, semi-arid lands of months past. But all in all, I’ve been thoroughly reminded that tropical is not always synonymous with sunshine nor paradise.

Yesterday, during a particularly vicious lunchtime downpour, an ankle-deep river of storm water filled the avenue on which I happen to both work and live. Red from the earth it was carrying, the water washed down the slight incline towards a roundabout where it dutifully turned left and headed further downhill to join the ocean. Having seen this some of my co-workers and I, just having dashed from our cover beneath the tin sheet roof of a restaurant, quickly realized the torrential rain was no longer our primary problem. Between us and the office flowed a newly formed river where a road used to be. Some removed their sandals to test the depth of the water, while others like myself stood there trying to figure out how to get across without having to take off our shoes and socks. Eventually we managed to flag down some of the pickup trucks sloshing by, hopped in the back and got a lift literally across the street. Photo junkie that I am, I ran up the five flights of stairs to my apartment to fetch my camera and get a few shots of the scene unfolding outside. This is when I found out that, amidst the deluge descending on this fair town, my apartment once again had no water.

And so is the paradox of Pemba, my adopted hometown of the past eight months. It’s a place where infrastructure is minimal when it exists at all, where rudimentary flickers of cell service, wireless and flat screen monitors inhabit the moldy concrete remains of a Portuguese colonial era more than thirty years gone. Water drips through ceilings as often as it doesn’t come out of taps. Shops and offices are stark and musty, rudimentary in their rough concrete surfaces and faded wood paneling. A neighbourhood of quietly decaying bungalows and palm tree-lined cracked asphalt nestles up against a row of strangely jagged Modernist concrete hulks now serving as local government offices and the city’s select few apartment buildings. Some vehicles are parked very permanently, their tires deflated and windshields smashed. Even the hospital has some twisted automobile hulks in its yard. Things are worn out, scratched, cracked, chipped, broken, smashed and abandoned. Wealth is exhibited purely at the level of the private individual, seen in the shiny new vehicles plying the infrastructural ghost of this broken colonial town, in the satellite dishes dotting decaying balconies, or perhaps in the gorgeous Mediterranean-style villas found along the rugged dirt roads past the beach. Public services, however, are little provided and even less expected. It would seem that new economic life is chaotically sprouting out of the ruins completely of its own accord. This is a world largely devoid of the public good. Of course, so far I haven’t even mentioned the 90% of the town comprised solely of mud huts and narrow paths.

My apartment building, the tallest in town at a towering seven floors, has a dusty junk-strewn shaft running alongside the staircase where an elevator used to be. The power supply is actually fairly decent, Pemba having traded up a giant generator for connection to the national grid not so long ago. However, there are still regular blackouts, system hiccups and power surges: sometimes it’s just my building, one side of the street, or the other, or both, or the whole town. When the lights go out at night, there is little more to do than stand on my balcony watching distant vehicle headlights bump their way up and down through the complete darkness. More often than not, blackouts are well synchronized to hit when DStv is actually showing a good film like City of God. Of course, to the large majority of the city’s residents this all matters precious little because they never have power.

Water is more of an issue. My apartment is supplied by a decrepit tank on the roof, which itself is supplied by water pumped up from a reservoir behind the building. Unfortunately, this elaborate system allows for way too many different points at which things can go wrong. Often the apartment’s tank doesn’t refill when empty, other times something breaks in the pumping mechanism. Sometimes little wood chips and bloated dead bugs pour out of the tap. Sometimes it’s not the lack of water that causes problems, but rather its overabundance. When I first moved in here in late August, the toilet in my washroom had a bad habit of not knowing when to stop refilling after a flush, happily flooding the hallway on several occasions. On an even less pleasant note, my sink drain has spewed up dirty water from points unknown to the point of overflowing the rim. Tired of cleaning up someone else’s mess- literally- I disassembled the plumbing under the sink and jammed the offending pipe with a pill bottle. Now my sink empties directly into a bucket, which I have to regularly dump down the bathtub drain or into the toilet. But at least it’s my wastewater.

My television has nearly exploded, wiping out a power adaptor and knocking out the fuse for half the apartment. The socket in my bedroom gave me quite a rough shock, enough that I swore at the top of my lungs as electricity coursed through me. Large piles of garbage are unceremoniously dumped throughout the alleyway adjacent to my building, comprised of everything from discarded cans to bovine jawbones. One such pile is directly below my window five floors down, and my lazier side has wondered on occasion whether I couldn’t just drop trash bags from up here rather than walking up and down the stairs. Sometimes a tractor with a flatbed comes by and some guys shovel it up, and other times people just light it up. It’s particularly pleasant when the sweet scent emanating from burning trash across the street drifts right up through my balcony doors. In fact, as I sit here typing this in the front room right now I’m catching a whiff of something that is quite likely garbage and most definitely on fire.

Breakdowns, interruptions, leaks, dumps and floods are the daily ingredients of existence in this town. With the decrepit state of its utilities, housed as they are within the crumbling remnants of colonial times, there is little argument that infrastructure is certainly not one of Pemba’s strong points. Maintenance is a dirty word.

And yet, just a few minutes spent basking in the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean under a brilliant blue sky are enough to make you realize how little this really matters in the end. Pemba is largely broken, but it’s also absolutely beautiful.