[PHOTO] Front and John, looking north

Front and John, looking north
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

At Front and John in downtown Toronto, on a December late afternoon at twilight, the busy cars move with haste.

[LINK] "All stations but America: why the US can't fall in love with rail"

Shilpa Kameswaran's speculation at Open Democracy applies equally to Canada, sadly.

Determined to explore the North American rail networks and to understand why there never are sighs of the slightest enthusiasm to partake in train journeys in the United States, I set off for a whole week on Amtrak’s historic and most admired long train routes – The California Zephyr and the Coast Starlight.

The tapering trapezium of the John Hancock tower diminished on the Chicagoan skyline this January as my train pulled out of the Union Station in downtown Chicago.

Making a journey from Chicago, Illinois across North-America to Emeryville, California covering 3,924 kilometers in 52hours on the ‘California Zephyr’ was for me the most hassle-free mode of continent exploration.

Originating in the mid-western city of Chicago the Zephyr passes westwards through the states of Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California. The passenger train route of the ‘California Zephyr’ started in 1949 is the eighth longest train route in the world and one of America’s most scenic, second only to Amtrak’s ‘Coast Starlight’ which sprints 2,216 kilometers along the Pacific ocean from Southern California to Oregon and Washington State covering the west coast's entire length.

Yet, shockingly three-quarters of my Superliner train all through both journeys was unoccupied, more shockingly, the sleeper-roomette and dining car services were first-class plush and fantastic and most shockingly an overwhelming thirty-six of the forty American peers I spoke with at the University of Chicago had never before heard of Amtrak’s ‘California Zephyr’ or ‘Coast Starlight’ all along while growing up in sub-urban America. What they had heard of were the shorter train routes and the dilapidated Amtrak stations at the little towns on these interior routes.

Why might a locomotive that lustfully loops around the upper Colorado River valley in the Rocky Mountains, the Wasatch Mountains, the Pequop Mountains and the Sierra Nevada mountains through forty odd tunnels be so insignificant and infamous?

Or the route from Toronto to Montreal along Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence?

A standard explanation of the marginality of passenger rail in North America as a consequence of highly dispersed patterns of population distribution which make rail not that advantageous, perhaps coupled with complaints about Amtrak's passenger relations, would work. This?

The real reasons may have to do with the real overriding philosophy of ‘individualism’ and the ‘indestructible importance of the individual’ on which the entire nation has been built brick by brick for generations. The real notions of the individual against nature, the individual’s conquest, the individual’s adventure, the individual’s unstoppable power of exploration, the individual’s immeasurable power to define leisure at her/his will, the individual’s pride in his/her personal exclusivity which have been reiterated and reconfirmed in recurring frequency by the media, the arts, the entertainment and most significantly by science and technology in North America surely and stably add up to why the idea of scuttling and scampering in a nine compartment passenger train with hundreds of other fellow passengers is unbearable to the average American who wants his holiday to be solely exclusive and not shared.

American capitalism’s precious beliefs of positioning the ‘individual choice’ above the ‘collective communal choice’ and of prioritizing the ‘individual interest’ before the ‘institutional interest’ have made the American consumer overtly selfish, child-like and demanding the best services his money can fetch him; and surely mode of transportation is not an excusable exception to this school of thought.

When the privately owned fuss-less low cost airlines and the fuss-less car rental enterprises can excruciatingly spoil their customers with custom made traveling options, the nationalized Amtrak failingly falls far behind. The only strata of customers the Amtrak seems to unfailingly and securely attract all round the year are the baby-boomers and senior adults who for one receive 15% discounts on their cheapest tickets; secondly are disadvantaged when it comes to driving on the expressways in unfavorable weather conditions and thirdly have the time to ride on a train for two whole days and sometimes more.

What say you?

[LINK] "Invasive Species Reconsidered: Finding a Value in Non-Natives"

Via The Loom I found an interesting essay by science writer Carl Zimmer suggesting that introduced species--animals and plants transplanted via human action from their native environment to one where they've traditionally been lacking--may not be as damaging to the natural environment as some suggest.

The tale of the honeybee is a sadly familiar one: a once-thriving species is on the ropes. After brutal bouts with mites and fungi, honeybees are now facing their most dangerous threat yet: a mysterious disease called colony collapse disorder. In the winter of 2010 alone, U.S. beekeepers reported losing 34 percent of their hives to CCD, which may be caused by viruses, pesticides, or some diabolical combination of factors. Researchers are working hard to figure out exactly why the honeybees are dying and how to save them because of their ecological importance. Honeybees pollinate many of the country’s fruit and vegetable crops, and they also carry out the same service for many species of wild plants. In Brazil, honeybees help keep isolated rain forest fragments from dying out by moving their pollen from tree to tree.


Amidst all the concern for the honeybees, it’s easy to forget an important fact about them. They’re not native to the New World.

The earliest records of honeybees in this hemisphere come from English settlers who arrived with hives aboard their ships in the early 1600s. They brought the bees to make honey they could eat and wax they could burn. Over the past four centuries, new stocks of honeybees have arrived at least eight times, from Europe, the Near East, and Africa.

Introduced species can, in some cases, become dangerous invaders, wreaking havoc on their new homes. They may gobble up native species, outcompete them, or just infect them to cause new diseases. Much of modern conservation management is organized around keeping alien species out and killing off the ones that made it in. And yet there are no loud voices calling for the alien honeybees to be wiped out in the New World.

“It’s almost like everyone politely ignores that they’re not native,” says Dov Sax, a conservation biologist at Brown University.

Sax and some of his fellow biologists think that it’s time to give some serious consideration to this paradox. In a paper published in Conservation Biology, Sax and two colleagues argue for recognizing the ecological value of some introduced species. “We predict the proportion of non-native species that are viewed as benign or even desirable will slowly increase over time,” they write.

The fact that a journal like Conservation Biology would publish such a statement is a testament to how seriously some researchers are taking the idea. “It’s considered edgy, but it’s not considered nuts,” says Sax. Not nuts, perhaps — but certainly not innocuous. The new paper is eliciting strong responses from other conservation biologists — ranging from hearty endorsements to fierce protests.

Sax and his co-authors — Julian Olden of the University of Washington and Martin Schlaepfer of State University of New York in Syracuse and INRA in Rennes, France — point to a number of studies that have documented the benefits of introduced species. Some non-native species provide habitat and food for native animals and plants, for example. In the southwestern United States, tamarisk trees have been aggressively spreading along rivers. The trees started drawing up so much water that

Some non-native species provide habitat for native plants and animals and can promote diversity.

conservation biologists feared it might not leave enough for the native plants. If the native plants disappeared, so might the animals that depended on them, such as the endangered southwestern willow flycatcher. The government spent millions of dollars to stop the tamarisk, using bulldozers, herbicides, and even tree-munching beetles. Yet in recent years some researchers have concluded the initial worries about the threat of tamarisks to the water table were exaggerated. At the same time, conservation biologists have found the southwestern willow flycatcher nesting in tamarisk trees. Their fledglings do as well in the introduced trees as they did in the native ones. Getting rid of the tamarisk would mean getting rid of the habitat of an endangered bird.

Introduced species can also help restore native ecosystems on degraded land. In Puerto Rico, for example, much of the native forest was destroyed for farming, and in recent decades conservation biologists have been trying to nurture them back on abandoned farmland. Native trees do a poor job of pioneering this degraded landscape. Alien trees, such as African tulip trees and rose apple, have colonized them instead. These new forests remain dominated by alien trees for their first three or four decades. But the forests are also a habitat in which native trees can begin to thrive again. After 60 to 80 years of growth, Puerto Rican forests become mixes of both alien and native trees.

Introduced species can promote diversity by acting like ecosystem engineers, reworking their new habitat. Off the coast of Chile, for example, a gelatinous invertebrate called Pyura praeputialis forms massive mats, providing nooks and crannies in which other species can thrive. Juan Carlos Castilla of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and his colleagues have found 116 species of invertebrates and algae living in these alien ecosystems, while nearby intertidal rocky shores were home to just 66 species.

Honeybees demonstrate another benefit that introduced species can offer. Other introduced species can pollinate plants as well, while some animals help native plants in other ways. In Hawaii, a bird called the Japanese white eye spreads the seeds of a native vine. These new partnerships between native and non-native species show that they aren’t precisely linked like a lock and key. “In reality, the world is a lot messier,” says Schlaepfer.

I made a post on the subject last June specifically relating to the domestic housecat, which has managed to interbreed with all but of a few Eurasian wildcat populations, so ensuring that the old stock no longer exists. In my own layman's perspective the more conciliatory attitudes described by Zimmer and Sax make sense to me inasmuch as ecosystems are never static and trying to go back to year zero always ends badly.

[URBAN NOTE] What's happening to the coffee shop?

The frequently interesting Leah McLaren complained recently that wireless Internet is destroying cafes, by giving users of WiFi venues only.

There's a battle brewing in my erstwhile Toronto neighbourhood, which I revisited on a recent trip home from my base in England. And I literally mean brewing – in the organic, fair-trade, slow-roasted Colombian sense.

It's no secret that urbanites everywhere like their coffee. It propels us to work, fuels social interaction during the day and occasionally keeps us up at night. So perhaps it's no surprise that the past few years have seen an explosion in the number of coffee houses in cities like Toronto. I'm not talking about the Starbucks invasion of neighbourhoods across the continent, but independent, brand-free cafés, the sort of places that are furnished with carefully selected thrift-shop finds, decorated by local artists and frequented by cardigan-wearing grad students and graphic designers who like their double iced frappuccinos large and their wireless on the house.

Sounds like a slice of modern urban paradise, doesn't it? All those freelance hipsters lounging around in vintage corduroys, sipping lavender chai tea and nibbling on wheat-free scones while uploading photos of last night's jam session onto Facebook. Seriously, dudes, what could be cooler?

Well, therein lies the problem. Unlike in, say, Vienna, where café-going typically involves heated intellectual debates over endless cups of Kaffee mit Schlag , the “third wave” coffee houses in Canada's largest city are attracting an increasing number of people who colonize them as work spaces. Call them home offices away from home, cafés cum study carrels. Ostensibly, they are public spaces, but they feel private sector.

She goes on to highlight at least one cafe owner who announce that, as soon as they got rid of the WiFi, they attracted high-spending, high-activity customers.

This subject interests me for--well--obvious reasons.



This picture shows me a half-hour ago where I am now, hoisting a mug to the camera at the Second Cup coffee shop on the southeastern corner of Bloor and Albany, just one block east of Bathurst Street, in the Annex. (Yes, this is a webcam picture, but I did what I could with Picnik.) Invested as I am in coffee, in wireless Internet, in coffee shops, and in the many wonderful ways in which these three items can interact, a reflexive skepticism of McLaren's thesis. Does the availability of wireless Internet keep people who would otherwise have bought more than a cup or two of coffee from doing so, or from interacting with other coffee shop owners? I'm inclined to distinguish between chains, like the Second Cup I am in now, and the less generic neighbourhood cafes which would be more rooted in their neighbourhoods and more amenable to spontaneous conversation between customers.

I also came across recently one piece by Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times, who--starting from crusades against portable electronic devices like ereaders in some benighted shops-- pointed out that the cafe is fundamentally individualistic, allowing people to interact or not as is the wont of an establishment that's basically a self-service space for free public assembly.

Not long ago in Brooklyn, a man with an iPod, whose headphones were whining, pulled off his headset. He asked two gossiping women nearby to talk more quietly. “Why don’t you turn your music down?” one of them asked. “It’s turned up so loud to drown you out!” shouted the man, in full 16th-century mode. Tempers spiked but, by cafe common law, both parties were wrong. There are all kinds of freedoms in cafes, but you can’t tell other people to turn it down. (The caffeine-induced irritability was a nice traditional touch, however.)

You also can’t tell cafe patrons to stop reading — even when e-readers don’t look (for now) as classy as paperbacks, newspapers or pamphlets. Sure, e-readers are dangerous: someone reading on one might make a note or check Facebook or play Scrabble. Sorry, proprietors — if they can find the Web with their tablet or phone, you shouldn’t be stopping them.

On July 1, Starbucks locations all over the United States started offering free, one-click, unlimited wireless service to their patrons. “We want to provide you with a great digital experience to go with your great cup of coffee,” the chain explains. Starbucks has long seemed to me like a flawed franchise that is squarely in the public good. In my eyes, this seals it.

As for the fancy tech-unfriendly cafes that shut out writers and readers like infidels in Ottoman times, maybe they should just style themselves as restaurants, with tablecloths, silverware and full service. If you have to bus your own table, history teaches, you’re in a cafe — and you can read and write what you want.

[H&F] "On maps and territories and their slippery relationships"

I've a post up at History and Futility commenting on the ways in which maps--of territories, of thought processes--don't necessarily reflect and can significantly influence reality. Feedback, feed-forward.

Go, read (and follow the links there, and enjoy the Borges)!

[LINK] "In search of an African revolution"

Azad Essa's Al Jazeera essay on the implications of the North African revolutions for sub-Saharan Africa reminds me of a point that Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui once made about the arbitrary boundaries between Africa and the Middle East, that the Red Sea unites as much as it divides on human and natural grounds, and that the Arabian peninsula could--if people so wanted--be reclassified as African. It all comes down to the question of where you want to draw the lines, visible or otherwise, on your own personal map.

Demonstrations are continuing across the Middle East, interrupted only by the call for prayer when protesters fall to their knees on cheap carpets and straw mats and the riot police take a tea break. Egypt, in particular, with its scenes of unrelenting protesters staying put in Tahrir Square, playing guitars, singing, treating the injured and generally making Gandhi’s famous salt march of the 1940s look like an act of terror, captured the imagination of an international media and audience more familiar with the stereotype of Muslim youth blowing themselves and others up.

A non-violent revolution was turning the nation full circle, much to the admiration of the rest of the world.

"I think Egypt's cultural significance and massive population were very important factors in ensuring media coverage," says Ethan Zuckerman, the co-founder of Global Voices, an international community of online activists.

[. . .]

Egypt was suddenly a sexy topic. But, despite the fact that the rich banks of the Nile are sourced from central Africa, the world looked upon the uprising in Egypt solely as a Middle Eastern issue and commentators scrambled to predict what it would mean for the rest of the Arab world and, of course, Israel. Few seemed to care that Egypt was also part of Africa, a continent with a billion people, most living under despotic regimes and suffering economic strife and political suppression just like their Egyptian neighbours.

"Egypt is in Africa. We should not fool about with the attempts of the North to segregate the countries of North Africa from the rest of the continent," says Firoze Manji, the editor of Pambazuka Online, an advocacy website for social justice in Africa. "Their histories have been intertwined for millennia. Some Egyptians may not feel they are Africans, but that is neither here nor there. They are part of the heritage of the continent."

And, just like much of the rest of the world, Africans watched events unfold in Cairo with great interest. "There is little doubt that people [in Africa] are watching with enthusiasm what is going on in the Middle East, and drawing inspiration from that for their own struggles," says Manji.

He argues that globalisation and the accompanying economic liberalisation has created circumstances in which the people of the global South share very similar experiences: "Increasing pauperisation, growing unemployment, declining power to hold their governments to account, declining income from agricultural production, increasing accumulation by dispossession - something that is growing on a vast scale - and increasing willingness of governments to comply with the political and economic wishes of the North.

"In that sense, people in Africa recognise the experiences of citizens in the Middle East. There is enormous potential for solidarity to grow out from that. In any case, where does Africa end and the Middle East begin?"

The ‘trouble’ that started in Tunisia (another African country) when street vendor Mohamed Bouzazi’s self-immolation articulated the frustrations of a nation spread to Algeria (yes, another African country), Yemen and Bahrain just as Hosni Mubarak made himself comfortable at a Sharm el Sheik spa.

Meanwhile, in 'darkest Africa', far away from the media cameras, reports surfaced of political unrest in a West African country called Gabon. With little geo-political importance, news organisations seem largely oblivious to the drama that began unfolding on January 29, when the opposition protested against Ali Bhongo Odhimba’s government, whom they accuse of hijacking recent elections. The demonstrators demanded free elections and the security forces duly stepped in to lay those ambitions to rest. The clashes between protesters and police that followed show few signs of relenting.

"The events in Tunisia and Egypt have become, within Africa, a rallying cry for any number of opposition leaders, everyday people harbouring grievances and political opportunists looking to liken their country's regimes to those of Ben Ali or Hosni Mubarak," says Drew Hinshaw, an American journalist based in West Africa. "In some cases that comparison is outrageous, but in all too many it is more than fair.

Go, read.

[BRIEF NOTE] Where are Libya's oil fields?

Where are Libya's oil fields?
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

In my Monday post outlining the grounds to suspect strong regionalist, even separatist, tendencies of existing in opaque Libya, I suggested that most of the oil was to be found in the west, away from the rebellious eastern region of Cyrenaica. As this image, found at The Oil Drum's post on Libyan oil via The Arabist makes clear, Libya's oil infrastructure (not necessarily production) seems to actually be more concentrated in Cyrenaica than elsewhere.