[PHOTO] Garrison Creek, a Human River of the future?

I picked this pamphlet up Sunday in Trinity Bellwoods Park at the beginning of the Homegrown National Park's contribution to the Jane's Walk weekend, a walk following the course of now-buried Garrison Creek from said park down to the shoreline, by Fort York and roughly paralleling Bathurst Street. The organizers of the walk would like to resurface Garrison Creek, at least partly, so as to restore something of Toronto's original nature. There has been some discussion of this in the past, but so far, nothing yet. But in the future?

[CAT] "Living-Room Leopards"

Ariel Levy's latest article in The New Yorker is in the current issue of that magazine. Free only to New Yorker online subscribers or owners of the actual physical copy of the magazine, it's a fascinating look at the world of cat breeders who are trying to breed pet cats that have as exotic a look as possible, the "living-room leopards" of the title. Levy takes on this culture, which seems to have something of the obsessive to it, concerned with producing a particular look regardless of the cost to the breeders or indeed to the often-inbred animals themselves.

(Myself, I wouldn't want a wild cat, in look or in appearance. I'm glad that Shakespeare's less than ten pounds. He's still adorable.)

When Anthony Hutcherson was a little boy, what he wanted most was something wild. But he was growing up in a very tame place: Helen, Maryland, a small farming community named after the postmaster’s daughter. “I wanted a kinkajou and a monkey and a skunk, a pet leopard,” he recalled—something unlike the cows and sheep out in the meadow. One day, when he was ten years old, waiting with his mother to check out at the grocery store, he saw something that thrilled him. It was a picture in Cat Fancy of a pretty woman in California, holding an exotic golden cat that she’d bred by crossing a domestic shorthair with an Asian leopard cat—a foul-tempered little beast with a gorgeous spotted coat. She called the result the Bengal, and touted it as “a living room leopard.”

His family didn’t understand his passion, he told me one recent afternoon. Hutcherson, who is African-American, offered a cultural explanation: “Generally, black people don’t like cats.” So he wrote to the woman in California, Jean Mill, and, to his delight, she wrote back. They have been friends and collaborators ever since. Hutcherson, now thirty-eight, is the chairman of the International Cat Association’s Bengal Breed Committee and a past president of the International Bengal Cat Society. He and Mill, like many of their colleagues, share a dream: to breed a cat that “looks like it just walked out of the jungle.”

We were sitting in Hutcherson’s living room, in Aquasco, Maryland, across from a glass cage where his kinkajou, a ferret-like nocturnal creature, was sleeping under a blanket. Hutcherson works as an event producer, and also runs a cattery, called JungleTrax, out of his house. When I visited, he had half a dozen sleek Bengal kittens, coppery creatures with well-defined dark spots—“rosettes,” in cat-fancier parlance. As we talked, he flung a cat toy in the air, and they leaped after it with astounding speed. Several times, they scratched us as they went by, so Hutcherson decided to trim their nails, holding the scruff of their neck in his mouth while he clipped. “When I’m gardening or mowing the grass, they all come outside with me,” he said. “And they really do look like little leopards. It’s really rewarding and humbling when you forget the bead of time, and you are watching a cat chase a bug up a tree—two thousand years ago, somebody probably watched a cat that looked like a leopard chase a bug. It is beautiful and transcendent.”

[LINK] "Ontario power plant cancellations: Ex-premier Dalton McGuinty says ‘our government was wrong

The Toronto Star's Bernard Weil reports on former premier Dalton McGuinty's testimony about the relocation of gas power plants in two Greater Toronto Area municipalities, Oakville and Mississauga. The whole thing has ramifications for the government of McGuinty's successor. Will the thing boil over?

In long-awaited testimony Tuesday before a legislative committee investigating the controversial cancellations in Oakville and Mississauga — which opposition parties charge was done to save five Liberal seats — McGuinty maintained the plants were axed because they were too close to residential areas and emissions could cause respiratory problems.

“In Oakville and Mississauga, we were faced with a circumstance where gas plants were sited right next to schools, condominium towers, family homes, and a hospital. That wasn’t right,” McGuinty said.

When it came time to build the plants, regulations implemented in 2009 would not have allowed wind turbines on the sites so it would have been folly to build natural gas-fired power plants there, McGuinty added.

“This all happened in the run-up to the election campaign,” he admitted, speaking of the Mississauga plant axed less than two weeks before voting day on Oct. 6, 2011.

“When that campaign began, the people of that community repeated their argument that the plant didn’t belong there.”

He added: “all three parties promised to cancel the plant if elected.”

McGuinty also acknowledged the minority government’s ability to get accurate figures on the cancellation costs has been “less than stellar.”

Opposition MPPs said the former premier’s testimony failed to clear up questions on when the government knew the cancellation costs were higher than the figures they kept using publicly.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto city council to have transit tax debate"

CityNews' Erin Criger is just one person among many to note that Toronto city council will be debating a transit tax notwithstanding the mayor's attempted veto. Rob Ford isn't doing well out of this, while conversely, TTC chair Karen Stintz is doing well. Stintz for mayor, perhaps?

Toronto city councillors overruled Mayor Rob Ford’s executive committee on Tuesday, voting to have a transit tax debate before the Metrolinx deadline passes.

The motion passed 27-13. It’s not yet clear when the debate will be held, but it will be during this council session. The session could run until Thursday.

“Thank you to all members of Council for allowing the important debate on revenue tools to happen,” TTC chair Karen Stintz tweeted after the vote.

Coun. Mike Layton agreed, tweeting, “Despite the mayors attempt to silence us, City Council votes 27-13 to have a critical debate about transit revenue tools.”

Last month, Ford’s executive committee voted to defer the transit tax debate until May 28 – the day after Metrolinx presents its report to the province on proposed revenue tools.

The deferment meant Toronto could have been shut out of a provincial conversation. However, Tuesday’s vote means the taxes and other funding tools will be discussed.

[URBAN NOTE] "A Few Delicate Questions About The Scarborough Subway"

Toronto transit expert Steve Munro examines at length the case being made yet again for a subway route in Scarborough, as opposed to the surface light-rail routes currently being mooted. The introduction is below.

In the run-up to a forced Council debate, it is not enough for some, including TTC Chair Karen Stintz, to simply appeal to a sense of democracy – six members of Executive should not be able to block debate by 45 members of Council on an important matter. This became a chance to dust off the “One City” plan and pull together a Scarborough coalition by advancing the cause of a Scarborough Subway – an extension of the Danforth line east and north from Kennedy Station to Sheppard and McCowan.

No sooner was this scheme back on the table, but other would-be players began to mutter about their own pet projects. That “extra half billion” the subway option in Scarborough may cost on paper could attract billions of add-ons, almost like the worst of pork-filled appropriations in the US Congress. What might fall off of the table to pay for the Scarborough subway plus any other extras needed to bring reluctant Councillors onside is unknown. Queen’s Park has been quite clear that there is no additional funding from that quarter, and so and extra must come from Toronto.

Queen’s Park can, of course, ignore whatever Council may try to add as conditions on approval of revenue tools, but if these undo the agreement to build LRT lines signed barely a year ago, this is no trivial discussion. Regional planning will take a back seat to political aspirations just as it has for the past four decades, and momentum for actual construction rather than endless debate and delay will be lost.

The whole concept that the subway option is “affordable” turns on the premise that it is only slightly more expensive than the LRT, and brings benefits the LRT option cannot. Some claims made for the subway option are, at best, misinformed, and at worst outright deceptions. Unfortunately, the public agencies charged with providing accurate information are staying silent lest they be drawn into yet another political debate that could wreck professional careers.

[LINK] "The Frozen Earth"

I've meant for some time to link to this Systemic post linking to Gregory Laughlin and Fred Adams' paper on the question of how planets gravitationally bound to their sun like our solar system's eight might be scattered into interstellar space via rogue encounters.

Planetary systems that encounter passing stars can experience severe orbital disruption, and the efficiency of this process is enhanced when the impinging systems are binary pairs rather than single stars. Using a Monte Carlo approach to perform more than 200,000 N-body integrations, we examine the ramifications of this scattering process for the long-term prospects of our own Solar System. After statistical processing of the results, we estimate an overall probability of order 2×10^5 that Earth will find its orbit seriously disrupted prior to the emergence of a runaway greenhouse effect driven by the Sun’s increasing luminosity. This estimate includes both direct disruption events and scattering processes that seriously alter the orbits of the jovian planets, which force severe changes upon the Earth’s orbit. Our set of scattering experiments gives a number of other results. For example, there is about 1 chance in 2 million that Earth will be captured into orbit around another star before the onset of a runaway greenhouse effect. In addition, the odds of Neptune doubling its eccentricity are only one part in several hundred. We then examine the consequences of Earth being thrown into deep space. The surface biosphere would rapidly shut down under conditions of zero insolation, but the Earth’s radioactive heat is capable of maintaining life deep underground, and perhaps in hydrothermal vent communities, for some time to come. Although unlikely for Earth, this scenario may be common throughout the universe, since many environments where liquid water could exist (e.g., Europa and Callisto) must derive their energy from internal (rather than external) heating.

Laughlin, the blogger, goes on to answer some common questions about how this might be relevant to us. We'd notice the risk, for instance.

There would be plenty of warning. With our current capabilities for astronomical observation, the interloping star would be observed tens of thousands of years in advance, and Earth’s dynamical fate would be quite precisely known centuries in advance. The most dramatic sequence of events would unfold over a period of about two or three years. Let’s assume that the incoming star is a red dwarf, which is the most common type of star. Over a period of months the interloping star would gradually become brighter and brighter, until it was bright enough to provide excellent near-daytime illumination with an orange cast whenever it is up the sky by itself. It’s likely that the size of its disk on the sky would become — for a few weeks — larger than the size of the full moon, and vastly brighter. Like the Sun, it would be too bright to look at directly. After several more months, one would start to notice that the seasons were failing to unfold normally. Both the Sun and the Red Dwarf would gradually draw unambiguously smaller and fainter in the sky. After a year, the warmth of the sun on one’s face would be gone, and it would be growing colder by the day… Over a period of several more years, the Sun would gradually appear more and more like a brilliant star rather a life-giving orb. A winter, dark like the Antarctic winter, but without end, and with ever-colder conditions would grip the entire Earth.

[LINK] "French speakers in California, Past and Present"

Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig wrote about the history of the French language in California, strongly associated with a long history of immigration and cultural prestige.

While today fewer than 1% of Californians speak French, some 150 years ago this language played a prominent role statewide, especially in northern California. The first Frenchman whose presence in California is documented is Pierre (Pedro) Prat, a doctor in the 1769 expedition headed by Gaspar de Portolà and Junípero Serra. Not long after, in 1782, a French-speaking sailor from Brittany, Pierre Roy, shows up at the new mission at San Buenaventura. [. . .] There must have been some French Canadian merchants and trappers who made it to Alta California in those early years, but there is no documented information about their visits. Additional settlers must have come from the French-speaking Midwest.

In the first half of the 19th century, California, then under Spanish and subsequently Mexican control, established trade relations with the rest of Spanish-speaking America and New England, as well as with many European countries, including Russia and France. French-speaking immigrants continue to arrive in this period, coming chiefly from western regions of France (Normandy, Brittany, southwestern regions), as well as from Belgium and Quebec. Each regional group typically filled an occupational niche: people from the southwestern regions of France were often winemakers and carpenters, those from the Pyrenees were mainly merchants and teachers, while immigrants from Brittany and Normandy were often sailors. They settled in Monterey, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and elsewhere. Many of the French-speaking immigrants learned Spanish and some married Mexicans, but typically they continued to speak French at home and even outside the French-speaking community (Foucrier 2005: 236). In multilingual early 19th century California, each tongue occupied its own niche: Spanish as the official language, English as the chief language of trade, and French—which was at the time the international diplomatic language—as an important political and cultural vehicle. Being able to speak French helped talented and ambitious young men like Victor Prudon and José María Covarrubias to became personal secretaries of influential men and thus to serve as intermediaries in the complex politics of the era. In May 1843, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo wrote to the governor Manuel Micheltorena suggesting that Victor Prudon be named prefect of the newly created Sonoma prefecture, pointing out that the young man had an advantage of speaking three languages: Spanish, English, and French. Vallejo himself is characterized by a Swedish traveler who visits him in 1842-1843 as “speaking good French and passable English” (Van Sicklen ed. 1945: 84).

[. . .]

The Gold Rush, which started with the discovery of rich gold deposits in 1848, changed the demographics of northern California. Masses of hopefuls began to arrive in 1849; among them were no fewer than 25,000 French speakers from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, and Louisiana. Unlike earlier French immigrants, many of those attracted by the prospects of finding gold came from Paris. While many of these newly arrived francophones looked for fortunes at the gold mines, many settled in the cities as well, including San Francisco. French neighborhoods were established, as were French social organizations and clubs. Unlike earlier French immigrants, those of the Gold Rush era typically did not speak English, nor were they motivated to learn it as they hoped to get rich and to return home within several months. Most were happy to get by with only one member of a group speaking (or perhaps only thinking that he spoke) English. The others would turn to such “designated interpreter” with Qu’est-ce qu’il dit? [‘What did he say?’]. As a result, the French prospectors got a nickname keskydees. In later years, as the gold mines were exhausted and xenophobic attitudes started to surface, obstinate refusals on the part of the francophone gold-seekers to learn English provoked distrust and hostility, on occasion even violence (Foucrier 2005: 239).

But the Gold Rush era was also the golden era of the French community in San Francisco. Cafes and restaurants in the City’s French quarter prospered. Several institutions were established to aid French-speakers in need. In 1851 a mutual aid society was founded to help sick francophones who did not speak English; hospital visits of such patients by French-speaking doctors were arranged. Two years later a French speaking volunteer fire brigade, the Compagnie Lafayette, was organized to combat the frequent fires and to insure proper communication during such emergencies. San Francisco’s French community also had its own church, numerous newspapers, and theaters. The most important French-language newspaper was the Echo du Pacifique, which, beginning in June 1852, came out three times a week on four pages: three in French and one in Spanish. In December 1855, it became a daily. For a few years, French theater flourished as actors and directors—fleeing economic and social turmoil in France in the wake of the 1848 revolution—brought the best and the latest of Parisian comedies, vaudevilles, and operas. This golden age of French theater in the City by the Bay was short-lived, however, as the fires that ravaged the city in May and June 1851 destroyed a number of theater buildings. But already in July of that year, the rebuilt Adelphi theater opened its doors to the public; sometimes its facilities were used for balls and other special events in the French-speaking community. All in all, life in California for the French immigrants of the mid-19th century must have been rather good. In fact, so many Frenchmen were leaving for the United States at the time that some politicians in France and French Canada feared a mass exodus. As a result, negative representations in newspapers and novels proliferated (Lemire 1987, Lamontagne 2002).</

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s immigrant enclaves spread to suburbs"

The Toronto Star's Nicholas Keung writes about ethnic neighbourhoods in Toronto. There's ongoing shifts, with old ethnic neighbourhoods in the downtown emptying out as suburban communities combining different ethnic groups emerge.

Driven by a better living environment, bigger and more affordable homes in the suburbs, more newcomers are settling in the 905 areas as older immigrant communities matured, moved out of the city and reached a critical mass in certain outlying neighbourhoods.

The Jewish community, for example, has taken hold of the Bathurst corridor from Lawrence Ave. to Centre St. in Thornhill, the Chinese in Scarborough, Markham and Mississauga, Italians in Vaughan and Indians in Brampton.

While there are still religious institutions and ethnic businesses dominating the old enclaves in the city, for many they are now little more than tourist attractions and places of reminiscence. (There are also residential clusters of impoverished immigrants who can’t afford the suburban dream.)

“The Greektown is not Greek; Chinatown is not Chinese. They are just ethnic business enclaves where you go, eat, play, have fun and go home,” said Ryerson University professor Sandeep Agrawal, an expert on ethnic enclaves and urban planning.

And:

According to Shuguang Wang, a demographics geographer at Ryerson University, many ethnic enclaves in the 905 have become “multi-centric,” meaning a dominant group has more than one cluster, often surrounding an ethnic mall or plaza, in a single municipality, sharing the space with mixed neighbours.

“These businesses may be owned and operated by the Chinese and viewed as ethnic businesses, but they are not only targeting Chinese clients,” said Wang.

“Sometimes because of city planning and zoning, not all areas can get permits for development. People cannot start their own enclave and have to add to the existing,” added Wang, explaining the emergence of mixed ethnic hubs in the 905.

Many ethnic retailers now reach out to a multicultural clientele, he said. Sunny Foodmart, a Chinese-owned grocery chain, for example, sells Halal meat at its Flemingdon Park store to cater to the area’s Muslim residents.