[PHOTO] Eight photos from Sir Casimir Gzowski Park, Sunnyside, Toronto

The Sir Casimir Gzowski Park, occupying the western end of Sunnyside Beach is a beautiful destination in itself, the strand caught between sea and park. The views this park offers of the world beyond, of the skyline of Toronto around and of the deep blue sea of Lake Ontario to the south, are inspiring.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• James Bow shares a deeply personal memory about a streetcar stop by Queens Quay where his life was recently transformed.


• D-Brief notes that antimatter is one byproduct of lightning. (Really.)


• Daily JSTOR counsels against buying into the scam of "authenticity."


• Language Hat shares a 2005 essay by Patricia Palmer, talking about how the spread of English was intimately linked with imperialism, first in Ireland then overseas.


• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money is strongly against Black Friday.


• The NYR Daily notes that Donald Trump's hardline policies are not going to help bring about change in Cuba.


• Out There talks about how we are able to be pretty sure that interstellar asteorid 'Oumuamua is not an extraterrestrial artifact.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer tries to imagine, economically, what an American Ontario would be like.


• Roads and Kingdoms talks about some good local beer enjoyed in Chiapas.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel shares a list of ten scientific phenomena we should be thankful for, if we want to exist.


• Arnold Zwicky shares a photo of his Christmas bell flowering maple.

[NEWS] Four science links: neutrinos and Antarctica, 'Oumuamua, Ceres and Pluto, panspermia

• This feature explaining how neutrino telescopes in Antarctica are being used to study the Earth's core is fascinating. The Globe and Mail has it.


• Universe Today shares "Project Lyra", a proposal for an unmanned probe to interstellar asteroid 'Oumuamua.


• Dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto, Nora Redd suggests at Discover, may have much more in common than we might think. Is Ceres a KBO transported into the warm asteroid belt?


• Universe Today reports on one paper that takes a look at some mechanisms behind galactic panspermia.

[URBAN NOTE] Four Toronto links: TTC noise, West Queen West taxes, terrorism, financial sector

• Global News notes one report suggesting high levels of noise on the TTC could cause hearing loss.


• Massive tax increases linked to development are now subjecting West Queen West to the possibility of being developed out of existence, at least for many of its businesses. blogTO reports.


• This report suggesting architectural and other design changes to Toronto City Hall, to protect against terrorism, is saddening. The Toronto Star has it.


• More than 7% of employment in Toronto is linked to the financial sector. Will this city become a truly major international hub, I wonder? The Globe and Mail reports.

[NEWS] Five links on cities: Vancouver, Edmonton, Portland, Hull, central and eastern Europe

• A new housing policy in Vancouver will focus, among other things, on underused and housing in well-off neighbourhoods. Global News reports.


• Can Edmonton's Accidental Beach survive? Maybe, if federal regulation and the ever-shifting waters of the North Saskatchewan River permit. Global News reports.


• Daily JSTOR links to a collection of articles explaining just how the Oregon city of Portland became a hipster mecca, here.


• Alec Charles' examination of the English city of Hull, a British City of Culture that is not only marginalized from mainstream Britain but at odds with the world (strongly pro-Brexit and all), is provocative. The article is here.


• Politico.eu notes how the failure of central and eastern European cities to pick up new EU agencies after Brexit underlines, for many, their continuing marginalization in Europe.

[NEWS] Five First Nations links: residential schools, Mohawk, native languages, Newtok, Métis claims

• Mario Canseco at the National Observer reports on a poll suggesting that Canadians generally are becoming more aware of the residential schools, though knowledge is uneven and far from uniform.


• Six Nations Polytechnic has created a new Mohawk language learning app intended to help that Iroquoian language thrive again. Global News reports.


• Chelsea Vowel makes a plea in Chatelaine for Canada to protect its indigenous languages, as is their right.


• The Alaskan village of Newtok is literally sliding into an adjacent river, victim of (among other things) climate change. No one has been helping since the 1950s.


• In eastern Canada, many people are starting to identify themselves as Métis without necessarily having verifiable Métis or Native ancestry. This can have significant consequences, financial and otherwise. The National Post reports.

[AH] "Accounting for Thanksgiving’s Ghosts"

For Thanksgiving, Jacobin Magazine reposted a provocative essay by Suresh Naidu, imagining what the United States would be like if its indigenous population had not died or been killed, "Accounting for Thanksgiving's Ghosts". This United States would certainly have been fundamentally different.

If ten million Native Americans experienced .5 percent population growth — a possibly conservative figure, considering indigenous populations were likely nowhere near the carrying capacity of the environment (world population growth has been almost 1 percent per year over the twentieth century, maxing out at 1.18 percent) — then the United States would currently have at least 130 million natives.

If they had been treated the same way Protestant colonialists treated other native populations — segregation with little intermixing — the resulting impoverishment would have radically reshaped the American social landscape.

[. . .]

Let’s assume that American society repressed and excluded natives no more and no less than it does in the real world, and so suppose that they would earn the income per capita of current Native Americans, roughly $18,000 a year. American GDP per capita would fall from $54,000 to something like $40,000, roughly equal to France. Inequality would obviously be much greater, something like what contemporary Colombia — the world’s eighth most unequal country — experiences.

Of course, these are just rough calculations, and the entire exercise is pretty speculative. But the effects of this thought experiment ripple out in fascinating ways.

The whole American social structure would obviously have changed. The political institutions required would have probably made the United States more like Latin America than the United Kingdom.

Colossally larger humanitarian disasters — massacres, population displacements, and internment camps — would have been necessary to keep the native population separate from the settlers.

Slavery on a large scale would likely have been maintained. Columbus turned first contact into the first Atlantic slave trade, filling boats back to Spain with captured Native Americans. Recent scholarship has shown how violence and coerced labor played an important role in creating the conditions for population collapse in the New World. Just as European slave demand amplified pre-existing slave systems beyond recognition in Africa, so too in the New World.

Some of his demographic assumptions, as have been pointed out elsewhere, are problematic. Projecting a population of ten million Native Americans circa 1500 five centuries into the future, while using the rates of population growth of the medically advanced 20th century to do the projecting, has obvious issues. Were I to write this essay, I would have looked towards Africa during this time period as a control.

Naidu is correct, I think, in that the persistence of a substantial indigenous population in most of the United States will fundamentally alter the settlement patterns. South Africa may well be a useful paradigm, with the western and northern Cape being mostly Afrikaansophone thanks to the long settlement but the remainder of the country, conquered much more recently, being overwhelmingly non-white. The densely settled Mississippi, in this alt-US, may well be a significant barrier.

(The same principle, incidentally, holds for the other predominantly settler-descended societies of the Western Hemisphere, from the Southern Cone up to Canada.)

This is not an achievable alternate history, mind; some sort of epidemiological catastrophe was inevitable. It is possible, however, that it might have been less severe if there was less imperialism. The desire of European imperialists to take control of indigenous populations and to use their resources, labour and otherwise, to finance their empire-building aggravated the catastrophe that befell the peoples of the Western Hemisphere, "from Labrador to Araucanïa" as Naidu put it. If these people had been allowed time to recover and not (for instance) be made into serfs working for European overlords, I would be willing to bet that they could recover.



Table 4 from Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian's paper "The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas", published in Journal of Economic Perspectives 24.2 (163-188), here reproduced for the ease of sharing, depicts the scale of the catastrophe. Could this have been avoided.

(More on this to come.)