You may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one

"Today we have not only an ecological crisis, we also have a kind of story crisis. That is to say there's something very wrong about the way that we understand who we are and our relationship with the earth." -- Continuum trailer

This is a film that needs to be made. This is a story that needs to be told. But best of all, this is a film that will be made because people believe it is a story worth telling.

Planetary Collective has spent the past three years working on Continuum, a feature-length documentary that tells the story of our interconnection with each other, the planet and the universe. Back in February, they put the project on Kickstarter in an attempt to raise enough money to fund the final push through crowd funding. I watched the trailer, fell in love with the film and decided I had to back the project. If all that was needed to make Continuum happen was a little bit of money from a lot of people then I wanted to be one of those people.

I don't know what excites me more: the film itself or the way Kickstarter has the potential to revolutionize how creative projects get funded. It gives citizens the power to support projects they like and it gives the filmmakers, artists and musicians complete control over their projects. It's democratic, it's participatory and it's refreshingly real in an era of manufactured pop stars and Hollywood schlock. We get to help make something great happen and, in return, we get to be part of that greatness.

Here's how the filmmakers describe Continuum on their Kickstarter page:

"We are in the midst of an ecological crisis of an unprecedented scale, with implications not only for mankind's social, economic and political spheres, but for the life system of the planet as a whole.

One of the fundamental factors underlying this crisis is our worldview: the way we see the world around us and our relationships to each other, the planet, and the cosmos as a whole. Our worldview informs our values, behaviour, and way of life in such a way that some environmentalists have declared the environmental crisis to actually be a 'crisis of worldview'. One dominant feature of our ordinary worldview is the misperception that we are separate from each other and the greater systems we are embedded within.

CONTINUUM is a feature-length documentary that explores this sense of separation and its roots in language, perception and our evolution. The journey will take us from the first stirrings of life to the emergence of a global brain; from the complexity and wonder of a single plant cell to the emerging biomimetic technologies that are changing the way we build the future; and from the appearance of modern humans to the planetary crisis we face today."

The filmmakers hope the documentary "will change the way we think as a species -- to stop seeing ourselves as separate from each other, from the planet and the cosmos -- and inspire us to work together to transform our planetary crises."

I can't wait to see this film when it's finished. In the meantime, I highly recommend watching Planetary Collective's first short film Overview -- which explores the perspective-altering phenomenon that many astronauts experience after being in space.

Hot off the press

Back when I was a student at Kyoto University's Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, my professor created a newsletter to highlight some of the impressive work being done by faculty and students in our program.

It was a project I was excited to be a part of because the point of the thing was not to be some sort of self-serving, jargon-laden, grant-justifying puff piece. The point of the thing was to be a place where we could share our stories with the wider world -- to shine a light on action both on campus and in the larger community. It was born of a genuine desire to bring our stories beyond the confines of the conference circuit. To build a bridge between scientists and the public.

The newsletter's third issue is now online. Articles cover a wide range of topics, from a forum on how to green university campuses to the role of young people in international biodiversity negotiations to the growing youth movement against nuclear power in Japan. My professor asked me if she could include a condensed version of my blog post on the UN climate change conference in Doha in the newest issue and I was happy to oblige.

It's not the most scintillating newsletter you'll ever read. But communication is a critical part of creating momentum for change and for that I salute it.

The end of the backyard ice rink?

This is not a story about hockey. Hockey is a game and this goes deeper than that. Strip hockey of its teams, its salaries, its sticks, its pucks, its rules and its regulations. Take all of that away and you are left with what makes hockey possible in the first place. This is a story about ice.

Ice is a part of our collective Canadian consciousness. When I think about the winters of my childhood, I think about the hours spent skating on the tiny ice rink my dad built in our backyard. It was a simple bit of engineering with magical results.

My dad would wait until mid-December for temperatures to drop. After enough snow had fallen, he would clear an area of the backyard and use the snow to make banks around the rink. He repeatedly sprinkled water on the sides of the banks and on the edge of the grass in order to seal the area around the edges so that the water wouldn't leak out. After it had been cold enough for the ground to freeze, he used a hose to build up a base of ice.

Once we had a couple of inches of ice, he would "Zamboni" it by filling a large pail with warm water and flooding the rink. The warm water melted the surface and filled in all of the cuts from earlier skating. It probably took a week or two, depending on the weather, to create a good surface. Of course, thaws and rain would melt the rink but my dad would rebuild it as soon as it got cold again.

I couldn't get enough of that backyard rink. I would skate every day after school and go back out again after dinner. The sound the edge of the blade makes when it scrapes across the ice is etched into my bones.

The backyard ice rink is part of our narrative. But for how much longer? Will future generations of Canadian children be able to skate on homemade outdoor rinks or will it be a story we tell them about the way things used to be?

Climate change is transforming the world as we know it. This is not an exaggeration; this is a fact. Research shows that Canada's average winter temperature has increased 2.5 degrees Celsius in the past 70 years. According to Environment Canada, last year was the third-warmest winter in Canadian history.

Scientists in Montreal were the first to connect the dots between climate change and a shorter outdoor skating season. They looked at data from weather stations across Canada during the last 50 years and extrapolated that "at current rates, within four decades there will be very little to no outdoor natural skating in Canada with the exception of Winnipeg."

This prompted a group of geographers at Wilfrid Laurier University to create RinkWatch, a website where users can enter information about their rink's skate-ability and where researchers can track climate change. Associate professor Robert McLeman is hoping this will help people better understand large-scale environmental issues by placing them in their own backyard.

As he told the Ottawa Citizen, "When you talk about climate change and global warming, it's one of those big-picture ideas that people have trouble relating to on a personal or individual basis, so we thought, let's get kids and families to collect data about outdoor skating and use that as a bridge to pull them into citizen-engaged science."

It's great to see scientists who understand the importance of getting the public involved in their work. They're not just working to address climate change, they're working to make it matter to all of us. It's about making us less complacent by making us care.

Deconstructing Doha

Two words come to mind when reflecting on the United Nations climate change conference in Doha: cognitive dissonance. We talk about the need to address climate change and yet we continue to burn fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow. This dissonance -- the inconsistency between what we know and how we behave -- was on full display in Doha.

Not that anyone expected Doha to raise ambition on climate change. Before it even began, Doha was only always seen as a "transitional" conference. It was about moving forward on a new agreement by 2015 that will require both developed and developing countries to cut their emissions. It was about making progress on a commitment to channel $100 billion to developing countries every year by 2020 (although no clarity was provided in the end).

It was also about launching a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2020 (when the new agreement comes into force). But without Russia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand on board, the second commitment period covers just 15 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That leaves us with a Kyoto Protocol that is more symbolic than significant.

The negotiations are starting to feel like a car stuck in a snow bank -- the wheels spin and spin but fail to gain traction.

The conference ended with a package of decisions called the Doha Climate Gateway, which at the micro level contains markers of progress but at the macro level reflects the low level of ambition and the lack of real movement that have hampered these talks for the past 20 years.

Despite closing with a weak outcome that all countries decided they could live with but that no countries were particularly happy about, the conference was applauded as a success. Not that "success" means much in international climate change negotiations these days; the word has become as gelatinous as jellyfish. Success no longer means that something monumental was achieved; success now means that the conference didn't collapse.

In the end, the Doha conference achieved what it set out to do. There was progress for the process but action on the ground is happening at a pace far too slow to get us to where we need to go. And so the gap between what countries have promised to do to reduce emissions and the growing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to widen.

A record-breaking year for climate change

Outside the conference walls, 2012 was a record-breaking year for climate change. November was the 333rd consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The first 10 months of 2012 were the ninth-warmest since records began. The volume of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a record high and Arctic sea ice shrank to a record low.

Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of the Caribbean and the U.S. East Coast. Typhoon Bopha killed more than 1,000 people in the Philippines and left 300,000 people homeless. And in case this wasn't evidence enough, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report that found extreme weather events could become more likely, more frequent and more extreme with worsening climate change.

The climate is changing but politics remains still. Every year that we don't deal with climate change, the problem just gets worse and worse. And at a certain point, it will be too late to fix it. There will be too many emissions in the atmosphere and no way back to a world that isn't buffeted by uncontrollable, catastrophic climate change.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon spoke frankly in Doha: "The danger signs are all around. One-third of the world's population lives in countries with moderate to high water stress; land degradation affects 1.5 billion people. Ice caps are showing unprecedented melting, permafrost is thawing, sea levels are rising. The abnormal is now the new normal."

Two degrees: still possible or too late?

The world's leading scientists have been telling us increases in global temperatures must be kept to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. In order to limit temperature rise to two degrees, the IPCC warns that global emissions have to peak by 2015 and then drop to 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.

But the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research suggests that two degrees is no longer the threshold between "acceptable" and "dangerous" risks but between "dangerous" and "very dangerous" climate change. Scientists there are looking at 1.5 degrees as a safer target. That means cutting global emissions at least 85 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.

We're not making much headway on that front. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the gigatonne gap between where global emissions need to go by 2020 and where they are actually going has widened over the last year. It suggests that annual global emissions should be reduced to at least 44 gigatonnes by 2020 in order to have a good chance of meeting the two-degree target. However, emissions were at about 50 gigatonnes in 2010, and they are projected to rise to about 58 gigatonnes by 2020.

Although Doha launched the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, the commitments that have been made are far too weak to actually achieve the target of keeping global temperature increase below two degrees Celsius. The IPCC suggested that developed countries should reduce their emissions by at least 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 but current commitments add up to 18 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 -- far below the range suggested by the IPCC.

Governments are aware that climate change comes with a time limit and that the window to stabilize global temperatures is closing. The Doha agreements note with "grave concern" the widening gap between what countries have promised to do to reduce emissions and the growing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Countries also stated an intention to "identify and explore in 2013 options for a range of actions to close the pre-2020 ambition gap."

But several reports seem to be abandoning hope of keeping to the two-degree limit. The UK government's scientific advisor says the target is "out the window." A study published in Nature Geosciences finds temperatures could rise by as much as three degrees Celsius by 2050. (To put it into context, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change predicts that a rise of three degrees would mean 550 million more people would be at risk of hunger, 170 million could suffer coastal flooding and nearly half the world's species could face extinction.)

In November, the World Bank warned the planet is on course to warm four degrees Celsius by 2100 unless urgent action is taken to address climate change. In the report's foreword, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the new leader of the World Bank, writes "It is my hope that this report shocks us into action."

What happens next?

This is the big question: what happens next? Will negotiations during the next three years actually result in real emission reductions or will it be too little, too late?

It's easy to feel pessimistic about international negotiations on climate change. Each meeting seems to follow the same pattern: all talk, no action. World governments have been talking about climate change for 20 years with very little progress. Trying to get 194 countries to move together in the same direction on climate change feels less like building consensus and more like herding cats.

Part of the problem is that negotiations are complicated by fundamental differences of positions, which have yet to be resolved. Countries will have to find a way to work through several key differences, including differences of historical responsibility, differences in development and differences in geographic vulnerability to climate change. International cooperation on deeper emission cuts will be impossible unless these differences can be resolved. After two decades, the split between developed countries and developing countries continues to fracture climate talks.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol enshrined a division between developed countries (which were required to cut emissions) and developing countries (which were not). This principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" compels developed countries, which were historically responsible for pumping the majority of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, to take the lead in reducing emissions while providing financial and technological support to developing countries. But the world in 2013 is a much different place than it was when the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated. Back then, China was classified as a developing country. Now it is the world's biggest emitter and will soon overtake the U.S. as the biggest economy. As a result, developed countries are insisting that developing countries take on commitments too.

The changing structure of the world's economy was front and centre at the Durban climate change conference in 2011, where countries agreed "to develop a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties" (to be negotiated by 2015 and come into effect from 2020 onwards). The key sticking point is what applicable to all will mean in the new agreement. In Doha, countries argued about whether or not the Convention principles, especially the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, should be at the core of the new agreement. They will somehow need to resolve this issue within the next three years.

Still, it is impossible to ignore what Lord Nicholas Stern has called the "brutal arithmetic" -- the fact that action by all countries will be necessary to hold global temperature increase below two degrees.

"His new research shows that even if developed countries cut their emissions to zero, that would not be enough to halt runaway climate change -- because emissions from rapidly industrialising economies are now so high. Greenhouse gases from emerging economies -- such as China, South Korea and India, that have industrialised rapidly in the past two decades -- now make up the bulk of the world's carbon emissions," reports the Guardian.

The negotiations leading up to 2015 will likely be complex, difficult and fraught with animosity, especially if developed and developing countries refuse to move beyond their entrenched positions. It's not clear if the 2015 agreement will keep climate change below two degrees Celsius because this would require steep cuts in emissions by both developed and developing countries, starting almost immediately.

The glimmer of hope in all of this is that if governments decide they want to raise the level of ambition on climate change, the new agreement can be a tool to set us on course. Governments can, theoretically, design the new agreement to match up with the deep emission cuts the IPCC indicates are necessary to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. The negotiations between now and 2015 will determine if we are serious about solving climate change or not. It's what happens next that really matters.

The unreality of reality

It's worth mentioning what it's actually like to be at one of these United Nations climate change conferences. The Economist described the meetings as a "theatre of the absurd" (an incisive observation that could be equally applied to the opulent Qatar National Convention Centre where Swarovski chandeliers dripped from the ceiling -- all of it paid for by the world's unquenchable thirst for Middle East oil).

Since 1995, representatives of countries from around the world have gathered at the annual Conference of the Parties to hammer out the details of international action on climate change. For two weeks each year, thousands of negotiators, politicians, heads of state, journalists, celebrities, business leaders, academics, youth activists and environmentalists converge in a frenzy of activity.

Because there are so many high-profile people in one place, security is always a concern. Passing your bag through an X-ray machine and walking through a metal detector become as much a part of your daily routine as brushing your teeth. The security checkpoints, scanners, X-ray machines, fences and road closures make you feel as if you are entering a gigantic hermetically sealed bubble when you walk through the conference doors. And, in a way, you are. You are entering a universe unto itself with a language unto itself. Everyone at the conference speaks in abbreviations: CDM, JI, REDD, SBSTA, SBI, AWG-KP, AWG-LCA. The numbingly dull list goes on and on (and we wonder why we're not winning the hearts and minds of the general public).

Comic relief is provided by the small contingent of oddballs that always turns up at these conferences -- like climate skeptic Lord Monckton, whose modus operandi is stopping the Marxists' wet dream of global totalitarian dictatorship. His self-aggrandizing blather has become so legendary that panelists no longer give him the floor during press briefings or at side events. So he decided to don a disguise in Doha, showing up at a press conference wearing an Arabic white gown and head cover. A few days later, he sat at an empty chair in the main plenary, impersonating a delegate from Myanmar to address the conference floor. He managed to give a short speech denying the reality of climate change before the President of the conference realized who he was and cut him off. Lord Monckton was escorted from the building and given a lifetime ban from attending U.N. climate change conferences. (It makes me a little sad to think we'll never see his antics again.)

A surreal location for a climate change conference

Qatar was a surreal location for a climate change conference. Or maybe -- as a living example of what growth at any cost looks like -- it was the perfect place for a climate change conference.

Qatar has the world's highest per capita carbon emissions. Which is not surprising when you consider it burns fuel to desalinate seawater, builds golf courses in the desert and cranks the air-conditioning to the max. Doha is what happens when you build a city in the middle of a desert with no thought to the environment (or human rights, for that matter).

The city is designed for cars. The roads are wide. No one walks anywhere. Sometimes there are sidewalks, sometimes not. Going for a walk is like interval training -- you alternate walking with bursts of sprinting across six lanes of traffic. The only form of public transport is taxis. There's not a cloud in the sky and yet there's not a single solar panel in sight. Doha's half-empty skyscrapers, luxury hotels and vast shopping malls were built by oil wealth -- the same oil that is accelerating the pace of climate change.

Action already underway

There is a tendency to despair after coming home from these climate change conferences. I'm left vacillating between idealism and cynicism. Hearing about action already underway inspires me; seeing the low level of political ambition on display depresses me. But I recognize the importance of staying away from the extreme end of idealism (the naive and infantile kind of thinking that presumes people are inherently good or will choose to do the right thing) and the extreme end of cynicism (the negative and defeatist kind of thinking that constantly says "that's unrealistic").

There's a quote from a speech that keeps me hopeful: "When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse."

I met many people in Doha working hard to make a difference. But the ones who impressed me the most were the young people. They were a reminder that action on climate change is already underway, that young people everywhere are working to reconstitute the world.

I met Reuben Makomere and Kennedy Liti Mbeva -- two Kenyan youth delegates who voluntarily created a jargon-free guide to the UNFCCC process to help young people better understand the negotiations.

I met a group of young women from the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts who teamed up with Greenpeace to send a Girl Guide from Ghana and a Girl Scout from Peru to the Arctic on an icebreaker ship. They witnessed new scientific research into ice thinning, and are now asking the world to protect the Arctic region.

I met three Japanese students from Doshisha University who explained how their university has been nationally recognized for its efforts to reduce carbon emissions on campus. Some of these efforts include setting the air conditioning at 28 degrees Celsius in summer and 22 degrees Celsius in winter, replacing energy inefficient light bulbs with LED lights and installing solar panels.

The examples go on and on. If I listed all of the brilliant work young people, NGOs, universities and local governments are doing to curb climate change, I could fill a book.

Conclusion

If we want to shift the level of ambition and political will that countries bring to the international negotiating table, we need to ramp up public concern on climate change. Without public pressure for strong action, countries will be able to continue to push for weak targets at international climate negotiations. Ministers will be able to return home from these meetings and ignore the problem until the next summit. Without this mutual reinforcement, international negotiations will continue to go nowhere and emissions will continue to rise.

Although the U.N. process is the centre of international engagement, "it is not the circumference of action on climate change." The fight to protect the climate doesn't begin and end at these conferences; it happens at home. The more we demand fundamental changes, the more space political and business leaders will have to act.

Or as George Monbiot put it: "Governments care only as much as their citizens force them to care. Nothing changes unless we change."

So how do we change? How do we create a groundswell of support for renewable energy and sustainable growth? I think it's worth repeating what I wrote before about the four things most social movements tend to share in common:

1. Action. If you want to influence other people, you need to back up your words with action. It's not about being dogmatic or demanding. It's about being the change you want to see in the world.

2. Communication. Share your ideas. If 10 people share their idea with 10 other people, they will reach 100 people. If 100 people share their idea with 10 other people, they will reach 1,000 people. If 1,000 people share their idea with 10 other people, they will reach 10,000 people. Ideas can spread exponentially, so start spreading them.

3. Organization. Slavery in America ended because people organized. The Berlin Wall came down because people organized. The Arab Spring spread across the Middle East because people organized. People need to come together to make their voices heard.

4. Long-term commitment. Urgency does not mean panic. It means continuous, patient action to change the world.

It's easy to blame political leaders for the failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the problem goes deeper than that -- there is very little being done to address the root cause of climate change. And while it's true that climate change is caused by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, that's only part of the story. The climate crisis is also a crisis of worldview.

We don't live in an infinite world and yet we act as if we do. We act as if the ocean will never run out of fish or as if the ground will never run out of oil. During the past 250 years, human beings have altered the planet more rapidly than any other period in history. We have consumed resources faster than they can regenerate. We have driven thousands of plants and animals to extinction. The science is clear: a major shift in our consumption and production patterns is needed in order to live within the constraints of the natural systems that support us.

It's time to break the cycle of cognitive dissonance that allows us to talk about the need to address climate change while we continue to burn fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow.


Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the UNFCCC.

George Stroumboulopoulos and his distractingly tight pants

Every fall, a new season of George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight begins. And with each new season comes big changes -- name changes, time changes, studio changes, channel changes -- but no changes have been as radical as the ones introduced this fall.

The length of the show has been chopped in half, the studio has been completely redesigned, the time slot has been moved to primetime, the news segment is out and a new three-person comedy panel is in. Also, George now wears skinny jeans that are distractingly tight in the crotch region (not that I'm complaining).

Here's how George explains the new format: "We used to go to bed together. Now we're having dinner together -- and maybe just that."

Cutting the show to 30 minutes and moving it from 11 p.m. to primetime may be good for ratings but it's bad for those of us who liked the freedom late-night television gave George to be George. Gone from the primetime show are George's musings on religion, politics and the environment. George was always impartial but he was never neutral. You never knew what party he voted for but you always knew what issues he cared about. His show was often a platform for his activism (he's an ambassador for the United Nations World Food Programme and he's traveled to the Arctic for a special on literacy, youth culture, and the loss of Inuit identity. He's been to Sudan with War Child Canada, and to Zambia for a World AIDS Day documentary. He sponsored the One Million Acts of Green challenge and he's a member of the David Suzuki Foundation's board of directors).

I miss the anti-religious, anti-consumerist and anti-authoritarian undertones of the old format. The only good thing about cutting the show in half is that it gives George less time to talk about hockey. I hate hockey.

But 30 minutes isn't enough time to let George do what he does best -- the long-form interview. George is a master of the long-form interview. He is sincere, interested, informed and intelligent. As a result, his subjects respect him. His interviews often feel more like conversations. He knows how to draw stories out of actors, directors, writers, musicians, athletes, activists and politicians. He's done the research and knows what he's talking about. He takes his time when asking a question. And, more importantly, he listens to what the other person is saying. He doesn't read scripted notes. He doesn't fawn. He isn't fake. He leans forward and draws people in with his natural charm and those big, brown liquidy eyes. He’s not just a good interviewer, he's an award-winning interviewer (as his collection of Geminis attests).

The CBC is making a big deal about moving the show to 7 p.m. But is this really a big deal? Do people still watch TV shows on television? I haven't watched TV shows on television since 2006. The beauty of watching George's show online is that I can watch it when it's convenient for me. So I can watch him when I eat breakfast or when I come home from work. Or I can just curl up on the couch and watch an entire week's worth of episodes back-to-back on Saturday afternoon. I suspect that most of his audience watches the show the same way, so why not keep it in the 11 p.m. timeslot?

Perhaps the move to primetime is a recognition by the CBC that George is one of its biggest stars. But what made him a star are all of the things you can't do in primetime. This is why Canadians like him. We sense he is genuine, deep and intelligent. If we want shallow and superficial, we'll watch CNN. The CBC is a public broadcaster. It should not be overly concerned about numbers and ratings and making money. Sure the CBC might get higher ratings by moving the show to primetime but at what cost? Is it worth getting more viewers if you have to sacrifice quality and depth? But there's no way to talk about this without talking about government funding and budget cuts and that's a post better left for another day.

As for the new set, I'm still getting used to it. It's too slick. Too bright. Too corporate. It's a beautifully designed set for a morning show. But not for George. The show's old set was always dark with lots of black. And I think this darkness contributed to the success of his interviews. It set a mood that helped people open up. The mood was serious and somber, a perfect setting for probing questions. The new studio doesn't match the mood that George tries to set in his interviews. It's too light, bright and airy. Of course, not all of George's interviews are serious. He's a funny guy and maybe he wants to inject more humour into the show. A lighter, brighter set better reflects this new direction.

The biggest change this season is the introduction of the three-person comedy panel. The panel takes up the last 10 minutes of each show and features two permanent panelists (comedian Ali Hassan and actress Naomi Snieckus) and one rotating guest panelist (filled by various celebrities but best when filled by the funny ones like Andrea Martin and Colin Mochrie). The panel riffs on random topics while George facilitates. Ali and Naomi are clever and funny. The panel is a good idea but it would be better to have it once a week rather than every night. Turning it into a weekly segment would keep it fresh and fun.

Anyway, I'm happy to see the show is still on the air. Nine seasons is an impressive run for a Canadian talk show. George just keeps getting better (and hotter) as he gets older. I just wish the CBC would recognize that George is one of their best interviewers and give him the time and space to do long interviews.

The new show is good. But I prefer the hour-long, late-night format.

Me and George outside CBC headquarters in Toronto this summer

Just for fun, here are a few of my previous posts about George Stroumboulopoulos:

We love George

George goes to America

Four hours with George Stroumboulopoulos

George Stroumboulopoulos: Canadian sex symbol 

An hour with George Stroumboulopoulos

The mountains are calling and I must go

For me, spending time in the mountains is not a luxury, it is a necessity. It's important to feel unimportant, to let some air out of the ego.

I've written about this before but I think it's worth repeating: the view from the top of a mountain not just stunningly beautiful, it's also philosophically important. To stand on top of a mountain and see nothing but mountains beyond mountains all the way to the horizon is a humbling experience. You can't help but surrender yourself to the realization that you are nothing more than an insignificant speck on a tiny planet in a vast universe whose mysteries we know very little about.

This is not a bleak, cold or empty view on life. To me, surrendering to the mysteries of the universe is more fulfilling than subscribing to a religious story that claims to have all the answers. Certainty is absurd. Why not revel in uncertainty?

There is nothing more fascinating than life on earth. Our planet is the only place in the known universe where life exists, which is an amazing thing when you consider how big the universe really is. Our planet is just one of eight in orbit around our sun, which itself is only one of about 200 billion stars in our galaxy. But even our galaxy is just one of 100 billion galaxies, all joined together in an enormous web stretching out in all directions.

It's a waste to reduce all of this to a religious story and then fight over whose version of the story is better. Why can't we just marvel in the evolutionary perfection of life without ascribing some greater meaning to it?

I didn't intend for this post to go this way (I was actually going to write a straight-up post about our hiking trip in the Swiss Alps. Where we went and what it was like and all of that). It's just that everything seemed so simple in the mountains and so unnecessarily complicated back in Bonn.

We got back from the Alps the day violent protests over the anti-Islam film were making headlines. The whole thing struck me as being absurd. It boggles the mind on so many different levels. I watched the trailer on YouTube to see what the fuss was all about. And I just don't get it. The film is such an incoherent, idiotic, embarrassingly bad, low-budget mess (the whole thing looks like it was filmed in front of a green screen) that it's hard to believe anyone could take it seriously. It's not even worth responding to, let alone getting up in arms about it.

What's wrong with us? And by "us" I mean "us as a species." Why are we still whipping ourselves into a frenzy over such petty, tribal divisions? Why can't we just accept that we don't have all of the answers and that none of us have exclusive access to the truth?

The cutest mayor ever

It turns out Japan is not the only country with cats in positions of power. Meet Stubbs. He's a cat. He's also the mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska (pop. 875).

Mayor Stubbs recently celebrated 15 years in office. To mark the occasion, CBC Radio interviewed Lauri Stec, manager of Nagley's General Store, which doubles as Stubbs' mayoral office. In the interview, Lauri admits Stubbs isn't exactly the hardest working man in Alaska. He usually spends his office hours in front of the computer, napping on top of the keyboard.

When he's not sleeping on the job, Mayor Stubbs likes to walk around town, keeping the rodent population at bay and having his belly rubbed by constituents. He heads to the bar at 4 p.m. everyday to drink water (out of a wine glass, no less) laced with catnip. Lauri describes Stubbs as an "all around good guy," who is a good listener, non-judgemental and doesn't raise taxes.

Fifteen years ago, so the story goes, the citizens of Talkeetna didn't like the list of human candidates for mayor so they decided to elect Stubbs as a write-in candidate. At the time, Stubbs was a kitten who had been newly adopted by Lauri. He was a fixture at her store and popular with local residents.

Technically, the town is a "historical district," which means Stubbs is more of a symbolic mayor than a real mayor. And, of course, there's a human council that steps in when actual decisions need to be made. But Stubbs has become a tourist attraction, drawing in visitors (and dollars) to the town.

Mayor Stubbs has become something of a celebrity, and is more popular in the polls than some of his human counterparts. He has 25,000 subscribers on Facebook, which is almost 10 times the amount of people (2,610, to be exact) following Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.

Meow.

Memo to Stephen Harper: "Capitalism is broken"

It was incredible to see the chairman of the World Economic Forum stand up in Davos last week and admit that capitalism is broken. "Capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us," said billionaire Klaus Schwab, whose message could have been ripped straight from the protest signs of the Occupy movement.

It was equally incredible to see Prime Minster Stephen Harper stand up at the same forum and arrogantly dismiss these criticisms. At a time when the world needs new ways of thinking, Harper wants to preserve the status quo. He stood up and said economic growth is his number one priority. But not before wagging his finger at his European hosts, saying they have lost sight of how to create jobs and growth (with diplomacy like that, it's no wonder Canada lost its bid for a seat on the UN Security Council). Harper then went on to talk about his pro-business policies, suggesting other nations would do well to follow his lead. He spoke about how he remains determined to build a pipeline to supply oil to Asia despite objections from First Nations groups and other citizens. "We will soon take action to ensure that major energy and mining projects are not subject to unnecessary [environmental] regulatory delays," he said.

In the words of Oscar Wilde, Harper is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Canada is ruled by a prime minister who can't connect the dots. Harper views the economy and the environment as two separate things to be tackled in isolation from each other. But this is a false dichotomy. The economy is a sub-system of a larger and finite system, the biosphere. From the perspective of physics or ecology, permanent economic growth is impossible. An ever-expanding economy within a biosphere of fixed growth is, as Lewis Thomas put it, "stupidity on the grandest scale."

This is not an argument against economic growth. Economic growth, up to a certain point, is a good thing. It reduces poverty. It reduces the rate of child mortality. It increases opportunities for education. It increases quality of life. And it improves the standard of living.

Yet, while it's true that economic growth improves human well-being, uneconomic growth -- growth where the costs are greater than the benefits -- is making us poorer, not richer. Former World Bank economist Herman Daly argues we need a more complete measure of wealth than GDP. That's because GDP measures an economy's total output but it doesn’t take into account harm done to the environment. "Everything is added in GDP; nothing is subtracted," writes Daly in a recent issue of Resurgence magazine. He suggests the negative consequences of production (things like nuclear waste, biodiversity loss, climate change, air pollution, eroded topsoil, dry wells, depleted mines, and oil spills) should be subtracted from the positive consequences of growth. He argues these costs need to be counted and netted out against the benefits.

Unlimited growth in a limited world

Unlimited growth is an old concept, one that was created at a time when our numbers were far fewer and when we didn't recognize the earth's natural systems were finite. If we continue on the current economic path, writes Lester Brown in his book Plan B 2.0, "the question is not whether environmental deterioration will lead to economic decline, but when. No economy, however technologically advanced, can survive the collapse of its environmental support system."

Part of the problem is that ecosystem services are not reflected in the current market system. As a result, people are not aware of their importance and place little or no value on them. Ecosystem services -- things like regenerating soil, recycling nutrients, controlling floods, filtering pollutants, pollinating crops, and maintaining the atmosphere -- have no commercial value, even though they are essential for the continued survival of life.

The chairman of the World Economic Forum admits it's time to rethink traditional economic growth. More importantly, he said, we must assess the quality of growth.

"How sustainable is it and at what cost to the environment? How are the gains distributed? What has become of the family and community fabric, as well as of our culture and heritage? The time has come to embrace a much more holistic, inclusive and qualitative approach to economic development," Schwab said.

Stephen Harper's support of the current capitalist system is, in contrast, embarrassingly out-of-touch. Worse than that, it's taking us down a road that leaves us vulnerable in the face economic decline, fossil fuel depletion, and climate change. We need new ideas, not more of the same thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. If the billionaire founder of an annual capitalist love-fest gets it, why can't Stephen Harper?

Deconstructing Durban

I spent the past two weeks in Durban, South Africa, at the United Nations climate change conference. I think I have recovered from the sleep deprivation, the over-caffination and the general frustration enough to put my thoughts into words.

I want to talk about what it was like to be at the conference. And I want to talk about the youth delegates, whose energy, enthusiasm and optimism blew my mind on a daily basis. But, before I do that, I want to talk about the outcome of the conference. To get the bad news out of the way first.

Durban was an incredibly complex and difficult meeting. In the end, all we got was a vague document called the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action. It's not a protocol or a mandate, just a "platform." It's too soon to tell if that's a good thing or a bad thing. If governments decide they want to raise the level of ambition on climate change, the Durban Platform can be a tool to set us on course. We now have an agreement to negotiate an "instrument" with "legal force." Governments can, theoretically, design the new instrument to match up with the deep emission cuts the IPCC indicates are necessary to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. The negotiations on the new instrument will determine if we are serious about solving climate change or not. So it's difficult to label Durban a success or a failure; it's what happens next that really matters.

That's the big question, what happens next? Will new negotiations actually result in real emission reductions or will it be too little, too late?

It's easy to feel pessimistic about international negotiations on climate change. Each meeting seems to follow the same pattern: all talk, no action. World governments have been talking about climate change for 20 years with very little progress. Trying to get 194 countries to move together in the same direction on climate change feels less like building consensus and more like herding cats.

Complicating matters is the fact that climate change comes with a time limit and the window to stabilize global temperatures is closing. The International Energy Agency has shown that CO2 emissions in 2010 were the highest on record; and they're still rising. Every year we don't deal with it, the problem just gets worse. And at a certain point, it will be too late to fix it. There will be too many emissions in the atmosphere and no way back to a world that isn't buffeted by uncontrollable, catastrophic climate change.

Scientists have been telling us increases in global temperatures must be kept to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In order to limit temperature rise to two degrees, the IPCC warns that global emissions have to peak by 2015 and then drop to 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.

But the latest science from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research suggests that two degrees is no longer the threshold between "acceptable" and "dangerous" risks but between "dangerous" and "very dangerous" climate change. Scientists there are now looking at 1.5 degrees as a safer target. That means cutting global emissions at least 85 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.

We are nowhere near that. The Kyoto Protocol contains targets that are far too small to achieve any of those goals. Under the Kyoto Protocol, developed countries are supposed to cut their greenhouse gas emissions a mere 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. That's not going to happen.

Part of the problem is that negotiations are complicated by fundamental differences of positions, which have yet to be resolved. Countries will have to find a way to work through several key differences, including differences of historical responsibility, differences in development and differences in geographic vulnerability to climate change. International cooperation on deeper emission cuts will be impossible unless these differences can be resolved. Compounding the problem is a lack of political will to do what is necessary to tackle climate change.

Which is why Durban -- just like each and every climate conference preceding it for the past two decades -- was an incredibly complex and difficult meeting.

A snapshot of the Durban climate conference


It's worth mentioning what it's actually like to be at one of these United Nations climate change conferences. The scale of these meetings is so big that critics often deride them as a traveling circus. (I don't like the negative connotation but it's not an entirely inaccurate description.)

Since 1995, representatives of countries from around the world have gathered at the annual Conference of the Parties to hammer out the details of international action on climate change. For two weeks each year, thousands of negotiators, politicians, heads of state, journalists, celebrities, business leaders, academics, youth activists and environmentalists converge in a frenzy of activity. Because there are so many high-profile people in one place, security is always a big concern. Passing your bag through an X-ray machine and walking through a metal detector become as much a part of your daily routine as brushing your teeth.

The security checkpoints, scanners, X-ray machines, fences and road closures make you feel as if you are entering a gigantic hermetically sealed bubble when you walk through the conference doors. And, in a way, you are. You are entering a universe unto itself with a language unto itself. Everyone at the conference speaks in abbreviations: CDM, JI, REDD, SBSTA, SBI, AWG-KP, AWG-LCA. The numbingly dull list goes on and on (and we wonder why we're not winning the hearts and minds of the general public).

I would hate to be one of the thousands of journalists covering the conference. The whole thing is so confusing and difficult to understand that I wouldn't know where to begin. How they manage to distill it down to a succinct sound bite is beyond me.

That's not to say the journalists don't struggle. I saw a journalist crying in the women's washroom during the first week of the conference.

"It's really hard to know what to write or how to put it all together," she sobbed.

It's too bad Bill Clinton turned the expression into a cliche because there's no better way to describe it: I felt her pain.

The conference was held inside the sprawling Durban International Convention Centre, which was unremarkable as far as convention centres go. Still, Durban wins points for its creative space-saving techniques. The underground parking garage was transformed into makeshift offices for the UNFCCC, as well as the American, British and Canadian delegations. It was an airless, windowless, oil-stained, concrete wasteland.



These conferences are what I imagine being on a cruise ship is like, minus the onboard entertainment (unless you count as entertainment the small contingent of oddballs that always turns up at these conferences -- such as the woman registered as "Supreme Master" or his highness Lord Monckton, who showed up in Durban to stop the Marxists’ wet dream of global totalitarian dictatorship).

Sitting in on international climate negotiations requires a strong stomach, endless reserves of patience and a suppressed gag reflex. In Cancun last year, I watched as negotiations on a draft text to enhance public awareness and education on climate change began with 45 minutes of bickering by countries over the wording of one sentence in the opening paragraph. And this was one of the least nasty, least confrontational negotiating sessions.

It's no secret that certain countries come to the negotiating table year after year to obstruct rather than push for progress. These thinly veiled attempts to kill the Kyoto Protocol have brought negotiations to a virtual standstill. The pace of international climate change talks is now so grindingly slow it's no wonder almost nothing gets accomplished. The Kyoto Protocol is still alive but it's on life support.

And now for the good news

If we want to shift the level of ambition and political will that countries bring to the international negotiating table, we need to ramp up public concern on climate change. Without public pressure for strong action, countries will be able to continue to push for weak targets at international climate negotiations. Ministers will be able to return home from these meetings and ignore the problem until the next summit. Without public support for immediate action, international negotiations will continue to go nowhere and emissions will continue to rise.

Building popular demand for fundamental changes requires all of us to become involved. The good news is that things are already changing, with NGOs, schools and young people leading the way. I met many people in Durban working hard to make a difference. But the ones who impressed me the most were the young people.

The UNFCCC hired me to help with youth-related activities in Durban. My job was to make sure the youth delegates were able to participate in the process as fully as possible. We arranged meetings for them with high-level negotiators. We organized four slots a day for mini-side events. We gave them booths, an office, a meeting room, space to protest, logistical support, and the ability to intervene during negotiating sessions. To its credit, the UNFCCC truly understands the importance of giving youth a voice at these conferences. After all, it's their future that is up for negotiation.

The youth delegates blew my mind on a daily basis. They were an endless source of optimism, hope, positive energy and creativity -- essential ingredients in the shift toward a more sustainable future.







It was a good conference for young people. They got more media coverage than I've ever seen them get before. Three stories stood out for me.

The first was the six young Canadians who stood up during Environment Minister Peter Kent's address at the main plenary and turned their backs on him.

The second was the young woman who interrupted the speech by the U.S. chief negotiator Todd Stern. Security officers eventually led her out of the room but not before her plea for action was met with long, sustained applause from the room full of delegates and negotiators.

The third was the huge protest that went on for hours inside the convention centre on the last day of the conference. Young people refused to move until they got a fair, ambitious and legally binding agreement on climate change. They didn't get what they wanted. But, still, it was an exciting thing to see. You got the sense that they are the front wave of a much bigger movement back home.


Every young person in Durban was there because they care passionately about climate change. Some came to share their views with delegates, others to raise awareness about the work of their organizations through side events.

The UK Youth Climate Coalition, for example, worked hard to let the outside world know what was going on inside the climate talks. They filmed, edited and produced several short videos that they uploaded to YouTube while in Durban.

My personal favourite Shakira's Waka Waka Comes to Durban features young people singing and dancing to the theme song of the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Because the climate conference was also being held in South Africa, the youth delegates decided to make Shakira's Waka Waka their official song too.

I hate to single out individuals because there was not one youth delegate who didn't impress me. But I think it's important to give a few concrete examples of the kind of work young people are doing.

Like Danae, who is working to engage young people on climate solutions in Mexico. Her project to improve alliances among young people, governments and NGOs won a national award, which is how she ended up in Durban.

Or Anton, a 17-year-old high school student from Germany, who wrote a policy paper on sustainable transportation, which he presented at a mini-side event in Durban. What was I doing when I was 17? Getting drunk, listening to Led Zeppelin, failing math? I had neither the motivation nor the intellectual capability to write policy papers at 17. At this rate, Anton is going to be the Chancellor of Germany by the time he's my age.

Or Esther, who developed a toolkit on climate change for young people in her home country of Nigeria. Her work took her to rural schools, where she helped set up climate change clubs. She also runs what she describes as the best blog in Africa.


Or the group of kids from South Africa who are leaders of their school's climate change clubs. They spoke about their school gardens, their recycling projects, and their efforts to raise money to install solar panels on their school roofs.


Or Jordan and Curtis, cousins from Nunavut in their early 20s. They came to Durban with a strong message for world leaders: climate change is devastating their northern home.

Jordan and Curtis spoke about how the snow is arriving later and melting sooner in Canada's far north. They also spoke about how melting Arctic sea ice is hurting polar bears, which rely on ice floes for shelter, hunting and breeding. As a result, hungry polar bears have been turning up at the town's garbage dumps in search of food.

The young men have spent time documenting the effects of climate change on their community through films and blogs. Their work focuses on Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (the traditional knowledge) of Elders. In preparation for the UN conference, Jordan created a film titled Experiences of Climate Change from Inuit Elders.

"I have a grandpa who likes to talk a lot," Curtis said. "We're not scientists but we know our land."


The examples go on and on. If I listed all of the brilliant work young people are doing to draw attention to climate change, I could fill a book. If these are our future leaders, the world is in good hands.

As for me, something wonderful happened on the last day of the conference. I had helped organize a high-level briefing for youth with Christiana Figueres, the head of the UNFCCC. More than 150 young people came out to hear Christiana talk about the status of negotiations and answer their questions. I was up on stage, moderating the event. We were running out of time but Christiana announced that she would take one last question. Neva, of the UK Youth Climate Coalition, was the first person whose arm shot up in the air. I pointed to Neva and she leaned forward to speak into the microphone. She explained that she wanted to make a comment rather than ask a question.

"On behalf of the youth, I just want to thank Sarah for all of the great work she's been doing. We appreciate her efforts." And then the youth delegates raised their hands in the air and wiggled their fingers in silent applause (clapping is so last century). I was so touched I almost started crying.

I gave Neva a hug afterward and told her that her comment was like a knife through my heart (in a good way). All of it, all of the sleep deprivation, the over-caffination, the frustration, all of it made worthwhile by one touching comment. It was nice to be appreciated but it was even better to have spent those two weeks giving love to the youth and getting love back. It was a moment that will stay with me forever.

Toward the end of the conference, many of the youth said they felt like they had been riding an emotional roller coaster. They vacillated between feeling inspired by the possibility of a better world and frustrated with the low level of political will to make that happen. Still, they realize a lot of the work happens between conferences, that climate change is not something the world tackles only once a year for two weeks.

Climate change is urgent but urgency does not mean panic. It means continuous, patient action to change the world, which is exactly what these wonderful young people are working hard to do. And that should give all of us hope.

You can check out the rest of the photos from Durban on my flickr page.

Hot off the press

One of the things I've been working on at Kyoto University is figuring out how to talk about environmental issues in a way that resonates with the public. After all, what good is scientific research if you can't communicate it?

There's a lot of interesting work going on at Kyoto University's Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies. But no one knows about it because very few of us bring our stories beyond the conference circuit. Professor Tracey Gannon wants to rectify this. So she created a newsletter to highlight some of the work being done by faculty and students in our graduate school. I helped her edit the newsletter and wrote an article on the future of nuclear power in Japan. The inaugural issue is now online.

The first issue focuses on the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and what faculty and students are doing to help the country rebuild. One article explains how the engineering department created an eco-friendly toilet for evacuees who were staying in shelters where there was often only one toilet for 500 people. Another article looks at the work of the disaster management lab, which is researching the role of social media during the Tohoku disaster. My friend Melina wrote about her experience volunteering in the disaster-affected area. Another student wrote about Kobe's Maiko High School, which is the only school in Japan that teaches a special course on environment and disaster mitigation.

The newsletter is stripped of academic jargon in order to tell our stories in a clear and compelling way. It's not the New Yorker and it won't win any design awards but it's a much-needed bridge between scientists and the public.

Rethinking nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster

I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister of Japan about the Fukushima disaster. Much to my surprise, the Japan Times decided to publish it.

The letter appears in today's newspaper. You can read it here. I have also cut and pasted the letter below:

Dear Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda,

The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan continues to resonate far beyond its geographical borders for many reasons, but most of all because it exposed a deep fault line that runs through the global nuclear industry.

The twisted, charred reactors that sit on the Fukushima No. 1 site are a powerful symbol of both the literal and metaphorical damage to an industry that has long promoted nuclear power as a safe, reliable and clean source of energy.

The Fukushima disaster -- the worst of its kind since Chernobyl -- has shaken our assumptions about nuclear power, proving it is more unstable and dangerous than we thought. The disaster has also exposed the human arrogance that leads us to think we can somehow "outsmart" nature by building nuclear power plants as if they were unsinkable ships impervious to the rumblings of the earth and the movements of the ocean.

We forget that nature can't always be controlled or predicted, and so when a bigger-than-planned-for tsunami slams into a nuclear power plant, we are shocked to see the ugly mess left behind when the water recedes -- in this case, a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, the release of radioactive materials and the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from their homes. The tragedy is that we did this to ourselves.



If any good is to come of the Fukushima disaster, it is that it has sparked a worldwide debate about the future of nuclear power. Switzerland and Germany took quick, decisive action after the Fukushima crisis and announced their complete withdrawal from nuclear power in the coming decades. I'm pleased to hear that you plan to phase-out nuclear power too.

But what happens next is more complicated. Shutting down nuclear power plants will leave us with an energy supply gap that will have to be made up somehow. Will we invest in renewable energy or rely on increased imports of polluting fossil fuels? Will we attempt to reduce the demand for energy in the first place or continue to act as if the ground will never run out of oil?

Before the March 11 disaster, nuclear energy accounted for about 30 percent of Japan's power supply. Former Prime Minister Naoto Kan hoped to fill the majority of that gap with renewable energy by the early 2020s. You have said that reducing Japan's dependence on nuclear power will be a gradual process and that some reactors will have to be restarted.

In Germany, however, political leaders acted immediately to phase out nuclear power following the Tohoku disaster. The German government reversed its pronuclear stance and decided to abandon nuclear energy within 11 years. Eight of Germany's 17 nuclear reactors were taken off the grid after Fukushima. The German government has set a target to produce 35 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

But it's not enough to just address the supply of energy; we also need to look at how we can reduce that demand for energy in the first place. This will require a change in the way we think about energy and the way we live our lives.

Here in Japan, for example, there are more than 5.5 million vending machines. They guzzle electricity day and night to keep drinks hot and cool. But do we really need any of those vending machines? Do we really need to have their refrigerators and heaters running 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the sake of convenience?

How we use energy, how we produce energy -- it's all part of the discussion. I hope you will continue to keep Japan on its path of phasing out nuclear power. I also hope you will start thinking about safer, cleaner and more reliable alternatives.

If there is any good to come out of the Fukushima disaster, it is this.

SARAH MARCHILDON
Kyoto

You will be missed

It is fitting that at the exact moment I read the news that Jack Layton had died, thunder rumbled overhead and the rain began to pour. It was as if the universe was grieving along with me.

His death came as a shock and I felt as sad as I would have if a friend had died. I never met Jack Layton. I didn't know him personally. But I felt like he knew me. Or he understood what was important to me. He fought for the things I cared about. He was more of an activist than a politician, and he had a strong sense of what was right and wrong, what was fair and unfair. He fought for what was right and he fought for what was fair. He fought for human rights, social justice and the environment. He fought for ordinary people not for powerful corporations. He marched proudly in the Gay Pride Parade every single year. He rode his bicycle to work. He was kind, compassionate, and caring. He spoke plainly and honestly -- always with hope and optimism. He was funny and intelligent. He was a man who devoted his life to the greater good.

It is unfair that his life should be cut short by cancer when he was only 61 and fitter and stronger than many people half his age. But it is especially cruel that his life should be cut short just months after he managed to lead the NDP to official opposition status. The party owes its historic success to Jack's charisma. He deserved to enjoy the results of his tireless hard work for much more than a few months. He would have made an excellent Opposition leader.

What will happen to the NDP now? Who will hold our Prime Minister accountable? Who will speak with a voice as strong and persuasive and reasonable and respected as Jack's when our Prime Minister promotes policies and measures designed to make a country that once stood for peace and human rights and compassion unrecognizable? We lost Jack Layton when Canada needed him most.

Two days before he died, Jack wrote a beautiful letter addressed to all of us. His last words were the most moving:

"My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world."

Farewell, Jack. You will be missed.