An Outside Chance

Facilitating a dangerous way of life – traffic engineers in a car culture

Also published at Resilience. Wes Marshall calls attention to a paradox about the profession in which he began his career: “It would make sense to assume that newer cities, built with all the knowledge that traffic engineers continue to accumulate, should be our safest cities. But that is not the case. It’s the older cities—mostly … Read More

sailing through June

PHOTO POST Things grow fast in June – especially this June in this corner of this province of Ontario. With an abundance of both rain and sunshine, the reeds in the marsh, the grasses in meadows, and the birds and bugs raced into summer at a gallop. OK, “gallop” isn’t quite the right word for … Read More

The concentrated ills of concentrated agribusiness

A review of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. Also published on Resilience. If you are a government-approved American hog farmer, you drive: a) a dusty pickup truck, from your barn to your local small-town feed store; b) a huge articulated tractor, through your thousand-acre fields of corn and soybeans; c) … Read More

Essential voices for the turn away from car dependency

A review of When Driving Is Not An Option Also published on Resilience In forward-thinking municipalities across North America, elected officials and staff members can learn important lessons by taking on the Week Without Driving Challenge. As Anna Letitia Zivarts describes it, “participants have to try to get around for a week without driving. They … Read More

m is for mayapple

PHOTO POST Each May I keep watch for my favourite woodland flowers, especially the mysterious Mayapple. In frequent pilgrimages to the woods, I see Squill showing their colours, and spiders starting the summer with feasts of midges. Then one day the Mayapples are shooting up out the ground, fully formed. Within a few days the … Read More

Do Ruddy Turnstones ask Red Knots for directions?

A review of The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth. Also published on Resilience. A half-century ago, radio telemetry pioneer Bill Cochran heard something surprising while listening to migrating songbirds: when a Swainson’s Thrush called, a Veery answered. This observation helped inspire a lifetime’s work for Cochran as well as … Read More

the line between winter and spring

PHOTO POST If you added up all the days, we only had about three good weeks of winter this year – but a fair bit of that came near the end of March. So spring was not in any great rush to settle in. Living on the north shore of a big cold lake, we … Read More

Counting the here-and-now costs of climate change

A review of Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World Also published on Resilience. R. Jisung Park takes us into a thought experiment. Suppose we shift attention away from the prospect of coming climate catastrophes – out-of-control wildfires, big rises in sea levels, stalling of ocean circulation currents – and we focus instead … Read More

A fragile frankenstein

Bodies, Minds, and the Artificial Intelligence Industrial Complex, part eight Also published on Resilience. Is there an imminent danger that artificial intelligence will leap-frog human intelligence, go rogue, and either eliminate or enslave the human race? You won’t find an answer to this question in an expert consensus, because there is none. Consider the contrasting … Read More

The existential threat of artificial stupidity

Bodies, Minds, and the Artificial Intelligence Industrial Complex, part seven Also published on Resilience. One headline about artificial intelligence gave me a rueful laugh the first few times I saw it. With minor variations headline writers have posed the question, “What if AI falls into the wrong hands?” But AI is already in the wrong … Read More

Farming on screen

Bodies, Minds, and the Artificial Intelligence Industrial Complex, part six Also published on Resilience. What does the future of farming look like? To some pundits the answer is clear: “Connected sensors, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, robots, and big data analytics will be essential in effectively feeding tomorrow’s world. The future of agriculture will … Read More

Watching work

Bodies, Minds, and the Artificial Intelligence Industrial Complex, part five Also published on Resilience. Consider a human vs computer triathlon. The first contest is playing a cognitively demanding game like chess. The second is driving a truck safely through a busy urban downtown. The third is grabbing packages, from warehouse shelves stocked with a great … Read More