Chris Turner, author of the excellent book The Geography of Hope, has a great piece on peak oil in The Walrus.
My reading at the new McNally Robinson Booksellers is tonight at 7 pm.
Eight hundred Britons have signed up with Dignitas and 100 have gone to Switzerland to die with dignity with the organization’s help, according to this piece on the British assisted suicide debate from The Economist. In addition, four out of five people support changes to the assisted suicide laws in that country so that anyone accompanying a terminally ill patient to Switzerland would not be doing anything illegal, as is now the case.
Assisted suicide is getting lots of attention across the pond. There have been a couple of high-profile cases in Britain recently and while a proposal to legalize assisted suicide seems destined to fail in Parliament, Lord Falconer (no relation, obviously) is pushing for an amendment that would make it legal for Brits to travel to Switzerland to die with dignity. He laid out his argument in an op-ed piece in The Times.
In other words, the debate is happening there and while the legalization of assisted suicide in Britain made not come right away, it will happen after citizens have had a real chance to learn about it.
Would that we were having a similar discussion here in Canada.
I will be reading and speaking at McNally Robinson’s Toronto location at 7 pm on Friday, June 12. Aside from a chance to hear more about That Good Night: Ethicists, Euthanasia and End-of-Life Care, it’s a great opportunity to check out the new store. I haven’t been yet, but I’ve been hearing great things, including that it offers the selection of a big-box store and the charm and comfort of an independent. Sounds good to me.
Jeff Rubin, the CIBC chief economist who famously predicted $200-a-barrel oil, isn’t backing down. He’s left the bank and his new book — Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller — argues that expensive oil will return and force a reversal of globalization. The Globe and Mail has a good piece on Rubin and an excerpt from the book. Well worth reading.
Here’s a taste of Rubin’s thinking from the sidebar: “What we need now is something equivalent to the U.S. Highway Act in 1956, when all of a sudden the U.S. decided to build an immense road infrastructure. … We need to do the equivalent in public transit. … Detroit’s problems are now permanent and structural, they’re not cyclical. There will be no recovery in auto sales.”
Kenneth Kidd of The Toronto Star has two excellent pieces in today’s paper — and I’m quoted in both saying things that will be familiar to those who’ve read DRIVE.
The first, shorter one, is “What car interiors say about us” and I have a little fun with coffee in it: “They’ve really schooled the Americans,” says Falconer, who jokes that the only thing this continent’s auto industry got right all on its own was the cupholder. (”In Europe, a man stands and has an espresso. He doesn’t drink non-fat decaf latte in his SUV.”)
The second — “Why we drive like idiots” — includes this bit: “There’s a societal pressure to make getting a licence easy,” says Falconer. The predictable result: We are, collectively, not the finest of motorists. “People just have bad skills. It’s too easy to get a licence compared with Europe.”
As I point out in DRIVE, improved interiors are related to sprawl because the more time we have to spend in our cars, the more comfort we demand from automakers and the more comfortable our cars, the more we’re willing to accept spending lots of time in them.
But something I didn’t think about until Kidd interviewed me is the role of sprawl in our attitudes toward licencing for drivers. In a car-dominated culture (read: North America) too many people need to drive because they live in sprawl, where public transit is inadequate, where walking is impractical and where even cycling is uninviting. After years of driving their kids everywhere, parents would punish any politicians who made it tougher for 16-year-olds to take the wheel. But, of course, that means teenagers are learning (and, too often, dying) at high speeds on our roads — and developing too many bad habits along the way.
Europeans, on the other hand, live in walkable communities with excellent transit, strong cycling cultures and extensive (and often fast) train systems. Meanwhile, gas is far more expensive and the rate of car ownership is much lower than in the US, where there are more cars than drivers. That means parents can afford to be a bit more patient and let their kids develop the necessary skills before hitting the Autobahn.
So sprawl not only encourages more driving, it fosters more bad driving.
Following in the wake of The New York Times article about Vauban, a German suburb where 70 percent of families live without a car, the paper asks six experts if this is a realistic goal for America. The answer again and again — as I discovered when I was researching DRIVE — comes back to accepting density and building mixed-use walkable communities.
I recommend reading the entire piece, but here are some highlights:
Witold Rybczynski says: “A more realistic goal for most Americans would be a semi-carless community, that is, one that is walkable within the neighborhood for convenience shopping, school-going and errands, and drivable for weekly shopping, consumer purchases and so on.”
D.J. Waldie says: “I can’t drive. And I daily benefit from these planning choices. But few Lakewood residents make as much use of Lakewood’s walkable, bike-able grid as I do. Good design is a requirement for letting go of your wheels, but only a partial requirement.”
Christopher B. Leinberger says: “There are many reasons to encourage this market trend: social cohesion, environmental sustainability, public health, lower public sector costs for infrastructure per square foot. But the bottom line is household economics. American families who are car-dependent spend 25 percent of their household income on their fleet of cars, compared with just 9 percent for transportation for those who live in walkable urban places… Walkable urban development is not for everyone but it is time that American communities offer choice.”
In an era when newspapers are struggling to survive, The Globe and Mail has foolishly given its readers one more reason to cancel their subscriptions: replacing must-read city hall columnist John Barber with unreadable international affairs columnist Marcus Gee.
After thirteen years at the clamshell, Barber deserves new challenges so I can’t really begrudge his decision — and I look forward to reading him in the Review section — but I am shocked and appalled that anyone believes that Canada’s answer to Bill Kristol is a worthy successor.
Barber is the kind of guy who loves vintage Detroit V8s — he dubbed his Grand Marquis the Grand Monkey — but rides his bike to work. Someone who understands urban issues, how city hall works (or, too often, doesn’t) and why it all matters so much, he wrote with insight, passion and plenty of wit. He never allowed himself to be sucked in by the cocktail party nonsense about socialists hordes taking over city hall and delighted in chronicling the clownish antics of the councillors who oppose Mayor David Miller. But he certainly was not shy about gleefully detailing the follies, foibles and flaws of the mayor and his allies either. Barber was, quite simply, the paper’s best columnist.
Not just bad news for the Globe, his departure is also a blow to those of us who care about Toronto, a city with great promise, but daunting challenges. The colleagues Barber leaves behind, he left behind years ago: at the Star, Royson James confuses crankiness with intelligence; at the Sun, Sue-Ann Levy sees reds under every bed; and at the Post… wait, is the Post still publishing?
My guess is the Globe bosses really do believe socialists run the city and they’ve promoted Gee to this crucial column to rant about it (and, if all goes well, influence the outcome of the next mayoral election). So here’s what we can expect: paint-by-numbers punditry, high dudgeon about high taxes and constant whingeing about the so-called war on the car.
That’s not a column I will be reading.
Austin Cline considers how Oregon’s “death with dignity” law has “improved the lives — and deaths — of so many.” He writes: “The actual consequences have been far more in line with what supporters predicted: some people would avail themselves of the drugs while the overall medical industry would shift to a position which does more to alleviate the pain, suffering, and indignity experienced by the terminally ill.”
I had a great time talking about That Good Night at Furby House Books in Port Hope yesterday. It’s an charming and excellent bookstore and the folks who run it — owner Bill Edwards and manager Jenny Munro — are lovely people who appreciate books and authors. If you’re ever in Port Hope, be sure to drop in.
The audience for my talk was really engaged, which is always a thrill for a speaker, and most seemed to share my belief that the issues that I cover in the book — including assisted suicide — are ones we need to talk about. So let’s get the debate started.
I will be appearing in support of That Good Night at the fabulous Furby House Books in Port Hope at 3 pm on Saturday, May 2.
A couple of weeks ago, I mailed a copy of That Good Night: Ethicists, Euthanasia and the End-of-Life along with a copy of the fabulous Spring 2009 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism to my friend Amy, who lives in Los Angeles, California. Yesterday, the package arrived encased in tape that said it had been resealed by the US Postal Service. The magazine was there, but the book wasn’t. Would someone really confiscate a book because it had the word “euthanasia” in the subtitle?
As I mentioned in my last post, I was on CBC Radio’s Wild Rose Country today. Lots of Albertans called in — far more than host Donna McElligott expected and far more than could fit into a half hour segment. And, in fact, Donna didn’t get to interview me as much as she’d hoped.
This didn’t surprise me. In the last two weeks, I’ve realized that people really do want to talk about death. I’m not saying they find it easy to talk about — just that they are aching to do it. Not only are they watching their parents and grandparents die and being disturbed by what they see, they are starting to think about what awaits them.
So far the medical and ethical communities haven’t shown much interest in having a public discussion about the negotiated death — let alone ideas such as assisted suicide and euthanasia — but I don’t think they will be able to control the masses much longer. I hope That Good Night helps ignite the conversation.
I will be talking about That Good Night during the phone-in segment of CBC Radio’s Wild Rose Country today at 12:30. Listen at 1010 AM and 99.1 FM in Calgary and 740 AM and 93.9 FM in Edmonton.
When I was doing the research for Drive: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile, I kept hearing car lovers blame the decline of the Big Three on the beancounters who had replaced the car guys in the executive suites of the automakers. But Grant McCracken, who shows up in Drive, offers a different take on his blog.
He argues that those companies should have hired chief culture officers: “What Detroit needed was a man or a woman in every C-Suite who understood what was happening in culture. It needed someone who understood what was happening in the minds of boomers (and why they were so deeply wedded to German luxury cars), in youth culture (when the muscle car culture was back with new and strange differences, and why cars like the funny, boxy little Scion was flourishing), in the life, the heart and the mind of the soccer mom (for many of whom the mini-van felt like the end of everything and especially their youth and their joy). Detroit needed a senior executive who understood the consumer, and the American feeling for mobility in every sense of the word.”
Instead, McCracken points, Bob Lutz who was into speed, not culture — and famously dismissed global warming as “a crock of shit” — ran GM’s product development. And now that Lutz has retired, a guy from the powertrain division is taking over.
Stuart Laidlaw has two stories in today’s Toronto Star that you should read. “Dead when the doctor says you are” is a good look at end-of-life ethics in the wake of the Kaylee Wallace case at the Hospital for Sick Children. “Ethicists help negotiate life and death decisions” is about That Good Night. Laidlaw’s Medical Ethics Blog is also worth reading, especially if you’re interested in the Baby Kaylee case, and you can follow him on Twitter at @StuartLaidlaw.
Given a choice between a review that praises the writing, but belittles the book, and one that praises the book, but belittles the writing, I’ll take the latter. So I guess I should be okay with this review of That Good Night by Bert Archer in the National Post, though I was tempted to go with this headline: “Imperfect writer reviews imperfect book for imperfect newspaper.”
Stuart Laidlaw of The Toronto Star interviewed me about That Good Night yesterday and put a few thoughts about the word euthanasia on his blog. He is working on a story that should appear in the paper soon.
Andrew Cash — musician, writer and a fine Friday afternoon hockey player — explains in Now why the government needs to invest in artists rather than automakers.
The proof is in the numbers: “The arts and culture sector, it turns out, is bigger in Ontario than agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, oil and gas and the utilities sectors – combined! More people work in arts and culture than directly in auto. With every dollar of public investment in the arts netting governments $1.84, it sounds like a pretty safe bet, especially compared to the teetering car business.”