Forgery League

I’m discovering far too many cool blogs to keep up with. RSS doesn’t help - it just seems to make it all even more overwhelming. When will I ever have time to read all this stuff?

WorldChanging is an environmental blog with a futurist stripe.

We’re up against some heavy, heavy challenges, and it’s understandable that some people feel paralyzed by despair (heaven knows I get that way sometimes) or want to turn back the clock to some idealized vision of the past. But those aren’t terribly useful. If we’re going to make it through all this while saving something of this planet, it’s going to take effort on every front. WorldChanging’s got reports on ecosystems and innovations from around the world, and occasionally a personal piece or two, like A Love Note To New Orleans.

(I’ll have to jot down more of my thoughts on the environment some time.)

The Spacing Wire is from the people who bring us the excellent Spacing magazine - thoughts on public space, urban living and Toronto.

The Toronto Psychogeography Society blog is along similar lines (and shares some contributors, such as Matt Blackett). It’s more about the experience of the city; the Spacing Wire is more about issues.

CBC Unplugged has news and podcasts from the locked-out employees of the CBC, nationwide. I haven’t had a functioning TV or radio in quite a while, but when I did, I listened to the CBC almost exclusively. Now employees in several cities are turning to the web as an outlet.

The first English-language community radio station in Canada was formed by idealistic, disgruntled volunteers from Radio Waterloo, the University of Waterloo’s cable station, after RW was closed down by the student federation and reluctantly re-opened with a quarter of its original budget. I’m not expecting massive revolution at the CBC - it’s not going away - but still… this could get interesting.

My faith in this city has been restored. David Miller’s the new mayor. On balance, the changes to council look good: Glen de Baeremaeker is in in Scarborough (diss Scarberia all you like - I’ll take it over Etobicoke any day) and most of the other new faces are promising. And now we’ll have an actual leader at the helm - and not a vile embarrassment of a furniture salesman elected on name recognition and blabbermouthedness alone who knows jack about the city and no longer even gives a crap about his job.

Out in the 905, things aren’t quite so pretty: same old suburban developer-sponsored louts, for the most part. In Hamilton, the new mayor backs the Red Hill Valley Expressway. Construction is underway, so short of a minor miracle (say, new provincial premier Dalton McGuinty pulling a Bill Davis), things don’t look too good on that front.

Beyond that, a federal election is looming, and I think Chretien’s slow-motion retirement might have pissed off people in sufficient numbers that a right-wing landslide is conceivable (if the Conservatives and Alliance do indeed manage to unite).

But for now, I am optimistic and highly relieved.

Read in the Star the other day: there’s a hidden river flowing through a good stretch of southern Ontario, way below the surface. Not too long ago, they found out where it comes out, somewhere under High Park (very roughly, our equivalent of Central Park). I love stories like that - the idea that there’s all sorts of stuff we still don’t know about, like buried rivers and tiny 500-year-old cedar trees and squid the size of houses.

I’ve noticed that in any animated film, one sure way to get me crying is to show a bleak landscape suddenly suffused by some elemental Power and come bursting to life: happens in Yellow Submarine, Princess Mononoke, the Firebird piece from Fantasia 2000, even that silly Lemonjelly video. There’s something about that symbolism that really nails me deep down: the idea of rebirth, of the world healing itself, of the power of Nature to regenerate.

I’ve seen pictures of the bleak, rocky landscape where I grew up (near the mining town of Sudbury, where according to Canadian urban legend the Apollo astronauts trained because of its similarity to the moon) turning into pine forest again, and it brought a smile to my face. So did word that parts of the Ukraine and Belarus, uninhabited by humans since the Chernobyl accident, have become refuges for wildlife. And I’m realizing that principle - that life keeps coming back, if only we quit messing with it and let it happen - is essentially how I conceive of God or the divine. It was that force that some in Hiroshima and Nagasaki feared was dead after the atom bombs fell. It says - even if we screw up utterly, there is hope; something new and wonderful will arise in time.