Ongoing occupation demanding fossil fuel divestment at U of T’s Victoria University

Friday was day 12 of Climate Justice U of T’s occupation at Victoria University, pressuring them to divest from fossil fuels.

They have a guide online for people wishing to visit the occupation.

They also have a petition.

First camp in an eon

Thanks to the prior exploration and get-up-and-go of my friend Natalia, I capped off the intense sequence from my brother Sasha’s visit through my mother’s departure with my first camping trip since pre-PhD.

This trip was meant in part as a gear shakedown for camping in the shoulder season. I can say definitively that the sleeping bag and fleece liner combo which I chose mostly to avoid sleeping in hostel-provided sheets was not comfortably warm at -11 ˚C and -9 ˚C during the coldest night hours, even with all my clothes on. My graduation gift tent did an admirable job of staying condensation-free, despite me curling up at the bottom of my sleeping bag to preserve my warm outbreaths.

We camped in and explored an area of crown land near the Catchacoma forest during a time of exceptional high water. A wetland area as seen in recent aerial images was mostly a large lake for us, with the outflow down a creek partly obstructed by an ATV bridge.

The trip was a remarkable and much-needed grit- and friendship-building experience. I can’t wait to get out again; taste simple food off the fire that tastes better than anything at home; wake to the bird chorus around dawn; and joke and talk with good friends while stomping through snowfall and hauling falling branches to the fire.

Old Orchard homes

Toronto’s Old Orchard Properties bills itself as a builder of “luxury custom homes” but, as a renter since the August before last, I think anyone who gets a tour and takes a detailed look will see that their self-praise is unjustified.

The bannister along our staircase has always wiggled so much that I doubt it would
hold me if I fell; the locks are cheap and the light fixtures take one bulb instead of two and are located in places too high and dangerous to reach (like above an open area for a
staircase, with a wobbly railing beside). The locks and plumbing fixtures are the irrationally cheap sort that landlords choose even when they are responsible for maintenance, and the air conditioning cuts in and out and cannot maintain a stable temperature in summer.

I know every business represents itself as premium, even if it makes discount napkins for the prison and public education systems, but it is particularly galling for a landlord which has treated us so badly as tenants.

Awarded my dictionary

As distant and improbable as it seemed at times, at tonight’s Convocation High Table I was given the dictionary traditionally awarded by Massey College to PhD graduates:

Photo by Chantal Phillips

This was a much more meaningful graduation for me than attending a U of T ceremony would be, and hearing the biographies of all the graduating Junior Fellows was a reminder of how many critical fights humanity is engaged in right now, and how it will take the best from all of us to fight our way to a successful, liveable, humane future for the world.

Early tomorrow I am off for back-to-back-to-back trips: first to visit our dear friends in Ottawa; then for a couple of days of quiet and reading at a dairy farm in Cambridge, Ontario; and then straight out on my first camping trip in many years.

After that, my full-time job will become finding a new affordable place to live in Toronto. Finding inexpensive accommodation is actually more urgent and important than finding an OK job. Per George Monbiot’s tough but invaluable career advice, financial security really comes from minimizing your expenses, not maximizing your income. The cheaper you can live, the freer you are to work on what is important and bring everything you can to the fight.

Lunch with Julie Payette

Thanks to the Science at Massey program, I had lunch with Canadian two-time Space Shuttle astronaut Julie Payette.

As a group, we talked about her International Space Station construction missions STS-96 and STS-127; new technologies for crewed space missions, planetary exploration, and habitation elsewhere in the solar system; extremophiles and the search for life beyond Earth in the solar system; and the many experiences of launch, microgravity, and living and working in space.

Payette was very accessible, humble, and kind — and clearly seemed happy to hang around with a bunch of nerds to talk about science and look at photos from her missions.

History belongs to future generations

I disagree with the fundamental notion inherent to the supposed “right to be forgotten”, which is the presumption that the main and most important purpose of documenting world events is to depict your life history in an autobiographical sense. My conviction is that history belongs not to the subjects who it is about, but to the future generations who will need to use it to understand their own situations and solve their own problems. When we censor the future out of vanity or even out of compassion for errors long-atoned for, we may be denying something important to the future. We act as the benefactors of those in future generations by preserving what ordered and comprehensible information may eventually survive from our era, and we should distort it as little as possible. The world is so complex that events are impossible to understand while they are happening. The accounts and records we preserve are the clay which through careful work historians may later turn into bricks. We should not pre-judge what they should find important or what they ought to hear.

The trace we each leave on the broader world during our brief lives is important to other people, and the importance of them being well-informed to confront the unforeseeable but considerable challenges they confront outweighs our own interests as people to be remembered in as positive a light as possible, even if that requires omission and/or deception.