CANADA Eco-comedian's bright idea wins
Ottawa Citizen, 5 April 5 2011, Tony Lofaro,
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/comedian+bright+idea+wins/4558974/story.html
Take Josh Rachlis, please.
The self-styled "eco-comedian" and former Ottawa resident has earned the wrath of girlfriends, co-workers and motorists for his dogged determination to make the world more environmentally friendly.
The 38-year-old has picked up litter from city streets, berated motorists for their idling car engines and lectured girlfriends about replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescents. Lately, he has directed some of that eco-anger into documentary films, one of which shared the top prize in the third annual Eco-Comedy Video Competition.
Cheekily titled An Inconvenient Ruth, the short film stars Rachlis, who is at home watching television with his girlfriend when all the lights go out.
An "idea" light bulb appears over his girlfriend's head, but it's not one of the twisty fluorescent ones, and he gets into an argument with her to switch over. It's an amusing take on the conservation movement and impressed judges enough that he tied for first place.
The two-minute video was filmed in his apartment, and it features Rachlis and his exgirlfriend's best friend. Sixty films from around the world were entered in the competition and Rachlis is the first Canadian to claim the top prize. He shares the $1,000 prize from the Sierra Club with Ben Zolmo, the other winner.
"I was pissing a lot of people off because I was bothering them by telling them to stop idling their cars and they would chase me down the street and tell me never to touch their cars again," said Rachlis, a copywriter in Toronto.
"So, I thought maybe I could combine the two, entertain people while getting out an environmental message and I might reach more people that way.
"If I can get a million people to watch a video, that's more people than I'll ever get to stop idling their cars," said Rachlis, who moved to Toronto 10 years ago.
Rachlis likes to think he invented the genre of eco-comedy. He says he made a music video for Laurie David, producer of An Inconvenient Truth, hoping to impress her with his environmental message and also to get in touch with her husband, Larry, the creator of the cult comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm. Laurie never did contact him, but his video won praise from David Suzuki and actor Ed Begley Jr., a fervent environmentalist.
"It's a difficult thing to make environmental stuff interesting enough to watch," Rachlis said.
"It has to be funny first and also have an environmental theme. A lot of my stuff is based on my life because my life is pretty funny. I'm always trying to get people to be more environmentally conscious."
Rachlis says he takes his "natural neuroses" about the environment and weaves it into his comedy.
His passion for the environment started at a young age and he remembers arguing with his parents to turn off the outdoor lights or lights in their home. His parents are Louise Rachlis, a former Citizen staffer, and Lorne Rachlis, a former director of education with Ottawa's public school board.
For a Grade 8 science project on acid rain, the young Rachlis put vinegar on plants to show what would happen to them.
"I've always been concerned about my health, so taking care of the environment seemed like a natural extension of that," he said.
"The thing about the environment is that it's a means to an end. We want it to be clean so that we can enjoy other things. Recycling and not polluting are not delightful goals in themselves, but my perspective is finding the humanity in it."
Chris Palmer, one of the competition's judges, said using humour was a good way to get an environmental message to a wide audience.
"The idea of the competition is to promote humour with the idea being that if people are laughing they would be open to more points of view," said Palmer, director of the Centre for Environmental Filmmaking at the School of Communication at American University in Bethesda, Maryland.
"But humour has to make a point to encourage people to be more conservation-oriented. That can be extremely challenging for filmmakers because what could be funny to one person will not be funny to other people," he said.
"His video made you smile and the message was clear and lucid that we should be using more fuel-efficient light bulbs and if you do you will be rewarded," he said.
To watch the video, go to youtube.com/joshrachlis
Pine beetles killing a tree species found across Canada
Canadian Press, 4 April 2011
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/968766--pine-beetles-killing-a-tree-species-found-across-canada
Alberta researchers say the destructive mountain pine beetle has infested a different type of tree that could allow the bugs to spread eastward across Canada.
University of Alberta scientists say they have proven the tiny beetles can jump species from the lodgepoll pine of western Canada to jack pine, the main tree found in the boreal forest.
Professor Janice Cooke says the beetles have been found in jack pine north of Edmonton and the bugs are knocking on Saskatchewan’s door.
Cooke says climate change will be the main factor that will determine how fast and how far east the beetles may spread.
Alberta has spent about $255 million fighting the beetle since 2006 and estimates the bugs have infested about 3.2 million trees in the province.
In British Columbia the beetles have attacked pine forests over an area five times the size of Vancouver Island and have killed 675 million cubic metres of timber.
Green shift into reverse
National Post, 2 April 2011, Tamsin McMahon
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Green+shift+into+reverse/4547915/story.html
When Jack Layton visited Alberta during the last federal election, his campaign plane swooped low over the oil sands as Mr. Layton declared -over Darth Vader's theme song from Star Wars -that "big oil and gas companies can't be trusted."
Last week, Mr. Layton kicked off his campaign in Edmonton, where the NDP holds Alberta's lone non-Tory seat. He didn't mention the oil sands.
Less than three years after the environment served as the ballot question for the first time in a federal election, public appetite for a green political agenda seems to have all but evaporated. Even the parties that have traditionally championed the environment have so far focused their campaigns this time on other issues, or framed their environmental platform around support for clean-energy projects, rather than punishments for fossil fuels.
"You can't run an election campaign nowadays on the environment," said John Wright, senior vice-president of polling firm Ipsos-Reid. "It's not seen as a crisis in this country. It hasn't affected people directly in many ways."
In 2008, the Liberals' Green Shift ads issued a rallying cry for the environment over photos of smoking oil refineries and dewcovered leaves, and Green Party leader Elizabeth May rode a groundswell of popular support into the leaders debate.
This time, Ms. May, excluded from the leaders debate thus far, is running a campaign that emphasizes economy, families and democracy. And while Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff suggested the federal government should play a greater role in regulating the oil sands, the party's environmental platform, to be unveiled Sunday, is expected to include no big ticket items like the widely unpopular carbon tax plan of 2008. Instead, expect incentives aimed at individuals and businesses who want to go green.
The enviroment still plays well in some ridings: When he got to Montreal, where polls show the issue still plays well, Mr. Layton promised to end subsidies for the oil sands. And Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced his support for Newfoundland and Labrador's Lower Churchill hydroelectric project as a major source of green energy in hopes of scooping up a few seats in a province that shut out the Tories the last time around.
But while the environment might become a deciding factor in some local races, analysts and pollsters say it has become a nonstarter in the national debate.
In part, the death of the green campaign in this election was sparked by the Liberals' disastrous carbon tax proposal in 2008 at a time when voters were broadsided by the start of a sharp and unexpected global recession. But even before the recession, political scientists say the environment, which had topped opinion polls only months before, had already begun fading from the public view.
This election, the environment has become even less of an issue for recession-weary voters. Political parties intent on winning a majority by crafting campaigns based on focus groups and opinion polls have taken notice of the shift in public opinion.
"It was a big issue last time because the Liberals chose to make it one," said Geoff Norquay, a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group and a former communications director to Mr. Harper. "But as we all know, it didn't work that well for them. So I think that all parties probably look at that experience and conclude that it's quite possibly a dangerous issue."
A more enduring impediment to winning an election on the environment is that voters are largely conflicted on the issue, even environmentally conscious ones. Depending on what question pollsters ask, the same voter can appear either passionately in favour of environmental policies, or completely disinterested.
"If we ask how important are environmental policies, or the environment in general, you normally get 70% saying it's very important. That's a very high number -often it's ahead of unemployment," said Michael Marzolini, head of market research firm Pollara and longtime Liberal pollster.
"But if we ask people what is the most important issue facing Canada, only about two or three percent will say the environment. People will say unemployment, even though they themselves aren't really affected by it. They won't say environment, even though they're thinking about the environment almost all the time."
That has left parties struggling to adopt environmental platforms that are seen as new and innovative, but not too new or innovative, and not something that will open them up to criticism that they are putting the environment before more pressing concerns. At the same time, provincial governments have taken up the mantle of environmental stewards, which has taken pressure off the federal government to portray themselves as green pioneers.
"There's really not a lot that hasn't already been done," Mr. Marzolini said. "There's always funds there for investment and green technology and everything else. I'm trying to think what you could do that's different from anybody else."
"The issue itself has now turned into a motherhood issue," he added. "It was always somewhat of one, but now it's the type of thing where its socially unacceptable not to be an environmentalist, or not to be environmentally conscious and as such we tend to take the issue for granted."
Another factor is Canadians' apparent ambivalence to the Alberta oil sands and other natural-resource-based industries that are largely recognized as having insulated Canada from the worst of the global recession. That has been aided by a successful public relations push by the petroleum industry and high-profile endorsements from Hollywood eco-activist James Cameron, who toured the oil sands last year, and U.S. President Barack Obama, who last week highlighted Canada as a "stable and steady and reliable" source of foreign oil.
"There's a lot of confusion on the issue and that's probably been driven by what has been a very good public relations strategy and certainly the James Cameron visit and all that type of thing," Mr. Marzolini said. "Basically, Canadians do not know whether this is an issue or not, but they know that economically it's a very vital part of what keeps the country running."
Ultimately, the politics of the environment are inextricably linked with the economy in a way that has never kept the issue at the top of the public's mind for long.
There have been three brief periods in Canadian politics when the environment went to the top of the polls: In the late 1970s, the late 1980s and the late 2000s. All were times when the country was coming off a period of extended economic growth. All were followed by a recession that wiped environmental issues from the minds of most voters.
"By 1993, the environment was the most important issue in the country," Mr. Wright said. "It eclipsed even jobs. Then the recession came and it dropped right off."
More recently, environmental awareness peaked again right before the United Nations summit on climate change in Copenhagen in late 2009. "The focus on global warming seemed to gather great steam until then," he said. "In the post-Copenhagen period, it has just drifted away. It was almost as if the activists took over the summit at that stage to push it along and it just kind of fell apart. And the rest of the world kind of shrugged its shoulders."
It's no coincidence that the environment has drifted off the public opinion polls at a time when gasoline prices have skyrocketed, sai Kathryn Harrison, a University of British Columbia political scientist who studies environmental policy. "I think we have a chickenand-egg situation where politicians think, yes, Canadians care about the environment, but they're not really willing to put their money where their mouth is."
Even beyond Canada, there is no global appetite for a major political campaign on the environment as U.S. and European countries struggle with weak economies and high unemployment.
"I think some of the purists would say none of that matters if we're all going to perish with the Earth not doing very well," Mr. Wright said. "But I guess people also look at this and say it's kind of hard to put all your eggs into the environmental protest basket when you actually need a job."
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