August 17 2010 by The Systemic Analyst.

The news is awash with the parents in Barrie who attempted to block the use of Wi-Fi in their children’s elementary school and lost. Call me crazy, but if parents didn’t want something that they believe is harmful to their children, and which isn’t likely necessary for their education, why is it imposed on their offspring? The School Board is there to serve the parents and children, no? Not there to rule them. Or have I missed something?

The focus on the debate as to whether or not Wi-Fi and the electromagnetic radiation it produces, (regardless of how slight,) is harmful misses a bigger point: why do elementary school children even need to have Wi-Fi access? Shouldn’t they be learning to read and acquiring other fundamental mental skills, not surfing the internet and dependent on technology for answers?

As a society we have become mental midgets. Ask anyone under 30 to navigate a road trip without the aid of a GPS and see how far you get. What if all of Canada’s spellchecks failed in computers one day, would documents created be intelligible?  Heaven forbid the electricity ever going out for an extended period of time - most Canadians wouldn’t know what to do with themselves, much less survive.

The issue with Wi-Fi isn’t just a health concern, it’s one of mental competence.

Posted in In The News, Health Preparedness, Environment | No Comments »

July 15 2010 by The Systemic Analyst.

Hogweed is causing residents in some parts of Canada a bit of alarm. The plant, if exposed to sunlight, can turn poisonous and lead to blindness if the sap finds its way into human eyes. The plant is already a problem in British Columbia and Newfoundland, but has also been spotted in Ontario.

Posted in In The News, Environment | No Comments »

June 10 2010 by The Systemic Analyst.

There have been a number of recent human run-ins with ordinarily wild and elusive animals. No, I don’t mean politicians outside the House of Commons or anything like that, but real animals that once lived in what we humans call the wilderness.

In Toronto’s cottage country (Orillia and area) there have been a spate of bear encounters of a not-so-friendly kind, with the latest involving a black bear chasing a woman on a bicycle. Last week in an Ottawa suburb, two young male moose wandered the cookie-cutter streets, evading capture, until one was ultimately killed by police. Coyote sightings have been reported on streets in Cornwall. And one woman believes she may have spotted a cougar on the other side of Ottawa, near Arnprior. I suppose in Ontario we are still faring better than some London, England residents, where earlier this week twin baby girls were mauled in their own bedroom by a fox.

We never were alone on the planet. Animal encounters and attacks were likely once very normal, especially in a country like Canada that has such vast amounts of wilderness.  Thus, the sightings alone are not necessarily cause for concern; the lack of fear these animals seem to be demonstrating for human society, however, is alarming. The more comfortable wild predatory animals become with humans, the more likely attacks will be become. And the more we encroach on their natural habitat, well, the more such unfriendly encounters will become reality. Perhaps urban developers might start taking this into consideration when scrapping with city officials on rates of expansion.

Posted in In The News, Environment | No Comments »

May 11 2010 by The Systemic Analyst.

Vanguard and AllAfrica.com are reporting: “Scientists have warned that the global climate change will have a strong impact on Nigeria particularly in the areas of agriculture, land use, energy, biodiversity, health amongst others.”

I certainly hope this is not the case. Lagos has a number of problems, but there is something about that city and Nigeria as a whole that make it very worth while.

Posted in Disasters, Environment | No Comments »

October 17 2008 by The Systemic Analyst.

The movie below is written and directed by Peter Joseph. It is 123 min long and offers a lot of food-for-thought. We welcome your comments.

Posted in Health Preparedness, Economic Issues, In The News, Identity, Security Measures, Environment, Food Security, Water Issues, Politics | No Comments »

October 9 2008 by The Systemic Analyst.

The number of articles around the world that describe people’s reactions to the mounting financial crisis is on the rise. As the number of private and corporate bankruptcies grow so will the pressure on governments and societies affected by the crisis. The situation is of particular concern in the Northern Hemisphere given the approaching winter months and possible disruptions to just in time food deliveries.

Posted in Economic Issues, Food Security | No Comments »

April 23 2008 by The Systemic Analyst.

Forget oil prices; shortages of food, and in some places water, are rapidly becoming serious concerns. The bubble that is our Western world often prevents us from seeing the dangers posed by our system; distracted by fears of job loss, unmanageable personal debt and an unending supply of mind-numbing entertainment pumped into our homes through the intravenous that is mass media, we can’t see what difficulties our way come. Step away from immediate and local concerns for a second, scan the international headlines on an internet search and suddenly some alarming trends become apparent: food prices are soaring, the hungry are rioting and some food producing countries are moving towards self-protectionism.

So long as there is processed food across the street in some store’s freezer or selling products in our market is still more lucrative than in the country of origin, why have grounds for concern, right? How long, however, can economics be expected to trump survival; our post-Cold War mentality leaves us still believing in a capitalist system as if it were religion, some divine law of existence that will neither change nor disappear. It’s unthinkable for most people to even conceive that our current system could be any other than what it is. Indeed, just broach the topic with someone and prepare for a touchy backlash of, what else could it be: a dictatorship? communism? what else is there? 

This inability to accept that systems come and systems go leaves us incredibly vulnerable to change. Lacking creativity to even imagine that there should be change renders us incapable of ever preparing for it.  

As an industrialized society we moved en masse to urban centres. We bought into a system - buying food from a network of stores, taking water from a network of pipes, wearing clothes mass produced in distant lands - and in the process became entirely dependent. If suddenly there was a break in the system and we no longer had access to the things that we need, what would happen?

Despite the comparative luxuries some of us have heretofore enjoyed in the West, the time has for us to reconsider the viability of our system. Hopefully, this will occur before the current food shortages, which are only just beginning, truly come to affect us - which inevitably will happen given how connected the system, upon which we as individuals have become so dependent, has become to the wider global network.

Posted in Food Security | No Comments »

March 4 2008 by The Systemic Analyst.

At last, a Western politician is aware of the looming threat posed by poor food security planning. Britain’s David Cameron is apparently pressing for measures that would foster the local production of food. His reasoning, which is quite correct, is that with increasing demands on food due to consumption and some types of biofuel production countries which depend upon other regions to feed them might find their citizenry are a whole lot hungrier than before. This isn’t rocket science, it’s a simple numbers game - so why haven’t other leaders come to the same conclusion? 

In a country such as Canada with a limited growing season, one would think that we would have a thorough national food security policy. A plan that encourages Canadians to stockpile should something nasty like a flu pandemic hit in the dead of winter, shutting down borders and airports effectively cutting off our winter food supply. Such a plan might have supported the small family farm, a now nearly extinct mode of production, to generate produce and livestock purely for local consumption. Or it might have put limits on factory farming techniques which aren’t flexible enough to cope during emergencies and are thought to heavily pollute the environment (to say nothing of its impact on human health). Heck, maybe it would just have any old plan, something other than telling the people through commercials to be prepared for a 72-hour period? Alas, it’s the local grocery store or nothing.

Food Security, I am afraid, like Pandemic Preparedness is lost on most Westerners. Few in the West, if any, can remember a real tangible crisis which threatened their lives. A couple brushes with recessions, outbreaks of disease and water contamination do little to smarten the bureaucrats and political leaders up.  It’s all easily forgotten when in the next minute they are on to the latest issue for which none of them were prepared.

Until we step back and see the bigger picture, we will be doomed to run around after each event trying our best to cope in the aftermath. We have been fortunate in a country like Canada that none of these issues has ever really spiralled out of control, too much, at least not in living memory. How much longer can we rely on the resiliency of the international system to maintain the current status quo? 

I certainly hope we don’t find ourselves only just rethinking things at the point of starvation. 

Posted in Food Security, Politics | No Comments »

March 4 2008 by The Systemic Analyst.

The Toledo Blade reported recently that Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania may have hit a road block in ratifying an agreement that would limit water withdrawal from the Great Lakes. If four states within the same country can’t adopt an agreement after 4.5 years of negotiations, why should Canadians expect that their “gentlemen’s agreement” is enough to protect our interests regarding the Great Lakes basin?

We might start minding our own interests by first looking past the many layers of bureaucracy which are so conveniently blamed for our lack of initiative around security measures (“oh, that’s provincial jurisdiction,” or “U.S. states and Canadian provinces can’t enter into binding agreements”) and finally do something that will protect the future of precious fresh water resources. Environmental degradation certainly won’t stop because this department or that province has been deemed responsible for what happens on an issue.

Perhaps we just need a reason to take fresh water resource depletion seriously. How about the plans of the Governor of New Mexico to have resources “shared” among the states - after all, he believes, that Great Lakes region is just “awash with water.” Care to share valuable water with green lawns in deserts, anyone?

Posted in Water Issues, Politics | No Comments »

February 26 2008 by The Systemic Analyst.

Associated Press has reported that “A “doomsday” seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened Tuesday deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.” At last the big boys are preparing for serious disaster, when will it be time for the average person to shift their perspective and take some responsibility for their own survival?

Currently, the average person acquires food from local stores, without much thought, for a few days ahead. Should anything minor and temporary happen (forget nuclear fallout, this could just mean border closures or a strike) food supply in a place like Canada would be considerably disrupted - particularly in the winter as we have become increasingly dependent on imports from California, Mexico and elsewhere. The convenience and monotony of grocery store procurement has blinded many of us to the fact that systems are not impermeable to disruption or collapse. Furthermore, the more complex and centralized the system the more vulnerable it is to threats and widespread destruction, much like a domino effect - such is the nature of a system that is reliant on say a central point of food distribution that ships products out across long distances to stores agreeing to carry said produce exclusively. Attack the centre and it all falls down.

Unfortunately, most people don’t want to think about such things. Thus, it’s easier to just continue as they always have, dependent on a wider system ignorant of the dangers that such dependency creates. If only more people would entertain the possibility of these threats and make plans, (obviously not on the scale of the Norwegians,) to truly guard their own interests the world might be that much more stable.

Posted in Disasters, Food Security | No Comments »