Energy meters available at the WPL

Energy meter at the WPL
Originally uploaded by Mita

Located on the second floor of the Central Branch of the Windsor Public Library are electricity meters for your conservation research needs.

Techno is back on WDET. Sort of

Speak of the sun and it shines. That's a saying of my mother who doesn't speak of devils. Anyhoo, mere days after I complain that WDET no long plays techno, I get an email announcing that their WDET HD music station now streams online.

I've been listening only for an hour or so and its a little disconcerting because there are no defined shows, hosts, or playlists. It could be a very long mix CD on repeat, for all I can tell.

But its a step in the right direction and so for the donation drive, I will give it up for WDET.

An open letter to WDET

Dear WDET FM,

In 2006, Fedde Le Grand's Put Your Hands Up for Detroit was the number one single in the U.K.

In 2007, WDET removed all of its electronica music programming, including Focus Detroit. Folk music remains on WDET. The Arkansas Traveller remains on WDET. But not the music that the world looks to Detroit to for.

In 2005, you removed many of your music shows to better concentrate on news and information programming but after a mighty hue and cry, these shows returned.

Its 2008. I continue to ignore every plea you make for much needed donations. I am putting my hands up for Detroit Techno.

The City Council, The Windsor Public Library Board and The CEO

The CEO of The Windsor Public Library is today's front page news after some investigative journalism has revealed that Brian Bell has been articling at a local law firm while on sick leave from his library administrative duties. According to Bell, there is no malfeasance because working at a law firm is as relaxing as pottery lessons.

The WPL has been embroiled in this sort of drama for some years now. Here's the context as I understand it.

City councils in Ontario do not have the authority to make management decisions regarding libraries because of laws designed to protect library collection decisions from political influence. The Windsor Public Library is accountable to its Library Board. And yet its safe to say that The City of Windsor have been trying to gain control of The Windsor Public Library Board. Here's the evidence:

In March of this year, Windsor City Council requested a "line by line" financial audit of the WPL despite the fact that a similar audit performed two years ago found that the library system was running efficiently. Why so many audits? "Under provincial legislation, the only way council can take over [a library board] is if there has been mismanagement, and that's the driving force behind the financial request". Also in March, Council requested that the library cut its budget by $400,000 while stipulating that there would be no reduction in hours or services. Furthermore, in May, the City tried to prematurely end the terms of the WPL Library Board members.

Complicating matters it is no secret that the mayor of Windsor and his allies in Council are not fond of Alan Halberstadt who is the only remaining city councilor on the library board. In fact, they had the knives out for him after he did not side with City Council's recommendation for such large budget cuts (addendum) and again after it was learned that the Board mistakenly applied an Pay Equity payment to "funny how the former director of Human Resources could make such a mistake" Brian Bell. As an aside, I have a tremendous respect for Alan Halberstadt and I feel that the call to remove him from the Board by some of his fellow city councillors was deeply hypocritical.

And something that might be completely irrelevant or just might be further complicating matters is that Brian Bell succeeded previous Library CEO, Steve Salmons, who may or may not be the "former librarian" referred to by local columnist Gord Henderson who is part of the Ontario government's Detroit River International Crossing team, which is, incidentally, currently battling a heated turf war with the City of Windsor's own plans for a crossing.

I'm not sure how this is all going to resolve as the WPL operates under the Carver Protocol, a commercial governance model which, according to City Councillor David Cassivi, "largely renders the library board impotent" as it vests all responsibility in the office of the library's chief executive officer.

(cross-posted at New Jack Librarian)

Being noxious on purpose - milkweed for butterflies

The first summer job I had was working the weekend shift of a Mr. Donut just on the outside of Sarnia's Chemical Valley. During the week, I was employed with three other students to take care of the Howard Watson Trail. The trail was once a railway corridor and so we were employed by Lambton Wildlife to keep the trail free of weeds to appease the homeowners who lived beside this precious ribbon of nature.

Removing the trail's ragweed didn't bother me. What did cause me angst was that we were obligued to remove any milkweed we found as milkweed is considered a noxious weed in Ontario as its thought to be poisonous to livestock. I hated pulling milkweed because its the monarch catepillar's sole food source. I still feel guilty about this.

So yesterday, after following the links from this page on Graffiti For Butterflies (via Kottke), I bought this Monarch Station Seed Kit from Monarch Watch. I don't know whether its too late to plant milkweed this year, butI'm sure I'll be able to find out with all the information and discussion space made available by this charitable group. The site's navigation is a little dodgy but in spite of this, I think their web presence is a model for environmental groups who are seeking ways to engage the public in their cause.

The dirt on gardening

I love gardens and I would love to have a beautiful garden. But I'm an awful gardener. I can't recognize many plants much less know their names or life cycles. Its all very daunting to me.

I know why I'm a bad gardener: I think of gardening as a relentless, back-breaking chore and not as an joyful escape from the stuffy confines of the indoors.

My goal is to put in a couple years of effort to establish a native garden which will hopefully need minimal maintenance on my part from thereon after. I made some serious efforts in this direction in 2006 and planted a bunch of good stuff (except in the wrong places for some of the species). Then I neglected the garden somewhat last year and this year, it appears that I am going to neglect the garden even more on account that I have a newborn.

So instead of a gardening story, I have a link for you to a TED Talk by Michael Pollan on looking at the world from a plant's point of view. Here's a brief synopsis: we humans think that we control plants to do our bidding in our gardens and through agriculture but how different are we from the bees and birds that are unwittingly manipulated by pl1ants that do the work of pollinating and distributing their offspring? After viewing this video, you may not look at gardening the same way again.

(And, if you are up to having your concept of self, subject and object messed up even further, you may be interested in Susan Blackmore's TED Talk on memes and temes)

[This post is part of a Windsor blogburst on gardening]

Eat real food. Eat more plants instead of meat

I'm at home on maternity leave and this means that for about 20 minutes every 1 to 4 hours, I am propped in a comfy chair lined with pillows and with a little baby girl latched on to me for dear life. As my toddler son so eloquently puts, she's eating me.

Being a food source, it shouldn't be too surprising that I have been thinking about food quite a bit as of late, especially after seeing Mark Bittman's TED Talk What's wrong with what we eat. I've been watching TED talks while I have been breast feeding. It beats the hell out of television.

Now, if you already follow Bittman's and Michael Pollan's work in The New York Times, then not much in this video will be new to you.But if you haven't, here's a synopsis of what he says: Eat more plants instead of meat. Eat real food.

The production of livestock is the second highest contributor to greenhouse gases. It's just after energy production and just before transportation. So instead of buying carbon credits every time you fly, perhaps you should buy some after you dine out at The Keg for steaks. Or you could eat less meat and more plants. It's better for your health and it's essential for our planet's health. Bittman provides many more details and many more reasons why to make the switch.

What I particular like about this talk is that Bittman lays out why the trendy and frequently promoted practices of eating organic food or being encouraging consumers to be concerned about food miles are not the solutions for the food problems at hand.

Bittman says that being a localvore only makes sense if you live in a place like California. Now, I would content that those living in 4-0-Wonderland, *do* live in a place like California - food-production-wise, of course. Its a good thing that we grow lots of plants round here.

Building a (charity) foundation

Have you noticed that pretty much every celebrity has a charitable foundation to their name? (some of which are a little dodgy) It got me thinking and I started doing some thinking that perhaps I would like create my own. Evidently, its quite easy to do... once you have at least 5 million dollars you are willing to part with.

One of the off-shoots of this little research jaunt is that I learned of something new to me: the community foundation - the charity foundation for the rest of us. Here's a comparison between private foundations and community foundations [pdf].

And following this thread, I learned of The Greater Windsor Community Foundation.

The answers are really more questions

You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. (See the world eco-region map ). At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.

The following exercise in watershed awareness was hatched 30 years ago by Peter Warshall, naturalist extraordinaire... The intent of this quiz is to inspire you to answer the questions you can't initially. [The Big Here Quiz]

I first read about The Big Here Quiz in a Whole Earth Review many years back. Late last year, I finally resolved to answer all its questions.

Its been a really useful exercise for me - as a librarian - and as a person trying to make connections to place where I didn't grow up but is now a place called 'home'.

What has surprised me is that I haven't been able to find anyone else who has done a similar job of properly researching their localized answers to the quiz. If you have taken it on, please let me know with a comment!

Name two places on different continents that have similar sunshine/rainfall/wind and temperature patterns to here. Last question of The Big Here Quiz

So I have to find a place in Europe and a place in Asia (if I stick to the same latitude of North 42 degrees) where there are similar sunshine, rainfall, wind, and temperature patterns as my home. Except, I live beside The Great Lakes which is very different than living by the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, or the Mediterranean sea. And somehow I think Windsor is quite different than the border of China and Mongolia.

Its the last question of The Big Here Quiz and I'm afraid its going to end with a whimper rather than a bang. I'm not going to give an answer.

What was the dominant land cover plant here 10,000 years ago? Q33 of The Big Here Quiz

According to The Ancient Life of the Great Lakes Basin: Precambrian to Pleistocene by J. Alan Holman

In summary, by 10,000 years ago the forest vegetation in southern Michigan had become more diverse, with mixed forests of white and red pine, yellow and paper birth, aspen, oak, white ash, red and white elm, and blue beech.

What other cities or landscape features on the planet share your latitude? Q32 of The Big Here Quiz

Windsor, Ontario is approximately at 42 degrees North - the same degree of latitude that separates Oregon from Northern California. Barcelona, Spain and Rome, Italy are a little more than 41 degrees North.

What species once found here are known to have gone extinct? Q31 of The Big Here Quiz

From the History of the Ojibway Prairie Complex:

• The Greater Prairie Chicken
• Trumpeter Swan
• Eastern Elk
• Passenger Pigeons
• Northern Bobwhite
  

How many days till the moon is full? Q30 of The Big Here Quiz

The moon will be full in 8 days. It will be a pink moon except to those followers of The New Jack Almanac. To them, it will be a playoffs moon.

Where is the nearest wilderness? When was the last time a fire burned through it? Q29 of The Big Here Quiz

Another easy one. The closest "wilderness" is The Ojibway Prairie Complex and its last fire was in 2003.

After the rain runs off your roof, where does it go? Q28 of The Big Here Quiz

I'm not sure how to verify my answer to this one. Assuming that the water doesn't get into the storm water sewer system, I would think that the water makes its way into the soil and then...

1) evaporate;
2) contribute to the soil's moisture
3) be used up by a plant;
4) collect in an aquifer somewhere below; or
5) make its way to the Detroit River

Its another one of those questions that is easy to answer with a principle ("the ground water cycle") but very hard to answer with something specific ("water in my neighbourhood collects underground and travels out via the stream").

Where does your electric power come from and how is it generated? Q27 of The Big Here Quiz

The source of electricity is the "grid". But there are two power generators nearby that one would think supplies the local demands:

Brighton Beach Power Station is a natural gas-fired combined cycle electricity generating facility with a nameplate capacity of 580 MW located in Windsor... The facility is fuelled by natural gas supplied by Union Gas Distribution infrastructure. The plant delivers both 115 kV and 230 kV to the Ontario grid at the J. Clark Keith substation which feeds into the Ontario electricity market administered by the Independent System Operator.

and

The Lambton coal-fuelled generating station (GS) is located on the St. Clair River, in St. Clair Township, 26 km south of Sarnia, Ontario. Its four generating units are capable of producing 1,976 megawatts (MW) of power. The station's annual production is in the range of 11 billion kilowatt-hours.

According to the Ontario Clean Air Alliance (of which the City of Windsor is a member [!]), the Lambton Generator Plant is Ontario's #2 polluter (pdf).

What minerals are found in the ground here that are (or were) economically valuable? Q26 of The Big Here Quiz

Halite (natural salt) and Anhydrite

Ojibway Mine, Windsor, Essex Co., Ontario, Canada
ref: Geological Survey of Canada Miscellaneous Report 39.
In dolomitic limestone and limy shale. The main salt bed is 8.2 m thick and is at a depth of 289 m to 297 m below the surface. Another bed is 9 m above it. The salt is exceptionally pure containing less than 2 per cent impurities. The salt beds occur in the Salina Formation of Silurian age.

Sulfur

Amherstburg Quarry, near Windsor, crude large xls;
5 localities in R.Traill, Cat.of Can.Mins., GSC Paper 80-18, 1983

[In the mid 1800's, thousands came to Windsor every summer to visit the sulphur springs in Brighton Beach, just outside of Sandwich... more]

Name 3 wild species that were not found here 500 years ago. Name one exotic species that has appeared in the last 5 years. Q25 of The Big Here Quiz

I'm going to answer the second part first - as its easy: in 2002, the Emerald Ash Borer was identified in the Windsor area. (Living in the Great Lakes area makes you very aware of the problem of invasive species).

The first part of the question bothers me. By using the word, 'wild' I'm assuming the question is about animal migration - but how well versed are we in animal migrations from 500 years ago?

Ah, it appears that Kevin Kelly has had second thoughts on this question as well...

If I could re-write this question, I would ask about now extinct life that once resided where you lived -- if only to write about the now extinct giant beaver that once grew to 2/3 the size of a black bear.

What primary geological processes or events shaped the land here? Q24 of The Big Here Quiz

In the beginning (about 2 billion years ago) "two tectonic plates fused and created the Midcontinent Rift, forming a valley that was the basis of Lake Superior. When a second fault line, the Saint Lawrence rift, formed approximately 570 million years ago, the basis for Lakes Ontario and Erie was created, along with what would become the St. Lawrence River." Molten magma caused "the highlands to sink and form a mammoth rock basin that would one day hold Lake Superior." Then the geological process of glaciation defined the area which we now know as the (Laurentian) Great Lakes.