That Time I Went To Sherbourne Common and Saw a Groundhog

After receiving a copy of Reshaping Toronto's Waterfront from University of Toronto Press, I thought the perfect place to begin reading this would be none other than the waterfront park pictured on the front cover of the book--Sugar Beach. I've written about Sugar Beach previously, so I won't say much about it now save for the fact that there was a hulking ship docked at the Redpath Sugar Refinery that was sending metallic reverberations out into the air as it unloaded its haul of yellowy unrefined sugar.

The waterfront is a strange place to be right now. There are completed projects like Sugar Beach and the Corus building, which sit amidst an otherwise vast expanse of either industrial lands or construction sites at various stages of completion.

After a particularly muscular wind caused me to eat too much white sand at Sugar Beach, I packed up my belongings and decided to head over to check out Sherbourne Common--or the completed part at least--since I hadn't yet taken a look.

The first half of the park opened September 24, 2010, and, while the second half is still under construction, you can start to begin to see how it will take shape. There were several constructions workers there on the day I visited working to install some weird public art.

The completed part of the park is a very alluring combination of bridges, shallow canals, hard surface, and a grassy expanse. There is also a funky building that houses, amongst other things, washrooms.

Right now the completed Sherbourne Common is a bit of an orphaned space. Eventually it will be sandwiched between development, creating a closed in feeling that will hopefully give the park a more cohesive feel. It's a bit difficult at this point to envision how all the new waterfront spaces are going to stitch together, but if the whole is anything like the parts then it's going to be pretty dazzling. However, Sherbourne Common, set further east of Sugar Beach (which was quite full on a mid-week day afternoon), was virtually empty except for me...and some creature underneath one of the bridges.

My curious gaze frightened whatever it was out of the safety of the bridge and out it came, furry and looking like a beaver with a bushy tale.

Being the sensitive animal lover I am, I proceeded to chase, what I later determined to be a groundhog, across the concrete expanse of the Common until it disappeared into the bushes on the other side.

So you see? Waterfront Toronto's ambition to reconnect Toronto to its waterfront, and thus to nature, has already seen success.

Video: Goodbye Water, Goodbye Life

Check out this video made for the Stop the Quarry campaign by Dyson Forbes, which aims to educate people on the deleterious effects of a 2,400 acre limestone quarry proposed for the Town of Melancthon.

For more information on the proposed Ontario quarry, read this excellent Torontoist article from November 2009 by now Torontoist editor Hamutal Dotan. Torontoist also covered the more recent Stop the Quarry protest march that happened on April 26, 2011.

Pit Stop from Dyson Forbes on Vimeo.

I Don't Believe in Earth Hour

Last night for Earth Hour I did nothing.

The event began in 2007 in Australia and now spans the globe, urging everyone to turn off the lights for one hour in an effort to get people thinking about energy conservation. If it had the whiff of a symbolic gesture in 2007 it certainly reeks of it now.

The Toronto Star published a story lamenting that Toronto only saw 5 per cent power drop for Earth Hour, noting that people gathering in Yonge-Dundas Square were disappointed to see retail stores in the area still brightly lit. Have these same people been to Yonge-Dundas Square any other hour of the year? You can practically read after dark by the light of the jumbotrons. Flying in to Toronto Island at night, the square looks like the dance floor to some wild urban nightclub--one that never closes.

Once for Earth Hour I went to a bar in downtown Vancouver. The entire place was dark and we drank beer by candlelight. Despite being a surprisingly romantic moment in what is normally a semi-dingy sports bar, it seemed nothing beyond that. As soon as the hour ended, the bartender flipped a switched and on zapped six giant plasma screen TVs all playing the same thing just from slightly different angles so you could practically be lying on your back in the corner of the bar and still manage to see the game.

Then there is everyone deciding what Twitter hashtag to use to tweet their Earth Hour experiences, which just shows how completely divorced we have become from how much electricity all our devices truly use. If it's not plugged in we're not really using power, right? Or is it just OK because it is power borrowed from another hour? All our Earth Hour tweets drain the power on our iPhones or Blackberrys, which we will inevitably be recharging later that night at home. You can't participate in Earth Hour and tweet it, too.

And Skype got in on Earth Hour by using twitter to advertise their group video calling feature, so you can share that great Earth Hour moment with your friends and family all around the world. Except that you need your computer to do it. And your internet plugged in. Oh, well.

I would say Earth Hour has been hi-jacked by companies and people who want to show they are environmentally friendly by doing something once a year, but then I never thought it was anything more than that in the beginning. I know there are those that make the argument that even though it is obviously a symbolic gesture, it gets people to think about their energy use the rest of the year. Maybe it does. But my suspicion is that the people most affected and legitimately interested in Earth Hour are those that were already thinking about their environmental impact.

The question is: does Earth Hour do anything to reach those that don't normally care and don't do anything to reduce their energy consumption? Unfortunately, I think it gives people, and especially businesses and corporations, a chance to participate in a big global greenwashing event, then go back to their regularly scheduled programming.

It's easy to think about our energy use one hour a year. The problem is all those other hours.

photo taken from the top of the CN Tower