Sean Bickerton

If you haven’t yet had a chance to catch the new Canadian reality series on the Food Network – The 100 Mile Challenge – I encourage you to check it out.

Families in the town of Mission have committed to eating only food and products produced within a 100-mile radius for 100 days, giving up coffee, tea, sugar, rice, yeast and most condiments and spices for the duration …

The series follows the struggles of six families for one hundred days as they desperately try to find local ingredients to replace their bare larders, meet local farmers and artisans, forage, and learn to prepare meals from fresh local ingredients. It may not sound scintillating, but it is a fascinating modern social experiment, and it’s being filmed just up the valley in Mission.

What I find most interesting about the show is how the process transforms the lives of the families – many only know how to shop at supermarkets and cook the prepared foods they find there, like boxes of mac and cheese. The process not only changes their relationship to their food but to their environment as well, (not to mention their entire way of life.)

Another great aspect of the project is the community-building that takes place, the building of new ties and strengthening of existing neighbourhood connections. As with any collaborative social exercise, however, conflicts inevitably develop. My favourite couple is the politician and his wife that keep finding ways around the rules … it must be an endemic problem.

In an age when global trading patterns are being disrupted, increasing local trade is not only a virtue but a necessity.

Another result is an increase in local trade. All three levels of government spend millions promoting international trade ties, but very little promoting local trade. In an age when global trading patterns are being disrupted, increasing local trade is not only a virtue but a necessity.

Our policies should not focus any longer exclusively on foreign trade but also foster local trade, and in the process help residents of Vancouver source local products and food. It would be good for the economy, good for the environment, and good for our public health.

I’m not yet prepared to give up tea, rice or the many spices and condiments that are the natural best products of other countries. But where any food or product is produced locally – dairy, produce,fish,  meat, preserves, grains, wines and oils, Tom and I are making an extra effort now to find and buy local.

For the epicurious, the 100 Mile Challenge appears on the Food Network, Sundays at 8pm. They also have a great website that helps locate local sources of food and identifies which local foods are in season.

 According to Xtra West, Ray Lam, the gay politician running for the NDP in False Creek was forced to resign over a controversy to do with two racy photos on his Facebook page.

None of the images displayed nudity or sex and the whole controversy was blown way out of proportion by a media pack that seemed to take a little too much pleasure in embarrassing a serious young gay candidate.

To me, the most revealing aspect of the tempest over his tightie whities says a great deal more about the out-of-touch mores of the media criticizing Ray than it does about his character. As best I can tell, his offense was being young and alive.

If the city’s reporters spent half as much time discussing the new, permanent $2,000,000 camera surveillance system put in by Mayor Robertson with no public discussion, or the recent charter revisions that restrict civil liberties in Vancouver (again without any public discussion) – as just two recent and notable examples – they might not spend as much time sniffing the briefs of young candidates trying to improve their communities.

I wouldn’t have voted for Ray Lam – I like Mary McNeil and Damian Kettlewell better – but voters deserved to hear his ideas debated on the merits. Every politician is improved by good debate, and it’s often in debate where good policies emerge.

I think the entire process is flawed when a gay candidate in his early twenties is disqualified for a party pic on Facebook, when actual elected officials erode long-standing rights without a peep from the same self-appointed keepers of the community’s conscience. 

It’s no wonder young people get turned off politics – the unpleasant reek of hypocrisy is too much for them  …

Please join me on Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 3pm at the Chan Centre for a special, Surprise fundraising Concert and reception sponsored by the Vancouver Recital Society.

The Recital Society brings the world’s greatest artists to Vancouver and those joining us on Saturday are in for a big treat!

Tickets are just $50 including reception, help a great cause, and are available at the door or by calling the VRS at 604-602-0363.

Sun and Snow (March 9, 2009)

But it’s just ten days until the vernal equinox …

Crocii @ UBC last weekend

Spring's promise outside Tinseltown Mall

It was Voltaire who said that when the government is wrong, the most dangerous thing of all is to be right. Nonetheless, many patriotic Americans did everything they could  to counter the radical ideology of those  that captured the White House in 2000.

Today that reign is discredited, the tragic results all too plain to see. The wreckage of their assault on reason is global, and the carnage, not limited to Iraq or New Orleans, lies strewn all around us: the shattered nations, economies and lives, the countless dead and wounded and the rule of law itself – that which Churchill called England’s greatest gift to civilization – shredded in all but name.

For those of us who lived in the U.S. through this time, it was heartbreaking to see the majesty and promise of the American Constitution desecrated by those posing as patriots sworn to its defense. Particularly when it is the rule of law that Constitution represents which is our best hope of defeating el qaeda.

Back in 2002, the neocons were riding high and planning the destruction of Iraq. That October, they published a clarion call in Foreign Affairs Magazine proclaiming a new era of unchallenged American supremacy, the final realization of Manifest Destiny and the virtues of American exceptionalism.

The following was my response on October 3, 2002. It rings as true today as ever before:

A Response

Mssrs. Brooks and Wohlforth err, and they err egregiously in at least two fundamental ways. While their assessment of U.S. economic and military power in relation to the rest of the world is essentially sound, they fail to take into account the fact that America didn’t get into this position through divine intervention, i.e. Manifest Destiny, and neither did it do so on its own.

America did not even win the Cold War on its own. Far from it, it did so in concert with the full participation and cooperation of other NATO governments and the active cooperation, if grudging, of those country’s citizens. While the authors denigrate that importance today, now that the U.S. stands astride the globe, the industrialized world had a part in this success, helped pay the expensive price for it, and expects a voice in the world order they helped create and today help maintain. Ultimately, even though America has more guns and bullets, it does not exist in a vacuum and ultimately cannot stand successful on its own.

With extraordinary hubris, they also make the case that the new American position is unassailable, “unique” in history. In my experience, whenever pundits declare something permanent and unique in our history, some unexpected event occurs to upset that particular apple cart. History teaches us that, regardless of the specific unanticipated causes and effects, it repeats itself.

Despite the authors’ limited ability to perceive some unexpected diminution of American power, I assure you that just as the Egyptian, and Babylonian and Mongol and Mayan and Roman and British Empires rose and fell, usually from causes of their own making, so, unfortunately, will our own. It’s called history, and no scholar, no matter how brilliant, can cause the Ozymandian suspension of its inexorable progress. So let’s not be too self-congratulatory just yet, particularly when our own world ‘dominion’ has barely existed for less than twenty years. A more intelligent assessment might be that world leadership today is our own to lose, an entirely different proposition, especially given current political trends in the nation’s capitol.

But fundamentally, and characteristically, what the authors miss, in their rush to declare the new American world order, is this — the power of American ideas. In truth, American power in the world has always been the power of its revolutionary idea that individual freedom and liberty arise from the very nature of being human. People don’t buy Big Macs or Levi’s jeans — they buy a piece of the American dream. Western governments didn’t align themselves with America because they had a vast military-industrial complex. They aligned themselves with a nation with shared humanist values that they could trust to lead in an enlightened way, albeit one strong enough to ensure the common defense.

If Americans, and worse yet, American scholars forget this, and now believe that this is America’s hour to lead the world unrestrained, to cast off the shackles of the Lilliputian nations in Europe and those like Japan and Canada that worry stupidly about land mines, and pollution and an international court to restrain genocidal dictators and the UN and global warming, and all of those other annoying little “people problems,” then their entire understanding of the roots of American power, which lies bedded in the ideals of individual human rights, is misguided. American power rests squarely on the concepts embedded within the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution, which in and of themselves have been as revolutionary a force on this earth as the concept of a single, unifying God.

The real question the authors should be asking is, what ideas are going to lead the world into the future? What is our compelling vision of a peaceful world for the next century that all people can understand and believe in as instinctively as the 20th century American dream? That’s an article I’ve yet to read, but eagerly await.

Today, on January 20, 2009, more than six years later, the entire world watched the inauguration of the author of that next chapter – Barack Obama.

As Churchill said, “This is not the end. Nor is it the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning …”

Help is on the way!

George Bush’s reign of terror is over. Today, Barack Hussein Obama became the 44th president of the United States, and called on Americans to join him in confronting what he described as an economic crisis.