let the slowdown begin

Let the showdown begin

Drive to stop highway extension led by affluent

National Post
Friday, April 28, 2006
By Brian Hutchinson

WEST VANCOUVER - For 12 days, residents from one of Canada's wealthiest and most expensive communities have camped on the side of a busy mountain highway, anticipating a clash with heavy equipment operators.

This is a protest scene like no other: a tent city dominated by rotating bands of elderly, mostly affluent citizens, wrinkled men and women wearing sensible shoes.

Some of the activists look like they just shuffled off the set of an Antiques Roadshow episode. Others -- younger and ragged -- appear to have come for the company and food. At least one did.

A confrontation is expected soon, and where it will lead, no one really knows. Workers hired by the province to blast a new four-lane highway route through an undeveloped part of tony West Vancouver are growing restless. And B.C.'s Transportation Minister is furious; this week, he began to mutter threats directed at the protesters.

Most of his opponents have white hair. One man relies on an electric cart to move about the blockade site, where perhaps two dozen tents are pitched. All have braved harsh elements: burning sun, or heavy rain, or driving wind. They sleep atop cold, hard asphalt or bare rock.

Media commentators have dismissed the protesters as pampered elitists and NIMBYs, eager to pave their own shaded driveways but vehemently opposed to any development that might disturb their local hiking trails or impede their brilliant, expensive views.

"Multi-millionaires are being a bunch of hypocrites," snarled The Province yesterday.

No matter. Members of the Save the Eagleridge Bluffs Coalition say they will be arrested and hauled to jail before they allow contractors to begin work on a one-kilometre upgrade to the Sea-to-Sky highway.

A narrow, twisting roller coaster of a route, the Sea-to-Sky connects B.C.'s Lower Mainland to Whistler, site of many 2010 Olympic Winter Games venues. It comes by the name honestly. Long portions of the Sea-to-Sky cling precariously to one side of the coastal mountain range, climbing and then suddenly plunging to sea level. It's among Canada's most dangerous highways.

The province has allocated $600-million for a series of improvements, including a $130- million diversion that will cut through the Eagleridge Bluffs, an environmentally sensitive patch of coastal forest in West Vancouver's highlands.

The land is owned by a private company controlled by the Guinness family of Irish brewing fame; British Pacific Properties Ltd. is negotiating a land expropriation payment from the province, which will add at least another $20-million to the project's cost.

BPP has developed much of the residential property in West Vancouver. Some suspect BPP welcomed the controversial overland route, as it would help spur future development in the area. (No one from the company returned telephone calls this week.)

The four-lane improvement was chosen over three other options reviewed by B.C.'s Ministry of Transportation. These included a less-intrusive two-lane tunnel favoured by environmentalists. The province says that while the overland route will feature a very steep grade up and down the bluffs, it is the cheaper, safer alternative.

Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon claims that a two-lane tunnel would cost taxpayers at least $210-million to build and would see twice as many driving fatalities as the overland route. He has also said the entire Sea-to-Sky upgrade has nothing to do with the 2010 Winter Games, a claim many find difficult to believe. The highway improvements are scheduled for completion in late 2009.

This week, Mr. Falcon suggested protesters could be held personally liable for any cost overruns caused by construction delays. He added that protesters who "spread false statements" about the four-lane highway diversion could face legal sanction.

"This isn't Nazi Germany," retorts Dennis Perry, official protest spokesman. "These scare tactics won't work."

Twice this week, contractors with large trucks arrived at the blockade. They asked to be allowed through and each time the request was denied. On Wednesday, protesters were handed a letter from Frank Margitan, the highway project director.

"The safety of our workers and subcontractor ... is being jeopardized," he noted. "We unfortunately have no option but to pursue all available legal avenues. [These] may include pursuing an injunction and enforcement proceedings and/or instituting a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of B.C."

Bring it on, say the protesters. They are prepared; they underwent passive resistance training a week before setting up.

They are certainly well fortified. No one starves at this blockade. A volunteer army delivers food baskets to the one or two dozen always on duty. This is both a blessing and a curse, says camp co-ordinator Rod Marining, an eco-protest veteran who helped found the Greenpeace movement almost four decades ago.

"We have attracted the odd homeless person," says Mr. Marining, standing on a bluff that overlooks the main protest site.

One of them, a gaunt fellow in his early twenties, was camping nearby when the blockade went up earlier this month. "I was getting a bit lonely, living up here all by myself," he said yesterday. "I hope we can keep this protest thing going for awhile."

He might get his wish. The other protesters perched on the Eagleridge Bluffs are old, but resilient.

-30-

Enough about the bluffs tunnel already

Multimillionaires are being a bunch of hypocrites

The Province
Thursday, April 27, 2006
By Michael Smyth

The protesters trying to stop the Sea-to-Sky Highway expansion at Eagleridge Bluffs have argued that building a tunnel would spare the area's sensitive environment.

But isn't a tunnel just as much of a scar on the belly of Mother Earth as four lanes of blacktop?

In fact, a formal environmental assessment was conducted on both the overland and tunnel options for the bluffs, where a hard-core group of local residents is blocking bulldozers.

The report said a tunnel would result in the destruction of 108 hectares of vegetation -- just slightly less than an overland highway -- while carrying risks of water-quality damage.

"Option D [the tunnel] requires two new bridge crossings of Nelson Creek, a high-value fisheries stream," said the environmental-impact report, which also flagged "water quality and hydrology concerns" with the tunnel option.

The federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans raised concerns about acid-rock drainage from tunnel construction.

And Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon, in an interview with me on Nightline B.C. on CKNW radio, told me: "We found that the tunnel would potentially drain the Larson Creek wetland.

"Let's not kid ourselves. Both options have environmental impact."

The bottom line: If you think you can drill and dynamite through tonnes of rock and earth to build a tunnel and not have an impact on the environment -- well maybe you're "green" from smoking too much highway ditchweed.

Then there's the cost. The protesters argue a four-lane tunnel can be built for roughly the same cost as an overland highway.

Really? In a zero-gravity environment, maybe. But on this planet, digging tunnels always carries massive costs and risks of going over budget because of unforeseen complications with digging.

The government has estimated the tunnel option would cost $70 million more than an overland highway. In this era of soaring construction costs, that seems conservative to me.

Put it this way: For the sake of saving some nice hiking trails, the tunnel option would cost more than double the annual budget of the entire B.C. Parks system.

"We'd have to close down a system of more than 600 parks, 11,000 campsites and 6,000 kilometres of hiking trails to save enough money to pay for a tunnel," Environment Minister Barry Penner said yesterday.

Then there's the blatant hypocrisy of it all.

The residents of the area complain about blacktopping the environment.

But what about their multimillion-dollar homes?

Don't they impact the local environment, too?

In this protest by not-in-my-backyard millionaires, maybe their rallying cry should be: "Don't pave paradise! Umm, except for my circular driveway."

Let's just get on with it.

-30-

when you gonna grow up

Okay, so here's how we all can just get along: We the boomers, the giant rat stuck in the python of life, can help generational peace by pretending to be younger

The Vancouver Sun

Thursday, April 20, 2006

By Peter Robb

If you listen carefully you can hear the drumbeats of a new war -- a titanic tussle of the generations.

The skirmishing is happening with increased frequency, the latest over a book by an American historian that stands as a defence of the baby boom.

Poor Leonard Steinhorn. All he wants to do is stand up for his age cohort, so he wrote The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy.

But he couldn't even survive a panel on the CBC. He was overwhelmed by the earnest anger of the author of Generation Debt, the very young Anya Kamanetz, and the razor-sharp intelligence of Margaret MacMillan, the historian author of Paris 1919.

The verbal beating was greeted by chortling on the blog of Maclean's columnist Andrew Potter, who ended his commentary with a sinister reference to Soylent Green, a '70s sci-fi film where anyone over 65 is rendered into mystery meat and sold in cans labelled Soylent Green. Yum.

So how can we move on? It seems to me the only thing is for the baby boomers, my people, that giant rat stuck in the python of life, to admit their sins.

We boomers have been avoiding this confession for too long by, you know, living our lives, raising our kids, working, stuff like that. No more, we must own up.

Take global warming. We did that. Methane is a greenhouse gas, isn't it? Cancer, yeah, we did that too. The War on Terror -- we are really doing that one.

Osama bin Laden. He's a boomer. Bill Clinton is, too. So is W. Can you see the pattern of treachery? The whole generation is the spawn of Satan.

Personally, I blame my parents, who produced four boomers, although my youngest brother just made it inside the line. Hey, wait a minute, does that make my parents Satan?

It seems that the one thing the boomers have really failed at is producing enough kids. The devious generation that produced us figured out that if they had a lot of kids, they would be well looked after.

Boomers figured out the Pill and everybody else will be paying.

There is no doubt, however, that we are out to screw those poor souls who arrived on the planet after us. You know, our younger brothers, sisters and cousins in Generation X, Y and Echo, and our own children among the millennials. We might as well admit it.

Younger generations, smaller in numbers, seem to believe that they are going to have to shoulder a burden of debt that is not of their making but will be exacerbated when the great blob that is the baby boom enters a dissolute retirement -- whenever that is now that mandatory joblessness has been ended in many provinces.

What will they do if we don't retire?

We are, according to our critics, slothful, bloated, self-centred greed-heads who do nothing for anyone else in any other age group except pile on the debt and rip off their futures to enjoy our present. To top it off, we occupy all the good jobs and show no signs of giving those up.

I wonder if my thirtysomething boss knows about this. Or my twentysomething colleagues. Just a second, here. How did they get jobs? That's just not right.

And what about the debt? It was rung up by Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Brian Mulroney. Hey, wait one cotton-picking minute here. Those guys aren't boomers. In fact there have only been two boomer prime ministers in Canadian history -- Kim Campbell (who lasted a few months) and Stephen Harper. Maybe it's not our fault after all.

It is time for clarity and compromise and I have a good one -- the Grup. A term derived from a Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk visits a planet ruled by children. All the gr(own)ups have died from a virus that kills adults.

The phenomenon has been identified by New York Magazine, which published a recent article by Adam Sternbergh on Grups.

The people are "40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act and dress like people who are 22 years old. It's not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent."

"It's about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning.

"It's about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano."

It's about people who transcend the generational walls. Boomers can do that. We're always trying to get younger.

And if it will end all the generational cant and carping, I'm all for it.

Source: Ottawa Citizen

Up With Grups*

He owns eleven pairs of sneakers, hasn’t worn anything but jeans in a year, and won’t shut up about the latest Death Cab for Cutie CD. But he is no kid. He is among the ascendant breed of grown-up who has redefined adulthood as we once knew it and killed off the generation gap.

Grupsters: The New Adulthood

* Also known as yupster (yuppie + hipster), yindie (yuppie + indie), and alterna-yuppie. Our preferred term, grup, is taken from an episode of Star Trek (keep reading) in which Captain Kirk et al. land on a planet of children who rule the world, with no adults in sight. The kids call Kirk and the crew “grups,” which they eventually figure out is a contraction of “grown-ups.” It turns out that all the grown-ups had died from a virus that greatly slows the aging process and kills anybody who grows up.

By Adam Sternbergh

New York Magazine

April 2006

Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because—you know what?—screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery”?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?

newyorkmetro.com