The Mayan Economic Stimulus Package
A draft of this post has been sitting on my desktop since April 4th. I just capped it off this morning to post.
Under the terms of one of the side agreements of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the environment ministers of Canada, Mexico, and the United States make up the top-most echelon of an organization called the Council for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).
It was more than 10 years ago now that the CEC convened one of its public hearings in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Griz and I went down to testify about Alberta’s deregulation agenda that was underway at the time. Following the conference, I took a few extra days to visit some of the sites in the Oaxaca region.
A short bus ride from Oaxaca is Monte Alban, the ruins of an ancient Mayan city-state. Visitors were quite free to wander the dark, rough stone steps of the meso-American pyramids. I climbed the steps to the highest of the palace/temple rooms and paced the perimeters of the dilapidated domicile. I reckoned that the room of this Mayan god-king, a person who could command the life and death of human beings, was not much larger than my room in a shared house with three room-mates. And I had running water and electricity.
In 1999, one of my longest-lasting files opened: particulate matter and ozone. Particulate matter (PM) refers to tiny, air-borne particles or droplets (aerosols). The most problematic particulate matter, from a human health perspective are those substances in the 10 micron and smaller size range. At 2.5 microns, these inhalable pollutants can reach deep areas of the lung and actually dissolve into our blood as though they were life-giving oxygen. Developing an approach to managing this type of air pollution was the job of a multi-stakeholder project team which included - among the upwards of a dozen people - myself, Geoff Granville of Shell, and Les Johnson of one of Alberta’s utility companies, EPCOR.
I think particular matter is an interesting pollutant. As I mentioned above, it can pass into the blood, so I imagine it as suspended grains of sand so small that they pass through the lung wall into the blood, making our blood into quicksand. In fact, the spike in deaths associated with high particulate matter events aren’t caused by respiratory distress, but cardio-events, as though weak hearts just give out from the effort of trying to pump thicker, quicksand blood.
It’s also interesting for being a non-threshold pollutant, which means that there is no level where no effects will occur. Statistically, at any concentration, you can calculate some number of people who are expected to die from air pollution. The less pollution, the fewer people will die.
Hannah and I borrowed the Edmonton Public Library’s copy of Chariots of the Gods a few weeks ago; a kind of documentary positing that ancient wonders like the Egyptian pyramids, the Nazca Lines of Peru, and the heads of Easter Island might actually constitute evidence that ancient peoples were once visited by extra-terrestrials. The film is a kooky-bit of Seventies ephemera.
The movie mentioned in passing how, when Mayan civilization was threatened, when crops were failing, or in other words when their economy was in crisis, the Mayan god-kings would order a ceremonial march to this perfectly round lake and a virgin would be sacrificed to appease the gods and restore prosperity.
In the course of the particulate matter and ozone project team, Geoff, Les and I were spun-off into a sub-group to develop a recommendation regarding the contentious question of at what concentration of pollution should we have to do something?
At Canada’s national level, it had already been decreed that action should take place at levels of 30 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic metre of air despite that acknowledgement that this level was a compromise between human health and the cost of taking action. The decree was a document called the CANADA-WIDE STANDARDS for PARTICULATE MATTER (PM) and OZONE, which said, that the 30 microgram number “may not be fully protective and may need to be re-visited at some future date.” The science says that human health effects are measurable at 15.
The three of us argued whether Alberta should adopt the national standard, or, given that our air was much cleaner that that compromised number, if we shouldn’t require action before some statistician could start calculating how many people were dying each year from the air pollution arising from the growing fossil fuel based economic activity in our province.
And it occurred to me then, “We are a committee of god-kings. We are counting how many people we will sacrifice for our prosperity.”
What strikes me now as significantlyless civilized than the Mayan Way, is how we marginalize, blame, and otherwise deny that this is going on. In the ceremony and processionals associated with the Mayan death-walk to that holy, round lake, there was honour and prestige awarded to the sacrificial victims and their families. But today, if we think of the sacrificial folk at all, it is to blame them for being ‘hypersensitives’.
In this analogy, our god is money.
Under the terms of one of the side agreements of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the environment ministers of Canada, Mexico, and the United States make up the top-most echelon of an organization called the Council for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).
It was more than 10 years ago now that the CEC convened one of its public hearings in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Griz and I went down to testify about Alberta’s deregulation agenda that was underway at the time. Following the conference, I took a few extra days to visit some of the sites in the Oaxaca region.
A short bus ride from Oaxaca is Monte Alban, the ruins of an ancient Mayan city-state. Visitors were quite free to wander the dark, rough stone steps of the meso-American pyramids. I climbed the steps to the highest of the palace/temple rooms and paced the perimeters of the dilapidated domicile. I reckoned that the room of this Mayan god-king, a person who could command the life and death of human beings, was not much larger than my room in a shared house with three room-mates. And I had running water and electricity.
In 1999, one of my longest-lasting files opened: particulate matter and ozone. Particulate matter (PM) refers to tiny, air-borne particles or droplets (aerosols). The most problematic particulate matter, from a human health perspective are those substances in the 10 micron and smaller size range. At 2.5 microns, these inhalable pollutants can reach deep areas of the lung and actually dissolve into our blood as though they were life-giving oxygen. Developing an approach to managing this type of air pollution was the job of a multi-stakeholder project team which included - among the upwards of a dozen people - myself, Geoff Granville of Shell, and Les Johnson of one of Alberta’s utility companies, EPCOR.
I think particular matter is an interesting pollutant. As I mentioned above, it can pass into the blood, so I imagine it as suspended grains of sand so small that they pass through the lung wall into the blood, making our blood into quicksand. In fact, the spike in deaths associated with high particulate matter events aren’t caused by respiratory distress, but cardio-events, as though weak hearts just give out from the effort of trying to pump thicker, quicksand blood.
It’s also interesting for being a non-threshold pollutant, which means that there is no level where no effects will occur. Statistically, at any concentration, you can calculate some number of people who are expected to die from air pollution. The less pollution, the fewer people will die.
Hannah and I borrowed the Edmonton Public Library’s copy of Chariots of the Gods a few weeks ago; a kind of documentary positing that ancient wonders like the Egyptian pyramids, the Nazca Lines of Peru, and the heads of Easter Island might actually constitute evidence that ancient peoples were once visited by extra-terrestrials. The film is a kooky-bit of Seventies ephemera.
The movie mentioned in passing how, when Mayan civilization was threatened, when crops were failing, or in other words when their economy was in crisis, the Mayan god-kings would order a ceremonial march to this perfectly round lake and a virgin would be sacrificed to appease the gods and restore prosperity.
In the course of the particulate matter and ozone project team, Geoff, Les and I were spun-off into a sub-group to develop a recommendation regarding the contentious question of at what concentration of pollution should we have to do something?
At Canada’s national level, it had already been decreed that action should take place at levels of 30 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic metre of air despite that acknowledgement that this level was a compromise between human health and the cost of taking action. The decree was a document called the CANADA-WIDE STANDARDS for PARTICULATE MATTER (PM) and OZONE, which said, that the 30 microgram number “may not be fully protective and may need to be re-visited at some future date.” The science says that human health effects are measurable at 15.
The three of us argued whether Alberta should adopt the national standard, or, given that our air was much cleaner that that compromised number, if we shouldn’t require action before some statistician could start calculating how many people were dying each year from the air pollution arising from the growing fossil fuel based economic activity in our province.
And it occurred to me then, “We are a committee of god-kings. We are counting how many people we will sacrifice for our prosperity.”
What strikes me now as significantlyless civilized than the Mayan Way, is how we marginalize, blame, and otherwise deny that this is going on. In the ceremony and processionals associated with the Mayan death-walk to that holy, round lake, there was honour and prestige awarded to the sacrificial victims and their families. But today, if we think of the sacrificial folk at all, it is to blame them for being ‘hypersensitives’.
In this analogy, our god is money.