One of us is an Idiot: Persuasion and Climate Change

As a hockey referee, I would often find myself entertaining unsolicited advice from coaches.

“You are an idiot,” they would helpfully suggest. This tended to result in more penalties for the team in question, at which point the coach would, rethinking his strategy, attempt to deepen it (“You are a giant idiot”) reframe it (“Have you considered the possibility that you are an idiot?”) or broaden it (“You are an idiot and a moron”). I have to confess that none of these strategies was particularly effective in altering my decisions. Indeed, owing to my years of experience, I am prepared to categorically state that telling someone they are an idiot is a singularly ineffective way to influence human behaviour.

But at least the coaches were open and honest about it. It’s one thing to be called an idiot, but quite another to be treated like one. The latter tends to be even less effective in influencing behaviour, which is why I am surprised that environmentalists continually resort to it.

Summarization: She ain't gonna happen, man

My Philippines experience continues to struggle, push back and otherwise resist my efforts to bundle it up into a tidy little blog. There are strings of environmental non-sequiturs going everywhere, giant pieces of cultural misunderstandings that I can't squish down and dangerous bits of corruption and intrigue that just won't allow themselves to be nicely summarized with a bow on top.

What has surprised me most is how quickly and easily I've slipped back into Western ways of eating, talking, washing, travelling, watching hockey, eating lobsters, etc.

To be fair, it took a minute or so.

Branding Your Hippopotamus: The Asia-Pacific Cities Summit

It’s not every day that one has the opportunity to present an elaborate hippopotamus metaphor at an international conference, and so I felt it would be remiss (not to mention intellectually irresponsible) of me not to work everyone’s favorite semi-aquatic mammal into my talk on “Green Cities” at the 2011 Asia-Pacific Cities Summit in Brisbane.

The summit, attended by nearly a thousand civic and business leaders, culminated in the signing of the “Brisbane Accord” by more than 40 city mayor’s from around the region. City mayors turn out to be curious animals in their own right, alternating been the signing of serious accords and the formation of enormous conga lines. The latter activity was fuelled by only a relatively small percentage of the truly impressive quantities of free booze on offer throughout the conference.

Of course, the whole kit and caboodle was designed to impress people who are far more difficult to impress than I am. In fact, they may have inadvertently overdone it: I needed to watch only 2 seconds of this act before deciding that sustainability is for chumps. I’m going to be Laser Man when I grow up.

"My friend, where are you going?"

“My friend, where are you going?”

The question is a fair and reasonable one, since I am a young, white man towering, somewhat confusedly, over a sea of Filipinos.

However, months of experience have taught me that an honest answer to this particular inquiry is not likely to yield much in the way of directions or impartial touristic advice. An admonition to buy some unidentified meat is much more likely. Now I happen to be a big fan of unidentified meat – some of my best friends are unidentified meat – but if I stopped every time I was called I wouldn’t get very far in this city.

It was never going to be possible for me to blend in here, no matter how much Ilokano I learned. Figuring out all the ins and outs of any new culture is hard; it’s just much more obvious when you look so different as well.

Still, the market seems to have been specially designed to thwart my vegetable-purchasing aspirations, which brings us back to the question: “where am I going?”

Heisenberg and the Plight of the Modern Backpacker: A Tour of Thailand

I went to Bangkok, saw oddles of temples, and didn't take any pictures.

This is partly because to do so would expose my laughable photography skills, and partly because I think that the photograph is increasingly relied upon as the only legitimate means of demonstrating or absorbing new experiences. We don't bother to remember, because a photo can do it better. And along with remembrance goes thought, because this cannot be digitally documented and thus lacks legitimacy.

Of course, there's only so much thought that should really go into a drunken photo of your friends pretending to have moustaches, but Bangkok's temples are something quite different. A temple is nice to look at – covered, as they are, by dragons – but simply to look at them without thinking about what they represent seems to me somewhat akin to hoping to know about bees by staring at the outside of a beehive.

The $#&! I Deal With

I know more than I ever wanted to about septage. Since what I wanted to know was more or less “nothing” I have been acutely aware of this insipid, creeping competence for the past several weeks.

But today, I realized with a start that I am doing something that might actually have an impact on the world. Which means, of course, that I have no one to blame but myself. I spent the months after my graduation telling everyone who would listen (too many to knock off) that I wanted to do ANYTHING that would have a tangible impact on the world.

So here I am. Wadding through shit.

And I admit it here in this blog post, for the first time anywhere, including my own head: it's not the least-interesting job in the world.

The sheer volume of vaccines one must receive before coming to the Philippines serves notice of the kind of sanitation problems faced in this part of the world. Hepatitis A, typhoid and cholera (which recently killed 21 people in another part of the country) are all very real concerns.

A great part of the problem can be traced to inappropriate contact between groundwater and wastewater. An average septic tank needs to be desludged (i.e. Emptied) every 5 years or so. With 67% of San Fernando's inhabitants having never desludged their tank (perhaps, like me, having never heard the term “desludged” before), it doesn't take much of a leap to imagine that many of those tanks are overflowing into the groundwater.

In fact, we don't really need to imagine: 58% of groundwater in the Philippines is contaminated with coliform bacteria and 56 of 59 wells sampled in San Fernando are contaminated with the same.

What we're working on now is a mandatory desludging program, which will empty every septic tank in the city on a repeating five year schedule. In order to get there, we've got to deal with a lot of shit, both figurative and literal.

But it's kind of interesting.

Whacking Enormous Rodents

Every couple of days, I have a moment that causes me to ask myself “is this really my life?” The answer is typically ‘yes’, but I generally repose the question, just to be sure: so I really am singing in an Ilokano song competition? There really is a perturbed-looking owl sitting in a box beside my desk at the office? Yes to both.

I think I have, in part, simply adjusted enough to the daily ins and outs of Filipino culture that I forget to expect differences. But also, I bring it on myself.

I had promised myself at the outside of this little adventure in the Philippines that I would seize every opportunity presented to me. I like to think of it like a whack-a-mole game, where there’s no time for hesitation:

“Hey Stu, want to go zip-lining with some middle-aged women from Manila”

WHACK! Gotcha, mole! (“Yes I do, Firth, thank you for asking.”)

“Want to give a speech?”

WHACK!

“Want to eat this disgusting food?”

WHACK!

“Want to...”

WHACK!

I would be tempted to believe that this is not real life at all, if it were not for the realities of work. I am, in turn, reminded of all the work yet to be done as the smell of burning garbage wafts through my windows at the end of a long day. If this is all just a whack-a-mole game, then the segregation (rather than burning) of waste in the Philippines is the King Kong of moles; a 300ft rodent spewing chemicals and smog into the atmosphere.

But I've only got six months to tackle the beast, so there's no time for hesitation. Good thing I carry a big stick.