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magazine / ja12
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July/August 2012 issue |
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Reverberations
Transit lessons
I read with interest about the cost of gridlock
in Canada’s largest cities (“A better way,” June 2012), having
learned about urban transportation from
Eric Miller as a graduate student at the
University of Toronto. However, the technical,
supply-side approach of traffic engineering,
even with novel solutions such as
Toronto’s proposed mobility hubs, will not
fundamentally alter travel behaviour. A
policy, demand-side approach represents a
better and more cost-effective way. Indeed,
the Ontario Economic Council advised the
Ontario government 30 years ago to
encourage public transit by the full-cost
pricing of private-vehicle use (e.g., toll
roads), along with complementary land-use
planning.
Larry McKeown
Ottawa
Home improvement
Thank you for the article on building
more energy-efficient homes (“Just
build it,” June 2012). I hope attention is
paid! In 1983, we designed and built an
R-2000 home. Such was our passion for
energy efficiency and being green. I have
wondered aloud why these technologies
have not been better promoted and utilized.
Even now, people seem generally
apathetic or ignorant, and as a selling point
for your house, it matters not. Today’s
homes are ridiculously expensive, and
the construction is definitely wanting.
Hilary Packard
Ottawa
This interesting article about
energy-efficient building reflects a baffled refusal to look at
basic facts. Matheo Durfeld wants
people to buy houses that cost 15
percent more and then throw out
the flooring and countertops!
What’s “green” about that? Most
importantly, if housing is such an energy
consumer, it’s surely not a “green” solution
to build an entire new set of houses.
Improving the existing ones would be a
much better use of resources, and it’s
taken my family a lot less than $40,000 to
improve the energy efficiency of our
house. We won’t solve problems
of consumption by buying new stuff, no
matter how cool it is. The 15 percent
premium means these green houses are
just conscience salves for the wealthy.
Julian Behrisch Elce
via internet
Cartographic confusion
Having a long-standing interest in
the visual representation of data,
I always look forward to the maps from
Canadian Geographic. I was disappointed
with “Energy use in Canada” (June 2012).
It has at least two elements that make it
opaque to interpretation. First, the introduction
states that it shows “what Canada
would look like if the provinces and territories
were scaled to represent the amount
of energy they use,” but that’s not what
was used. As “How this map works”
explains, they are scaled to reflect their
respective per capita energy-use values,
a substantially different measure. This is
confusing because it asks us to compare a
mental model of the usual map of Canada
by land area with a new representation
that has changed by two variables —
energy use and population.
The second point of confusion is that
it combines industrial activity and personal
activity. So now the map asks us to
incorporate whatever sense we might
have of each of the regions’ populations
and compare it with energy use that is
not dependent in any consistent way on regional population. “How this map
works” and the legend do describe some
of this, but they don’t explain much.
What conclusions can the reader take
away? I couldn’t take away anything
except the desire to write this letter.
Nitin Manerikar
Calgary
Another look North
It was gratifying to read “A new look at
the ‘old North’” (“Discovery,” April
2012), given the largely unheralded
historical significance of this piece of
Canada’s geography. Robert Cockburn’s
contribution to the documentation and
celebration of P. G. Downes’ travels and
writings is rightfully well recognized — no
one has done more — and the arrival of
his new book, Distant Summers,
is welcomed by aficionados of
northern literature. I must, however, take
exception to writer Conor Mihell’s statement
describing Downes’ 1939 journey to Nueltin Lake: “Getting there involved traversing
an unmapped territory of whitewater
rivers, boggy, bug-infested portages
and sprawling, windswept lakes.” This is
both an exaggeration and, in some degree,
untrue — not to reduce the significance of
Downes’ journey or his cartographic contribution.
(Cockburn, who is a stickler for
historical accuracy in every detail, would
agree, I’m sure.)
Two notable non-aboriginal travellers
preceded Downes on his route north:
J. B. Tyrrell in 1894 and Ernest
Oberholtzer in 1912, each of whom did
some serious mapping of the route.
Others, mostly trappers, knew the route
but needed no maps. Oberholtzer, in fact,
passed through Nueltin Lake and continued
on downriver (this is where one finds
whitewater, beyond Nueltin) to Hudson
Bay. His map was the first of Nueltin.
Equally significant, the route had been
used for centuries before them by Dene
(Chipewyan) hunters following the caribou
out onto the Barren Lands. Both Tyrrell and Oberholtzer received guidance and
rough maps for the route from Dene at
Brochet. It is to reflect this ancient history
of the route that my book about the region
was entitled The Old Way North (Borealis
Books, 2008), in which these and many
other stories of this landscape are told.
Long before fur traders and explorers
pushed north through Athabasca into
Great Slave Lake and beyond, long before
Europeans sailed into the Northwest
Passage, the “old way north” was used by
countless generations of Dene to access the
very heart of our country, the same mystical
landscape of P. G. Downes’ dreams.
David F. Pelly
Ottawa
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* Letters may be edited for length, accuracy and liability.
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