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July/August 2012 issue

Table of Contents Caving How far would you walk? Street-level solution Q&A with MissPixels Path of the paddle Northwest Passage trailblazer Getting an underwater grip B.C.'s forestry future 50 years in space Largest radio telescope Chickens don't cry wolf Mosaic The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Book Reviews Reverberations ----------------------------------------------- Past issues archive Subject index Contributors index

TECHNOLOGY

Tubes
A Journey to the Center of the Internet
By Andrew Blum
HarperCollins
304 pp.,
$29.99
hardcover

As Wired magazine correspondent Andrew Blum puts it in his first book, Tubes, “The internet only works because every network is connected, somehow, to every other. So where do those connections physically happen? More than almost anywhere else, the answer is ‘Ashburn.’” In Tubes, the New York City tech writer (and former University of Toronto human geography student) goes on a quest to find the actual physical internet. He trails the wire leading from his modem into the wall, watches it disappear, then wonders, “Now where?”

The answer turns out to be a surprisingly small handful of places, like Ashburn. These locations — corporateowned bunkers where the endless strands of the internet meet up — are lovingly described by Blum the way other writers bring to life particularly remarkable vistas. He lingers on the “dimly lit corridors” and “tight rows of cages stretching far off into the half light, like the stacks of a library.” Inside each of these cages is a network. “When two customers want to connect to each other,” reports Blum about Ashburn, “they’ll request a ‘crossconnect,’ and a technician will climb a ladder and unspool a yellow fibre optic cable from one cage to the other.” Presto. Facebook and Google are now talking to each other, making an embedded YouTube video on my cousin’s profile page stream onto my screen that much faster. From Virginia, we cross the ocean, stopping to watch the final moment of a new fibre optic cable’s journey from West Africa to the Portuguese coast. There, it slides into a freshly dug tunnel and is attached to the rest of the continent’s wiring in a vault that is then sealed shut with a manhole cover and left to do its job — to serve as the “singular spot on Earth” that connects the people of South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Cameroon, Nigeria and a handful of other countries to Europe’s digital infrastructure.

The journey picks up in the final chapter when we travel to Oregon, a state whose cool, dry weather has made it a hub for massive data centres that generate enormous heat and need “enough power to light a small city” to operate. In fluid and always engaging prose, Blum gives shape to the contemporary communications “cloud,” which, it turns out, is not a cloud at all but more anonymous buildings in the middle of nowhere. It is in those buildings — owned by, among others, the aforementioned Google and Facebook — where our calendars, videos, photos and profiles are stored.

In the end, the revelation that the internet is actually a haphazard assemblage of multinational hubs isn’t quite enough to sustain an entire book. Tubes focuses a bit too much on, well, tubes. Thinking back on chapters devoted to the Ashburns of Europe, such as Frankfurt’s DE-CIX and Amsterdam’s AMS-IX — chapters which primarily reveal that all these bunkers look and work pretty much the same — I wish Blum had spent more time helping us understand the way the physical internet is reshaping the physical world.

It’s at the moments when he confronts us with the enormity of it all, however, that his book really resonates. “Behind each light,” he writes about a Facebook data centre, “was a one-terabyte hard drive; the room contained tens of thousands of them; the building had three more rooms this size. It was the most data I’d ever seen in one place — the Grand Canyon of data.”

Unlike the actual Grand Canyon, Facebook’s Oregon data storage site is not a place that many are likely to want to visit. But like the Grand Canyon, the data centres of Oregon are, indeed, monuments. To what, we don’t yet know.

— Hal Niedzviecki

HISTORY

Bound for the Barrens
Journal of the Ernest Oberholtzer & Billy Magee 2,000-mile Canoe Voyage to Hudson Bay in 1912
Edited by Jean Sanford Replinger with Nancy Paddock
The Ernest Oberholtzer Foundation
278 pp.,
$19.95
softcover

From late June to early November 1912, American adventurer Ernest Oberholtzer and his Ojibwa canoeing partner Billy Magee did exactly that. This year marks the 100th anniversary of their Canadian Barren Lands expedition, a trip in which Oberholtzer and Magee paddled and portaged from central Manitoba to Hudson Bay and back. Bound for the Barrens, published by the Minnesota-based Ernest Oberholtzer Foundation, celebrates the skill and courage of the two men. The foundation is dedicated to the preservation of Oberholtzer’s legacy as a source of inspiration, renewal and connection to the natural world.

Contained within the book’s pages are the six notebooks in which Oberholtzer pencilled his journal entries, often writing at the end of long paddling days, working by the fading light of a campfire. His writing is dramatic in its excitement, perilous in its danger. For authenticity’s sake, the editor has held to Oberholtzer’s words as he wrote them, including what might now be recognized as misspellings. Complementing the journal entries are several of Oberholtzer’s photos from the journey, as well as original map sketches and handwritten notes.

Departing The Pas, Man., on June 26, the canoeists arrived at Hudson Bay via the Thlewiaza River, north of Churchill, on Sept. 12, proceeding to paddle south along the coast to York Factory. From there, they commenced an arduous upstream journey on the Hayes River to Gimli, on Lake Winnipeg, arriving on Nov. 5. Oberholtzer fulfilled his dream of following in the footsteps of famed Canadian explorer and cartographer J. B. Tyrrell, who had conducted his own barren- ground explorations two decades earlier. Without a map much of the time, Oberholtzer was able to produce accurate maps using just a watch and a compass.

Over the course of his lifetime, Oberholtzer wrote numerous articles in defence of wilderness preservation as well as adventure stories for boys’ magazines. What is ironic about this journey is that Oberholtzer did not write an account of it himself. To complete a book about the expedition was a lifelong ambition. In reference to his own failure to do so, Oberholtzer once said, “I couldn’t just sit down and go into this story. Thoughts of it just shook me. Whenever I thought of it, it was just a landslide, you see.”

Perhaps now that his notebooks have been published, Oberholtzer and Magee will be given proper recognition for their incredible exploits into the Canadian wilderness.

— Stefan Superina

Fair Trade
A Human Journey By Éric St-Pierre
Goose Lane Editions
240 pp.,
$35
hardcover

Guzman is just one of the many faces of the fair-trade movement we meet in Montréal-based photojournalist Éric St-Pierre’s Fair Trade. The book is the author’s third (and first English) publication on the movement, and it reads a lot like an interesting textbook, full of clear statistics, but also has the depth and personality of a novel. Fair Trade is divided into 13 sections; each focuses on one product, from cocoa and quinoa to handicrafts and wine, and follows a formula of stories, definitions and numbers to show how fairly traded products make their way into the hands of consumers in other countries.

With his beautiful, vivid and all-telling photographs, St-Pierre captures the joys and plights of the people on the other end of life’s finer things. Fair Trade is a book you can read from beginning to end or one you can open up and read from any page. Either way, it will make you think a little more deeply about where your food and jewellery come from and the people who produce it.

— Hillary Windsor

Long Beach Wild
A Celebration of People and Place on Canada’s Rugged Western Shore
By Adrienne Mason
Greystone Books
215 pp.,
$24.95
softcover

But the beach has seen its share of tumultuous events in recent times too. When a Chilean barque ran into coastal rocks in 1915, local lore holds that a Hawaiian seaman (one of the handful of survivors) surfed ashore using a plank. Numerous shipwrecks and the remains of a Second World War airplane can still be found among the reeds, calling to mind the infamous period when Japanese residents in the area were forced to leave their homes. Twenty-five years later, all residents had to leave when Long Beach became part of Pacific Rim National Park. Squatters’ huts were burned to the ground, and people who had owned B&Bs in the area for 30 years watched their businesses bulldozed.

With photos that recall the changing times and traditions of Long Beach, seasoned author and editor Adrienne Mason explores the evolution of Long Beach and Vancouver Island, her lifelong home. Readers learn about everything from the West Coast’s temperamental tectonic plates to the tendency of Long Beach visitors to race motorcycles along the shore and collect shells stark naked, drawing a reprimand from a local doctor that Long Beach is “neither Sweden nor the Garden of Eden.” Mason’s book takes readers on a walk down the famous beach, presenting a thorough — although perhaps, at times, overly thorough — depiction of Canada’s wildest coast.

— Kenza Moller

Queen Street
Toronto’s Urban Treasure
Photos by George Fischer and Pascal Arseneau with text by Christopher Hume
Nimbus Publishing
233 pp.,
$29.95
hardcover

In 233 vivid pages, accomplished photographers George Fischer and Pascal Arseneau capture the flavour and fabric of one of Toronto’s most famous streets. The text, by Toronto Star architecture writer Christopher Hume, walks readers through the history and modern-day feel of neighbourhoods such as Queen West and the Beaches. There may be no other street like Queen in Toronto — or anywhere in Canada, for that matter.

— Kenza Moller

100 Under 100
The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Living Things
By Scott Leslie
HarperCollins
304 pp.,
$24.99
softcover

This rare creature is one of the 100 endangered species with global populations of less than 100 profiled in Scott Leslie’s fifth book, 100 Under 100. The Annapolis Royal, N.S.-based nature photographer and writer lists the world’s rarest living things, from the Mexican wolf and the Hawaiian crow to the Sicilian fir and the Wyoming toad, and advocates for their preservation.

100 Under 100 is an encyclopedia of endangered species, presenting detailed histories and descriptions of an array of animals, plants and insects and providing reasons why their numbers are so sparse. The book reels you in with harrowing statistics but also offers optimistic, yet achievable next steps outlining how we can bring these numbers back up — for example, by establishing protected natural breeding reserves for red-listed animals. Throughout this book, Leslie celebrates the life and diversity of our world and shines a hopeful light on the future.

— Hillary Windsor

The New Northwest Passage
A Voyage to the Front Line of Climate Change
By Cameron Dueck
Great Plains Publications
256 pp.,
$24.95
softcover

Once in the Arctic, Dueck’s attention turns to climate change and its impact on Inuit communities, and the book becomes a series of vignettes as the author travels from one remote town to another and discovers the unique challenges facing an ever-changing Inuit culture. Readers learn about the region’s history and hop between Dueck’s experiences, from eating a still-warm, raw caribou kidney to exploring an old Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. While somewhat scattered at times, The New Northwest Passage nicely captures the joys and pitfalls of an Arctic journey.

— Kenza Moller

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