GreenerPolitics

One of the nice things you can do when you run your own website is that you can tell people about the cool friends you know. One of the coolest for me is Jan Triska: painter, thinker, poet and, judging from what he does to himself in triathlons, Death Races, birkebiners, a masochist.

He has been a good friend of mine for many years and he is the person I credit/blame for getting me involved in the Green Party. In a particularly frosty November, he ran as one of 6 candidates in the Alberta Provincial Election.

He is also a regular contributor to GreenerPolitics, writing under the pseudonyms Mountain Man and Minimalist. And he isn’t exaggerating when I say minimalist.

When I visit Ottawa, Canada, I have always crashed at his place. We frequently go out for long bike rides along the Ottawa river and swim at Britannia beach. After a particularly challenging time of doing politics, it’s great to be able to get this kind of exercise.

The reason Jan is a minimalist is that he saves his pennies for travelling: Spain, Mexico, Costa Rica and many other places.

My most memorable trip with Jan was when we backpacked through the Mexican highlands over Christmas 1999 - 2000. Much in the same way that it is a momentous moment when your odometer in your car turns from 99,999 km to 100,000 km, the change from 1999 to 2000 was deserving of being celebrated. We marked it in a special way apropos to where we were: we toasted with shots of tequila all the good things that we were taking from the 1900’s to the 2000’s: democracy, rock music, the internet, the United Nations, etc, etc.

We then toasted with a no-label (and rather vile-tasting) mescal all the things that were destined to be left behind in the 1900’s (with good riddance): the Inquisition, despotism, the topsey tail, foot-binding, and so on. Needless to say, we got violently ill to the point of experiencing hallucinations, but there is no one on this planet who could make getting violently ill a relatively pleasant experience.
Jan is the a-typical Renaissance Man, always learning, always trying something new. I am privileged to know him.

Happy birthday, Mr Triska.

When it comes to being Greener, if you’re not on the cutting edge of technology and innovation, then you might miss the boat. For example, I thought I knew everything there was to know about material efficiency, cradle to cradle manufacturing – all that stuff. And then in waltzes in Tim Antoniuk with a revolutionary idea: if we can maximize the desireability of the objects we use, then we will reduce the chances of throwing it away.

In fact, his ideas would be great entries into the Buckminster Fuller Challenge: a $100,000 prize for the best idea that enables us to live sustainably. I interview Elizabeth Thompson of the Buckminster Fuller Institute about this prize as well as the legacy that Bucky Fuller has left behind.

For those unfamiliar with Buckminster Fuller, here is a short excerpt courtesy of Wikkipedia:

Fuller was concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet optimistic about humanity’s future. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the “technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life”, his analysis of the condition of “Spaceship Earth” led him to conclude that at a certain point in the 1970s humanity had crossed an unprecedented watershed.

Fuller was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of key recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had reached a critical level, such that competition for necessities was no longer necessary. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. “Selfishness”, he declared, “is unnecessary and…unrationalizable…War is obsolete…”