works of wanderlust

Tag: december-ish

  • Sustainable All

    If you asked me for my political position on where the world should be going, I’d tell you. After all, it’s never great to write these things down, particularly on a public website where you are trying to foster a positive, happy vibe without some means to avoid the wrath of the countless people who disagree with you.

    Instead, I’ll write about why I like cast iron so much.

    What do you think the world will be like 25 years in the future?

    We live in a disposable world, don’t we?

    We’re arguing over single-use plastics — bags, straws, and wraps — as if the question is one of convenience trumping trash. In reality, it is a question of sustainability.

    Everything we do shifts energy. Everything we do increases the general entropy of the universe. These are just laws of physics, not even opinion.

    The opinion comes into play when we ask what the accumulated effects of billions of people shifting around energy and increasing universal entropy mean for this tiny ball of dirt and water and air upon which every one of us are bound past, present and future.

    For as much as I love great cooking and hefty cookware, there is a often said but generally understated benefit to cast iron: it lasts forever.

    The thing is that a lot of things last forever. That plastic straw you sipped your cola through for fifteen minutes will last in the ground as waste effectively forever. Well, okay, sure, ten thousand years is not actually forever, but it’s a heckuva long time on a human scale.

    On the other hand that plastic straw is not usable forever. It’s usable for a few weeks under ideal circumstances, if you saved it and washed it and took care with it. But ninety-nine percent of the time a plastic straw lasts forever but is usable for fifteen minutes.

    Cast iron pans last forever, but more importantly the are usable for a very long time. Generations in many cases. We can confidently say that any well-made cast iron pan is usable for good hundred or so years because we have examples of collector pans that date back easily as far back as cast iron pans were commonly manufactured. Yes, they take energy to cast and energy to mine iron from the ground and energy to move around the supply chain to get into your kitchen, but over the usable life of a pan — which can be very long — it even out, and likely even wins out.

    On the other hand, there are much less sustainable ways to fry an egg.

    In the next twenty-five years, say by the mid-40s, I really think we’re either going to need to have our collective mind firmly wrapped around the kinds of choices we make about disposable versus sustainable objects.

    Do we drink from a straw or do we slurp from a cup? Do we love our non-stick Teflon™ or do we cook on cast iron? Do we keep the species alive for a few more hundred years, or do we turn the Earth into an unlivable wasteland?

    I think that decision, however we manage to get there — by consensus, force, or inevitability — will dramatically shift what the world in twenty five years looks and feels like.

  • Travel-less

    What did you want this year
    … but not get?

    If all goes well my travel-happy soul will find some relief in the near future, but if you are like me the one thing you probably didn’t get last year was a ride on a plane.

    The last time I flew anywhere was a few months before the pandemic locked down the world, and as we zoomed over a surprisingly blue-skied Greenland I snapped some teasing photos of the snowy, iceberg covered landscape below.

    Hopefully the story of 2022 is a little less grounded … for all of us who live to wander.

  • Merry Christmas

    What did you want this year
    … and get?

    Too much.

    As I was wrapping up my work email for the holiday break yesterday, thumbing through my last few messages, a long thank you note rolled in from the president of a company with which my team does a significant amount of business.

    It concluded with a bit of an explanation:

    “We had thought about sending out our usual gift baskets this year,” he wrote, “ but with the logistics of everyone working from home we decided not to do that.”

    ”Instead,” he continued, “we have made a large donation to the food bank in the names of all our clients.”

    I remember in past years when over the last week before the Christmas break a few big boxes of chocolates or candies would appear and everyone would pick away at them as the last few days wound down to vacation. As much as I know the work I do is appreciated by some, the mundane and behind-the-scenes nature of being a technology professional means a lot of it also goes unnoticed. It’s nice to be appreciated, and a bix box of treats definitely helps.

    It’s a weird thing to miss, but then again there a lot of things missing these days, huh?

    I hit the reply button and typed something back, thanking him and wishing him a Merry Christmas.

    We miss the sweets, but most of us are doing the kind of work we do to make the world a more interesting place, not for the Christmas baskets.

    I got too much of the things I thought I wanted this past year, but seeing a simple little gesture like that, as basic and seemling obvious as it is reminded me that what I really wanted this year was for the world to be a little gentler, more caring, and generous to each other.

    So, I guess I got a little of that, at least.

  • Don’t Take Participation for Granted

    You can read these words.

    You have access to knowledge unknown and unfathomable to any generation before you.

    You are online, connected, exploring big ideas and complex thoughts.

    Explain a valuable life lesson you learned in 2021.

    I restarted blogging at the beginning of 2021 after a fairly long absence from the sport. I put fingers to keys once again not because I think I have anything particularly important to say or even to add to a conversation already a billion-voices-strong, but because everyone should be able to have a space among those voices.

    Everyone should at the very least be able to participate.

    Equally. And if not, then equitably.

    This is definitely not the case right now.

    Voices are amplified because they are already louder.

    Voices are lifted because they come from someone famous.

    Voices go viral because they say something ridiculous, hateful, dumb, or nonsensical.

    Some people like to talk about deplatforming.

    Some people opt to complain about cancel culture.

    Others seem to be hung up on who has the right to speak about one thing versus another thing.

    We can and should have authorities on topics of importance, voices who speak with weight on certain topics or issues or policies. We should hear those voices and measure them against rational, thoughtful indicators of truth, reason, and the tools by which we measure the same.

    But we should all participate in the conversation. At the very least, weigh in, converse, listen, and hear each other. Participate in two-way or a billion-way exchanges of position, idea, and respect.

    This is definitely not the case right now.

    You can read these words. You are participating. I am participating. We shouldn’t take that for granted. It is a gift, a responsibility, and part of being alive in this time when we all live.

  • Adventure Runs Season Two

    I may have written earlier this year about how I’ve spent each of the last two summers devising a weekly run outing for my running crew.

    Each week over about fourteen weeks of summer we would meet at a location I’d disclosed earlier in the day for a six to eight klick run.

    It could be through a neighbourhood. It could start in a bedroom community outside the city. It might wind through the river valley in an interesting place. It just had to be somewhere interesting, new or both.

    What adventure from 2021 will be forever etched upon your memory.

    In mid-June I summoned the runners to a location on the far east side of the city in a small park area adjacent to a billionaires row of oil refineries.

    From here the mighty North Saskatchewan river wends past the last few suburbs of Edmonton and out into the vast prairies, Atlantic-bound (or at least towards the Atlantic via the Hudson’s Bay).

    We parked, lathered up in bug spray and trotted off into the valley at a casual running pace.

    Along the way we encountered treacherous cliffs, uncertain detours, instagrammable locations to pose with rusted out vehicles, paths lock to construction, bushwacking through low tree branches, a small but wet water crossing, a climb up a grassy summer ski hill, and a slog through an ill-marked trail …or three.

    It was a kooky but amazing little evening adventure.

    And it was topped off by the fact that as we all went to drive away home from the single exit to the park, there stopped a freight train blocking our path of escape for nearly an hour. We all wandered around outside of our queued up vehicles and lamented the real meaning of an urban evening adventure that ended with a prairie blockade.

    Local adventure is what you make of it. It’s finding something new, even if new is just a few minutes drive from where you live, work, or usually play.

    I think back on that evening in mid-June and how it defined what could go sideways on a quirky, loosely-planned run, but it also highlighted exactly why we crave such things at all. It is now, even almost six months to the day later, stuck in my brain as one of the weirdest evenings of the summer… in a good way.