Seth Klein on Mobilizing for the Climate Emergency, and the Lessons of WWII

03/15/19 • 48 min

“There is a time coming, in our lives, when the tap of natural gas into our homes and into our city is going to be turned off. It’s not tomorrow — we have time to make adjustments.”

As follow-up to his interview with Vancouver City Councillor Christine Boyle (Episode 19) — mover of a unanimously-approved motion to declare a climate emergency — Gord wanted to speak to one of the ‘generals’ working on a solution to coming disaster. Someone with the knowledge, experience, and character to not just define the nature of the challenge we face in the coming decades, but to take on the mantle of leadership.

Whether Seth Klein is one of those generals is not yet clear, but he certainly seems to be writing the battle book.

The now-former BC Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives —he actually founded the progressive think tank’s west coast chapter in 1996 — Klein has identified some compelling parallels between the effort made by the Canadian government and industry between 1939 and 1945 to mobilize behind the war effort, and what may be required to keep this ship we call Western civilization afloat today.

With little doubt that drastic measures are needed, Klein believes the responses of countries like Canada during the Second World War are not just instructive, but likely instructive and maybe even necessary in this time of existential crisis.

What were those responses? There were many. They were mandated, legislated. And no person, no institution, was immune.

This conversation isn’t just a sneak preview of his upcoming book — it’s a conversation about a similar challenge we faced 80 years ago, how we faced it, and whether we can do it again today.

“There is a time coming, in our lives, when the tap of natural gas into our homes and into our city is going to be turned off. It’s not tomorrow — we have time to make adjustments.”

Whether Seth Klein is one of those generals is not yet clear, but he certainly seems to be writing the battle book.

What were those responses? There were many. They were mandated, legislated. And no person, no institution, was immune.

This conversation isn’t just a sneak preview of his upcoming book — it’s a conversation about a similar challenge we faced 80 years ago, how we faced it, and whether we can do it again today.

Previous Episode

Nathan Edelson on Housing, Gentrification, & the Future of Inner City Planning

In 1997, as workers were stripping asbestos out of the old Woodward’s building, the Vancouver planner overseeing the project predicted it would take 10 to 20 years for Hastings Street to change. “From anything we can see, the community will be overwhelmingly low-income for that long,” Nathan Edelson told the Vancouver Sun.

Flash forward 22 years, and he was both right and wrong. True, a lot has changed on Hastings Street since the opening of the new Woodward’s Building in 2010. The central passion of legendary activist, non-profit housing developer, and city councillor Jim Green, Woodward’s has led the urban revitalization — or gentrification — of the west end of the Downtown Eastside. It sure did take a long time to change, but change it did, no matter how you label it.

Yet, one could say it’s also taken a long time for nothing much to change. Edelson can acknowledge a modicum of success, but he’s clear on one thing — there’s lots more to be done.

Because it’s all still happening. The 24-hour drug market. Unchecked addictions amongst the city’s most vulnerable populations. A lack of safe, affordable housing. It clearly gave Edelson pause recently, as he reflected on the past, present and future of inner city planning.

He does so from a different perch today, as consultant with the False Creek South Neighbourhood Association for their *RePlan project (which is focused on the 1,800 housing units on City-owned, leasehold land between the Cambie and Burrard bridges). Back in the day, Edelson and his ‘brothers and sisters’ in the city’s planning department were in the thick of it, focused on what he calls “a reasonable public purpose”: to provide temporary shelter for the poorest in our society and to, over time, replace that with self-contained, permanent social housing.

And so, despite any perceived equivocation over the outcomes of his work over the years, there’s no doubt Woodward’s was a success in providing some of that social housing. It’s just one example of the many civic projects Edelson helped usher through local community planning and consultation processes, and ultimately through the Councils of the day, for populations co-existing across the entire spectrum of need in society. Go ahead, Google him. You’ll see.

Humble almost to a fault — “some of my best ideas were his”, he says, deflecting credit to Jim Green — Edelson continues to carry the torch for housing, which is, in his opinion, job #1 for planners.

So yes, as Gord put it, he was right. Right in his beliefs and his methods, because it all had an impact. Still, Edelson thinks it’s not enough. He’s just not done focusing on those in our city who are in need, and how he can help shape what the future will bring.

Nathan Edelson is this year’s speaker at the Jim Green Memorial Lecture, tomorrow evening (March 13) at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts at Woodwards, 149 West Hastings Street.

A Night with Jeff Tumlin: Acknowledging Privilege & Getting Cities to Yes

“Google ‘Tumlin NIMBY’ or ‘Tumlin Santa Monica’, and you can see a little bit of the story arc.”

An effective stage-setting for a dialogue earlier this month, in front of a small gathering at Gord’s West End apartment, with Jeff Tumlin, Principal and Director of Strategy for Nelson Nygaard.

One in a long-running series of Price Tags Soirées, and our first live audience recording, the chat included a Q&A with a few special guests well-known to #vanpoli followers.

Tumlin, raised in LA and happily transplanted to San Francisco via Stanford university in the late 1980’s, survived the recession of the early ’90s by (essentially) growing a branch of the transportation demand management tree — he was able to, over time, convert Stanford’s campus-wide parking into more money to support the implementation of a multi-modal transportation strategy.

Parking = $$$, and he turned it into a generous bankroll for university, and a career for himself with one of North America’s most-respected transportation consulting firms. He’s become an expert in helping communities move from discord to agreement about the future of transportation, and in the conversation you can hear he loves the challenge. Calling inequity and privilege for what it is and, in the fight for public space, using compassion and humour to move forward.

True, he tacitly acknowledges, sometimes it doesn’t work, as with Santa Monica. But eventually his clients seem to get there, one way or another.

** Spoiler alert: North Shore policy and politics do indeed come up. Why do you think he was in town?