andrewfrank.ca

My girlfriend and I just moved into a new apartment together and neither of us own much furniture (three chairs if we include the rolling computer chair).

Desiring an eco-friendly, non-toxic couch (a loveseat to start) that wouldn’t cost us over $2000 (come on Upholstery Arts, eco-friendly needs to be wallet friendly too), I set out to build a somewhat stylish couch, made entirely of recycled pallets (about 150 million pallets end up in landfills every year).

For $20 worth of materials (second-hand cushions and a couple boxes of different-sized nails) and about a day’s worth of time (finding pallets, transporting them on my roof rack, cutting them, constructing the couch without plans) this is what I came up with, and it’s sturdy and very comfortable!

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Repurpose! A sturdy little couch  (and half-pallet foot stool) I threw together over the weekend using pallets (only new material was a handful of nails). Recycled, non-toxic, sturdy as heck and really comfortable.

Beach blanket back (you could upholster it). Multi-colour striped cushions bought for $5 a piece at “mis’cel’la’ny” (humans for responsible reconsumption) near Hastings & Nanaimo (the ladies there are awesome, so interesting and energetic and I now know everything there is to know about the neighbourhood…or close to it ; ). The foot stool slides directly under the couch (which also has a tonne of storage space if you need it), a great innovation from Linnet.

This is light plywood from a collapsible wooden shipping box I found in my search for pallets. Shipping symbols give the couch a bit of a story. Good to keep it upright, but this thing definitely isn’t fragile.

The guts of the operation: Two smaller pallets as the side supports/pieces, held together and framed by three 2×4′s salvaged from a larger pallet. After that it’s the plywood shipping box backing in a triangular shape, with recycled garden wire fencing for the bench seat (strong and shapes nicely). Put together sparingly using nails, with 1″ roofing nails to secure the wire bench seat underneath the frame. STURDY.

Pallet Love

So that’s it. We now have plans to make a larger couch/day bed using a larger pallet, possibly mounted on casters to allow for easy reconfiguration of our living space.

As a building material, pallets are free, so there isn’t too much to complain about. The wood itself varies in quality depending on age and manufacture, and depending on the type of nails used to construct the pallet (typically spiral). It’s often best to cut rather than pry apart. The wood breaks easily if the nails are deeply seated, so you need to be strategic and sparing in your cuts.

A serious benefit is the symmetry of the pallets – not much measuring required if they’re a standard size. I kept thanking the keen eyes of the Chinese pallet builders who probably put these together before they were shipped (with who knows what else) to North America.

As soon as you start building with pallets, every alley becomes a treasure trove…just don’t hoard them. Also, be mindful of your neighbours, hammering is best done in an adjacent alleyway or side street, and definitely not in the evening (I owe my neighbour a bottle of wine for putting up with my overly keen hammering).

Happy pallet furniture building!

An interesting article in the Calgary Herald today, detailing how the “Re-think Alberta” campaign is making provincial politicians jump. Apparently Angus Reid surveyed 4000 Canadians, Americans and Britons and found that after watching the campaign video clip (complete with shots of dying oil-soaked ducks) folks were less keen on visiting the province. Shocking.

All of this has sparked a great deal of conversation among the province’s political leaders about potential responses. The Liberals want real action like dry tailings ponds and a hard cap on greenhouse gas emissions. The Wildrose Party seems to think the province should be bringing the PR fight to international audiences (knock yourselves out), while the present Tory government has launched a $268,000, taxpayer-funded pro-oilsands marketing campaign that is aimed at Albertans themselves…apparently an effort to circle the wagons and to reassure voters that everything is okay, and that they should be proud of what’s happening in their province.

A quote from the article:

“Stelmach noted the government is beginning its communication efforts within provincial borders to better inform citizens and have them stand up and show their pride. He believes Albertans don’t fully understand the size of the oilsands and how much is actually mined.”

Sounds like an ill-advised effort to persuade citizens of the government’s version of the truth – even the Wildrose Party doesn’t like it. It also seems like yet another tax-payer funded subsidy to the oil and gas sector (shouldn’t they be fitting their own PR bills?), not to mention that it actually multiplies the effect of the original “Re-think” campaign by showing Albertans that their province is under fire.

Citizens can smell greenwashing and government propaganda a mile away.

Keep on rethinking Alberta, it looks good on you!

Hey folks,

We’ve moved into some new digs and my contact information has changed. If you want my new phone number for work or personal purposes, shoot me an email here: andrew “at” andrewfrank.ca (that’s the address I’m using these days).

Best regards!

Andrew.

As a media relations professional, I’m often the first point of contact between an environmental campaign and the news media. This past week I did some media outreach for the new “Rethink Alberta” campaign by Corporate Ethics, and early on in my calls to reporters, I knew this campaign was going to do more than just make a colourful PR splash. This was a market campaign with real teeth, and reporters could sense that.

A market campaign, as originally pioneered by environmental groups like ForestEthics and Greenpeace, is more than just a boycott. It’s an active effort (often over multiple years) to inflict brand damage and economic pressure on an entity (company, government or otherwise) that is harming the environment and to articulate alternative forms of development while pushing the entity towards them (admittedly the ENGO community needs to do a better job of articulating what the future should look like for the oil sands industry).

In the case of the “Rethink Alberta” campaign, the strategy is to put pressure on more than one provincial industry (so in addition to oil sands, tourism) and to cleave the two apart while also creating new economic and social consequences for unchecked oil sands development.  Markets and the opinions of publics and key decision makers in other parts of the world are leveraged, and local voters are alerted to the changing economic environment and global perceptions of the place they call home. Clear lines of blame are drawn and the likelihood of political consequences is heightened.

In today’s ubiquitously connected world, a little goes a long way, and so even a modestly funded campaign can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of earned media, and can spark conversations across a continent. Such has been the case with the “Rethink Alberta” campaign and that’s precisely why media commentary has shifted from coverage of the campaign as a PR stunt, to more of a wake-up call to the industry and provincial government that the status quo is ultimately untenable.

From the Wall Street Journal to Reuters and every provincial news outlet in Alberta, this story and its damaging message is painting the province as an undesirable place to visit, a place where great environmental damage is being wrought with wanton abandon. That’s a message that stays with readers and viewers (even dormantly for years), and it’s a message with economic clout that appears to be pushing industry and political groups to talk about real efforts to clean-up the oil sands.

In a recent Vancouver Sun article titled, “Influential council calls for ‘dramatic gesture’ to counter bad oil sands P.R,” various political and industry experts, including the president of Total E&P Canada are emphasizing the importance of not just fighting PR with more PR, but of the importance of actually doing something to clean-up the industry.

To quote the Vancouver Sun article:

Total E&P Canada president Jean-Michel Gires acknowledged that organizations attacking the oilsands are dangerous to the energy sector, noting their message has caught the ear of decision-makers in Washington, London and other parts of the world.

“They ask, ‘Is it a big problem? Are you concerned? Why don’t you pay more attention to the environment? Are you going to stop the development of the oilsands?’ ” he said.

“You definitely need to listen, understand and explain much better your case, tell much better your story, and understand that your story can be improved.”

The story can be improved.

During my media outreach, I had a conversation with a publisher in Alberta who took umbrage with the “Rethink Alberta” campaign message. He felt that maligning Alberta’s oil sands would push the US to purchase oil from hostile countries. After moving beyond that tired rhetorical threat (which is oft repeated by the Alberta government) we had a conversation about what Alberta should and could be doing in terms of cleaning up its wet tailings ponds, slowing down the rate of production and emissions to something commensurate with what climate science says is safe, and ultimately establishing a royalty system that will actually benefit Albertans.

Norway, who’s petro industry is now winding down because of dwindling supplies, has a pension plan worth approximately $443 billion dollars because they took their fair share of resource revenues when they could. What’s Alberta’s plan when the resource has been extracted and burned in 100 years time, as the industry’s own “business as usual” scenario would have it? What will the province have to show for all the negative branding it will have endured? Who will be left with the clean-up bill? Would it be better to slow things down and clean them up now, extending and maximizing the value of the resource over the long term?

My originally hostile friend was acutely aware of all these possibilities and necessities and expressed great frustration with what he saw as his government’s total mismanagement of the oil sands. He agreed that his province needed to do better.

If one of the other Alberta opposition parties can articulate a plan to sustainably manage Alberta’s oil sands, they’ll hit political gold. Albertans are proud of their province, but they’re not proud of their government’s management of the oil sands. They feel they’re being let down, and they’re starting to get pissed off (a market campaign helps coalesce frustration and anger).

In the mean time, market campaigns like “Rethink Alberta” will put increasing pressure on the province, helping to fuel real debate and discussion until somebody decides to do the right thing.

Looking for some amazing summer reading? Look no further than Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” This is how Isaac Babel described Tolstoy’s writing after reading the novel, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”

A lot of people put this book on their literary “bucket list,” planning to eventually, someday, maybe, getting around to reading it…you shouldn’t wait.

Don’t be intimidated by the length of the book (almost 1500 pages), as soon as you’re hooked (about 10 or 20 pages in) you’re grateful for the length because the story won’t end anytime soon, and you can spend the rest of the summer periodically immersing yourself in the human drama, battles and intrigue of the Napoleonic wars and the Russian aristocracy of the day.

But to be turned off by the idea of the Napoleonic wars or Russian aristocracy (as I easily could be) would be a mistake, these are merely the events, the excuses, the backdrop that serve as Tolstoy’s canvas for painting a powerful treatise on the human condition…it’s the characters, their inner thoughts, passions, moral struggles and transformations that are the meat of “War and Peace” and that make it such rich reading.

Almost an ethnography, the story is based on extensive historical research and there are approximately 160 real persons “named or referred to” (according to Wikipedia) in the novel. That’s perhaps why it all feels so real. And despite being intensely human and intimate, the work is also cinematic in its scope, delving into long battles described in such rich detail and with such fluid prose that it’s as if you’re watching “Band of Brothers” or a similar Spielberg/Hanks WWII collaboration.

Make sure you get the latest translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky (preferably at a local, independently owned bookstore).

Happy reading!

Dear Don,

I just read your piece criticizing Ignatieff’s support for a federal tanker ban and I think it does your readers a disservice.

First things first, a recent poll shows that 80% of British Columbians support a legislated tanker ban in BC’s coastal waters. Assuming politicians are effective when they follow the will of voters, Ignatieff’s policy would appear to be smart, sound and to borrow your allusions to oil, “slick.”

Your piece also falls short of a true “apples to apples” comparison when you compare Vancouver as a petrochemical import/export zone, to Kitimat, and use it as an excuse to allow Enbridge’s project.

A key difference that’s worth keeping in mind when Kitimat is described as being “too dangerous,” is that the Georgia Straight (where tankers travel on their way to Vancouver) is a hell of a lot safer than the Hectate Sraight or the Dixon Entrance where tankers would travel on their way to Kitimat – those waters are some of the most dangerous in the province (known for massive storms, and hard to navigate channels and navigation hazards). The sheer volume of the oil to be transported via the pipeline would also far eclipse anything happening in Vancouver.

All that aside, the question of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline is about weighing whether or not we as a society want to introduce a far greater ecological risk to one of our province’s most ecologically rich areas in exchange for an estimated 560 long-term jobs (a drop in the bucket) and greater revenue for an already very rich industry (not to mention the climate change implications of shipping and burning tar sands oil as fast as possible in/to Asian markets). A majority of the First Nations who’s territories the pipeline would pass through on its way to Kitimat are unequivocally opposed to the project, precisely because its risks far outweigh the benefits to them. I won’t even get into issues of Aboriginal land title, although it would be nice if project boosters didn’t gloss over the very real social and legal obstacles this project will face with respect to First Nations consultation, and which Ignatieff’s policy can be seen to be taking into consideration on some level.

Ignatieff’s policy is sound and responsible, and contrary to your contention that it represents a move, “…to shut down northern B.C. tanker traffic because it’s a popular move in a time of short-term environmental anxiety,” I’d contend that it represents sober policy making in a time of frenzied, short-term tar sands development. If the oil patch and its boosters had their way, the resource would be sold and burned within 100 years, pushing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and related climate change beyond the point of “no return.”

Personally, I think the tar sands need to be cleaned up, their production slowed down to a level commensurate with what climate science suggests is a sustainable level of C02 release, and then Albertans need to wake up and collect the real resource royalties they’re entitled to. Pandering to the oil industry in a time of record prices and profit, as appears to be the status quo, is sad. What’s the plan when the oil is gone? Alberta could learn a thing or two from Norway, a country that has taxed its petroleum industry, and has managed to save billions in a national pension plan in anticipation of the decline (already happening) of that same petroleum production.

I hope you’ll incorporate some of these considerations into your future commentary on Canada’s tar sands development, and ill-conceived projects like Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. I think your readers would appreciate a more well-rounded, nuanced view of the true risks, benefits and lost economic opportunities associated with the current approach to development.

Best regards,

Andrew Frank.

A quick and dirty little website that allows users to visualize the BP oil spill in their own backyards – using Google Maps data to show the size of the affected area in local terms. http://www.ifitwasmyhome.com/

Just picked up this microphone for conducting interviews for my thesis research, as well as voice-over work and potential podcasting – seems pretty sweet so far with four recording patterns (including figure eight). At an affordable $160, it’s another example of the new low barriers to professional quality media production. Pretty nifty.

Someone has uploaded this incredible animated short film to YouTube (3 parts) which I’m embedding below. It’s about 30min in length and I highly recommend it.

Bob Anderson and I are using the film as part of our new environmental communication course at SFU (“CMNS 388: Environment, Media and Communication”). It’s a beautiful film that won an Academy Award and has been translated into several languages.

Apart from its ground breaking animation (a painstaking art form requiring the same patience and commitment that is the subject of the story itself) the story, while originally “fiction,” is still “real” as an expression of the human spirit and it has inspired countless real life tree planters, people who have restored environments and made new environments that can support diverse ecological communities.

Despite the long odds we face in building a sustainable society, this story is a reminder that the human spirit is capable of very beautiful things.