Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon have posted a wonderful video of author Ursula K. Le Guin reading from her fantastic new novel LAVINIA and answering questions from the audience about the book and her writing:

LAVINIA is Le Guin’s interpretation of the Virgil’s THE AENEID. It focuses on Lavinia, who appears in the poem, but never speaks.

Here’s what the reviewers are saying:

“Le Guin is famous for creating alternative worlds (as in Left Hand of Darkness), and she approaches Lavinia’s world, from which Western civilization took its course, as unique and strange as any fantasy. It’s a novel that deserves to be ranked with Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.”—Publishers’ Weekly (starred review)

“Le Guin has researched this ancient world assiduously, and her measured, understated prose captures with equal skill the permutations of established ritual and ceremony and the sensations of the battlefield ... Arguably her best novel, and an altogether worthy companion volume to one of the Western world’s greatest stories.“—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A]pproaching a new book by Le Guin is like discovering a new Rembrandt. In some ways, the quality of the work is irrelevant, as it’s sure to be declared a new masterpiece—which it will be by most standards. The only thing to do is to judge the work against its creator’s own rigorous standards. Even in comparison to the rest of Le Guin’s body of work, Lavinia stands very high.“—The Winnipeg Free Press

“In one of the more impressive displays of feminist reconstruction since Margaret Atwood wrested Penelope out of the hands of Homer, National Book Award-winner Le Guin has rewritten the last six books of Vergil’s epic poem to create a rich life of the mind for the Latin princess. Unlike Atwood’s “Penelopiad,” the novel, as Le Guin writes in an afterword, is a “love offering,” and she writes with great affection for both the poet and his hero.“—The Christian Science Monitor

“This is a powerful and rewarding novel, a intricately layered narrative that weaves many themes into its rich tapestry, and touches on subjects that remain urgent in our own time.“—The Globe and Mail

“Le Guin does a fantastic job of bringing a tertiary character to life… Trojan horses, Vergil’s The Aeneid, ancient Italy, prophecies and quick witted maidens: Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin offers a lot to like. I give it a 4 out of 5. High entertainment value.“—So Misguided

“Well-researched with epic battles and many interwoven threads, Le Guin has captured the spirit of Virgil’s work and presented it faithfully in her own measured, lyric prose. Le Guin’s Lavinia is a strong, fascinating woman, with a tale to rival any hero of old.”—Eclectic Closet

Dan Vyleta, the Edmonton-based author of the excellent thriller PAVEL & I, has been interviewed by Harriett Gilbert, for The Word on the BBC’s World Service!

Click here for The Word website.

We have just kicked off a campaign with Eco-Libris that is pretty exciting. Read about the details below.

Raincoast Books and Eco-Libris announced today the results of their first joint environmental campaign: Buy a Book, Plant a Tree.

Raincoast Books has signed up 80 Canadian retailers who will be selling a wide range of environmentally themed books through April 2008 which are emblazoned with Eco-Libris stickers stating that for each book purchased a tree will be planted in Central America and Africa. Participating independent bookstores, located from cost-to-coast, have purchased over 4,500 specially stickered books and hence over 4,500 trees will be planted on behalf of Canadian readers.

Raz Godelnik, Eco-Libris Co-founder and CEO explained that these trees not only benefit the environment but also the local communities where they are planted: “More than 12 acres of trees will be planted on behalf of the Canadian readers, offering many benefits to the local communities, from trees planted on the mountain slopes in Guatemala, preventing mudslides, conserving soil for more productive crops and protecting water to fruit trees that provide additional food and income in Malawi.

“Reading books should not have an adverse impact on the environment,” adds Godelnik, “and planting trees to balance out the paper usage in books is a practical first step towards sustainable reading, by replenishing our dwindling forest resources on this planet. We plant these trees with the help of highly respected U.S. and U.K. registered non-profit organizations who are screened for, and work to, very high ecological and sustainability standards. This way we make sure that Raincoast’s efforts to go green will have a maximum impact on society and the environment

“Raincoast and our Canadian customers are very pleased to be working with Eco-Libris on the ‘Buy a Book, Plant a Tree’ campaign,” said Jamie Broadhurst, VP Marketing for Raincoast Books. “No one campaign is going to solve the challenge of creating sustainable publishing practices, but each new campaign raises more awareness and makes that goal more attainable. We have a lot more work to do.”

For more information and great book recommendations go to: www.raincoast.com/green/

For more information on Eco-Libris go to: www.ecolibris.net

Does ALL SOULS draw on your real life experiences as a teacher?

The choral sections, where unattributed speech serves as a scene, draw on real life exchanges I have overheard as a teacher. 

“We didn’t know you were coming.”

“I tried to save you a place.”

“She couldn’t invite you; she could only have six friends.”

The literature taught in the novel is literature I have taught to seventeen-year-olds; and more than once I have heard the complaint that nothing happens in To the Lighthouse.  From middle school on the big books are all about death, but death in books.  In All Souls, a school community, uncommonly small, privileged, insular—another ruined garden, if you will—confronts death outside of books.  In math class Marlene Kovack, one of the sick girl’s classmates, muses, “Astra Dell’s dying: What did it mean to them all in this overheated room?” The book is bent on answering this question. 

Do you worry about what your students might think of your work, and what they might extrapolate (erroneously or otherwise) from it?

My earlier books, the two story collections and the novel, Florida, I would like kept on a high shelf until my students come of age, but All Souls, I hope, will amuse them for being familiar; moreover, it is a more accurate portrait of the school than may be seen on TV.  The author of the Gossip Girl series is a former student of mine, a good writer, who, by her own admission, spent her weekends riding horses; nevertheless, her depiction of school life tends to be sensational. All Souls is in part a response to the stereotypically repugnant, empty, pretty-girl models most often paraded in novels about private schools.

Your prose is beautifully succinct.  Do you edit yourself ruthlessly?

I do edit myself ruthlessly and rarely move forward until the passage is right. 

There’s also a kinetic energy though.  Is it difficult to balance the editing and control with intensity and daring? 

I don’t usually think of myself as balancing control with intensity; the struggle is to move characters, create scenes; the struggle is to stay interested in the scene.

Do you feel a strong affinity to poetry?

As has been true for many writers, poetry came first for me; I wanted to be a poet but despaired of achieving an evolved soul, fully believing then and now that poets live in a purer atmosphere that will not sustain lesser mortals.  I don’t think novelists ever reach the slopes of Parnassus although some have come close. 

What motivates you?  Do you have any rituals when you’re writing?

Reading is a provocation.  Reading other fiction or poetry is as much an inspiration as experience.  As to rituals, none beyond securing some privacy and time, but I do not write on trains or planes.

What are you working on now? 

I am working on a very difficult long something that I sometimes call a novella even though I don’t understand what a novella is exactly.  This long-something is to be part of a third short story collection.  Most of the stories have been published in NOON, a literary annual. 

Thank you Christine!

Click here for part one of Christine Schutt’s Q & A

Christine Schutt is the author of the short-story collections A DAY, A NIGHT, ANOTHER DAY, SUMMER and NIGHTWORK (named by the poet John Ashbery as the 1996 Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year) as well as the critically acclaimed novel FLORIDA, which was a 2004 National Book Award Finalist.

In her new novel ALL SOULS, published by Harcourt (April 2008), popular high school student Astra Dell fights a rare cancer in the hospital, whilst her classmates at an exclusive Manhattan private school concern themselves with boys, teachers, exams, dance recitals, college applications, graduation, and, of course, the ailing Astra. 

Christine Schutt lives and teaches in New York City. We caught up over email.

What was the inspiration for ALL SOULS?

First came the name Astra Dell on an afternoon when I had been thinking of Pip’s Estella, and her name’s associations, the stars, the sky, the sky as it is experienced when Pip and Estella walk in Miss Havisham’s ruined garden.  Romantic, gauzy associations were in the air when I came up with the name Astra Dell, which combined sky and dell and seemed silly but worthy of any and all exaggerated beauty and gracefulness I might wish to attach to it.  The name, the dancer, the hair in that order; I committed to her saintliness when I took up her sickness and a community’s reaction to it as the way to organize and write a school novel with a large cast.  The saintliness and the sickness I took from life, a former student’s; she is thanked in the acknowledgments. 

The novel is set in New York in 1997.  Was it a conscious decision to set it before 9/11 or were there other reasons for the date?

Yes, I wanted the New York City I knew before September 11, 2001; the earlier date allows for a jolly solipsism, self-involvement mitigated by age and inexperience of emptiness.  In the novel, when Astra Dell is rumored sickest, she is a topic avoided for the simple reason that the sick girl’s “futureless future” horrifies her friends.  (Healthy girls, marginally unhealthy girls, American girls of all classes, do not, in my experience, look into a summer and see blank; rather, there is camp or a trip or an internship.) Since September 11, 2001, the possibility of the futureless future for us all in an instant occurs to anyone even passing through the city; everyone has been made a bit older and harder by the event—even the girls I know and teach seem born cynical.  As to why 97, my choice was made by my sons, teenagers at the time, full-blown, wonderful and awful; they and their friends and their girlfriends and the girls I taught made a deep impression on me in 1997.

All Souls raises some very uncomfortable issues (notably sexual relationships between adults and teens in their care).  Do you think it is important for fiction to be challenging?

Writers look for dramatic interest, and my experience of outdoor dramas—one drowning, two suicides, some accidents involving animals or heavy machinery—is yet small in comparison to the indoor dramas I might elaborate on.  The greatest of these dramas involve plausible sexual transgressions that keep me awake when I am writing. The writer, as much as the reader then, is challenged to look. 

I found it interesting that you’re quite un-judgmental of your characters’ behavior.  Is moral ambiguity important to your fiction?

I don’t set out to be morally ambiguous.  I want to be fair in the treatment of my characters, to admit any action is possible. 

Read part two of my Q & A with Christine Schutt tomorrow!

The Canadian Bookseller Association announced today that Raincoast has been short listed for the CBA Libris awards for Marketing Achievement of the Year for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and for Distributor of the Year.  Raincoast won the Marketing Achievement once before in 2005 and Raincoast has won a plethora of distribution awards over the years: being named the fastest distributor in the two annual Quill & Quire industry surveys (2003 and 2004), winning the CBA Distributor of the Year Award four times in the last six years and having be named by the Western Book Reps Association as The Best Shipper through Hell and High Water.

The winners of this year’s Libris Awards will be named on June 15 in Toronto. Many thanks to our customers for their vote of confidence in our abilities. 

Can you share an interesting experience you had researching INVISIBLE NATION?

As I describe in Chapter 6, I think I’m the only journalist who used his entire gas mask and chemical suit during the war, investigating what luckily turned out to be a bum-steer from the Kurds about a chemical shell they said had made a bunch of them sick.

Has US involvement in Iraq has aided the Kurdish cause?

The Kurds have been struggling for centuries, and in recent history they owe their worst defeats and their greatest victories to American foreign policy.  At the moment they’re riding high as Washington’s most trusted ally among Iraq’s factions, but they’re watchful for a hint that America might cut them loose again.

Will their situation change dramatically if the US military withdraws from Iraq?

If America leaves the region the Kurds will be able to hold their territory in the north against any of the internal factions.  It’s outside powers like Iran and Turkey - both with restive Kurdish populations of their own - that the Kurds of Iraq see as a major threat.

What inspired you to become a writer?

I got addicted to travelling when I was 19 years old, taking a back-pack to Central America and Middle East and I always kept a journal.  It wasn’t until 1996 that some journalist friends clued me in to the fact that I could make a living from it.

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring foreign correspondents, what would it be?

I’d skip school and head out into the field.  Once you get a taste of the “ground truth”, you’ll never go back to watching from a distance.

Is there a particular ritual involved in your writing process? Or is it all about the deadline?

For writing news, the deadline is the only incentive you need, I’ve filed stories from the top of an armoured car stuck in human traffic (that was in 2005, the last time the Gaza border with Egypt burst open).  For writing the book I enjoyed a long cross country ski in the morning before a long day of writing, then another one in the evening if I’d earned it.

How do you relax?

I’ve been building a house out of stone in Maine for about a dozen years, it’s an eternal work in progress and once of my favourite things to do when I come back from the field.

What books are you reading at the moment?

I’m reading What is the What, by Dave Eggers and The Accidental Empire by Gershom Gorenberg - about the Israeli settlers movement. I also just picked up The New Cold War, by Globe and Mail correspondent Mark MacKinnon.

Canadian writer Brett Grainger was interviewed by NPR about his new book IN THE WORLD BUT NOT OF IT, fundamentalism, and confronting religious stereotypes, last week!

Click here to listen to the NPR interview.

Click here for the Raincoast Q & A with Brett. 

The largest ethnic group in the world without a homeland, 25 million Kurds live in the area around the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. In INVISIBLE NATION, BBC correspondent Quil Lawrence delivers an intimate and unflinching portrait of the Kurds’ quixotic quest for statehood and how it is reshaping Iraq. 

Quil is the Middle East correspondent for BBC news magazine The World. He has spent much of the last seven years in Iraq and Kurdistan, reporting for National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has won various awards for his journalism, including the Harry Chapin Media Judges Award and the Judges Award from the National Conference of Community Broadcasters.

He lives in Jerusalem, and we talked about INVISIBLE NATION by email.

What first interested you in the Kurds and their quest for statehood?

While I was a free-lance journalist based in Bogota, Colombia, I read in the Guardian Weekly about the capture in Kenya of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdish rebel group in Turkey, the PKK.  Hundreds of Kurds around the Middle East and Europe were so passionate about Ocalan that they immolated themselves in protest.  I had no idea what a Kurd was at the time, but the protests made a deep impression and peeked my curiosity.

I made my first visit to Iraqi Kurdistan in early 2000, when I was a Pew International Journalism Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).  I spent several months in Washington talking with policymakers about the subject - Paul Wolfowitz was conveniently dean of SAIS at the time, he would later become the principle architect of the Iraq invasion.  I made two trips to Iraq as part of the fellowship, in the days when foreign reporters were a rare sight.  The Kurds were desperate for media attention and afraid that without it Saddam might easily crush them again.  It was a good time to get to know people like Jalal Talabani - then a rebel leader and now President of Iraq.  I met and formed lasting relationships with key figures of what is now the Kurdish Regional Government.

I had no idea at the time what good preparation I was making.  After my fellowship in 2000 I began working for the BBC World Service radio on their news magazine The World, produced with PRI and WGBH in Boston.  In January of 2003 I found myself back in Northern Iraq, crossing-in through the mountains from Iran in a blizzard.  With no idea when the US invasion was coming, I waited out the war for three months.  In those days most of the world was convinced that Saddam had anthrax or at least mustard gas - Kurdistan had living proof of that.  As the war approached many Kurds fled population centers fearing a last ditch revenge attack by the regime.  I slept with a gas mask next to my pillow.

I did most of my research just listening back through the audio recordings I’d made over 7 years covering Iraq - hundreds of hours of interviews.  In 2006-7 I took a sabbatical from the BBC.  I made one two-month trip to Iraq for research and then moved home to Maine to write in the wintry seclusion there.  I was also commuting to visit my girlfriend in Ottawa, and I would listen to entire day’s worth of audio recordings while I drove across Quebec to see her.

Read Part Two of our Q & A with Quil Lawrence tomorrow.

What inspired you to become a writer?

Reading as a child introduced me to a vivid world of the imagination. Travelling with my parents as an adolescent revealed the richness of a wider world of real experience. Writing combined both those pleasurable realms. Then after a while I discovered I could get paid for it.

Did you have a mentor, or was there a journalist who you particularly admired?

We never met, although I interviewed him once by phone, but Pierre Berton was my model: a wonderful story-teller who found material on every street corner and in the neglected back-closets of history. He also encouraged me to believe (against the odds early on) that a fellow could be a financially successful writer without either being an academic or an employee of some large corporation.

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring writers, what would it be?

Do it: write. Write at every opportunity. Write for an audience, write for a teacher, a client, a friend or yourself; but write. No one ever got good at anything without spending a lot of time being bad at it first. But never, ever, write carelessly. Write about something; observe it closely. Choose every word with precision. Make every phrase you write, whether it’s in an email or a novel, the very best you can make it at that particular moment. Then go back later and see how you could have said it better.

Is there a particular ritual involved in your writing process?

I plan. I imagine the story then think about what I will need to know in order to write it. Then I go and learn that. Then I draft an outline and organize notes around it pointing to the relevant parts of the research material I’ve collected. All this can take between weeks and months.

Then one day I start at the beginning of the outline and start putting the real words down. When I’m writing for a project, I usually begin writing sometime between eight and nine o’clock each morning and continue until around five. I take several short breaks during the day to fix coffee or a soup or salad, but seldom a longer one. I eat at the keyboard. I usually work six or seven days a week until a manuscript is complete.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a major magazine feature that will extend the ideas in DRY SPRING into a new area, and on a novel that imagines how far someone might go who truly believed some of the darkest predictions being made for our climate future.

How do you relax?

A lot of what I do for my work is huge fun. Reporting, for example. I don’t really need to ‘relax’ from it. But at the end of a writing day I do like to veg in front of a good TV crime drama (Numbers, the various Law and Orders and Without a Trace are all faves). My hobbies are creative woodworking and (not so creative) home repairs. Now and again, not as often as I’d like, I cook in a style I call bistro improv!

What books are you reading at the moment?

Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest, about the worldwide flowering of groups seeking ecological and social justice; James Lee Burke’s Louisiana-set Dave Robichaud mystery Pegasus Descending (I’m a long-time fan); Partha Dasgupta’s disarming A Very Short Introduction to Economics (from a series of such useful ‘very short introductions’ published by Oxford Press); an assortment of other books about the economics of the environment; El Reino del Dragon de Oro, an adventure for adolescent readers by Isabelle Allende (with my Spanish dictionary in hand).

Could you introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book to start with?

For people who are concerned about our future and the planet we are creating, I recommend the philosophical groundwork laid by Thomas Berry, who reconciles today’s most urgent tasks with the ongoing story of mankind and our sense of the divine in his The Great Work.

For people interested in how Canada deals with the environment, I recommend Elizabeth Brubaker’s short book Property Rights in the Defence of Nature (Earthscan, 1995). It made me think differently about our legal approach to protecting the environment, and it’s well written.

Thanks Chris!

Click here for part one

Click here for part two

Who are the worst offenders when it comes to wasting water?

North Americans, without a doubt. And Canadians as a group waste as much water as Americans. But it’s important to put some perspective around that. North Americans use more water than anyone else on earth in their daily lives (and could reduced that use by at least half without any penalty in our quality of life). But domestic use as a category consumes only a small fraction of all the water ‘used’ in a country. Agriculture uses the greatest amount. In both the U.S. and Canada, some irrigation is highly efficient, some not. Industry also ‘uses’ a lot of water but returns most of that water to the environment. The issue there is how clean the water is when it’s returned, and by and large North American industries do much better on that score than factories in those countries to which we’ve outsourced our consumer manufacturing, places like China and Indonesia.

What is the key to preserving our water?

The place to start is to recognise that our economic life relies entirely on water delivered from natural ecosystems, and that we must begin to account for that value in all our economic choices. That means not only in what we build and where, but in what we buy and what gets included in the price of things. And that shift in thinking has to be put into action.

The practical place to start first is to insist all of us, families and industries alike, pay the full cost* of the water we use, whether it comes from wells or a community system. Communities that haven’t done so already should switch immediately to metered water service to homes and business and water rates that rise with the volume of water that either consume.

We also need to make every drop of water we do take from nature work as hard as it possibly can for us. We need innovators to discover ways to do more with less of it. And once individual needs are satisfied for water to drink, cook and wash with, we need to direct every drop to the most valuable, most productive end. The most powerful instrument we know of for motivating innovation and directing resources to their most productive use, is the marketplace. So we also need shed our exaggerated fears of allowing water and markets to mix.

*’Full’ cost means not only the cost of treating water for consumption or the cost of pipes to deliver it to homes and businesses. It also means the cost of protecting in perpetuity the headwater valleys and wetlands where nature’s water supply is gathered and delivered to streams and aquifers. It includes the cost of preserving the downstream ecosystems that remove from water the heavy metal toxins that elude our treatment plants in sewage effluent.

What should governments be doing?

Much of what we can do isn’t expensive or technically challenging, but it does require political leadership to change rules. Beyond installing water meters and volume pricing at the municipal level, most governments need to review their whole policy around water and the landscapes that provide it to ensure that the value of both is reflected in all the other activities government influences. That may mean instituting new rules for water ‘capture’ from the wild, or making special provision for the protection of wetlands that filter water and recharge wetlands. In many places, communities and governments are discovering that they need new forums for making decisions about water that take into consideration all of the interests in a watershed (the area drained by a single big river).

Can you share a success story?

Perhaps the most powerful example is New York City. In the 1990s it faced spending $5 billion on a new water treatment plant to meet its growing thirst, and another $1.5 billion on two additional sewage treatment plants that would be required when that new water worked its way through the city’s drains and toilets. Instead, its leaders opted to spend $500 million on a range of investments that improved the quality of water the city receives from the Catskill Mountains through better land-management practices there, and others to reduce water waste in the five city boroughs. Rebates got owners to replace nearly half the city’s toilets with low-flow models. Plugging leaks in city mains saved nearly as much water. Altogether the city cut its water needs by one-fifth and escaped both an expensive building program and the political fight over where to put two new sewage plants.

In Canada, local private investors are building a new community for 2,500 people in Victoria that will use water so carefully that over a year it will save as much water as the entire British Columbia capital city uses on the hottest day in summer. The neat thing is that the builder told me, the more efficiently his projects use water and every other resource, the more money his business makes. In other words: green pays!

Are there some simple steps an ordinary person can take to help conserve water?

The most obvious things begin at home: keep an eye on running water and fix leaky taps promptly. When you replace toilets and shower-heads, go with low-flow models. The place where most households use the most water is outdoors. In dry regions, irrigating lawns can quadruple water use. Choose landscaping and ornamental shrubbery that work with your local climate’s natural rainfall. If you do decide to irrigate, use timers to apply only what is needed (more can actually damage your lawn, garden plants and soil).

When issues surrounding water arise in your community, give them your attention. Lend your voice to sensible solutions that respect the great value we receive from healthy ecosystems that collect, clean, store and deliver our most important economic, human and natural resource. 

Read the third and final part of our Q & A with Chris Wood tomorrow! (click here for part one)

CHRIS WOOD is a veteran international journalist and former Maclean’s editor and correspondent. He has written for The Globe and Mail, The Financial Post, The Walrus, TheTyee.ca, and more. His writing on water has won two Gold National Magazine Awards, and he was co-author of Blockbusters and Trade Wars, which was shortlisted for the Donner Prize.

Chris’ new book DRY SPRING, which examines the future of water in North American, is not just “another book about ‘climageddon’,” he promises. It is about what we can all do, indeed must do, to ensure that we survive the changes in our climate: “There are many reasons to be apprehensive about the quarter-century ahead. Many things could go terribly wrong… Water, however, is at the heart of solving all these other problems. If we can get the water part right, we will have the chance to apply our astonishing collective ingenuity and adaptive capacity to all the rest.”

After three decades of reporting natural phenomena, Chris’ research took him to the deck of a foreign freighter transiting the Great Lakes, the bed of the drained Colorado River south of the Mexican border, and the Rocky Mountain foothills where a century-old ditch recalls a long-forgotten standoff between Canada and the United States. He recorded scores of personal interviews with ranchers, vintners, fishermen, ship captains, families who have fled their homes - all so readers could “experience the impacts of climate change today through people like themselves.”

In the book Chris focuses on the years immediately ahead. Suggesting realistic solutions, he courts controversy by challenging lobbyists who oppose the so-called ‘commodification’ of water. According to Chris, these well meaning activists are not saving the environment, but instead setting it on a path to destruction. “Nothing inspires innovation faster than a problem that can be solved profitably,” he argues. “Once we shed our fear of mentioning water and markets in the same breath, a panoply of inexpensive, effective and adaptive solutions begin to recommend themselves.”

Chris lives in the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island, where he is active in local efforts to achieve a more sustainable community. We corresponded by email.

When did you first become interested in the weather and climate?

I’ve lived most of my life in the country, where weather is much more present in your day. That was especially so over the nearly ten years that I spent living on boats. You notice when the weather changes more than if your day is spent inside buildings. I made the connection between climate change and the increasing wildness of the weather when I had the opportunity to interview one of Canada’s top climate scientists in the aftermath of a horrendous ice storm that devastated eastern Ontario and southern Quebec.

Why did you decide to focus on water?

Weather is where climate touches down in our life, and the most important variable in the weather is water. Is it raining today? Snowing? How many days has it been since we last had rain? Storms that also bring rain, like hurricanes and typhoons, do more damage than winds alone do. Droughts (too little rain) and floods (too much) are the number 1 and number 2 most-costly types of natural disaster.

Weather, when you think about it, is also our only renewable source of clean water. Even the water in rivers, lakes and most wells depends ultimately on rain and snowfall. Everything else that we do, from growing food to making goods for sale, also depends on that water. After I had been following the science on climate change for a little while, I realized that the effects of ‘global warming’ weren’t waiting for the middle or end of the century to be felt. They are apparent already in the way that weather patterns are changing and hence, how our ultimate source of water is changing.
Changes in the availability, reliability and quality of our water supply will be the most acutely felt impact of climate change. And they are already upon us.

Are we really facing a water crisis?

Yes - and no. It’s important to distinguish between water resources on a large scale, viewed across a whole continent or over the period of a year, and what is available in a particular community right now, today. Over the world as a whole, across North America or all of Canada, there is enough water in theory to meet all our needs. (Canada is even getting more water than it used to). Of course none of us actually live in theory. And in the real places where we do live, climate change is making local water problems more acute.

The explanation for the paradox is this: climate change is also making weather more variable and extreme. That is, the weather is swinging from unusually wet to unusually dry with increasingly rapidity and becoming more extreme at the margins: wetter when it’s wet, but also drier when it’s dry. At the same time, climate change is moving entire features of the global weather system around, so for instance, rain which used to be reliable as clockwork in certain places and seasons, now falls either somewhere else or during another time of year.

So our water crisis is real, but it manifests differently from place to place.

How is the crisis manifesting itself?

In some regions it may be felt in water shortages. That’s been true lately in the American southeast where major urban regions like Atlanta have come within weeks of draining their reservoirs dry. In other places (or even the same ones at other times) the crisis may be felt in torrential downpours that overwhelm drains and flood homes under record amounts of runoff water.

It may also be felt in less obvious ways. When a combination of climate change and development reduces the amount of rainwater that percolates beneath the ground, aquifers decline and wells run dry. When summer rainfall arrives in fewer but heavier rainstorms, it washes enormous volumes of toxic pollutants off roads and fertilizer excess out of fields, flushing these into swollen rivers where the unprecedented flows are also increasing erosion. So we see that too, especially in places like Ontario or the US Atlantic seaboard.

Even harder for many of us to notice is that less winter precipitation is falling as snow. That has astonishing significance. It’s a factor in low water levels later in the year in the major rivers of western North America and the Great Lakes.

Where are some of the worst hit regions?

In North America, the U.S. southwest is in the crosshairs of reduced rainfall and the rising loss of water to evaporation because of hotter days. But virtually the entire United States is growing progressively drier as changing weather patterns drive rainfall further north.

Canada, in contrast, is getting wetter, but most of that extra precipitation is falling in the far northwest. Southern Canada, where most Canadians live, is in some places getting drier and everywhere experiencing an increasing severity of both extreme droughts and extreme floods. Southern Alberta got both in the first half of this decade. It is particularly vulnerable, and already running out of water in some river basins. Southern Ontario faces increasingly competitive demands for a water supply that is not growing and in summer is declining. The Great Lakes region as a whole is going to have to adjust to lower lake water levels, particularly late in the year. British Columbia, where I live, is getting walloped at both ends of the deal: wilder, wetter winters and much drier summers in places like the Okanagan Valley where water supplies are already often short.

Internationally, Australia is a special case. It’s the driest continent already and in the last three years its people have awakened to that fact that for them climate change is creating a nationwide water crisis now. The Mediterranean countries, central Asia, the Sahel region south of the Sahara, northern Mexico and the Amazon Basin are all places that are likely to lose water in the global weather realignment.

Read Part Two of our Q & A with Chris Wood tomorrow!

William Dalrymple, author of THE LAST MUGHAL, speaks at the ROM on March 26th
Launches campaign to restore 15th century Tibetan painting

The Friends of South Asia (FSA) at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) celebrates the re-opening of the Sir Christopher Ondaatje South Asian Gallery with its first event of the season: Who was the Last Mughal? Lecture & Book Signing with William Dalrymple. The reading takes place on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 6:30 pm in the Signy & Cléophée Eaton Theatre at the ROM, followed by a book-signing. Copies of THE LAST MUGHAL will be on sale: this is the launch of the paperback edition in Canada.

Celebrated historian and author William Dalrymple will speak about his latest book, THE LAST MUGHAL: The Eclipse of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. This is the tragic story of the poet-Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II, who found himself swept up by the largest anti-colonial uprising in the nineteenth century, the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The result was the catastrophic end to the dynasty that built the Taj Mahal, horrific casualties, and an ascendant British Raj. Within five years, the last Mughal was dead, buried in an unmarked grave far from his beloved Delhi.

“Dalrymple presents a brilliant, evocative exploration of a doomed world and its final emperor, Bahadur Shah II ... That the rebels fatefully raised the flag of jihad and dubbed themselves ‘mujahedin’ only adds to the mutiny’s contemporary relevance “ (Sunday Times).

William Dalrymple is the author of five books of history and travel, including Delhi: City of Djinns and White Mughals. He has recently written about the Pakistani political scene for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Hindu, The Guardian, and The Toronto Star. This event launches FSA’s fundraising campaign to restore a rare and extremely fragile Tibetan Buddhist painting from the 15th century. This conservation project will allow the thangka to go on display for the first time in the Museum’s history.

Tickets are now on sale: $35 Public; $30 ROM members; $25 ROM/FSA members. Register online at http://www.rom.on.ca/programs, click ROMLife lectures, Keyword Mughal or call 416.586.5797.

This event is generously supported by the Ancient Echoes * Modern Voices: South Asia Programs Fund.

FSA is a membership group which supports a deeper understanding and appreciation of the diverse and rich history of South Asian arts at the ROM through the Sir Christopher Ondaatje South Asian Gallery, special events and programs.

For more information, visit http://www.rom.on.ca/friends, e-mail , or call 416.586.5700.

What inspired you to become a writer?

Initially I thought of going into academics, but I couldn’t bear the thought of putting your heart and soul into writing that nobody was ever going to read. Nonfiction writing seemed like a good compromise between university life and journalism.

You wrote a feature for the magazine Toronto Life that went on to win a National Magazine Award. What was the article about?

It was about the dark side of Huntsville, the town I grew up in. After university, I moved to Toronto, and it struck me that my friends there had a very one-sided experience of Huntsville—to them, it was “cottage country,” a playground of the rich, a Canadian version of the Hamptons. The Huntsville I knew was very poor and culturally unsophisticated—more like Appalachia than the Hamptons. So I wrote this story about a family feud between two old logging families, in which one guy tried to kill his son-in-law with a hunting rifle. But the story was also about my own relationship to Huntsville. My ancestors were among the first to settle the area in the late 19th century, when it was pure wilderness. I wanted to figure out what it means to say you’re “from” somewhere, when that place is so far from your present identity, when it only lives in your memory.

How did winning the award affect your writing career?

It didn’t really affect my career, but it definitely affected how I approached the book. In some ways, it was a model for the book. I left fundamentalism and Huntsville around the same time, in my late teens. Fundamentalists and hillbillies are both outsiders in modern society. Maybe it’s because I was a fundamentalist who grew up around hillbillies, but I’m very attracted to outsiders as a writer. I like the thought of serving up a cliché and then chipping away at it by making it more complicated and three-dimensional. Also, like the Toronto Life story, the book was an attempt to figure out what hold fundamentalism still has on me today. And what I discovered was that there’s still a lot that I respect and value about my fundamentalist childhood—the love of literacy and daily study of the scriptures; the conviction that ideas matter, that what you believe has implications in the world.

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring journalists, what would it be?

Don’t bother with journalism school. Pick up the reporting skills by doing an internship or working at a school paper. I think it’s very important for journalists to know something about the world—about culture and history and religion—and the best way is by doing a liberal arts degree. Anybody can report on events. What the world needs today is analysis: the ability to put those events into a larger historical and cultural context.

Do you have a particular ritual that you adhere to when you’re writing?

If I have a rule, it’s to change things up—where I write, when I write, whether I use a computer or a notebook. If something isn’t working, I try something else.

How do you relax when you’re not writing?

I try to read the kinds of books that inspired me to become a writer in the first place. I’m also a bit obsessed with pop culture. I’m one of those nerds who read the early script reviews of superhero movies when they get posted on websites.

What books are you reading at the moment and what made you pick them up?

Right now I’m trying to fill in some of the holes in my education—I just finished Herodotus, which absolutely blew my mind. Herodotus is not only the first historian. He’s the first journalist. Like Augustine, he is such a modern spirit. He’s sceptical in his reporting. He’ll write, “So-and-so says that this mountain was created by a god who wanted to build a sandcastle, but I’m not totally sure about that.” At the moment, I’m reading Moby Dick. People always say it gets boring in the middle, when Melville goes into this long lecture on the biology of whales, but I think it’s fascinating. It must have been a conscious strategy. At a certain point, the book itself becomes a kind of white whale—an obsession that you can’t put down, even though it’s killing you.

Could you introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book to start with?

In the late 1930s, Rebecca West wrote an account of her travels through Serbia and Yugoslavia called Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. She was incredibly prescient in describing the darkness that was about to fall over Europe. I’m not a huge fan of travel literature, but her book is a masterpiece of the genre: every page has these long ruminations about history, art, theology—you name it. She was also a novelist and in some ways, I think Black Lamb anticipated the so-called “new journalism” of the 1960s. She was incredibly effective at evoking the inner lives of the people she encountered, especially the religious and cultural worlds of Orthodox Christianity and Islam.

You’re living in the United States these days. What took you there? Do you still keep a connection with Canada?

I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, four years ago to do a master’s degree at Harvard. My wife is in the middle of doing her PhD, so we’ll be here for a few more years. I enjoy living in the States, but Canada is still definitely home. It might be that what they say about exile—that you can only write about a place when you’ve moved away from it—is true. Living here has certainly given me a chance to reflect on my experiences in Canada that might not have been available otherwise.

Thanks Chris! IN THE WORLD BUT NOT OF IT is available later this month.

I’m pleased to announce that world-renowned author, anthropologist and archaeologist Brian Fagan will be presenting an illustrated public talk at the Vancouver Public Library on March 26th! “The Pleasure of Ruins” will explore the fascinating science of modern archaeology and highlight some of the important global issues of climate change and heritage conservation that we face today in our modern world.

Widely regarded as the leading authority on the interaction of climate and human society, Brian Fagan is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, and a best-selling author. His latest book THE GREAT WARMING: CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE RISE AND FALL OF CIVILIZATIONS has received excellent reviews in The Winnipeg Free Press and Maclean’s Magazine, and you can see Brian tonight on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart!

“The Pleasure of Ruins” is a free talk organised by the Archaeological Society of British Columbia and will be held at 8pm, March 26th in the Alice McKay Room at the Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch, 350 West Georgia Street.

“The Pleasure of Ruins”
Archaeological Society of BC Special Public Event
8:00PM, Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Alice Mckay Room, Vancouver Public Library Central Branch
350 W. Georgia Street, Vancouver, B.C.

(For media types, if you’d like further information, or to arrange an interview with Brian Fagan, please email me: dan[at]raincoast.com - Thanks!)