I’m here in the city for exactly this reason: to get some face-time with people who I interact with mainly, or in some cases exclusively, online. My trip was timed to coincide with the summer session of UBC’s Optional-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing (which I am most of the way through now), so I could meet up with many of my fellow students as well as some of the profs. But I am also taking advantage of being based here, downtown Vancouver, for the opportunity to have lunches and coffees with people who I don’t normally get a chance to see.

And all of that has made me think about this business of “friends” versus “connections,” and online relationships versus “real” relationships. I’ve managed to avoid Facebook and this whole idea of accumulating “friends” – some of whom may be real-life friends, but many of whom are really more like connections, or contacts. At least LinkedIn and Twitter’s use of the words “connections” and “followers” acknowledges that these online relationships are not necessarily personal, nor are they necessarily two-way.

I am one of the many members of LinkedIn who has signed up, and periodically accepts invitations from “connections,” without getting what the whole thing is about. But Twitter is different for me. I do feel that I have actually formed some great relationships – dare I call them friendships? – on Twitter. Looking at these relationships (started via Twitter, but progressing to longer email communications) it almost feels that an online relationship can be as “real” and personal as a face-to-face relationship.

However, I realize that if I truly believed that, I wouldn’t be here in Vancouver this week.

My UBC program is called “optional-residency.” This means that the whole program is online, other than a ten-day session on campus in Vancouver every July – (which is, itself, optional). So nearly all of the interactions with my classmates are online. We talk in chat rooms. Only a few students have uploaded photos of themselves, so my mental picture of what they look like has been fabricated from some blend of what their name represents to me and what they write about.

This week, I met for the first time two students who I got to know this past year in a non-fiction class. In a non-fiction class, when you get to “know” one another you actually find out a lot. There were only seven of us, and we shared memoir and personal essay works that are still in progress: writing that is as raw as it gets. We revealed parts of ourselves that we are not yet ready to reveal to our “real-life” friends or our families, probed our classmates with cutting personal questions, pushed one another to “go deeper, go deeper.” We know one another – or at least know things about one another – that we;ve revealed to few others.

Yet, in a way, we don’t know one another at all. There is something that comes from seeing how someone’s eyes flash, from hearing the passion of their voice, from breathing their air, that online contact cannot replace.

It is expensive for me to be here, downtown, for most of a week – expensive in terms of hard costs as well as in terms of time. But I feel it is worth it.

For example, the editor who I lunched with today: He has been editing and publishing my work for years, and I have read much of his – so we already knew that we had much in common in terms of ideas and values. Over the years, we have both had to give and take to bring some of my articles to publication, so we both knew that our relationship carried a healthy dose of mutual respect.

But now I know what he looks like, how he speaks, what food he likes to eat. And we spoke about more than just whatever article I am currently working on. I feel that, by each of us taking an hour out of our busy days for a little bit of face-time, we have taken a step towards a place that perhaps you can never truly get to in the online world: from mere “connections” to “friends.”

I keep seeing the same advice: Build your brand. And that is fine if you are only interested in, or only working in, one thing.

But I am interested in everything. To some people, that might look like I am all over the place. (Which, in a way, I am, I admit… )

But the thing is: everything is connected. And that’s what I am most interested in – the connections. So this is what I write about - both in my non-fiction and my fiction – and what I try to show through my sound stories (the radio dox) and my photos as well.

I don’t want to travel to some game farm to get the technically perfect, tight close-up of a captive wolf. I want to show that animal in its natural environment, connected to the habitat that it needs to survive. To me, that’s the story: the connection, the relationship.

Everything is connected. I feel that, in our “modern” and “advanced” society, where most of us live in cities far from the places where the things we consume come from, many have lost that sense of connection – but that doesn’t mean that that connection is not there. We’re just not aware of it. Every plastic-wrapped product you purchase is connected – both to where it came from (likely extracted from an oil well just like the one spewing out in the Gulf right now – so who’s really at fault there?), and to where it’s going (trucked to a landfill? or consuming energy as it gets transported and reformed into another product?)

Even if we are not always aware of the connections, they are still there.

So I think that is what I think about, and now what I blog about. Connections. Relationships – to our planet, to our food supply, to movements of our planet, to each other, to our own bodies.

But if I am supposed to be a brand – well, how do I make “connections” my brand? It’s a pretty big thing, not very definable.

A lot of what I do (i.e. why I left my well-paying job in the mining industry to earn a pittance as a writer) is about helping people to have the knowledge to make good decisions. To have the actual information, as well as to try looking at things differently – at times, even popping out of our ingrained “western” world view and reassessing our values and, therefore, our actions. Both about the big thigns and the little things: be it about personal health, or about treating our planet in a way such that the next generation can also live well here, or about preparing ourselves for the earthquake and tsunami that are coming here to the west coast. Every decision we make affects something: the world around us, the people around us, and the people to come.

So if you look at everything I blog about, the theme is there. Connectedness. But if you look at my list of blog topics – well, it looks like I am all over the place.

You’ve probably noticed that my blog activity has been a bit slow lately. That’s partly because I’ve had a busy spring, and have been focussing on my major projects rather than the blog. But it’s also because I am reassessing this blog, and I need your help! I plan to start posting more regularly, but I am just trying to figure out where I should go with the whole thing.

So, for those of you who have been following my blog this year – as well as for those of you who are new to it – what would you like to see here? What do you think I should do? Are you getting the connections I am trying to make, or do I seem to just be going all over the place?

But last month, the West Vancouver Memorial Library contacted me and asked if I wanted to put together a show of my photos. What an opportunity – of course I said yes! So I’ve been frantically preparing images, getting them printed, and now I am framing. And what a good feeling it is, seeing these images printed large.

I remember when I first started to print and display my photos, a decade or so ago. I had been photographing “seriously” for twenty years by then – I’m not saying I was “good” that whole time, but I had been working hard at improving myself: learning the technical stuff, and being ultra-critical about my own work so I could continue improving. But all of that time, all of the photos that I had taken were slides stashed away in little boxes. Once I started doing slideshows, and printing and framing my works – once I started showing them to people – I realized that’s what it’s all about.

I don’t photograph for myself. I photograph because I want to share what I see and what I feel when I am out there; I want to put a frame around a little part of it, and take it back home to share with others. Not many people get to see wild animals in the wilderness these days, and that’s something that’s really important for me. To show wild animals living where they belong: in their natural setting – not captive, not on the “wild game farms”, where so many “wild” animals are photographed these days – but to show the extensive habitat they need to survive. (We need those wild areas to be intact, in order for us to survive, too).

So I’ve had some good fun these last few weeks, going through images and readying them for exhibition. I still haven’t made the final selection of what will and won’t be shown – there will be between 30 and 40 prints on display all together – but I’m offering you a sneak preview of some of them here.

And if you are in or around Vancouver, I invite you to come down and see them all! They will be on display for all of June and July, at the West Vancouver Memorial Library (1950 Marine Drive), open daily (and free entry, of course!). And please, leave a comment here and let me know what you think…

(And – apologies for the long absence on the blog. Between the long travels, as well as trying to meet several overdue paying writing commitments, I made the executive decision to focus on the prior commitments. But I’m back now!)

First of all, the blog. Well, to be honest, I didn’t really know what I’d write about. I know lots of bloggers blog about writing, but – well, it just doesn’t interest me to write about writing itself. There is so much out there that I am interested in, so I decided to just go for it, write about whatever was catching my attention at that moment. Or, whatever I thought was important to write about, but that I would be unlikely to get published in other venues.

What really surprised me was how much I ended up writing about food! About growing food, about gathering food, about sustainable and local food sources. The fact that I blogged about this so much really drove home to me how much our food supply, and where we source out food from, concerns me.

Interestingly, these posts have proven to be some of my most-read blog posts as well. Until the ultramarathon-running tips posts were published (Multi-day race prep, Jan. 4, and Foot care while racing, Jan. 13), which were extensively linked-to by various sports-people and through Facebook, the most frequent route through which people found my blog was by googling the terms “Growing rice in Canada.” Who would have known? I wanted to find a carb source that I could grow out here on the west coast besides potatoes. I thought of rice – couldn’t find any info about growing it here in Canada on the internet – so just tried it out. Well, apparently I’m not the only one who’s been searching for info about rice-growing here in the north.

Twitter has been a mixed blessing for me. I love it! Which is part of the problem. I do spend too much time on it, which of course cuts into my writing time. I still have not broken 100 followers – but my followers are great, all people who read something I wrote somewhere and decided personally that they want to hear more from me. So I feel that there really is a connection with them, far beyond the anonymity of the internet, and that is wonderful!

I’ve had trouble working out who to follow, myself, though. I now follow just over 50 Twitterers, and there are many others that I’d like to follow – but the reality is that if I follow many more, I won’t actually have the time to read all the tweets that come in each day (at the moment in the low hundreds, and, so far, I still read nearly every one of them). So right now, the twitterers that I follow are mainly news organizations (e.g. @CBCNews, @cnnbrk) and various book-oriented publishers or writers (e.g. @globebooks, @GuardianBooks, and many others – check out my own “Following” list on http://twitter.com/jwindh).

I also follow a few bloggers who work in writing or publishing, who do an absolutely stellar job of compiling articles that relate to the publishing industry: @inkyelbows, @thecreativepenn, @rachellegardner, and @nathanbransford. I highly recommend any writers to follow these guys – through the articles they’ve led me to, I’ve been able to keep up-to-date on the many twists and turns that the publishing industry has been through these last few months.

So, where am I going to go with all of this? Well, I think the biggest thing that I’ve realized is that most of my blogging and tweeting is really about two different things – (1) myself and my interests as both a scientist and a writer, and (2) adventure sports. I think these two audiences are mostly mutually exclusive, so I realize that combining everything in one feed effectively dilutes anything I blog or tweet about. So I think what’s coming up in the next few months will be to split things up – get another Twitter account and set up a separate blog for the sporting themes. So this blog may actually move a bit towards writing about writing from time to time, after all (since writing is the main thing I do, these days) – but it will still be what it is now: a compendium of stuff that I find interesting, written when the inspiration strikes.

I’m pleased with the year. It’s my first foray into social media. It’s been a learning experience, it’s been fun, and I think it’s been really useful. (The website/ blog has had over 8000 hits so far, and I’m pretty pleased with that. Thanks, everyone!)

And you may have noticed that I have not mentioned my use of Facebook. I’ve been reluctant to join Facebook right since it first came out because of the contract you must “Agree” to when you join. It has softened up somewhat since then (after Canada won a lawsuit against Facebook about privacy concerns) but it still requires that you assign Facebook all rights to anything you ever post there (which they will cede back to you when you delete your account provided that no one else has ever copied it anywhere… yeah, right). Every time I nearly succumb to the peer pressure (everyone is on it!) Facebook pulls some other move that draws me away again, e.g. this new scheme of tracking people through their so-called “Open Graph” system.

Sorry guys, I don’t want you to track anything about me for your marketing purposed. Not saying I’ll never join… just saying that I’ve been thinking of it for years, and still can’t bring myself to agree to what they want me to agree to. Or to how they continue to change their terms of use.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who has been following my adventures and my ideas. Now that I know what I’m doing, I aim to make this blog a much more interesting place over the next year – so I hope you’ll come back frequently, to check in about what’s on my mind that week. And tell me what you think about it…

“But does it really matter, if I recycle?” Sharleen asks.

This is a big question. And my answer is YES it matters!

Our environmental problems are overwhelming. So overwhelming. And, once you start to grasp the overwhelmingness of it all, it’s really depressing. So people tend to focus on the positive – even if that positive is not actually representative of the big picture. It’s something to clutch at. Because the reality of the negatives – the very major changes we need to take make in in our lifestyles order to ensure that our planet is liveable for humans in the future – are mind-boggling.

So, instead, people focus on the positive things that we can do – things that, on the scale of the problem itself, actually have neglible impact – to the point that I think these “false-positive” messages are really damaging. Because now we can justify our consumption by letting ourselves believe that we are doing our part:
- oh, it’s OK if I consume manufactured single-use items that were transported to my home using greenhouse gases because I recycle them (consuming more greenhouse gases)
- and I can fly around the world because I’ll buy carbon credits to offset the fuel burned on my behalf (usually “credits” for projects e.g. tree-planting, that would have gone on anyway)
- and it’s OK for me to keep using energy because we are moving towards alternative sources – technology will save us!

Sorry if I sound cynical. I am. I am starting to feel that this whole feel-good thing about recycling is a huge fraud, perpetrated (by whom? I don’t know) to make people feel OK about consuming single-use items. Recycling used to be only the final last-ditch option of the three R’s:
1. Reduce
2. Reuse
3. Recycle
Now, recycling seems to be a source of pride. Look at the big pile of single-use items items I have at the bottom of my driveway this week! See what a good environmentalist I am?

Recycling is still throwing something out – and burning more fossil fuels as those items are transported back to the plant and remanufactured into another single-use item.

This is especially poignant right now, as it was just announced that there will be no more recycling of newspapers in BC. Newspaper for recycling will now be shipped to the US or to Asia! How can we feel good about that!

I am not for a moment trying to claim that I lead the perfect model life in any way. The way our society is structured now, it is impossible to – you’d have to truly eject yourself from society (which I am actually considering doing). But there is not enough room in the Canadian wilderness for 34 million homesteading hermits, so even that is not a feasible large-scale solution either (and even less so for most other countries).

What my mission is, at the moment anyway, is to try to encourage others to cut down their consumption. Of what? Of everything. It is very hard to remain in society yet cut your consumption by 100%. But it is quite feasible for most people to cut consumption by 10 or 20%. Rather than me cutting down by 100% just to make the point – if I can convince ten people to cut down their consumption by 10%, the net effect on our planet is the same as me taking the 100% eject-myself-from-society extreme route. So I encourage people to:
- get on their bike, or walk, and use their car 10% less
- eat 10% less meat (our high meat consumption is a huge cost to the planet)
- use 10% less plastic – get in the habit of carrying reusable shopping bags, and reject products that use excessive packaging
- use 10% less paper
- produce 10% of their own food
I think it would barely impact most people’s lives to make these 10% cuts. In fact, I bet that most people could cut all of these things by 25% without any serious suffering.

And what if I can influence 1000 people to make those 25% cuts? That would have the same net result as 250 times the effect of me going extreme and ejecting myself from society! So pass this info around.

We really can each make a difference. As individuals, it sometimes seems that what we each can do is very small – but there is a power in spreading the word, convincing others to do the same. That way we stand together. And, together, we do make a difference.

Sharleen, I do hear what you are saying about supporting the publishing industry. And I do so very fondly remember those weekend mornings, reading a real paper newspaper over a cup of coffee. But, for a long time now, I haven’t felt good about throwing that paper in the bin – even if it is a recycle bin. Every now and then I manage to snag someone’s old paper – sometimes weeks old – to relive that pleasure. (The second R).

But, to me, if I have to choose between supporting an industry (even one I work in!) and supporting the future of our planet, a place for our children, I have to choose our planet and our collective future. And that’s why I think we should – no, we must – get used to alternative financial models for many of our industries. The news(paper) industry is only one of them.