This cartoon was literally Swiftian. And burning babies is still Harper's implicit policy, as he incinerates thier future, giving the world they'll inherit an infinitesimally small priority compared to, say, putting more children in jail, in larger and ever-more Kafkaesque prisons, or filling the deep pockets of oil company shareholders. (True confession: I hold pension funds in the tar sands. Almost anyone who has a pension in Canada does – even those with so-called "ethical" mutual funds.)

This 2007 cartoon was timed for the holidays, right after the Bali conference. We face an even grimmer future after the fiasco of Durban.

Happy holidays.

(Below, the cartoon that led up to the one above.)

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I just had fun with the locavoracious idea – gravel instead of food.

That gravel pile took about an hour to ink. I'll sue Highland for a repetitive stress injury!

There was one comment that stood out somewhere in Highland's marketing – that aggregate is one of the bases of civilization. It almost made me spew my coffee (oh, when our civilization goes down, that will be what humankind will miss), but I couldn't find a home for it in the cartoon.

In a way, I'm just repeating a lot of Highland's claims ("chemicals aren't used in the processing of the gravel"), but they seem so absurd it's funny.

Additional sources:

$18 million per acre:
http://rabble.ca/news/2011/06/monster-mine-plan-cuts-deep-ontario-farmland

If you're looking for in-depth information about why this would a create sort of mini-tarsands in Ontario, check out  North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Taskforce. There's a lot of good information here. The site for the No Mega Quarry movement is here.

I was going to caricaturize the Highland rep, John Lowndes, who met with farmers to buy their land, but he is a bit of a shadowy character without good photos on the web. The money behind him is Baupost Group (their site is locked – also very shadowy) which is a hedge fund led by Seth Klarman. There are plenty of photos of him. See this article for more about him.

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This special, full-page cartoon appeared in last month's 40th anniversary issue of Alternatives.

When I was 21, I spent a year backpacking in Europe. Like every other tourist who went through Paris, I experienced a brief frisson as I stood before the real, original Mona Lisa. I had probably already seen it over a thousand times in duplication. Its celebrity did make a confrontation with the original intriguing – like running into Scarlett Johansson on the street. But in the end, I felt let down. Why all the hoopla? Somehow, the original felt like a pale imitation of…itself.

This gave me the idea for a cartoon about cheap Mona Lisa reproductions somehow draining the original work of its colour and then literally threatening its existence, sort of as an inverse Dorian Gray. Teams of specialists would be ushered in to try to save it. Reproductions were banned. Other famous artworks began to falter as well. Michaelangelo's David withered. The Sistine Chapel started to crumble. Picasso's works became even more cubist.

This loss of the aura or cult of the original was discussed by Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I was fresh from reading about him and eager to play on both his ideas and my experience of the Mona Lisa Letdown.

But my cartoon never came to life. It felt, somehow, too fanciful. Back home in Canada, I could find no context.

Flash forward to the digital age, which found me mulling over whether the exponentially expanding universe of digital photographs is draining reality of its colour, of its "realness." Metaphorically speaking, I felt it was: When more people at a wedding are viewing it on their camera screens than are experiencing it first-hand, does the actual experience lose its authenticity? Are we living for life's sake or to make a good Facebook post? Is the glut of images, now cheapened because of their metastasizing quantity, also devaluing the memories they capture?

Hardly fuel for a cartoon in an environmental magazine. Unless I could show that photography was actually damaging the natural world, in a manifestation of the observer effect, in which the very act of observation changes what is being observed. Are we observing our world to death?

I started googling the Cloud, and was surprised, sadly, to find evidence to back up my musings. My google trail is below.

So, happily, the cartoon that had been buried like a cicada in larval form can now come forth and make loud, irritating noises.

Cartoon Sources in order of reading

"Is a picture worth even 140 characters anymore? Barely."
http://sweatstock.com/picture-word-parity-imminent

"Facebook users upload 7.5 billion photos per month."
250 million photos per day x 30 = 7.5 billion per month

This blog, which I found after my cartoon was done, ably illustrates the explosion of images. But its estimation of 3.5 trillion total photos worldwide is, in my opinion, far too low.

"The datasphere has ballooned beyond a zettabye – a million times the content of the largest library or equal to 75 billion fully-loaded 16-gig iPads!"

"This cloud … generates as much CO2 as the world's airlines."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8297237.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2010/07/100726_data_wt_sl.shtml

"At this rate, by 2020, the Earth's data load will be 35 zettabytes."

"Your e-reader has the environmental impact of 30–70 books – and the average American reads only nine a year (Canadians read 20)."
http://gigaom.com/apple/is-reading-on-your-ipad-more-green-than-paper-books

But the greenness of e-readers is hotly debated. This site has a list of links that deal with the topic. Of course, an iPad is far more than an e-book – you can read magazines, watch video and do lots more. Figuring out the environmental impact of using one as opposed to doing it all the old-fashioned way is like comparing apples (pun intended) and oranges using algebra.

"Over 25 million iPads and 5 billion cell phones all use the mineral coltan."

Virtually any portable electronic device uses coltan, which is used to extend battery life. Just google "coltan," and you'll find oodles on information on it. You can start at Worldwatch and Foreign Policy. It's mining doesn't only threaten gorillas – millions of humans have also died in wars fueled by this dirty metal.

I first heard about coltan almost a decade ago on a short-lived but excellent Canadian TV drama, The Eleventh Hour. I thought it was fiction, as the word "coltan" sounded so sci-fi. But it wasn't. (It's short for columbite-tantalite). Think twice before ditching your cell for a new, equally dirty one. (How many times did you use to replace your old land phone? And how many cell phones have you ever owned?)

"We're shredding biodiversity – nature's cloud – to grow our zettacloud."
Media headlines have disputed that species are disappearing as fast as has been reported. But that is a sham. Biodiversity, which when you come down to it is an unimaginably complex form of information, is disappearing faster than our own data is accumulating.

I didn't have space in the cartoon to open this can of endangered worms, but the crux is that our cloud of information is metastisizing at the expense of nature. Reality is fading in part due to the digital photography boom. Our digital world is becoming richer and denser as nature is becoming poorer and scarcer. Digital feels effortless, footprintless and eco-friendly. But the infrastructure – energy for cooling huge data-centres, mining, disposal of heavy metals – is not.

Used well, fueled by renewable energy, the Cloud could be part of the solution. But it's being predominantly used to transmit nude photos of Scarlett Johannson millions of times.

___

This story just appeared in the Globe on a plan to regular conflict minerals.

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What's old is new again. Nearly two decades ago, a friend of mine told me of her friends, who were doing the same thing. At the time, I found it bizarre, misguided political correctness run amok – and great fodder for cartoons. After all, I thought, in the first few years, parents and siblings have a greater influence in a child's mental development than society at large. They are not free of societal preconceptions, much as they might want to think otherwise.

Of course, in 1994, there was no Internet, and the story didn't hit the media.

Do I still think it's bizarre? Well, keeping a secret like that would be immensely impractical. It spotlights gender as a defining aspect of personality – by making it into a secret, it is emphasized. And the parents may push their (maybe) boy to do (maybe) "girl" things.

However, as the parent of a girl who wishes desperately to be a boy, I find the Great Wall of Gender tall, thick, impenetrable and ever-growing, despite decades of striving for women's rights. It's the first question asked of a new baby. Clothes and toys are more and more genderfied. And marketers have been unfettered to foist stereotype-reinforcing (and apparently highly profitable) media on our children.

When my daughter, having just switched to boy clothes, picked up a flower off the sidewalk, a man sitting on his porch said, "ahh, hes' a flower-lover, eh?" I can't imagine him saying that if a girl-identified kid did the same thing.

So I understand Storm's parents' motivation, and hope it opens some eyes and helps bring down the wall – or at least hacks a few doors through it.

I still find this cartoon funny. I like when a cartoon has legs. Regardless of what's between them.

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It's been hard to miss the onslaught of television and full-page print ads trumpeting how environmentally friendly the oil sands are. (They're called "oil sands" now, not the more apt "tar sands." Big Oil: 1, Earth: 0.) They all feature photography of "real people" – do-gooders all – against a natural backdrop. You know the ads are authentic because the skies are not blue. They're grey, and the lighting is all dark and sombre. This isn't just a PR-job. This is a realistic assessment of the situation. And you know what? It ain't as bad as it's being painted by David Suzuki and his followers. And Big Oil is really trying to do a good job. Which is why they're shoveling so much money into these ads.

When I looked for a spokesperson to use for this cartoon, I found that the person behind this campaign, Janet Annesley, VP Communications, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, had a video online in which she talks about her motivation, inspiration, etc. – all very much like the ads she has commissioned. Yes, her father and grandfather were in communications. (Since this cartoon was printed in the December issue of Alternatives Journal, the video has  been pulled from the oilweek.com Rising Stars feature, though her name is still on it. A screen capture is below.)

But nobody will know. They'll think I'm just being over-the-top again. Sigh.

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Santa brought me a new 40-year retrospective of Doonesbury. Its weight is such that I will build up my biceps while reading it. It fits in no bookshelf in the known universe. That is because the strips are reproduced at a size that does them justice, and there are 1,800 of them. [Insert long rant about the incredible shrinking comic strip here.] 

New Year's puts me in a retrospective mood -- hence my comic data mining.

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My friend Rob, who provides an invaluable humor-meter for my work, says I should do more like them. Re-reading them at this distance, there's a freshness and fun irreverence about them that I haven't achieved recently.

At this point I'm between gigs. In September I decided that This Bright Future, the strip I'd been drawing for a year for the online eweekly The Canadian Charger, had no future. I was feeling burnt out and overwhelmed with the graphic design work that actually pays my mortgage.

While I'm in cartoon limbo, I've taken the opportunity given by Posterous (thank you Art Kilgour!) to quickly select a preexisting "theme" (graphic look), throwing my designer hat out the window and swallowing my I-will-do-all-original-work pride. Within a few hours, I posted all of my recent, non-Weltschmerz cartoon work. They are listed at left.

I'll use this blog to riff on cartooning, post recent stuff (if I can unstuff my creativity) and ramble on as concisely as I am able.

I hope you enjoy a chortle or two.

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