Latest news with #daylighting
Globe and Mail
09-06-2025
- General
- Globe and Mail
Robert Macfarlane's new book asks a question he couldn't ignore: Is a river alive?
When I mention to Robert Macfarlane that I live next to a buried river – Garrison Creek, which runs unseen, but is frequently smelled, through Toronto's west end – his eyes visibly brighten. He leans closer to his computer screen. 'Are they going to daylight it?' Click on the blue underlined text for photos, audio and text annotations He's referring to the practice – executed with socially transformative results in cities such as Seoul, Seattle, Singapore and Munich – of exhuming such 'ghost rivers' from their concrete tombs. I tell him that the idea has been proposed by local and environmental groups, but has yet to gain real traction. 'It's such a powerful metaphor, isn't it?' he says. 'But daylighting is also a literal act: returning a river to the sun. A river we cannot see or hear or name becomes a river that is redundant to the imagination and resource to the system only.' Robert Macfarlane near the River Cam which flows through Cambridge, England, where he lives. Tom Oliver Lucas /The Globe and Mail Macfarlane, 48, speaks almost as lyrically as he writes. Over the past two decades, the Cambridge professor of literature and environmental humanities has emerged as one of the world's pre-eminent nature writers – an inheritor of the mantle of authors such as Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies, Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez (a friend of Macfarlane's until his death in 2020). Macfarlane approaches his subjects with the soul of the logophilic poet he once aspired to be (a body of water is described as having 'lacustrine calm') and an unerring eye for great narratives. He's covered much of the world's topography in award-winning books such as Mountains of the Mind (mountains), The Wild Places and The Old Ways (pathways), and Underland (subterranean landscapes). His book Landmarks, meanwhile, was a celebration of the often endangered words people have used to describe the natural world. So turning to rivers, as he has done in his latest book, bears a certain logic. But while Is a River Alive? aligns stylistically with Macfarlane's previous work – overflowing (all water metaphors to be forgiven in advance), as it is, with gorgeous, vivid prose – it is far more political than its predecessors. 'Across 10 previous books and more than 20 years of writing,' he writes in the introduction, 'I have never before known a subject with the urgency of this one.' Although he didn't write while he was on the river, Macfarlane filled his notebooks with his impressions of what he saw and experienced when he came ashore. Tom Oliver Lucas /The Globe and Mail He didn't originally plan to write about rivers per se; he was interested, rather, in what we mean by 'life.' He began by jotting down three questions: Can a forest think? Does a mountain remember? And is a river alive? 'They were all good questions to spend time with, but it was that third one that just plucked at my sleeve and wouldn't let me go.' This was in 2020, just a few years after the Rights of Nature movement was given a major boost by the granting of legal personhood to New Zealand's Whanganui River after sustained pressure from Maori campaigners. What's your favourite river in the world? Share your story with The Globe At the same time, rivers in England, Macfarlane's home country, were facing a deepening crisis. Overwhelmed and instrumentalized into invisibility and incapacity, the majority were effectively dead. And the problem, Macfarlane soon realized, was global in scope. 'That's where it felt like a writer could step into the space and begin to tackle the stories we tell about rivers and the ways we imagine them.' That writer, clearly, would have to be him. His research for Is a River Alive? took Macfarlane to three places where local river protectors have used imaginative techniques to cope with existential threats: mining, in the case of Ecuador's Los Cedros River; industrial pollution, for the rivers and estuaries of Chennai, India; and megadamming for the Mutehekau Shipu, also known as the Magpie River, which runs through Innu territory in northeastern Quebec. In 2023, Macfarlane travelled to eastern Quebec in order to follow the course of a river known in English as the Magpie, and in Innu as (among other names) the Mutehekau Shipu. Robert Macfarlane/Supplied The book also takes us to the psychic and intellectual spaces where Macfarlane ventured as he attempted to answer the question in the book's title. While he came out on the pro-rivers-are-alive side (he uses the pronoun 'who' when referring to rivers), he readily acknowledges how difficult and counterintuitive the concept can be for those, like himself, raised on rationalism (his parents and brother are doctors). Conferring rivers with personhood, he writes, isn't the same as anthropomorphism. 'To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of 'life', and in so doing – how had George Eliot put it? – 'enlarge the imagined range for self to move in.'' Those who still find the notion a tad flaky might consider the fact that corporate personhood has been naturalized in many countries for years. The idea reached its most extreme form in the U.S. after the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, but even in Canada, corporations have many of the same Charter rights as human Canadians, including freedom of expression. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to give nature formal rights in its constitution. Robert Macfarlane/Supplied Macfarlane approached each of his planned three river journeys differently, and with different companions. In Ecuador, he hikes and clambers through one of the most biodiverse regions of the world, the high cloud forest around the Rio Los Cedros, in search of the river's source. With him are a mycologist, an environmental-rights lawyer and a musician. In Chennai, he gets a tour of the city's toxic, sludgy rivers – victims of the area's unregulated heavy and chemical industries – by a young, self-taught naturalist who, along with a small group of fellow activists, is taking brave steps toward their resurrection. (The 2017 granting of legal personhood to the Ganga and Yamuna rivers, theologically considered deities, was inspired by New Zealand's Whanganui River ruling.) Amid the depressing carnage are moments of wonder. In a lake sanctuary reeking of nail polish, Macfarlane sees what he calls an 'avian Venice' – a floating city of birds. Where Chennai's rivers meet the Indian Ocean, he helps a local patrol move sea-turtle eggs to a place where hatchlings are less likely to get confused by the city's bright lights during their seaward scramble. After a patrol moves the nest from a polluted river, a baby sea turtle makes its way to the Indian ocean. Robert Macfarlane/Supplied The book's transcendent third section describes the 160-kilometre kayak trip Macfarlane took down the lower Mutehekau Shipu toward the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This time his entourage consists of his polymathic eccentric friend, Wayne, two francophone backcountry guides, Raph and Danny, and a local fisherman named Ilya. Here, Macfarlane's writing takes on a flow and intensity verging on the spiritual. (He isn't religious, but has admitted to falling back on the language of religion when trying to capture nature's sublimity). A thrilling, harrowing account of his journey down the river's rapids is told, appropriately enough, in what amounts to full stream-of-consciousness. 'I am still very far from being able to take that in, let alone comprehend it. I think perhaps I will always be coming to terms with it,' Macfarlane writes of his experience in Quebec. I ask him to expand on those cryptic lines. 'Words were just pouring through me. It was very, very strange and powerful and for a writer to feel that they were being written by a force utterly alien to them was perplexing and thrilling.' Before embarking on that final trip, Macfarlane had consulted with Governor-General's Award-winning Innu poet and activist Rita Mestokosho, who'd been instrumental in having the Mutehekau Shipu declared, in February, 2021, 'a person with a right to live' – the first river in Canada to be so recognized. After offering guidance for his river journey, she'd tied a bracelet of red cloth around Macfarlane's wrist. 'The other bracelet you must leave on your wrist. Only time or the river, which are the same things, can remove it,' said Rita Mestokosho. Macfarlane still has the red thread bracelet. Tom Oliver Lucas /The Globe and Mail When I ask if he still has it, he pulls back his sleeve. 'It's here, over my pulse, next to the only tattoo I have, and will ever have': the cuneiform symbols for river from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Literature's oldest written story means a lot to Macfarlane. He's studied it in multiple translations, made an album based on it with musician Johnny Flynn and is currently working on a graphic novelization of it. At the heart of Gilgamesh is a sacred cedar forest that gets destroyed by extractive interests, so when Macfarlane realized that the Ecuadorian cloud forest he'd be travelling to, Los Cedros, literally translated to 'the cedar forest,' he got chills. It's testament to the impact writing the book has had on him that Macfarlane has gotten involved with several related causes (in addition to the many he's already involved with). He joined the board of the Los Cedros Fund and continues to follow the fate of the Mutehekau Shipu – which could yet be dammed – through Mestokosho, with whom he has developed a close friendship. Is a River Alive? also inspired three 'water-songs,' one of which, he says, will be sung at springs and rivers at risk. Macfarlane was drawn to the Mutehekau after it became the first Canadian river to be recognized as a 'legal person' in 2021. Robert Macfarlane/Supplied 'I began these river-journeys in doubt and uncertainty,' Macfarlane writes. So in what frame of mind, I ask, did he end them? 'I ended unsure of what I'd seen and sensed, unsure of what power would make of such ideas, which are at once the strongest forces that we can muster and profoundly vulnerable to the sharp teeth and heavy blows of power.' He pauses. 'I couldn't have known that I would be publishing this book into a British context in which our rivers are all dying, and a North American context in which the war on life is accelerating to calamity pace. In which clean air and water regulations are being rolled back with greater speed and scale than by any administration before. 'And so the ideas at the heart of the book – of life as a web of relations, of the ancient compact of life that flows between humans and freshwater – feel at once more fragile and more crucial than at any point in my life. I don't mean that in a grandiose sense: that the book has some great conversional power to it. I mean that although the ideas and the places and the rivers I've spent time with have been ancient on the one hand, they have felt very urgent on the other. As a writer, that feels like the right place to be.'
CBS News
04-06-2025
- General
- CBS News
Sacramento stalls on enforcing daylighting law aimed at improving pedestrians safety
SACRAMENTO — A California law aimed at pedestrian safety now bans cars from parking 20 feet from intersections. The law allows cities to issue fines to violators, but the City of Sacramento has not issued those fines even in the face of what some have called a pedestrian safety crisis. Slow Down Sacramento founder Isaac Gonzalez is calling on the city to speed up its conversion of city streets to follow state law. "We really shouldn't wait until people get hurt before we actually act and follow state law," Gonzalez said. "I think, unfortunately, in the city, we get decision paralysis. Where do we start? The problem is so huge." The so-called daylighting law requires all California cities to create 20 feet of space on the approaching side of intersections to prevent collisions. A City of Sacramento spokesperson confirmed that the city has not removed all meters, has not started red striping all the intersections, and is still working to identify how many spots need to be removed. Asad Mohammadi lives in Natomas, down the street from a new "quick-build" temporary traffic safety installation the city created after two pedestrians were killed in separate collisions. The installation went up after the second deadly collision. Asad Mohammadi /lives near deadly crash "It was a very sad day," Mohammadi said. "After that incident happened, then they put the sign up, they should have put it at the beginning." Sacramento's police department reports that so far this year, there have been 13 deadly collisions on city streets. Last year, there were 34. The year before, there were 55. Sacramento's own law and legislation committee declared an emergency in 2024 over the number of pedestrians killed in roadway collisions. "Let's talk about the cost-benefit ratio here," Gonzalez said. "What does it cost to paint a curb red, versus what does it cost for someone to die and for us to pay out a big lawsuit? I would rather be on the side of painting the curb red." The city council voted to approve a $25 fine starting July 1 for violators of the law. It will need to ID and remove spaces to begin that enforcement. What the rollout of that enforcement will look like is still unclear.
Daily Mail
06-05-2025
- Automotive
- Daily Mail
The ultra-petty new California law that's tricking confused drivers into paying huge fines
California 's new 'daylighting' law is blindsiding drivers with steep fines for seemingly minor parking violations. The state-wide law, Assembly Bill 413, which went into effect March 1, bans parking within 20 feet of any crosswalk - marked or unmarked - to improve pedestrian visibility. But, many curbs aren't painted red up to the full 20 feet, creating confusion and costly tickets of nearly $120 for unsuspecting drivers. The new rules are so unclear that authorities in San Francisco said they would not fine drivers in violation. Meanwhile, officials in San Diego have written thousands of tickets to motorists. 'It's all about pedestrian safety,' Erin Longen, Parking Enforcement Supervisor with the San Diego Police Department, told Fox 5. 'It's basically that no one can park within 20 feet of an unmarked or marked crosswalk on the approach side of the crosswalk.' To raise awareness ahead of its enforcement, the SDPD began public outreach and issued warnings starting January 1. 'We handed out 1,500 warnings for two months - it was a little blue slip we would leave on cars we saw in violation,' Longen said. 'This helped get the word out ahead of the ticketing and enforcement.' Since enforcement began, more than 4,200 tickets have been issued, totaling nearly $500,000 in fines. 'We've written over 4,200 tickets, which sounds like a high number, but it's less than 10 percent of the tickets we're writing as an agency,' Longen added. In San Diego, most 'daylighting' tickets are being handed out in high-trafficked areas and popular neighborhoods like La Jolla, North Park, Hillcrest, Normal Heights, University Heights, Ocean Beach, and Pacific Beach. 'We're ticketing it citywide, and, obviously, the more impacted areas are going to be where more people live, right?' Longen said. Although the law is meant to reduce pedestrian accidents by improving sightlines at intersections, its rollout has been rocky. Drivers continue to be fined even when curbs aren't painted red to clearly mark the 20-foot zone. Cities like San Francisco have declined to enforce the law due to these challenges, while San Diego has forged ahead. Officials say over 1,000 intersections have been reviewed, with red curbs added at more than 200 and 97 parking meters removed. 'To make it easier for drivers to follow this new law, [San Diego] City teams have evaluated more than 1,000 of the busiest intersections in the densest areas of San Diego,' City of San Diego spokesperson Anthony Santacroce told SFGate. 'Nationwide, 43 states already have daylighting laws, and most prohibit parking within 20 feet of an intersection,' Santacroce added. 'The average length of an automobile in the United States is approximately 14 feet. To help estimate 20 feet, it may be helpful to envision about one car length and a half's worth of distance. Despite these efforts, many curbs remain unmarked, putting drivers at risk of violating the law. The $117 fine is nearly triple the previous $40 penalty, after a decision by the city of San Diego to raise all ticket prices in a search for revenue to help plug a $258 million shortfall in the next fiscal year, NBCSanDiego reported. It is projected to generate up to $3 million for the city by year's end.
