Recently a number of impressions converged to prompt me to get back to this blog.
First there was a bit of research I did as I’m building a new website about my career and personal development over a lifetime. It had to do with 1973 when my brother, his wife and I spent time hanging out at 19 Huron Street in Toronto. Between joints and jugs of wine making the rounds, we discussed the prospects of leaving our factory jobs and heading back to the land with other like-minded radicals.
The Toronto Communal Living Assistance Project or,as it was more popularly known, the Hall, was a “sortof post–hippy drug drop-in centre,” located at 19 Huron Street. “Those associatedwith the Hall were those who were truly trying to find an alternative styleof life, which does not involve dependency on existing structures andsystems.” They were also looking to overcome the “fragmentation andpurposelessness of the alternative scene in Toronto”.Otherinitiatives associated with the Hall included Wachea, a free food program for transients; Switchboard, an employment service; a crafts co-op tosupport local artisans;Guerrilla, an underground newspaper; and theToronto Free University. Links were also drawn with local theatre groups,the Toronto Free Youth Clinic, the Red White and Black resistors group,and Canada’s first and most notorious “free university,” Rochdale College.
The Baldwin Street community was a successful merger of thepolitical left and the emerging counterculture.It was also the scene ofmost of the city’s urban communes, the vast majority of which wereassociated with draft resisters and their families.70It also became the centreof hip enterprise, including the establishment of craft co-operatives such asthe Ragnarokr Leather Cooperative and the Little Yellow Ford Truck Store(also known as the Liberation Tribal Store), which sold locally made craftsas well as crafts imported from Southern and Central America.Theneighbourhood was also the home to Toronto’s first natural food store, theWhole Earth Foods. The Whole Earth Family commune established thisventure in July 1969 when the group pooled their resources to rent astorefront at 160 McCaul Street. The store was the first of its kind in thecity and introduced California-style natural food sales to Torontonians.
The members of the commune group purchased organic and pesticide-freefood in bulk, repackaged it, and took turns running the store. In return,everyone in the co-operative was guaranteed room and board, as there wasrarely any cash left over for distribution to the commune’s members.According to one of the original members of the commune, the store slowlydeveloped a “solid base of customers … consisting of hippies, Marxists, artstudents and [the] lunatic fringe.” “Over the years,” she continued, “nursesand doctors started drifting in … and eventually more … Moms and Dads,looking for new ways to eat.” But the idea of ecological sustainability wasfound not only in the range of products that occupied the shelves and binsof the store. Members of the commune scrounged old construction sitesfor the store furnishings and made everything in the store by hand from old wood, often recycled from the Teperman Wrecking Company.
If any of this sounds familiar to you as a climate activists, you should be alarmed. That was fifty years ago.
“One of the hardest parts of writing about the history of the climate crisis was stumbling across warnings from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, musing about how things might get bad sometime after the year 2000 if no one did anything about fossil fuels. They still had hope back then. Reading that hope today hurts.
“The headlines from around the world told a story still not fully understood or one we don’t want to face,” the report said. This claim that no one was paying attention was not entirely fair. Some scientists had been talking about the issue for a while. It had been in newspapers and on television, and was even mentioned in a speech by US president Lyndon Johnson in 1965. A few months before the CIA report was issued, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had addressed the UN under a banner of applying science to “the problems that science has helped to create”, including his worry that the poorest nations were now threatened with “the possibility of climatic changes in the monsoon belt and perhaps throughout the world”.
By this point, February 1977, the problem of burning fossil fuels was seen more through the lens of the domestic oil crisis rather than overseas famine. The climate crisis might still feel remote, the New York Times mused, but as Americans feel the difficulties of unusual weather combined with shortages of oil, perhaps this might unlock some change? The paper reported that both energy and climate experts shared the hope “that the current crisis is severe enough and close enough to home to encourage the interest and planning required to deal with these long-range issues before the problems get too much worse”.