A hike in the Grand Canyon makes one think Posted: October 20, 2012

Perceptions by Gerry Warner

In a world where 15-year-olds are being bullied to death, presidential candidates vie to see who can be rudest in front of the camera and the greatest of sports icons are revealed to be frauds, sometimes you’ve just got to get away.

And that’s what I did the past two weeks. I got away to one of the grandest places of all and you can do it too. Just point your vehicle south and drive over a thousand miles on Highway 93 – surely one of the loneliest highways in the world – and you’ll arrive at the heavily-forested Kaibab Plateau more than 8,000 feet high and staring down from the North Rim into of one of the greatest chasms on earth – the  Grand Canyon.

That initial look at the vastness below, the red and ochre cliffs rising like stone temples, the ancient limestone walls surrounding them and the lacy ribbon of the Colorado River shimmering in the deep shadows of the grey inner canyon rock almost two billion years old – well if that doesn’t take the cares of this woeful world off your heavy shoulders – then nothing will.

And so it was about a week ago when I heaved on my overnight pack and began what seemed like a million-step journey from the north to the south rims of the great gash in the earth’s crust that geologists say is at least 1.6 billion years old and studded with fossil remains to prove its unfathomable longevity. And believe me these numbers are as unfathomable to a mere mortal like yours truly as is the grandeur of the canyon itself. The reading material I brought with me said every step down you take down in the Grand Canyon is the equivalent of going back 100,000 years in time.

Try to fathom that one?

This means that in less than a step below the North Rim (pictured above) you’re back in time way beyond the pyramids and when you complete the step you’re already past the Neanderthals, the very ancestors of the human race. In about a kilometer, you’re walking with the dinosaurs and by the time you’ve hit the bottom of the canyon you’re more than half way to the first one-celled creatures that climbed out of the primordial ooze about four billion years after the origin of the earth. And you’ve done all this before curling up at night and watching the stars from the canyon floor.

Personally, I took some comfort in the fact that the geologists themselves differ greatly on the age of the Grand Canyon and how it even originated. The majority believe in the ‘Young Canyon’ theory, placing the great rift in the Earth’s crust at about six million years old while others think it could be as old as 70 million years with the rock layers themselves going back eons longer. The geological experts also disagree on the role the Colorado River played in the Canyon’s formation. Did the uplifting of the Kaibab Formation come first and the river later carved its way down or was the river already there cutting through the giant upwelling of rock as it rose? Oddly enough, almost all geologists agree there’s evidence that the Colorado River once flowed north-east, the opposite of what it flows now. How confusing can it get?

But I don’t think the Grand Canyon is meant to be understood. I’ll leave that to the geologists. In my view, the canyon is meant to be enjoyed and you can’t go wrong doing that. In the evening as the sun sets on the rim and light dances on the craggy buttes turning them into giant pyramids rising from the deep shadows below, it’s nothing short of magical. Then, in a few minutes, the light is gone and a faint orange glow settles over the vast panorama leaving only ghostly silhouettes etched against the sky and an endless canopy of stars twinkling over the darkened abyss beneath.

It’s enough to make an atheist think twice and the religious more faithful. As for the woes of the world, they’ll no doubt stay. But a visit to the Grand Canyon may make them a little more bearable.

Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and Cranbrook City Councillor. His views are his own.

A view from the Grand Canyon's South Rim. The Colorado River can just be seen flowing through it. Images by Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

Social media “journalism” poor substitute for real thing

Perceptions by Gerry Warner

Sept. 28, 2012

Just back from the UBCM convention Friday and all I can say is I despair for the future of print on paper journalism if the UBCM’s panel on “Social Media and Local Government Leadership” is any indication.

By “print on paper journalism” I mean just that – newspapers, magazines and books as opposed to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterist whatever that is.

The panel was made up of several of the stars of what I like to call “The Big City Media” in Vancouver as well as elected local government officials and it wasn’t long before the aforementioned started falling all over themselves showing how hip they were to using social media, sometimes called “New Journalism” or “Citizen Journalism” as opposed to the olden days four or five years ago of stogy old print on paper journalism often referred to “Legacy Media.”

And what do you think much of the discussion was about? How often they “tweeted” or “posted,” how many “likes” they got for certain stories and who had the most “followers.” I kid you not. One local government official sitting beside me was so disgusted by the discussion he called aloud “crap” and walked out. And frankly, I don’t blame him.

But as I sat there listening to the gibberish, I got to thinking. It’s an Internet World now whether we like it or not and Google, Facebook and Twitter are the new media gods as much as that may offend the sensibilities of some of us old Luddites. So as the Victorians said to nervous young brides prior to sex: “Lie on your back and think of England,” I’m trying to accept this so-called “new journalism,” but I’m not quite there yet. Let me tell you why.

Consider the huge scandal that erupted this week over the most read newspaper columnist in Canada, Margaret Wente of the Toronto Globe and Mail. Wente and the Globe have been in damage control all week over a column that Wente wrote almost three years ago that strongly appears to have borrowed some wording – word for word, in fact – from an earlier piece in the Ottawa citizen. In a news story Tuesday, the Globe said it had taken “disciplinary actions” against Wente but didn’t say what they were. Wente herself, in a mea culpa column said something about not checking her notes which sounded weak and unconvincing. The column prompted 1,800 comments on-line – a record – and most of them were negative.

So what’s going on here and what does it have to do with social media? Well, as a columnist myself, having written hundreds, probably more than a thousand, in 30 years of journalism, I think I can make an educated guess. Thanks to the Internet, it’s so easy for social media “journalists” to fall in the clutches of Google, Wikipedia and the like and ATRIBUTION, the Golden Rule of journalism, has gone out the window. The Net, in fact, makes finding “information” so easy that many of today’s “new journalists” conveniently overlook the quality of “information” they’ve received. This leads to shoddy and superficial journalism, or in the case of ideas and opinion, an irresistible temptation to pass off other ideas and opinions as their own. Under deadline pressure, they may even believe it’s their own, but that doesn’t excuse it.

I’d like to think this is what happened in the Wente case because I’ve greatly enjoyed her columns over the years and had a lot of respect for her. Now I don’t know whether my respect was deserved.

Social media, with the power of the Internet behind it, is indeed a powerful force. But often that power is a mile wide and an inch deep. It can be very superficial and with all the substance of a soap bubble. And so when I hear a bunch of seasoned media professionals and politicians on stage going ga ga about their tweets and followers, I really have to wonder. As George Bernard Shaw once said: “there’s less to this than meets the eye.”

Would Woodward and Bernstein have brought down a president by relying on Facebook postings and tweets? I doubt it because “Deep Throat,” their main source, was a flesh and blood person they interviewed face-to-face and not a random piece of information they found floating in cyberspace.

They call it the “New Journalism.” If that’s the case, I’d rather stick with the old.

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Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and a Cranbrook City councilor.