Quote of the week:

“Some of us will miss him. There are others I guess who will not.” —Irwin Steinberg, friend of colourful and controversial former Equality Party MNA for Westmount and later péquiste candidate Richard Holden, who committed suicide on Sunday.

Ecological earful

You won’t be able to toss a fistful of compost at Laurier Park without hitting an ecologist this weekend, with serial recyclers from every tree-hugging gang from Greenpeace to Équiterre to Écosolaire taking part in the first-ever Festival Écolo.

Fittingly, a dozen local earth-conscious Joes and Josephines organized the weekend festival, which will include information kiosks, food, music and workshops on limiting cars in the city, explaining UNESCO’s Earth Charter and on greening our laneways. The overall theme is air pollution, the local presence of which festival director André Boulanger blames on our auto-loving amigos.

“Half of us don’t have a car but we all submit to their aggression,” he says. “There are those who live in the city and then there are those who live off the city: people who drive in to work and make money, but aren’t aware of the damage they cause.”

Sandwiching the workshops are a festival kick-off benefit party on Friday at la Salle Belle Gueule, (5585 de la Roche, 9 p.m., $10) and a Sunday picnic at Laurier Park.

Check out www.festivalecolo.com for the nitty-gritty. » Kristian Gravenor

Ethical warfare

How do you justify going to war? How should the victor treat the vanquished? And what rights and obligations does a country bear towards the population it is occupying?

At a colloquium next week at the Université de Montréal, which will bring together academics from across North America, Europe and Africa, these are only some of the questions to be posed and debated. Christian Nadeau, of the UdeM philosophy department and the colloquium’s organizer, says many of the talks will be theoretical but draw on examples from Iraq to the 1967 Six-Day War.

But relatively recent approaches to solving international crises—humanitarian intervention, for example—will also be questioned. “What is the responsibility of a state to intervene in other states, but ones in which we are not necessarily engaged in or have links with?” Nadeau says. “For example, what’s the nature of our responsibility towards the situation in Darfur?”

War will be in the air next week from Sept. 27 to 29 at the Maison de la Culture Côte-des-Neiges (5290 Côte-des-Neiges). Admission is free. For the line-up, see www.creum.umontreal.ca. » Patrick Lejtenyi

Front line libraries

Local filmmaker Julian Samuel is fascinated by libraries. They are repositories of knowledge, centres of learning and essential to a well-educated and democratic populace. His newest documentary, Save and Burn, screening next week at Ex-Centris, will look at how libraries are used worldwide, but also how they can be abused and destroyed. Samuel turns his lens to the situation in Iraq and Palestine, where libraries have suffered terribly in the chaos of war zones.

“If you want to train a doctor, you need some manuals and some books,” he says. “If you want to train a civil engineer, you need books. If a library is destroyed, where are you going to get the books you need to be able to transport water?”

Samuel says he wants to accentuate the links between a country’s libraries and its civil society.

“Libraries contain instrumental tools of knowledge and history,” he says. “If you can’t touch the past, you can’t bring about the fruition of democracy.”

The film runs from Sept. 26 to 29 at Ex-Centris (3536 St-Laurent). Consult listings for showtimes. » Patrick Lejtenyi

Haiti unveiled

2005 marks Haiti’s independence bicentennial, and while history hasn’t been kind—politically, at least—there’s no denying the rich cultural contribution its citizens both there and abroad have made. Montreal’s Haitian community is particularly strong, and on Wednesday, Sept. 21, the line-up for a series of events celebrating Haitian culture was unveiled. Called “Haiti: 200 ans d’histoire à partager,” the series has as spokesmen Haitian-Montreal author Dany Lafferière and the president of Montreal-based human rights group Rights and Democracy Jean-Louis Roy.

“This will be a tour of our culture which will include various facets,” says organizer Marie Élise Lebon. “This will include music, both classical—which we call ‘savante,’ because it’s not very well known—and roots, which we call ‘voodoo jazz.’” Concerts will follow in the fall and spring.

Besides music, there will be a major colloquium in November on culture and development. Writers, economists, artists and other intellectuals will take part.

For more info, visit www.cidihca.com. » Patrick Lejtenyi

REAR-VIEW MIRROR

19 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK
Sept. 25–Oct. 15, 1986

On the cover: A graphic and photo of people standing outside a metro station, as the Mirror examines Montreal’s shambolic urban development. “There is no articulated image of the future,” complains one critic. “Planning in this city is light years behind the rest of North America,” adds another.

• Mayoral candidate and Foufounes co-owner François Yo Gourd explains the thinking behind his plan to annex Westmount should he win: “Westmount is the nipple of Montreal, and what’s a tit without a nipple.” He also plans to buy the Eiffel Tower as his first act as mayor.

• “Take the single ‘Dig It’: a hip-hop meets Satan kind of thing,” reads, in part, the review of Skinny Puppy’s Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse. “It’s the rhythm that’s accessible, not the product. Like Cabaret Voltaire before them, they seem to have applied their darkness to the dancefloor.”

• David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet is about small-town America’s seamy underbelly and its terrifying manifestations aren’t meant to be either pretty or conventionally understandable,” reads the review.

Angel >> Addressing euthanasia It’s a tough topic for anyone to broach, so when politicians do it, there are bound to be fireworks. In November, MPs will debate the issue in the House of Commons, after the Bloc’s Francine Lalonde proposed it earlier in the summer. Lalonde says that MPs have a moral obligation to do so, and she has a point: Earlier this year, Marielle Houle, a Sherbrooke woman, was allegedly suffocated by her husband, after she’d endured years of agony and had repeatedly expressed her wish to die. And then there’s the Terri Schiavo fiasco this spring. The right to die with dignity would spare the ill and infirm the final tragedy of being made a public spectacle.
Insect >> Warming polar seas With September almost gone, scientists will have a better idea as to how disastrous the situation in the polar seas has become. Satellite images have shown that the permanent ice sheet was at its smallest ever last month, and September is usually the month when the surface sea ice is at its minimum. Many scientists say that the warming and loss of ice may now be irreversible, as more heat from the sun is absorbed, causing more ice to melt. As proof, they look at last winter, when for the first time, the ice did not reform. This was the fourth year in a row ice levels did not rebound to normal levels.