Dave,

You are on the right track, and Vancouver is a perfect paragon of all the negative aspects of growth. SIted in a once beautiful environment inhabited by hundreds of thousands of native settlers living comfortably off the land, the growth at any cost mentality here has destroyed our renewable resources--salmon, forests, farmland, and even water--and has created the worst bubble economy on earth.

We are building thousands of new condos a year, in glass and steel towers impossible to insulate for cold and intolerable greenhouses in the summer without air conditioning. No one locally can afford these unsustainable "little boxes filled with tick-tacky," as they are priced at over 9 times the median family income here, and thus the most expensive housing in the world (UN data).

We thus have thousands of homeless living on the street, with numbers growing every year despite a "full employment" economy leading up to our recently winter Owe-lympics event. Condo towers built on top of retail have also starved us of any and all community gathering points, and thus atomizing our diverse population.

Meanwhile, we dump essentially raw sewage into our bays and inlets at all times, and during heavy rains, you can remove the word "essentially." We also directly dump millions of cubic metres of our most polluted urban soils right into the ocean, PAHs and PCBs included. No testing, no regulation, no penalties.

Now, I and a group called the Vancouver Media Cooperative have footage, mostly in 1080i HDV, of all of what I describe. It is easy to get more and you may see much more signs of decay we have not recognized. We also have a large number of highly articulate activists to interview, on every subject from Peak Oil to homelessness.

In the land of the lotus-eaters, Hooked on Growth is right at home.