Environment Haliburton

Haliburton in Transition

2011-02-21T06:17:00.000-08:00

Environment Haliburton! is investigating the Transition Initative and its application locally. This is a grassroots movement that started in Ireland and England several years ago. It has since spread around the world. The Transition movement is about communities responding to the challenges of:
1. Peak Oil….with the profound implications of the inevitable contraction of oil-based energy;
2. Climate Change …which is destabilising the planetary biosphere with implications for habitation, agriculture and food supplies;
and now
3. Economic Instability… which is reflected in rising food and transportation costs, unemployment, and the contraction of credit.

The Transition movement arose to confront these challenges and seeks to re-examine core values and essential functions of commuity life with creativity, imagination and humour . It is positive, solutions-focused, viral and fun. It provides an opportunity to improve the health and resilience of the community during the transition that awaits us.

At a meeting held on January 29th, members of Environment Haliburton! watched the video, ‘In Transition 1.0’ (http://vimeo.com/8029815). ‘In Transition 1.0’ is the first detailed film about the Transition movement filmed by those that know it best, those who are making it happen on the ground. We then discussed its relevance to the citizens of Haliburton County.

It was noted that there are already organisations in Haliburton County engaged in aspects of what Transition addresses. Local food, improved public transportation, the farmer’s market, community gardens, Healthy Communities are all aspects of Transition. Co-operation and mutual support with a positive attitude to transition is the aim.

It was agreed that we would invite a representative of an existing Transition group to describe how the Transition movement started in their community and how it might work here. We also agreed that we would invite individuals and representatives of existing organizations in Haliburton County who might be interested in learning about the Transition movement.

Environment Haliburton has invited David and Bonnie Collacut of Transition Barrie to speak and dialogue with those who come, on Saturday February 26, 10am in Room 12 at the Haliburton campus of Sir Sandford Fleming College.

Call 705-754 -9873 if you plan to attend or if you cannot, but would like to be kept informed. We are asking that you watch the video referred to above, if you can, prior to the meeting. Searching on Transition Town or Transition culture will also provide information on the the global Transition movement.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius power and magic in it! (Goethe)

Tree cutting bylaw coming for county - Haliburton Echo - Ontario, CA

2011-01-28T08:56:00.000-08:00

http://www.haliburtonecho.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2951962

By Chad Ingram

Updated 20 minutes ago

The county is moving towards the establishment of a tree preservation bylaw.

County councillors voted at a Jan. 26 meeting to put out a request to the four lower-tier municipalities to delegate all or part of their powers to create bylaws surrounding the destruction of trees to the county.

The bylaw would look mainly at the destruction of vegetation in shoreline areas and county planner Jane Tousaw said putting it in the hands of the county would be the most cost-effective for all municipalities.

Tousaw said the county would incur unknown costs affiliated with licensing, site inspections and enforcement related to the process, but that if not all townships agreed to the process, there could be overlapping of duties and possible duplication of costs.

"It's a huge enforcement issue if it isn't handled properly," said Dysart et al Reeve and county warden Murray Fearrey.

Tousaw said there was a drive from the public to see action on the issue.

"There is some urgency from the public's sort of view … to go through with this policy," she said.

Tousaw said while many people want to see increased protection of shoreline vegetation, there are some who don't feel it's not the government's place to be telling them what trees they can and can't cut on their properties.

The county's various lake associations should also be called on for input, she said.

Tousaw said how far the setback would be still has to be identified.

None of the county's townships currently has a such a bylaw.

H20 Woes: Measuring the Damage of our 'Water Footprint' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

2009-08-27T11:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,644867,00.html

By Samiha Shafy

A Dutch hydro engineer has come up with a "water footprint." At a conference in Sweden, he and other participants discussed water waste, supermarkets filled with fruits and vegetables produced in some of the world's most arid regions and ways we can stop wasting our most precious resource.

Arjen Hoekstra didn't really stand out in the crowd of 2,000 scientists, activists, politicians and representatives of industry roaming the halls of the Stockholm trade fair. Far more attention-getting figures than the 42-year-old Dutch hydro engineer attended World Water Week in Sweden last week. Asian delegates wore glowing saris. And Indian businessman Bindeshwar Pathak drew flocks of media everywhere he went at the event after being named the recipient of this year's Stockholm Water Prize for inventing a toilet for slum dwellers.

But Hoekstra preferred to keep a low profile at the annual global conference, which focuses on water-related issues. He had nothing to prove. Still despite his apparent efforts to keep a low-profile, Hoekstra's creation served as a magnet for debate here. Hoekstra came up with the idea of the "water footprint."

10,000 Liters of Water for a Pair of Jeans

His equation is actually just a couple of numbers used to describe the amount of water that is used -- or polluted -- during the manufacture of various products. Anyone can calculate their water footprint by looking at the amount of water they use directly and then by looking at the amount of "virtual water" they use -- that is, how much water is used in the production of any goods they consume. The global average for an individual's water footprint is 1,243 cubic meters of water per year. In the US, this goes up to 2,483 cubic meters per year; in Germany it's 1,545 and in China, 702.

Hoekstra's water footprint formula has already made headlines around the world with its estimates of the amount of water that is used or abused in the simple products that are a part of our everyday lives:

140 liters of water for one cup of coffee!

2,400 liters for a hamburger!

10,000 liters for one pair of jeans!

In the dicussions and workshops in Stockholm, participants debated what sort of action should be taken as a result of the water footprint figures. The WWF environmental group first recognized the validity of the water footprint, and further conservation and environmental protection groups as well as the United Nations and the World Bank soon followed suit. Finally, even multinational companies like Nestle, Unilever and Pepsi got on board.

Virtual Water Heading In The Wrong Direction

And they all seem to agree that Hoekstra's numbers could be potentially explosive -- mainly because they make it clear how thoughtlessly water, the most precious of resources, is handled in so many areas. "Because of the international trade in water-intensive products, there are floods of virtual water flowing around the world," Hoekstra said. "And many of them are flowing in the wrong direction, going from water-poor regions to the water-rich."

Mostly these flows involve food, biofuels and cotton. Between 70 and 80 percent of all the water consumption in the world is used for agricultural purposes. The European Union, for example, contributes indirectly to the drying out of the ever-shrinking Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan through its cotton imports from the region. And when the Germans buy ham from Spain or oranges from Israel, they are also contributing to water scarcity in those areas. In fact, Germany, a country that has plenty of water, is one of the biggest importers of virtual water in the world.

Today, around 1.4 billion people live in areas where water is scarce. Climate change, population growth and the flows of virtual water only serve to exascerbate the problem. "By 2050, we will be confronted with the paradoxical situation of having to feed another 2.5 billion people, but with significantly less water," said Colin Chartres, director general of the International Water Management Institute, an internationally funded, non-profit organization looking into ways to improve land and water management.

'In Dry Areas There Should Be No More Agriculture'

Against that backdrop, delegates in Stockholm argued about how realistic Hoekstra's more radical ideas are. "In dry areas there should be no more agriculture," the Dutchman has suggested. His idea involves using the trade in virtual water to rebalance the earth's water budget. Instead of watering desert fields, Egypt would be better off importing beans or millet from Ethiopia, for example. And Australia, where the Outback is one of the world's most arid regions, should also cease to export virtual water in the form of meat, fruit and wine production.

The same arguments could be applied to all of Earth's dry zones -- from the Middle East to northern China and northwestern India to Southern California. Hoekstra says all of these regions could mitigate their water paucity by letting their fields dry up and importing more virtual water. "These water-poor regions need to come up with a new vision for the future," Hoekstra argued. "Just as the oil producing countries, where oil is starting to run out, have had to do."

But what would make any country abandon agriculture, altogether or partially? British environmental researcher Tony Allan, 72, first coined the phrase "virtual water" in the 1990s and he agrees with Hoekstra. "Singapore is an interesting example," he said. "They don't have water sources or agriculture. Ninety percent of their water needs are covered by the import of virtual water. The rest comes from recycling and desalination."

Rich Countries Buying Up Land To Insure Water Supplies

Of course, Allan knows that Singaporean model isn't necessarily appropriate for the rest of the world. Even he admitted that no country would voluntarily give up its agricultural practices in the foreseeable future. "But it is no longer taboo to talk about these things," he noted.

During the Stockholm workshops, experts quickly agreed that new pricing structures could steer the water trade in the right directions. Today, water prices are often distorted through government subsidies to farmers -- mainly because if the subsidies were not there, then agriculture and animal husbandry would very quickly become prohibitively expensive in those dry regions and no longer worthwhile.

Meanwhile, countries like China and Saudia Arabia are buying up large, fertile pieces of land in places like Africa, Asia and Latin America. By buying land instead of food, they are ensuring access to water in the future. The land-grabbing countries aren't alone, either -- they're competing directly with food production giants like Nestle and Coca-Cola, which have been buying up rights to water reservoirs around the world for years.

Many companies are welcoming the increasing debate about water footprints in Stockholm. It's a great opportunity for them to do something to improve their image. Indeed, several large corporations sent whole delegations to Stockholm. At the workshops, the delegates continually repeated the same message: Their employers are trying their very best to leave a smaller water footprint.

URL:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,644867,00.html

Popular Insect Repellent Deet Is Neurotoxic

2009-08-06T09:11:00.001-07:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090804193230.htm

ScienceDaily (Aug. 6, 2009) — The active ingredient in many insect repellents, deet, has been found to be toxic to the central nervous system. Researchers say that more investigations are urgently needed to confirm or dismiss any potential neurotoxicity to humans, especially when deet-based repellents are used in combination with other neurotoxic insecticides.

Vincent Corbel from the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Montpellier, and Bruno Lapied from the University of Angers, France, led a team of researchers who investigated the mode of action and toxicity of deet (N,N-Diethyl-3-methylbenzamide). Corbel said, "We've found that deet is not simply a behavior-modifying chemical but also inhibits the activity of a key central nervous system enzyme, acetycholinesterase, in both insects and mammals".

Discovered in 1953, deet is still the most common ingredient in insect repellent preparations. It is effective against a broad spectrum of medically important pests, including mosquitoes. Despite its widespread use, controversies remain concerning both the identification of its target sites at the molecular level and its mechanism of action in insects. In a series of experiments, Corbel and his colleagues found that deet inhibits the acetylcholinesterase enzyme – the same mode of action used by organophosphate and carbamate insecticides.

These insecticides are often used in combination with deet, and the researchers also found that deet interacts with carbamate insecticides to increase their toxicity. Corbel concludes, "These findings question the safety of deet, particularly in combination with other chemicals, and they highlight the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to the development of safer insect repellents for use in public health".

Journal reference:

Vincent Corbel, Maria Stankiewicz, Cedric Pennetier, Didier Fournier, Jure Stojan, Emmanuelle Girard, Mitko Dimitrov, Jordi Molgo, Jean Marc Hougard and Bruno Lapied. Evidence for inhibition of cholinesterases in insect and mammalian nervous systems by the insect repellent deet. BMC Biology, (in press) [link]

Adapted from materials provided by BioMed Central, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Canadian Feds Grossly Underestimate Impact of Gutting Environmental Law

2009-06-28T17:00:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Doug Smith

Up to 14,000 projects will evade assessment over the next 2 years

June 26, 2009

CONTACT: Ecojustice
Justin Duncan, Lawyer, Ecojustice (416) 368-7533 ext 22
Stephen Hazell, Executive Director, Sierra Club Canada (613) 241-4611 ext 238; (613) 724-1908 (cell)

Two months after announcing the enactment of controversial regulations that will allow more than 2,000 projects across the country to evade legally required environmental assessments, the federal government has revealed that the number of projects being exempted from assessment will now be up to 14,000 over the next two years.

"It is clear that the Harper government is having troubles with basic mathematics," said Ecojustice lawyer Justin Duncan. "In addition to a spiralling fiscal debt, they're saddling Canadians with an environmental debt that may never be paid back."

In April, Ecojustice launched a lawsuit on behalf of Sierra Club Canada claiming that the federal government acted unlawfully in issuing two federal regulations that gut the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA). The Federal Court has just allowed the groups to amend their filings to challenge the expanded exemption of 14,000 projects.

The lawsuit challenges the Exclusion List Regulations that exempt thousands of projects such as highways, bridges, roads and sewer systems from facing the scrutiny of legally required federal assessments over the next two years. The lawsuit also challenges the Adaptation Regulations that unlawfully give powers to the Minister of the Environment to exempt any other project from federal environmental assessment (EA) that is funded under the Building Canada Fund.

"EA is a key tool to identify and assess the adverse environmental effects of development projects so good decisions can be made" said Sierra Club Canada Executive Director Stephen Hazell, "in throwing 14,000 economic stimulus projects out of the EA process, the federal government is effectively saying we don't want to know the environmental effects. Damn the environmental torpedoes, full speed ahead."

CEAA was passed in 1992 to promote sustainable development by ensuring that federal decision makers have good information about the environmental impacts of projects and to ensure public participation in the environmental assessment process.

The government was served with formal notice on Monday that the groups seek to amend the lawsuit to include the expanded exemption list. The case is expected to be heard in Federal Court later this year.

The Transition Initiative | Orion Magazine

2009-06-25T05:38:00.001-07:00

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4792

If the Transition Initiative were a person, you’d say he or she was charismatic, wise, practical, positive, resourceful, and very, very popular. Starting with the town of Totnes in Devon, England, in September 2006, the movement has spread like wildfire across the U.K. (delightfully wriggling its way into The Archers, Britain’s longest-running and most popular radio soap opera), and on to the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The core purpose of the Transition Initiative is to address, at the community level, the twin issues of climate change and peak oil—the declining availability of “ancient sunlight,” as fossil fuels have been called. The initiative is set up to enable towns or neighborhoods to plan for, and move toward, a post-oil and low-carbon future: what Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Initiative, has termed “the great transition of our time, away from fossil fuels.”

Nuclear-plant workers face elevated cancer risk

2009-06-23T21:41:00.001-07:00

http://www.canada.com/Nuclear+plant+workers+face+elevated+cancer+risk+report/1724362/story.html

By Jeremy Warren, Canwest News ServiceJune 23, 2009

Saskatoon Star Phoenix

SASKATOON - Those working in, and living near, nuclear-power plants -- such as the one being considered for construction in Saskatchewan -- are more likely than the general population to develop cancer or die from it, according to a research paper being released Tuesday.

The 30-page Exposure to Radiation and Health Outcomes, commissioned by the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, found that chronic exposure to low doses of radiation causes the higher risk.

A 15-country, 12-year, 407,391-person study of nuclear-power workers found the employees are twice as likely to die from all causes of cancer than the general public because of the extra radiation exposure, said the report written by Saskatchewan-based health researcher, Mark Lemstra.

But in Canada, one of the 15 countries studied, reactor workers are 7.65 times more likely to die from all causes of cancer compared to non-employees, said the report. Researchers are unsure why Canadian reactor workers seem to face a higher cancer risk than those in other nuclear countries.

"We don't know why Canadians are more likely to get cancer than others,'' said Lemstra, a former researcher with the Saskatoon Health Region. "We are going to have to consider revising the protection standards of nuclear workers. ''

Another study, which looked only at cancer rates among Canadian workers, concluded nuclear-power workers are still 3.8 times more likely to die from radiation-related cancer than non-workers, said the report. "The results . . . confirm that chronic exposure to low doses of radiation are associated with an excess relative risk of cancer mortality,'' it said.

The report was presented to the Future of Uranium in Saskatchewan stakeholder conference in Regina. Lemstra cited 22 articles in the report, pared down from a review of more than 1,700 articles he found in medical databases, reference lists and on the Internet. The report found that, even outside the workplace, radiation has effects on the human population.

A German study cited in the report found children below the age of five who live within five kilometres of a nuclear facility are 2.19 times more likely to develop leukemia. "There's a simple solution: Keep children more than 10 kilometres away from a nuclear facility,'' said Lemstra.

Children are more susceptible to radiation because, in the early stages of development, their bodies are more sensitive to the effects of inhalation, ingestion and other forms of internal exposure, said the report. "The association between leukemia incidence and mortality from radiation exposure is very strong. The greatest risks are found for youth under the age of 20,'' said the report.

Health effects of nuclear power go beyond radiation. Consistent cost overruns of constructing a nuclear reactor can siphon off government money that could be spent elsewhere, according to the report. If the provincial government is responsible for all, or a percentage of, cost overruns -- a common deal between private and government partners -- there is less money for health or education spending, wrote Lemstra.

In Finland, a reactor under construction has already gone 50 per cent over its $4.2-billion budget and will cost $8 billion to finish. Based on the $10-billion estimate to build a reactor in Saskatchewan, the final tally could rise to $20 billion, and if the province is responsible for a portion of the extra costs, government coffers will be stretched thin to the detriment of other departments, said Lemstra.

``Where will this money come from? In the U.S., the costs are transferred to the public or the ratepayers,'' he said. ``We don't really have the extra money to spend on risky ventures.''

jjwarren@sp.canwest.com

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

Half Farmer, Half Something Else: 'New' Lifestyles for an Eco-Friendly 21st Century

2009-05-15T07:28:00.001-07:00

http://www.enviweb.cz/?env=obecne_archiv_hgbhaHalf_Farmer_Half_Something_Else_New_Lifestyles_for_an_Eco_Friendly_21st_Century.html

Half Farmer, Half Something Else: 'New' Lifestyles for an Eco-Friendly 21st Century

02.05.2009

The global economic crisis, which began with the collapse of U.S. securities house Lehman Brothers in 2008, also triggered a series of business failures and job losses in Japan.

The nation was already facing a number of problems. An increasing number of young people is having trouble finding jobs. Many people are quitting their jobs early. The country's self sufficiency in energy and food is low, at 4 percent and 40 percent, respectively. Japan has a rapidly aging society, bringing with it elderly nursing care issues, along with the aging of the farming population, with more than two-thirds of farmers aged over 65. Moreover, the number of people complaining of mental disorders is growing rapidly, and more than 30,000 people commit suicide each year. Meanwhile, a new lifestyle is quietly becoming popular. Some think this way of living, called the "Half-Farmer/Half-X" lifestyle, has the potential to significantly reduce or gradually solve these other problems, and to help the nation realize a more attractive and diverse future.

A 21st-Century Lifestyle: Friendly to Planet, Friendly to People.The concept of the Half-Farmer/Half-X lifestyle was first proposed in the mid-1990s by Naoki Shiomi, who now lives in the city of Ayabe in the north part of Kyoto Prefecture. The basic idea is that people pursue farming, not so much as a business but to grow food for their own family, while being constructively involved in society by realizing their own personal passion -- something he called their "X" factor. The "X" represents the questions each person must answer to find out what they really prefer to do, what they really want to do, and what they can do for others, while discovering their personal mission, their life's work, or their "true" calling in life.

Shiomi himself began pursuing this lifestyle years ago, and now helps many people find their own "X." He said that through these practices, he keenly sensed that this type of lifestyle is a way of making the most of each person's talent and abandoning the twentieth-century style of mass production, mass consumption, mass and long-distance transportation, and mass disposal, while pointing the way to making happier lives and a sustainable Earth more possible.

Environmental Problems Inspired the Half-Farmer/Half-X Lifestyle Shiomi first came up with this idea while considering the solutions to environmental problems, and this encouraged him to start the quest for a better lifestyle. When he left his hometown of Ayabe and moved to another urban area, he began to consider environmental problems from the perspective of future generations and ponder how he should live. As a result, he felt a strong ambition to start subsistence farming to enable his family to grow crops at least for their own consumption.

Shiomi also believes that environmental issues are largely associated with people's attitudes and mind-frames, an example being that some people shop and spend money on things they don't really need just to satisfy an emotional void. In industrialized countries, for example, many people tend to consume goods haphazardly in order to feel fulfilled, or buy goods on impulse after receiving prodding from various information sources, such as commercial advertisements on television and in newspapers, magazines, as well as flyers, and in-store point-of-purchase displays.

While practicing such consumption patterns, people don't have the time to give more than a passing thought to the global environment or the working conditions of the producers of the goods they buy. When shopping, they often put things into their shopping basket without even considering whether they are absolutely necessary, whether using them matches their values, or whether the products can be used for a long time. Shiomi believes the root causes of today's environmental problems are linked to most people's immature ways of trying to find their own identity, as well as their desire to simply consume, which leads to consumption behavior that resembles an addiction.

Shiomi discovered a fundamental truth by living the Half-Farmer/Half-X lifestyle back in his rural hometown of Ayabe. In other words, he found contentment in making less money but being spiritually enriched. And he is not alone. Others living the same lifestyle in Ayabe find it to be true. Shiomi says he has heard similar comments from other practitioners of the Half-Farmer/Half-X lifestyle, whose numbers have increased nationwide in recent years. Basically, they are content with their lives, in which they enjoy the practice of everyday farming, even on a small scale, and at the same time they work on developing a satisfying vocation, thereby not turning so easily to consumption, and in fact finding less need for it. In addition, because agriculture -- which is integrally affected by weather, water, soil, air, and other natural elements -- is part of their daily lives, they cannot help but shift their focus to the natural world and become sensitive to changes in the environment. Naturally, they develop a "sense of wonder," as described by Rachel Carson, author of the environmental book "Silent Spring."

Farming Complements a Person's "X" Factor Shiomi explains that one of the reasons he recommends the Half-Farmer/Half-X lifestyle is that through it people can enhance and deepen both their farming life and their vocations at the same time. In the act of growing things, people experience nature directly and begin to harmonize with it. They also feel more closely connected in mind and body with the cycles of life through the experience of being close to life and death and nurturing living things. In the modern era, in which places of production and consumption are almost completely separate, being involved with growing things could be instrumental for many people to regain a sensitivity to and sensibility about the natural world.

Meanwhile, almost everyone wonders from time to time who they really are and what is the purpose of their life. According to Shiomi, the answer to these questions is to practice the "X" each person is called to do. When truly being engaged in their "X," he says, people might even forget about sleeping and eating, be filled with enthusiasm, really enjoy their life, and feel life is worth living. The experience of becoming more sensitive by focusing on farming and deeper thoughts, while sharpening sensibility through earnest work, often brings out the best in people while they work on their personal calling. Not only that, people tend to feel immeasurably more secure in this economic crisis when they know they have enough basic food to survive, at least until next summer.

Learning about True Affluence through the Half-Farmer/Half-X Lifestyle In the old days, having many and large possessions was considered a sign of affluence, and people actively pursued this status, but lately some people's values are changing slowly but steadily. Nowadays, more people are asking themselves if they will really be that happy if they have a lot of things.

Shiomi has conveyed the concept of the Half-Farmer/Half-X lifestyle through lectures, books, the Internet, etc., and he says that people in their twenties to forties, the so-called "debt generation," show particularly strong interest in his concept. This seems to be because they are the ones that will have to pay the debt left by the previous generation, which over-consumed natural resources and abused the environment. A steadily increasing number of young people are recognizing that it's better to share benefits rather than monopolize them, to live life commensurate with one's income level rather than chasing after unnecessarily large things, and keeping pace with the flow of nature rather than leading a hectic life consuming energy and sacrificing the environment. These people are working to incorporate this more comfortable lifestyle into their daily lives.

Many people in Ayabe are now exploring their own "X," irrespective of their age and gender, and whether they grew up there or moved from outside. In fact, a number of people have become successful while exploring their "X," and have helped in activating their communities at the same time. For example, one woman aged over 70 started to offer accommodations at her spacious farmhouse as a green tourism business. And one former teacher began growing roses in memory of Anne Frank to donate as symbols of peace. There's also a married couple focusing on their painting works of art, while also cultivating their sensitivity to nature and engaging in farming. Once hearing stories like these, more and more people have come to visit Ayabe to see how people there live, from as far away as Taiwan, where one of Shiomi's books has been translated into Chinese.

It is not only in Ayabe that this is happening but also other regions throughout Japan, where an increasing number of people are following the Half-Farmer/Half-X concept and leading more enriched, happy lives. Shiomi believes a new fulfilled and happy life model can be followed in a society consisting of people who have found their own "X." He believes that creation of such a society is his own "X" quest.

Living in the countryside is not necessarily a prerequisite to living the Half-Farmer/Half-X lifestyle. There are many ways to grow things--on balconies, rooftops, weekend farm plots, community gardens, and so on. A flexible type of thinking is necessary to live the Half-Farmer/Half-X lifestyle, regardless of whether a person lives in the city or the country, and nothing can be perfect from the start. Accomplishing just one percent of a person's ideal way of farming and exploring their personal "X" is progress in itself; there is no formula that must be followed. People should start with what is possible right now. Sowing at least one seed is the quickest way to start growing things and finding one's own "X" factor.

The Half-Farmer/Half-X concept is spreading, and is seen as a ray of light showing the way to a better lifestyle in this modern society, which is facing various problems regarding self-sufficiency, food supply, employment, mental issues, environmental issues, aging, energy, education, money-centrism, and so on. Hopefully, more remedies to the problems of our age will be revealed in the next 10 years or less and will include new lifestyles like the one Shiomi lives.

Written by Hiroyo Hasegawa

Japan For Sustainability

A PERMACULTURE RETROFIT FOR AN OLDER DWELLING

2009-05-06T12:07:00.001-07:00

This list was published on Robert Waldrop's website
http://www.bettertimesinfo.org/retrofit.htm

New passive solar construction isn't an option for many people. There is a crucial need for ideas and practical examples for retrofitting existing houses and other buildings to be more sustainable and frugal in their operations. This list is not meant to be a prescription for all situations, but rather some ideas that can be implemented based on the situation and local climate. It cannot be emphasized enough that using passive solar is very site specific. What works in the Tropics doesn't necessarily work for Nova Scotia. Much of this list mirrors the plan we have for retrofitting our dwelling in Oklahoma City, which is a Craftsman-style duplex built in 1929.

The goal is to recreate our dwelling so that it is frugal in its operations and which provides its residents a high quality of life. This is our best practices list. Feel free to make suggestions for additional ideas and possibilities. bwaldrop@cox.net

1. Super-insulate the dwelling. We are going for R-35 in the walls and R-75 in the attic. We think the best resource to use for this is cellulose. It has a lower embodied energy than fiberglass. In existing construction, the way to get this much insulation in walls is to build a new interior frame all the way around the exterior walls of your house. Pack that with cellulose, cover with whatever, and voila, superinsulated walls. You lose a little space, 10 inches or so inches around the exterior walls. Do this first. The goal in our Oklahoma City climate is to spend more now for passive measures that will reduce the long-term operating costs of the dwelling, and make it comfortable and livable even if outside energy is cut-off for significant periods of time. :Super-insulation also includes paying careful attention to air infiltration, and doing a proper job of caulking and weatherstripping.

2. Make passive solar adaptations to the existing structure. We can all hope we have a good site for solar, but with retrofit you have to make do with what you got. I am not an expert on passive solar, but I am reasonably well read as a layman on the subject and have been discussing passive solar on line for several years. Passive solar adadptations involve figuring out ways to capture more solar energy and use it to condition the interior of the house. The cost of a solar retrofit is an investment which pays interest every month for the rest of the life of the dwelling, in the form of reduced energy expenses.

Passive solar retrofits can be multifunctional, but adding new functions to the sun space doesn't increase the amount of energy available, it divides it among the tasks at hand. Many tasks equals less energy for any one task. So decide at the beginning of your design process what the most important benefit is that you want from the solar retrofit. If you primarily want to heat the house in the winter, then you want a sun space without a lot of thermal mass, which will heat up fast and move that heat into the house. If you want to grow plants in that space, however, you will have to have extra thermal mass to keep the plants warm at night, and all of the heat that is stored in the sunspace for that purpose is not available to heat the house. This is just a short description of the possibilities. The point is that even older houses can have what amount to advanced passive solar retrofits and get very good results. Our duplex is Craftsman era, and the finished look of whatever we add onto our south wall will likely look a lot like a 1920s era porch.

3. Abandon conventional air conditioning in the summer. We don't use conventional air conditioning and we encourage everybody else to abandon it too. There is an art to living without air conditioning that has largely been lost. People used to know how (and when) to open their houses at night for ventilation, and when to close them up in the day time to keep out the heat of the days. Ceiling and table fans can move the air around inside (thereby knocking about 10 degrees Farenheit off the apparent temperature). In areas with low humidity, swamp coolers are a good choice. A low powere whole house fan which is operated at night also helps. More information about our experience living without air conditioning in Oklahoma City can be found at http://www.energyconservationinfo.org/noacok.htm . We think this http://www.tamtech.com/wholehousefanhv1000.htm is a really interesting low power whole house fan.

4, Grey water recovery and re-use system.

5. Solar clothes dryer (a/k/a The Clothesline.). This is the easiest passive solar retrofit. And it provides a great return - nothing beats the smell of air dried clothes.

6. Get rid of high energy/wasteful appliances such as dishwashers, garbage disposals and compacters, and clothes dryers.

7. Replace incandescent lighting with compact flourescent lighting. This is "low hanging fruit", do this early in your retrofit plan.

8. Window and door quilts. Hang these over the inside of windows in the winter.

9. Window shades in the summer - on the outside of the windows. Once the sun hits the window, the heat gets in the house by conduction, even if there is a shade and a curtain on the inside of the window.

10. Use landscaping to lower your energy bills. Plant deciduous trees and other vegetation and place structures (trellises, vines, large shrubs, etc.) appropriately so that your sunny exposures are shaded in the summer, but open to sunlight in the winter.

11. Green roofs (or very shady roofs). People with flat roofs should definitely consider a green roof. Everybody should want a shady roof.

12. Rainwater harvesting and distribution system.

13. Drip irrigation for gardens (fed with harvested rainwater and grey water).

14. Super-insulated room in the interior as a "cold weather shelter".

15. Wood burning stoves for cooking and heating.

16. Outdoor kitchen for summer use, including a brick oven and a solar oven.

17. Edible landscaping (permaculture zones 1 and 2).

18. Solar hot water heating.

19. Solar air heating. This is an active solar retrofit that heats air and moves it into the house, usually with fans.

20. Solar chargers for small batteries (like the one at http://www.ccrane.com/solar-battery-charger.aspx , which costs $15, we have several and they work fine. Get a battery tester too as it doesn't have a way to monitor how much charge is in the battery.).

21. Underground food storage area -- for storage of vegetables, home processed foods, and aging saurkraut, kimchee, pickles, wine, beer, vinegar. Also functions as a tornado shelter.

22. Exterior shutters for windows (instead of or in addition to window shades.)

23. Double or triple paned windows and/or "storm windows". If you put your house in super-insulation mode, you will have 10-12 inch thick walls. Think about a second window on the interior. And a window quilt.

24. Regular attention to caulking and weatherstripping.

25. Ventilate the attic.

Robert Waldrop, Oklahoma City

www.bettertimesinfo.org

www.energyconservationinfo.org

www.oklahomafood.coop

Early Spring

2009-05-06T11:05:00.001-07:00

Breaking the silence about Spring

Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than seventy locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring — in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the like? The records the USDA have kept show that those same lilacs are blooming as much as two weeks earlier than they did in 1965. April has, in a very real sense, become May. This is one of the interesting facts that you’ll read about in Amy Seidl’s book, Early Spring, a hot-off-the-press essay about the impacts of climate change on the world immediately around us – the forest, the birds, the butterflies in our backyards.

The brilliant title of Seidl’s book was one of the reasons that it caught my attention. The other was that I have realized I need to better educate myself about the impact of climate change on everyday life. I’ve been dismissive of the idea that the average person can really detect the impacts of recent warming on, for example, the timing of the apple-blossom season, but I’ve been taken to task by several of RealClimate’s readers for this. If you are paying attention, they have argued, the changes are actually rather obvious.

Of course, Amy Seidl is not the average person. Rather, she’s a trained ecologist with a Ph.D. (as well as an avid gardener) and she’s clearly paying extremely close attention. Her book is the first one I have read that effectively brings home the tangible impacts that global warming will have – is having – on our everyday lives. “We are increasingly familiar,” she writes, of images of melting glaciers, “but how do we give them relevance in our lives? From my window I see no glaciers.” She answers her own question with a series of vignettes, some from her own experiences, many more from her extensive research (well referenced throughout the book).

Cardinals, robins and cowbirds are all arriving earlier in Vermont than they did a century ago. Kingfishes, fox sparrows and towhees are not. Why the difference? The answer, as Seidl explains, is that the former group has the ability to respond ecologically to the changes, because these birds cue their arrival to temperature. The latter, it appears, respond more directly to temporal cues, that won’t change even as climate does. It’s obvious from this example that the make up of bird life in Vermont – the species distribution – will change over time. This may not necessarily be a bad thing of course. On the other hand, it turns out that the robins are the most important host for West Nile virus; the early bird gets the worm, so to speak, and passes it along to humans.

Maple seedlings need about 100 days of below-freezing weather. As this becomes rarer, fewer maples will populate the forests. This, Seidl explains, is why species-range models predict the decline and eventual loss of sugar maple (at least in New England) in the future. But, she notes, the models don’t take into account the full complexity of the system, such as the impact of competition among different species. So we don’t really know what will happen, or how fast. What we do know is that maple-sugar farmers have noticed – and documented – an earlier maple sugaring season over the last few decades.

There are many other examples in Early Spring both of clear climate-related changes (such as the early arrival of robins), and of less clear-cut changes (the maple sugaring season). Seidl doesn’t make the common mistake of assuming that the more ambiguous examples are necessarily due to climate change. For example, she quotes a maple-sugarer who points out that technological changes have allowed them to tap maples earlier, and hence that the timing of sugaring is a weak measure of climate change. The point though, is that even rather minor changes are, after all, being noticed. And if much larger changes do occur, as predicted, they will most certainly have impacts we can’t ignore, even if we don’t live in the Arctic or in Bangladesh. In other words, Seidl tells us, listen to the farmers and gardeners, and the observations of regular people: they are meaningful.

The soberness of Seidl’s approach to the subject of climate change impacts contrasts starkly with that of many books before it. It couldn’t be further, for example, from Mark Lynas’s book, Six Degrees, which is a truly alarming read. In my comments on Six Degrees, I said that it wasn’t an alarmist book. I stand by that characterization, because – and this is what I liked about it – it doesn’t go beyond what is in the scientific literature. However, while Lynas’s book is a straightforward reading of the scientific literature, it is a somewhat uncritical one, and hence tends to emphasize what might happen in the future over what will happen; this is a point that many readers of my review seem to have missed. Seidl’s book, on the other hand, is focused on the more certain – and often less dramatic — things, and on the impacts we are likely to see in our own lifetimes.

The calm demeanor of Seidl’s book, and the very personal nature of it, could lead one to think that it is primarily just a philosophical reflection on the climate change story. Indeed, Bill McKibben, in his introduction to Early Spring, says that in the face of changes we may not be able to prevent, “one of our tasks is simply to bear witness”. Certainly, the book is partly that. But Seidl’s voice, like Rachel Carson’s before her, has the authentic and authoritative voice of a scientist, made all the more compelling for being very much rooted in the author’s own story and experiences. And she doesn’t pull punches when she has something definitive to say: “One thing is clear:” she writes, “we will not be able to manage the climate”.

Early Spring has the potential to be immensely influential, a real turning point in the popular appreciation of climate change impacts among laypersons and scientists alike. Read it.

Lester Brown:Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?

2009-05-06T07:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=civilization-food-shortages&print=true

Scientific American Magazine - April 22, 2009

Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?

The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse

By Lester R. Brown

One of the toughest things for people to do is to anticipate sudden change. Typically we project the future by extrapolating from trends in the past. Much of the time this approach works well. But sometimes it fails spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided by events such as today’s economic crisis.

For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate probably seems preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think seriously about such a complete departure from what we expect of ordinary life? What evidence could make us heed a warning so dire—and how would we go about responding to it? We are so inured to a long list of highly unlikely catastrophes that we are virtually programmed to dismiss them all with a wave of the hand: Sure, our civilization might devolve into chaos—and Earth might collide with an asteroid, too!

For many years I have studied global agricultural, population, environmental and economic trends and their interactions. The combined effects of those trends and the political tensions they generate point to the breakdown of governments and societies. Yet I, too, have resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization.

I can no longer ignore that risk. Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that are undermining the world food economy—most important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising temperatures—forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible.

The Problem of Failed States
Even a cursory look at the vital signs of our current world order lends unwelcome support to my conclusion. And those of us in the environmental field are well into our third decade of charting trends of environmental decline without seeing any significant effort to reverse a single one.

In six of the past nine years world grain production has fallen short of consumption, forcing a steady drawdown in stocks. When the 2008 harvest began, world carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) were at 62 days of consumption, a near record low. In response, world grain prices in the spring and summer of last year climbed to the highest level ever.

As demand for food rises faster than supplies are growing, the resulting food-price inflation puts severe stress on the governments of countries already teetering on the edge of chaos. Unable to buy grain or grow their own, hungry people take to the streets. Indeed, even before the steep climb in grain prices in 2008, the number of failing states was expanding [Purchase the digital edition to see related sidebar]. Many of their problems stem from a failure to slow the growth of their populations. But if the food situation continues to deteriorate, entire nations will break down at an ever increasing rate. We have entered a new era in geopolitics. In the 20th century the main threat to international security was superpower conflict; today it is failing states. It is not the concentration of power but its absence that puts us at risk.

States fail when national governments can no longer provide personal security, food security and basic social services such as education and health care. They often lose control of part or all of their territory. When governments lose their monopoly on power, law and order begin to disintegrate. After a point, countries can become so dangerous that food relief workers are no longer safe and their programs are halted; in Somalia and Afghanistan, deteriorating conditions have already put such programs in jeopardy.

Failing states are of international concern because they are a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees, threatening political stability everywhere. Somalia, number one on the 2008 list of failing states, has become a base for piracy. Iraq, number five, is a hotbed for terrorist training. Afghanistan, number seven, is the world’s leading supplier of heroin. Following the massive genocide of 1994 in Rwanda, refugees from that troubled state, thousands of armed soldiers among them, helped to destabilize neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (number six).

Our global civilization depends on a functioning network of politically healthy nation-states to control the spread of infectious disease, to manage the international monetary system, to control international terrorism and to reach scores of other common goals. If the system for controlling infectious diseases—such as polio, SARS or avian flu—breaks down, humanity will be in trouble. Once states fail, no one assumes responsibility for their debt to outside lenders. If enough states disintegrate, their fall will threaten the stability of global civilization itself.

A New Kind of Food Shortage
The surge in world grain prices in 2007 and 2008—and the threat they pose to food security—has a different, more troubling quality than the increases of the past. During the second half of the 20th century, grain prices rose dramatically several times. In 1972, for instance, the Soviets, recognizing their poor harvest early, quietly cornered the world wheat market. As a result, wheat prices elsewhere more than doubled, pulling rice and corn prices up with them. But this and other price shocks were event-driven—drought in the Soviet Union, a monsoon failure in India, crop-shrinking heat in the U.S. Corn Belt. And the rises were short-lived: prices typically returned to normal with the next harvest.

In contrast, the recent surge in world grain prices is trend-driven, making it unlikely to reverse without a reversal in the trends themselves. On the demand side, those trends include the ongoing addition of more than 70 million people a year; a growing number of people wanting to move up the food chain to consume highly grain-intensive livestock products [see “The Greenhouse Hamburger,” by Nathan Fiala; Scientific American, February 2009]; and the massive diversion of U.S. grain to ethanol-fuel distilleries.

The extra demand for grain associated with rising affluence varies widely among countries. People in low-income countries where grain supplies 60 percent of calories, such as India, directly consume a bit more than a pound of grain a day. In affluent countries such as the U.S. and Canada, grain consumption per person is nearly four times that much, though perhaps 90 percent of it is consumed indirectly as meat, milk and eggs from grain-fed animals.

The potential for further grain consumption as incomes rise among low-income consumers is huge. But that potential pales beside the insatiable demand for crop-based automotive fuels. A fourth of this year’s U.S. grain harvest—enough to feed 125 million Americans or half a billion Indians at current consumption levels—will go to fuel cars. Yet even if the entire U.S. grain harvest were diverted into making ethanol, it would meet at most 18 percent of U.S. automotive fuel needs. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.

The recent merging of the food and energy economies implies that if the food value of grain is less than its fuel value, the market will move the grain into the energy economy. That double demand is leading to an epic competition between cars and people for the grain supply and to a political and moral issue of unprecedented dimensions. The U.S., in a misguided effort to reduce its dependence on foreign oil by substituting grain-based fuels, is generating global food insecurity on a scale not seen before.

Water Shortages Mean Food Shortages
What about supply? The three environmental trends I mentioned earlier—the shortage of freshwater, the loss of topsoil and the rising temperatures (and other effects) of global warming—are making it increasingly hard to expand the world’s grain supply fast enough to keep up with demand. Of all those trends, however, the spread of water shortages poses the most immediate threat. The biggest challenge here is irrigation, which consumes 70 percent of the world’s freshwater. Millions of irrigation wells in many countries are now pumping water out of underground sources faster than rainfall can recharge them. The result is falling water tables in countries populated by half the world’s people, including the three big grain producers—China, India and the U.S.

Usually aquifers are replenishable, but some of the most important ones are not: the “fossil” aquifers, so called because they store ancient water and are not recharged by precipitation. For these—including the vast Ogallala Aquifer that underlies the U.S. Great Plains, the Saudi aquifer and the deep aquifer under the North China Plain—depletion would spell the end of pumping. In arid regions such a loss could also bring an end to agriculture altogether.

In China the water table under the North China Plain, an area that produces more than half of the country’s wheat and a third of its corn, is falling fast. Overpumping has used up most of the water in a shallow aquifer there, forcing well drillers to turn to the region’s deep aquifer, which is not replenishable. A report by the World Bank foresees “catastrophic consequences for future generations” unless water use and supply can quickly be brought back into balance.

As water tables have fallen and irrigation wells have gone dry, China’s wheat crop, the world’s largest, has declined by 8 percent since it peaked at 123 million tons in 1997. In that same period China’s rice production dropped 4 percent. The world’s most populous nation may soon be importing massive quantities of grain.

But water shortages are even more worrying in India. There the margin between food consumption and survival is more precarious. Millions of irrigation wells have dropped water tables in almost every state. As Fred Pearce reported in New Scientist:

Half of India’s traditional hand-dug wells and millions of shallower tube wells have already dried up, bringing a spate of suicides among those who rely on them. Electricity blackouts are reaching epidemic proportions in states where half of the electricity is used to pump water from depths of up to a kilometer [3,300 feet].

A World Bank study reports that 15 percent of India’s food supply is produced by mining groundwater. Stated otherwise, 175 million

Indians consume grain produced with water from irrigation wells that will soon be exhausted. The continued shrinking of water supplies could lead to unmanageable food shortages and social conflict.

Less Soil, More Hunger
The scope of the second worrisome trend—the loss of topsoil—is also startling. Topsoil is eroding faster than new soil forms on perhaps a third of the world’s cropland. This thin layer of essential plant nutrients, the very foundation of civilization, took long stretches of geologic time to build up, yet it is typically only about six inches deep. Its loss from wind and water erosion doomed earlier civilizations.

In 2002 a U.N. team assessed the food situation in Lesotho, the small, landlocked home of two million people embedded within South Africa. The team’s finding was straightforward: “Agriculture in Lesotho faces a catastrophic future; crop production is declining and could cease altogether over large tracts of the country if steps are not taken to reverse soil erosion, degradation and the decline in soil fertility.”

In the Western Hemisphere, Haiti—one of the first states to be recognized as failing—was largely self-sufficient in grain 40 years ago. In the years since, though, it has lost nearly all its forests and much of its topsoil, forcing the country to import more than half of its grain.

The third and perhaps most pervasive environmental threat to food security—rising surface temperature—can affect crop yields everywhere. In many countries crops are grown at or near their thermal optimum, so even a minor temperature rise during the growing season can shrink the harvest. A study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has confirmed a rule of thumb among crop ecologists: for every rise of one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above the norm, wheat, rice and corn yields fall by 10 percent.

In the past, most famously when the innovations in the use of fertilizer, irrigation and high-yield varieties of wheat and rice created the “green revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, the response to the growing demand for food was the successful application of scientific agriculture: the technological fix. This time, regrettably, many of the most productive advances in agricultural technology have already been put into practice, and so the long-term rise in land productivity is slowing down. Between 1950 and 1990 the world’s farmers increased the grain yield per acre by more than 2 percent a year, exceeding the growth of population. But since then, the annual growth in yield has slowed to slightly more than 1 percent. In some countries the yields appear to be near their practical limits, including rice yields in Japan and China.

Some commentators point to genetically modified crop strains as a way out of our predicament. Unfortunately, however, no genetically modified crops have led to dramatically higher yields, comparable to the doubling or tripling of wheat and rice yields that took place during the green revolution. Nor do they seem likely to do so, simply because conventional plant-breeding techniques have already tapped most of the potential for raising crop yields.

Jockeying for Food
As the world’s food security unravels, a dangerous politics of food scarcity is coming into play: individual countries acting in their narrowly defined self-interest are actually worsening the plight of the many. The trend began in 2007, when leading wheat-exporting countries such as Russia and Argentina limited or banned their exports, in hopes of increasing locally available food supplies and thereby bringing down food prices domestically. Vietnam, the world’s second-biggest rice exporter after Thailand, banned its exports for several months for the same reason. Such moves may reassure those living in the exporting countries, but they are creating panic in importing countries that must rely on what is then left of the world’s exportable grain.

In response to those restrictions, grain importers are trying to nail down long-term bilateral trade agreements that would lock up future grain supplies. The Philippines, no longer able to count on getting rice from the world market, recently negotiated a three-year deal with Vietnam for a guaranteed 1.5 million tons of rice each year. Food-import anxiety is even spawning entirely new efforts by food-importing countries to buy or lease farmland in other countries [Purchase the digital edition to see related sidebar].

In spite of such stopgap measures, soaring food prices and spreading hunger in many other countries are beginning to break down the social order. In several provinces of Thailand the predations of “rice rustlers” have forced villagers to guard their rice fields at night with loaded shotguns. In Pakistan an armed soldier escorts each grain truck. During the first half of 2008, 83 trucks carrying grain in Sudan were hijacked before reaching the Darfur relief camps.

No country is immune to the effects of tightening food supplies, not even the U.S., the world’s breadbasket. If China turns to the world market for massive quantities of grain, as it has recently done for soybeans, it will have to buy from the U.S. For U.S. consumers, that would mean competing for the U.S. grain harvest with 1.3 billion Chinese consumers with fast-rising incomes—a nightmare scenario. In such circumstances, it would be tempting for the U.S. to restrict exports, as it did, for instance, with grain and soybeans in the 1970s when domestic prices soared. But that is not an option with China. Chinese investors now hold well over a trillion U.S. dollars, and they have often been the leading international buyers of U.S. Treasury securities issued to finance the fiscal deficit. Like it or not, U.S. consumers will share their grain with Chinese consumers, no matter how high food prices rise.

Plan B: Our Only Option
Since the current world food shortage is trend-driven, the environmental trends that cause it must be reversed. To do so requires extraordinarily demanding measures, a monumental shift away from business as usual—what we at the Earth Policy Institute call Plan A—to a civilization-saving Plan B. [see "Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization," at www.earthpoli cy.org/Books/PB3/]

Similar in scale and urgency to the U.S. mobilization for World War II, Plan B has four components: a massive effort to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent from their 2006 levels by 2020; the stabilization of the world’s population at eight billion by 2040; the eradication of poverty; and the restoration of forests, soils and aquifers.

Net carbon dioxide emissions can be cut by systematically raising energy efficiency and investing massively in the development of renewable sources of energy. We must also ban deforestation worldwide, as several countries already have done, and plant billions of trees to sequester carbon. The transition from fossil fuels to renewable forms of energy can be driven by imposing a tax on carbon, while offsetting it with a reduction in income taxes.

Stabilizing population and eradicating poverty go hand in hand. In fact, the key to accelerating the shift to smaller families is eradicating poverty—and vice versa. One way is to ensure at least a primary school education for all children, girls as well as boys. Another is to provide rudimentary, village-level health care, so that people can be confident that their children will survive to adulthood. Women everywhere need access to reproductive health care and family-planning services.

The fourth component, restoring the earth’s natural systems and resources, incorporates a worldwide initiative to arrest the fall in water tables by raising water productivity: the useful activity that can be wrung from each drop. That implies shifting to more efficient irrigation systems and to more water-efficient crops. In some countries, it implies growing (and eating) more wheat and less rice, a water-intensive crop. And for industries and cities, it implies doing what some are doing already, namely, continuously recycling water.

At the same time, we must launch a worldwide effort to conserve soil, similar to the U.S. response to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Terracing the ground, planting trees as shelterbelts against windblown soil erosion, and practicing minimum tillage—in which the soil is not plowed and crop residues are left on the field—are among the most important soil-conservation measures.

There is nothing new about our four interrelated objectives. They have been discussed individually for years. Indeed, we have created entire institutions intended to tackle some of them, such as the World Bank to alleviate poverty. And we have made substantial progress in some parts of the world on at least one of them—the distribution of family-planning services and the associated shift to smaller families that brings population stability.

For many in the development community, the four objectives of Plan B were seen as positive, promoting development as long as they did not cost too much. Others saw them as humanitarian goals—politically correct and morally appropriate. Now a third and far more momentous rationale presents itself: meeting these goals may be necessary to prevent the collapse of our civilization. Yet the cost we project for saving civilization would amount to less than $200 billion a year, a sixth of current global military spending. In effect, Plan B is the new security budget.

Time: Our Scarcest Resource
Our challenge is not only to implement Plan B but also to do it quickly. The world is in a race between political tipping points and natural ones. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to prevent the Greenland ice sheet from slipping into the sea and inundating our coastlines? Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the mountain glaciers of Asia? During the dry season their meltwaters sustain the major rivers of India and China—and by extension, hundreds of millions of people. Can we stabilize population before countries such as India, Pakistan and Yemen are overwhelmed by shortages of the water they need to irrigate their crops?

It is hard to overstate the urgency of our predicament. [For the most thorough and authoritative scientific assessment of global climate change, see "Climate Change 2007. Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," available at www.ipcc.ch] Every day counts. Unfortunately, we do not know how long we can light our cities with coal, for instance, before Greenland’s ice sheet can no longer be saved. Nature sets the deadlines; nature is the timekeeper. But we human beings cannot see the clock.

We desperately need a new way of thinking, a new mind-set. The thinking that got us into this bind will not get us out. When Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for the New Yorker, asked energy guru Amory Lovins about thinking outside the box, Lovins responded: “There is no box.”

There is no box. That is the mind-set we need if civilization is to survive

Nuclear costly any way you cut it

2009-05-05T08:58:00.001-07:00

Nuclear plants are not just costly to build, they are also expensive to operate. Put aside for a minute the billion dollar repair bills and take a look at the salaries of Ontario Power Generation’s employees released under Ontario’s “sunshine” law requiring public entities to report incomes over $100,000.

In 2008, approximately 57% of OPG employees made more than $100,000 (click here for the full list). Reading through the list of close to 7,000 employees making more than $100,000, you will quickly see that the majority are involved in the company’s nuclear operations. At the top of the list is OPG CEO Jim Hankinson, who made $2.475 million (that’s 17 times the annual budget of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance).

Nuclear’s bloated costs may be good for those working for OPG, but the rest of Ontario’s residents would be far better off if we replaced nuclear with lower-cost hydro imports from Quebec. Quebec has the power, but Ontario seems to be too busy preparing to write big blank cheques to nuclear companies to pursue the lowest cost options for the province’s consumers.

Please pass this message on to your friends.

Thank you.

Jessica Fracassi, Communications & Membership Director
Ontario Clean Air Alliance
402-625 Church St, Toronto M4Y 2G1
Phone: 416-926-1907 ext. 245
Fax: 416-926-1601
Email: jessica@cleanairalliance.org
Website: www.cleanairalliance.org
Website: www.OntariosGreenFuture.ca

The Ontario Clean Air Alliance is a diverse, multi-stakeholder coalition of approximately 90 organizations including cities, health associations, environmental and public interest groups, corporations, public utilities, unions, faith communities and individuals. The OCAA’s short term goal is to achieve the complete phase out of Ontario’s four coal-fired power plants by 2010. Our long term goal is to ensure that all of our electricity needs are met by ecologically sustainable renewable sources. Our partner organizations represent more than six million Ontarians.

Interested in volunteering with the OCAA? Please contact Angela Bischoff at angela@cleanairalliance.org, 416-926-1907 ext. 246.

Sign our petition: http://www.ontariosgreenfuture.ca/petition.php.

If you are on Facebook, please consider joining our group.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to this list, please visit http://www.cleanairalliance.org/bulletins_email_signup.

Liberals vote to keep nuke loophole]

2009-04-30T08:13:00.001-07:00

On Monday April 27th, Liberal members of the Ontario Legislature’s Committee on General Government voted down proposed amendments to the Green Energy Act put forward by the NDP’s Energy Critic, Peter Tabuns. These amendments would have eliminated special deals for nuclear projects by making it illegal for them to pass their capital cost overruns onto electricity consumers and taxpayers.

This means the government MPPs have voted to retain the biggest loophole in the Green Energy Act instead of acting in the spirit of the Act and ensuring a truly level playing field for renewable power projects.

Voting to retain special privileges for nuclear projects were Laurel Broten, Kuldip Kular, Bill Mauro, Carol Mitchell and (for one of two votes) Linda Jeffrey. Please contact these MPPs and ask them why they think nuclear power deserves better treatment than clean renewable power, especially in a Green Energy Act.

Please pass this message on to your friends.

Thank you.

Jessica Fracassi, Communications & Membership Director
Ontario Clean Air Alliance
402-625 Church St, Toronto M4Y 2G1
Phone: 416-926-1907 ext. 245
Fax: 416-926-1601
Email: jessica@cleanairalliance.org
Website: www.cleanairalliance.org
Website: www.OntariosGreenFuture.ca

The Ontario Clean Air Alliance is a diverse, multi-stakeholder coalition of approximately 90 organizations including cities, health associations, environmental and public interest groups, corporations, public utilities, unions, faith communities and individuals. The OCAA’s short term goal is to achieve the complete phase out of Ontario’s four coal-fired power plants by 2010. Our long term goal is to ensure that all of our electricity needs are met by ecologically sustainable renewable sources. Our partner organizations represent more than six million Ontarians.

Interested in volunteering with the OCAA? Please contact Angela Bischoff at angela@cleanairalliance.org, 416-926-1907 ext. 246.

Sign our petition: http://www.ontariosgreenfuture.ca/petition.php.

If you are on Facebook, please consider joining our group.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to this list, please visit http://www.cleanairalliance.org/bulletins_email_signup.

NAFTA - Environmentalists in battle to be heard in pesticide case

2009-04-27T07:39:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Lesley Forrester

April 27, 2009

The Toronto Star

Environmentalists in battle to be heard in pesticide case
NAFTA can block their participation and take arbitration proceedings
behind closed doors

by Luke Eric Peterson

Look out, Ontario.

Dow Chemicals has filed a claim under the North American Free Trade
Agreement seeking compensation for a Quebec ban on lawn pesticides.
Dow says that the ban amounts to an unfair "expropriation" of the
company's Quebec pesticide business.

Although the NAFTA claim is focused on the Quebec ban, don't be
surprised if Ontario comes into the sightlines now that a similar
province-wide ban came into effect last week.

The ramifications of this NAFTA dispute have spurred environmental
groups to mobilize for battle. A hint of the coming fireworks could be
glimpsed on Parliament Hill late last month.

In hearings of the Standing Committee on International Trade,
environmental groups signaled their plans to intervene in any
forthcoming NAFTA arbitration proceeding.

These groups insist that governments should be permitted to act on a
precautionary basis to shield vulnerable groups such as children -
even when the scientific evidence is uncertain as to the long-term
health impacts of certain substances.

They plan to present their own views to the arbitration panel that
will hear Dow's case.

However, the groups complain that the NAFTA Chapter 11 arbitration
process is less than welcoming when it comes to hearing from concerned
citizens and other interests.

In testimony to Parliament last month, environmental advocates
lamented that NAFTA - unlike more recent trade pacts - permits foreign
companies to sue a NAFTA government behind closed doors.

Will Amos, an Ottawa-based lawyer representing the David Suzuki
Foundation and the Quebec group Equiterre, says that his clients can
submit written arguments to a NAFTA arbitration panel, but they may be
blocked from showing up and watching, or participating in these high-
stakes arbitration proceedings.

"There is no guarantee that the investor won't request confidential
proceedings, which would further limit our ability to understand what
case they're bringing, and there will be no opportunity for us to make
oral representations before the tribunal," Amos says.

"This is totally unlike the Supreme Court of Canada," he adds.

Indeed, it's unfortunate that NAFTA disputes can be arbitrated in
private - unlike domestic court hearings

Otherwise, members of Canada's Supreme Court might benefit from
sitting in on these arbitration hearings, and gaining a better
appreciation of this NAFTA process.

If permitted into the hearing room, the justices might be taken aback
by the extent to which NAFTA tribunals can now review the actions of
governments.

In fact, one of the things that has incensed many members of the
environmental community - and which might bemuse members of the
Supreme Court - is that pesticide bans in other parts of Canada have
already been upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada.

In 2005, the court dismissed an effort by a pesticide industry
association to challenge a ban introduced by the municipality of
Toronto.

Environmentalists assumed that this ruling affirmed the right of
governments to act proactively so as to minimize potential health
risks.

However, it now appears that the Supreme Court was merely engaged in a
dress rehearsal.

Sure, pesticide bans in different parts of Canada have been declared
constitutional by the highest court in the land, but in the 21st
century, constitutions are not the only law of the land.

Rather, it will fall to three arbitrators - one appointed by Dow, one
by Canada, and the third by mutual assent - to determine whether our
North American constitution, the NAFTA, sanctions the actions of the
Quebec government.

The Dow arbitration promises to be of seminal importance.

Dow protests that Quebec lawmakers failed to take heed of several risk
assessments, including one by Canada's federal government, which
showed that the pesticide ingredient 2,4-D "does not entail an
unacceptable risk of harm to human health or the environment."

Of course, others - including some governments - have questioned
whether risk assessments should be the final word on such matters.

Environmental and medical groups like the Canadian Cancer Society have
long argued that no amount of risk is worth taking when it comes to
"unnecessary" chemicals, such as lawn pesticides, which are used for
purely cosmetic purposes.

However, where governments wish to drive certain risks closer to zero,
it will fall to a panel of NAFTA arbitrators to decide who shall pay
the price for doing so: the chemicals industry or the Canadian
taxpayer.

COLIN MCCONNELL/TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO
Premier Dalton McGuinty and Environment Minister John Gerretsen
announced the province's intention to ban cosmetic use of pesticides
April 22, 2008.

Luke Eric Peterson is editor of Investment Arbitration Reporter, an
online news service reporting on NAFTA-style investor-state
arbitrations (www.iareporter.com).

http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/624693

======================

April 27, 2009

The Toronto Star

MP pushes for national ban

New Democrat MP Pat Martin has introduced a private member's bill in
the House of Commons that would impose a national ban on the cosmetic
use of pesticides on lawns, gardens and in parks.

Martin, a member from Winnipeg, says his bill would ban the use of
pesticides until there is scientific evidence they are safe. The bill
would take effect on Earth Day, April 22, next year if it's approved
by the Commons. Private members' bills are rarely passed, however.

Martin says he wants to force manufacturers to prove that their
products are safe.

Canadian press

http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/624694

Senate NWPA hearings (UPDATE)

2009-04-27T07:17:00.001-07:00

Hello:

The Standing Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural
Resources has indeed begun hearings on the Navigable Waters Protection
Act amendments that became law with the passage the C-10, the federal
government's budget implementation act.

We hoped that we would be able to influence the Senate on the nature
and scope of their hearings on this issue.

We strongly urged that the committee:

- hold hearings in different parts of the country
- provide opportunities for participation remotely through video
conferencing
- provide funds to assist groups in traveling to the hearings

We also expressed serious concerns about the need for adequate time to
prepare presentations.

It appears that we have had zero influence on any of these points. In
fact we did not receive a formal response to our communications with
the Senate committee until last Thursday April 23, the day the
hearings began.

Here is what we understand:

- The hearings began April 23
- The hearings will take place for two hours each Tuesday and Thursday
up to May 14 (with the exception of Thursday April 30
- A handful of groups have been picked by the committee to appear
- Each speaker will have 5 to 7 minutes to speak followed by questions

PARTICIPATING IN THE HEARINGS

If you can and want to participate in these hearings, there is still
time to contact the committee:

Please contact:

Lynn Gordon
Clerk/Greffier
The Senate/Le Sénat
1053 Édifice Chambers Building, 40 rue Elgin Street
Ottawa Ontario K1A OA4 Canada
tel. (613) 991-3620 tél.
fax (613) 947-2104 télec.
toll free 1-800-267-7362 sans frais
gordol@sen.parl.gc.ca<mailto:gordol@sen.parl.gc.ca

CANADIAN RIVERS NETWORK PARTICIPATION

A representative of the CRN will be presenting at the hearings May 5.
One of the things we will be saying is that the CRN is a network of
diverse groups across Canada with equally diverse issues and concerns
related to the NWPA amendments, and one representative cannot even
begin to represent all of those issues and concerns.

This is an unfortunate outcome. We do not believe these hearings are
to short, too narrow and too late.

But, now matter how small the opportunity we believe it is important
to get some issues on the record.

A report from these hearings will be tabled in the Senate.

_______________________________
Canadian Rivers Network
www.ispeakforcanadianrivers.ca

NOTE: You are receiving this email because you are on the
mailing list of the Canadian Rivers Network. We do not share
our mailing list. To be removed from or added to this list please
send an email request to canrivers@sympatico.ca

A good article on Transition Towns in the NY Times

2009-04-21T19:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19town-t.html?_r=5&ref=magazine&pagewanted=print
April 19, 2009

The Green Issue

The End Is Near! (Yay!)

By JON MOOALLEM

The stage lights went up at the Panida Theater, a classy old movie house in Sandpoint, Idaho, and the M.C. stepped out of the dark with one finger high in the air. There was an uprising of applause and cheering. Then, shouting like a head coach before a bowl game, she said, “Sandpoint, are you ready?”

It was a Friday night last November. All around the little town of Sandpoint, beetles were blighting north Idaho’s pine forests. The previous day, the U.N. reported that emissions from automobiles and coal-fired power plants were collecting in brown clouds over 13 Asian and African cities and blocking out the sun. Iceland’s main banks had crumpled, and American auto executives were about to fly to Washington in private jets to plead for a bailout. Off the coast of Africa, Somali pirates were hijacking oil tankers. But the folks at the Panida Theater wouldn’t stop clapping. The Sandpoint Transition Initiative, a new chapter of a growing, worldwide environmental movement, was officially coming to life.

The Transition movement was started four years ago by Rob Hopkins, a young British instructor of ecological design. Transition shares certain principles with environmentalism, but its vision is deeper — and more radical — than mere greenness or sustainability. “Sustainability,” Hopkins recently told me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely. For a generation, the environmental movement has told us to change our lifestyles to avoid catastrophic consequences. Transition tells us those consequences are now irreversibly switching on; we need to revolutionize our lives if we want to survive.

Transition’s approach is adamantly different from that of the survivalists I heard about, scattered in the mountains around Sandpoint in bunkers stocked with gold and guns. The movement may begin from a similarly dystopian idea: that cheap oil has recklessly vaulted humanity to a peak of production and consumption, and no combination of alternative technologies can generate enough energy, or be installed fast enough, to keep us at that height before the oil is gone. (Transition dismisses Al Gore types as “techno-optimists.”) But Transition then takes an almost utopian turn. Hopkins insists that if an entire community faces this stark challenge together, it might be able to design an “elegant descent” from that peak. We can consciously plot a path into a lower-energy life — a life of walkable villages, local food and artisans and greater intimacy with the natural world — which, on balance, could actually be richer and more enjoyable than what we have now. Transition, Hopkins has written, meets our era’s threats with a spirit of “elation, rather than the guilt, anger and horror” behind most environmental activism. “Change is inevitable,” he told me, “but this is a change that could be fantastic.”

After developing the rudiments of Transition with a class he was teaching at an Irish college, Hopkins moved to the English town of Totnes, and, in 2005, began mobilizing a campaign to “relocalize” the town. The all-volunteer effort has since been busily planting nut trees, starting its own local currency and offering classes on things like darning socks in order to “facilitate the Great Reskilling.”

More than 80 other initiatives across England have followed, including one in Bristol, a city of nearly half a million people. Worldwide, there are now more than 150 official Transition Towns (communities with an active group of citizens), and last winter, trainers from Totnes traveled the globe to run workshops, leaving activists on three continents to begin the relocalization of their own communities — autonomously and with whatever financing they can raise. (The Transition revolution is, loosely speaking, a franchise model.) Sandpoint, Idaho, was the second Transition Town in the United States after Boulder County, Colo. They have been joined by more than 20 others in the last year, including Portland, Maine; Berea, Kentucky; and even Los Angeles. But the American arm of the movement is expanding far faster than it is accomplishing anything, which is why the event in Sandpoint that night was so significant. The Sandpoint Transition Initiative was the first in North America to hold this kind of coming-out party, meant to engage the community in its work. This constituted Step 4 in the 12-step Transition Process laid out in Rob Hopkins’s Transition Handbook, the jargon-filled manual at the center of the movement. The handbook calls this event “A Great Unleashing.”

The Transition Handbook reads like an imaginative take on a corporate-management text. It recommends techniques for building consensus, from bureaucratic-sounding protocols like Open Space Technology to an exercise in which people decorate a potato like a superhero. “The Transition model,” the founder of one English Transition Town explained to me, “provides a structure, a foundation for organizing.” And along with Transition’s emphasis on hopefulness over fear, this rigorous playbook seems to set it apart from earlier grass-roots crusades. It is, Transition leaders say, what they hope will allow the movement to bring in the people that conventional activists have failed to reach and, just as important, keep everyone focused through the messiness and disillusionment every community-organizing effort encounters and many do not survive.

At the Panida, the keynote speaker was Michael Brownlee, the director of the Transition effort in Boulder and a representative of Transition U.S. — an even newer group that is forming to help the movement spread in America. He was like the Transition equivalent of a middle manager flown in from corporate.

Brownlee gave his own variation of the standard PowerPoint presentation distributed at Transition trainings. Up on the screen behind him came a slide showing the three convergent emergencies that Transition aims to help us through: climate change, the unraveling of the global economy and peak oil. The theory of peak oil concludes that the productivity of the earth’s oil wells will soon peak — if it hasn’t already — and, once production falls short of demand, the market for our fundamental resource will rapidly spiral into chaos, potentially pulling much of society down with it.

Brownlee spelled out some probable outcomes, quoting peak oil’s pantheon of thinkers: Oil hits $300 a barrel by 2013. Middle Eastern exports cease. Things we take for granted — supermarkets, suburbs — quickly become impossible, and the world sinks into an “unprecedented economic crisis” that will “topple governments, alter national boundaries,” incite wars and “challenge the continuation of civilized life.” Brownlee paused after reading that last quote. He hadn’t even gotten to climate change and the implosion of the American dollar.

It was all surprisingly easy to imagine. Lately, an apocalyptic bile has been collecting in the back of America’s throat. Our era has been defined by skyrocketing line graphs, and it’s easy to wonder if we have finally pushed something just a little too far and are now watching everything start to teeter over. Maybe it’s not our dependence on oil, but the carbon we have plugged up the atmosphere with. Or global population. Or credit derivatives. We’re all starting to career down the other side of that hill — which hill, specifically, is up to you. But it’s the shadowy side, and none of us can see the bottom.

In Sandpoint, though, people were trying to move the stale chatter of environmental collapse out of the health-food store and into the 21st century — to pull each incongruous part of their community together and make their town, collaboratively, the blessed place they all knew it could be. At a time when so much fuzzy energy for change ricochets through our culture, and even Chevron ads ask us to use less oil and harness “the power of human energy” instead, Transition seemed to offer this sold-out theater in Idaho both a vision and a lucid, 240-page instruction manual with which to give it a try.

Would it work? Nobody could say. But as Brownlee finished, and the crowd suddenly re-erupted into applause, even just trying it seemed to feel wonderful. Next, a group of kids raced onto the stage in Sgt. Pepper garb, holding inflatable guitars. Later came a “sustainable performance arts” troupe (they use biofuels when fire dancing) and a woman who sang about rain and peace. By the time the last guitar duo performed “Here Comes the Sun,” everyone in the room was so keyed up — so ready to turn the impending dark age of peak oil and climate change into a renaissance — that no one heard the slightest menace in the line “Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting.” Or if they did, they just kept singing along anyway.

The second phase of the Sandpoint Transition Initiative’s Great Unleashing weekend began the next afternoon. A four-hour meeting was called to divide people into working groups, Step 5 in the Transition Handbook. Each working group would focus on a necessity of the town, like food, energy or transportation. They would develop projects, then research and write a plan delineating what steps Sandpoint must take in order to relocalize over the next several decades. The Transition Handbook calls this crucial document an Energy Descent Action Plan. Producing one is Step 12.

More than 100 people turned out for the meeting in the gymnasium of a local charter school. Everyone wore name tags. Richard Kühnel, who started the Sandpoint Transition Initiative with some like-minded friends in his living room, drew a shining sun on his.

Kühnel, 54, is a smiling stick figure of a man, with wispy hair and a whitening beard. He has worked as a software designer on and off since he was a teenager but also has a degree in “ecosocial design” from Gaia University. (He is Austrian and moved to Sandpoint in 1995 with his wife, an alternative-medicine practitioner.) Kühnel organized the initiative’s first meeting early last year after returning from a pilgrimage to Totnes, where he attended one of the first Transition trainings. He was attracted to the movement, he told me, because it alone seems to understand how to persuade people to address the world’s gloomiest challenges without shoving them into denial or depression. “We are not fighting against something,” Kühnel told me. “We are for something. I wanted to be part of the solution, positively responding to all these challenges here in Sandpoint.”

Sandpoint is a town of 8,100 people, rimmed by the Cabinet and Selkirk Mountains and bordered by picturesque Lake Pend Oreille. Like many Western towns, it is the mottled product of a century of migration. Railroad workers were followed by timber workers. In the 1970s, young, long-haired back-to-the-landers arrived, and many persevered even as northern Idaho ossified into a conservative stronghold. Last year, after the rise of Sarah Palin, who is a Sandpoint native, a local magazine ran an account of the couple of months she spent there as an infant before moving to Alaska. “I was in the eighth grade,” a former baby sitter told the magazine. “I held her.”

Transition seeks to “unleash the collective genius of a community,” as Hopkins often puts it — to unify a town behind a single, critical purpose. And at first glance, unifying Sandpoint might seem impossible. But those living on the land, whether out of a left- or right-wing ideology, do have a lot in common, including an astounding amount of resourcefulness. Peggy Braunstein, who came to Sandpoint from New York 27 years ago, told me that for her and her neighbors, many of whom live off the grid, life without oil “isn’t so overwhelming or shocking. People here have already lived a scaled-down life. We’ve already bartered and shared, canned together.” A local green-tech entrepreneur told me that Transition should not have too much trouble “bridging the rednecks and the hippies.” (“The best way to bring them together is a Willie Nelson concert,” he joked.)

At the charter school, everybody found seats in a circle. Many balanced legal pads on their laps. Kühnel’s wife, Berta, began by asking everyone to join hands. She instructed them to close their eyes and transmit energy around the circle in a clockwise direction. “We’re going to journey into 2030 and see what’s there for us,” she said. She told them to feel their bodies lifting into the clouds, falling back to earth as rain, then joining a river, “flowing forward in time.” The river ran through Sandpoint. It was the future now, and Berta asked everyone to look around: “What’s the technology? Is there technology? How do we dream? How do we live?”

Sandpoint’s mayor, a painter and former hardware wholesaler named Gretchen Hellar, was sitting next to Berta. When I asked her later what she made of the exercise, Hellar told me: “First of all, I’m not a good-feelings, touchy-feely kind of person.” She added, “People wanted to talk about where we can put community gardens, how can we make our downtown more viable.” John T. Reuter, a Republican city councilman a few seats over, told me that when Berta told them to hold hands, he was looking around the room, counting up the people he knew Transition just alienated.

The crowd split into groups of nine to draw their visions. Bruce Millard, a local architect who builds with straw bales, quickly emerged as his group’s moderator. Quite tall, with a ponytail and mustache, Millard bent over and drew several circles on his group’s sheet of paper with an orange crayon. He envisioned a hub-and-spoke system: many villages, each with a different specialty, with downtown Sandpoint as a trading post in the middle.

The group started brainstorming, assuming there would no longer be cars or a power grid. One village might grow food. Another should educate children.

“Where are we going to put the corpses?” someone asked.

“Eat ’em!” said a woman in braids.

“Can you just make a rule that everybody’s cremated?” a somber-looking woman in a blazer asked. Her husband was sitting with his face in his hands.

“Well,” Millard said, “it takes a lot of energy to cremate people. Besides, now we’re getting into rules.”

Millard’s sketch happened to look a lot like the master plan of Fourierism, one of the most popular secular utopian movements in American history. In the early 1800s, Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, proposed, in a series of jargon-filled writings, a self-sufficient community model called a “phalanx.” A central estate or “phalanstery” would be surrounded by tradesmen’s workshops, cultural institutions and farmland.

Fourier was horrified by what he saw at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. His fears may sound familiar: that dishonest lending and capitalism in general would lead to the enslavement of humans by big companies; “industrial feudalism,” he called it. And, not unlike Transition, he aimed to overhaul society one phalanx at a time. Fourier claimed to have reduced all possible human personalities to a number of essential types. From there, it was simple math. He calculated that if precisely 1,620 men, women and children were collected in a 6,000-acre phalanx, they would — all by merrily following their individual passions — end up satisfying all the phalanx’s essential needs. “The new amorous world,” he wrote, would rise out of “the new industrial world” by the force of “passional attraction.”

By the mid-1800s, more than 15,000 Americans had experimented with Fourieristic living, many drawn to its promise during a severe economic downturn. But Fourier’s belief that acute scientific modeling could bring disparate people together didn’t hold. It reflected, the historian Carl J. Guarneri writes, “the naïve faith that . . . Baptists would get along with freethinkers and intellectuals would make great farmers.” Arguments tore phalanxes apart. So did debt. All but eight failed within three years.

It has been an American impulse since the Puritans: feeling the world racing in the wrong direction and withdrawing to a small, insular place to start over. Hippies came to Sandpoint in the 1970s for similar reasons: to live solitary, self-reliant lives. But going back to the land was tough, particularly since many never lived on the land in the first place. (“I couldn’t build things with my hands,” one man, once part of a small commune called Huckleberry Duckleberry, told me. “It was futile.”) By the early ’80s most had either moved into town or left the region.

Now, maybe because our various crises have escalated, or because it costs so much to disappear into your own parcel of wilderness, opting out no longer feels like a possibility. One of Transition’s more oblique arguments may be that we can’t escape anymore. We have to work together to remake the places where we already live.

By now, around the charter-school gymnasium, one group was imagining year-round farmers’ markets in the buildings that would, by 2030, no longer be banks. Another discussed bicycle parking and nodded benignly at a man who pictured everyone living in caves with Internet connections. Millard’s circle was ticking off ways they could travel between the villages they had drawn. “O.K., so we’re walking, we’re bicycling, we’re skiing,” he said.

“Kayaking!” someone offered.

Peggy Braunstein spoke up, worried about the snowy north Idaho winters. “We’ve got a problem,” she said.

“There’s no problems,” Millard told her. “In a dream there’s no problems. There’s only solutions.”

Karen Lanphear, who has been steering the Transition Initiative alongside Richard Kühnel since its inception, found this portion of the meeting excruciating. “I thought we squandered at least an hour or an hour and a half of people’s time,” she told me later. Lanphear is a commanding woman of 62 with short, styled gray hair and a doctorate in education. In many ways, she is Kühnel’s temperamental opposite. She feeds off his visionary energy but felt compelled to run their earliest meetings with timed agendas.

In the six weeks before the Unleashing, Lanphear met with the Downtown Sandpoint Business Association, the University of Idaho extension office and the branch manager for U.S. Bank. She was the keynote speaker at the Greater Sandpoint Chamber of Commerce’s monthly Women in Business luncheon and penned six editorials on Transition for the local paper. Lanphear told me she has a gift for “building coalitions.” This was apparent. But it wasn’t clear if everyone she briefed had the same frame of reference. Karl Dye, head of the Bonner County Economic Development Corporation, told me, “All the things Transition’s doing basically line up with what we’re trying to do, which is create better-paying jobs.” He saw a lot of promise in Lanphear’s group, though he also said: “If you start a business to produce food locally and there are opportunities to make money by taking it to other areas, you’re going to do it. You may believe in Transitions and local production and local consumption, but hey, man, we’re still Americans.”

At the time of the Great Unleashing, most people in Sandpoint presumably hadn’t heard anything about Transition. But the ones who had often found a way to interpret the movement as extensions of their own visions. Having watched second- and third-home owners, retirees and tourists rush into Sandpoint, many latched on to Transition’s vague promise of building a better, quainter community. A minister told me she was glad that Transition wasn’t “a greenie, hippie, far-out thing.” But Michael Boge, the City Council president, seemed to complain of exactly that, telling me he didn’t understand why the group had to cheapen a good idea by “inventing a new word for it and wrapping themselves in that catchphrase.” (The new word Boge objected to wasn’t “Transition”; it was “sustainability.”) Still, Boge, who owns five drive-in restaurants and is active in a long-distance motorcycling club called the Iron Butt Association, told me that he felt allied with Transition’s ideals. “I’ve bitched about this to my friends for years: we need to make a concerted effort to get off fossil fuels,” he said. “And I truly believe that with the country and God behind us, we can do it.” Transition was a prism, offering a slightly different view of Sandpoint depending on how each person turned it, but always shooting out lots of rainbows.

Transition’s message is twofold: first, that a dire global emergency demands we transform our society; and second, that we might actually enjoy making those changes. Most people I met in Sandpoint seemed to have latched onto the enjoyment part and run with it. The vibe was much more Alice Waters than Mad Max. (Jeff Burns, a local food activist who joined the food working group, was a conspicuous exception. “Some people on the food group want to feel good,” he told me, “and some people want to figure out how to feed 40,000 people in case the trucks stop rolling.”)

Michael Brownlee, the keynote speaker from Boulder, sat silently in his chair during the charter-school meeting. That night, he told me that the unflinching cheeriness of everyone involved made him optimistic. But he also worried that people didn’t yet understand that “just because you’re passionate about a particular issue like transportation or water or local food doesn’t mean that you have the skills to do the research, analysis or planning around that issue.” He later added, “If I knew how to convey how serious, how urgent the situation is without sending people into fear and helplessness, it would take a great burden off of me.”

During the next few days, I surprised myself by actually arguing with people in Sandpoint about whether they were doing Transition properly — with enough intensity, given the stakes. “I can’t live with the ambiguity of pending disaster,” Lanphear told me. “I was raised to believe there are no problems without solutions.” She said she didn’t believe things would become as bad as Brownlee and others predicted. She had a lot of faith in the ethic and ingenuity of younger generations and also told me, contradicting what seems like a central tenet of Transition, “I think technology is going to be one of our saving graces.”

A few months after the Sandpoint Un-leashing, I went to a meeting of the new board of Transition U.S. in Sebastopol, Calif., north of San Francisco. The organization had just partnered with the Post Carbon Institute, another peak-oil-focused nonprofit group, and received $280,000 of seed money. The board had signed the lease on its new headquarters 12 days before I arrived.

Transition U.S. is designed to offer guidance to Transition initiatives forming around the country and to organize trainings. Already it had communicated with activists in more than 900 communities. Jennifer Gray, who started the second Transition Town in England and then went to California to found Transition U.S. last year, was spending most of her time fielding phone calls and e-mail messages. She took it as a good sign that no one in Sandpoint was reaching out to her.

Transition insists that initiatives be completely bottom-up organizations. There’s no central oversight, and the movement is expected to evolve slightly differently wherever it springs up. The trajectory of each initiative shouldn’t be controlled too tightly even by its local leaders; Step 11 in the handbook is really more of a mantra: “Let it go where it wants to go.” Like a Fourierian phalanx, a Transition Town should be the product of the passions of its residents — all of its residents, equally. Unlike Fourierism, though, Transition doesn’t claim its method is mathematically guaranteed to succeed. It simply posits that our best hope is to “unleash the collective genius of the community” and hope all the right pieces spill out. “We truly don’t know if this will work,” Rob Hopkins asserts in a mission-statement-like document called the “Cheerful Disclaimer!”

Consequently, the structure Transition sets forth is intentionally very minimal, and improvisation is encouraged. The handbook’s 12 steps needn’t be done in order (Hopkins now calls them the 12 “ingredients”), and communities are free to skip ones they don’t find useful. Ultimately, the most profound thing Transition offers isn’t a methodology at all but a mood.

“The genius of the Transition message, as I see it, is that it takes what we should be doing to avert these crises and turns it into something that sounds inviting and positive and uplifting,” Richard Heinberg, a Transition U.S. board member, told me in Sebastopol. Heinberg is an icon of the peak-oil fringe and the author of the seminal, comfortless book “The Party’s Over.” In 2007, he published a wider-ranging volume called “Peak Everything.” Still, Heinberg said he worries that Transition risks losing people in the elation it inspires. He has been debating with Hopkins whether, in addition to devising a long-term descent, Transition should emphasize preparing for disasters that Heinberg says are unavoidable or already unfolding, like volatile gas prices or “being sideswiped by economic catastrophe and weather disruptions.”

Eventually he expects the energy grid to weaken or shut off entirely and, like Michael Brownlee, he told me he considers martial law or worse persecution possible as resources become scarcer. Jennifer Gray, meanwhile, told me she expects “a big population die-off.” Heinberg said, “There’s nothing wrong with being motivated by fear if there’s something to be genuinely afraid of.”

I returned to Sandpoint in late February. The 11 working groups formed at the charter school in November were meeting regularly. They ranged in size from half a dozen to about 20 people and were all filing minutes to a steering committee as they plotted their first projects.

Jennifer Gray describes one of Transition’s goals as creating a “parallel community,” putting things like local power generation or local food networks in place to survive the slow crumbling of our current ones. But for the most part, the projects evolving in Sandpoint seemed designed to make the town’s current infrastructure a little greener and more livable. One group hoped to facilitate energy audits, making Sandpoint’s buildings more efficient users of the energy grid. The mobility working group, meanwhile, was planning to install a barrel of brightly colored flags at a dangerous intersection downtown. Pedestrians could pick up a flag and cross the street waving it, making themselves more visible to automobile traffic. Ideally, one member told me, they would persuade the city to put a traffic light there, “but that’s two, three years down the road.”

I was also surprised by the degree to which Transition members were intermixing with city authorities. Shortly after the Great Unleashing, Shelby Rognstad, a young cafe owner and an early Sandpoint Transition Initiative board member alongside Kühnel and Lanphear, was appointed to the town’s planning and zoning commission — a significant position, because Sandpoint was writing its first new comprehensive plan in 30 years. Rognstad spent the winter reading thick books on urban planning and cut down his involvement with Transition significantly. His outlook was changing. “Philosophically, I want to look 100 years down the road and just shoot for that vision,” he told me. “But the city’s only going to go for what’s real and achievable right now, in this fiscal year, in this election cycle.” He said he was thinking of running for office.

Kühnel was serving on the mayor’s advisory council on sustainability, a panel that was assessing a proposal by Transition’s food working group for an organic community garden.

By all estimates, the food group was far ahead of the others. When Jeff Burns approached the city about doing a garden as a first project, the parks director immediately pulled out satellite maps and started recommending plots. The parks director and the mayor had already scouted locations for gardens and were only waiting for some kind of volunteer organization or beautification committee to come and ask for one. Transition was given a third of an acre of an unused athletic field near the center of town and agreed to help keep the rest of the property weed-free in exchange. The food group had already lined up donations of seeds and tools and had a built-in pool of exuberant volunteer gardeners. A groundbreaking party was planned for early May.

And so, the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was taking its first steps. They were baby steps and, it seemed, pointed in only the general direction of the revolutionary postcarbon future the Transition Handbook had called them toward last fall. Other working groups are now volunteering to help the Chamber of Commerce, which happened to be starting its own “buy local” campaign. Transition Initiative members will organize a contest to design the campaign’s logo and will go around town, asking shop owners to hang up posters. Lanphear told me, “As long as we get the work going in the right direction, it doesn’t matter who gets the glory or the credit.” Richard Kühnel chose to see it in an even more positive light. He told me, “I feel whoever wants to participate and whose ideas are aligned with ours, that’s who the Sandpoint Transition Initiative is” — whether those people know it or not.

“I love Richard’s energy,” Councilman John T. Reuter told me during my last afternoon in Sandpoint. “I can’t say that enough times. I just think he’s the best thing since sliced bread. But I guess I can’t really say that because sliced bread is a problem — that’s part of the industrial-food complex. So he’s better than that! Richard is the best thing to recover us from the crime of sliced bread.”

Reuter is 25. Bearded but otherwise baby-faced, he is one of three City Council members under the age of 31. He comes from a family of Greek Orthodox sheep ranchers in southern Idaho and now heads the county Young Republicans. He talks fast, scurrying through wry digressions like a comedian at a Catskills resort.

“Have you read Rob what’s-his-name’s book?” he asked me, meaning the Transition Handbook. Almost before I could answer, he said, “I read that whole thing.” Reuter didn’t like it, though. “There’s no question oil is a limited quantity,” he said, adding that we should prepare for a life without it. But the handbook struck him as overly pessimistic, resigning humanity to the sort of druidic life people at the charter school were romanticizing. “I guess I don’t celebrate the loss of energy the way some of the people in the Transition group do,” he said. “I like having a dishwasher.”

What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” It was easy to argue that at the initiative’s core, in place of any clearly defined philosophy or strategy, was only a puff of enthusiasm. But Reuter seemed to argue that enthusiasm is an actual asset, a resource our society is already suffering a scarcity of. “There’s just something happening here that’s reviving people’s civic sense of possibility,” he later said. “Politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ right? I think what the Transition Initiative is doing is expanding what’s possible in people’s minds. It is expanding people’s ability to dream bold. And that’s what we need to do: dream bold. Because people have been limited by their own imaginations.”

More than anyone else I had spoken to in Sandpoint, including the initiative’s own organizers at times, Reuter was able to articulate a cohesive understanding of what Transition was actually doing. The movement wasn’t going to unify everybody in Sandpoint, he said: “I know that’s their dream, but I just don’t see it happening.” But it was inspiring for Reuter to watch the group emerge as one fervently turning gear in the larger mechanism of self-governance.

“It’s like any other civic organization,” he said approvingly. It wasn’t a very romantic notion, and maybe achieving that status so easily was a sign that the initiative wasn’t really tackling the level of paradigm-busting work Transition wants to awaken us to. Maybe that will turn out to be regrettable. But, as utopian movements go, it also struck me as an unusually constructive outcome.

Writing an Energy Descent Plan or building a parallel community — bridges to carry us over the terrible time ahead and into a world we long for — wasn’t going to be Transition’s strength or its usefulness, as Reuter saw it. “Government used to be the place in our community where people came together and made civic decisions,” he told me. “That’s what we should do again, and that’s what’s going to bring us back together: not having government be this force somehow outside of us, that’s bearing down on us or annoying us, but as a force that we actually embrace and want and that does what we want.”

Reuter had a utopian vision, too: the one laid out in the U.S. Constitution. And the Sandpoint Transition Initiative seemed to be moving Sandpoint closer to that ideal in its own small way, even though it was working out of a totally different handbook. They were managing to make the functioning democracy in their town a little more productive. For a wide range of not-always-consistent reasons, people in Sandpoint decided that Transition could help them build the world they wanted. And now, only because enough people stepped forward and made that decision, Transition actually looked like a good tool for the job. They were picking it up by whatever handle they grasped. They were swinging it as earnestly as they could.

Ontario wholesale electricity prices go negative

2009-04-20T09:07:00.001-07:00

Is this why Toronto blazes at night.....to consume the unused power?
Eric

Ontario’s wholesale spot market electricity price was negative for 214 hours between March 24 and April 19, 2009 according to information provided to the Ontario Clean Air Alliance today by the province’s Independent Electricity System Operator. During this period the average negative price was approximately - 1 cent per kWh; however prices fell to - 5.1 cents per kWh on March 29^th.

Negative wholesale prices mean that large volume customers in Ontario (e.g., Imperial Oil, Inco) and the U.S.A. are paid to consume our electricity.

Negative wholesale prices are due to the fact that our inflexible CANDU nuclear reactors are not able to reduce their output as demand declines.

Please pass this message on to your friends.

Thank you.

Jessica Fracassi, Communications & Membership Director
Ontario Clean Air Alliance
402-625 Church St, Toronto M4Y 2G1
Phone: 416-926-1907 ext. 245
Fax: 416-926-1601
Email: jessica@cleanairalliance.org
Website: www.cleanairalliance.org
Website: www.OntariosGreenFuture.ca

The Ontario Clean Air Alliance is a diverse, multi-stakeholder coalition of approximately 90 organizations including cities, health associations, environmental and public interest groups, corporations, public utilities, unions, faith communities and individuals. The OCAA’s short term goal is to achieve the complete phase out of Ontario’s four coal-fired power plants by 2010. Our long term goal is to ensure that all of our electricity needs are met by ecologically sustainable renewable sources. Our partner organizations represent more than six million Ontarians.

Interested in volunteering with the OCAA? Please contact Angela Bischoff at angela@cleanairalliance.org, 416-926-1907 ext. 246.

Sign our petition: http://www.ontariosgreenfuture.ca/petition.php.

Forests Pay the Price for America's Love Affair with Really Soft Toilet Paper

2009-02-28T06:38:00.001-08:00

Forests Pay the Price for America's Love Affair with Really Soft Toilet Paper

By Tara Lohan

AlterNet http://www.alternet.org/story/129351/

February 28, 2009

Americans have been long chastised for our environmental footprints (and for good reason). But the latest report from environmental groups including Greenpeace should give us major reason to pause. The Guardian could not have said it any better:

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country's love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public's insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

The numbers are shocking: More than 98 percent of the toilet paper we use in the US is from virgin forests, the Guardian reports. Across the world, people are struggling to save our forests from deforestation, and instead of helping out, we're wiping are butts with our best defense against climate change. And until the time comes when Obama gets Congress to pass a TP Act, Greenpeace has some help for consumers, with a handy guide for getting some good toilet paper that won't harm the environment.

The New York Times explained why it is we insist on only the finest trees:

...Fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.

The Guardian explains why this phenomena is not worldwide, but seems to be an American experience:

Dave Dixon, a [Kimberly-Clark] company spokesman, said toilet paper and tissue from recycled fibre had been on the market for years. If Americans wanted to buy them, they could.

"For bath tissue Americans in particular like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides," Dixon said. "It's the quality and softness the consumers in America have come to expect."

Longer fibres in virgin wood are easier to lay out and fluff up for a softer tissue. Dixon said the company used products from sustainbly farmed forests in Canada.

Americans already consume vastly more paper than any other country -- about three times more per person than the average European, and 100 times more than the average person in China.

Greenpeace launched a campaign to draw attention to why this might be a significant problem. The Times writes,

Still, trees and tree quality remain a contentious issue. Although brands differ, 25 percent to 50 percent of the pulp used to make toilet paper in this country comes from tree farms in South America and the United States. The rest, environmental groups say, comes mostly from old, second-growth forests that serve as important absorbers of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. In addition, some of the pulp comes from the last virgin North American forests, which are an irreplaceable habitat for a variety of endangered species, environmental groups say.

Greenpeace, the international conservation organization, contends that Kimberly Clark, the maker of two popular brands, Cottonelle and Scott, has gotten as much as 22 percent of its pulp from producers who cut trees in Canadian boreal forests where some trees are 200 years old.

There are solutions. As Graham Hill says in the Huffington Post, “Shouldn't we take a hint from Islamic culture and ask ourselves, ‘If there's **it anywhere on our body would we prefer to wipe it away with paper or wash it off with water?'”

And if that route won't work. Hill has another idea -- government action.

Instead of waiting decades for carbon-soaking forests to stop being decimated by our need for t.p., this is an area where the government should step in. Someone needs to step up and tell us that next year or in two years or three, all toilet tissue will be 20 percent recycled fibers (for example).

Yes, Kimberly-Clark will scream and cry, and yes, it seems like a somewhat trivial matter. Yet enforced cultural change is hard. We keep buying the soft stuff that strips the forests because it's there on the shelf. So this might not be the place where we can afford to wait for every last human consumer to decide that recycled t.p. is okay. We need the forests and their CO2 absorption now.

So instead of letting demand drive forest decimation, let's get Euro and demand manufacturers put increasing amounts of recycled fiber into their squares. If we did I'll just bet they'll find another technique to eventually give us soft and recycled. In the meantime we all suffer the relative indignity of the new rough and tough toilet paper era together.

It's all a matter of perspective really. Sure, soft toilet paper may be a sweet luxury you don't want to part with, but I'll take an old-growth forest any day and the possibility that rising seas might not actually wipe out my coastal abode.

How the Crash Will Reshape America - The Atlantic (March 2009

2009-02-24T08:04:00.001-08:00

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography
Richard Florida's latest thoughts.

The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

Margaret J. Wheatley: Eight Fearless Questions

2009-02-23T19:58:00.000-08:00

http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/eightfearlessquestions.html

My friend Chris Corrigan has added 3 more questions ....(at the end).

EIGHT FEARLESS QUESTIONS

Excerpt from "A Call to Fearlessness for Gentle Leaders" address at the Shambhala Institute Core Program, Halifax, June 2006

by Margaret Wheatley ©2006

I think these questions are worth holding for a while.

How do you call yourself? How do you identify yourself? And have you chosen a name for yourself that is big enough to hold your life's work?

I have a colleague who first suggested this to me. And he said, "So many of us choose names that are too small for a whole life." So, we call ourselves, 'cancer survivors;' that seems to be a very bold name, but is it big enough to hold a life? Or, 'children of abuse.' Or, we call ourselves 'orphans,' or 'widows,' or 'martyrs'.... are these names big enough to hold your life?

And the second question that just occurred to me as I was doing this is, Are we choosing names that demand fearlessness? You're a coach. You're an executive. You're a consultant. You're a teacher. You're a minister. You're a hospital administrator. You're a civil servant. Are those names demanding fearlessness of us? I don't know what the names are that would create fearlessness, but I think this is a very important question.

What's so bad about fear?

Fear has a lot of positive attributes when you think about it. First of all, it gives us adrenaline. So it gives us the energy we need, the surging we need, to really do things that, then, look courageous. So, fear could be a good thing.

The second thing about fear is that it's instantly available. You don't have to do any work here; you just have a thought and suddenly you're afraid.

And the other good thing about fear is that it's a constant companion. Day and night. Waking and dreaming. It's always there.

So, what is there to fear about fear? I don't know the answer to that question yet. So, I just ask you to consider it. But, it seems to me that a lot of our fear is based on wanting to protect and defend ourselves. And a lot of fear arises when we're so focused on ourselves that we lose our engagement with the world. If the way out of fearfulness is to stop identifying so terribly with ourselves and with the self that we're trying to protect and defend and nourish, then this leads us into the possibility that the way out of fearfulness is to connect with the greater world.

Does the world need us to be fearless?

What's going on in the world, and does it require a different response from us? Does the world need us to be fearless? Here's a poem that I wrote a while ago, that also expressed my views on this:

The flags are flying at half-mast. Again.
This one drapes across the highway as I drive toward it.
It's over-sized, the type of flag that became popular when patriotism
needed to be more visible.
It suffocates the road, limp, lifeless.
Wind attempts to lift its spirit but
the flag refuses so
laden with sorrow.

This flag is for Katrina.
I remember another massive flag that
flared-out defiantly in the fierce wind after 9-11.

The world I see will soon be lost in lifeless flags.
We are only at the beginning.

Last night, I threw out a salt container that still had some salt in it.
I wanted to clear out space in my crowded cabinet.
As I tossed it in the garbage, it came to me. There will
come such scarcity that even those few grains will be treasure.
I still threw it out, but I vowed to remember this night.

Now, how do I live whole-heartedly?

Every time a flag gets lowered, I tell myself:
This is what it feels like as a culture dies.
This is what it feels like in the age of destruction.
This is what groundless feels like.
Don't grasp for ground.
Don't grasp.

Groundlessness has to be learned.
I am teaching myself with these terrifying mantras.

What if we can't save the world?

What if our efforts come to nothing? What if, at the end of our lives, we die having watched destruction and not been able to create any good effect?

What, really, is available to us if we can't save the world? What do we fund our work for? Where do we gain energy if we don't believe that we're going to be successful? How can we do our work without hope that we will succeed?

There's something very interesting to understand about hope. That is, that hope and fear are one. Any time we're hopeful, we don't know it necessarily, but we're bringing in fear. Because fear is the constant, unavoidable companion of hope. What this simply means is that I hope for a certain outcome and I'm afraid I won't get it. I hope for a certain result and I'm fearful it won't happen. This is the way that hope and fear are wedded together. There is a place called, "beyond hope and fear." It is to be free from hope, so that we are free from fear.

So, it might be that the road to fearlessness is only found by giving up hope. By giving up outcomes, by giving up goals.

I find this to be an intolerable posture, by the way. If we don't have hope, where will we find our motivation? If we don't have hope, who will save the world? If we go down in despair - which seems to be the alternative to hope in many peoples' imaginations, who will save the world?

What if your work achieves nothing? Thomas Merton, a great writer and contemplative in the Catholic tradition, said, "Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not, perhaps, results opposite to what you expect.

"As you get used to this idea of your work achieving nothing, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there, too, a great deal has to be gone through, as, gradually, you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything."

What would it feel like to find our fearlessness with each other? For those relationships to be enough? For us to feel we would have made a significant contribution, and led a good life, just because we cared for, loved, consoled a few people? This is quite a frightening thought; to shift from saving the world to loving a few people? Doesn't seem like that will do it, does it?

What is it like to live in the future now?

I was given a passage by the Brazilian theologian, Ruben Alvez, who described hope in this way:

"What is hope? It is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is the suspicion that the overwhelming brutality of fact that oppresses us and represses us is not the last word. It is the hunch that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe, that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual, and that, in a miraculous and unexpected way, life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and to resurrection.

"But, hope must live with suffering. Suffering, without hope, produces resentment and despair. And hope, without suffering, creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness. So, let us plant dates, even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see.

"This is the secret of discipline. Such disciplined love is what has given saints, revolutionaries, and martyrs the courage to die for the future they envision; they make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope."

I'm finding this to be a very provocative exploration of hope, not comfortable at all. I don't actually want to make my body the seed of the future I hope for, or the seed of my own highest hope. I don't really want to have to sacrifice that much. I don't think I really know what "disciplined love" is. I don't understand that.

Why do we imprison ourselves? Why are we so afraid?

The American poet, Robert Bly, wrote:

"If we don't lift our voices, we allow
others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.
Every day we steal from ourselves knowledge gained over a thousand years."

Why do we imprison ourselves? And what's the nature of the bars? What's the nature of the prison?

I think some of the prison bars that we have constructed for ourselves are our fear of losing our jobs. Our fear of not being liked. Our need for approval. Our desire to make important changes but not have to risk anything at all. So, we still want the comfort of this life and it feels like a bigger risk to step out and say, "No," or to say, "You can't do that to me." It feels like a larger risk, because I think the real prison we're in is our affluence, and our focus on our affluence or our hypnosis around material goods. I offer you this to think about: what is it that keeps you from acting fearlessly?

I'm quite perplexed by how fearful we are as cultures now in North America, and in Europe: we're so damned fearful of losing what we have, we're not noticing that we're losing what we have through our silence.

Why do we put up these bars that keep us back from doing what we know needs to be done? What impedes us from standing forward for those things that nurture us, our hearts, and our spirits? Bernice Johnson Reagon, who was very active in the civil rights movements and also a wonderful singer, co-founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, tells the story of looking back at those days of the civil rights movement, now from the safety and comfort of a successful life and career. She said, "In those days, we used to go out onto the streets, we used to protest. They would shoot at us, and someone would get killed. And then we'd go to their funeral and then we'd mourn and we'd grieve. And then the next day, we'd go back on the streets and protest some more." And she said, "When I look back, now, I think we were crazy to do that." But, then she said this. "But, when you're doing what you're supposed to do be doing, it's somebody else's job to kill you."

Can we work beyond hope and fear?

Can we find a way to be motivated, to be energetic, to be happy; to take delight in the work that we're doing that isn't based on outcomes, that isn't based on needing to see a particular result? Is that even available?

What if we could offer our work as a gift so lightly, and with so much love, that that's really the source of fearlessness? We don't need it to be accepted in any one way. We don't need it to create any certain outcome. We don't need it to be any one thing. It is in the way we offer it, that the work transforms us. It is in the way we offer our work as a gift to those we love, to those we care about, to the issues we care about. It is in the way we offer the work that we find fearlessness. Beyond hope and fear, I think, is the possibility of love.

What would it take for us to just deal with what is? To not need to be always engaged in changing the world?

Yitzhak Perlman, the great violinist, was playing in New York. Yitzhak Perlman was crippled by polio as a young child, so the bottom part of his body doesn't work well and he wears these very prominent leg braces and comes on in crutches, in a very painful, slow way, hauling himself across the stage. Then he sits down and, very carefully, unbuckles the leg braces and lays them down, puts down his crutches, and then picks up his violin. So, this night the audience had watched him slowly, painfully, walk across the stage; and he began to play. And, suddenly, there was a loud noise in the hall that signaled that one of his four strings on his violin had just snapped.

Everyone expected that they would be watching Yitzhak Perlman put back the leg braces, walk slowly across the stage, and find a new violin. But this is what happened. Yitzhak Perlman closed his eyes for a moment. Yitzhak Perlman paused. And then he signaled for the conductor to begin again. And he began from where they had left off. And here's the description of his playing, from Jack Riemer in the Houston Chronicle:

"He played with such passion, and such power, and such purity, as people had never heard before. Of course, everyone knew that it was impossible to play this symphonic work with three strings. I know that. You know that. But that night, Yitzhak Perlman did not know that. You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before. When he finished, there was an awe-filed silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. Everyone was screaming and cheering and doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had just done. He smiled. He wiped the sweat from his brow. He raised his bow to us. And then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet and pensive and reverent tone,

"'You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.'"

Sometimes, it is our task to find out how much music we can make with what we have left. What is the name that is big enough to hold your fearlessness, that is big enough to call you into fearlessness? That is big enough to break your heart? To allow you to open to the suffering that is this world right now and to not become immobilized by fear and to not become immobilized by comfort? What is the way in which you can hold your work so that you do feel free from hope.... and therefore free from fear?

When have I been fearless in my life?
Who am I called to be for these times?
What is the question that you could live into for the next 30 days that would keep these insights alive as (an enduring) learning journey for you?

______________________________________________

Bio

Margaret Wheatley writes, teaches, and speaks about radically new practices and ideas for organizing in chaotic times. She works to create organizations of all types where people are known as the blessing, not the problem. She is President Emerita of The Berkana Institute, a charitable global leadership foundation serving life-affirming leaders, and has been an organizational consultant for many years, as well as a professor of management in two graduate programs.

Her newest book, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time, was released in January 2005. Her book, Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, (January 2002) proposes that real social change comes from the ageless process of people thinking together in conversation. Wheatley’s work also appears in two award-winning books, Leadership and the New Science (1992, 1999) and A Simpler Way (with Myron Kellner-Rogers, 1996,) plus several videos and articles.

She draws many of her ideas from new science and life’s ability to organize in self-organizing, systemic, and cooperative modes. And, increasingly her models for new organizations are drawn from her understanding of many different cultures and spiritual traditions. Her articles and work can be accessed at www.margaretwheatley.com, or 801-377-2996 in Utah, USA.

--  <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.winterfolkcamp.com">http://www.winterfolkcamp.com</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.haliburtonfolk.com">http://www.haliburtonfolk.com</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.environmenthaliburton.ca">http://www.environmenthaliburton.ca</a> ---------------------------------------------- `·.¸ ><((((º> .·´¯`·.¸.·<º))))><¸.·´¯·.¸ `·.¸.·´¯`·.¸ ><((((º> ¸.·´¯`·.¸><((((º> <º))))><·.¸.·´¯`·.¸><((((º>·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸ ·..·´¯`·. <º))))><.¸.·´¯`·.¸.·<º))))><   Eric Lilius Box 27 (1563 Eagle Lake Road) Eagle Lake, ON  K0M 1M0 CANADA W78.34.12/N45.07.09 705-754-9873 705-754-9860 (fax) mobile: 705-854-0311 <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="Skype:ericlilius">Skype:ericlilius</a> -------------------------------------------------------------- What you people call your natural resources, our people call our relatives. Oren Lyons, Onondaga elder  How can we best serve all the children of all species for all time? William McDonough  If it can't be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted,  then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production. Pete Seeger from "If It Can't Be Reduced"...  lyrics adapted verbatim from a zero-waste resolution  passed by the Berkeley, California, city council  If you don't use your own imagination,  somebody else is going to use it for you. Ronald Sukenick

Phosphorus ban would help lakes reduce algae

2009-01-16T18:45:00.001-08:00

Jan. 9, 2009

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Measure would ban phosphorus from lawns

By Lee Bergquist of the Journal Sentinel

Fertilizer that contains phosphorus could be banned from Wisconsin lawns, golf courses and other grassy areas by next year.Phosphorus stimulates plant growth and has long been a component in most traditional fertilizers. It is the middle of three numbers used to describe ingredients on fertilizer packages.

Key Democratic lawmakers will hold a news conference detailing the legislation.Lawmakers have tried to advance a phosphorus ban in the past, but the prospects for passage improves this year because Democrats now control both the Senate and the Assembly.

Rep. Spencer Black (D-Madison) and Sen. Mark Miller (D-Monona) are the leading co-sponsors of the legislation. Black said Friday the legislation is part of an "ambitious environmental agenda" in the new session aimed at attacking an array of water-quality problems.

In the case of a phosphorus ban, advocates hope that limiting its use will reduce algae blooms on lakes and other waterways.If approved, the bill circulating among lawmakers would go into effect one year after passage.Farm use would not be affected.

Dane County and 31 villages and towns, including a dozen in southeastern Wisconsin, already restrict the use of phosphorus-based fertilizers by property owners, according to the Wisconsin Association of Lakes.They include the town, village and city of Oconomowoc, Village of Chenequa, Village of Nashotah and town and city of Delavan.

"(Phosphorus) is essentially plant food," said Tami Jackson, a spokeswoman for the association, spurring algae blooms, crowding out useful plants and eating up oxygen that causes fish kills.Dane County banned phosphorus in fertilizer in January 2005.Sue Jones, watershed management coordinator for Dane County, said it was premature to judge whether the ban is improving water quality.

And that's the problem, said Karl Schimmel, president of Lawns of Wisconsin Network, a trade group.He described phosphorus bans as "feel-good legislation."

The group agrees phosphorus can harm lakes and streams but believes fertilizer gets a bad rap when other sources of phosphorus, such as manure runoff and goose and duck feces, also contribute to the problem.Lawn-care companies have been offering fertilizer without phosphorus in recent years as the demand for the product and local restrictions have grown, Schimmel said.

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the largest business lobby, hopes a compromise can be struck. Scott Manley, director of environmental policy, said a statewide ban is preferable to patchwork regulation. But he said language in the bill puts the onus on retailers and should be placed on fertilizer users.

There are limitations in the legislation. Phosphorus-based fertilizer could be used on new lawns and grass where soil is deficient. Milorganite brand fertilizer also gets a reprieve, according to the bill. Milorganite contains 2% phosphorus.

Jeff Spence, director of marketing for Milorganite at the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, said that phosphorus from organic sources tends to leach slower into water than synthetic fertilizer.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/37341199.html

A ready-made vehicle idling campaign

2009-01-05T08:01:00.001-08:00

http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/transportation/idling/material/campaign-resources.cfm?attr=16

I didn't know that this existed.

Massive EU crackdown on the use of scores of toxic pesticides

2009-01-01T16:57:00.001-08:00

December 21, 2008

Massive crackdown on the use of scores of toxic pesticides

New EU rules, opposed by Gordon Brown, will phase out use of cancer- causing compounds in Britain

Britain is to get its toughest crackdown on toxic substances in food and the environment, despite determined resistance to the safety measures from Gordon Brown.

Scores of pesticides suspected of causing cancer, DNA damage and "gender-bender" effects are to be phased out under new EU rules, which are being hailed as a revolution in the way the public is protected against poisonous chemicals.

The use of all pesticides in public places is to be dramatically reduced, with aerial spraying banned anywhere in the country.

Yesterday environmentalists hailed the measures – to be adopted following long negotiations between the European Parliament and individual governments – as a "landmark", while the National Farmers' Union called them "devastating". The agrochemical industry has bitterly resisted them, backed by the Prime Minister, who has voiced his concern that they would damage agriculture and food production without significantly benefiting health or the environment.

Almost half of all food eaten throughout Europe has been discovered to be contaminated by pesticides, with six of the most dangerous substances among the 10 most frequently found.

The European Parliament has long been pressing, with strong cross- party support, for radical controls, despite opposition from some governments, especially Britain. The new measures are the result of a compromise between the two sides, hammered out last week.

Under the deal, a list of 22 particularly hazardous chemicals used in scores of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides will gradually be phased out to avoid abrupt withdrawal from the market. The chemicals will be given a further five years' grace if banning them would put crops in serious danger. Pesticide use is to be kept to "a minimum" in parks, playgrounds, schools and near hospitals. Aerial spraying will be banned unless given exceptional approval by safety authorities.

Industry will have to release the results of any studies that show harmful effects, and there is to be better protection for bees, whose numbers have been falling alarmingly across Europe.

The National Farmers' Union said that the measures – which will have to be finally confirmed by the Parliament and EU leaders early in the new year – "will have a devastating effect on the horticultural industry and will see a reduction in crop yield and quality", and would also force up prices.

But environmentalists dismissed this as "scaremongering", pointing out that only a small minority of the 507 substances in pesticides would be banned. Though they would have liked even tougher controls, they still hailed the agreement as a breakthrough. Hiltrud Breyer, the German Green MEP who steered the proposals through the parliament, called them a "milestone for the environment, health and consumer protection". "The EU is setting a global precedent by phasing out highly toxic pesticides," she said.

Yesterday, Nick Mole, of the Pesticides Action Network, said: "This is a landmark, the biggest ever crackdown on poisonous chemicals... It says that anything hazardous to health or the environment will have to go, rather than taking the position... that if it is used properly it can be tolerated."

http://license.icopyright.net/user/viewFreeUse.act?fuid=MjI0NTI5OA%3D%3D

--  <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.haliburtonfolk.com">http://www.haliburtonfolk.com</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.environmenthaliburton.ca">http://www.environmenthaliburton.ca</a> ---------------------------------------------- `·.¸ ><((((º> .·´¯`·.¸.·<º))))><¸.·´¯·.¸ `·.¸.·´¯`·.¸ ><((((º> ¸.·´¯`·.¸><((((º> <º))))><·.¸.·´¯`·.¸><((((º>·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸ ·..·´¯`·. <º))))><.¸.·´¯`·.¸.·<º))))><   Eric Lilius Box 27 (1563 Eagle Lake Road) Eagle Lake, ON  K0M 1M0 CANADA W78.34.12/N45.07.09 705-754-9873 705-754-9860 (fax) mobile: 705-854-0311 <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="Skype:ericlilius">Skype:ericlilius</a> -------------------------------------------------------------- What you people call your natural resources, our people call our relatives. Oren Lyons, Onondaga elder  "How can we best serve all the children of all species for all time?” William McDonough  If it can't be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted,  then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production. Pete Seeger

Ocean currents can power the world, say scientists - Telegraph

2008-12-04T12:56:00.001-08:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/renewableenergy/3535012/Ocean-currents-can-power-the-world-say-scientists.html

A revolutionary device that can harness energy from slow-moving rivers and ocean currents could provide enough power for the entire world, scientists claim.

By Jasper Copping
Last Updated: 2:39PM GMT 29 Nov 2008

Existing technologies require an average current of five or six knots to operate efficiently, while most of the earth's currents are slower than three knots Photo: AP

The technology can generate electricity in water flowing at a rate of less than one knot - about one mile an hour - meaning it could operate on most waterways and sea beds around the globe.

Existing technologies which use water power, relying on the action of waves, tides or faster currents created by dams, are far more limited in where they can be used, and also cause greater obstructions when they are built in rivers or the sea. Turbines and water mills need an average current of five or six knots to operate efficiently, while most of the earth's currents are slower than three knots.

The new device, which has been inspired by the way fish swim, consists of a system of cylinders positioned horizontal to the water flow and attached to springs.

As water flows past, the cylinder creates vortices, which push and pull the cylinder up and down. The mechanical energy in the vibrations is then converted into electricity.

Cylinders arranged over a cubic metre of the sea or river bed in a flow of three knots can produce 51 watts. This is more efficient than similar-sized turbines or wave generators, and the amount of power produced can increase sharply if the flow is faster or if more cylinders are added.

A "field" of cylinders built on the sea bed over a 1km by 1.5km area, and the height of a two-storey house, with a flow of just three knots, could generate enough power for around 100,000 homes. Just a few of the cylinders, stacked in a short ladder, could power an anchored ship or a lighthouse.

Systems could be sited on river beds or suspended in the ocean. The scientists behind the technology, which has been developed in research funded by the US government, say that generating power in this way would potentially cost only around 3.5p per kilowatt hour, compared to about 4.5p for wind energy and between 10p and 31p for solar power. They say the technology would require up to 50 times less ocean acreage than wave power generation.

The system, conceived by scientists at the University of Michigan, is called Vivace, or "vortex-induced vibrations for aquatic clean energy".

Michael Bernitsas, a professor of naval architecture at the university, said it was based on the changes in water speed that are caused when a current flows past an obstruction. Eddies or vortices, formed in the water flow, can move objects up and down or left and right.

"This is a totally new method of extracting energy from water flow," said Mr Bernitsas. "Fish curve their bodies to glide between the vortices shed by the bodies of the fish in front of them. Their muscle power alone could not propel them through the water at the speed they go, so they ride in each other's wake."

Such vibrations, which were first observed 500 years ago by Leonardo DaVinci in the form of "Aeolian Tones", can cause damage to structures built in water, like docks and oil rigs. But Mr Bernitsas added: "We enhance the vibrations and harness this powerful and destructive force in nature.

"If we could harness 0.1 per cent of the energy in the ocean, we could support the energy needs of 15 billion people. In the English Channel, for example, there is a very strong current, so you produce a lot of power."

Because the parts only oscillate slowly, the technology is likely to be less harmful to aquatic wildlife than dams or water turbines. And as the installations can be positioned far below the surface of the sea, there would be less interference with shipping, recreational boat users, fishing and tourism.

The engineers are now deploying a prototype device in the Detroit River, which has a flow of less than two knots. Their work, funded by the US Department of Energy and the US Office of Naval Research, is published in the current issue of the quarterly Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering.

EcoDriving USA

2008-12-02T19:08:00.001-08:00

http://www.ecodrivingusa.com/#/be-an-ecodriver/

--------------------------------------------------------------
What you people call your natural resources, our people call our relatives.
Oren Lyons, Onondaga elder

"How can we best serve all the children of all species for all time?"
William McDonough

If it can't be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted,
then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.
Pete Seeger

Food Storage as Grandma Knew It

2008-11-06T13:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/garden/06root.html
By MICHAEL TORTORELLO

In a strictly technical sense, Cynthia Worley is not transforming her basement into a time machine. Yet what’s going on this harvest season beneath her Harlem brownstone on 122nd Street, at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, is surely something out of the past — or perhaps the future. The space itself is nothing special: Whitewashed granite walls run the width and depth of the room, 16 feet by 60 feet. A forgotten owner tried to put in a cement floor, but the dirt, which takes a long-term view of things, is stubbornly coming back. “It’s basically a sod floor,” Ms. Worley said. What’s important is that the shelves are sturdy, because Ms. Worley and her husband, Haja Worley, will soon load them with 20 pounds of potatoes, 20 pounds of onions, 30 pounds of butternut and acorn squash, 10 heads of cabbage, 60-odd pints of home-canned tomatoes and preserves, 9 gallons of berry and fruit wines, and another gallon or two of mulberry vinegar. The goodies in the pint jars and the carboys come from the Joseph Daniel Wilson Memorial Garden, which the Worleys founded across the street. The fresh produce is a huge final delivery from a Community Supported Agriculture farm in Orange County, which they used all summer. Packed in sand and stored at 55 degrees, the potatoes should keep at least until the New Year. The squash could still be palatable on Groundhog Day, and the onions should survive till spring. Ms. Worley, who counsels and teaches adults for the New York City Department of Education, and Mr. Worley, a neighborhood organizer and radio engineer, will let their basement-deprived friends store vegetables, too. The Worleys, like a number of other Americans, have made the seemingly anachronistic choice to turn their basement into a root cellar. While Ms. Worley’s brownstone basement stash won’t feed the couple through the winter, she said, “I think it’s a healthy way to go and an economical way.” According to a September survey on consumer anxieties over higher fuel and food prices from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames, 34 percent of respondents said that they were likely to raise more of their own vegetables. Another 37 percent said they were likely to can or freeze more of their food. The cousin to canning and freezing is the root cellar. “I’ve been doing local food work for a long time,” said Rich Pirog, associate director of the Leopold Center, who conducted the study. “And I’m seeing an increase in articles in various sustainable ag newsletters about root cellaring.” According to Bruce Butterfield, the research director for the National Gardening Association, a trade group, home food preservation typically increases in a rotten economy. In 2002, the close of the last mild recession, 29 million households bought supplies for freezing, drying, processing and canning. Last year that number stood at only 22 million — a figure Mr. Butterfield said he expects to rise rapidly. Root cellars have long been the province of Midwestern grandmothers, back-to-the-landers and committed survivalists. But given the nation’s budding romance with locally produced food, they also appeal to the backyard gardener, who may have a fruit tree that drops a bigger bounty every year while the refrigerator remains the same size. While horticulture may be a science, home food storage definitely can carry the stench of an imperfect art. According to the essential 1979 book, “Root Cellaring,” by Mike and Nancy Bubel, some items like cabbage and pears do best in a moist environment below 40 degrees (though above freezing). To achieve this, a cellar probably needs to be vented, or have windows that open. Winter squash and sweet potatoes should be kept dry and closer to 50 degrees — perhaps closer to the furnace. Other rules of root cellaring sound more like molecular gastronomy. For example, the ethylene gas that apples give off will make carrots bitter. As a general principle, keeping produce in a cool chamber that is beneath the frost line — the depth, roughly four feet down, below which the soil doesn’t freeze — can slow both the normal process of ripening and the creeping spread of bacterial and fungal rot. These are the forces that will turn a lost tomato in the back of the cupboard into a little lagoon of noxious goo. But if you leave that green tomato on a vine and drape it upside down, it will gradually turn red in three or four weeks. “I’ve had fresh tomatoes for Thanksgiving,” said Jito Coleman, an environmental engineer who practices the inverted tomato — which should be a yoga pose — in a root cellar he built in the house he designed in Warren, Vt. People who squirrel away vegetables tend to be resourceful, and they do not limit themselves to the subterranean. Anna Barnes, who runs a small media company and coordinates the Prairieland Community Supported Agriculture in Champaign, Ill., says squash hung in a pair of knotted pantyhose stay unspoiled longer than others. Here, the cold is optional, too. It’s the bruising that comes from a squash sitting on a hard countertop, she said, that speeds senescence. (“You wouldn’t want to do it in the guest closet,” Ms. Barnes said. Or, presumably, wear the pantyhose again.) Taken to a do-it-yourself extreme, lots of places can become stockrooms. Margaret Christie has surrendered countless nooks in her 1845 Federal-style home in tiny downtown Whately, Mass., to laying away the crops she grows in the family’s half-acre vegetable plot. Ms. Christie, 44, a projects director for Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, a nonprofit that supports community farming in western Massachusetts, also feeds her husband and three children from their milk goats, laying hens, pigpens and lamb pastures. This year, she swapped a lamb for 40 pounds of sweet potatoes, 40 pounds of onions and 40 pounds of carrots from a neighbor’s farm. This cornucopia has colonized the basement, along with the family’s own potatoes. “They’re sitting next to the Ping-Pong table,” she said, in “five-gallon buckets with window screens for the lids.” Onions, garlic and pumpkins dwell in an uninsulated attic — except in midwinter, when that space drops below freezing. Then the vegetables move into the guest bedroom. If that space has already been claimed, they occasionally hide out under the bed of her 11-year-old son. Their homegrown popcorn kernels have a way of turning up everywhere, courtesy of the neighborhood mice, who have developed their own taste for locally grown year-round produce. The contemporary American, for whom a pizza delivery is seldom more than a phone call away, is an oddity in the annals of eating. Elizabeth Cromley, a professor of architectural history at Northeastern University, said that at one time, “just about every house had special facilities for preserving food.” Professor Cromley has finished a book called “The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses,” which is to be published by the University of Virginia Press in 2010. She said that understanding food preservation is not a frivolous pursuit. More than 400 books instructed 19th-century Americans on how to plan a functional house, with a practical larder, basement and outbuildings, she said. “You’re not going to die if you don’t get a new dress,” she said, “but if you don’t know this, it will kill you.” Harriet Fasenfest, 55, who lives in Portland, Ore., has been playing with her food for a long time. A semiretired restaurateur, she started “hacking up” her small city lot in the Alberta Art District to grow food. (Her husband asked, “Where will we play Frisbee?” and Ms. Fasenfest replied, “The park.”) She also teaches classes on canning and created the Web site portlandpreserve.com. There is no digging a dry refuge from the seep and suck of a Portland winter. So in lieu of a traditional cellar, she applies the scientific method. “Last year I tried an experiment with four different varieties of apples,” she said, “to see how long it took them to rot. So I put them in a box in my shed and then they rotted. It worked!” When she’s not filling her 10-foot-by-10-foot shed, she experiments in the cubbyholes that sit alongside the outdoor cellar stairs. Copra onions, Ms. Fasenfest has found, store better than Walla Wallas. An indoor heating vent can cure butternut squash so effectively that it can probably last in cold storage until the economy turns around (whenever that is). Nevertheless, even those who rhapsodize about the pleasures of eating locally grown food year-round have to admit that the effort doesn’t always seem worthwhile. Ms. Fasenfest has been forced to conclude that the labor that went into growing and storing the 30 pounds of russet potatoes now beneath the stairwell was not really adequate to the reward. “If we had to survive off of those,” she said, “we’d be dead.” By MICHAEL TORTORELLO IN a strictly technical sense, Cynthia Worley is not transforming her basement into a time machine. Yet what’s going on this harvest season beneath her Harlem brownstone on 122nd Street, at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, is surely something out of the past — or perhaps the future. The space itself is nothing special: Whitewashed granite walls run the width and depth of the room, 16 feet by 60 feet. A forgotten owner tried to put in a cement floor, but the dirt, which takes a long-term view of things, is stubbornly coming back. “It’s basically a sod floor,” Ms. Worley said. What’s important is that the shelves are sturdy, because Ms. Worley and her husband, Haja Worley, will soon load them with 20 pounds of potatoes, 20 pounds of onions, 30 pounds of butternut and acorn squash, 10 heads of cabbage, 60-odd pints of home-canned tomatoes and preserves, 9 gallons of berry and fruit wines, and another gallon or two of mulberry vinegar. The goodies in the pint jars and the carboys come from the Joseph Daniel Wilson Memorial Garden, which the Worleys founded across the street. The fresh produce is a huge final delivery from a Community Supported Agriculture farm in Orange County, which they used all summer. Packed in sand and stored at 55 degrees, the potatoes should keep at least until the New Year. The squash could still be palatable on Groundhog Day, and the onions should survive till spring. Ms. Worley, who counsels and teaches adults for the New York City Department of Education, and Mr. Worley, a neighborhood organizer and radio engineer, will let their basement-deprived friends store vegetables, too. The Worleys, like a number of other Americans, have made the seemingly anachronistic choice to turn their basement into a root cellar. While Ms. Worley’s brownstone basement stash won’t feed the couple through the winter, she said, “I think it’s a healthy way to go and an economical way.” According to a September survey on consumer anxieties over higher fuel and food prices from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames, 34 percent of respondents said that they were likely to raise more of their own vegetables. Another 37 percent said they were likely to can or freeze more of their food. The cousin to canning and freezing is the root cellar. “I’ve been doing local food work for a long time,” said Rich Pirog, associate director of the Leopold Center, who conducted the study. “And I’m seeing an increase in articles in various sustainable ag newsletters about root cellaring.” According to Bruce Butterfield, the research director for the National Gardening Association, a trade group, home food preservation typically increases in a rotten economy. In 2002, the close of the last mild recession, 29 million households bought supplies for freezing, drying, processing and canning. Last year that number stood at only 22 million — a figure Mr. Butterfield said he expects to rise rapidly. Root cellars have long been the province of Midwestern grandmothers, back-to-the-landers and committed survivalists. But given the nation’s budding romance with locally produced food, they also appeal to the backyard gardener, who may have a fruit tree that drops a bigger bounty every year while the refrigerator remains the same size. While horticulture may be a science, home food storage definitely can carry the stench of an imperfect art. According to the essential 1979 book, “Root Cellaring,” by Mike and Nancy Bubel, some items like cabbage and pears do best in a moist environment below 40 degrees (though above freezing). To achieve this, a cellar probably needs to be vented, or have windows that open. Winter squash and sweet potatoes should be kept dry and closer to 50 degrees — perhaps closer to the furnace. Other rules of root cellaring sound more like molecular gastronomy. For example, the ethylene gas that apples give off will make carrots bitter. As a general principle, keeping produce in a cool chamber that is beneath the frost line — the depth, roughly four feet down, below which the soil doesn’t freeze — can slow both the normal process of ripening and the creeping spread of bacterial and fungal rot. These are the forces that will turn a lost tomato in the back of the cupboard into a little lagoon of noxious goo. But if you leave that green tomato on a vine and drape it upside down, it will gradually turn red in three or four weeks. “I’ve had fresh tomatoes for Thanksgiving,” said Jito Coleman, an environmental engineer who practices the inverted tomato — which should be a yoga pose — in a root cellar he built in the house he designed in Warren, Vt. People who squirrel away vegetables tend to be resourceful, and they do not limit themselves to the subterranean. Anna Barnes, who runs a small media company and coordinates the Prairieland Community Supported Agriculture in Champaign, Ill., says squash hung in a pair of knotted pantyhose stay unspoiled longer than others. Here, the cold is optional, too. It’s the bruising that comes from a squash sitting on a hard countertop, she said, that speeds senescence. (“You wouldn’t want to do it in the guest closet,” Ms. Barnes said. Or, presumably, wear the pantyhose again.) Taken to a do-it-yourself extreme, lots of places can become stockrooms. Margaret Christie has surrendered countless nooks in her 1845 Federal-style home in tiny downtown Whately, Mass., to laying away the crops she grows in the family’s half-acre vegetable plot. Ms. Christie, 44, a projects director for Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, a nonprofit that supports community farming in western Massachusetts, also feeds her husband and three children from their milk goats, laying hens, pigpens and lamb pastures. This year, she swapped a lamb for 40 pounds of sweet potatoes, 40 pounds of onions and 40 pounds of carrots from a neighbor’s farm. This cornucopia has colonized the basement, along with the family’s own potatoes. “They’re sitting next to the Ping-Pong table,” she said, in “five-gallon buckets with window screens for the lids.” Onions, garlic and pumpkins dwell in an uninsulated attic — except in midwinter, when that space drops below freezing. Then the vegetables move into the guest bedroom. If that space has already been claimed, they occasionally hide out under the bed of her 11-year-old son. Their homegrown popcorn kernels have a way of turning up everywhere, courtesy of the neighborhood mice, who have developed their own taste for locally grown year-round produce. The contemporary American, for whom a pizza delivery is seldom more than a phone call away, is an oddity in the annals of eating. Elizabeth Cromley, a professor of architectural history at Northeastern University, said that at one time, “just about every house had special facilities for preserving food.” Professor Cromley has finished a book called “The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses,” which is to be published by the University of Virginia Press in 2010. She said that understanding food preservation is not a frivolous pursuit. More than 400 books instructed 19th-century Americans on how to plan a functional house, with a practical larder, basement and outbuildings, she said. “You’re not going to die if you don’t get a new dress,” she said, “but if you don’t know this, it will kill you.” Harriet Fasenfest, 55, who lives in Portland, Ore., has been playing with her food for a long time. A semiretired restaurateur, she started “hacking up” her small city lot in the Alberta Art District to grow food. (Her husband asked, “Where will we play Frisbee?” and Ms. Fasenfest replied, “The park.”) She also teaches classes on canning and created the Web site portlandpreserve.com. There is no digging a dry refuge from the seep and suck of a Portland winter. So in lieu of a traditional cellar, she applies the scientific method. “Last year I tried an experiment with four different varieties of apples,” she said, “to see how long it took them to rot. So I put them in a box in my shed and then they rotted. It worked!” When she’s not filling her 10-foot-by-10-foot shed, she experiments in the cubbyholes that sit alongside the outdoor cellar stairs. Copra onions, Ms. Fasenfest has found, store better than Walla Wallas. An indoor heating vent can cure butternut squash so effectively that it can probably last in cold storage until the economy turns around (whenever that is). Nevertheless, even those who rhapsodize about the pleasures of eating locally grown food year-round have to admit that the effort doesn’t always seem worthwhile. Ms. Fasenfest has been forced to conclude that the labor that went into growing and storing the 30 pounds of russet potatoes now beneath the stairwell was not really adequate to the reward. “If we had to survive off of those,” she said, “we’d be dead.”

David Suzuki hosting The Current Friday.

2008-10-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

David talks to the founder of Nowtopia, Bill McKibbon on 350, and bird experts about the importance of birds and the consequences of their declining numbers..

You can listen to this on the internet by choosing the more westerly time zones.
http://www.cbc.ca/listen/streams.html

The program will be available later from the website.
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/index.html

The Corporation released for free

2008-09-30T06:29:00.001-07:00

‘The Corporation’ Released for Free on BitTorrent

Filmmaker Mark Achbar just released an updated “official” torrent of it. Everyone is free to download, watch, discuss, and share it.
The new torrent download includes a high-quality rip of the master DVD and a 40 minute interview with Joel Bakan, the author of the book and writer of the film. Mark Achbar actually dedicated a computer in his garage to do nothing but seed.
Although the torrent download is free, the filmmakers encourage people to donate a small fee if they like what they see.(....)
The makers of “The Corporation just launched a Campaign for Corporate Harm Reduction (C4CHR) in collaboration with Hellocoolworld.com. The purpose of this campaign is to collect stories about the impact of the film, asking people what they did, or something they’ve heard happened as a result of the film.

“We want to create a feedback loop on the “what you can do” front, and perhaps turn it into a book. The torrent is a great way to stay in touch with people about our current activities Achbar” Achbar explained.

He added, “my only regret is that I didn’t put up my own torrent sooner.”

Environmental Health News: Front Page

2008-09-16T21:06:00.001-07:00

Buy your tomato products in glass.
Eric

Bisphenol A linked to diabetes, heart disease in humans.

By Marla Cone Editor in Chief Published Sep 16, 2008

Canned food is a major source of human exposure to BPA.

People exposed to higher levels of a chemical in plastic food and beverage containers are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and diabetes, according to a new scientific study published today.

The research – the first large-scale study of bisphenol A in human beings – adds to evidence from animal tests that the compound may be contributing to an array of diseases and other health problems.

With about two million tons used worldwide each year, BPA is one of the highest-volume synthetic chemicals in the world, and it is found in the bodies of more than 90% of Americans. Traces of it leach from containers made of polycarbonate, which is a hard, clear plastic, and the epoxy linings of canned foods and beverages.

For the 1,455 U.S. adults tested, the more BPA in their urine, the higher their rates of heart disease and diabetes, according to research by a British team of scientists

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/

A Reporter at Large: The Island in the Wind: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

2008-07-04T19:35:00.001-07:00

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_kolbert

The Island in the Wind

A Danish community’s victory over carbon emissions.

by Elizabeth Kolbert July 7, 2008

Once people on Samsø started thinking about energy, a local farmer explains, “it became a kind of sport.”
Photograph by Joachim Ladefoged.

Related Links: Slide Show: Photographs of the Danish island of Samsø, by Joachim Ladefoged.

Jørgen Tranberg is a farmer who lives on the Danish island of Samsø. He is a beefy man with a mop of brown hair and an unpredictable sense of humor. When I arrived at his house, one gray morning this spring, he was sitting in his kitchen, smoking a cigarette and watching grainy images on a black-and-white TV. The images turned out to be closed-circuit shots from his barn. One of his cows, he told me, was about to give birth, and he was keeping an eye on her. We talked for a few minutes, and then, laughing, he asked me if I wanted to climb his wind turbine. I was pretty sure I didn’t, but I said yes anyway.

We got into Tranberg’s car and bounced along a rutted dirt road. The turbine loomed up in front of us. When we reached it, Tranberg stubbed out his cigarette and opened a small door in the base of the tower. Inside were eight ladders, each about twenty feet tall, attached one above the other. We started up, and were soon huffing. Above the last ladder, there was a trapdoor, which led to a sort of engine room. We scrambled into it, at which point we were standing on top of the generator. Tranberg pressed a button, and the roof slid open to reveal the gray sky and a patchwork of green and brown fields stretching toward the sea. He pressed another button. The rotors, which he had switched off during our climb, started to turn, at first sluggishly and then much more rapidly. It felt as if we were about to take off. I’d like to say the feeling was exhilarating; in fact, I found it sickening. Tranberg looked at me and started to laugh.

Samsø, which is roughly the size of Nantucket, sits in what’s known as the Kattegat, an arm of the North Sea. The island is bulgy in the south and narrows to a bladelike point in the north, so that on a map it looks a bit like a woman’s torso and a bit like a meat cleaver. It has twenty-two villages that hug the narrow streets; out back are fields where farmers grow potatoes and wheat and strawberries. Thanks to Denmark’s peculiar geography, Samsø is smack in the center of the country and, at the same time, in the middle of nowhere.

For the past decade or so, Samsø has been the site of an unlikely social movement. When it began, in the late nineteen-nineties, the island’s forty-three hundred inhabitants had what might be described as a conventional attitude toward energy: as long as it continued to arrive, they weren’t much interested in it. Most Samsingers heated their houses with oil, which was brought in on tankers. They used electricity imported from the mainland via cable, much of which was generated by burning coal. As a result, each Samsinger put into the atmosphere, on average, nearly eleven tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Then, quite deliberately, the residents of the island set about changing this. They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.

The residents of Samsø that I spoke to were clearly proud of their accomplishment. All the same, they insisted on their ordinariness. They were, they noted, not wealthy, nor were they especially well educated or idealistic. They weren’t even terribly adventuresome. “We are a conservative farming community” is how one Samsinger put it. “We are only normal people,” Tranberg told me. “We are not some special people.”

Skin Deep: Cosmetic Safety Database - Special Report

2008-07-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

http://cosmeticsdatabase.com/special/sunscreens2008/

Does your sunscreen work? An investigation of nearly 1,000 brand-name sunscreen products finds that 4 out of 5 contain chemicals that may pose health hazards or don't adequately protect skin from the sun's damaging rays. Some of the worst offenders are leading brands like Coppertone, Banana Boat, and Neutrogena.

More than a million cases of skin cancer are diagnosed in the U.S. every year, but FDA still hasn't finalized sunscreen standards first announced 30 years ago. Click here to tell FDA you're tired of waiting. Meanwhile, companies are free to claim but not provide broad spectrum protection. Until FDA requires that all sunscreens be safe and effective, Environmental Working Group's comprehensive sunscreen guide—including a list of 143 products that offer very good sun protection—fills in the gaps.

BIG OIL SCREWS EVERYONE

2008-05-30T04:55:00.001-07:00

Every time Sohaila Rezazadeh rings up a sale at her Exxon station on
Chain Bridge Road in Oakton, USA her cash register sends the information
to Exxon Mobil's central computers. If she raises the price of gasoline
a couple of pennies, chances are that Exxon will raise the wholesale
price she pays by the same amount. Through a password-protected Web
portal, Exxon notifies Rezazadeh of wholesale price changes daily. That
way the oil giant, which is earning about US$3.3 billion a month,
fine-tunes the pump prices at the franchise Rezazadeh has owned for 12
years.

Now, however, Rezazadeh says she cannot stay in business. Credit-card
fees are eating her profit margins. Exxon, which owns the station land,
last week handed Rezazadeh a new lease raising her rent about 30 percent
over the next three years. She stuck a copy on the window of her station
to show customers who are angry about soaring pump prices. Rezazadeh has
told Exxon that she cannot make money with the rent that high. Her
territory manager's reply, she said, was simple: "When you go, leave us
the keys..." - Washington Post

Study links air pollution to blood clots in legs

2008-05-13T06:27:00.000-07:00

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080512/pollution_study_080512/20080512?hub=TopStories

High-stakes battle over mining rights

2008-05-12T07:03:00.001-07:00

High-stakes battle over mining rights

Century-old law giving prospectors right to drill on private land unites natives and non-natives

May 12, 2008 04:30 AM

Peter Gorrie
Environment Reporter

OMPAH, Ont.–Frank Morrison knew immediately what the red metal tag meant. He didn't understand why it was on his land.

It was a crisp, sunny morning in October 2006. Morrison, retired from the advertising industry, was cutting wood on the rolling, 40-hectare property, 100 kilometres north of Kingston, that he and his wife Gloria moved to six years ago.

The tag was attached to a tree that had been chopped to just over a metre high. A straight row of pink ribbons ran from it into the bush. Other trees had been crudely blazed.

All this meant that a prospector, without permission, had claimed the site for a potential mine.

Calls to the provincial Ministry of Northern Development and Mines confirmed that Oakville-based Frontenac Ventures Corp. had staked the claims – in fact, to 80 per cent of the Morrisons' property and, eventually, about 12,000 hectares in the area. The company was looking for uranium.

Under Ontario's century-old Mining Act, and across Canada and most of the world, all this is legal. In fact, secret staking is considered crucial to the industry.

"We found out very quickly that there is no help. The mining industry trumps everything," Morrison said recently in the couple's log home – partly finished and with construction at a standstill while the mine remains a threat.

The Morrisons are part of a gathering protest over mining rights that is uniting non-natives and Indians, and causing a major headache at Queen's Park.

The mining industry has long operated out of sight, and mind. Not any more: Soaring prices for uranium, platinum and other minerals have touched off a claims-staking rush across much of Ontario.

The race for resources has put the spotlight on the Act, which, under a system known as free entry, allows prospectors and mine developers almost unhindered access to public lands and much private property as well.

Indians say they're fighting for the right to control development on their traditional lands. The Morrisons and other non-natives are incensed that prospectors can arrive, unannounced, and dig for minerals under their feet.

The controversy has grown so high profile that Premier Dalton McGuinty promises to "modernize" the creaky law.

Much is at stake: Queen's Park is courting mining companies to boost the province's economy. Industry officials warn mining would die without free entry.

Prospectors depend on secrecy, said Neal Smitheman, lawyer for Frontenac Ventures. "They don't want to share information before staking ... It's easy to have your claim jumped."

On the other side, seven people are in jail for protesting mine developments, and more might join them next month.

AFTER FINDING THE METAL

Morrison contacted a local Indian group, the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, whose land claim covers most of the proposed mining territory.

After months of research and phone calls, non-natives and Indians joined forces.

On last year's national aboriginal day of protest, the Algonquins set up a blockade camp at Frontenac's base, a few kilometres from the Morrisons' place, where exploratory drilling was to be done. A short-term event became a peaceful vigil that continued for months. Non-native supporters, who refer to themselves as settlers, brought food and supplies, and communicated the story to the rest of the province.

Meanwhile, at Frontenac's request, a Kingston judge issued an injunction against the protest. In October, several Algonquins and non-natives, including Morrison, were charged with violating the order.

The case went to court in February. While charges against the non-natives were withdrawn, Associate Chief Justice Douglas Cunningham told the Algonquins to submit to the injunction or go to jail.

All but one agreed. The exception was Bob Lovelace, 59, a former chief who teaches at Queen's University in Kingston.

"I am in a dilemma," he told the court. "I want to obey Canadian law, but Algonquin law instructs me that I must preserve Creation. I must follow Algonquin law."

"There can only be one law – the law of Canada as expressed in this court," Cunningham replied as he imposed a six-month jail term and a $25,000 fine.

That wasn't the end of it. For technical legal reasons, a second set of charges was laid later last fall against the same group. A June 2 hearing has been set.

The camp continued until February, when the court ordered opponents to stay at least 200 metres away. The OPP charged four non-natives: They, too, are to be in court next month.

One of the Algonquins who will again stand before Cunningham is Harold Perry, 78, an honorary chief who moves and speaks slowly after a couple of strokes and heart attacks. He didn't want to comply with the order last time but acquiesced for friends worried he'd die in jail. He'll respond differently if issued the same ultimatum next month, he said over tea and sandwiches in the rural lakeside home he built nearly 50 years ago in a village called Ompah, 100 kilometres southwest of Ottawa.

"There comes a point at my age when if you don't stand up for your rights, what are you living for?"

Around the same time Lovelace was jailed, up in Thunder Bay, six members of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, or KI, an Indian community in Ontario's far north, got six-month terms for protesting development of a platinum mine.

In Eastern Ontario, critics fear the health and environmental impacts of an open-pit uranium mine, particularly that radioactive waste would ruin water sources and that the project would kill the tourism and cottage economy. But the heart of the dispute is who determines where mines are built.

Staking raises different issues on private and public land.

Like the Morrisons, most private property holders own just the surface rights to their land. Prospectors can stake for minerals without permission. If exploratory drilling or other work is to be done, landowners can negotiate for compensation. But if they object, they can't simply say "No." They must take their case to the provincial Mining Commissioner to decide.

"When your land is staked, what it really means is that you really have no rights at all," Gloria Morrison said. The claim staking has destroyed the value of their property, she said, but, far more, the experience shattered a lifetime of certainties.

"You believe in democracy, freedom of speech and justice in the courts. Then you're faced with one assault after another. It's like the ground is pulled out from under you."

On public, or Crown, land, mining can go ahead as long as the province approves, and it usually does.

Reserves are off-limits to miners, but the Act is an issue when Indians claim additional territory, which usually means Crown land.

In 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled, on a dispute in British Columbia, that Indians must be consulted before development occurs. Ontario's Liberal government says it concurs. But it and the courts interpret consultation as simply offering information and discussing how projects should proceed.

The Ardoch Algonquins and KI members argue that's not enough: "The government's view is that there will be consultation but at the end of the process there will be mining exploration," says Ardoch co-chief Mireille Lapointe. "That's not consultation. There needs to be the possibility it will lead to no exploration."

Now that free entry has moved out of the shadows, a reportedly divided Liberal cabinet is trying to figure out how to respond.

To defuse the controversy, the government says it supports freeing Lovelace and the "KI Six."

On the bigger issue: "We need to modernize the Act so that it is in keeping with our values and expectations at the beginning of the 21st century," McGuinty said in a recent written response to critics.

But it appears unlikely free entry will be abandoned, or that consultation will include a veto for Indians.

The government has no desire to curtail development, and some communities welcome it, Mines Minister Michael Gravelle said in a recent interview. "The real issue is how do we find the balance between the requirement to have consultation that's viewed as legitimate by First Nations and the need to maintain the investment climate, which is extremely positive in Ontario. It's a bit of a tightrope."

--  http://www.haliburtonfolk.com http://www.environmenthaliburton.ca ---------------------------------------------- `·.¸ ><((((º> .·´¯`·.¸.·<º))))><¸.·´¯·.¸ `·.¸.·´¯`·.¸ ><((((º> ¸.·´¯`·.¸><((((º> <º))))><·.¸.·´¯`·.¸><((((º>·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸ ·..·´¯`·. <º))))><.¸.·´¯`·.¸.·<º))))><   Eric Lilius Box 27 (1563 Eagle Lake Road) Eagle Lake, ON  K0M 1M0 CANADA W78.34.12/N45.07.09 705-754-9873 705-754-9860 (fax) --------------------------------------------------------------  The solution to your problem is to see who has it.  Ramana Maharshi

Fwd: Living on Earth as if we want to stay

2008-04-21T11:20:00.001-07:00

Who: Mike Nickerson, author of:
Life, Money & Illusion; Living on Earth as if we want to stay

What: Discussion on Sustainability and a way forward

Where: Haliburton Fish Hatchery - 66712 Gelert Road

When: Thursday, April 24, 2008, 7 - 9 pm

Sponsor: Gaia Centre, gaiacentre@sympatico.ca
www.gaiacentre.org
Carol Kilby
705-754-2474
____________________________________________

"Living on Earth as if we want to stay" is an international speaking tour drawing attention to the challenge of the day. Lanark, ON resident, three-time author, Mike Nickerson is facilitating workshops and participating in discussions around the theme of Nickerson's latest book, "Life, Money & Illusion; Living on Earth as if we want to stay" He and his wife, uranium activist, Donna Dillman are visiting communities across Canada and in the USA, from the last week of March until the end of September and will be in Haliburton at the Fish Hatchery, 66712 Gelert Rd, on April 24th from 7 to 9 p.m.

"Cures do not result from treating symptoms. The cause must be addressed. While Climate Change has captured public attention, it is a symptom of a greater challenge. That challenge is that the human species has grown to fill its planet," says Nickerson, who has spent his entire adult life, almost four decades, educating on sustainability issues.

"It is odd," he continues, "at a time when our biggest problems are the result of our size, that our leaders maintain that more growth is the solution. Like adolescents approaching adulthood, our society clings to its carefree past. Since most adults have been able to make that transformation successfully, there is good reason to believe that our society will also accept its maturity. With willingness to face the problems, the answers need not be complicated."

Nickerson's latest book, "Life, Money & Illusion: Living on Earth as if we want to stay," details the differing views on how to be successful in our changing times. One, the "Life" perspective, says we need to preserve and enhance ecosystems and communities, the other, the "Money" perspective, says we need to continuously ex pand production and consumption. These two approaches differ significantly on how they would deal with today's most serious problems.

Life, Money & Illusion, a 2007 Nautilus Book Award finalist, distributed by New Society Publishing, suggests a way forward, offering up new ways of organizing mutual provision (the economy) and a change in priorities that can lead to a long and joyous future.

For more information, see:
http://www.SustainWellBeing.net/LMI/Welcome.html
http://www.SustainWellBeing/LMI/tour_to_come.html for tour details.
www.uraniumcitizensinquiry.com
www.ccamu.ca
Contact
Donna Dillman
613-259-9988

Plan would change outflows from Lake Ontario

2008-03-31T09:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080329.LAKE29/TPStory/Environment
NTERNATIONAL JOINT COMMISSION: REGULATING WATER LEVELS

Plan would change outflows from Lake Ontario

IJC wants to reduce risk of flooding in low-lying areas; environmentalists complain goal comes at the expense of wetlands

MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT

ENVIRONMENT REPORTER

March 29, 2008

The International Joint Commission has issued a new proposal for regulating water levels on Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River that critics say sacrifices environmental concerns in favour of the interests of shoreline property owners.

The IJC, a Canadian-U.S. body that oversees shared boundary waters, released a proposal yesterday that would attempt to change water outflows from the lake to reduce risk of flooding in low-lying areas. But the plan comes at the expense of rehabilitating wetland areas that have been severely damaged by the current water management regime.

Alone among the five Great Lakes, water levels on Lake Ontario are amenable to a high degree of human control, mainly through a massive power dam straddling the St. Lawrence River at Cornwall, Ont.

In the 1950s, when the current plan for managing outflows was drafted, the environment wasn't a top-of-mind issue, and the goal was to reduce water-level fluctuations for flood control, shipping, and hydropower development. But the approach has degraded more than half the lake's wetlands, an extensive area of riparian habitat about 133 square kilometres in size.

At a news conference yesterday, an IJC official said adopting a more environmentally friendly water management approach would likely increase losses due to flooding by about $2.75-million a year. But he also warned that those living around the lake and the river, Canada's most heavily populated region, would be more vulnerable to infrequent, catastrophic flooding that would cost more than $100-million. These losses would occur primarily in low-lying areas of Ontario, New York, and in Quebec around Montreal and Sorel.

The IJC official, engineering adviser Russ Trowbridge, said devastating flooding would be a risk at times when high water levels in the fall are followed by heavy spring runoff and difficulty allowing increased water flows due to ice conditions.

The IJC has spent five years and $20-million considering various water regulation options for Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, including one that would have placed wetland habitat recovery as a major goal by restoring part of the lake's pattern of natural water fluctuations, but demurred. "The potential damages to some interests were too great for us to implement it at this time," said Irene Brooks, acting chairwoman of the U.S. section of the commission.

She said governments would have to provide more funding to mitigate risks to shoreline property before the IJC would consider revising its approach.

Environmentalists condemned the IJC. "It really showed me that the real concern [of the IJC] is the protection of property values," said John Jackson, program director for Great Lakes United, an environmental group based in Montreal and Buffalo. "We are really distressed."

The IJC proposal hasn't been closely followed by Canadian governments, unlike in the United States where it has faced intense scrutiny.

New York Governor David Paterson issued a letter highly critical of the IJC to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, urging her to force the organization to adopt rules with more priority on the environment.

"The current protocol for water-level management has had a very negative impact on the ecology of Lake Ontario, severely damaging more than half of the wetlands (33,000 acres) bordering the lake," the letter said.

At the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, an aide to minister Donna Cansfield was unaware of it and couldn't comment. The Department of Foreign Affairs, which must concur with any IJC proposal before it can be adopted, was unable to comment. The IJC proposal is open for 90 days of public comment and will be subject to public hearings in June.

MINDEN:Free workshop in Minden on drinking water protection, septic maintenance and available grants

2008-02-29T08:46:00.000-08:00

The workshop will be held at the following:
Minden, Royal Canadian Legion, Hwy 35 & 21, Thursday, March 6th, 6 to 9 p.m.

(Fenelon Falls, Ontario) Property owners can learn how to protect their drinking water and access grants for eligible projects at a free workshop in Minden, Royal Canadian Legion, Hwy 35 & 21, Thursday, March 6th, 6 to 9 p.m.

Experts from Kawartha Conservation, the Haliburton Kawartha Pine Ridge Health Unit and Well Aware will be talking about and answering questions on proper septic maintenance, groundwater protection, well maintenance, well water testing and what projects are eligible for and how to access grants.

WHAT:

Free workshop for property owners on drinking water protection and available grants

WHEN:

Thursday, March 6th from 6 to 9 p.m.

WHERE:

Minden, Royal Canadian Legion, Hwy 35 & 21, Thursday,

Sasha Lambrinos, Kawartha Conservation Stewardship Coordinator
Anne Elmhirst, Haliburton Kawartha Pine Ridge District Health Unit
Brenda Ibey, Well Aware

For more information, contact Sasha Lambrinos at 1-800-668-5722 or slambrinos@kawarthaconservation.com.

Kawartha Conservation is a watershed-based environmental organization focused on providing abundant clean water within a healthy landscape. It is one of 36 conservation authorities in Ontario providing natural resources management. The Kawartha Watershed intersects portions of the City of Kawartha Lakes; Township of Scugog; Township of Brock; Municipality of Clarington; Township of Galway-Cavendish & Harvey; and Township of Cavan-Monaghan.

www.kawarthaconservation.com

"Leading the way to abundant clean water within a healthy landscape"

Outspoken scientist dismissed from panel on chemical safety - Los Angeles Times

2008-02-29T08:29:00.001-08:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-epa29feb29,0,6191299.story

Deborah Rice, an award-winning toxicologist, was removed from a group of experts researching a widely-used flame retardant after industry lobbyists complained that she was biased.

By Marla Cone
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 29, 2008

Under pressure from the chemical industry, the Environmental Protection Agency has dismissed an outspoken scientist who chaired a federal panel responsible for helping the agency determine the dangers of a flame retardant widely used in electronic equipment.

Toxicologist Deborah Rice was appointed chair of an EPA scientific panel reviewing the chemical a year ago. Federal records show she was removed from the panel in August after the American Chemistry Council, the lobbying group for chemical manufacturers, complained to a top-ranking EPA official that she was biased.

The chemical, a brominated compound known as deca, is used in high volumes worldwide, largely in the plastic housings of television sets.

Rice, an award-winning former EPA scientist who now works at the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, has studied low doses of deca and reported neurological effects in lab animals. Last February, around the time the EPA panel was convened, Rice testified before the Maine Legislature in support of a state ban on the compound because scientific evidence shows it is toxic and accumulating in the environment and people.

Chemical industry lobbyists say Rice's comments to the Legislature, as well as similar comments to the media, show that she is a biased advocate who has compromised the integrity of the EPA's review of the flame retardant.

The EPA is in the process of deciding how much daily exposure to deca is safe -- a controversial decision, expected next month, that could determine whether it can still be used in consumer products. The role of the expert panel was to review and comment on the scientific evidence.

EPA officials removed Rice because of what they called "the perception of a potential conflict of interest." Under the agency's handbook for advisory committees, scientific peer reviewers should not "have a conflict of interest" or "appear to lack impartiality."

EPA officials were not available for comment Thursday.

Environmentalists accuse the EPA of a "dangerous double standard," because under the Bush administration, many pro-industry experts have served on the agency's scientific panels.

The Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, reviewed seven EPA panels created last year and found 17 panelists who were employed or funded by the chemical industry or had made public statements that the chemicals they were reviewing were safe. In one example, an Exxon Mobil Corp. employee served on an EPA expert panel responsible for deciding whether ethylene oxide, a chemical manufactured by Exxon Mobil, is a carcinogen.

Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst at the Environmental Working Group, called it "deeply problematic from the public interest perspective" for the EPA to dismiss scientists who advocate protecting health while appointing those who promote industry views.

Lunder said it is unprecedented for the EPA to remove an expert for expressing concerns about the potential dangers of a chemical.

"It's a scary world if we create a precedent that says scientists involved in decision-making are perceived to be too biased," she said.

Rice was unavailable for comment Thursday.

In addition to her testimony for the Maine Legislature, Rice has been quoted in media reports saying there is enough scientific evidence to warrant bans on deca. "We don't need to wait another five years or even another two years and let it increase in the environment, while we nail down every possible question we have," she told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last March.

In a May letter to an assistant administrator at the EPA, Sharon Kneiss, a vice president of the American Chemistry Council, called Rice "a fervent advocate of banning" deca and said she "has no place in an independent, objective peer review." She told the EPA that Rice's role on the panel "calls into question the overall integrity" of the EPA's evaluation of chemicals and that Rice may have influenced the other panelists in their review of deca.

Top EPA officials met with the industry group's representatives in June and promised to take action, according to a letter that EPA Asst. Administrator George Gray sent to the group last month. In that letter, Gray said the EPA found "no evidence" that Rice "significantly influenced the other panelists."

Environmentalists are concerned that Rice's removal could result in a less protective standard.

After EPA officials dismissed her from the five-member panel, they removed her comments from the panel's report on deca and removed all mention of her. Three months later, at the request of the chemical industry group, the EPA added a note to the panel report that Rice was removed "due to a perception of a potential conflict of interest" and that none of her comments were considered in their review of the chemical.

EPA documents show that Rice's comments while serving on the panel focused on technical, scientific issues. For example, she advised the EPA to consider the cumulative effects of not just deca, but chemicals with similar neurological effects.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said he was disturbed by Rice's dismissal and the Environmental Working Group's findings about pro-industry panelists.

"If this information is accurate, it raises serious questions about EPA's approach to preventing conflicts of interest on its expert scientific panels," Waxman said.

The conflict of interest policies of another environmental institute, the National Toxicology Program, also has come under fire. Last March, a major consultant for a federal center that evaluates reproductive hazards of chemicals was fired after The Los Angeles Times reported that the firm had financial ties to 50 chemical companies or associations.

Rice specializes in neurotoxins -- chemicals that harm developing brains. Before she went to work for the state of Maine, she was a senior toxicologist at the EPA's National Center for Environmental Research, where she had a major role in setting the EPA's controversial guideline for exposure to mercury in fish.

In 2004, the EPA gave Rice and four colleagues an award for what it called "exceptionally high-quality research" for a study that linked lead exposure to premature puberty in girls.

Many toxicologists and other environmental scientists have said they are highly concerned about flame retardants known as PBDEs, polybrominated diphenyl ethers.

In laboratory tests, PBDEs have been found to skew brain development and alter thyroid hormones, slowing the learning and motor skills of newborn animals.

Two of the compounds, called penta and octa, were banned in 2004. Before the ban, amounts in human breast milk and wildlife were doubling in North America every four to six years, a pace unmatched for any contaminant in at least 50 years. Now they are decreasing.

Scientists had initially thought that the deca compound was not accumulating in people and animals as the other PBDEs were. But it appears that deca turns into other brominated substances when exposed to sunlight, and now many scientists say it, too, is building up in the environment worldwide. Deca has similar effects on animals' developing brains as the banned PBDEs.

The chemical industry contends that low doses pose no danger and that the compound is necessary to prevent fires in many consumer products. In addition to TVs and other electronics, deca is used in furniture textiles, building materials and automobiles. About 56,000 tons were used worldwide in 2001, mostly in the United States and Asia.

Only Maine and Washington state restrict use of deca; both passed laws last year that phase out some uses. Similar bills have been introduced in California but have not passed.

marla.cone@latimes.com

Carbon capture, nuclear energy big budget winners

2008-02-28T10:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/news/story.html?id=c400b024-8022-48e0-8888-70ca4eac4546&k=78432

By Mike De Souza, Canwest News Service

Published: Tuesday, February 26, 2008

OTTAWA - The Harper government sprinkled a series of new environmental measures into the federal budget on Tuesday, including a $300-million boost for nuclear energy and a $240-million investment to clean up pollution from coal-fired power plants in Saskatchewan.

Meantime, it abruptly announced the termination of a popular program that offered tax rebates on energy efficient cars that had been widely criticized by most of the car manufacturing industry.

"Canadians demand and expect that action is being taken to reduce harmful emissions and to crack down on polluters," Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said in a prepared speech to the House of Commons. "Today we are taking action to fulfil our commitments to a cleaner, healthier environment."

Though Prime Minister Stephen Harper and members of his government have recently described global warming as one of the greatest threats facing humanity, Flaherty's budget speech did not mention any concerns about climate change and adaptation.

The $300 million for Atomic Energy of Canada Limited will nearly triple the budget of the Crown corporation, which develops nuclear products and reactors. The budget indicates that the funding would help AECL develop an advanced CANDU nuclear reactor and maintain safety and operations at its Chalk River facilities.

The Chalk River reactor was shut down over safety concerns last fall, but Parliament passed emergency legislation to reopen it in December because of fears of a global shortage of medical isotopes produced at the facility.

The $240-million investment for the coal industry in Saskatchewan is earmarked for new technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions and store them underground.

The government is also offering more tax incentives for green investments and beefing up environmental law enforcement. But for the average consumer, an incentive program that was introduced in the 2007 budget, offering tax rebates of up to $2,000 an new energy efficient cars will no longer be available after December of this year, while a special tax on gas-guzzling vehicles remains in effect.

Honda Canada, other manufacturers and environmental groups criticized the program the so-called "feebate" program, explaining that it was poorly designed and would not effectively encourage consumers to choose energy efficient cars.

The government is also setting aside $66-million over two years to set up an electronic monitoring infrastructure for carbon-trading, for proposed regulations to crack down on pollution from industrial facilities and to allow for a market trading system that puts a price on emissions.

Environmental groups said the new measures, including a $250-million aid package for car manufacturers, were not a sign of responsible leadership.

"The government has missed the boat on climate change once again" said Stephen Hazell, the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada. "What we have are a number of industry subsidies masquerading as environmental investments and it just doesn't work.

http://www.environmenthaliburton.ca

FENELON FALLS: Free workshop on drinking water protection

2008-02-25T13:39:00.000-08:00

Free workshop in Minden on drinking water protection, septic maintenance and available grants

The workshop will also be held at the following:
Minden, Royal Canadian Legion, Hwy 35 & 21, Thursday, March 6th, 6 to 9 p.m.

(Fenelon Falls, Ontario) Property owners can learn how to protect their drinking water and access grants for eligible projects at a free workshop in Minden, Royal Canadian Legion, Hwy 35 & 21, Thursday, March 6th, 6 to 9 p.m.

Experts from Kawartha Conservation, the Haliburton Kawartha Pine Ridge Health Unit and Well Aware will be talking about and answering questions on proper septic maintenance, groundwater protection, well maintenance, well water testing and what projects are eligible for and how to access grants.

WHAT:

Free workshop for property owners on drinking water protection and available grants

WHEN:

Thursday, March 6th from 6 to 9 p.m.

WHERE:

Minden, Royal Canadian Legion, Hwy 35 & 21, Thursday,

Sasha Lambrinos, Kawartha Conservation Stewardship Coordinator
Anne Elmhirst, Haliburton Kawartha Pine Ridge District Health Unit
Brenda Ibey, Well Aware

The forgotten story of the Northwest's only uranium mines |

2008-02-25T10:48:00.001-08:00

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/pacificnw/2004191779_pacificpuranium24.html

Sherman Alexie was a teenager when he first felt threatened by the uranium mines near his home on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

His grandmother had died from esophageal cancer in 1980. A few years later, his mother and some other tribal members took out a road map and began marking red dots on every home where someone had cancer.

The roads where the ore trucks rumbled by were pocked with red.

"I remember at that point knowing at some point in my life I'm certainly going to get sick," recalls Alexie, the acclaimed author who now lives in Seattle and recently won the National Book Award. "I have very little doubt that I'm going to get cancer."

Such is the legacy of the Northwest's only uranium mines. At least for those who even know they exist.

Luz » Blog Archive » Welcome to Luz!

2008-02-21T08:46:00.001-08:00

This comic is the creation of Claudia Dávila, a free lance illustrator in Toronto.
http://www.transmission-x.com/luz/2007/10/26/hello-world/

Welcome to Luz!

Thanks for visiting my web comic about Luz! She’s a city girl on a mission to gather “the knowing”: knowledge and experience about sustainable survival for humans, specifically in urban centers. Occasionally we’ll glimpse into Luz’s musings about the human condition and our connection, or lack thereof, to the natural world. You’ll meet her neighbours, friends, and mom and grandma, all of whom have knowledge of their own to share with Luz. Whenever it’s appropriate I’ll include commentary and links to more information relating to the content of each episode.

I hope you enjoy this weekly strip, while accumulating “the knowing” for yourself as the post-petroleum era approaches.

Plastic (Not) Fantastic: Food Containers Leach a Potentially Harmful Chemical: Scientific American

2008-02-20T18:32:00.001-08:00

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a ubiquitous compound in plastics. First synthesized in 1891, the chemical has become a key building block of plastics from polycarbonate to polyester; in the U.S. alone more than 2.3 billion pounds (1.04 million metric tons) of the stuff is manufactured annually.

Since at least 1936 it has been known that BPA mimics estrogens, binding to the same receptors throughout the human body as natural female hormones. And tests have shown that the chemical can promote human breast cancer cell growth as well as decrease sperm count in rats, among other effects. These findings have raised questions about the potential health risks of BPA, especially in the wake of hosts of studies showing that it leaches from plastics and resins when they are exposed to hard use or high temperatures (as in microwaves or dishwashers). (more)

Haliburton County Uranium Update

2008-02-12T07:33:00.001-08:00

Edward Burtynsky

Uranium Tailings #12, Elliot Lake, Ontario, 1995

chromogenic print

http://www.cowlesgallery.com/

FUME Public Meeting Wed., Feb. 13, 2008 at 7pm

FUME is hosting a public meeting on Wednesday, February 13, 2008, 7:00pm

at the Glamorgan Community Centre in Gooderham.

We have invited a number of local people to speak about FUME,
as well as the various aspects of uranium mining and exploration and
its effect on our community, our health and our environment.
There will be time afterwards for questions and comments.

Coffee and tea will be served.
Please spread the word!

Everyone is welcome.

We held an initial meeting last Friday.Turnout was fantastic!
As our support grows we will be forming committees to work on the various
aspects of this fight.
There is a lot of work to be done!
Work has already started on a Youth Committee.
If you know of any youth who would like to be more actively involved in this issue,
Please let them know about us.

Please contact us if you'd like more info.

Contact us at

fighturanium@gmail.com

or visit us on the web at

www.fighturanium.com

March 15 Bancroft Uranium is hosting a public information session

Lloyd Watson Centre in Wilberforce.

Open House at 6pm followed by a presentation at 7 and then a question period.

We would like to get as many people out there as we can.We're aiming for 100 or more.

We will have yellow armbands for people to wear.

March 7 SAGE (Safe and Green Energy),are hosting

an evening with Dr. Michael Mehta,

Weighing The Risks of Nuclear Energy

Toward A Renewable Energy Strategy for Ontario

An Evening with Dr. Michael D. Mehta

Friday, March 7, 7:00 pm

Peterborough Public Library

345 Aylmer Street North

Admission: Free(donations accepted)

A Question and Answer session will follow Dr. Mehta's presentation

Coffee and tea will be served

Michael D. Mehta specializes in science, technology and society with a focus on health and environmental risk issues. Dr. Mehta is Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta and Executive Director of thePopulation Research Laboratory. The Population Research Laboratory at the University of Alberta is the largest social sciences research centre in Western Canada.

Dr. Mehta has authored the following books:

· Risky Business: Nuclear Power and Public Protest in Canada

· Biotechnology Unglued: Science, Society, and Social Cohesion

· Nanotechnology: Risk, Ethics and Law

· Environmental Sociology: Theory and Practice

Here's a link to some info on Dr. Mehta's book: http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/166564510.html.

Brought to you by SAGE

For more information, email goSAGE@yahoo.ca

Finally, we have updated the website and blog site with a new 'NEWS' section and events on the 'Events' page.

Our support is really growing! We anticipate a good turnout at our meeting Wednesday as well as at the Bancroft meeting Friday. Hope to see you there!

Regards,

Christine and Robin

FUME (Fight Uranium Mining and Exploration)

www.fighturanium.com

Uranium Mining and Exploration in Haliburton

http://f-u-m-e.blogspot.com/

Agroup of activists dedicated to the defence of our environment and the preservation of the beauty of the Haliburton Highlands. Our aim is to change the mining act, stop uranium mining and exploration and investigate the possibility of raising a class action lawsuit against the government for putting the health and welfare of its citizens in danger.
Contact us at: fighturanium@gmail.com

Uranium Exploration in the Haliburton Area

As you may or may not be aware, the Highlands East and Bancroft areas are actively being staked and claimed for potential uranium mining and exploration. Currently, roughly 17% of Monmouth township has been staked (appox. 8500 acres). This includes both private property and crown land.

El Nino Ventures,
One of the two larger stakeholders in Monmouth, has claimed a total of 9,765 acres in Faraday, Cardiff and Monmouth townships and is currently exploring the Amalgamated Rare Earth claim in Monmouth. Another prospector has claimed roughly 5,000 acres in Monmouth.

Your land could be staked! In Ontario, most property owners hold only the surface rights and not the mineral rights to their land. This means a prospector (anyone who applies and pays the $25 licence fee) could come on to your land without being required to notify you and claim the mineral rights. The mineral rights holder can then start exploring (this could include drilling, digging, stripping, building roads, etc. ) on your land. Under the Ontario Mining Act, there is nothing the surface rights owner can do to stop this. But we can try! For more information on mining and mineral rights in Ontario, follow this link to the Government of Ontario website.

Check out http://f-u-m-e.blogspot.com/ for more information about Uranium Mining and Exploration in Haliburton County

Environmental Health News

2007-04-02T06:08:00.001-07:00

www.EnvironmentalHealthNews.org is published daily by Environmental Health Sciences, a not-for-profit organization founded in 2002 to help increase public understanding of emerging scientific links between environmental exposures and human health. EHS publishes 2 websites: www.EnvironmentalHealthNews.org

www.OurStolenFuture.org

The Year Without Toilet Paper

2007-03-27T23:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/garden/22impact.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin

March 22, 2007

The Year Without Toilet Paper
By PENELOPE GREEN

DINNER was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb.

A sour odor hovered oh-so-slightly in the air, the faint tang, not wholly unpleasant, that is the mark of the home composter. Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture - the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set - her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover.

A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there.

Meanwhile, Joseph, the liveried elevator man who works nights in the building, drove his wood-paneled, 1920s-era vehicle up and down its chute, unconcerned that the couple in 9F had not used his services in four months. "I've noticed," Joseph said later with a shrug and no further comment. (He declined to give his last name. "I've got enough problems," he said.)

Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella's parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.

Mr. Beavan, who has written one book about the origins of forensic detective work and another about D-Day, said he was ready for a new subject, hoping to tread more lightly on the planet and maybe be an inspiration to others in the process.

Also, he needed a new book project and the No Impact year was the only one of four possibilities his agent thought would sell. This being 2007, Mr. Beavan is showcasing No Impact in a blog (noimpactman.com) laced with links and testimonials from New Environmentalist authorities like treehugger.com. His agent did indeed secure him a book deal, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and he and his family are being tailed by Laura Gabbert, a documentary filmmaker and Ms. Conlin's best friend.

Why there may be a public appetite for the Colin-Beavan family doings has a lot to do with the very personal, very urban face of environmentalism these days. Thoreau left home for the woods to make his point (and secure his own book deal); Mr. Beavan and Ms. Conlin and others like them aren't budging from their bricks-and-mortar, haut-bourgeois nests.

Mr. Beavan looks to groups like the Compacters (sfcompact.blogspot.com), a collection of nonshoppers that began in San Francisco, and the 100 Mile Diet folks (100milediet.org and thetyee.ca), a Vancouver couple who spent a year eating from within 100 miles of their apartment, for tips and inspiration. But there are hundreds of other light-footed, young abstainers with a diarist urge: it is not news that this shopping-averse, carbon-footprint-reducing, city-dwelling generation likes to blog (the paperless, public diary form). They have seen "An Inconvenient Truth"; they would like to tell you how it makes them feel. If Al Gore is their Rachel Carson, blogalogs like Treehugger, grist.org and worldchanging.com are their Whole Earth catalogs.

Andrew Kirk, an environmental history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose new book, "Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism," will be published by University Press of Kansas in September, is reminded of environmentalism's last big bubble, in the 1970s, long before Ronald Reagan pulled federal funding for alternative fuel technologies (and his speechwriters made fun of the spotted owl and its liberal protectors, a deft feat of propaganda that set the movement back decades). Those were the days when Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth writers, Mr. Kirk said, "focused on a brand of environmentalism that kept people in the picture."

"That's the thing about this current wave of environmentalism," he continued. "It's not about, how do we protect some abstract pristine space? It's what can real people do in their home or office or whatever. It's also very urban. It's a critical twist in the old wilderness adage: Leave only footprints, take only photographs. But how do you translate that into Manhattan?"

With equals parts grace and calamity, it appears. Washed down with a big draught of engaging palaver.

Before No Impact - this is a phrase that comes up a lot - Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan were living a near parody of urban professional life. Ms. Conlin, who bought this apartment in 1999 when she was still single, used the stove so infrequently (as in, never, she said) that Con Edison called to find out if it was broken. (Mr. Beavan, now the family cook, questioned whether she had yet to turn it on. Ms. Conlin ignored him.)

In this household, food was something you dialed for.

"We would wake up and call 'the man,' " Ms. Conlin said, "and he would bring us two newspapers and coffee in Styrofoam cups. Sometimes we'd call two men, and get bagels from Bagel Bob's. For lunch I'd find myself at Wendy's, with a Dunkin' Donuts chaser. Isabella would point to guys on bikes and cry: 'The man! The man!' "

Since November, Mr. Beavan and Isabella have been hewing closely, most particularly in a dietary way, to a 19th-century life. Mr. Beavan has a single-edge razor he has learned to use (it was a gift from his father). He has also learned to cook quite tastily from a limited regional menu - right now that means lots of apples and root vegetables, stored in the unplugged freezer - hashing out compromises. Spices are out but salt is exempt, Mr. Beavan said, because homemade bread "is awful without salt; salt stops the yeast action." Mr. Beavan is baking his own, with wheat grown locally and a sour dough "mother" fermenting stinkily in his cupboard. He is also finding good sources at the nearby Union Square Greenmarket (like Ronnybrook Farm Dairy, which sells milk in reusable glass bottles). The 250-mile rule, by the way, reflects the longest distance a farmer can drive in and out of the city in one day, Mr. Beavan said.

Olive oil and vinegar are out; they used the last dregs of their bottle of balsamic vinegar last week, Mr. Beavan said, producing a moment of stunned silence while a visitor thought about life without those staples. Still, Mr. Beavan's homemade fruit-scrap vinegar has a satisfying bite.

The television, a flat-screen, high-definition 46-incher, is long gone. Saturday night charades are in. Mr. Beavan likes to talk about social glue - community building - as a natural byproduct of No Impact. The (fluorescent) lights are still on, and so is the stove. Mr. Beavan, who has a Ph.D. in applied physics, has not yet figured out a carbon-fuel-free power alternative that will run up here on the ninth floor, though he does subscribe to Con Ed's Green Power program, for which he pays a premium, and which adds a measure of wind and hydro power to the old coal and nuclear grid.

The dishwasher is off, along with the microwave, the coffee machine and the food processor. Planes, trains, automobiles and that elevator are out, but the family is still doing laundry in the washing machines in the basement of the building. (Consider the ramifications of no-elevator living in a vertical city: one day recently, when Frankie the dog had digestive problems, Mr. Beavan, who takes Isabella to day care - six flights of stairs in a building six blocks away - and writes at the Writers Room on Astor Place - 12 flights of stairs, also six blocks away - estimated that by nightfall he had climbed 115 flights of stairs.) And they have not had the heart to take away the vacuum from their cleaning lady, who comes weekly (this week they took away her paper towels).

Until three weeks ago, however, Ms. Conlin was following her "high-fructose corn syrup ways," meaning double espressos and pastries administered daily. "Giving up the coffee was like crashing down from a crystal meth addiction," she said. "I had to leave work and go to bed for 24 hours."

Toothpaste is baking soda (a box makes trash, to be sure, but of a better quality than a metal tube), but Ms. Conlin is still wearing the lipstick she gets from a friend who works at Lancôme, as well as moisturizers from Fresh and Kiehl's. When the bottles, tubes and jars are empty, Mr. Beavan has promised her homemade, rules-appropriate substitutes. (Nothing is a substitute for toilet paper, by the way; think of bowls of water and lots of air drying.)

Yet since the beginning of No Impact, and to the amusement of her colleagues at Business Week, Ms. Conlin has been scootering to her office on 49th Street each day, bringing a Mason jar filled with greenhouse greens, cheese and her husband's bread for lunch, along with her own napkin and cutlery. She has taken a bit of ribbing: "All progress is carbon fueled," jeered one office mate.

Ms. Conlin, acknowledging that she sees her husband as No Impact Man and herself as simply inside his experiment, said she saw "An Inconvenient Truth" in an air-conditioned movie theater last summer. "It was like, 'J'accuse!' " she said. "I just felt like everything I did in my life was contributing to a system that was really problematic." Borrowing a phrase from her husband, she continued, "If I was a student, I would march against myself."

While Ms. Conlin is clearly more than just a good sport - giving up toilet paper seems a fairly profound gesture of commitment - she did describe, in loving detail, a serious shopping binge that predated No Impact and made the whole thing doable, she said. "It was my last hurrah," she explained.

It included two pairs of calf-high Chloe boots (one of which was paid for, she said, with her mother's bingo winnings) and added up to two weeks' salary, after taxes and her 401(k) contribution.

The bingo windfall points to a loophole in No Impact: the Conlin-Beavan household does accept presents. When Mr. Beavan's father saw Ms. Conlin scootering without gloves he sent her a pair. And allowances can be made for the occasional thrift shop purchase. For Isabella's birthday on Feb. 25, her family wandered the East Village and ended up at Jane's Exchange, where she chose a pair of ballet slippers as her gift.

"They cost a dollar," Ms. Conlin said.

It was freezing cold that day, Mr. Beavan said, picking up the story. "We went into a restaurant to warm her up. We agonized about taking a cab, which we ended up not doing. I still felt like we really screwed up, though, because we ate at the restaurant."

He said he called the 100 Mile Diet couple to confess his sin. They admitted they had cheated too, with a restaurant date, then told him, Yoda-like, "Only in strictness comes the conversion."

Restaurants, which are mostly out in No Impact, present all sorts of challenges beyond the 250-mile food rule. "They always want to give Isabella the paper cup with the straw, and we have to send it back," Mr. Beavan said. "We always say, 'We're trying not to make any trash.' And some people get really into that and others clearly think we're big losers."

Living abstemiously on Lower Fifth Avenue, in what used to be Edith Wharton country, with early-21st-century accouterments like creamy, calf-high Chloe boots, may seem at best like a scene from an old-fashioned situation comedy and, at worst, an ethically murky exercise in self-promotion. On the other hand, consider this response to Mr. Beavan's Internet post the day he and his family gave up toilet paper.

"What's with the public display of nonimpactness?" a reader named Bruce wrote on March 7. "Getting people to read a blog on their 50-watt L.C.D. monitors and buy a bound volume of postconsumer paper and show the filmed doc in a heated/air-conditioned movie theater, etc., sounds like nonimpact man is leading to a lot of impact. And how are you going to measure your nonimpact, except in rather self-centered ways like weight loss and better sex? (Wait, maybe I should stop there.)"

Indeed. Concrete benefits are already accruing to Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan that may tempt others. The sea may be rising, but Ms. Conlin has lost 4 pounds and Mr. Beavan 20. It took Ms. Conlin over an hour to get home from work during the snowstorm on Friday, riding her scooter, then walking in her knee-high Wellingtons with her scooter on her back, but she claimed to be mostly exhilarated by the experience. "Rain is worse," she said.

Perhaps the real guinea pig in this experiment is the Conlin-Beavan marriage.

"Like all writers, I'm a megalomaniac," Mr. Beavan said cheerfully the other day. "I'm just trying to put that energy to good use."

Heat Invades Cool Heights Over Arizona Desert

2007-03-27T22:26:00.000-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/3a5wyh
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/us/27warming.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

March 27, 2007
By TIMOTHY EGAN
SUMMERHAVEN, Ariz. — High above the desert floor, this little alpine town has long served as a natural air-conditioned retreat for people in Tucson, one of the so-called sky islands of southern Arizona. When it is 105 degrees in the city, it is at least 20 degrees cooler up here near the 9,157-foot summit of Mount Lemmon.
But for the past 10 years or so, things have been unraveling. Winter snows melt away earlier, longtime residents say, making for an erratic season at the nearby ski resort, the most southern in the nation.
Legions of predatory insects have taken to the forest that mantles the upper mountain, killing trees weakened by record heat. And in 2003, a fire burned for a month, destroying much of the town and scarring more than 87,000 acres. The next year, another fire swept over 32,000 acres.
“Nature is confused,” said Debbie Fagan, who moved here 25 years ago after crossing the country in pursuit of the perfect place to live. “We used to have four seasons. Now we have two. I love this place dearly, and this is very hard for me to watch.”
The American Southwest has been warming for nearly 30 years, according to records that date to the late 19th century. And the region is in the midst of an eight-year drought. Both developments could be within the range of natural events.
But what has convinced many scientists that the current spate of higher temperatures is not just another swing in the weather has been the near collapse of the sky islands and other high, formerly green havens that poke above the desert.
Fire has always been a part of Western ecology, particularly when the land is parched. But since the late 1980s, the size and reach of the fires have far exceeded times of earlier droughts. And the culprit, according to several recent studies, is higher temperatures tearing at a fabric of life that dates to the last ice age.
“A lot of people think climate change and the ecological repercussions are 50 years away,” said Thomas W. Swetnam, director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “But it’s happening now in the West. The data is telling us that we are in the middle of one of the first big indicators of climate change impacts in the continental United States.”
And it comes at a time when millions of Americans are moving to these places. Since 1990, more than eight million homes have been built in Western areas that foresters call “the urban-wild land” interface, also the focus of recent federal firefighting efforts.
The fear is that what happened to Summerhaven is a taste of things to come. As heat-stressed ecosystems provide fuel at the edges of new homes, catastrophic fires could become the new normal. Dr. Swetnam compares it to new developments in hurricane-prone areas in the Southeast.
Others say the projections are overly alarmist, and note that fuel buildup is a legacy of fire repression, not necessarily higher temperatures. They also say the higher reaches of the West may simply be evolving into less alpine settings, and could resemble life that exists at lower elevations.
Still, there is a broad consensus that much of the West is warmer than it has been since record keeping began, and that changes are happening quickly, particularly in places like the sky islands.
“The West has warmed more than any other place in the United States outside Alaska,” said Jonathan T. Overpeck, a University of Arizona scientist and co-author of the recent draft by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last month in Paris.
A trip up to any one of the 27 sky islands shows the ravages of heat on the land. The forests are splotched with a rusty tinge, as trees die from beetle infestation. Frogs with a 10,000-year-old pedigree have all but disappeared. One of the sky islands is the world’s only habitat for the Mount Graham red squirrel, an endangered species down to its last 100 or so animals.
For the squirrel, the frog and other species that have retreated ever higher, there may be no place left to go.
“As the climate warms, these species on top of the sky islands are literally getting pushed off into space,” Dr. Overpeck said.
The Coronado National Forest, which includes Mount Lemmon and Mount Graham, lists 28 threatened or endangered species. Heat has greatly diminished the web of life that these creatures depend on, and they “have not evolved to tolerate these new conditions,” Forest Service officials wrote in a report on the declining health of the sky islands.
For people moving to the breezy pines to escape desert heat, the fires that swept through places like Summerhaven can be terrifying. Fire comes much earlier, and much later, in the season.
“You can tell the weather is changing,” said Michael Stanley, head of the water district here, which lost two-thirds of its customers after the fire. “The snow melts earlier. The fires are big. It makes life very interesting.”
On her regular hikes around Mount Lemmon, Ms. Fagan has noticed many changes. She recently saw a type of rattlesnake that usually lives in the lowlands, and — while hiking over snow — was surrounded by gnats.
“I’m standing on snow while swatting away gnats,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh my God, what are these guys doing out in the winter?’ ”
Last year, wildfires burned nearly 10 million acres in the United States — a record, surpassing the previous year. The Forest Service has become the fire service, devoting 42 percent of its budget to fire suppression last year — more than triple what it was in 1991.
The current drought is not nearly as bad as the one in the 1950s, or one in the mid-16th century, but it has caused a huge forest die-off.
The only difference this time around is higher temperatures, said David D. Breshears, co-author of a study published by the National Academy of Sciences on the subject.
The increased heat, Dr. Breshears believes, is the tipping point — stressing ecosystems in the Southwest so quickly that they are vulnerable to prolonged beetle infestation and catastrophic fires.
“The changes are so big, and happening so fast,” Dr. Breshears said. “We saw it happen all the way up the elevation grade and across the region.”
Dr. Swetnam, who said he used to be skeptical about some of the projections on Western landscape changes, came to a different conclusion after studying fires. Since the mid-1980s, about seven times more federal land has burned than in the previous time frame, he found, and the fire season has been extended by more than two months.
Dr. Swetnam laments the loss of areas unique to the Southwest.
“The sky islands have existed since the Pleistocene,” he said, “and now with these huge fires you stand to lose some unique species.”
All of which should be a caution to people moving to reaches of the desert prone to dramatic change.
“The Chamber of Commerce doesn’t like people like me saying things like this, but large parts of the arid Southwest are not going to be very nice places to live,” Dr. Swetnam said.
Here at Summerhaven, Ms. Fagan, who lost her home and gift shop to the fire, is staying put, even though she knows — firsthand — about the changes under way on the sky island where she built a business and raised her two boys. She made her last mortgage payment on her house a few months before the fire took it.
“We lost 90 percent of our community and two-thirds of our mountain to fire,” she said recent one warm morning. “There may be nothing left to burn. But I can’t ever leave this place. I love it too much.”

It's not easy being GREEN workshop

2007-03-09T06:30:00.000-08:00

It’s not easy being GREEN workshop
A practical workshop for OUTDOOR EDUCATORS to make it EASIER to implement sustainable programming and building designs.

Date and Time: April 2, 2007 8:30-4:00
Location: Sustainable Living Centre at Kinark Outdoor Centre, Minden.
Cost: $40 (includes lunch)
Accommodation: $24 (includes a continental breakfast)
For more information or to register please contact:
Erin Derbyshire at erin_derbyshire@bwdsb.on.ca or (519) 534-2767

Getting to the Bottom of the Good Life

2007-03-05T11:46:00.000-08:00

John Cossham

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By Chris Benfield

IF he is not the greenest man in Britain, he must be a contender.

For the past 20 years John Cossham, of York, has made a point of finding a new way to reduce his environmental impact every year, starting long before it was generally accepted that the burning of fossil fuels was warming up the planet and threatening disaster.

It all started when he dropped out of university at the age of 18.

He became a vegetarian and then started growing his own vegetables. Gradually, he began turning most of his own waste into compost.

Now he says, he and his wife and two children put less global warming gas into the atmosphere in a year than the average household does in a month.

He has, of course, no car and no mobile phone and never switches on the central heating.

He rides a bicycle and once a week he uses that and a trailer to pick up 100 kilograms of damaged organic fruit and vegetables, from shops in York, which he takes home for his compost heaps. He recommends an "ethical supermarket" called Out Of This World, which has branches in Leeds and York.
He allows his wife and two boys, nine and seven, to use the lavatory in their semi-detached house on Hull Road, York but he prefers to use a commode and feed the contents into a dedicated composting bin, along with damp sawdust, as recommended in a book called Humanure, by Joe Jenkins. The sawdust comes from the logs he cuts for two stoves in the house.

When the mix is ready, it feeds cucumber vines, raspberry canes, apple trees and other plants on which the fruit grows well away from the ground – just a precaution, he says, because the composting process kills any bugs.

Tonight he will be revealed as one of the advisors who helped BBC reporter Justin Rowlatt cut his impact on the planet, and his household budget, over a year for Newsnight. Tonight's edition of Panorama, Go Green Or Else, will sum up Mr Rowlatt's experience and introduce Mr Cossham as his composting expert for his Ethical Man experiment.

Mr Rowlatt said: "He is, quite literally, the King of Compost. He filled me with enthusiasm for making my own, but I didn't actually try the Humanure process, because my wife drew a line."

Mr Rowlatt and his wife and three children saved more than £2,500 over a year of greening their lifestyle.

Mr Cossham has done a bit more than that.

When he is not working on his garden or his allotment, he works part-time as a children's entertainer called Professor Fiddlesticks. He also earns a little as a composting consultant and claims Family Income Supplement to take his income up to about £15,000 a yea. Their electricity bill, from renewable sources, is £200 a year.

Mr Compost's top tips

Build a compost heap in layers, with dry brown stuff on wet green stuff.

Tip urine in to help keep it active and to save energy and chemicals at sewage works.

Use it to grow pumpkins, which keep well through the winter and make nice soup and fried slices.

Cooked food attracts rats unless you treat it with a Japanese preparation called bokashi.
Last Updated: 05 March 2007

Tests on four noted MPs show they carry more chemical contaminants than average Canadians

2007-01-04T11:15:00.001-08:00

Jan 4, 2007

The Globe and Mail

Why are politicians such a TOXIC lot?

Tests on four noted MPs show they carry more chemical contaminants than average Canadians

by MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT

ENVIRONMENT REPORTER

TORONTO -- Tests conducted on four prominent federal politicians, including Health Minister Tony Clement, have found that all of them carry trace levels of dozens of potentially dangerous pollutants in their bodies.

The testing, which was also done on NDP Leader Jack Layton, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose and Liberal environment critic John Godfrey, found a bewildering cocktail of contaminants. They all had residues from stain repellants, flame retardants and insecticides, among other deleterious substances.

The results came from an unusual chemical checkup organized by Environmental Defence, an activist group that had previously tested ordinary Canadians and found extensive contaminant burdens in everyone evaluated. Based on this finding, it challenged the elected leaders to see how they stacked up, and the four volunteered to do so.

For reasons that are unclear, the politicians had a significantly higher burden of chemical contaminants in their bodies than other Canadians the group has tested.

Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence, said politicians may live in ways that expose them to more pollution."Maybe it's attributable to the unique lifestyles these guys lead," Mr. Smith said. "Politicians have a very strange, very stressful lifestyle that results in them grabbing a bite to eat when they can and eating a lot of junk food."

The results of the tests were released yesterday by Environmental Defence.

Blood and urine samples from the politicians were evaluated for the presence of 103 pollutants. These included the polybrominated diphenyl ethers used to make computers and mattresses more flame-resistant, the perfluorinated chemicals used to make Teflon-coated frying pans and fast-food wrappers, and DDT, the feared insecticide that was banned decades ago but is so persistent it is still circulating in the environment.

Of the quartet, Mr. Godfrey had the highest number of pollutants, at 55, but contaminants weren't a partisan political issue because the group was remarkably similar. Mr. Clement and Mr. Layton both had 54 each, and Ms. Ambrose had 49. All the politicians had mercury at more elevated levels than ordinary Canadians.

None of the individual contaminants found in the politicians were at levels viewed as dangerous, although some, such as flame retardants and non-stick chemicals, have only recently come under intense scientific scrutiny. Some types have recently been withdrawn from use because of health concerns.

Mr. Layton participated in the study because he wondered about his own burden of substances. "Frankly, I was curious. I suspected that I was probably well populated with the chemicals that you find in an urban area," he said. Mr. Layton had the highest levels of flame retardants of the four politicians.

Mr. Godfrey said the results show "no one is immune from picking up dangerous chemicals, no matter how healthy a lifestyle you lead."

The substances the politicians were tested for have been found to cause cancer, disrupt normal hormone function and lead to birth defects, among other problems. Each politician had a chemical profile as unique as a fingerprint.

Mr. Godfrey, for instance, carried the highest level of organophosphate pesticides, and his readings were 45 times higher than Ms. Ambrose, who had the lowest levels. She, by contrast, had the highest arsenic levels, which were nearly four times higher than Mr. Godfrey's.

Both Ms. Ambrose and Mr. Clement issued statements on their contaminant levels lauding actions the minority Conservative government has taken to reduce this type of pollution, such as a decision late last year to fast-track safety evaluations for 200 chemicals in widespread use that had never been given detailed study.

Mr. Smith said regulators in Canada and elsewhere currently do not perform health assessments on whether the dozens of chemicals people have in their bodies interact with each other, something he contends is a major oversight.

However, some people play down the risks, contending that the chemical burdens in the politicians would have to be far higher to have adverse health effects.

"Just because you find something doesn't mean it's doing anything. It's a question of amounts," said Dr. Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society in Montreal.

Mr. Smith said the politicians were privately taken aback when they saw the results and found they had detectible levels of so many chemical pollutants. "They were surprised as heck by the results," he said.

He said this is a typical reaction because most people view themselves as health-conscious about food and exercise, but the pollutants have become so ubiquitous in the environment they're almost impossible to avoid.

"There is still this tendency to say, 'Well, I go to the gym every day, I watch what I eat,' " he said. "What these results reinforce is how completely pervasive these pollutants are and that no one in this country is so powerful that they can escape the effects of this pollution."

http://tinyurl.com/whzqn

Friends of the Frost AGM

2007-01-04T10:41:00.000-08:00

Friends of the Frost Centre AGM
Saturday, January 10, 2007, 10:00am,
Kinmount Community Centre

Please attend if you can! (details below)

Dear Friends and Colleagues

On behalf of the Friends of the Frost Centre I would like to thank you for supporting our bid to operate the Frost Centre. Your interest, words of encouragement, your attendance at the community forum, your donations, and/or your membership gave us the will and courage to prepare a strong proposal. We are proud of what we accomplished presenting the government with an option that would have provided affordable and accessible programs for a wide variety of learners, helped achieve some of the government’s own strategic priorities, and served the local community in significant ways. Contrary to what has been reported in the media, our proposal was not about opening the Centre as it was; it offered, by necessity, a new way of doing things. We are, of course, disappointed that we were not the successful bidder; we gave it our best shot. That said, it is now time to look to the future.

On Saturday, January 6, 2007, at the Annual General Meeting of the Friends of the Frost Centre, the future of the organization will be decided. Some options that will be considered include the following:

1. Continuing as a cooperating association to support, enhance and offer affordable environmental education programs to a wide range of learners and to support other environmental initiatives in the Frost Centre area;

2. Changing to a community foundation for environmental and heritage education that would develop and offer learning programs and services, and support learning initiatives in the Haliburton and/or Muskoka area;

3. Transforming into a community foundation to serve other community needs; or

4. Dissolve as an organization and forfeit our charitable status.

Obviously, all options except 4 require ongoing community support and participation.

If you are interested in helping to shape the future of the Friends of the Frost Centre,
we invite you to attend our AGM at the Kinmount Community Centre,
(2 Dickson Street, Kinmount, Ontario)
on January 6 at 10:00am.
Only members will be allowed to vote.
For more information or to sign up as a member please visit www.friendsofthefrostcentre.ca , call 1-877-892-9955 or 705-754-3436 or email friendsofthefrostcentre@gmail.com

If you are unable to attend the AGM, please feel free to share your thoughts/preferences on the above options before January 5th. Should we decide on one of the first three options we will need members to serve on the Board of Directors. If you are interested please let us know.

Thank you again for all of your support.

Max Radiff

President

Friends of the Frost Centre

Friends of the Frost Centre
P.O. Box 1002,
Minden, ON
K0M 2K0
705-792-9955 / 877-892-9955

THE DENIAL MACHINE

2006-11-16T18:59:00.001-08:00

THE DENIAL MACHINE  

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/denialmachine/



"In the past few years, a hurricane has engulfed the debate about global warming. This crucial scientific issue has become a rhetorical firestorm with science pitted against spin and inflammatory words on both sides.

How could scientific fact, which many believe could determine the very future of the planet, become a political battleground, pitting left versus right, environmentalist versus climate change sceptic?

The Denial Machine follows a small but powerful group of scientists who argue, among other claims, that global warming may be a good thing and it investigates their links to the oil and coal industries.

Bob McKeown investigates why a debate that some say could determine the very future of our planet has become a partisan battleground."



Read More About This Story

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/denialmachine/



On CBC-TV:

* Wednesday November 15  at 9pm and midnight

On CBC Newsworld:

* Friday November 17 at 10pm ET

* Saturday November 18 at 1 am, 4am  9am ET

* Sunday November 19 at6 am  7pm ET

* Tuesday November 21 at 4am ET

Protests at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources

2006-11-16T18:31:00.000-08:00

Day of Action protests cuts to "Ministry of No Resources"

TORONTO - Union members working at the Ontario Ministry of Natural
Resources are taking part in activities across the province today to protest the ongoing demolition of key programs of the ministry.

"In the last two budget years, the McGuinty government has swung the axe
at MNR programs with a zeal we haven't seen since the Mike Harris days," said Leah Casselman, president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. "The Ministry of NaturalResources has become the Ministry of No Resources. It can no longer effectively manage and protect the natural resources that
belong to all Ontarians."

Among the cuts being protested, Casselman pointed to:

  ·       the slashing of operating budgets for Conservation Officers, resulting in a 19 per cent reduction in the number of convictions for fish and wildlife offenses from 2004-05 to 2005-06 (an even larger drop is expected for 2006-07);

  ·       the elimination of 226 full-time summer jobs for regular students and seasonal employees in the province's provincial parks, including park wardens, natural heritage educators, and maintenance staff;

  ·       the closure of MNR offices to the public; and
·       a reduction in compliance inspections of commercial resource users.

"The aesthetic, cultural, economic, educational, environmental,
recreational, and social value of our natural resources far exceeds
the cost of protecting and managing them," said Casselman. "We intend to
continue this campaign over the winter in the run-up to the provincial budget."

Campaign activities for this first Day of Action will see employees wear
black to work, fasten orange flag tape to car and truck aerials, and sign petitions for presentation in the Legislature. Rallies and barbecues are also planned, and the union has launched an educational web site, featuring an online petition, at
http://www.savethemnr.ca.

                                           - 30 -

For more information, contact:   Elaine Bagnall, Peterborough (705) 755-2589

               Ed Evens, Sioux Lookout (807) 737-3759

               Dave Fluri, North Bay (705) 494-6791

               Mark Roddick, Thunder Bay (807) 627-4352

               Peter Wall, Hearst (705) 372-3310

Starting a weblog

2006-11-16T16:27:00.000-08:00

There are many things happening that are of environmental significance to Haliburton. This weblog will allow us to share up-to-date information. Items that appear here may end up in the more permanent pages later.

Environment Haliburton

Haliburton in Transition

Tree cutting bylaw coming for county - Haliburton Echo - Ontario, CA

By Chad Ingram

Updated 20 minutes ago

H20 Woes: Measuring the Damage of our 'Water Footprint' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

URL:

RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS:

Popular Insect Repellent Deet Is Neurotoxic

Canadian Feds Grossly Underestimate Impact of Gutting Environmental Law

Up to 14,000 projects will evade assessment over the next 2 years

The Transition Initiative | Orion Magazine

Nuclear-plant workers face elevated cancer risk

http://www.canada.com/Nuclear+plant+workers+face+elevated+cancer+risk+report/1724362/story.html

Half Farmer, Half Something Else: 'New' Lifestyles for an Eco-Friendly 21st Century

http://www.enviweb.cz/?env=obecne_archiv_hgbhaHalf_Farmer_Half_Something_Else_New_Lifestyles_for_an_Eco_Friendly_21st_Century.html

Half Farmer, Half Something Else: 'New' Lifestyles for an Eco-Friendly 21st Century

A PERMACULTURE RETROFIT FOR AN OLDER DWELLING

Early Spring

Breaking the silence about Spring

Lester Brown:Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?

Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?

The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse

Nuclear costly any way you cut it

Liberals vote to keep nuke loophole]

NAFTA - Environmentalists in battle to be heard in pesticide case

Senate NWPA hearings (UPDATE)

A good article on Transition Towns in the NY Times

The End Is Near! (Yay!)

Ontario wholesale electricity prices go negative

Forests Pay the Price for America's Love Affair with Really Soft Toilet Paper

By Tara Lohan

Americans have been long chastised for our environmental footprints (and for good reason). But the latest report from environmental groups including Greenpeace should give us major reason to pause. The Guardian could not have said it any better:

How the Crash Will Reshape America - The Atlantic (March 2009

Margaret J. Wheatley: Eight Fearless Questions

Phosphorus ban would help lakes reduce algae

A ready-made vehicle idling campaign

Massive EU crackdown on the use of scores of toxic pesticides

Ocean currents can power the world, say scientists - Telegraph

A revolutionary device that can harness energy from slow-moving rivers and ocean currents could provide enough power for the entire world, scientists claim.

EcoDriving USA

Food Storage as Grandma Knew It

David Suzuki hosting The Current Friday.

The Corporation released for free

Environmental Health News: Front Page

Bisphenol A linked to diabetes, heart disease in humans.

A Reporter at Large: The Island in the Wind: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

The Island in the Wind

A Danish community’s victory over carbon emissions.

by Elizabeth Kolbert July 7, 2008

Skin Deep: Cosmetic Safety Database - Special Report

BIG OIL SCREWS EVERYONE

Study links air pollution to blood clots in legs

High-stakes battle over mining rights

Fwd: Living on Earth as if we want to stay

Plan would change outflows from Lake Ontario

Plan would change outflows from Lake Ontario

IJC wants to reduce risk of flooding in low-lying areas; environmentalists complain goal comes at the expense of wetlands

MINDEN:Free workshop in Minden on drinking water protection, septic maintenance and available grants

Outspoken scientist dismissed from panel on chemical safety - Los Angeles Times

Carbon capture, nuclear energy big budget winners

By Mike De Souza, Canwest News Service

FENELON FALLS: Free workshop on drinking water protection

The forgotten story of the Northwest's only uranium mines |

Luz » Blog Archive » Welcome to Luz!

Welcome to Luz!

Plastic (Not) Fantastic: Food Containers Leach a Potentially Harmful Chemical: Scientific American

Haliburton County Uranium Update

Environmental Health News

The Year Without Toilet Paper

Heat Invades Cool Heights Over Arizona Desert

It's not easy being GREEN workshop

Getting to the Bottom of the Good Life

Tests on four noted MPs show they carry more chemical contaminants than average Canadians

Friends of the Frost AGM

THE DENIAL MACHINE

Protests at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources

Starting a weblog