If you’re 18 to 30 years old and interested in transportation, urban planning and sustainability, and especially looking to work in the field, consider applying to this conference happening in Vancouver in August. Connecting Communities: BC Youth Summit for Sustainable Transportation is sponsored by TransLink, B.C. Transit, and the Canadian Urban Transit Association. The deadline to apply is Monday, February 21 at 11:59 pm. I hope some positive conversations arise.
At the end of the article, after pointing out that the school studied has a lot of financial support available, Dwyer asks, “If getting in some exercise before starting school really does boost academic performance, what would it take to have fitness facilities like Naperville’s in high schools labeled as dropout factories?”
I took advantage of today’s glorious sunshine and brought my camera with me to Stanley Park’s Lost Lagoon and seawall. In case it’s not obvious, I have a thing for willows and birds. Don’t you just love the word ducks?
Today is National Sweater Day, WWF’s cheeky campaign to encourage us to collectively turn down our thermostats and embrace the (Ugly) Sweater. It turns out our woollies could go a long way to saving winter:
Turning down the thermostat by three degrees can make a big difference in fighting climate change. In fact, if every Canadian turned down their thermostat in the winter, we could save 2.2 megatonnes of carbon dioxide per year. That’s like taking 350,000 cars off the road. — WWF Canada
Yowsers. But forget the statistics for now, because Ugly Sweater day at the David Suzuki Foundation is a perfect excuse for a team photo. With one absentee, Creative Services did an impromptu photo shoot showing off our range of sweaters, from stylish to nostalgically ugly.
It starts out pretty depressing, but the TIME article “Foodies Can Eclipse (and Save) the Green Movement” is an interesting read that shows both our progress and how far we’ve yet to go in achieving a sustainable, healthy food system. Bryan Walsh’s hopeful prediction of success and what it means for the environment as a whole is an interesting perspective with which I generally agree.
These days, we expect everything of significance to be recorded and made available on on the Internet, so I’m thankful for GOOD Magazine food editor Nicola Twilley’s written recap of an event I assumed I’d find online. (Maybe later it’ll turn up.) My favourite author, Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food), and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser had a fascinating conversation with Evan Kleiman (host of KCRW’s Good Food) that managed to shock and inform me despite all the knowledge I’ve accumulated about food issues. What stood out most for me was this:
When Evan Kleiman asked whether a sustainable food system could feed the world, Pollan was quick to point out that “we’re not feeding the world with the system we currently have.” Schlosser added that the problem is not one of production, but rather distribution: “We live in a world where a billion people are hungry and another billion are obese, and only between 12 and 14 percent of the food we grow is actually eaten by people.” (75 percent is fed to livestock, and of the remaining 25 percent, roughly half is wasted along the way, he elaborated.)
Wow. Pollan’s blunt remark spelling out what should be an obvious truth pulls the rug out from under our system’s fundamental theory. Schlosser’s statistics are at the same time utterly tragic and darkly ironic.
And this revelation from Pollan reminded me of The 100-Mile Diet‘s account of the time spent on gathering and preparing food now versus 50 or 1000 years ago: “Over the past decade, we’ve somehow found 2 extra hours each day to be online, but we say we don’t have time to cook.” Indeed. (Zing.)
Last night I watched a shocking episode of CBC Marketplace about superbugs in supermarket chicken. I knew about the routine use of antibiotics in factory farm animals — which account for most of our meat production, the most popular of which is chicken — but the degree to which antibiotic-resistant bacteria (aka superbugs) have developed is a disturbing new revelation. Daily use of antibiotics, often the same ones administered to sick humans, are being given to healthy and ill chickens alike. If chickens, cows, pigs and so forth had a natural diet and weren’t kept in such cramped conditions, the incidence of disease would be extremely low. Antibiotics wouldn’t be necessary, preventative or otherwise. Disease outbreaks would also be uncommon.
The human health threat posed by the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria — found on two-thirds of the 100 chicken packages sampled — has the potential to return us to pre-1930s conditions, says the study. Is the public health risk really worth cheaper chicken prices?
Antibiotics also kill the helpful bacteria in our gut, so I can only imagine how sick the patients profiled in this episode are from multiple attempts to cure their antibiotic-resistant infections.
This is just another reason among many — animal ethics, environment and others — to return to sustainable farming methods.
Fragrances lurk in all sorts of consumer products. They can be a toxic chemical soup of ingredients manufacturers aren’t required to disclose. (Photo by Karin Bultje via Flickr)
Yesterday on transit, a woman began applying a hand lotion that, unbeknownst to her, triggered an allergic reaction in the passenger seated next to her. As the doors opened every few minutes, ushering in “fresh” air, I gasped for it, a brief relief from the fragrance from which I could otherwise not escape except by moving elsewhere. It wasn’t that the odour was unpleasant. This isn’t usually my problem. It’s that the chemicals in the fragrance irritate my nose — or brain, rather — in various ways, the worst of which is actually pain. I met a bus driver with the same issue: she spends her workday with a scarf covering her face.
So you can imagine when I walk into a department store where the perfumes invade the doorway that I hold my breath and scamper through as quickly as possible. I’ve done that years, but my reaction has developed in the last year and a half. While it’s unpleasant, it’s probably a good thing because it’s made me aware of the health problems associated with fragrance, also known as parfum, and helps me avoid it. But it’s pretty hard to avoid the scent left on my hands after using a public washroom.
Will Allen harvesting (Photo credit: Growing Power)
Back-to-back films on agriculture at the World Community Film Festival this afternoon left me uplifted and feeling like change is on the horizon. Dirt! The Movie, Fresh and A Thousand Suns reminded me how many people there are who think like me — including those attending the event — and what amazing impacts these people are making around the world.
One farmer in the US took it upon himself to build a wind farm on his farm as security for survival. (Actually, I think that was part of Dirty Business, a film about coal and energy which followed. I saw four films in 6 hours, so please forgive me if I confuse them.) Will Allen, a former basketball player, returned to his family’s farming roots and started Growing Power, where compost is everything. Joel Salatin is a farming hero, Michael Pollan speaks the truth in terms people can understand, schools are tearing up asphalt for gardens, and rehabilitation programs for inmates are reconnecting people with the land.
The 10th annual World Community Film Festival presents “social justice and environmental films set around the world and across the street.” Opening tonight, it runs through Sunday afternoon at Langara College.
I’m particularly interested in films like Dirt! and Fresh, both to do with sustainable agriculture. There are films on water, pollution and biodiversity as well. Also, if you missed it in theatres, Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie plays Sunday at 3:30pm.
Come check out this variety of films that address social justice and environmental issues — two things that are inextricably linked!
This daily green blog challenge is in celebration of David Suzuki’s 75th birthday, supporting the David Suzuki Foundation. Please help me out by sponsoring me online now.
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Fragrances lurk in all sorts of consumer products. They can be a toxic chemical soup of ingredients manufacturers aren’t required to disclose. (Photo by 
Will Allen harvesting (Photo credit: Growing Power)