Magical Thinking (or: what happens when you talk to rivers)

I'm not sure what to make of this story. I'm not sure whether it even is a story or if it is only a series of unrelated events. Human beings like to make stories about everything: I forgot my umbrella, so it rained; I just got back inside and put the shovel away, so the snowplow came by; I have a really important interview tomorrow, so tonight my neighbours will have a party that keeps me up until two. It's called magical thinking and we all do it even when we know we're being ridiculous. Still.

This may be a series of unrelated events, or it might be a story. I'll write the events out in chronological order and let you decide if and how you want to put the causal chain in.

One.

Last week, my Thursday class on writing for periodicals, we were given an assignment to write a short 300-word piece on a location of our choosing. We must rely both on written research and at least one interview, due this coming Thursday in rough draft. She gave us some short instructions on how to go about getting and conducting interviews.

For two days I dithered. The farm, or the park on the Don? The park on the Don, or the farm? Both are meaningful to me. I'd enjoy learning more about both of them. I'd have no trouble getting an interview at the farm but written research might be tricky. On the other hand, there's an entire annotated bibliography online on material about the Don River, though I wasn't sure who I would interview. So many people were involved there that I had to be able to contact someone--I went with the Don. I printed reams of reports off of the City's and the Conservation Authority's internet sites, and wrote down lists of names that came up and their contact information.

Two.

Friday night I could not sleep. The thought of living off of savings panicked me. It does that sometimes. Despite my Scottish last name, my actual Scottish heritage is in the minority; I am more English and Norwegian than Scottish. Still, in terms of my fiscal personality, and I am Scots through and through. I save money. I keep budgeting spreadsheets and track numbers in my head and haven't carried a credit card balance in over ten years. Even if I had the money for it, I can't imagine buying clothes I don't need or a $300 sweater. In an era where it is common, and perhaps even expected, for people to live off of debt, it sends me into a panic to think even of spending my savings, let alone owing anyone money for anything. So Friday, I could not sleep. I thought about spending my savings. I thought about unexpected expenses that might send me into debt. I thought about graduating with no money and having no cushion for a job search. I spent an hour with the spreadsheet reassuring myself once again that any job in the next two years bringing in any money whatsoever will allow me to graduate with a savings balance, however meagre, and no debt, so long as I am careful. Sometime around 3 I fell asleep.

Three.

I started the week with a major sleep debt. Sunday night I sent off a few emails asking for interviews. By Tuesday I had nothing still. I left a few voicemails.

Four.

Wednesday was my day with Frances. I have no classes Wednesday, so I drop Frances off "right on time" at Ms. S.'s class, and pick her up when it ends. She loves this. She asks me every day if I will be able to drop her off "right on time" and pick her up "without going to daycare." When she sees me outside the window waiting for her after her s/k class, she jumps up and down and waves her arms and starts babbling at me through the glass. This is how happy she is to know that I will be picking her up and taking her home and she won't have to go to daycare that day. She ran to get her backpack and we walked home together.

It was a beautiful day but she didn't want to go outside. She wanted to play with me inside. I was terrible company; still exhausted from Friday night and worried now about the interview and the assignment. So exhausted that I was fighting sleep on the sofa while she talked to me, and I think for about fifteen minutes I actually did sleep. I was too tired to do housework and too distracted to do homework.

Around five o'clock one of the people I had left messages for called me back and told me that he had no experience with the park in question, but the next evening there was going to be a council meeting at which someone with a great deal of experience there would be present. All this while, in the background, Frances asked me "Who's that, Mummy? Is that your friend? Is that Greg? Is it Siobhan? What are they asking you? Is it my Daddy?" "Shh," I mouthed, pointing at the phone, trying to pay attention to the person on the other end.

Five.

Thursday morning I had still not caught up on my sleep. I had to get Frances to school at nine and then run and then get to school myself for 11:30 and then do a few errands and get home and do some homework and get Frances's bag packed for the weekend with Erik and then on my only night off that week I would have to go to a council meeting for a few hours so I could get an interview for a school assignment. I would never catch up on my sleep again, that was certain.

I was grumpy. To put it kindly. I furiously scolded myself for it; is it Frances's fault that you're tired and all of her requests this morning feeling like the one-more-thing you just can't deal with right now? No. Do you have to sound like such a bitch? Maybe you'll get an hour to yourself this afternoon, maybe you can have a nap then. Where are her shoes? Her shoes her shoes her shoes. Frances, go find your shoes, put them in your bag. Fine, I'll find your shoes for you, don't I have unlimited time and energy? Come on, let's go, we're going to be late again.

I came back. I collapsed on the couch for thirty minutes, drawing up lists of what I had to do that day, packing my bag for school, listlessly checking Facebook. I put on my running shorts and t-shirt and got my iPod and sunglasses and set off down the main street for the park. It was a beautiful day, but it meant little to me. At times I found myself actually crying as I ran, for being so tired and having my time so packed that if I were to accept such an excuse as exhaustion for not running then I would never run. I got to the boulders just downstream from the little waterfall, paced a little on the footpath running beside the river, looking to see if there were still any baby garter snakes (no, there were not). I checked the time on my iPod; 10:30. Shit shit shit, I had fifteen minutes before I was supposed to leave for class, I wouldn't even be home by then. I would be late again, and I had had no time to just sit there and be and enjoy my spot by the river.

At that moment everything seemed utterly hopeless. I would not be able to get my homework or assignments done. I would not be able to spend the time with Frances that I wanted to. I would not be able to find work in my new field or, after having taken time off, my old one. I was a fool who had reached too far for too much and would be punished for it. I would be exhausted forever, the time before me stretching off into a dreary distance that would continue unabated until Frances had moved out, and I would just move through each day as I had the day before, never being who or what I wanted to be, never being the mother I wanted to be or doing the work I wanted to do or being even a generally competent human being. I was failing as a single mother, and all I could do was slog through and wait for the day when I wasn't a mother anymore. The day I stopped failing would be the day I no longer had the chance to get it right.

What I would really like is a full day off and a hundred thousand dollars, I thought. Enough for the next two years and a small cushion when it's done. I knew it was silly as soon as I'd thought it, in part because there's no such thing as security and in part because I know people who have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank and are still petrified that the moment they lapse, the moment they step off the work treadmill, they'll end up homeless. And a full day off would come sooner or later. I just needed to hang on until it did--if only I could hang on to my patience as well and not unwittingly take my frustration and tiredness out on Frances, who doesn't deserve it.

The biggest downside of being a perfectionist is that you are always, inevitably, failing.

What am I here for, anyway? I thought. What's the point of all this? Just to slog through and be miserable and failing all the time until it's too late and it doesn't matter anymore? That can't be right. How can that be right? Why can't I just be a normal person who's satisfied with a regular, well-paying job and a nice house and a lot of television? Why do I have to go making everything so complicated?

I might have mentioned my green kin before, or that to me the river is practically a person, or that I like critters and speak to animals. So.

I quietly said to the river, if only you could tell me that I'm doing the right thing, that I'm on the right path. If only you could give me a sign.

Six.

I turned around and saw a hawk fly to a maple tree across the path. It clenched a branch far above my head and stared. Creamy belly, dark back, vicious hooked beak.

That's a hawk, I thought. Not a sign.

Still, I stood and stared at it for a few moments, more runners passing me with curious and faintly concerned looks on their faces, before I turned to home and ran back.

Seven.

I asked the teacher after class if in her opinion it was worth it to take an entire evening and sit through a few hours of council meeting for a chance at an interview.

Yes, she said. Absolutely. I could take notes during the meeting and ask a few questions on my way out the door afterwards and I'd be done and have some good material.

Of course I was asking her for permission not to, to tell me that it was too much effort for a small assignment and I should try to get something easier. I was asking for permission to take the night off. I didn't get it, so I went to the council meeting. And thought with dread about sitting in a roomful of strangers, introducing myself to them and asking them a lot of questions they didn't have time to answer.

Eight.

The person I'd spoken to on the phone had emailed me a copy of the agenda, which had included a request to RSVP the meeting coordinator, so I did. A few hours later, after Erik had picked up Frances, I set off by subway and arrived about fifteen minutes before the meeting was to begin. A table full of vegetarian food had been set out by the door; my stomach growled.

"Are you M?" I asked a woman standing near the table (M being the meeting coordinator).

"No," she said. "Are you Andrea? AF forwarded your email to me, I have it on my desk to contact you tomorrow. We were hoping we could publish whatever you're writing in our next newsletter. Of course we'd give you credit."

"Oh, of course," I said; thinking: clip!

"I can't answer much about that park in particular," she went on, "but the person you really want to talk to is sitting over there."

That was the person I'd been told would be at the meeting. I sat towards the back and took notes while eating pasta and cornbread, and afterwards she introduced us and we chatted about plans for the park and its history and his involvement there, and it came out that he works for a Big Canadian Media Conglomerate that owns a dozen or more major Canadian magazines in the Toronto area, during which the magical word "internship" made an appearance or two, which I threatened to make good on next summer. He then invited me to a tree planting in the park for Saturday and gave me a ride home.

I managed to get through an entire undergrad education in environmental studies and a ten-year career in the environmental field without ever having attended more than three tree plantings. But I smiled and promised to show up if I could arrange childcare.

Nine.

All day Saturday was a fine drizzly light rain, sometimes strengthening; and I was outside planting choke cherries, dogwoods and elders on the banks of the Don. It felt like giving thanks. Although right now it mostly feels like stiff shoulders.

~~~~~

Is it a story, or a series of unrelated events? Was it a sign, or a hawk? Does it matter?

Posted by Andrea at 8:27 PM | Comments (8)

The Green Family: The Marathon

I meant to write and post this over a month ago; but then, well, I couldn't quite figure out how to end this. I know what a marathon is in environmental-metaphor speak, but it fell flat. Here goes:

A marathon is when it stops being someone else's thing and becomes your thing. When you find a cause or an issue that you care passionately about and work on it not because someone else told you you should, and not because someone else told you what to do, but because it's yours. I am not there myself and I don't know if I ever will be. The closest I come to it is in my writing here, hoping that by sharing the immense love I have for my own environment, that maybe you will love yours a little bit more too. (The ultra-marathoners, for those of you who are wondering, which I know is all of you because doesn't everyone find this fascinating?, are the people like David Suzuki who take their thing and make it everyone else's thing too--the leaders and organizers.)

But, enh, who cares? The number of environmental marathoners in the world is quite slight, and we don't all need to be at that level. We just need our lifestyles, politics and activism to be in reasonably good shape.

Here's a recap of the Green Family How To Train for an Environmental Marathon Guide:

1. The Introduction, wherein I introduce the ecological footpring calculator and break down the basics of what level of environmental action corresponds to what level of physical effort.

2. The Slow Walk, some very easy and basic lifestyle changes to knock a few hectares off of your footprint.

3. Walk Fast, being slightly more challenging lifestyle actions.

4. Walk/Run, more challenging lifestyle actions plus a little self-education on local environmental issues and resources.

5. Run a 5k, the last of the lifestyle changes plus some online resources on environmental news for your edification.

6. Run a 10k by reading a book. A whole book on an environmental issue.

7. Run a Half-Marathon: activism for beginners!

8. Rest and Regroup, including environmentally-themed fun for the whole family.

9. Run 20 Miles: more challenging and time-consuming forms of environmental activism.

10. The Marathon: Ta-da! You're here.

I'm not going to quiz you on what you personally have taken from it or done (though if you'd like to tell me that would be great). But I would like to keep this going as an occasional series on environmental lifestyle changes, fun stuff, and activism for families. Activities in the run/walk to rest-and-regroup stages, maybe once per month or so. (Unless any of you would like to make strong pleas either for more or less frequency.)

If any of you would like to participate, that would be fun too (whether by contributing ideas, posts here, posts on your own blog that I'd link to, or whatever you can think of). Let me know in the comments or by email (andrea AT andreamcdowell DOT com). So long as it has nothing to do with either boycotts or stuff you can buy, which not only rubs me the wrong way but is more than adequately covered in far more popular venues than mine.

Posted by Andrea at 8:05 AM | Comments (5)

Wee Treehugger

We were in the mall and I was trying to find a way to convince Frances to walk. As is the case with many children, she can run, jump, skip, dance and turn cartwheels all afternoon, but can scarcely walk for fifteen minutes before declaring herself exhausted and asking for a lift. I needed to get groceries and pick up some books on hold at the library and had foolishly forgotten to bring my cart, so was in the position of lugging several heavy hardcovers to the grocery store, and Frances was asking me to carry her.

"Oh sweetie, look at everything I'm carrying! I can't pick you up," I said.

Just then she stopped. "Mummy, is this a real tree?" she asked me.

"Yes, it is."

"But it's inside!"

"I know. Isn't that silly?"

She nodded. "I like this tree. Can I touch it?"

I nodded, and she petted it, then wrapped her arms around it and gave it a hug, resting her cheek against the bark with her eyes closed. Onlookers grinned at her. "Oh Mummy, there's another one!" She ran to the next, and hugged it too.

"How many do you think we can find between here and the grocery store?" I asked her. "Can you count them?"

Off she ran, all requests to be carried forgotten in the excitement of tree-counting (there were eleven, we discovered), and this ploy worked all the way through all the errands right until we left the mall, at which point she promptly asked me to carry her again. Still. Success! I congratulated myself on being such a creative, thoughtful mother, who came up with something educational and positive that would get her child moving on her own steam and at great speed through all the errands she had to do.

Every time since, when we've gone back, she insists on stopping, counting, and hugging every tree.

It is very sweet.

And by and large, it slows us down. "Mummy, it's another tree!" She stops, pets it, gives it a lingering hug. Onlookers grin. "So it is," I say, looking at Marvin II's clock. "Come on sweetie, it's lunch time. Let's go home."

"Oh, there's another one!" Off she runs. I sigh.

Posted by Andrea at 8:39 AM | Comments (5)

worth every mosquito bite

If you've been reading along for even the past six months or so--and certainly if you've been reading for longer--then you will already know that one of my favourite places on earth is my grandparents' cottage. It was a shack. It was a small, dirty, mouse-ridden shack with no running water, no toilet, no shower, built at least in the 1930s when a family lived there--with no heat, no insulation, no paved roads. I can't imagine it. There's nothing to do at the cottage except stick your feet in the creek and watch pinecones go over the falls. I loved it. To this day I can recall how it felt to put my hands or feet on the sandy, dry soil, all covered with pine needles and cones, and watch the ants scuttling over me. How the rocks nearest the shore were slimy and the water was always cold and you couldn't go out very far because the current was strong--it's a big creek--and you didn't want to get swept over the falls yourself.

Huh. I can't even begin to say anything about it without running off at the mouth. I'll start again:

If you've been reading along for even the past six months or so, you will already know that one of my favourite places on earth is my grandparents' cottage. Even if I haven't been there in almost twenty years.

So I was presented with something of a dilemma when Greg invited me to go up to his parents' cottage for the August long weekend to meet his parents and sister. Of course, phrasing it as a "dilemma" makes it seem as if there was ever any doubt of what I would do: the cottage is just down the street from my grandparents's. The cottage won. Any potential awkwardness would just have to be suffered through for the opportunity to see forests and trees and bugs and maybe even a few critters. (You might have noticed that I really like forests and trees and, yes, bugs and critters.)

Although as it turns out, there was no awkwardness. It was a lovely weekend all around. We played Settlers of Catan and Greg's superhero role-playing game (though I was more of an observer there, I did get to be the giant monster lobster, and I think I managed to clack and scuttle with the best of them) and brainstormed clues for a scavenger hunt and ate, and that, plus tromping around in the bush getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, pretty well sums up the weekend. The forest just behind the cottage is wet enough (either this year in particular or just in general) to support a wide variety of funky mushrooms and I dragged Greg through all of it getting shots of yellow translucent mushrooms like jellyfish and white mushrooms with red caps like elf homes in cartoons and irridescent mushrooms like the insides of seashells, and the local garter snake came out to say hello and asked me to take its picture too. I won't post them all today at least in part because I couldn't possibly, they wouldn't fit, but I'm sure you'll see them all eventually.

The cottage is on a fair-sized lake with a number of small-to-middling islands scattered through it (note: this describes much of Ontario thirty minutes north of Toronto and up), one of which is named the Peanut for its dimunitive size. Greg and I took the paddle boat out there and tromped around (as much as you can tromp over an island smaller than my living room) and I took photos of all the itty-bitty blueberry plants and trees that had somehow managed to grow on an island that is entirely an outcropping of clear and rose quartz (though it looks like granite, having been covered by fungi and mosses and lichens).

That's one of the things I love about the region: the bedrock is so close to the surface everywhere that it juts out, the bones of the earth right there to be touched, and still life thrives all over it. Everywhere you look is a green tangle of leaves; the tree seeds find cracks in the rock and somehow there's enough there to grow on. Life is tough.

Posted by Andrea at 8:44 AM | Comments (4)

Eyes to See With

I don't know about you, but when I stay home from work with a bad mirgraine--the kind that makes me nauseous and dizzy--go to bed, wake up feeling a bit better with the headache biding its time in the background, I go for a nice long bikeride with my camera. At least, if the weather is nice and I expect it might be my last chance for a while and I haven't been able to do so because of childcare responsibilities and weather, I do.

I put my camera in my backpack along with my journal and a pen and the iPod, and zip down beside the Don, drinking in the sight of summer-green leaves against a summer-blue sky and the gurgling of the river at my left, here narrow and brown, there wide and grey-white. I try not to, but as I ride I categorize what I'm seeing: goldenrod, tansies, snapdragons, orchids, violets, sunflowers (someone's birdseed distribution error, I imagine), deer,

Wait.

Deer?

I brake the bike hard, get my camera out of the bag, turn it on and double back on foot.

Yes, deer.

A doe and a fawn, staring at me. I stare back. "Hello," I say. They don't reply but they haven't run away yet. (click) "Aren't you lovely," I say. "Thank you for staying." (click)

A girl walking by stops to see what I am taking pictures of, and grins widely. Eventually the doe and fawn trot away, and I pack up my camera. The girl and I smile at each other, pleased to have shared some magic on an ordinary Thursday afternoon.

That bikeride was packed full of sightings. Monarchs posing patiently for me, dragonflies skimming the river and stopping to rest on a nearby leaf, bumblebees half the size of my thumb soaking pollen from tansies, something like a white grasshopper flaunting itself on a dark green leaf by a footpath in the woods. And--two more deer sightings. One of them another doe-and-fawn pair.

The doe and fawn were well-hidden the second time, I grant you; so I can understand not seeing them, and forgive the cyclists, joggers and walkers who went by staring at me curiously. (You might have to click on the picture for the full-size version to find them yourself.) What could she be taking pictures of? Who could she be talking to?

But the last deer was standing not a metre from the paved bikepath, calmly and loudly munching on leaves. I stopped and snapped away. "Look at you." (click) "Aren't you beautiful." (click) "Thank you for staying still and letting me take your picture." (click) "Can you believe that no one else can see you?" (click)

Other members of my species just went right on by, not sparing a glance for a the grown deer standing right in front of them, looking only at me with worried frown on their foreheads. But--look. There's a deer in this picture, isn't there?

Too busy on their way to the tennis courts, I guess; too caught up in whatever is going on in their heads, too worried, too distracted. But whatever the reason, it shocked me. Look!

Nature is right there. You just have to keep your eyes open. Squint, maybe. Pay attention.

Posted by Andrea at 8:58 AM | Comments (12)

The Green Family: Run 20 Miles

Really it's pretty amazing if any of you are even contemplating this step. Twenty miles is a long, long run. It takes a lot of work and dedication. If you have come this far, that is impressive.

There's nothing wrong with resting on your laurels at this point and continuing the lifestyle changes, education, and occasional bit of activism that you've undertaken already. But let's say you wanted to go farther. Let's stay you're still working up for that marathon. What else can you do?

1. Campaign. If there was a candidate you learned about that said everything you believe in and you want them to get into office, sign on. Campaigns can always use volunteers.

2. Take on a stronger role in the environmental group you learned of before.

3. Instead of writing a letter to the editor, try writing an op-ed.

4. When you write a letter to a company, try collecting signatures before you mail it in.

5. Become involved in local or municipal government committees.

6. If you are involved in any school councils or neighbourhood groups, try pushing for the inclusion of more environmental activities (anything from using reusable cups at meetings to planting a naturalized garden on the school grounds. In Canada at least there is an established environmental group (Evergreen) with a program that tries to accomplish this; it never hurts to ask for help).

Basically, this month you are taking your issues out of the closet. It's not private anymore, it's public; and it's now both personal and political.

Posted by Andrea at 12:04 PM | Comments (2)

The Green Family: Rest and Regroup

As any actual runner will tell you, after a significant race you always take some time off to recover. Last month took some effort, and might have been new for you. So this month, let's have some (environmentally-minded) fun. Let's get to know where we are a little better.

It's spring now, or will be soon. How about the following?

Plan a garden with native or heritage plants. Look into local sources for gardening supplies that are organic and low-impact (compost, mulches, containers, etc.). Or plan a butterfly garden.

Get a field guide for local plants, wildflowers, birds, small animals, or mushrooms in your area. Find somewhere you can go for a walk or a hike to track them down (if not now, if it's still too cold and wet, then when the weather cooperates).

Look through a book like this one* to get some ideas of fun environmental activities to do with kids.

Look through a book like ReadyMade to get ideas for fun things to make out of things you already have. (Reuse crafts can go beyond the egg-carton-caterpillar and the toilet-paper-tube-birdfeeder.)

Find a community garden near you.

Get a book about astronomy out of the library and learn to identify a few constellations.

Pick a native plant species to follow through its growth cycle.

If you are planning on doing some landscaping this year, think about edible forest gardens.

Learn about a few edible wild plants in your area (though unless you are very confident in your identification skills I would not advocate eating them. If you want to be able to do this, there may be a course in your area).

~~~~~

* I have not read this particular book, but I have read similar other books like Sharing Nature with Children and Hands-On Nature, all of which have good stuff in them and are good introductions if you are absolutely clueless about what to do in the outdoors except walk, run, bike, camp and picnic. Some of them are fairly detailed and will give you background information on a particular natural topic so that you can structure a lesson and activity around learning something, others are more recreational. Pick whatever suits you and your progeny.

Posted by Andrea at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

Happy Earth Day

You're not going to get much else out of me today, because I plan to be outside (and not on the computer) as much as possible.

At least around here, it's a beautiful day. The sun is shining, it's warm, ten degrees above seasonal for April. The first leaves are coming out and the first weeds flowers are blooming. I rode my bike to work today without a jacket.

So I think today Frances and I will eat our dinner under the trees out back. Frances will watch the squirrels running around and try to make friends with them. I'll read a book, and make a plan for something we can do outdoors that is more earthy and less living-roomish. Then she'll play with C. They'll plan a carnival or a party of some sort, share their toys, play with one of C's budgies.

This past weekend , when the warmer-than-it-should-be weather started, I rode my bike down to the Don. The last piles of dirty snow had finally melted and the entire trail was accessible again. There were families out walking dogs, couples jogging, a few other people on bikes; despite the lack of leaves on the trees it was just like last summer. The bike made the wooden bridges rumble like tractors, and sped down the hills fast enough to make me worry about spinning out in puddles of fine gravel. There were no trilliums, sadly, but other green things were poking themselves up through the leaf litter. Whenever I could I watched the river--now placid, now running, now sluggish, now tumbling over boulders and logs down a slight incline, now thrown up by stones in a shallow bed into a white froth. On the last bridge before exiting the park I stopped and got off my bike just to watch the water running off into the distance. The trees were still bare, the banks barren. The sun had started setting and the twilight was deep. That something in me plugged in to the something outside, like stepping in to an old cathedral where large and important events once took place, or like catching a glimpse of face in a crowd belonging to someone you thought had long since died. Or maybe like seeing something holy, a reflection of that bit of god that lives in everything suddenly on the surface. "My god," I said out loud. "I missed you."

I don't think I can put into words how much she is like a real person to me.

Posted by Andrea at 8:14 AM | Comments (4)

Green

(This week Julie wants to know what the earth or environmentalism means to us.)

I admit it: my environmentalism is not 100% altruistic. I can't say exactly what % it is altruistic, but at any rate it's not 100, and that's the important thing. Because the earth is a bit of a close personal friend of mine, and I would so like it if people would stop abusing her.

What I love about her that you (or I, at any rate) don't get from anyone else is her absolute commitment to egalitarianism.

When I ride my bike down to the park and sit on the river's banks, on large boulders that are sometimes in the sun and sometimes in the shade; when, if the weather is warm, I work myself right down to the water's edge to dip my fingers in; the river does not say to itself, "This one yelled at her kid this morning. Let's be extra cold." The sun doesn't pull itself behind a cloud because I don't dye my greys. The trees don't shrivel up and turn brown because my car is getting old and doesn't like starting in winter anymore.

Nothing about who I am matters when I'm sitting there. The river will dance over the stones the same for anyone who comes along behind me, whether supermodel or felon, geriatric or child, executive or homeless--they get the same rushing, the same backspray, the same wobble on the third boulder behind the bench. A rabbit or coyote or chipmunk or even a mushroom will see the same trees (if you ignore the mushroom's total lack of sense organs).

Similarly, when I was young and skinny and weird, and I laid on the ground of a pine needle forest, I did not get extra jabs from the fallen needles because I was such a dork.

If a wealthy man and I were to camp in the same patch of open ground, the planet would not leave a pebble right underneath my right hip while apologizing profusely for the inconvenience to the man and promising to rectify it right away; nor would it invent lumps and roots for a poor kid wearing thick glasses because his parents can't afford contacts.

A breeze won't look up my skirt and then follow me home, begging for my phone number.

It is possibly the only experience most of us have with such indifference: the rain doesn't care what your skin colour is or if your parents never graduated from highschool or that you're a boy who likes to wear skirts. Maples go scarlet for anyone, whether people who look like them regularly grace the covers of magazines or not. Brad Pitt and Scarlet Johannsen don't get a better snowstorm than the rest of us.

I know as well as you do that our race and class and sex and age and size and ability and all the rest of it absolutely affects the kind of access we get to the planet and the share of her resources we can claim before we are labelled thieves, radicals or terrorists and locked away. But that's a people thing. Once we get to the same spot on the same day, you and I both get the same sun and the same birdsong and the same crocuses sticking their green fingers through the mud. You never get that from people.

Maybe that's why it's so easy for me to relax in natural spaces.

And maybe that's why it's so easy for me to believe that when the planet gets sick of us and decides to fry the lot of us, being a millionaire is not going to save you. It might get you a reprieve, but in the end an inhospitable planet is inhospitable in Ethiopia and Kansas and Belarus and Bel-Air.

Most importantly for me, I think, is that one day when I'm old and possibly disabled and become invisible in that way that old women seem to, when the cashier's eyes slide automatically to the person standing behind me and people wait with an impatient grin on their face for me to hurry my ass through the door they're holding, and I'm taking my bag full of prescriptions home to sort them all into their slots in the day-of-the-week pillbox on my kitchen table, once I get outside and turn my face up to the sky, I get the same sun as the person beside me, no matter who they are.

Posted by Andrea at 8:53 AM | Comments (9)

The Green Family: Run a Half-Marathon

Big breath in, big breath out. Are you ready? It's time to be an activist.

By now your lifestyle is as good as you can make it. You know something about your local environment. You know something about most big environmental issues, and a fair bit about at least one. You know who your representatives are. It's time to think about how you can start to put it all together.

I know it's scary, especially if you have an image of a placard-wielder in your head, but there are lots of things you can do. Think of one issue that is important to you, and a suggested solution for it. No, you can't rebuild our cities or redesign our economy, but you can do something besides lifestyle changes. Here are some ideas:

1. Write a letter. Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Write a letter to a politician, either your representative or the person in charge of the ministry or agency that affects that issue. Write a letter to the person in charge of public affairs for a company that is involved in something that troubles you. Write a letter to the person in charge of public affairs for a retail outlet that sells a product that troubles you. Remember to spell correctly and use good grammar. Get it proofread if you don't trust yourself. And don't yell or call anyone names; be polite and as positive as you can be. (Unless they are killing people.) Remember that actual paper letters have more of an impact than either form letters or emails (precisely because they are less convenient, they are taken more seriously); also, yes, your reply will be a really dumb form letter or some mumbo-jumbo that doesn't answer your concern at all. This doesn't mean that the person who read it isn't taking it seriously, it means that they have to give you the stock reply. That letter could still be the subject of a meeting or two, especially if it's part of a pattern or trend.

Nice letters count too. If there's a business doing something really great, don't just give them your money, tell them why. "I'm so pleased to have found sweatshop-free affordable clothing for my kids!" or "I shop here because of the rainforest free lumber" or whatever--give them some positive reinforcement. Activism doesn't have to mean complaining all the time.

2. Look through the public notices section of your local newspaper. (You figured this out way back during the walk/run). Find a meeting about an issue or project that concerns you. Attend, or if you can't attend, use the alternative means of expressing your interest in participating and being kept informed. Sometimes this is as easy as being added to a mailing list. Then, when there's an opportunity for you to become involved, you'll know about it.

3. Volunteer with that environmental group you found so long ago. Call them up and ask them what kind of help they would like.

4. Participate in a tree-planting or other public environmental initiative. Even better, volunteer to be part of the group that follows up on public planting projects to keep them alive.

5. In some places, there are opportunities to do field-work monitoring of endangered species or other environmental issues. Often these are allied with local nature or environmental groups, or colleges or universities.

6. If you enjoyed that book you read, give it to a friend or family member. Yes, that counts. You've taken a step to make a private concern public and persuade someone else of your point of view, which is one of the main thrusts of environmental activism.

7. Be part of a community garden.

8. Talk to your child's school about greening the school grounds, improving recycling or composting, or adding more environmental aspects to the curriculum. Do a bit of research first so that you know how they can accomplish this without stretching meager budgets or asking overworked teachers to do even more than they already do. There are organizations out there that make such projects their major focus; you can get a lot of help.

9. If you live in an apartment building or condo, the same applies.

10. Politely harass local businesses about improving bicycle parking. Politely harass your employer for the same, if appropriate, and if it applies also changing and locker facilities for those who bike, run or walk to work.

Other ideas can be left in the comments box. In my opinion, all activism means is that you are expanding the focus of change beyond your immediate family. You are trying to change minds and change practices (based on good information) outside your front door, make it a little bit easier for everyone to choose the greener option.

Posted by Andrea at 9:01 AM | Comments (5)

The Green Family: Run a 10k

Science journalism tends (like most journalism) to be sensationalist and not particularly deep. It's a limitation of the medium. My new favourite example is a news story I read a few months ago that said a study proves men and women like their kisses different, which just goes to show you that men are looking for sex sex sex and women just want a stable provider. If you're thinking, 'say what?', exactly. Looking deeper into the study in question found that yet again there was far more similarity than variability in how the two sexes answered the questions presented, which probably indicates that men and women are looking for mostly the same things, but that doesn't make for a good news story.

It's the same thing with environmental journalism. Facts are often obscured in the pursuit of a good story. Environmental blogs, while generally run by scrupulous and well-informed people, have the compunction of brevity, which makes it difficult to get a good handle on any particular issue.

So this month's assignment is to read a book. Any book on an environmental subject, so long as it's not a good-news book (and that's not because all good-news books are bad, but that there is a tendency of anti-environmental crusaders to publish books that claim to be good-news books and which really are thinly veiled screeds about how all environmentalists are idiots). You're free to just walk into a bookstore or library and pick something interesting, but here are some titles I can recommend over the last year or two:

Field Notes From a Catastrophe

The Weather-Makers

WorldChanging

Cradle to Cradle

Last Child in the Woods

Sustainable Planet

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Bonus points to anyone who reads, or at least skims, the IPCC report on Climate Change. If enough of you do, maybe we can have a discussion about what it actually says, as opposed to what the newspapers tend to claim that it says.

Posted by Andrea at 9:00 AM | Comments (5)

Andrea + Books = True Love Forever, Also No Money (Or: the UnShopping Midway Update)

January I did ok. In January, this is what I bought:

A birthday present for one of Frances's friends.
Art supplies for an actual project that I am working on and having great fun with, sort of an art journal/book of shadows in a box.
Three magazines. That's where I slipped up. They were not essential and did not meet my criteria.

Still, for a month of no shopping, that's not bad.

First weekend of February, do you know what happened?

I bought four books. Yes, four.

One is Bub and Pie's fault. I saw a comment she left on another blog about The Highly Sensitive Person and decided to read it. There were no copies available in the library system (I checked) so Chapters it was.

Two is The Green Family's fault. I am trying to cook more meatless meals, and my current cookbooks aren't cutting it. Sure, they have pasta and dairy dishes, but almost all of them have meat. So I bought a vegetarian cookbook. This, I told myself, was a reasonable compromise that will allow me to make environmental contributions for years to come. I tried the potato-and-cheese frittata on Saturday and not only did I love it, but Frances liked it too. And it had onions in it! (Frances is not keen on the vegetables.)

Three is Fun on Friday's fault. I decided it would be Fun to teach myself how to cook indian food on Fridays. This is when I cook for myself, see, and make things I know Frances won't touch. So I bought an indian cookbook, and actually went straight to the grocery store afterwards to get fixings. Ground beef curry, green beans, potatoes and basmati rice later, and I was very happy.

Huh. It just occurs to me now that I'm going to blame the blog in one fashion or another for three of my book purchases.

Four is not only squarely my fault, but led to more shopping. It's a workout book. I have the elliptical, that's good; I have a few cardio dvds, that's good. I have weights and a few workouts torn out of magazines; I've had them for years and they are getting very boring, not to mention too easy. That's not so good. This one looked like it had enough variety to keep me going for a good long time and it wasn't wimpy. No offence, but I like it when it's hard to go upstairs the next day. That's my aim. And couldn't I have waited until March? Yes ... but no. I got it that same Friday.

This then led to the realization that the 15-lb weights I had been using and which were already too easy and had been for a while were going to be really too easy because these workouts use fewer reps and sets, and if you're not a weights person that won't mean anything, but I knew there wasn't going to be any point doing these with 15 lbs, and I tried it on Sunday and I was right. So I went to a used sports equipment store and got new weights--dumbbells that will get me up to 35 lbs and if that doesn't keep me for a while, I'm screwed.

But they were used! Does that count?

Lesson learned: I can do one month.

Second month is a bit tougher.

But I'll keep trying. And in the meantime I can make yummy indian and vegetarian meals while contemplating my innate sensitivity and then burn it all off by hurtling around a few chunks of heavy iron.

Posted by Andrea at 9:17 AM | Comments (12)

The Green Family: Run a 5k

This is the last time I'll look at lifestyle changes, because these ones will bring you down to about 5 ha, and they will probably hurt.

All of the following:

1. Meat occasionally (once per week, with eggs and dairy daily)

2. Processed, packaged or imported foods 50% of the time or less.

3. Carpooling 50% of the time with a distance cap of 300 km/week, OR up to 100km/week of transit travel with no driving.

This will get you to 5.2 ha, for our average family of 4 in a suburban detached house. If you want to go lower, you are now looking at relocating into a smaller house that is close enough to everything that even transit is not often necessary. You can also give up meat altogether, or processed, packaged or imported foods. If you did all of these things, it would reduce you to 3.6 ha (assuming a house between 1000 & 2000 square feet, family of four, some transit and no driving, no meat but some dairy/eggs, and very little processed, packaged or imported food). I'll assume that this is probably already beyond where most of you are comfortable going, and now we'll turn to non-lifestyle activities.

This month: The Big Picture

There's a reason the world is in the mess it's in, and I hope that by now you can see it's not just because we're all lazy, unmotivated, uneducated slobs who don't care about the planet. In fact it is impossible for anyone in North America to consume only their fair share. And it's not because our fair share is some draconian extreme that no one should be expected to limit themselves to; it's because there's a lot of waste and inefficiency embedded in the system where individual lifestyle choices have no impact.

In my first post I used the example of the energy distribution system. Approximately 80% of electricity is lost between the generating station and the user. Your conservation efforts are therefore working only on a pool of the 20% of electricity that makes it to your outlets. General consumption is another one. You can buy the xyz product that comes without the excess packaging, but both of them still required resource extraction, refining, manufacturing, storage, shipping, and retail space. The bulk of environmental impacts will be created well before a product is packaged for shipping, and reducing the packaging (while good and necessary) will not meaningfully reduce a product's impact.

Everything in North American society was built on the assumptions that resources were limitless and the environment's capacity to absorb wastes was inexhaustible. Neither of these assumptions were true, and now that they are becoming problems, changing course is difficult. If we are going to build a sustainable society, it will have to be one in which human needs and human rights can be met within the context of much less than 1.7 ha per person (since the global population continues to grow, while the planet does not). Knowing the big picture will help you support solutions that move us toward that kind of society, in whatever way presents itself (which, yes, may sometimes involve spending money, but a lot of times not).

In December you learned a bit about your local environmental issues; now it's time to look at issues on a larger scale. What follows is a list of links to environmentalist magazines and blogs (books will come in a later post). Consider this a tour of your green information neighbourhood, a familiarization with where to go, what to read and who to talk to when you want to know what is really going on.

Blogs

Gristmill

DeSmogBlog This one is explicitly devoted to clearing up misinformation put out by global climate change skeptics. A good source for when you need a comeback to "well I read in x magazine last week that...."

Sustainablog

TreeHugger This is a good consumer resource for, as they put it, making environmentally sensitive product and service choices.

WorldChanging

Publications

Alternatives Journal is a Canadian environmental news magazine magazine.Light on product reviews. This is not a shopping publication.

GOOD is not specifically an environmental magazine, but definitely comments from a pro-sustainability perspective.

These are the only two I'll include here today (but feel free to suggest more in the comments if you know of any) because it's easy enough to find green magazines on the rack at the drugstore that are all about selling green products.

Posted by Andrea at 9:58 AM | Comments (6)

Unshopper Encore

Did you know that the average Canadian family spends something like $800 on Christmas gifts?

Am I the only one who's shocked? How is it possible that the average Canadian has $800 to spend on gifts in one month of the year? No wonder everyone's neck-deep in debt.

Even when I was living in a big house in a family unit that made well over the average Canadian salary, we spent probably less than $800 for everyone's gifts all together. And that would include the big gift for the family--a piece of furniture or electronics. I can't imagine spending $800 on presents.

Apparently, the average Canadian spends $1447--one thousand four hundred and forty-seven dollars!--on Christmas!

I tell you, this makes me feel considerably better about my own holiday spending. Last week I was feeling guilty about the size of the pile of presents beneath the tree (that it was too big), yet altogether I don't think it cost me even $100. And not that cheapness is a virtue, but spending more could not have made Frances any happier than she was with that little yellow duckie.

You might have guessed that shopping is not my big thing. It's even less my big thing now that I'm a single mom who never drives. For one thing, I can't just "pop out" in the evenings--I have to stay home with Frances--and so I only have Thursday and Friday evenings and Saturday during the day, if I want to hit a few stores. Generally by then I'm just too tired and there are too many other things to take care of. For another, when you see something great in the stores, and then realize that you are going to have to carry it home, that you can't just pop it into the trunk but will need to lug it somewhere on foot, well. That often tips the scales from "bargain" to "can't be bothered." I have not been to a scrapbooking store since I moved to the apartment (I have to driiiiiiiive, it's so faaaaaaaaar), or any big box outfit except for toys-r-us to find Frances some legos. (And to remind myself, as if I needed it, of how pink has sugar-coated the modern consciousness of girlhood to a toxic degree; but that is a separate gripe.)

Except, that, you know.

There's a bookstore across the street.

And I like bookstores. I like to wander around in them. I like to pick up books, and admire the covers, and feel the texture of the pages, and sample a few paragraphs, and read the reviews, and imagine who I might be when the book is done, that incrementally different Andrea who has learned something valuable or challenging or just novel. I like to pore over the magazine racks, pick up something I haven't seen before to flip through it and see what its philosophy is, admire the glossy photographs, snort at the headlines, look at all the things I could learn how to do if only I had unlimited time to pursue it. I like shopping for books and magazines. And there is a nice big bookstore across the street.

As a result, there are about forty books and magazines that I have not yet finished in my apartment. Forty. Now I realize that for some people this is status quo; but I hate owning books I've never read, even if they're books I get twenty pages into before realizing that it's utter tripe and my time would be better spent perusing the callgirl ads at the back of the free alternative newsweeklies.

This is all a very long and roundabout way of saying that, unshopper that I am, I could stand some improvement. A challenge. A reminder of what is important. Surely what is important does not include a small library's worth of books and magazines that I will never get around to reading. (But then I see some great new book and I think that if I don't get it now I might not ever get it, it will go out of print and I will forget it exists and then I won't have the option of reading it in the future when I have time! And somehow, each time, this strikes me as a tragedy I can ill afford, and I cave to the siren song of the book.)

Right. So. I'm doing this, again:

Two months. No shopping except for necessities (food, medications). Can I do it?

I think I probably can, but, ah, I have a confession to make. I pre-shopped for my unshopping months. I did. I identified a few things I would need over the next two months that don't fall in the food-and-medications category and got them this week. Like fitness shoes, since the old ones were so old that the lining was wearing through and the soles were giving out, and I workout several days per week so it was a situation that could only deteriorate. (They were on sale, though--30% off.) And like two photo frames to frame up some of the Frances photos that had been moldering on the kitchen table. (Several other photos continue to molder.) And like two waterproof mattress pads so Frances can start sleeping diaper-free (they, too, were 40% off). And like the two sequels to a book I am reading now, because I will finish it soon and I don't want to have to wait until March to find out what happens next. (But! But! They are research for the novel. Really!) So I am not perfect.

And I already know I am going to make a few exceptions:

1. Craft supplies if they are for a particular project. For instance, if I am at the scrapbooking store doing some pages with a friend and need a piece of cardstock to finish a page, then that's ok. Adding to the stash at home is not. I'm not likely to do this more than once in the next two months so it's not a terribly big deal. Also, once I finish painting the night table, my next project is an apron because I truly need an apron. I do a lot more cooking now than I did when I was married (how does that work, exactly?) and it has not been kind to my wardrobe. I have a pattern; I don't have fabric.

2. A new giant sketch pad for Frances, who has completely filled every page in her existing one, and I know she will not go without colouring in such a book for two months.

Otherwise, though, no shopping until March.

Not even books and magazines.

Now, this might not seem all that impressive, considering the pre-shopping and exceptions already outlined. But when I look back at my goals from last year's unshopping experience, it all turned out pretty well. Most of them became habits--I don't buy consumer magazines anymore (with the very occasional exception), I rarely buy junk food or diet coke, and I hardly ever go to craft stores outside of particular projects. The only thing that didn't stick was the chocolate, and that's because the local grocery store does not appear to stock the fair-trade variety, which stinks. For a four-week non-shopping exercise, that's not bad.

At least the unshopping will give me more time to pursue my New Year's Resolutions (come back tomorrow for that fresh evidence of insanity).

Posted by Andrea at 6:24 AM | Comments (9)

The Green Family: Walk/Run

This month in the marathon training: Adding in the occasional metaphorical sprint or jog.

This is where we start to leave lifestyle concerns behind, and you'll soon see why. Let's target a footprint of 6.0 ha for our hypothetical family of four people living in a house under 3000 square feet. You have the following options:

Limit your car travel to 150 km/week. That's 30 km/day or, if you commute every day, living 15 km from the office and no other trips.

Carpool 50% of the time, with the old limit of 300 km/week.

Reduce your meat consumption to once or twice per week (the old assumption was meat every day but not at every meal). This will make you a superstar and bring you down to 5.6 ha.

We are still using 3x or more our fair share, with some pretty significant changes in lifestyle. So I'm hoping that you can see by now that lifestyle changes on their own will not be the solution. This is why we're now going to start learning stuff, too. Learning is still relatively easy and not unpleasant and can make a better foundation for future action.

So here we go: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find the answers to the following ten questions (Google U has a good reputation for these kinds of studies):

1. The name and party affiliation (if appropriate) of your municipal, provincial/state, and federal representative.

2. The name of your bioregion.

3. Three native plants of your bioregion.

4. Where your drinking water comes from.

5. Where your garbage goes to.

6. The closest park or conservation area.

7. The name of one local environmental or naturalist group.

8. Where municipal and/or provincial/state agencies are required to place advertisements for public meetings.

9. The name of one piece of environmental legislation that is in force where you live (whether municipal, provincial/state or federal).

10. One local hot-button environmental issue.

Now you've reduced your consumption by about 3 ha, and you are beginning to know where you live; you've achieved some basic environmental literacy. You are starting to run.

Posted by Andrea at 6:57 AM | Comments (3)

The Green Family: Walk Fast

Let's assume we'd like to take our hypothetical standard family down to 6.5 hectares per person (still more than three times our fair share, but still a significant difference from where we were).

Cut your consumption of pre-packaged, processed or imported foods by 25%. Twenty-five per cent is equivalent to about one meal per day.
-Cook, and use fewer frozen dinners or entrees
-Try to find places selling locally grown produce
-Drink tap water (Scout's honour, it's safer than bottled water. Really.)
-Cut down on the chips, packaged cookies, and other junk foods, if you're not already doing so for health reasons.
-Replace some distant ingredients with local ones. What happens if you replace white or brown sugar with maple sugar or honey?

Locally-grown produce is usually the tricky one. You may be able to find a CSA in your area that will deliver local produce to your door. You may be able to find a farmer's market, or a local farm with a market on-site. In a northern climate these are options only during the growing season. If you have the time and energy for food preserving, more power to you.

Other local ingredients can also be found. I know Loblaws in the GTA sells a brand of flour that is grown and milled in Waterloo, and there is a local farm that grows grass-fed beef on land that is not suitable for other types of farming (meat only replaces grain as a food source for people when meat is fed on grain. If meat is fed on grass, which people can't eat anyway, the effect is not the same). The Brickworks hosts a farmer's market that boasts a pretty healthy conscience. Gay-Lea is a dairy company with farms, manufacturing and retail in Ontario. There are lots of really good cheese companies that produce in Ontario and Quebec, as long as you look outside Kraft.

Now, carpool. Carpooling 25% of the time (and no, your progeny does not count unless you are dropping them off somewhere on your way to somewhere else) will bring you down to 6.3. If you are aiming for 6.5 then you want to carpool about 13% of the time. That is just over one trip in ten. If you work full-time and carpool one day every two weeks, you're there.

Posted by Andrea at 7:56 AM | Comments (9)

The Green Family: Walk Slow

About a month ago I posted about what is actually needed to make our lifestyles and society sustainable, and how an individual going about it is much like someone training to run a marathon next year; you have to start slowly, but not stay slow. After starting slowly, you have to ramp up. Here is the first installment of "How to Run the Environmental Marathon by Summer 2008."

If the average Canadian uses 8.8 productive hectares to sustain themselves, you can knock yourself down to about 7 without too much effort:

Cap your car travel to 300 km/week.

Use a fuel-efficient vehicle (4.5 to 6.5 L for 100 km).

Institute energy-conservation and energy-efficiency measures in your home.
- programmable thermostats, if you are not renting
- compact flourescent lightbulbs
- turning the lights (and TV and computer etc.) off when you leave the room
- using power bars to plug in anything that draws a constant charge (like iPod and cell-phone chargers), and turning the power bar off when the item is not in use
- keeping the temperature set a degree or two outside of comfortable

Work on reducing consumption and waste patterns.
- Use reusable containers and avoid disposable ones wherever possible.
- Maybe happy meal toys aren't such a good deal?
- This is where the concept of "enough" comes in handy. If you truly have enough, if you are happy with what you have, then try asking yourself what any new purchase will add to your life. If the answer is survival (food, medicine) or "a lot" (something you know you will get a lot of use and pleasure out of), then it may be be worthwhile. If the answer is "by this time next week, probably nothing," then don't get it.

And yes, I said pleasure. But the key to that is recognizing what will genuinely add to your life and what just looks like a good idea at the time. It's a balancing act. Pink knee-high suede boots are not more environmentally destructive than utilitarian brown ones--but damned if they don't make me smile whenever I look at them.

This assumes a four-person family living in a detached house smaller than 3,000 square feet with electricity and running water, which I'll use as the standard throughout just to keep things consistent. But if you are living in a smaller house or with more people or if it's not detached, then you get brownie points.

All of this stuff you probably already do. The good news is, you are already consuming less than the average Canadian. The bad news is, from now on it gets harder.

~~~~~

(Go to myfootprint.org to see how you rate. It's not a perfect tool, unfortunately, but it's the best out there right now that I'm aware of.)

Posted by Andrea at 6:51 AM | Comments (10)

The Green Family: All right, Ms. Smartypants, what am I supposed to do then?

I've said before that learning how to do this environmentalism thing is kind of like running a marathon. On one hand, you don't want to go out and try to run 26 miles tomorrow; you'll only end up in the hospital. On the other, if you let the idea of running 26 miles someday scare you off, you'll probably spend tomorrow sitting on the couch, and that will put you in the hospital one day too. And if you had three hands, you might also consider that if you spent all your time strolling around the block, then tried to run a marathon, you'd, well, end up in the hospital.

So let's pretend that sometime next year you might like to run the enivronmentalist marathon without ending up in a hospital. How would you do it?

Keep in mind that there are probably about five thousand ways of approaching this; but here's one:

1. Walk Slow: Basic, easy lifestyle changes.

2. Walk Fast: More challenging lifestyle changes.

3. Walk/Run: Lifestyle changes with some education thrown in.

4. Run a 5k: Your environmental house is squeaky clean. Time to think about the big picture.

5. Run a 10k: Looking beyond the newspapers and blogs.

6. Run a half-marathon: Activism only sounds scary until you've done it once.

7. Rest and Regroup: All work and no play makes Jane burn out, and puts her in the hospital.

8. Let's try that half-marathon again: Voting.

9: A twenty-mile run: Beyond voting (whether of the wallet or democratic variety)

10: The marathon: We'll just call you Suzuki.

Not everyone needs to run a marathon. But realistically, everyone in the first world needs to be at least doing a walk/run on a regular basis, if not a 10k, if our planet is going to be in good health for our children. Pretending you want to run a marathon next year gives you about a month to practice each step, find a good groove before adding more on, and not settle for less than you are capable of because a marathon sounds too intimidating. So what I'll do is write a post or two for each step--assuming enough of you are interested in my opinions on this subject--and you can ignore them all, but you'll know what's involved in really making a difference.

We're going to use The Ecological Footprint Calculator, but keep in mind that it is a very broad and imprecise tool. There used to be a more detailed one out there but I can't find it anymore. In any case, take it with a grain of salt; we'll aim to chop our footprints down to about half of the average Canadians (from 8.8 to 4.4) over the course of four months, then start to look at the big picture.

Walking is a whole lot better than nothing. It's just not enough.

Posted by Andrea at 10:12 AM | Comments (7)

The Green Family, Redux

When I first started doing Green Family posts, it was in the context of your typical dual-parent dual-income suburban car-based detached-house family structure. The challenges were apparent, but typical: how to reduce car trips, reduce water use, reduce packaging, instill a connection to non-human nature in a young girl surrounded by manufactured items in a built environment, and reduce consumption generally.

Things look a little different now.

No more detached suburban house; now we live in a townhouse/apartment hybrid. This reduces our electricity, heat, and water consumption drastically. No more car; we walk or bike or take transit everywhere. No more ginormous house demanding to have empty corners filled with useless brickabrack. No more woodlot down the street; now we are two transit stops from a great big beautiful park with a huge river through it. The challenges of shade gardening with native plants remain, but this is not the time of year for that.

So problems solved, right? We are living the eco-friendly lifestyle.

Not so fast.

On average a Canadian uses 8.8 hectares to support his or her lifestyle, and in the old house I used about six thanks to lifestyle changes. So, let's see: my new home is less than half the size of the old one, I never drive anymore, and I have nowhere to put new stuff so I'm not buying anything that's not related to the move (except books).

I now use 5.4. We would still need three planets if everyone on earth were to live the way I do. If I were to give up meat completely, give up all processed and imported foods (which in Canada includes vegetables and fruit--we're not talking cheetos here), I would use 3.1 hectares. We would still need 1.7 planets.

I'll wait while that sinks in a little.

If I live in an apartment building, never take a car anywhere, buy nothing, eat no meat at all, use energy conservation measures, and never buy any food whatsoever that isn't locally grown and not processed in any way, I still use almost twice as much as my fair share. It goes without saying that these are sacrifices I am not prepared to make, being an overly-privileged westerner with an entitlement complex.

I can't help it. I live in Canada.

It is cold in winter, necessitating heat, tying me into the whole energy production and distribution system. This system is wasteful even if I conserve (something on the order of 80% of electricity is lost in the transmission lines, and large gas and oil pipelines leak). Even if I drive nowhere, Canada is a large country where manufacturing, storage, retail and residential are spread out over enormous distances, so everything I own or might own travels a lot, sometimes several thousand miles; so yes I've reduced my personal mobility but the mobility of all my stuff remains high. I am alive, therefore I eat, and I eat in a country with a limited growing season where food in winter by necessity comes from far away (unless I want to risk scurvy, or learn canning--which will fit into the single mother's schedule how exactly?).

If you live in North America and plan to be housed, you will use much more than your fair share.

I am not advocating that we lie down and let the twin apocalypses of global climate change and resource exhaustion steamroll us into extinction. I am saying that personal lifestyle changes, while a good idea, are not and cannot ever be enough. You will not save the world with your credit card, whether you bring it with you and buy something 'green' or leave it at home and buy nothing at all. The world will not be saved in the shopping mall.

What I am advocating will be saved for another day, because this is long enough already.

Posted by Andrea at 10:07 AM | Comments (10)

TGF: Bleeding-Heart Carnivores

If you're a carnivore with a conscience, it's difficult to buy groceries. One wants meat. One realizes that the meat for sale is pumped full of hormones, fed an unnatural diet, reared on antibiotics, kept cooped up in a shelter so small it necessitates the removal of non-edible body parts, slaughtered inhumanely, and frequently repackaged after the best-buy date.

Salivating, aren't you?

I was happy to buy free-range grass-fed beef from the farm over the summer--but it's closed now until May. What to do?

Earlier I had found (and mentioned) a local farm that raises grass-fed organic free-range beef. They also ship in pork, chicken, etc., from other similar farms, and sell it from a handy on-line store. It's hard to be more self-righteous ethical than that. Only one problem: the $150 minimum order.

Strictly in the name of research, you understand, I bit the bullet. We are now the proud possessors of a freezer-full of ground beef and skinless boneless chicken breasts. Guilt-free. Even the standard vegetarian argument about calories-per-acre and water supply doesn't hold because the land is unsuited for growing other crops anyway, so in this case, it's either meat or weeds. Err, wildlife habitat.

Also fortunately, it tastes good.

Less fortunately, it is more expensive. Which brings me back to the argument I've been making for, oh, ten years now, that the problem with organic food is that you have to pay for it twice and that we need systemic changes in our agricultural system to make the right choices also the easiest ones.

Anyway, if you live in the GTA, can manage the minimum order, don't live within easy distance of a Whole Foods and really hate the thought of what's going into your chile con carne, the farm in question is Beretta.

Posted by Andrea at 7:09 AM | Comments (11)

Enough

As many of you know--well, ok, all of you, plus a few hundred others besides--I am not down with the popularity contests. And you're sick of hearing about it, so I'll zip my mouth shut.

But I was really pleased to get this little token:

from Jen over at One plus Two, for my Big Theory of Everything.

Because social justice issues are so important to me, and being recognized for that makes me happy. And because they're bending over backwards to make sure this has nothing to do with popularity.

It also makes me happy to send one over to Andrea at the Fishbowl for her Unshopping post.

Not even for only the reasons she stated (environmental destruction, waste disposal, waste of resources). But also because it provides a mechanism for examining our thought processes about needs, wants, and what constitutes enough. This is more important than it sounds. For as long as the wealthiest twenty per cent continue to believe that they need or deserve to consume eighty per cent of the world's resources, or that cutting back to sixty per cent is as much as they can manage without destroying their chances at earthly happiness and/or reverting to a brutish neolithic existence, nothing will change. Not the small things, not the big things--in order for the economic and social systems that keep us locked in this cycle to shift, our political and business leaders need to have a solid base of public support for those changes. As long as we spend money on 50%-off two-year-old perfume boxed sets for a hypothetical gift for next Christmas, or buy pyjamas for someone who never wears pyjamas just because we have to give them something, or continue to act as if we believe that love for a child should be primarily expressed in marketplace transactions, we are not demonstrating a strong base of public support for those difficult choices.

It has nothing to do with these small, individual choices, in and of themselves, being sufficient to save the world. It has to do with realizing that we're not living within our means financially, socially or environmentally. It has to do with seeing that we truly can't afford this. It has to do with using our daily actions and typical behaviours to examine our beliefs and priorities.

An excellent place to start is to see how vastly outnumbered our necessary purchases are by our unnecessary ones. Yes, it's too late for you to jump on this particular bandwagon. So why not take February instead, and spend a month asking yourself what you need? Defined as "what keeps you alive," because our loopy culture has somehow defined "something to fill the empty spot on the fireplace" or "new drapes to match the new carpet" as needs.

You don't even have to worry, yet, about what you're going to do about the things you buy that you don't need. Just take a month to notice how you talk to yourself about the things you buy or want.

~~~~~

I wrote in my other post that I would come up with a list of things I routinely buy that make me feel like shit. Here it is:

1. Consumer magazines. (I pay people money to tell me that I'm inadequate but, with the correct purchases, I can buy my way to acceptability. I never enjoy reading them and as soon as they're done they go in the blue box--a waste of paper, a waste of ink, a waste of my time.) These include fashion, women's, craft, fitness and food titles. I'm not going to buy them. When I look at them and feel myself being seduced by the pretty pictures and glossy paper and the lack of reading materials in my house, I'll remind myself how crappy they always make me feel and buy a book instead. Or a non-consumer magazine. (Speaking of which, I found Good the other day. Good is good. A positive magazine about serious social justice issues that focuses on solutions and problem-solvers and, for charter subscriptions, will donate the entire subscription cost to one of a number of American nonprofits working on those issues.)

2. Junk food. (Processed corn derivatives fried in trans fats that make me feel ill and do bad things to my blood sugar.) I already restrict myself to one purchase a month, but let's see if I can give up my February trans-fats fix and make it to March without any.

3. Regular chocolate. (Dependent on child slave labour and produced by unethical companies; also does bad things to my blood sugar. And there are alternatives which might be pricier, but I can afford them.) I'm going to see if I can halve my non-fair-trade chocolate purchases, to $4 a week from $8 in the next month.

4. DIET COKE. Damn me.

5. Scrapbooking and craft supplies when they are for no project in particular. (It doesn't bother me when I use them, especially as most of it ends up being gifts; but when I don't, it's another waste of resources and fuels that ends up collecting dust in my oversized house.) This one is simple: I will only go to the craft store or the scrapbook store if there is a particular project I am working on and I am missing a particular supply. Otherwise, it is off-limits.

And to discourage let's-piss-our-money-away spending in general, I'll aim to put an extra $200 in my savings account between now and the end of February.

My hope is that if I can do this in February and it's not too hard, I'll just keep doing it. Then, instead of a one-month fast with a binge at the end, I've done something more permanent.

Posted by Andrea at 6:54 AM | Comments (12)

TGF: A Farm Farewell

It's not easy to be green in a Canadian winter. Just look outside to see why--everything is brown, grey, and an occasional dirty white.

I struggle with this, with how you encourage a child to forge bonds with the non-human environment during those months of the year when the non-human environment can easily kill. We already have had one day this fall when the temperatures dipped to -18C with a wind chill. That's cold.

Yet I think that this bond needs to be based on respect, and the non-human environment is in all cases almost certainly stronger than any person, so learning to avoid the bitterly cold is not a bad thing. I think the opposite would be worse--teaching that winter in Canada is a fuzzy-bunny season of snowmen and sledding would be to Disneyfy what, until very recently, was a brutal season. Even a hundred years ago working and middle class families struggled all winter, when the money for fuel ran out in December and left them cold until Spring.

So we haven't been getting out much. It's been too bloody cold. And while the Life Lessons may be entirely positive it doesn't make for a stirring narrative.

But last weekend the temperature climbed to +7C, warm enough to leave the necks of our winter coats unzipped and make do without mittens and gloves for short periods. So we made our last trip to the local farm, which closes just before Christmas and reopens in May.

The weather was just warm enough to thaw the mud, and all of us got our blue jeans spattered between the car and the farm's door. We bought a bag of cabbage for the rabbits (fifty cents) and went first to the open barn, which for some reason we'd never before visited. Inside were more sheep and goats, two truly humongous turkeys--the rest we'd seen in the Spring must have been slaughtered already for Thanksgiving and Christmas, a few cows, and approximately twenty chickens.

"Look, Frances. Here are the chickens who make our eggs."

"They say 'cluck cluck,'" said Frances.

OK, it wasn't the reaction I was going for. But I was happy to see them, since lingering in the back of my mind was that I was taking their egg advertising at face value and assuming that the free-range chickens must be around somewhere. And here they were, cluck-clucking, gathering at the fence to beg for a snack, beaks and tails and feathers intact. Healthy happy chickens, unafraid of people.

After feeding our cabbage to the bunny rabbits, we slipped and slid back into the store. Onions, garlic, honey from their own bees, butter tarts, a few dozen eggs, ground beef and a roast, and eggnog.

Happiness, for this holiday fanatic, is finding a locally-made eggnog supply two weeks before Yule.

~~~~~

We've been putting peanuts out the back door again, to watch the squirrels and the blue jays come down. It works; every time we are rewarded by black squirrels playing tag in the snow or a flash of blue as a jay swoops in and away.

I'm trying to decide if it means I'm a wimp if, every time a squirrel scampers through the snow to snatch a peanut and run back to its nest, I wince at the thought of its cold, aching paws. But it's probably too much to knit them all booties.

Posted by Andrea at 7:19 AM | Comments (14)

Book Review: LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice

First off, an unrelated complaint: Isn't there a law against having two colds in the summertime? Isn't there? If there isn't, shouldn't there be? How have our lawmakers lapsed so egregiously in their responsibilities? Surely we can put a measly little virus in its place: "Cold virus, you already own November to May; we have to draw a line in the sand somewhere, and we're drawing it here. Keep your paws off July and August, or we're sending you to itsy bitsy microbe jail. We mean it."

A few months ago I read LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Ah, I see you nodding your heads: 'yes, I see. Bioregionalism. Of course. Exactly.' Bioregionalism is a philosophy that argues that the natural scale of human organization is one based on the environment's patterns of self-organization--that is, that a human culture should logically be about the same size as the ecology its dependent on (but you already knew that). So that a culture based in the Great Lakes Bioregion should, ideally, not be larger than the Great Lakes Bioregion; and if the sizes managed to match up, you'd end up with a society that is small enough that some sort of actual democracy is possible and is knowledgeable enough about the environment its dependent on not to foul its own nest all the time. Personally, I think this is true; I also think that today's mega-countries aren't going anywhere in the near future, so the challenge of bioregionalism is how to encourage bioregional subcultures within today's nation states, and this is not at all related to the topic of today's post, but I wanted you to know what bioregionalism means before I go natter about this book I read that has the word "bioregional" in the title.

An easy introduction to the concept of bioregionalism this book is not; an interesting meditation on the practice of bioregionalism in one particular place and time it is. The book is broken down into several sections of different facets of bioregionalism practice, such as Grounding (figuring out where you are), Living (figuring out what that means for you), Reinhabiting (changing your lifestyle to be more in tune with the place you live in), Imagining (place-based art and culture), Trading (the economy), and Acting (personal actions).

It is not an exploration of traditional bioregionalism as I understand it, either; Robert Thayer's take is more pragmatic than the utopian and idealistic bioregionalism literature I found when I was doing my undergrad ten years ago. Whether this is good or bad is impossible to say. On the one hand, it's nice to see the concept moving beyond the fringe; on the other, it's sad to see that its focus has shifted away from the cultural-social-economic means to full sustainability it was intended to be towards a concept of ecological rehabilitation with only minor changes in human society. Undoubtedly this makes it more palatable, but it's less inspiring as well.

And you, my Dear Readers, are tapping your feet impatiently: "Home, Andrea. This is supposed to be about Home. Get to it. I have a million other things to do today." Right, yes, I'm getting to it.

Thayer grew up in Colorado, and moved to the Sacramento Valley for a job in his, I believe, late twenties; in the twenty-odd years he'd lived in Colorado, he'd never formed a bioregional practice. He'd never attached to it. It wasn't his home.

He lived there, I know. And I know that today "home" means for most people "the address I give people when they ask where they can mail something;" so why is it that that's not home for me?

I have a home in the traditional sense; or rather, I have a house. Actually, the bank has the house. I think we own about a hundred square feet of it. Anyway, the important thing is, I live there. All my stuff is in it. I sleep there at night, I eat most of my meals there; my computer's there, and you know that counts for something. But after living there for over a year, I still drive past it half the time when I'm coming home from work. Woops! Wrong driveway/street. Good job, Andrea.

I like the house. If you have to live in a house, and these days it's considered uncivilized to pitch a tent on the patch of land you call your own, it's a good house to live in. It's in decent shape, it's big, it's well taken care of, it has electricity and running water, and, you know, my computer's in it. But I don't think of it as my home. My home, as much as it exists where I'm living right now, is the patch out the back door. Erik wanted the house because it was new enough and clean enough and big enough; I wanted the trees.

In winter, when I couldn't go outside as much, I felt disconnected. I fantasized about living in a smaller, less expensive house. Is it so bad to buy a new house in a new subdivision where the trees can be mistaken for survey sticks? Can't I live happily without grass for a few more years if it means our household expenses go down?

Then spring comes. The trilliums and trout lilies bloom.

The trees bud. The squirrels scamper on to the deck and beg for peanuts at the back door. Spring turns into summer: I walk into the woods each week to see which new wildflowers are ready to bloom, if the coneflowers are out yet. I love the coneflowers, not just because of their colour and size but because of the gigantic bumblebees that swarm them.

Yes, I know that's not a bumblebee; I'll post that picture later.

We find rabbits on the lawn. We catch frogs in the back garden, and Frances makes a new friend. I sit out on the back deck with a cold drink in the afternoon or evening; the wind dances with the trees, monarchs fly over our heads, chickadees and goldfinches and purple finches and sparrows and doves and blue jays and cardinals and grackles and woodpeckers battle for the best bits of sunflower seeds. The house sitting on the land is almost incidental; it's the land itself that's home.

I can picture myself visiting new places, even for extended periods perhaps, a year or two; but I cannot imagine living anywhere else. I can't say how or why it happened, but the plants and animals of my childhood and young adulthood are as much friends and family as any person I know. When I walk into an ash-maple or pine forest, when I see the chickadees taking seeds from the birdfeeder for a friend on the branches, I am home. I belong. They're not human, but they are my kin. When I need to relax, I close my eyes and picture myself at my grandparents' cottage, lying on the sandy earth, the shallow tree roots rippling the ground, ants crawling over a leg or arm, pine needles thick beneath me, the pine trees they came from so shading the forest floor that nothing else takes root. The broad flat stones that lead to the creek banks are in the sun; I sit on the large one right by the edge, take off my shoes, and a hundred tiny minnows rush out to swarm around my feet. There are crayfish and frogs for catching and a thousand pinecones to toss in and send over the falls.

From waterfallsofontario.ca

There's no electricity, no running water, no neighbours. That's home. That's my home. Those trees, those minnows, that rushing water--those are my people.

How did this happen? I didn't go there more than a handful of times each year growing up; how is it that I can still close my eyes and picture it so clearly it becomes more real than the chair I'm sitting in? My childhood was not remarkable; my guess is that Thayer reaching adulthood in Colorado without ever feeling himself at home is much more common and we probably share most of our early experiences. I wish I knew what had happened, what the switch was. Imagine what the world would be like if everyone felt that the world around them was kin. That home wasn't the box you lived in, but the land the box stood on.

If I could live for a few years in New Zealand or the south of Italy, I would. I'm not xenophobic or provincial. I love travelling, I love new. But in no other place I've been could I stand outside in a wild spot and feel as if I were as rooted to the ground as the trees, as if I belonged there. In no other place can I hear, when I am alone, the steady pulse of the earth beneath me.

The building I live in is inconsequential. This place is my home--not the buildings, the people, the language, the customs, the insitutions or all that other frippery we pile on top of it, but the actual place.

Posted by Andrea at 10:06 AM | Comments (3)

TGF: Think Globally, Eat Locally

Dear Readers, I did it. Yesterday, I ate nothing that wasn't grown and processed and sold within 150 miles of my home. And this was even less easy than one might suppose, considering I am in the full grip of a bad summer cold--the kind where you can walk outside in a sweatshirt and pants with the sun blazing overhead and complain of a chill.

On the plus side, the food was the best part of my day. I had:

1. scrambled eggs with milk and cheese
2. wild blueberry muffins (pictured above)
3. tomato-and-cheese sandwich with basil and oregano on cheddar nugget bread made with spelt flour
4. steaks
5. potatoes
6. peas
7. vanilla ice cream--this might have been cheating, but I am sick.

And I never got around to the peach in my lunch bag.

When I first committed to spending 24 hours eating nothing that wasn't grown locally, I envisioned a full day of berries and nuts and maybe some beans--very healthy, not too appetizing, and boring. I could have done that, too, and it would have been easier; but I wanted to prove that local eating could in fact be pleasurable and something one might feasibly do on a regular basis, not as a novelty prank on a blog. So it took longer, but it was a lot more fun and the food was much, much better.

Here's how I did:

Not bad, eh?

Once I found the flour--that's the Kitchener lemon-- a whole world of new possibilities opened up. Mind you, they opened up only in the imagination, because actually finding the flour turned out to be tricky. I knew the company existed, I knew they sourced their grains locally and milled them locally, I knew they were supposed to be available in health food stores. They also can be purchased on WOW organics, but they have a minimum $60 order policy, and I didn't want to buy $60 worth of flour only to find out it sucks. The yellow pages came to my rescue and directed me to a health food shop across the street from the Loblaws, and there I found it--but only spelt. 'What the hell?' I thought. 'How different can it be? The packaging says it makes a good all-purpose flour.' And does packaging ever lie?

The flour when bought in a store is very pricey--about $7 for a small bag--on the other hand, I saved quite a bit on the steaks (a good roast for about $25 or $30, sliced into eight) and the rest of it was, if not as cheap as the supermarket, pretty close. Anyway. I now had flour and wild blueberries. 'Muffins. Can I make muffins? Is there a muffin recipe that uses only local ingredients? Maybe I can find a pioneer cookbook online, I'll bet that would be local.'

I did find an online searchable pioneer cookbook, but decided I wasn't quite brave enough to try recipes like, "One pint milk, two eggs, half cupful butter, half cupful yeast, one cupful sugar, a little salt. Warm the milk and in it let the butter melt, add to these the well-beaten eggs, salt, yeast, sufficient flour to make a stiff batter. Let rise over night, in the morning add the sugar. Work well and make into thin round cakes, let rise for four hours, cover with egg and sprinkle over them a little sugar. Bake in a quick oven, about twenty minutes." Bake in a quick oven. Hmmm.

So a modern cookbook it was, but what to do about ingredients such as sugar and cooking oil? Could I substitute maple sugar? According to the internet--indeed I can! And maybe I could pretend that melted butter is cooking oil? Why not? Is there any local butter? Back to the internet: Not exactly, unless you define "local" as "within 150-200 miles." OK, close enough. Now I had ingredients for wild blueberry muffins.

The red apple outside of the hundred-mile circle is the dairy marker: There are two cooperatives that purchase milk from dairy farms in eastern ontario and make them into butter, milk, cheese etc. for sale in the Greater Toronto Area (Ontarbio, marketed as Organic Meadow, and Gay Lea). I'm still a bit squeamish on these ones; it doesn't really seem in the spirit of things to be buying milk and milk products from cows that I can't meet and through such a highly industrialized processing and marketing framework; but how interested am I in purchasing unpasteurized milk products? At the moment, not very. There are also oodles of cheese factories in that area of the province (brand names include Ivanhoe, Wilton, Black River, Mapledale and Forfar, and possibly Baldersons).

The local apple--the one on top of the read balloon--is Forsythe Family Farms, and it was my source for the peas, steaks, potatoes, tomatoes, wild blueberries, eggs, and peaches. The potatoes, tomatoes, wild blueberries and peaches came from other farms in the area or in the Niagara Region (the apple near St. Catharines). We also bought the ice cream at Forsythe's--the Kawarthas, the bunch of green grapes a bit to the north. The two cherries near the edge of the circle represent the maple sugar, from Formosa.

(The basil and oregano came from my garden.)

Baking with spelt flour was a bit more adventurous than anticipated. Whether it was the fault of the recipes or the flour I can't say, since both recipes were new to me, but especially in the case of the bread I had to use more flour than the recipe called for (six cups instead of four). That said, it turned out very well.

In both cases maple sugar did the trick nicely; the butter substituted well for the cooking oil; and the final products were good. And so was the rest of it: the scrambled eggs with milk and cheese; the sandwiches; the dinner of steaks, potatoes and peas. Yummy. (I don't need to tell you that the ice cream was good too, do I? I didn't think so.)

If I were to write everything I'd learned to prepare for that one-day food adventure, it would take a book, so I won't. I probably will write a few more posts over the next little while covering some of it--like what's involved in finding local foods, some tools and tricks for hunting them down, how the economics shook out, recipes and substitutions for those common yet not-local ingredients like sugar, the difference between organic and sustainable, the place of trade in food economies, a big list of sources for anyone in S Ont who's interested, and so on. But before I tie this one off:

Confessions: Besides the Diet Coke, I waved my magic wand over the baking powder and yeast and declared them local as well. According to the pioneer cookbook it is in fact possible to grow your own yeast (!), but that would only make sense if one was going to bake bread every week. Which they did. But I can't see myself doing that. And I still don't have a clue where baking powder comes from. I told myself that even the pioneers, those intrepid adventurers who had no choice but to eat locally, did import some food products. People have been trading food products sustainably for thousands of years; but there's a big difference between trading small quantities of spices and leavenings back and forth, vs. being unable to purchase Ontario strawberries in a major Canadian grocery chain in the middle of July. Anyway, this is one of those subjects that ought to be a post on its own, so I'll leave it there.

The most pleasant discovery was simply that I ate well. There was a sacrifice of time involved, in finding and preparing the food, but at no point did I feel that the food itself was substandard or not something I would choose to eat. Even finding it and preparing it was fun. Going to the farm was fun. Finding new stores was fun. And I like to bake, so the baking was fun too. It was not a hardship.

I don't think I will ever eat solely locally as a permanent lifestyle, but I definitely see myself eating locally far more often. The options are more varied than I had supposed and not as expensive as I'd feared. Finding them was the hard part, and that's done.

Posted by Andrea at 8:22 AM | Comments (13)

TGF: Find Your Foodshed

Environmentalists clinging to hope like a bundle of reeds in a stormy sea like to recount the story of chimpanzees on several isolated islands learning how to use a new tool. Chimpanzees are clever animals, so that they were capable of tool use was never in doubt; what's fascinating is that only chimps on one of the islands were actually taught. As far as anyone knows, there is no contact between the islands. Yet somehow, once a threshold number of chimps on the first island learned how to use this tool, they all just ... knew.

It's a concept more fully explored in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, though his focus appears to be more on business and marketing than on social movements--still, the basic idea remains that somehow, maybe, if you can get enough individuals performing some seemingly isolated and useless action, as if by magic, it will expand overnight and everyone will be doing it. Abra cadabra! Poof! And there will be Real and Sustainable Change sitting on the landscape like a tame newborn dragon.

Social Marketing uses this assumption, too--that the best way to convince someone to undertake an inconvenient or difficult behaviour that is in society's best interests is by convincing them that everyone else is already doing it. It worked with recycling (why do you think your municipal government gives everyone a bright blue box? Because it tells all the neighbours who's recycling and who isn't). Peer pressure: it's a beautiful thing.

So I find it interesting that not one, and not two, but three books are either out or shortly to come out detailing food production and food choices: Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (currently #8 on Amazon.com's bestsellers list), Singer's The Way We Eat (at 308), and in spring 2007 The 100-Mile Diet by Canadians Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon. Three books in a year? Could it be? Dare one hope? Is globalized industrial agriculture losing its well-varnished sheen? Are there so many people interested in eating locally-grown and/or environmentally sustainable food products that they constitute a market large enough to support three books in one year?

Smith and MacKinnon's book won't be out for several months, but in the meantime you can visit their website to learn how you, too, can eat locally. Where is your 100-mile foodshed? How do you get started? Where do you shop? How can you tell what's grown or made locally vs. what's imported? And ... does this mean you have to give up coffee? (Answer key: a nifty gizmo will give you a map; start with perhaps one day or one meal; try CSAs, farmers markets, or start a garden; ask a lot of questions; and "wave your magic wand and declare it local.")

Erik is going to love it when I walk in the house this evening and declare, "Honey, we're going on the 100-mile diet!" Fortunately I've already been visiting our local organic farmer's market and have started the garden, so it'll be a piece of cake. Right? Sure it will. Although maybe, just to be safe, I'll start with one day and let you know how it goes.

Andrea's 100-Mile Foodshed:

My Rules:

1. All ingredients plus the final production/packaging if appropriate within 100 miles of my house.
2. Organic, because I'm still intensely conflicted about whether it's better to buy local & conventional or long distance & organic--local & organic allows me to sidestep the entire controversy.
3. One weekday's worth of meals and snacks.

My Magic Wand Exceptions:

1. Diet Coke. Justification being that there is almost certainly a bottling plant within 100 miles of my house, and I'll just ignore all of the ingredients.

My Dealers:

1. WOW Organics.
2. Village Market.
3. Markham Farmer's Market. (No website! Imagine!)

Potential Frustrations:

1. Things are labelled "Made/Grown in Ontario" but Ontario is a pretty big place, so I might miss my 100 miles.

Wish me luck. I'll let you know how it goes. Anyone want to help me pick a date?

Posted by Andrea at 1:04 PM | Comments (11)

The Problem with Organic Food

If you ask people why they don't buy organic, much of the time, they will tell you that it costs too much money. And they're right. It does. But not for the reasons they think. If, on the other hand, you ask people who buy organic food if they think it costs too much money, they will probably agree. Sometimes they also argue that as more people buy it, the costs will come down. They're wrong. Oh, it will come down a little, but not enough to make it economically competitive with conventional foods as they are currently priced.

Organic food costs too much money because its purchasers pay the price of food production twice. They pay it once directly at the grocery till, with raised food prices which factor in the costs of organic production. They pay it again indirectly, in their taxes (local and non-local) and in the societal costs of conventional agribusiness food production; the taxes which go to police and clean up the environmental degradation of industrial farming, the seas of shit that flow downstream from hog farms and contaminate drinking water (a big deal here in Ontario post-Walkerton), the pesticides and herbicides sprayed onto fields and the toxic effects of those, the health effects and the impacts of those health effects on mortality and productivity and so on. If you buy conventional food, you pay these costs once--in the indirect and nearly invisible subsidies that allow conventional farming to be so productive and look so "cheap."

But if you buy organic, you pay twice. So yes. It costs too much.

A real solution will never see the costs of organic food go down by more than a token amount. The real solution would be to factor the subsidies directly into the costs of the food at the checkout counter. Believe me, if you saw directly on your grocery bill the environmental and social costs of conventional food production, the choice between a bag of cheetos and an organic apple, or even between an inorganic apple and an organic apple, would never look the same again. Purchasers of conventional foods would bear the full costs of their choices. Purchasers of organic foods would too, but would no longer have to bear the full costs of other people's choices.

Wouldn't this result in a terrible increase in food costs, borne disproportionately by low-income folks? No, I don't think so. The fact is that the indirect costs are already monstrous, we're already paying for them, and they are already being borne disproportionately by low-income and marginalized folks due to a little-known problem called "environmental racism" (whereby practices and industries with unbearable environmental and human health impacts nearly always locate in poor areas and areas populated by visible minorities). It would simply be a transfer of those costs from indirect, invisible areas to direct, highly visible ones. This transfer might actually lower the cost substantially because people would be able to choose, for the first time, what costs of food they would rather pay for: the increased costs of socially and environmentally responsible food production, or the increased costs of cleaning up socially and environmentally irresponsible food production? The former is almost always cheaper than the latter.

Such a change would of course require some sort of government intervention. All of the subsidies to conventional farming start with legislation and policies that are either blind to or supportive of the effects of agribusiness. Switching the indirect costs to direct costs will never be done voluntarily. Mr. Christie is not going to go after his custom