No idling

 
There’s an interesting story in today’s Montreal Gazette about the impact of idling your car. Besides polluting and wasting fuel, it also damages the car engine because newer cars are designed in order not to have to be idled before you start driving, even in the winter.
Idle Threat
Bylaw rarely enforced. Only 106 out of 1.3 [...]

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Oil, that is, black gold

I’ve been reading a couple of interesting things recently about the oil sands projects in Alberta.
The first is this series, published earlier this year in the Globe and Mail. The eight-day series looks at the development of the oil sands, and the environmental and social cost of the projects, which are estimated to have a [...]

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Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow

The winds are howling, it’s a cool  -6C (-14 with the wind chill) outside and all I can think about is a plan I cooked up to grow a big garden this summer at my parents’ house in the country.
A couple of months I ago I read Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent book Animal, Vegetable Miracle, the tale [...]

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I’m going to wash that algae right out of the lake

Last summer you could hardly go a couple of days in Quebec without hearing about blue-green algae, a toxin affecting the province’s lakes and chasing swimmers out of the water.
While agriculture and sewage from lakefront homes greatly contribute to the spread of blue-green algae, a small part of the problem is phosphates coming from things like dishwasher detergents. [...]

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Think eating lo-cal is hard? Try eating local in February

 
A few years ago I wrote a story (see below) for the Montreal Gazette about a British Columbia couple who were following what they called a 100-Mile Diet. For a year, they would only eat food that came from a 100-mile radius of their Vancouver home. Their project later became this book.
Writing that story really put [...]

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Take a deep breath

I was out running earlier today when a bus accelerated past me, blowing a big cloud of exhaust in my face. It’s hard to think that running is good for your health when that happens.
When I got home, I heard there was a smog warning for Montreal today and that reminded me of some tips I [...]

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Plastic baby bottles + heat = hormone disruption

This story by my colleague Michelle Lalonde at the Montreal Gazette had me rounding up our plastic sippy cups and the kids’ drinking cups and checking their bottoms for the right recycling symbols – if it has a 7 inside that little triangle, there’s a good chance they contain the dangerous chemical bisphenol A.
Here’s what Environmental Defence had [...]

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As the worm turns

A few years ago when we lived in a lovely upper duplex with beautiful mouldings, hardwood floors and a delicious claw-foot bathtub but no back yard, we had a worm composting box in our kitchen. All winter long we fed those red wigglers our coffee grounds, shredded newspaper and kitchen scraps. And they ate like pigs, [...]

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