Four wheels bad, two wheels good

With this great spring weather we’ve been having here in the frozen north, it was time to get the bikes back out and try to get back to leaving the car at home for short trips.
Yesterday was sunny, warm and all the streets were clear for a quick six-minute trip to one kids’ preschool. It was [...]

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Lights out

 
Earth Hour is tonight from 8 to 9 p.m. wherever you live.
Think you’ll be bored in an hour without electricity? Here are some suggestions to keep you busy:

Read

Play board games

Knit

Talk to your significant other. Who know what that could lead to…

Play with your kids

Sing

Play an instrument

Draw

Sleep

Go for a walk

Montreal Canadiens’ fans: listen to the game [...]

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Get out the candles

 
People around the world are making plans to shut off their electricity for an hour on March 29 (that’s two weeks from tonight) in a global statement against global warming. More than 32,000 Canadians – including our family – have already pledged to turn off their lights between 8 and 9 p.m., local time.
Last year, [...]

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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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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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Doing the carbon two-step

Now that we’ve been thinking greener for a while, I thought it would be interesting to find out what kind of an impact our lifestyle has on the planet. Using a carbon footprint calculator, I plugged in all sorts of information about our family from the number of kilowatt hours of electricity we use every year [...]

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Vegging out

 We’ve toyed with vegetarianism over the years. Sick of meat, we launch into delicious veggies, legumes, tofu,  eggs and even texturized vegetable protein for a few weeks. But we always slide back into meat eating, either with a hamburger or some crispy slabs of bacon. Or a big juicy steak from The Keg.
Our flip-flopping on food was [...]

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One step forward, two steps back

Our quest to leave our car in the driveway to reduce our family’s contribution to climate change continues.
I’ve learned it takes excellent organizational abilities, superior time-management capabilities and the skills of a cultural animator to persuade some people in my family that taking a wagon, or God forbid, walking, is a fun way to get where [...]

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It’s like the 1990s, all over again

Remember waaaay back in the early 1990s?
Brian Mulroney was still the Prime Minister, the Northern Pikes were all over MuchMusic (remember She Ain’t Pretty?), and the environment was hot, hot, hot. But in a good way, not a climate-change-is-warming-the-planet kind of way.
It seems our love of things retro has brought the environment back as a [...]

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