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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Na na na na na

As I was breastfeeding my toddler for what felt like the umpteenth time yesterday, I started to try to think about the postive aspects of nursing forever and ever amen. This is what I am going to try to focus on instead of trying to figure out why this baby just does not want to be weaned. [...]

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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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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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Waste not, want not

Want to leave a legacy your family will never, ever forget?
How about letting the funeral home that cremates your body use the heat from burning you up to heat the room where your funeral is being held? That’s what a funeral director in England is proposing to his customers.  “It is a generous gesture,” he says.
You [...]

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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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I love my green TV

 
I caught a couple of very entertaining green shows on HGTV last weekend. Both – Eco House Challenge and No Waste Like Home – are about families trying to live in a more environmentally aware way.
Eco House Challenge pits two Australian families against each other to see who can be the greenest, and the results are hilarious. It kicks off with each [...]

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