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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The worms came crawling, one by one, hurrah

For the first time since we got our outdoor compost bins, we are adding green waste like fruit and vegetable peels to it all winter long. It has kept the family of squirrels living in the maple tree in our back yard very happy as they have everything from canteloupe rinds to avocado skins to munch on in the cold dead of [...]

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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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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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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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Inspiration for the new year

It’s the first day of the year, fresh with possibilities.
I’m reading a book called Raising Your Baby Green, and liked this line from the introduction: “Raising your baby green doesn’t require a revolution in your lifestyle or creature comforts. Do as much or as little as you want.”
Doing something greener seems to be on the mind [...]

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