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 worth of $90 billion.

The second is the book Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn’t Seem to Care) by William Marsden, a colleague of mine at the Montreal Gazette. Marsden, who is an investigative reporter, spins a great yarn about the development of the oil sands, from a loony plan to blast the oil from the sand with a nuclear bomb to the boom/bust/boom experience of a Calgary oil man.

Reading the book left me with an impending sense of doom. The amount of fossil fuels left on the planet is finite, yet we seem not to care, building more roads, buying more cars, and ignoring the environmental costs of harvesting energy this way.

Reading about the oil sands has been making me think about what our family can do to conserve fuel and oil around our house.

We switched to an electric furnace a couple of years ago to reduce our fossil-fuel consumption. Now our biggest fossil-fuel user is our minivan, and I’ve been trying to use it less. It has been more challenging than I thought.  I’m hoping once the weather warms up and I can get my bicycle and kids’ trailer back out on the road I’ll truly be able to reduce the amount of time we use our van.

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 of her family’s year-long experiment to eat locally. They moved to a farm in Virginia and decided to eat only food that was produced near them - either on their farm or by local farmers. Bananas were out but there was much excitement during asparagus season.

It’s a great story about food production, the changing seasons, agriculture and modern food production. It made me want to plant a big garden that would feed our family for at least a few months of the year. But we don’t have the soil for it — our city back yard is small and shaded by an enormous decades-old maple that keeps our house so nice and cool all summer long. But my parents, on the other hand, have a few acres of land in the country where they say we can plant a big garden.

Soon, once this neverending snow melts and the ground starts to thaw, we’ll be heading out there to get our hands dirty. I can’t wait.

You can whet your appetite for summer’s vegetable bounty with this recipe, designed to use up an overflow of zucchini in the Kingsolver’s garden. And you can dance around your warm cosy house while the wonderful Arlo Guthrie sings the Garden Song.

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. So we switched to a phosphate-free brand that we picked up at our local health food store. But at $8 a box, it seemed awfully pricy. I thought there had to be a better way.

So I mixed up some homemade dishwasher detergent – half baking soda and half Borax. It cleaned well for a while, and I felt very virtuous and thrifty. But then we started to get a whitish film on our dishes. That’s when we started alternating the homemade with the outrageously expensive store brand.

Then our dishwasher conked out. My husband spent hours taking it apart, peering inside, and swearing. We thought we would have to buy a new one, but he managed to resurrect it from the near-dead. And then put a ban on the Borax after he found a warning on the company’s website to not use it in the dishwasher.

So my ears perked right up today when I heard that the federal government is instituting a country-wide ban on any detergents with more than 0.5 per cent phosphates, something the Quebec provincial government has already done. The bummer in today’s announcement from Ottawa? It doesn’t take effect until 2010. Greenpeace slammed the decision today, saying Quebec pharmacy chain Jean Coutu has done more to restrict phosphates by refusing to stock phosphate-containing soaps.

Even Quebec’s Environment Minister says even with the new restrictions on phosphates, we’ll be stuck with the blue-green algae for at least another 10 years.

Until the phosphate bans come into effect, I’m going to try this homemade dishwasher detergent and see if we can do our small part in the crusade against blue-green algae — and not break the dishwasher while we do it.

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 the idea of trying to eat local in my head. Ever since, whenever I’ve had the choice, I try to buy locally grown food on my weekly (okay, sometimes daily) shopping trips. It’s not a hard job in the summer, when Quebec produce is everywhere, and we get a weekly box of organic vegetables from farmers  Jamie & Nora Quinn’s farm in Elgin, Qc.

But in the dead of February, with 20 cm of fresh snow on the ground, and last summer’s harvest just a dim memory, it’s another question altogether. You can usually find some root vegetables, maybe some hydroponically-grown lettuce and tomatoes, and apples from storage. Still, I thought I did a good job on a locally-grown dinner for the fam tonight:

• Mashed Quebec potatoes and one of the last heads of celeriac from last summer’s vegetable deliveries
• Quebec-grown turnips
• Quebec-raised turkey meatloaf with Quebec carrots and onions
• And for dessert, stewed Quebec apples.

Not bad for a snowy February day, I’d say.

Here’s that story I wrote:

How what we eat helps climate: What’s good for the environment is great for the economy
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
By Monique Beaudin, The Gazette

Eight months ago, Vancouver writers and J.B. MacKinnon undertook what many thought would be an impossible task – for a year, to eat only food produced within a 100-mile (160-kilometre) radius of their home.

They were concerned about the environmental impact of the global food-distribution system: trucks carrying summer fruit and vegetables to snowbound Canadians, burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“Our food is travelling even more than we do, and that seems ridiculous when a lot of things like salads, carrots and potatoes can grow locally, but you don’t necessarily see them in your local grocery store,” Smith said.

They never expected their “100-mile diet,” which they chronicle in an online magazine, to draw international attention and generate buzz all over the Internet.

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 had read for getting a run in without the harmful effects of air pollution in the city. I usually follow these rules in the summer when the smog warnings come fast and furious in Montreal, but they apply in the winter too.

1. Run early. Air quality deteriorates during the day, so it would be worse to run in the afternoon or evening, especially during rush hours.

2. Avoid running near highways or busy roads. That’s where all the car & bus exhaust fumes are.

3. If the air quality is particularly bad, don’t run at all. Take the day off and hope for better air tomorrow, or head inside and run on a treadmill.

And lastly, leave your car at home and cut down on your own air pollution production!

P.S. The city monitors air quality and calculates an air quality index. Find up-to-date info on this page.

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 to say this week about its new research on baby bottles and bisphenol A:

A new study by Environmental Defence shows that a harmful chemical, bisphenol A, leaches from popular brands of plastic baby bottles found on Canadian store shelves. Bisphenol A, is a known hormone disruptor and is associated with adverse health effects, including breast and prostate cancer, early puberty in girls, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, and obesity.

From Toxic Nation, here’s a list of safe plastic baby bottle alternatives.

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, turning our green waste into dark black compost.

Now we have a yard with a composting bin in the back and a lot of creepy crawlies doing our work for us. But my friend Emeline, over at cochonetrouge, has been using a worm composter for the first time this winter and kindly answered my questions about her family’s experience.

Why did you start composting with worms?
I was too lazy to go outside!  All jokes aside, our outdoor composter was filled to capacity and we wanted a winter alternative. So we researched a bit and got our worms and starter bin through the R4 program at Concordia University.

How does it work?
We have a bin under the kitchen table that has the worms. I feed them about once a week, and line the top with some newspaper to make sure the environment doesn’t get too damp.  I was told not to go in there very often, but I can’t resist. I love seeing them. We have little baby worms and big mama worms… it’s really fun to watch.

What do you feed them?
All my vegetable/fruit kitchen scraps. Except for citrus and onion. Worms no likey citrus and onions. No meat, no dairy, no grains, no fats.

Does it smell?
Nope.

Do the worms escape?
We’ve had maybe 3 or 4 escapees. They’re serving life without parole.

What are you going to do with the compost?
Not sure yet, maybe use it for some seedlings if we can get a little greenhouse project up and running. If not, we’ll use it in the flower and veggie beds this summer.

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 to whether we own a motorcycle or if we’re vegetarians. The calculator figures out the impact of human activities on the planet by calculating the amount of greenhouse gases we produce in our daily lives. It measures the impact in tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2).

You can see how we did above: 11.5 tonnes, which I was very happy to see was below the Canadian average but still far above the ideal world average, which would be two tonnes. There is a lot we could do to reduce our footprint, such as turning down our thermostat, reducing our water temperature by a degree or two, eating less meat, and one I really want to look into — recycling our grey water.

I’m going to check back in at the end of the year and see if our footprint has shrunk.

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 can read all about it at mediamatinquebec, the newspaper being put out by locked-out journalists at the Journal de Québec, Quebec City’s daily tabloid. The labour dispute began last April but they have been putting together this newspaper every day.

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 in my mind as I read this piece in the Globe and Mail. The author, from the Vancouver Humane Society, argues that we should reduce our meat consumption in order to reduce the impact of climate change. He’s not saying go veggie, just eat less red meat.

The head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the scientists who won the Nobel Prize) recently called on us meat-eaters to cut back on eating meat by 10 per cent, use bikes and stop shopping for the sake of shopping.

Well, our Christmas credit card bills continue to roll in, so that’s put a big damper on the shopping. Our bikes are packed away for the winter, but we are walking more. So I think it’s time we look at the meat question.

In the past week we’ve eaten meat almost every day. Mostly chicken, but there was some lamb and a meal of pork chops. One thing we eat very rarely is beef and that’s because the sight of a big slab of raw beef turns me right off cooking. It makes me think of flesh, which I know all meat is, but there’s just something about the raw beef that brings it home every time.

We can’t all be like British celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, who adores meat and is always suggesting to cook it way rarer than I could ever consider eating it. In her latest cookbook, Nigella Express, she recounts how she tells restaurant staff how she’d like her meat cooked. No rare or medium for her: “I tell them just to hit it on the head and walk it straight through.”

Bring on the vegetables.