Vert-à-Go

I confess that I do struggle against climate dread. Any new news about the environment is very seldom good news, and it is demoralising beyond belief to walk home from the farmers’ market with a bag of locally-grown organic food, only to be blown past by someone chucking a McDonald’s wrapper out of the window of their Hummer.

But we can’t sit around and do nothing, even if somewhere out there our evil twin is itching to replace every ounce of carbon that we struggle not to emit. And the food that we choose to eat can make a real and instant difference to our ecological impact. It’s important to educate yourself about what is in the food you eat, where it comes from, how it is produced, and what impact it has on your health, the people who grow it, the animals who provide it, and the environment. As Wendell Barry puts it, “Eating is an agricultural act.” We need to pay attention to our food, not just be mindless consumers.

Here are a dozen things you can do right now to radically reduce your food footprint. Most of them will save you money and improve your health, too!

1. Eat less meat

2. Grow some food to eat this year

3. Eat seasonal, locally-produced food

4. Eat organic food, preferably locally-produced

5. Choose fair trade food products

6. Only eat fish and seafood from safe and sustainable fisheries

8. Reduce your consumption of industrially-produced/processed/fast food

7. Walk, bike, bus or carpool to the store, market, or restaurant

9. Plan your meals ahead and keep track of leftovers to avoid food waste

10. Drink tap water, not bottled water, and don’t forget the carbon/water footprint of other drinks too

11. Compost your food waste

12. Use more energy-efficient ways to cook your food

…and check out Reiko’s Bento Lab–-just because I guarantee it will make you smile!

(this post is mostly a rerun–but it still says everything that I want to say. Happy Earth Day!)

The Saskatchewan Eco-Network will host the 4th Annual Saskatchewan Environmental Film Festival (”See the Change, Be the Change”) this weekend at the University of Saskatchewan.

Today, 22 March, is the United Nations’ World Water Day. This year’s theme deals with transboundary water–the lakes and rivers that cross political and geographical borders. This theme is a timely reminder that when it comes to water, we’re all in the same boat. We all need it every day, and we’re all vulnerable to the same problems that can affect our water supply: drought (as climate change reduces snowpack and rainfall) and contamination (by factories, transportation, agriculture, and individuals). We may live on a large and  (for now) seemingly abundant river here in Saskatoon, but that water has to travel a long way to get to us. What happens if and when something happens to the water supply upstream? Forget oil–it’s a water shortage that’s the real concern.

Most Canadians take clean and easily accessible drinking water for granted. But worldwide, 1 in 7 people do not have access to safe drinking water, and a child dies every 8 seconds from drinking contaminated water. It’s not just a problem in developing countries, however. No one is immune from the dangers of unclean water, as the deaths and illnesses in Walkerton and North Battleford tragically demonstrated. Last April there were nearly 1,900 “boil water” advisories in place in small communities across Canada. First Nations communities in particular are vulnerable to contaminated water supplies, due to environmental pollution and lack of proper treatment facilities.

Water supplies are also a giant concern. Although the earth is covered water, most of it is salty and only 1% of it is fit for drinking. Canada has a large share of the world’s fresh water, but we are also gluttons when it comes to water usage. The average Canadian uses an average of 329 litres of water per person per day, which is twice as much as Europeans. In Mozambique, the average person uses 1.3 litres of water per day–that’s less than one flush from a low-flow toilet. We seem to think that we can simply go on using as much as we like of it while dumping whatever we like into it (chemicals, fertilisers, animal waste, and other pollutants) and that it will just keep flowing, clean and pure, from the tap indefinitely. This is a profoundly deluded viewpoint, and it will come back to haunt future generations unless we smarten up and start treating water as the incredibly precious resource that it is.

Here are some links/petitions/events to help you learn more about the ‘hidden water’ you’re consuming, and which can also help you to reduce your water consumption:

• GOOD magazine’s illuminating table of typical daily water usage can show you exactly how you can cut your water footprint. Hint: pick chicken much more often than beef, and grains and vegetables much more often than meat.
• Waterfootprint.org can help you calculate your personal water footprint, and also features a product gallery showing how much water goes into what, complete with case studies.
• Inside The Bottle, a campaign against bottled water, is asking you to sign a petition today supporting public water systems in Canada and around the world. Pour yourself a glass and count yourself in as one of the many people who are choosing tap water over bottled, which is more expensive and uses far more energy and resources to produce.
• Core Neighbourhood Youth Co-op sells rain barrels–catching rain water for your garden can make a really satisfying dent in your summer water bill.
• Rethink that trip to Las Vegas–Lake Mead could be within a few years of going dry, which could literally leave Las Vegas high and dry (and Los Angeles too).
• Oxfam Saskatoon is showing two films on Tuesday, 24 March in honour of World Water Day–Sisters of the Planet and Refugees of the Blue Planet. These films will be shown from 2-4pm at the Neatby-Timlin Theatre (Arts 241) at the University of Saskatchewan.

The City of Saskatoon has been holding its yearly public ward meetings over the past few weeks. These meetings are usually held in the autumn, but were delayed because of the timing of the federal election (looks like they may have to permanently find another time for them, as we may well be having another election this October too).

The Ward 6 meeting on 22 January, which I attended, was a good opportunity for area residents to ask questions of Mayor Don Atchison, Councillor Charlie Clark, and representatives of various city departments. As I posted on Twitter the day of the meeting, so many people focus on national and provincial politics and forget that we can often make bigger and more positive changes to people’s lives at the civic level!

People at the meeting got up and spoke about the need for community gardens and more public green space in the ward, as well as their desire for better infrastructure and support for cyclists and pedestrians in the city. They also expressed their concern about lead levels in the tap water in older homes and the availability of recycling facilities. Justifiably high praise was also passed on to city council about the new Saskatoon Farmers’ Market location on River Landing.

So what is the city doing about the public’s concerns? It is currently investigating the possibility of converting some of the Victoria and Nutana school grounds to public park space, and is scoping out a number of potential community garden sites (sadly, the current Nutana Community Garden will be no more after the 2009 growing season, as the lease will soon be up and the land is slated for development–I’ll be writing more about this soon). I believe that the city is more than willing to try to accommodate and help set up community gardens, but the main obstacles are finding a suitable public space that has easily available water for irrigation. We need to push hard to identify more of these spaces and get gardeners behind the projects. If you’re interested in finding out more about community gardening in Saskatoon, get in touch with the Saskatoon Community Garden Network (you can join the Facebook group or email Dana Barrand for the next meeting details in March–I’ll also be posting them here soon).

The mayor freely admitted that the development for cycling paths is woefully behind schedule (it would apparently take 25 years to carry out the city’s planned scheme at the current rate) and pledged his support for the concept of human-powered transport. However, he didn’t give any details on how an accelerated timeline would be achieved. Saskatoon is so compact that a bike journey often need take no longer than one by car (and is very often faster, when you consider time to find parking). Riding a bike keeps you fit, reduces air pollution, and saves you money. It’s a no-brainer. Interested in improving cycling access, safety, and support in Saskatoon? Tell your city councillor and the mayor that this is something you strongly believe in. There’s also a Facebook group to support safe cycling downtown (a notoriously dangerous hotspot, as even the mayor admitted at the meeting that Saskatoon’s drivers “are not very good”).

Advice was given out to worried homeowners who cannot afford the estimated $4,000-7,000 it costs to replace old lead water pipe connections (and renters whose landlords are not willing to replace them. It was stressed that that the source water in Saskatoon is extremely pure, but that lead can accumulate while the water sits in the pipes nearby or inside the home. This has become a concern in cities across the country. To minimise horrible water wastage*, it was recommended that people take showers first thing, then let each individual tap run for 30 seconds before using it for drinking. Filters were also recommended. I’m not quite sure how the many people on limited incomes in the city who may be having problems finding the money for their existing water bill are supposed to find extra money for filters and for all this additional water (not to mention the expense of getting the water tested)!

It is a really unfortunate situation, as Councillor Clark pointed out at the meeting, because many people have bought (often older) homes closer to the centre of the city at least in part to try and reduce their environmental footprint. When we moved back to Saskatoon, we chose our neighbourhood largely because it was within easy walking distance of most places that we want to go. I collect rainwater to use in the garden and have put in more drought-tolerant plants. Through much more careful use of water and lights, we had managed to greatly reduce our utilities bill over the past year. But if it happened to have lead connection pipes, we would either have to use our fridge water filter for cooking and coffee/tea as well as fresh drinking water, or run a huge amount of water down the drain every day. Fortunately for us, I discovered that the main line had been replaced about 15 years ago, before we moved in. But there are thousands of homes that still have the old connection. To find out whether you have lead water connection pipes, phone the city at 975-2491 and they will look up the details for your address.

The issue of recycling was also raised. Mayor Atchison expressed his support for recycling facilities, but thought better results could be achieved through the use of several “super-depots” located throughout the city. Councillor Clark disagreed, stating that he thought that a curbside blue box collection program could work well in Saskatoon. I have to say that it doesn’t personally seem to make much sense to me to have thousands of cars burning gasoline hauling newspapers and plastic back and forth all over the city when one vehicle could do pickups. The success of Saskatoon Curbside Recycling seems to show that when people have the convenience of door-to-door pickup, they will recycle anything that isn’t nailed down and will often pass the recycling bug onto their friends and neighbours. It would also provide the necessary infrastructure to begin collecting organic/kitchen waste, which would be so much better properly composted rather than dumped into the landfill to create methane gas. I don’t think people will really be willing (or should be willing) to drive their used coffee grounds or potato peelings halfway across the city twice a week to a central collection point.

There were many other issues raised at the meeting that night, but these are the ones of most relevance to my blog. For a good overview of the issues raised at the ward meetings, check out Sean Shaw’s blog–he has attended many (if not all?) of the city ward meetings this month and posted notes on those for both Ward 4 (where he plans to run for councillor in the autumn) and Ward 6. Thanks, Sean!

If you feel strongly about any or all of the above issues or anything else (I’m sure you do!), you can get in touch with City Council via this online form or get contact details for your local councillor here.

* It has been recommended that a tap be left running for 10 minutes before water is used for drinking if it has not been flushed out in for 6 hours. The expense and sheer waste is staggering, frankly. But then, so is the idea that you might be drinking water with an unsafe level of lead in it.

Work is continuing apace on the front garden—you can see a new long bed for anemones extending along the sidewalk, with a new rock border. This border creates a nice wide edge with space for bulbs, and make it harder for our two small people to stomp across the middle of the yard and through the flower beds.

We stacked the old pieces of sod up along the edges of what will be the path, to get it out of the road while we’re working. I’ve been burying some of it upside down in the newly dug beds (about a foot down) so it can compost all by itself.

And what’s that poking up in the middle?

It’s the beginning of the herb spiral!

I shovelled dirt into a mound (could have gotten rid of some more of the upside-down turf on the bottom of it, but for some reason I forgot to stick it in), and then I started pressing rocks into the base to see how big we needed to make it. We actually enlarged it somewhat after this picture; it’s about 1.3m across.

We stacked up two layers of rocks all round, then once we got all the way around, started moving in to create the spiral and a small planting area at the top. We finished building it after it was too dark to take a picture, so I’ll have to post one tomorrow! It was a really fun project.

The Victoria Day long weekend is the traditional time for Canadians to put in their gardens. This year, the holiday really falls on the early side of the 24th of May, so I’m not panicking to get everything planted this weekend. I haven’t even bought any bedding plants yet, although I did plant some lettuce seeds in pots on the deck about 10 days ago, which are now enthusiastically poking their heads out of the dirt. I’ll plant some more in the next day or so so that I have nicely staggered crops of salad greens throughout the summer, and plan to put in some other cool-weather vegetables like carrots, beets, radishes, and spinach. Tomato seedlings could probably do with another week under their cosy coats, just in case.

One thing that we did start work on today, which I’m very excited about, is removing the grass from our front garden. I have been gradually chipping away at this pathetic area of sod for the past few years, expanding the flower beds and putting in low-maintenance perennials instead. Our house faces north and we also have a very old maple tree in the front yard, which means that it is an awkward area for gardening. Part of it is in total shade, part of it is about half-shade and half-blast furnace, and all of it tends to be very dry because of the tree cover. There really isn’t enough sun there for grass, and because I don’t like wasting water on a lawn, it can look pretty terrible when it’s dry. We do have a small patch of grass in the back garden for the kids to play on, but we never just go and sit on the grass at the front. So, its days are numbered!

We are planning on extending the perennial beds, putting in a path, and also a raised bed in the middle. We are still deciding between putting in a herb spiral (I think that it might be difficult getting the right kinds of stackable rocks for it–my mom and dad’s farm tends towards producing round, not flat rocks!) or something star-shaped like this raised bed kit from Lee Valley. I plan to put in most of our lettuce and greens out here, and will be launching an experiment with herbs and carrots to see how well they do with the somewhat limited sun.

So, we’re getting the ground prepared and then we’ll have a look at our rocks and see how they stack up. I’m also planning on getting some willow branch cuttings from my mom and dad’s farm to make an obelisk for scarlet runner beans…my sister’s branches actually took root and started to leaf out again, forming a beautiful living obelisk. Sweet!

City dwellers are becoming increasingly excited about the possibilities for growing food in the space that is traditionally dominated by a barren patch of grass. I’ll be posting more about the burgeoning Food Not Lawns movement in the coming week!

(photo by Neil Wilkinson)

Here’s a quick round-up of five of the most fascinating food issue articles I’ve read lately:

Our personal actions to halt climate change can sometimes seem depressingly insignificant, says Michael Pollan in the New York Times. But the best way to start is to grow some–even just a little–of your own food. (registration required)

Genetically modified crops are not the solutions to world hunger that Monsanto claims they are, says The Independent. In fact, a major study has found that GM soyabeans produce 10% less food than their non-GM counterparts.

George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, says never mind the credit crunch–the real crisis is global hunger. And if you care about it, eat less meat.

Forget carbon: you should be checking your water footprint, says Amol Rajan in The Independent. A new Dutch web site, waterfootprint.org, can help you work out how much water is used to grow, manufacture, and transport common foods and products.

Japan is a market pioneer again–it’s the first industrialised nation to run out of butter. This surprising shortage proves that even wealthy countries are not immune from the issues of self-sufficiency and food security, says Leo Lewis in the Times of London.