Clay and Wattles

A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by Vivian Song of the Sun Media syndicate about energy efficiency and climate change in the north. She’s writing a series called “Green Planet” over the next week or so. Part one is here: FALLOUT ZONE: Moving targets’ a challenge. I’m quoted in this one.

Like any good multi-media journalist, Vivian also shot some video of our house which appears on the canoe.ca website. The caption reads

Kevin Kennedy, a city councillor in Yellowknife, shows his eco-friendly home for our cameras, while providing tips to make your house greener.

Here is the video:

Click here if you want to rate it on the Canoe site. Click here for more videos tagged “Environment” on the Canoe site, including several which Vivian shot in Yellowknife.

I recently ran across an Australian blog called Typing is Not Activism: its title is a very pithy reminder of a problem that has been troubling me lately. Likewise, recycling is not activism, using canvas shopping bags is not activism, joining Ecology North is not activism. All of these are good actions, but, by themselves, they’re just tiny gestures in the right direction.

Everywhere I go in my activist life, I talk to people who truly understand the problem of climate change (and other environmental and social problems). Yes, there are huge swaths of people who “don’t get it” and would rather focus on the marital hijinks of Britney Spears. Yes, there are active climate change deniers (though I’ve personally met very few of them). I’m talking instead about the people who come to the meetings, donate to environmental causes, display the bumper stickers, and so on.

Somehow, many such people understand and acknowledge the problem on one hand, while failing to make the connection to their own behaviour on the other. There are many exceptions, of course. Nor am I perfect either. Still, I don’t think I’m being unreasonable to suggest that the majority of environmental activists/supporters are somewhat misguided (I want to say hypocritical, but that implies intention – I don’t think this failure is entirely intentional).

Call it “Al Gore Syndrome.” Part of me wants to thunder curses down upon “environmentalists” who drive cars, eat meat, live in enormous houses, or fly in airplanes, for example. Don’t people understand that the solutions to climate change are in their own hands? It might be inconvenient to change, but it is possible.

I’ve heard a lot of excuses about automobiles — as a rule, I try not to make people feel guilty about driving (after all, I’ve owned cars myself), but let me say once and for all: if you care about climate change, you need to make a plan to stop using your private vehicle. In extreme cases, it might be a five year plan — maybe it involves moving house or changing jobs. So be it.

Meat-eating is the last thing that a lot of people will change — for some of us, meat-eating is part of our identities. In the north, I run across many, many people who claim that their meat-eating is sustainable because the food is harvested from the land. If your daily diet of meat truly does come entirely from local, wild sources (or organic, sustainable farms), then you’re in the clear. If not, then you have to live with the knowledge that, outside of driving, your optional meat-eating has the largest environmental impact of any consumer activity. Nobody says you have to go “cold turkey” (pun intended), but you can make a plan to reduce your meat consumption and stick with it. Yes, I know you say you hardly ever eat red meat — you’re practically a vegetarian already really — but be honest: are you really keeping track?

Being permitted to live in a big, energy-wasting house with a fossil fuel heating system is a Canadian birthright. We can’t freeze in the dark, can we? Certainly not. And yet, if you live with a small family in a monster home with wasteful systems, you need to make some changes, perhaps even move. Household systems are in the top five largest consumers of fossil fuels and creaters of pollution in North America. The average new home in Canada is 1800 square feet and the average family size is about three people. That means that if you live in a single family home of average efficiency (or worse) that allots more than roughly 600 square feet per person, you’re definitely part of the problem — even without acknowledging that the average house is already extremely wasteful and unsustainable. On the plus side, you can switch to biomass or other alternative heating systems, use electricity and water efficiently, and perhaps disregard floor space to some extent — even so, you can’t ignore this question if you truly want to solve the problems of climate change and environmental degradation.

Air travel is another consumer activity that we give ourselves a free pass on. Sure, I’ll make sacrifices, but not my vacation! I’m an eco-tourist, travelling in far off untouristed places anyway. I need that trip to Edmonton every three months to stay sane. Wrong. You want it — you don’t need it. Buses and trains can be inconvenient, but they are the only sustainable forms of mass transportation in the world; when they are available options, we must use them — when they aren’t, we must carefully evaluate our decision to travel. Travelling less or by slower, uncomfortable methods is a hard pill, but, if you really want to stop climate change, you can’t keep making exceptions for yourself.

I know I’m not perfect either. I know some of these things are difficult. I don’t expect everyone to change overnight. Even so, if you want your environmentalism to be more than a style or a social activity, you have to ask yourself: Am I all talk? Do I really want to live up to my values? Can I afford to do otherwise?

I spent most of yesterday at the World Community Film Festival, an annual showing of films from around the world. The topics are mostly in the social and environmental realm, but the sheer number of films ensures a wide variety of topics and perspectives.

Western Arctic Moving Pictures is the local sponsor of the festival, which travels around the country every year. This is our third year hosting it in Yellowknife. It continues today and Monday, so come down to Northern United Place and check it out.

Yesterday I saw The Ecological Footprint, a film by and about the Global Footprint Network and its efforts to create a baseline method of measuring environmental impact.

I’ve linked to it before, but it is worth checking your own footprint. What I found most interesting was the discussion of national footprints: I was surprised to learn that Italians use one third of the resources per capita that Americans do (and Canadians aren’t far off the North American pace) – nobody would accuse them of having poor quality of life.

Global Dimming argued that our impact on climate is actually more complicated than we’ve been thinking: while greenhouse gases are trapping heat in our atmosphere, air pollution is also reflecting some of that radiation back before it hits the earth. As we reduce pollution, we may actually be making climate change worse!

Independent Intervention: Breaking Silence was the inspiring story of independent journalists in Iraq trying to get uncensored, unsanitized news and images to the western, and particularly American, public.

Favela Rising was about a musical and social movement in the poorest slums of Rio, intervening between corrupt and brutal military police on one hand and drugdealer armies on the other. Brazil is one of my favourite places I’ve never been, so I was fascinated by the culture and contradictions of this amazing story; it was moving, sad, and inspiring.

Best of all, I saw The Power of Community – How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, a film about Cuba as a laboratory for how to the rest of us might cope with peak oil, a crisis they’ve already been through. In the case of Cuba, the crisis was artificial – a result of the ham-handed U.S. embargo and the collapse of the USSR.

Even so, the resourcefulness of the Cuban people is amazing and inspiring. They managed to switch their entire system of agriculture over to organic and sustainable methods within a few years. They made innovative changes to their transportation system. Above all, they maintained their investments in education and health care to provide for the future. I’m sure that few Cubans would choose to go through drastic oil withdrawal again – it was clearly a painful and scarring transition – yet, there are many lessons for the rest of us in their experience.

Well, I’m sorry to report that my friend Doug came in second in last night’s election. He worked very hard, as did a lot of friends and volunteers. I don’t think we made any terrible mistakes and the final result seemed to come down to “popularity” for lack of a better word. In saying so, I don’t mean to insult our new MLA – the winning candidate had many family connections and decades worth of personal contacts in the riding, which are indeed worth something; in spite of all Doug’s great leadership qualities and vision, he didn’t have those roots.

I am excited to report, however, that my friend Bob Bromley was elected in the nearby riding of Weledeh – it wasn’t a great night, but Bob’s victory helped confirm that progress on environmental and social issues is at least possible.

I’m sure some people out there are wondering what happened to me for the past three weeks. I’ve been very busy starting up my classes at Aurora College and acting as the co-campaign manager for my friend Doug Ritchie’s run for MLA in the Great Slave riding where I live. Doug’s website is here.

The election will be over next week, so I’ll be able to breathe a great sigh of relief and get back to normal life.

Last summer I walked for 350 kms through Wood Buffalo National Park (Canada’s largest and one of the least visited). I wrote about the trip here.

At an Earth Week event on Tuesday, I gave a sneak preview of the documentary I’ve made about the trip, Wet Boots and Bison Plops: my one-armed, solar-powered, zero-impact solo ramble through Wood Buffalo National Park – without insect repellent.

The audience seemed to appreciate the film and I’m looking forward to finishing up post-production. I’ll put up more info about screenings (and maybe web access) in the future, but here are a few stills to whet your appetite:

The bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world.

- Susan B. Anthony, 1896
(quoted on the History Timeline of the Bicycle page)

I noticed the other day that a whole year has passed since my first post on this blog. I’m pretty happy with the way it has turned out. I’ve had emails and comments from many people, and the stats show that people check in regularly to see how I’m doing. More importantly, this blog has really helped me to systematically focus on my environmental footprint and make major reductions.

My values are the same, but my behaviour has changed drastically. I was environmentally-conscious before, but the path of least resistance led me to many choices that were more wasteful and polluting than they should have been. True, I didn’t drive much, ate vegetarian food, rode my bike, recycled, avoided over-packaging, etc, etc. I did all the easy things, but I still owned a car, burned oil in the furnace, used large amounts of water and hydro, ate unsustainable foods, travelled by air, etc. I was an activist, too, but never felt very effective. I’m not sure I’ve achieved a sustainable life since then, but I feel a lot closer to it. I’m certainly leading an examined life, rather than going with the flow. I’ve also become a more committed activist and even risked running for City Council.

As a family, we have really benefitted from making a project out of reducing our impact. There were so many easy improvements to make (many of which had side-benefits like saving money and making us healthier), but it took a concerted effort to make them. Once we invested some time in getting started, it was easy to get used to the changes and make them permanent. Buying only organic food wasn’t difficult to get used to, but it took a bit of consideration to decide we should commit to it. Selling the van was a leap of faith, but now I know we’ll never need another one.

This website has mostly been for me and my family, but I’m happy that others have read it and been inspired. It isn’t that what we’ve done is unique (I know lots of people working on the same things), but documenting it helps provide models for other people: we get most of our ideas from the changes our friends and neighbours are making.

Whenever I’m reminded of the unsustainable way my fellow Canadians live, I try not to get frustrated or blame people. Everything I’ve done to reduce our footprint is something someone else did first. I learned and changed and so can others.

In support of our World Water Day march on Edmonton, I wrote the following opinion column to submit to various media outlets. I don’t think it ever appeared anywhere else, but here it is for the record:

Bursting dams are a staple of apocalyptic movies. Whether helped by terrorist saboteurs, Godzilla, or Lex Luthor, the pent-up water always explodes with biblical force through growing cracks in the face of the dam and rushes like a lava flow over the innocent towns and villages below, leaving nothing alive in its destructive wake.

Now imagine that the dastardly villain has also poisoned the water with deadly toxins like naphthoic acid and arsenic and that even a tiny leak could devastate much of northern Canada forever. It sounds too far-fetched for even a Roger Moore-era James Bond flick, yet this is almost exactly the scenario the Alberta government is creating in the northern Alberta tar sands.

Gargantuan toxic tailings ponds diverted from the Athabasca river already cover over fifty square kilometres around Fort McMurray – yet tar sands extraction has barely begun. The tar sands tailings are so toxic, scarecrows and propane-powered cannons must be used to deter migratory birds from landing on the ponds and to prevent animals drinking the water.

As a downstream northerner from Yellowknife, I’m already worried about the drop in water flow entering the Athabasca and Slave Rivers which fill Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River system. Aboriginal people and other northerners are reporting historic lows in river levels, affecting vital transportation lifelines. Slowly but surely, Alberta is turning off the tap to our northern rivers: the same rivers that support the fish, the caribou, the migrating birds, and the people of the NWT; the same rivers that flow through one of the last bastions of pristine boreal forest in the world; the same rivers that have already been severely weakened by hydro-electric dams and the ravages of the climate crisis.

Unfortunately, that diverted water doesn’t just disappear. During the process of tar sands oil extraction, which fouls two to four barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced, the water is systematically poisoned and then stored in man-made tailings ponds behind dikes. When these dikes begin to fail – and, let’s face it, they will fail, whether from a flood tomorrow or neglect fifty years from now – the water, now toxic, will flow right back into the Athabasca River again. Northerners are already hearing about increased incidence of rare and unusual cancers in Fort Chipewyan – a first nations community immediately downstream of tar sands country.

Northern Alberta and the NWT can’t win with tar sands development: if we are lucky, diversion of water from our rivers and lakes will merely suck the life from the north creating a kind of zombie ecosystem; otherwise, we can look forward to the deadly chemicals from the toxic tailings leaking into our rivers, whether catastrophically or slowly, and killing the land a bit more dramatically. Is it any wonder the government and citizens of the Northwest Territories are asking the government of Alberta to slow down?

Alberta is rushing tar sands development, ignoring what is happening downstream. Northerners are asking the Alberta government to stop permitting companies to divert our water until the health and environmental impacts can be assessed and a management plan created to limit those impacts. We want a binding water-sharing agreement between the Northwest Territories and Alberta. Any good neighbour would agree that these are reasonable requests.

A group of northerners from all over the NWT are travelling to Edmonton this week to echo our territorial government’s request that Alberta consider the downstream effects before blindly rushing to strip mine northern Alberta for oil. We know that the citizens of Alberta will agree with us – please let your leaders know you want to be a good neighbour.

The unlikely super-villain in this case may be the government of Alberta instead of Dr. No, but, James Bond, where are you when we need you?

Our 72-hour whirlwind bus-powered invasion of Alberta was a success. The bus trip wasn’t so bad and we all arrived intact.

The photo at left shows Michael Miltenberger, MLA for Fort Smith, and Doug Ritchie, Ecology North Program Director, holding a copy of the “right to water” resolution passed in the NWT Legislature (that’s me holding up the banner in the background). The photo was taken at the rally we held on the steps of the Alberta Legislature. Members of our group met with the Conservative Environment Minister and members of the Liberal and NDP caucuses. We were surprised and pleased by the number of print, radio, and TV reporters who showed up at the rally. My main contribution was the words I wrote for our marching song (the title was Paul Falvo’s idea):

Let It Flow, Let It Flow, Let It Flow
(to the tune of “Let It Snow, Let it Snow, Let It Snow”)

Oh the tar sand mines are frightful
But that Al Gore’s quite insightful
And since we’ve no place to go
Let It Flow! Let It Flow! Let It Flow!

Athabasca shows signs of stopping
And Mackenzie’s flow is dropping
The spigot’s turned way down low
Let It Flow! Let It Flow! Let It Flow!

If the North doesn’t win this fight
How we’ll hate going out in the stream!
If Alberta can use foresight
All the way north will stay clean!

The land is slowly dying
And, my dears, we’ll soon be crying
But as long as you love us so
Let It Flow! Let It Flow! Let It Flow!

The event was a lot of fun and seemed to have an impact. Thanks are due especially to Doug from Ecology North and Lindsay, Leila, and Meredith from the Prairie Chapter of Sierra Club. Great job, everyone!