Clay and Wattles

A child pedestrian is 151 times more likely to be killed or injured than an adult is to catch AIDS.

-John Elkington & Julia Hailes, Manual 2000: The Ethical Consumer Guide

More worms! My friend Tasha has kindly given me another couple of hundred worms (at left). Thank you so much, Tasha! They have made themselves right at home with their long-lost cousins. It’s like there’s a party going on in the composter now – the loud reggae music is starting to get to me, but otherwise I’m thrilled.

Some interesting things I’ve noticed in the WOW (world of worms) lately:

• we have all kinds of seeds sprouting in the composter (peppers, apples, ????)
• steam rises from the compost when I poke around in it – I think that means it’s working

p.s. to the squeamish: I love looking at and playing with worms, but it is completely unnecessary – it is quite possible to compost without ever touching a worm and hardly ever even seeing one. If you aren’t squeamish, here’s the video.

I haven’t written much about my efforts to save water yet, so here I go.

There are at least three big issues relating to water usage: water heating, waste water, and toxic water pollution. Naturally, if you use less, you pollute less and have to heat less. We’re shooting to improve all three. We have plenty of clean water where we live (for now, at least), so taking more than our share isn’t a huge issue. Still, it takes infrastructure and energy to get the water from the Yellowknife River to us, and even more resources to treat it before putting it back in Great Slave Lake. Best to use less.

How are we using less? There are two painless steps we took last year: installing faucet aerators on all our taps and showerheads, and upgrading our broken, old top-loading washer with a new front loader.

The aerators were a piece of cake to install and cost only a few dollars at any hardware store. They work by reducing the flow from the tap when you run water. The bottom of the aerator is full of tiny holes which spread out the water, so the flow feels the same as before. You will never notice the difference, but it can save a lot of water over time. Do it this weekend!

When we needed to replace our twenty-year old washer, we chose an Energy Star Whirlpool Duet model, which wasn’t cheap, but should pay for itself in energy and water savings over its lifetime. This Natural Resources Canada Energy Star site was very helpful. We bought our washer at Furnitureland because they had the energy efficient model we wanted in stock. Front-loaders are better because they require less water, less detergent, and less power to run. The clothes come out with less water in them, so you save energy on using the electric dryer as well (though we should hang clothes to dry if possible).

Along with CRT computer monitors and pre-1983 refrigerators, I understand that top-load washing machines are one of the appliances that may make sense to replace even if your old one still works. Top-loaders are that wasteful! This was one of the bonus tips I gleaned when we had our energy audit by Arctic Energy Alliance.

Naturally, we wash in cold water, which works fine. We also use Nature Clean detergent from the Co-op which (according to the box) biodegrades 99% within 28 days.

Of course, there are even more efficient washing options. I recently found this one which could make off-grid living easier or be practical for a small household: The Wonder Wash.

This pdf file (click to download) is a list I have been compiling of organic products available in Yellowknife (click here for help on opening pdf files). I started it because I wanted some data to present to the Co-op about how they are doing in this category. I think it might also be useful for people who are trying to find a certain item, but don’t know where to look.

The list is nowhere near complete. It includes notes I made from walking down about half the aisles in the Co-op, plus information on register tapes from Extra Foods (downtown and Range Lake). I found a couple of organic items at Sutherland’s Drugs and included them on the list as well. I tried to include as much information as I thought might be useful to make good environmental choices (including packaging and place of origin). I left lots of stuff blank because I didn’t collect the information. The list is almost all vegetarian and includes a few non-organic green products or vegan alternatives. Extra Foods prices were the lowest available (which sometimes requires you to buy multiple items). When I get more ambitious, I will throw this in a database so people can query and add to it if they want.

A couple of surprises I discovered:

• Both Extra Foods stores charge exactly the same price for everything (I always figured the downtown store was more expensive)
• Co-op has a lot more organic choices than I thought, including a few that are unavailable elsewhere, but they can be hard to identify on the shelf (perhaps we need to ask for special labels?)
• I’m sorry to say that I haven’t found a single organic item so far that isn’t cheaper to buy at Extra Foods rather than Co-op (even for the rare items that are exactly the same brand and variety)

Canada is losing wilderness at the rate of one square kilometre every hour.

-John Elkington & Julia Hailes, Manual 2000: The Ethical Consumer Guide

I received an unpleasant shock today when I noticed that there was no deposit on a tetrapak of soymilk I purchased. I haven’t returned any beverage containers to the new depot yet (we’ve been saving them to donate to my wife’s school), and had assumed that all non-milk beverage containers were included in the program.

I have checked the NWT Beverage Container Regulations and sure enough:

“milk” means milk from a domestic ruminant, milk substitutes and yogurt beverages and includes flavoured milk, infant formula, nut milk, rice milk and soy milk

Section 2.2.a of the regulations clearly states that “milk” (according to the definition) containers are excluded from the program.

Damn! While I am willing to accept that fresh milk should be exempted from the program (since it comes in plastic recyclable containers anyway), I am very disappointed that other containers will have to simply be thrown away. Surely, there is a way to include these containers in the recycling program without charging a deposit?

I will look into this further and report back.

I special-ordered a copy of The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery and have read the first hundred pages. I just couldn’t wait for it to come to the library (and, besides, books like this fall into the same category as bike accessories: green treats!). Notwithstanding Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, this may well be the best book I’ve ever read about climate change. I will write more about it later, but here is a quote on polar bears to get you started:

If nothing is done to limit greenhouse gas emissions, it seems certain that sometime this century a day will dawn when no summer ice will be seen in the Arctic – just a vast, dark, turbulent sea. My guess is that the world will not have to wait even that long to be done with nanuk, for before the last ice melts the bears will have lost their constellation of den sites, feeding grounds and migration corridors, without which they cannot breed. Perhaps a cohort of elderly bears will linger on, each year becoming thinner than the last. Or perhaps a dreadful summer will arrive, when the denning seals are nowhere to be found. A few ingenious hunters may eke out a living on a diet of lemming, carrion and sea-caught seals, but they’ll be so thin that they will not wake from winter’s sleep.

I recently posted some of the reasons I became a vegetarian. If you are serious about reducing your environmental footprint, you must consider eliminating factory-farmed, high-impact animal products and non-organic plant foods from your diet, while trying to choose items that are produced as close as possible to where you live. After driving a car, eating is the most environmentally damaging thing we do.

For northerners, a sustainable diet may well include some locally-harvested animal products, but if you are not exclusively a hunter or have concerns about animal suffering, then check out this persuasive list of reasons to be a vegetarian. I especially like reasons 25, 28, 35, 82, and 90. Many of the reasons refer to specific US laws and circumstances, but Canadian laws are similar and we eat a lot of food produced in the US.

By 2025, North Americans will be wasting almost 8000 centuries of their time, annually, sitting in stopped traffic.

-John Elkington & Julia Hailes, Manual 2000: The Ethical Consumer Guide

I have already made a case for why environmentalists and social activists should be using free and open source software (FOSS).

One of the best places to download free software is Sourceforge.net It hosts over 100,000 open source projects, but it can be a bit confusing to new users. Here is a step-by-step guide to how to download Sourceforge programs:

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