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Food blog no. 1 – waste not, want not

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My friend and colleague, Prof. Ellie Perkins recently forwarded an article to a number of us about the "cost of eggs". I assumed that it was all about the nutritional value of hens' eggs and expected to read that I could soon keep chickens in my back garden in Toronto - and why not? Vancouverites can. With the advent of the growing season, I am currently in an "urban agriculture" headspace, as well as engaged in the ongoing battle to increase the number of vegetarian meals that my family eats (for both cost and carbon footprint reasons) to over 50%. It turned out that Ellie's article was a very curious piece about the high value placed on the eggs of students with high SAT scores by couples hoping to conceive via fertility treatments and egg donations! Eggs are parts of life cycles, and all organisms need food as they go through their life cycles. Food security and sustainability of supply are huge issues. When I began teaching ecology at York in 1991, global per capita food production had been steadily rising. In recent years, per capita food production has been declining for various reasons, but there is still enough food to feed the world, if we could get it distributed.

Tristram Stuart's book Waste, highlights the issue of how much food is wasted as a result of our industrial-scale approach to agriculture and best-by dates which result in enormous quantities of food being thrown out. Many families throw out much of the food from their fridges and GOOD magazine tells us that the average American wastes 0.5 lbs of food per day. In London, England, 176,000 bananas are thrown out everyday. Both GOOD and Stuart point out that, if diverted appropriately, this wasted food, could address issues of hunger quite seriously and it could also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Another way of putting into perspective the information about just how much food never makes it into people's stomachs, is to take a look at the excellent series, What the World Eats. It is based on the book, Hungry Planet, and shows photos of families from around the world with their weekly groceries spread out before them, as well as the cost. A picture really is worth a thousand words, and this is the book that I would want to see in everyone's house, on the kitchen table.

The 2001 AAAS Atlas of Population and Environment, is also an excellent resource.

So, take-home message number 1 - eat ALL of the food that you buy for you and your family. Do this before thinking about eating locally or organically or turning vegan - which I'll cover later. Reducing food waste at the local kitchen level takes a lot of planning and is hard work. I DO THIS, and so can you. Follow GOOD's and Martha's advice and plan weekly family menus. Freeze leftovers and use up food that's on the edge of going off. As Gordon Ramsay  points out, time and again, in his books and tv shows - good restaurants waste very little food - they would not make money if they did.

Dawn R. Bazely

LCBO probably makes more progress in one flyer than Toronto’s cycling advocates make in two years…

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My latest set of blogs are a bit delayed, because following on from teaching BIOLOGY 2010, York's Plant Biology course, and the arrival of a very early spring, I am writing a lot about food - security and sustainability. These blogs take a lot of fact-checking and research and are time-consuming to write.

So, here's a quick shout out to the LCBO - the Liquor Control Board of Ontario - who this past weekend, likely did more to promote cycling as a form of sustainable transportation among non-enthusiasts, than all of the cyclists, cycle clubs and cycling advocates that I know, put together, including the City of Toronto cycling office!

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They put a very handsome young man, dressed in an impeccably tailored suit on a bike, and made it the cover of last weekend's flyer promoting French wine. This arrived as an insert in our Saturday paper.

Marketing-wise, we'd normally expect to see this chap in an ad for an expensive sports car, but here he is, on a bike, looking cool and trendy. Ahem, note to male members of my fellow middle-aged cohort "you are more likely to keep fitting into your expensive suits, if you cycle, rather than buy a sports car".

I have cycled hundreds and hundreds of kilometers in Oxford and Cambridge, as well as in the Netherlands, and Sweden. Everyone and their dog cycles around. BUT here in North America, despite the best intentions of  advocates, cycling's just not as widely perceived as something that everyone should do, for all of their life. I hope that this flyer cover has some unintended consequences that are good for the environment and people's health.

Just one beef about the adverts: as the parent of a teen, who thinks that bike helmets are totally dorky, despite the stats and the wide availability of cool helmets (widely reviewed, including at the website, Outdoor Urbanite) - I do wish that the inside shot with the baguette and flowers showed the model wearing a bike helmet.

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Dawn R. Bazely

Climate movement reboot in Bolivia

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From the Western media, you may not have known that a historic climate change conference was held last week in Bolivia. Hard on the heels of the failure in Copenhagen, Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, proposed the people's conference as a counterpoint to the pessimism and big power politics in Denmark.

Over 30,000 people attended the conference and met in 17 + 1 working groups to hash out a people's agreement. Along with a proposed universal declaration for the rights of Mother Earth, enormous energy and spirit is being unleashed in the Global South to bear on the existential threats facing the human species, something to keep in mind in the complacent North that is sleepwalking through the unfolding disaster.

And despite the predictable and almost deliberate media blackout, it is again the South that is taking the lead, and amongst them, the poorest of the poor. Since taking power in 2005, Morales has been in the forefront of calling for the defense of Mother Earth, or Pachamama as she is known in the Andes. His thoughts on the matter are encapsulated in a LA Times op-ed that appeared following the conference.

Bolivia's situation is particularly parlous, as the glaciers that supply the parched country most of its water have been in full retreat. The country is also one of the poorest in the hemisphere, having been plundered mercilessly by conquistadors, dictators, and neoliberal governments for much of its history. Morales has made major strides in the five years of his administration, yet still the contradictions and difficulties of balancing extractive industries that supply much of the government's revenue with the government's environmental advocacy remains.

For more insight, see Naomi Klein's article, "An New Climate Movement" and the conference's Spanish language site.

The City of Toronto’s 20-minute Makeover

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On Friday, April 24th, 2010, IRIS had the opportunity to participate in the City of Toronto’s 20-minute Makeover at York University. This makeover was a celebratory event for Earth Day and marked York’s commitment to campus sustainability. We went to the Danby Woods by Chimneystack Road to clean up one of the woodlots on campus.

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The group found a wide range of dumped objects in all kinds of materials, mostly fabric, plastic and paper products.  We also found a hidden “dump site” – a place where people seem to cover their garbage with leaves and branches. The group dug most of the garbage out from the mound. Disposable food and drink packages were the majority of the waste collected there. Some of the packages had already started decomposing when we dug them out. However, we found that even for paper packages, there was still a certain amount of material that is not biodegradable—at least in the short run. For example, Tim Hortons cups contain a thin layer of plastic protection inside the cup that takes longer to decompose than the paper component of the cup. Even once the outside paper layer is gone, the inside layer was still be present in cups that we found.

I think the whole process of participating in this activity is fairly educational. One might never notice how much waste material we have around us unless we take a serious look. Within twenty minutes, IRIS and other groups picked up seven bags of garbage including an unwanted kid cart. I was amazed by the result and the effort we can make to perfect our environment within only 20 minutes! Waste and disposable materials are a serious problem to consider. Instead of focusing purely on academic perspective, we should put our theory into practice. We should pay more attention to our living environment and protect the earth by contributing small daily tasks such as picking up some garbage. If we work together and show that we care, we can make a huge difference together.

Climate Change: Women’s Voices from the Global South

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Last week, IRIS attended the Climate Wise Women (CW2) to listen to the experiences of three women from the Global South who are already living with the impacts of climate change. After the failure of COP15 to reach a binding accord, a group of women from the Global South, began a worldwide speaking tour. Their objective is share their stories and to spur climate action at the grassroots level. This well put together public speaking tour offers an alternative narrative on how climate change affects women and families.  Ulamila Kurai Wragg from the Cook Islands focused on how traditional knowledge, inheritance structures, and livelihoods are changing forever.  The community has found that traditional crops can no longer flourish, fish have migrated away from the shores near home, and local water reserves are now saline. Ulamila's family has adapted by changing crops, by collecting rain water whenever possible, and by walking to fishing grounds on the other side of the Island. However, resource yields have fallen and the pressure to seek other livelihood options looms for her daughters. Ulamila’s message was that traditional ways of life and cultural practices have already changed due to climate change. Sharon Hanshaw from Biloxi, Mississippi told us a tragic story of personal loss and community displacement after Hurricane Katrina. Her message was that politicians have turned a blind eye to most vulnerable victims of the Hurricane, and in response women have gathered to place political pressure on the local government to rebuild what was lost.  Finally, Constance Okollet from Uganda told a gripping tale about the impacts of the 2007 flooding and subsequent droughts on the agricultural community of Tororo. She recounted the stories of the deaths of children and elders to cholera and malaria during the floods, and then the further losses due to malnutrition as the drought came.  Just as the community began to recover, another intense flood and drought followed in 2009. Her message was that the community has never seen such an intensity and frequency of both droughts and floods. She emphasized how her community fears only the worst for their future and survival. The presentation pointed to how local people are living with the impacts of climate change, and offered the space for understanding climate impacts and responses across gender and cultures.

Learn more at: http://www.climatewisewomen.org/

Eyjafjallajokull: Necessity is the mother of green invention?

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This morning’s episode of CBC’s ‘The Current’ featured the sounds of birds singing in West London. A newsworthy event, since no one knows if the birds sing everyday. On most days, the songs are drowned out by the ever present droning of jet engines overhead. Local residents interviewed commented both on how nice the sounds of nature are, and how refreshing silence can be in the city. A radical idea: nature is part of the city and contributes to our well being. Elsewhere, the British Navy has sent ships to take stranded travelers home; others have taken trains home. And for those whose travel plans have been canceled, they are opting to go local by taking trips to the countryside.  A radical idea: we can relax close to home, and we can move across Europe by train, boat, and not plane.  Business is adapting as well, with the grounding of employees on their way to meetings, conferences, and presentations, business is replacing travel with video conferencing.  Another radical idea: business people do not have to fly for every meeting abroad.  Perhaps the Icelandic volcano was fortuitous for climate politics, because without any advocacy from environmentalists, people have found alternative ways for moving, consuming, and conducting business. It is estimated that the grounding of planes has saved about 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in less than a week (plane emissions minus volcano emissions).  This is not to sideline the frustration of millions of travelers or the loss of millions to the airline industry. But, just before the planes take off again, we should take a moment to think about how this one geological event opened a space of potentiality, and showed us that we can find alternatives to emitting GHGs, if necessary.

NIMBYism and windfarms in Toronto

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The City of Toronto was well ahead of the Canadian curve when it came to adopting basic principles of sustainability around public transport, intensification of building density and the need to increase sources of renewable energy. The Ontario Green Energy Act has provided marvelous opportunities for increasing provincial sources of renewable energy. I have been amazed at how wind farms built in recent years in southwestern Ontario and on the way to Grey Bruce have livened up the landscape.

But, as the province moves on from terrestrial wind farms to offshore projects, one Toronto community is mobilizing against them. Some Guildwood residents have asked their city councilors, Paul Ainslie and Brian Ashton, to bring forward a motion to the city’s executive committee asking the province for a blanket-moratorium on wind-power development. The Globe and Mail article, Bluff residents fight wind turbines, explains that this motion, if passed, will be purely symbolic. But, while it will have little impact, it illustrates the nature of local opposition to such projects. The article quotes my colleague, Mark Winfield: "it would be “tragic" if fear of angering residents prevented the city’s politicians from pursuing much-needed renewable energy initiatives."

I am grading final exams right now. Since my head is in this space, my response on hearing about this motion in the last week was to imagine a take-home exam that I would like to set all of the voting residents of this local community. Here are the essay questions:

1. Explain what the acronym NIMBY stands for and discuss how this may or may not be applicable to Guildwood.

2. Define the term “ecological footprint” and explain how you would calculate your personal footprint.

3. In the documentary, The Age of Stupid, the filmmaker, Franny Armstrong illustrates the case of local residents opposing a wind farm project on the basis of landscape aesthetics. Compare and contrast this case with that of Guildwood in terms of how you are still “do[ing] your bit for the environment” (quote from wind-farm opponent in The Age of Stupid).

4. Discuss the evidence in the peer-reviewed literature for the harmful impacts of wind farms on human health and the environment. In your answer, define the term, peer-reviewed literature. (hint - you may want to use Google Scholar for this).

The purpose of these questions? Well, none of them have definitive right or wrong answers, so they are aimed at improving the level of informed opinions on the issue, because, obviously, there is homework that would need to be done to answer these questions. In the Globe article, Mr. Ainslie comments “there’s a lot of things that are unanswered”. These questions would help in addressing his concerns.

And, I am NOT advocating for only peer-reviewed science to drive action and policy. My close colleague,  environmental ethicist, Dr. Nicole Klenk proposes that “scientific narratives should be denied a priori privilege over non-scientific interpretations of nature for policy purposes”. I completely agree – local knowledge is very important and should be taken into account. BUT just how much local knowledge is there about wind farms in Guildwood?

I have lost patience with the dominant notion in our society, that an uninformed opinion should count for as much as an informed opinion. Too many people, including my teenager,  are getting away without doing their homework. The question of exactly whom I see as being responsible for this lamentable state of affairs is a topic for another blog.

Dawn R. Bazely

PS the quote is from the 2008 article, “Listening to the birds: a pragmatic proposal for forestry” in the peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Values, volume 17, pages 331-351

The quest for a sustainable writing tool

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Last Friday, I was one of the volunteer parent drivers for an excited group of school children that included my daughter. We went to the opening day of  the "Harry Potter" Exhibition at the Ontario Science Centre. Like all trendy exhibitions, the cost of entry was pretty steep, and naturally, since this is a commercial enterprise which is all about making money, the exit of the exhibition led directly into the gift shop. All kinds of pricey Potter paraphernalia was on sale:  a Wizard Chess set for over $400 and a replica of the marauder's map for $45 (prompting me to keep asking myself, "Do J K Rowling and Warner Bros REALLY need another few million?"). Luckily, my daughter kept her selection on the less expensive side and settled on a $20 Parchment Paper Writing Set. "Heck, I thought" as I handed over the plastic, "I could put the kit together from stuff I have on hand at home, and make a quill from a gull or Canada goose feather..." [photopress:Harry_Potter_1.jpg,full,alignright]

Now, when it comes to consuming sustainably, we all KNOW that we should strive to avoid creating garbage that goes into landfill. The Parchment kit purchase got me brooding about my ongoing irritation at the mountain of used up ballpoint and felt-tip pens that I and all the students that I teach have been creating. I am extremely annoyed at how few pens are  recyclable or biodegradable (there are some that are) and at their limited use for  crafts. I have actually given this very serious thought and I maintain a huge collection of pen lids salvaged from pens that have run out, just in case some artist needs them for an installation project involving making a mosaic or collage out of old pens.

My irritation was recently exacerbated, because I was given a beautiful York University metal, rollerball pen. When it ran out, I tried to buy a refill for it, and found that this needed a "special order" from the bookstore. Only one other person had placed such an order, which led me to wonder what all the other recipients had done with their rather expensive metal pens once they ran out?

This seemingly small question of writing instruments had become, for me, yet another irritating example of our sustained unsustainable practices. And, I thought of a solution: I grew up using a fountain pen, and I would go back to it.  Through most of the 1980s, and early 1990s, I used a SINGLE pen - a Sheaffer, with a 14K gold nib that I simply refilled from a bottle of ink. Unfortunately, I am as hard on fountain pens as I am on everything else. On dusting the pen off, I found out that I had stopped using it  because it was very leaky and the nib was bent out of shape. After watching my forefinger and middle finger turn blue, I remembered...

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So, off I went on a rather desultory search for a new fountain pen that  has taken me  6-months, give or take. Staples did not really sell quality everyday-use fountain pens, but rather, caligraphy kits with specialist nibs. I then began a random check of stationery stores but failed to find inexpensive, good quality fountain pens. I did, however, discover that the only fountain pen for sale in the York Bookstore was DISPOSABLE. I did end up buying it, out of sheer fascinated horror at the concept, it and I have used it up - it gave a pretty smooth, if guilt-inducing write.

I was starting to become quite obsessed with the whole issue of  being forced to use single-use pens but did not have the time to do a really thorough investigation. But, today, while hanging around, waiting for my daughter , who was on a birthday celebration scavenger hunt at the Eaton Centre, I went on a hunt of my own. At Birks, and European Jewellers, I found Mont Blanc pens for $500-$1000. Gulp! I would lose it/break it/ drop it. Too expensive for me.

But, luckily, I found a shop called La Swiss, with a very patient young man, named Marc who was having a slow day. I drove him crazy, because here, at last was a shop full of not just Swiss watches but a ton of German, French and US-manufactured fountain pens. I left the store with 4 of them:

1. A Waterman, Charleston, Ebony Black model - nice weight, and heft

2. A Diplomat Excellence B Black Lacquer model - a little heavier and with a fine nib

Since they were both well under my target price point of $200 each, and I was so happy to have found a store with a whole range of fountain pens, I went crazy and bought a couple of inexpensive (around $35 to $60) pens from companies that I had never heard of:

1. An ONLINE Piccolo tri-colour fountain pen with a pink and purple lid. This German company, founded in 1991 by Alexander and Thomas Batsch, manufactures a line of eco-friendly, writing products for kids - and, has one of the most chic retail websites I have ever seen - WAY TO GO!

2. A Monteverde Jewelria resin fountain pen in brown. Monteverde is a US company.

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I expect to be just fine with these pens for the rest of my life. Like HP Reverse Polish notation calculators, I expect that most people will be unlikely to pick up a pen and use it if I leave it around. Do consider switching back to a fountain pen, and rejoin the fan club. If you did not grow up using one, give it a whirl with a disposable starter pen - you are sure to love it. Fountain pens write faster and smoother than any other pen that I have ever used, and I write a lot. The only thing to remember is to put the pen in a ziploc bag when you fly - the ink leaks - or, just don't fly.

Dawn R. Bazely

Spring is here… too early

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This morning, the novelist, Rui Umezawa, who is a neighbour and who kindly reads my blogs, asked me why I have been so inactive on the blogging front. "Too busy", I yelled across the garden fences. This term I have been teaching BIOLOGY 2010, the Plants course, which I taught from 1991-97, before powerpoint and course websites. So, while all of those life cycles are forever burned into my brain, chalk and talk, as we call that style of lecturing, is, in science, pretty much gone the way of the dodo. I have had to create Keynote and Powerpoint lectures and to learn "moodle" which is the most comprehensive electronic classroom software that I have ever seen. This open source software has replaced the way that I previously accessed my course websites - namely through the very nice, and now retired Biology Department Lecturer who functioned as our webmaster.

Moodle has allowed me to teach this course as I always wanted to: skipping from chapter 1 directly to chapter 32, and then to 21, to chapters 2-8, to 11-12 and then 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13 in Raven et al's Plant Biology 7th Ed.  CRAZY, right? But in fact, moving through the material in this sequence always made more sense to me than the linear way that I was forced to teach in earlier versions of the course text book: i.e. start at chapter number one and proceed forward in a one-way sequence. The internet and moodle has provided me with the tools to lay out a completely different roadmap than that provided by the book's author's and index, and, in 2010, the students can follow my map and route through the text book. If I had tried to do this in the 1990s, supported by paper course handouts and chalk and talk lectures, there would, most likely, have been a revolution in the lecturehall. Students who missed classes would have been griping about the jumping around, and any deviations from the lecture schedule, when I found that I was not delivering planned lectures on the expected date. With moodle, I  constantly update the students about where we got to, and with podcasted lectures, they have more flexibility than ever before, to miss a class and still catch up.

I LOVE IT - but it's been a heck of a lot of work at the back end. Still, there's nothing like jumping into a new technology with two feet, and sinking or swimming. The York University support staff have been amazing and I have taken several mini-courses. And, the time involved, has meant no time for blogging here. But, I have sought to imbue the course with a large measure of sustainability thinking. This is easy to do in a course that is essentially about biodiversity, why plants are important to humans, and about evolution. Our lectures on the Carboniferous and the tree ferns and progymnosperms (ancestors of seed plants) that fixed enormous amounts of carbon, and which subsequently turned into fossil fuels, relate directly to human-produced greenhouse gas emissions arising from the burning of these fossil fuels. I found an amazing old You Tube video about fossils, from the 1950s or 1960s by Royal Dutch Shell (that's Shell Oil to you and me), that the students have watched.

Everything is connected. Teaching about flowering plants and pointing out to my students that trees are already flowering , has reminded me, every day since early March, that climate change is happening NOW. I told my husband yesterday that one is supposed to prune roses when the forsythia blooms, and today, I have seen forsythia flowers. My gardening journals from the 1990s tells me that in 1994, the forsythia was only just flowering on April 27. In the early 2000s, I was noting that the forsythia blooming in mid-April was just "too early" - and in 2010, it's been flowering since the 2nd or 3rd of April. Climate warming is here, and in fact, in the USA, the Gardening Zones were  adjusted in 2006 by the Arbor Day Foundation to reflect this.

Dawn R. Bazely

Winkling out those climate change skeptics – yes, they are everywhere

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Hmmm - I arrived home after a hard week of BIOL 2010 (PLANTS) lectures and more missed deadlines, to pick up the Globe and Mail Friday edition for a nice, relaxing read, when I suddenly sat up straight at Neil Reynolds' Business section column - The mythical assertion of fossil fuel scarcity. It's all about a recent article by Professor Emeritus Peter Odell, in the European Energy Review (I haven't downloaded and read it yet, but I will).

"Wow!" I thought, "it kind of goes against everything that I have been reading about Peak Oil, for much of the last decade", so it must be important. And then, I ask myself, who is this Odell? Quickly checking him on Google Scholar, I found that my academic work is cited more than his, and he's 30 years older than I am. Then, I check him out further, and find some interesting comments in response to an article, in the same vein, that he wrote in The Guardian in 2008. Some of the quite long, coherent, as opposed to the short, incoherent,  responses say things like "Mr. Odell, I request that you get up to speed on what's happening with the world oil situation. Your misinformation is doing everyone a great disservice" and "Unfortunately, Mr. Odell is woefully unaware of the current oil situation" and "Anybody who knows anything about oil is aware that the R/P ratio is a pointless statistic. If Peter Odell is using it, he either ignorant or disingenuous" and, my favourite, "I seriously don't see how you could be a professor emeritus of international energy studies and believe the stuff you have written".

But, it gets better - Prof. Emeritus Odell is on Republican Senator J. Inhofe's notorious and hilariously debunked list of supposed expert climate change skeptics. For the debunking by Prof. A. Dessler, just go to: http://www.grist.org/article/the-inhofe-400-skeptic-of-the-day1/ and keep changing the number at the end of  the url to 3. And, while you're at it, check out the very detailed debunking of Dr. Seitz as a climate denier, which is one of Peter Sinclair's "crock of the week" videos.

A few blogs ago, I outlined what I perceived to be a failure of the Canadian media to carry out proper investigative reporting vis-a-vis Bjorn Lomborg, and, well, it just carries on, unfortunately with a columnist in my favourite Canadian newspaper. This is not the first time that Neil Reynolds has published anti-climate change columns that sort of have an an aura of balanced reporting. In the same way that academics carrying out medical research must reveal all of their sources of research funding when publishing articles, it would be helpful for members of the Canadian Press to reveal their political affiliations. Then it'd be obvious to those readers who are not prepared to dig a little deeper as to exactly where they are coming from.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Michael Enright give an after-dinner speech, and was surprised to hear him decry the appalling state of investigative journalism in Canada. (He named the New York Times as the best newspaper in the world. I started paying a lot more attention to it, and have been forced to come to the conclusion that he probably was right. For TV journalism, I would have to say, that Al-Jazeera English, is also right up there in terms of quality of in-depth reporting, with respect to covering generally ignored issues). I have now come to the sad conclusion that his assessment of the general state of Canadian journalism was also pretty much bang on.

Dawn R. Bazely

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