An open letter to Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver

So yesterday the Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver published an open letter to the Canadian public about the environmental "radicals" whose "goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth." Referring to Enbridge's new Northern Gateway Pipeline, he decries the attempts to stop the export of tar sands oil to Asia, which is the Harper Government™'s new plan after the Keystone XL Pipeline to the US was effectively scrapped by President Obama.

Much though this insidious attack offended me personally — I'm sure Oliver would lump we in with the crazies — it didn't surprise me. Oliver's attitude is in fact typical of business and government, whose interests are always in short-term profit over the long-term welfare of the public. What they fail to understand — or perhaps, more rightly, acknowledge — is that the destruction of the environment will actually lead to more lost jobs and disastrous economic decline, and that the environmental agenda is not in fact about the environment but about humanity. Environmentalists want to save the world because they — we — want to save the human species. This planet, as I said in the previous post, is the only like it within the nearest 200 million light years; we don't get another one. It is finite.

David Suzuki had a clever response, I thought, calling the environmental paradigm "a pretty conservative approach" that seeks to "'live within our means,' 'save some for tomorrow,' [and] think about the 'legacy we leave for our children.'" He pointed out that the government's policies actually deplete and destroy the very resources it seeks to profit from, ensuring, in the long-term, economic depression (not big 'D,' though that could easily follow).

Here's another writer saying the same thing as me: 350.org

food waste, caloric density, cooking...

Time for an update. It has now been over a year since I stopped eating red meat. It still sucks, but I still feel committed to the decision. My daughter will often say to me, "so Daddy, just stop being a vegetarian! If you want to eat meat, then eat it!" This is in fact helpful, because I have to restate my case to her: I don't eat meat because I love her and I want her and her children to have a beautiful planet to live on. We don't get another one. In fact, author Bill Bryson says (in his excellent book A Short History of Nearly Everything), the average distance between stars is about 200 million light years, meaning that's the closest we are to another Earth-like planet at the right proximity to its sun to support life. "Two hundred light years is so far beyond us as to be, well, beyond us." (p28) ...All to say, it's worth trying to preserve this tiny finite planet for future humans; our great migration to Earth Mark 2 is a few years off.

1) There was a program on the CBC a couple weeks ago — I think in conjunction with their annual Sounds off the Season food drive — about how much food gets wasted in North America. It's obscene. Now, I'm a pretty frugal guy as it is, and growing up my mom always tried to waste as little food as possible, so I have always tended to eat things others might not, and save things others might throw out, but after hearing the article I have been being even more intentional. This is problematic on the rare occasions there's beef being eaten in our house, but otherwise one of the main things I've been trying to do is eat smaller portions. I find that if I dole out a smaller plate of food for myself, I not only eat less but also waste less. Not only that, it also means I can finish whatever my daughter doesn't, also leading to less waste.

2) I've also been thinking about, for lack of less jargony term, "caloric density." For a variety of reasons, including the ailing economy, personal finances, climate change, Third World hunger, and recent CBC articles about the prolongation of human life (one report said the potential was almost infinite life! How on earth do they expect humanity to have enough food if everyone lives into their hundreds and hundreds?), I've begun thinking about food sources, and just how calorie-rich nuts and seeds are. One cup of sunflower seeds, for instance, has like 1200 calories! So 2 cups would be enough to sustain someone my size for a day. Environmentally, this would mean such a tiny little footprint, both in terms of production and in terms of waste. Not that we could ever move as a species towards such a diet, but is it worth thinking about how to apply this in some (more balanced) manner? Maybe cutting my meals in half and eating more nuts & seeds?

3) A couple nights ago I tried to make potato chips by baking rather than deep-frying them. They were in the oven at like 425ºF for over 45 minutes and only got about halfway done. I started wondering how much energy it must take to make many of the foods we eat regularly, which once again brought up the idea that easily the most "environmentally-friendly" way to eat is raw food, not cooked. I have not yet converted, no. Not sure I could bring myself to do it. Being a vegetarian or even a vegan seems like a cakewalk by comparison.

fire (now with references)

So I suck at being good to the planet. I'm trying to make the right decisions, but even when I oh-so-virtuously manage to deny myself all kinds of things I feel are harmful, I still manage to mess it up.

I have just come back from camping with my family. It was mostly restful, except for the somewhat leaky tent one night and the steadily deflated blow-up mattress the next, but on the third day (of five), while I was sitting beside the fire pit nursing damp wood to life, I had a glimmer of memory about campfires being terrible for the environment. As I recall now, the information was given in reference to the Third World and their meagre choices for heat - wood, dung, garbage in some cases - but it made me realize that I was polluting the air too! Now you may be saying, Oh come on Bowen, surely a few campfires cannot do that much damage to the atmosphere! ...and in one sense you're right, but the Tragedy of the Commons (is that Thoreau or Malthus or someone else? - edit: it's someone named Garrett Hardin, and it was coined in 1968 in the linked article) dictates that if you and I think that way, basically so does everyone else, and suddenly we're all having just a few campfires by the thousands and the tens of thousands... you can see where this leads. So... what to do?

There are a few different factors to consider:

1. apparently trees only remove CO₂ from the atmosphere for a certain length of time. By some estimates, after about 100 years of life, trees begin to decay and return their CO₂ to the air. So... by burning wood over a century old, does this create more CO₂, or an equal amount? Edit: "Carbon sequestration," as it's called, does only last in trees for between 80 - 100 years, after which time it is offset by decay in the tree, which releases CO₂. see here...

2. we could consider using those indoor creosote-removing recycled-coffee-bean ready-made logs outside while camping. But are they meant for outdoors? Are they safe for cooking with? And, most pertinently, do they produce noxious and environmentally-damaging gases? Edit: depends who you talk to. This company says their logs are "greener," while this report (p2 under "Toxic Pollutants") says some of them release PCBs and other toxic gases.

3. if no campfire, then all cooking must be done otherwise: is propane a better alternative?

...This also leads me to the dreadful conclusion that perhaps cooked food is worse for the environment than raw food. I am already a super-reluctant vegetarian; do I have to consider not eating anything cooked now too? Good God.

My second major revelation was to do with some of the snacky-type "vacation foods" we brought along, ostensibly for our daughter, but y'know. Oreos, for instance. Turns out Oreos are made with (cow-fat derived) shortening rather than butter (splitting hairs though? more on this...). Ack! And both a vegan friend of mine and our (very not-vegan) neighbour recently mentioned, separately in the same week, that they don't eat Jell-O because of its gelatine, which of course is from cow hooves.

And suddenly I felt foolish and simple-minded in my conviction not to eat "beef." It seems fairly clear that all the "fruit of the bovine" may be just as bad as beef itself (quick! creative writers! new Creation myth where the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is actually a cow! go! oh and also, now the serpent is actually Adam's little girl saying, "but daddy you love beef! you should stop being a vegetarian. I want you to be happy!" Please also read Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage for reference). Given that I don't eat beef anymore because of methane (a greenhouse gas which I have cited numerous times as being 90x more toxic to the atmosphere - technically the troposphere, Jack and Annie and their Magic Treehouse recently pointed out to me), isn't buying dairy products just supporting the same industry and therefore the production of the same toxic gases? Shit!

so... do goats burp or fart?

cow farts

Sometime in the spring we had a moment of weakness and went to a pizza chain (a sit-down one. with a bar) for dinner. When the waitress took our order, I asked whether a particular sauce was meat-based and my daughter (almost 5 now) exclaimed, "Daddy doesn't eat beef because of cow farts!"

She's not wrong. It's why. It's also why I tend not to eat even the "happiest" lamb or mutton (actually that's because of sheep burps). Last time I had red meat, then, was Easter dinner. We bought a leg of lamb, organic and locally sourced, from our local butcher. It was melty. And I tried not to feel guilty.

So generally I avoid beef no matter what. In their book The Way We Eat, Peter Singer and Jim Mason do an excellent job of pitting the various ethical factors in our dietary decisions against one another. In terms of beef, they convincingly argue that pasture-fed organic "free range" cows are actually more damaging to the environment than factory-farmed ones fed corn and other grain because eating grass makes the happy cows fart more. This produces more methane, which is a greenhouse gas 90x more potent than CO2, and accounts for the fact that by some estimates, our North American meat industry alone is responsible for around 40% of our total greenhouse gas emissions. Ugh. Which means that even if I get happy beef that has been shot in the back of the head while watching the perfect sun set with its adoring bovine family, it's still going to be responsible for record-breaking temperatures, droughts, water shortages, etc. for something like the next 800 generations of my offspring (apparently greenhouse gases stick around for about 20,000 years).

But ho, what news? Apparently, we're working on the scientific equivalent of bovine bean-o. See here in the March 2011 edition of Business Green!

So maybe, just maybe, one day I'll be able to eat a non-lentil, non-tofu, non-mushroom burger again. A boy can dream.

http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2038244/diets-stop-cows-methane-emissions

tiny little OCD decisions

I may have written about this before, I can't remember.

We don't buy bottled water in our house - we (perhaps naively, but I'll save that for a future conspiracies blog) just trust what comes out of the tap. But we like it cold. Today, when I was filling up the jug to put in the fridge, I wondered, does it take more energy to let the water cool before I fill the jug, or just take the first water that comes out and let it cool in the fridge? It occurs to me now, it uses less water to do the latter, which then seems like an obvious choice. But having read The Way We Eat, I find myself weighing various environmental consequences against others: which is worse, wasting a couple litres of water or using extra electricity by putting lukewarm water in the fridge?

I have no idea what the answer is, but I'm plagued by such decisions. Here are choice others:

• driving at what speed does it become equally bad, because of drag, to have the windows down as to run the AC?
• is it worse to water your own vegetables (thereby using water) or to buy non-local non-organic veggies from somewhere with high rainfall (thereby using petrochemicals)?
• does it take more gas to turn the car off frequently and then turn it on (like at a long light) or just to keep it running?
• is it worse to drive to the bookstore (using x amount of gas) and buy a new book or to order it secondhand online (using y amount of gas - likely more than x)?
• do the eggs I buy from a local farmer actually use more resources - in terms of food, water, gas, etc. - than the ones I buy from the grocery store (because the latter are mass produced and more carefully controlled)?

...as a musician and academic, I'm also always thinking cost because money's always a little tight, so then factor that in too. Sometimes, I have to admit, cost wins over environment. It can be expensive trying to do right by the Earth, and much as I want to think long-term, there are times when I can't afford to. Those are times when I feel incredibly guilty, times for which I imagine myself apologizing to my daughter and her children in 25 or 40 years.

bye baby bunting

Daddy's going hunting.

Well, at least, that's the plan at some point in the future. My brother-in-law (also Ben) and I were talking last night about meat (and my vegetarianity) and we totally see eye-to-eye, but he still eats meat and I don't. And I explained, rather obviously to him probably, that I didn't mind so much about the animal lives lost to produce meat, but that I did mind a) about their treatment and health and b) about the environment.

I have eaten chicken a couple times since the fall, and turkey twice, and it was because they were local, "organic" (greenwashed and impotent though that word has become, I do still believe that choosing it is a loud way to vote with my money), and free range. In at least of two of those cases, we in fact know the producer personally.

I still miss meat. Beef most of all. But that's the one thing I can't find a way to justify; even when beef is well-treated and grass-fed and all of that other good stuff, it still produces methane, and lots of it.

Now I know that this is not a particularly balanced approach - my wife called it "boycotting" meat, which I think is an apt label. I'm not eating meat, basically, because too many other people are. I could be more balanced about it, and frankly anyone who knows me knows that I will likely be a meat eater again one day (by virtue of my fickleness), but I think I do better, in some ways, as a fervent fundamentalist than a laid-back liberal. It's easier.

I started re-listening to the CBC's excellent series Have Your Meat and Eat It Too enjoying the re-affirmations of the conclusions I've drawn, and feeling good again about being a vegetarian. In the third episode, though, are some of the most compelling interviews, with people like Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan

...and the gist of what they say is twofold:

1. in nature, ecosystems are dependent on animals: without animals, farms need chemical fertilizers to enrich the soil
2. governments support the current meat production system by subsidizing corn and soy, which are fed to animals.

In other words, it may be possible to eat meat - and maybe actually help small ecosystems thrive - if we look to smaller producers who have created closed systems within which animals play a crucial role.

Back to hunting, then: my thinking is that those are animals which have led as natural a life as they can have had (making "free range" and "organic" look pretty ridiculous), and that becoming part of the food chain again - in a direct way - I am probably doing much less damage, both to ecosystems and to the global environment, than buying produced meat, regardless of the source. In fact, if it was part of a cull, I might even be contributing to an ecosystem by keeping it in balance.

[addendum: apparently they've discovered that curry spices reduce methane in ruminants! so curried beef is better for the environment...?

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/curry-spices-for-cows-and-sheep-could-cut-methane-emissions-2029761.html]

CBC is a Superhero

So, yesterday evening I had a quick conversation about this blog and these ideas with a good family friend, and she mentioned not really always being able to follow what I'm on about. Which I think is fair: I'll be the first to admit I occasionally do lose sight of the forest through the trees; I sometimes have a hard time communicating what I want, and sort of leave out the important details.

But, once again, thank goodness, CBC has rescued me from myself. I was driving over to the LCBO this evening and had on the radio, and it being after 9 Paul Kennedy's Ideas was on and guess what?

They are currently running a 3-part series called Have Your Meat and Eat It Too, all about factory farming and the food system!

So for those of you who have been tempted to read the book I've been plugging but cannot quite bring yourselves to buy a copy/ sign one out of the library / root around at Value Village / ask to borrow mine, you can get the meat and potatoes (!) of what I've been saying in only 3 short hours of listening! Carpet sweep your house, put your laundry on the line, make some non-bolognaise spaghetti sauce, and tune in to this program. It's kind of like a greatest hits of The Way We Eat. It's excellent.