I have a hard time with environmental and ecological footprint. I always feel that my family could be doing more. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the more is educating those people who actually could be doing a lot more. Hopefully this blog post will reach some of those people and I’ll have done my part.

Now some of these things I don’t practice myself due to my lifestyle but I’ll mention those in context. These are in no particular order just some of the most important items. Feel free to add your own ideas below in the comments.

1. Car pool – This is one that I don’t practice because I’ve never driven to work in the last 10 years. I live within walking distance to work. Car pooling not only saves money on gas, wear and tear on your car, and parking but gets you talking and socializing with your neighbours, creating communities. Some of the arguments I’ve heard against car pooling are that people are on different schedules. Change your schedule. Socialize a bit, get to know your neighbor. People like having their cars during the day. In Calgary we have a car share program that is amazing. It’s called Car2Go. Check it out.

2. Compost – Yes, by now you know I’m a big fan of composting. By composting you not only decrease landfill items that won’t break down in the landfill environment anyway but you end up with the most enriching product that you could ever put on your lawn and garden. I’ve heard people mention that they don’t compost because they have garburators. Let me just remind you of the healthy end product of composting and that garburators use energy and increase the work that the city has to do to clean the water.

3. Say no to A/C and Turn down your thermostats in the winter just 1 or 2 degrees – This is basic, I know people in Calgary that have built in A/C. This is Calgary people. At most you’ll use this feature for a month a year. Enjoy the heat! In the winter, instead of turning up the heat, put on a hoodie or sweater. A/C is one of the biggest energy users in the summer.

4. Buy quality goods, or say no to the purchase in the first place – This is more important than the next, I believe. I’ve bought cheap shoes at Payless Shoes and sadly, months or even weeks later I’ve had to throw them out. Toss them completely. They were beyond repair. Now I’m alright with spending over $100 on a pair of shoes or boots in hopes of keeping them for years. Same with tools or computers, spend a little more money on something good that will last longer. Then look to number 5 when your goods have worn out. A better yet, if you don’t need something, please don’t buy it. Just because its the coolest gadget, do you really need it?

5. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle – You have been told this before but so many people think that as long as they recycle, they are doing the right thing. Sure, it’s better than throwing things out but you have to look at the three “R”s in priority. Work on reducing your consumer spending and all of your frivolous and unnecessary buying. That is much bigger than recycling all your useless goods that you’ve purchased. Reuse is next. Look at some of the things you are about to recycle or throw away, can you reuse them for something? Can you put them up on a site like Freecycle and allow someone else to reuse them? There is a whole industry of up cycling now, the art of taking garbage or other items that you don’t use and turning them into works of art or useful things. Check out Etsy for some reused items done up in this fashion.  And lastly, if things have pretty much run their course, please look at recycling before hitting the trash bin.

6. Buy local goods and food – That table and chairs you just bought that came from our favorite Swedish furniture store have travelled miles continents to get to your house. There are local furniture manufacturers or antique stores that are a much better option. Firstly, you decrease the carbon footprint of these goods reaching Canada and then your home but you also keep money, jobs and goods in your hometown. When it comes to fruit and vegetables, we’ve become accustomed to eating Kiwi fruit and bananas any time of the year. That’s probably not the right thing. Foods have been modified in order to withstand long distance shipping. Buy locally. Preserve fruit and vegetables. Even better, start your own raised bed garden and enjoy the “fruits” of your labor. Here in Canada Superstore actually does a good job at sourcing out at least Canadian made food. Their other items aren’t local but the food they try their hardest. Try farmers markets.

7. Try out “Green” power – Yes, solar panels and wind turbines are out of most of our budgets still, but they are getting close. If you consider that most solar power installations are able to pay themselves off in about 10-15 years now, its getting close. I would think it would have to get down to as little as 5 years in order for mass adoption. But there are companies out there that create green power and are willing to sell you a piece of it. I subscribe to Bullfrog Power here in Calgary but I’ve wrote a whole article on other carbon offsetting programs that you can join in your neighborhood. These ensure that any energy you use is injected back into the grid as green power, from solar farms, wind turbines or even bio mass.

8. Eat Less Meat – Did you know that there are more greenhouse gas emissions from raising cattle than cars? Remember, it’s everything that goes into raising the cow: grain, fertilizer, growth hormones, land space, butchering, transport… I’m not decreeing a vegetarian lifestyle but you don’t need to eat meat at every meal. Try even skipping meat for a day at a time. Then maybe go to eating meat only 1-2 times a week. You won’t die and despite popular belief, you won’t be malnourished.

9. Decrease your flying vacations – This one I struggle with. I like to go to Mexico in the wintery depths of winter but now we try and go for longer and decrease the amount of back and forth.  But again, look to carbon offsets to help if you are like me and can’t say no to your warm winter vacations. It doesn’t stop the fact that the aviation industry has one of the biggest environmental footprints of all. Fly less.

10. Teach your children well – This is my biggest challenge out of all of these items but I sure hope I’m doing a good job on teaching my kids about the environmental issues that will affect them. Lead by example. Say no to unnecessary purchases. Buy locally. Make gifts instead of buying gifts. Stick to one family car if you can and make it the most fuel efficient one you can.

Please add any more things that we could be doing in our everyday lives.

Straight from the Grow Website:

It’s not just ‘Old MacDonald’ on the farm anymore. All across the U.S. there is a growing movement of educated young people who are leaving the cities to take up an agrarian life. Armed with college degrees, some are unable to find jobs in the current economic slump. Fed up with corporate America and its influence on a broken food system, they aim to solve some of the current system’s inequities by growing clean, fair food. Mostly landless, they borrow, rent or manage farmland in order to fulfill their dreams of doing something meaningful with their lives.

GROW! takes a look at this new generation of sustainable farmers through the eyes, hearts and minds of 20 passionate, idealistic and fiercely independent young growers. In the film they speak of both the joys and the challenges involved in tending the land.

Filmed on 12 farms throughout the state of Georgia during an entire growing season, GROW! provides an honest and inspiring look at this next generation of farmers.

Anybody who appreciates the value of good, wholesome food grown close to home, who cares about our food supply and the future of farming will want to see GROW!

Friday, November 23, 2012 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Calgary, Alberta
Unitarian Church of Calgary (1703 1 Street NW)

Register for this free potluck event

Grow Website

There has been quite a few articles on carbon offsets lately. What are they and are they just a money grab? I thought I would look into carbon offsets and some of the companies that are claiming to provide them. A lot of people ask “Why would you want to pay more money for a flight, on top of your already overpriced tickets?” To balance your highly polluting lifestyle.

Carbon offsetting air travel

One 2 hour flight for one passenger produces about 267.14 Kg of CO2. Just to put that in perspective, the average 2 hour car journey injects 780 Grams of CO2 (providing you aren’t driving a Prius or Volt). This is one of the biggest (preventable) producers of greenhouse gases today. (besides the oilsands)

So what does a eco-consious traveller do? Carbon offsets. Talk to your company, maybe they will help you out with offsetting on your next business trip. Here is a calculator to find out how much carbon your trip produces.

Carbon offsetting events and concerts

Events and concerts now are trying to be “carbon zero” but the only way they can really do this is by purchasing carbon offsets. You can’t completely run a U2 concert off of solar power yet. Yet… How much power does a U2 concert use? This produces and estimated 31,500 tonnes of CO2, carbon emissions that end up in our atmosphere.

So what does an event organizer do? Purchase carbon offsets and promote his or her event as such.

David Suzuki has an article on holding carbon neutral conferences and concerts: Link

Carbon offsetting homes

I subscribe to carbon offsets with my house. Even though my house is extremely efficient for a 100 year old house (800KWh a year!) I still like to be green and use a Canadian company called Bullfrog Power. Now obviously I don’t get all my energy from Bullfrog but I have given them access to my energy bill and they inject the amount of energy use that I use back into the power grid but through one of their wind farms. I pay and extra $11 a month for this piece of mind. It doesn’t mean my family becomes frivolous with our power. No, we still try and bring our KWh down as low as we can, but we feel a bit better about the energy that we do use. The average house produces 10,000 kg CO2 emissions. Hmm, what if you bought some carbon offsets, would that make your mind feel better?

Purchase consumer carbon offsets.

There are many companies out there that provide carbon offset services. Its really a hard sell for companies like this because most people are paying money for nothing more than piece of mind. If you took out that carbon offset bill out of any of these, the air trip would still happen, the concert would still rock, the home would still be powered. Is it the right thing to do? I like to think it is. Piece of mind knowing that your actions aren’t affecting the world in a negative way.
Here are a list of some of the companies I have found that provide carbon offsetting. Remember, the company doesn’t even have to be in your country for this to be effective. For a concert in England, you could still be buying offsets in USA and it would still have the same effect.

Companies offering Carbon Offsets

• Bullfrog Power
• Bow Valley Power
• Carbon Zero
• Carbon Neutral
• Planet Air
• Carbon Fund
• Climate Trust 

Disclaimer: I don’t work for any of these companies. I am a Bullfrog Power customer but the other companies listed here I have not tried.

Please feel free to add any others in your area or country that you know about. Here is the wikipedia entry on Carbon Offsets for more information.

You’re probably here because you want to know how to compost but for those of you not sold on the reason to compost lets ask a few questions.

1. Do you care about the environment?
2. Do you want your garden to thrive?
3. Do you want to stay away from pesticides and herbicides?
4. Do you want to decrease the amount of household waste your house creates?

Composting is the answer to all of the above.

But how does a household get started in the wonderful world of composting? Here is a how-to guide to start basic composting, decreasing your waste and increasing your garden’s potential

Compost Bin Type

In my never ending quest to be more gentle to the earth I’m looking for new things to do. And if I am going to change careers into permaculture and garden design I am going to find ways to make money. Enter vegetable seed saving. My wife has even joined in this year. Now this is really the first year that we’ve started saving seeds. And I’ll follow up in the spring and let you know how they all worked out. I wanted to do a test run before we ever start selling seeds. They have to work.

Obviously the logic behind this is saving money and resources. I probably spend somewhere around $50 on seeds in the spring. I don’t think we’ll ever get away from not buying any though. In our neighborhood we have something called Seedy Saturday in the spring where locals sell their seeds and other early spring wares. It’s wonderful and so crazy all in the same. And if you think about getting $3 for 20 seeds that really cost you nothing to collect, it’s a great deal. People are getting local produce seeds at a reasonable price and I am making a bit of a living. So not only do we save money, but we can make money at this if seed saving is done right too.

Seeds we have saved so far:

• Acorn Squash
• Patty Pan Squash
• Red Peppers
• Hot peppers
• Cantaloupe

Sure, it’s not that much but we’ll have enough seeds from our winter eating (we get most of our produce from the Sustainable Produce Urban Delivery (SPUD) service so we can be sure that we are saving quality, organic seeds.

One thing I’m not too sure on is the open-pollenated vs heirloom vs hybrid seed varieties. I have been doing some research on it and found the following:

Open-pollenated has two flavours. Self pollenated and cross pollenated. Self pollenated means that they can pollenate themselves, they don’t need any other plants. They have a male and female parts on their flowers. Cross pollenated means you need another plant to pollenate. This can be an issue with two of the same species close by, say squash. Because they can cross breed using the pollen from like plants. Keep these kinds of plants isolated from other species.

Hybrid seeds and plants are a little more complicated. It’s where you cross mate cross pollenated species. You can end up with a more drought tolerant plant or some other unique feature but these types are hard to keep in a gene pool. Meaning the next batch may not come out the same. These types of seeds aren’t worth saving.

Heirloom’s are plants that have been “true to type” for decades. Nothing has changed. So you can have an open-pollenated heirloom. But as long as it stays true to type, you can call it a heirloom.

I think I’ve got these all straight.

Tips on seed saving:

1. Only save seeds from high quality vegetables
2. Make sure your seeds are washed and have completely dried before packing
3. Don’t put them in plastic. If there is any moisture left, they will mold and become useless.
4. store them in paper envelopes.
5. Store them in an air tight container in the cool and dark. You can even freeze them.

Any other tips?

This article on seed saving goes into much more detail

I have a coworker that has recently totalled his car, sadly by bumping into a curb and releasing the airbags. The car was in fantastic shape with low mileage and kept indoors most of the time, but the deployment of the airbags is a $8000 cost. Anyway, he’s been trying to make a decision on whether or not to get a new car. They live inner city and hardly use their car except to go up to Edmonton or to the mountains. We gave him the idea on not getting a car and just renting whenever they wanted to go on their weekend trips. Yes, imagine living without a car.

The question: Could you live without owning at least one vehicle?

Here’s some of the math involved:

New Car Option:

• New car: $25,000


• Insurance: $1300 /year


• Two tanks Gas month: $960 /year


• Maintenance: $750 /year 

Assumptions: A car will be viable for about 7 years, so lets divide the cost of the car by 7.
$3571

Grand total: $6581 per year
Over 7 years: $46067

Carless lifestyle option:

• Renting a standard size car one weekend a month with full insurance: $71 /weekend x 12 = $852  
• 1 tank of gas on each rental: $480 


• Transit pass book of 10 tickets x2 x 12 months: $660 

Grand total: $1992
Over 7 years: $13944

The difference over 7 years you’d save $32,123 in favor of no car!

Did I forget anything? Anything else that you’d add in either case? You could even throw in two nice bikes for $2000 and still be way ahead. Even 4 cab rides a month to the airport ($1920). Seems like a no-brainer. Join Car2go as well.

Not bad, you sure could knock down your mortgage over 7 years and really decrease that overhead too. So again, could you do it, could you live without a car?

I went to an Eco-Living Fair this weekend and was quite excited about it. I knew there would be the worm composters, solar experts, bike enthusiasts, plumbing specialists selling their low flow everything and on demand hot water. But this year they had some cool workshops that my family signed up for. The first was how to build bat houses. Did you know that a little brown bat can eat up to 1000 mosquitos in one hour?  And that these little guys can live up to 40 years? Well, as you’ve probably guessed, they are in decline and the best thing you can do for them is provide them a home. We learned how to make a simple bat house. We made two in the class and were given a third by a condo dweller, who wasn’t allowed to put it up.

Next up was how to keep Mason Bees. I didn’t even know what a mason bee was but when I found out that these little guys can pollenate 100 times faster than a honey bee, I was sold. Oh, and they are native to Calgary. And all it takes is a little block of wood with a series of 5/16″ holes drilled to create a wonderful home for Mason Bees.

Sorry, bit of a digression there but you needed to know these things.

Here’s where the sad part came, there were hardly any people at the eco fair which got me to thinking, why don’t people care? Have humans really become that apathetic? It appears so, which raises the question, why?

This is one newbie permaculturist’s point of view but I think ethics play a big part. We don’t have any, and more importantly, big companies don’t have any. Think about oil and gas companies in Alberta, they have more than enough capital to get some green energy start ups going but they are scared of loosing out their share of the money if something becomes successful. Completely wrong attitude. They have an opportunity to make a ton of money by doing THE RIGHT THING! We shouldn’t be polluting the earth with the nasty oil sands. We should be building solar farms and wind farms. Getting Alberta off the dirty coal power which we use so much of. It made me sad again to learn that Alberta is the leading province when it comes to greenhouse gases. Pathetic.

I live in Calgary and was thinking what if the city council decided that any new house in Calgary had to be Net Zero, meaning not use any outside resource for heating, water, or electricity before being approved? Well, any good person knows that this is entirely possible and many people do it everyday. But this council would be ousted from their aldermanic seats quicker than a jet pilot ejection seat! Our fossil fuel powered society wouldn’t stand for it. But think about the new jobs that would be created in this new era. AND, we would never have to worry about water shortage if we harvested our own rainwater. A little change in the way things “Should” be done, rather than how they have been done.

So is it lack of ethics or too much greed that got us in this boat?

We know what “should” be done. But no one is willing to stick their necks out in front of the conservatives that run this great province and country.I have a dream that one day, people will start doing the right thing. Not just tossing everything out, turning out a few extra lights, composting, using rain barrels, using grey water in toilets, not building NEAR as big, etc…

I was asked to teach some volunteers how to build some raised garden beds for the SHARP Foundation, a non-profit that provides support and housing for people with Aids and HIV. I jumped at the opportunity and pointed the team of about 20 people in a direction of completion. The raised garden beds were very easy to make. We made use of nice cedar as well to prevent rotting without having to use paint or finish. The volunteers came from the University of Calgary and sure made the work easy.

Raised Garden Bed Materials:

• 9 2x6x8′ cedar planks
• 1 4x4x8′ cedar post
• small bag of 3″ galvanized nails

Levelling the Garden Bed

Hard at work building the frame of one of the five raised garden frames.

My wife and I are quite avid wine drinkers. Actually, we like pretty much anything alcoholic. We have been drinking pretty much exclusively red wines for the last number of years with the odd white wine thrown in.

Janna discovered Evolution White Wine a while back and we just can’t seem to get enough of this wonderful white wine blend. Yup, a white blend and it’s from the Sokol Blosser vineyards in Oregon. The blend consists of Pinot gris, Riesling, Muscat, Gewurtztraminer, Muller-Thurgau, Semillion, Pinot Blanc, Sylvaner and Chardonnay. Quite a crap shoot for everything that’s white. It’s a beautifully crisp wine that really works well.

On the label it says “Luck vs Intention”. They aren’t really sure if they lucked out on the blend here but regardless, this is a great summer wine that you should experience. Your lucky day is today! And yes, some nice wines coming from Oregon right now. Keep your mind open.

They’ve just started an Evolution Red as well. I found it last night at the liquor store so I thought we’d pick it up. I’ll let you know how it is.

As you know, I’m a huge Apple fan but there are some things that just don’t cut it with the company. We all know that Apple revolutionized the music industry, both in the way that music was purchased as well as the way it was consumed. Now, I have a huge music collection so I thought I would attempt their new iTunes Music Match, basically your whole music library in the cloud. Sounds good on paper but its proving to be not near as great in practice.

Here’s my former process with three devices:

1. Rip music from CD on my iMac at home, my primary library with 500GB of music on a drive
2. If I want it on my iPhone to listen, I will copy it over to my MacBook Air and use iTunes to copy over all of the files at once to my iPhone.
3. I can then easily manage my music with iTunes – On my iPhone, my sons iPods and my iPad

Total time consumed for 10 albums – 10 minutes post rip

What I try and do now:
1. Rip music from CD on my iMac at home
2. If I think it’s fit for iTunes Match then I will copy it over to my MacBook Air and it gets uploaded to the Match servers
3. I can’t directly copy the music from iTunes anymore because my account is associated with Music Match
4. So I have to click on “Music > iTunes Match > Show all song from iCloud”
5. Go back into the Music App and wait for my library to load
6. Go through each and every album SLOWLY due to lags on the phone and click on “Download All”
7. Once done I have to go back in and turn off the “Show All Songs from iCloud” otherwise it takes forever to find music I have locally.

Totally time consumed for 10 full albums – 45 minutes post rip

It’s the lag on the Music App that is the most painful. It’s the drag and wait until it catches up. The only way to make it any faster is to turn it off.

It really is painful how long it takes to get albums locally with the new Music Match. Unless it improves dramatically, I won’t renew it.