Earth Hour

And it’s unifying! Last year I spent Earth Hour at the Trevi Fountain in Rome. While it was a rather dismal turning off of the lights there, there was a huge gathering and a buzz in the air. The WWF tents were swamped, and all the tourists milling about were there for a different reason – unity! Standing together for something positive. Even though I barely spoke Italian, I could understand the excitement of joining together with other people for something besides self-indulgence. How can you not embrace the collective energy of hundreds of millions of people performing a positive act together? A couple years before that I was in a restaurant in Toronto, and had completely forgotten. The owner came around and asked everyone’s permissions to turn off the lights, and before you knew it, a standard dinner date had turned into an amazing and memorable candlelit evening!

There are NO boundaries in Earth Hour – no country lines, no religious boundaries, no political divisions. We all stand together for a sweeping hour in the name of OUR planet. The one we all share. The one we all have a duty to protect from our own damaging practices.

So try it out. Join thousands of cities, and hundreds of millions of people and today (March 26th) at 8:30 PM , turn off your lights for an hour (or more!) Have a romantic candlelit dinner. Walk out to a park and look at the brilliant array of stars. Play Scrabble on the living room floor with your children and candles. Just lay down and feel the lack of constant electrical buzzing. Go to a famous landmark! Sign up at (www.earthhour.org) and commit to stand together with so many people. Spread the word to your family and friends!

And then beyond that. Try making sure all the lights are off when you leave the house. Turn the lights off when you leave a room. Turn your computers off at night. Have everything plugged into a power surge bar, and just turn that off when you leave. So much electricity is wasted daily by appliances left plugged in (up to 10%), and that takes both time, money, and resources to power. You’ll save money and reduce your environmental footprint. Let’s start to think for ourselves: for our big, beautiful planet that we all share.

It’s not too late. And every act counts. And together – we can make a difference.

www.earthhour.org

I don’t think a strictly vegetarian diet is something most people in North America can transition to easily, nor am I against animal consumption in minimal, necessary amounts. I do know that far too many people consume more meat than is beneficial for their or our planets health, they are consuming animals raised and killed in absolutely disgusting and unsanitary conditions, and that our over-consumption of meat is causing the starvation of billions of people (1 lb of meat raised = 15 lbs of grains raised).

What I would like to see, is a gradual conversion to a low-meat diet for everyone, and vegetarian if you can make it there. Cutting out red meats, consuming sustainably harvested fishes and free-range, grain fed chickens free of hormones. At this point in our global environmental destruction, this is no longer a choice – it is mandatory if we don’t want our biosphere to collapse and kill ourselves right off the planet. And with more options than ever showing up in our grocery stores, it’s becoming easy for everyone to access a fully nutritious meat-less diet no matter where you live.

So – consider becoming a vegetarian. For one meal a day. Or one day a week. Or one week a month. Or one month a year. Or a year. Or a lifetime. It’s healthy, sustainable, and forces you to focus more carefully on what you ingest. For every meal that you don’t eat meat, it is the equivalent of a starving African child having enough food to eat for 4 days. What if that was your child?

Next post, I will get into the awesomeness of fruits and vegetables, and the downfalls of corporate control, GMO’s, and pesticides on those lovely bearers of deliciousness. Enjoy my handiwork

<Click on the image to see the enlarged version>

I have long been of the opinion that the modern system of burials in the West are both unsustainable and environmentally degrading.

The traditional process of burial requires the body to be heavily saturated in chemicals, and buried in expensively and chemically veneered coffins. Both of these objects will eventually begin to leech their toxic wastes into the ground soil, where it will and does poison the soil, ground water, and living organisms around the land. Additionally, with an exploding population, the space that would be required to bury every body in one of these caskets with even a moderately sized plot is astronomical. More land will be taken up by cemeteries than by farmland in the next two hundred years if we continue on with traditional burials, and the dangerous effects of the toxins will be amplified greatly. Whatever happened to a simple “from whence we came, we shall return” philosophy?

Upon death, the body naturally begins its return to the earth by decomposition, an active process of anaerobic bacteria. In the West, open caskets often requires embalmed fluids to be pumped into the body through arterial injection, to slow the decomposition and allow mourners to see the body in a state more akin to the living. I personally find the practice absurd for its intentions of preserving that which no longer is, but it is common in the West and historically – as seen in the famous Egyptian mummies, and the Han dynasty in China.

The actual process of preparing a corpse for viewing involves applying disinfectants and germicides to the body.  The body is then embalmed with a variety of chemicals. Embalming arose as a more common practice in the West during the American Civil War – with the increased incidents of loved ones dying far from home, methods of embalming advanced as bodies were required to be sent long distances for burial. Formaldehyde, the popularly known embalming chemical, was discovered in 1867 by the German chemist August Wilhelm Von Hofmann, and has been widely employed since.

Embalming fluid is first injected in the veins, then internal fluids are removed and replaced with embalming fluids, and finally fluids are injected both above and below the skin. The chemicals involve a large variety of preservatives, sanitizers, disinfectants, and additives – primarily formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, ethanol and humectants.  All of these chemicals are designed to retard decomposition, which is in complete opposition to the natural breakdown process.

After the body is clothed, heavy amounts of creams, makeup and powders are applied in order to make the deceased appear living. Occasionally hypodermic bleaching agents, such as phenol based cauterants are injected prior to the makeup. All of these chemicals accumulate and eventually seep into the ground.

Now, moving on to the coffin.  Most caskets sold contain stamped steel, chipboard (that requires environmentally unfriendly glue to hold the pieces together), and toxic veneers. Additionally, some of the more high-end coffins employ exotic or endangered woods that naturally retard decomposition, but the harvesting of these woods is a practice that leads to degradation of forests and exploitations of other countries natural resources.  These chemicals eventually leak into the ground, while the original steel structure of the coffin takes unnecessarily long times to break down.

Finally, the cemeteries themselves require vast amounts of space for what will be an infinitely increasing amount of bodies, and are full of tombstones and concrete vaults. It is illogical to presume that there will be enough space on the planet for all bodies of for seeable human continuation to be buried. Considering that the average burial plot size is 1.2 X 3 metres (not even taking into consideration the exponentially rising amount of obese adults that require up to almost twice the width of an average burial plot), for every person on the planet alive right now to have a plot of land, that would require alone 25 000 square kilometers of land composed entirely of uninterrupted burial plots. This doesn’t include exponential increasing amounts of people being born every year, or the cemeteries that already contain billions of bodies across the land. Do we really want to have this much land dedicated to just corpses?

Cremation is a historically common alternative, especially in places like India, where there is simply no space for graveyards. Cremation, while saving on space and chemicals, has been called into question for not being the ‘ultimate’ environmentally friendly response. It can require high amounts of fuel to burn the human body, and although environmental initiatives to offset this have been put into the place, the human body can release many chemicals while being burned (including mercury from fillings), causing some air pollution. It is still more environmentally friendly and more space-saving than traditional burials, and can be especially useful for transporting loved ones to distant places they may have wished to have been laid to rest, rather than transporting the entire corpse.

If we really need a place to commemorate the lives of our loved ones publicly and locally, there is a new alternative that is actually just a return to a natural and biologically consistent system of biological breakdown, known as ‘Green’ or ‘Natural’ burials.  It’s simply placing the chemically untreated body in a biodegradable, local wood coffin or organic cotton shroud, and placing the body in the ground in designated eco-burial sites. Instead of tombstones, native trees are often planted instead, preserving the ecology of the area while ensuring the body of the loved one returns to the earth as nature intended in a safe and sustainable environment. It’s actually very cheaper, and more hands on – the family can participate to any degree they want in the actual burial process. This method encourages land preservation, restores wildlife and promotes a healthy habitat, while saving quite a lot of money. Plots can costs upwards of $4,000 dollars, not including the embalming costs or coffins (additionally around $2000-$300), whereas green burials can be as low as $700 for a plot.

I am fully supportive of this initiative, as I find the funerary industry to be one which capitalizes monetarily on people’s grief and necessity for short term-solutions, as well as being environmentally damaging. So why don’t you consider cremation or a green burial, and discuss these options with your loved ones, both in the case of your death or theirs. It is environmentally, pocket-wise, and religiously friendly to all.

I personally hope my inevitable departure to be minimal in terms of both financial and environmental impact, and hope those loved ones of mine reading this now know where I’d like these old bones to break down!

*****

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

- Walt Whitman  “Song of Myself”

More information can be found here:

http://www.ecoburials.ca/

http://planetforward.ca/blog/tag/eco-friendly-burial/

http://www.ppo-canada.ca/death/burial.htm

A list of regulations for green burials in Canada can be found here:

http://www.forestofmemories.org/policy/canada/provinces.htm

The  first time I ever actually considered changing my dietary habits to organic/vegetarian was when I lived in Los Angeles.  America, by any standard, has the world’s unhealthiest food as their standard cuisine – generally rampant with bad fats and grease, over laden with salt, processed and refined flours and sugars, and additives to numerous to count.  Fortunately, produce is easily accessible in the Mediterranean clime of California, so one doesn’t have to go without fresh food if they don’t want to.  But, as is the case with most people in the Western Hemisphere who are crowding into cities daily, pulled by the lure of convenience, comfort and flashing lights, we are generally ignorant as to the massive system that brings food to our plates, and entirely content to just go to the supermarket, collect our “food” and go home.

On a beautiful day in late summer several years ago, I was driving the I-5 from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The Pacific Coast Highway was of course the far more beautiful option, but required more time than was available. The I-5 is a more direct route north, but also cuts through the heart of America’s agricultural Garden of Eden. More than 50% of America’s produce and dairy is from California. Lovely groves of lemon trees, softly waving fields of olive trees and strawberries passed across our field of vision as we wound up hills and around lakes, and back down through flat valleys. As the miles sped by into dust under our wheels and the Eagles roared from the stereo, we started to notice an acrid smell. Nothing was visibly wrong with the car, but it ominously remained and grew stronger.

Having reached a plateau, we started to notice that the once dusty-olive coloured horizon was darkening. As we grew closer we realized with increasing horror that the encroaching darkness was cows awaiting their turn in the slaughterhouse. For miles and miles on both sides of the highway were black with cows. Visibly depressed, heads drooping, not even bothering to flick their tails to shake off the thousands of flies that swarmed them greedily. Some stood crammed side by side, some laid down, all languished without shade, or any sight of troughs of water or food.  In the distance, a squealing factory that we presumed to be the slaughterhouse emitted a stench that required us to cover our noses – even inside the car with the windows up.  A dark energy settled over the place, almost as tangible as the smell and sight. Then and there I gave up on factory beef. My disillusioned visions of cows prancing around green meadows of flowers and tended to by charming farmers with rough hands and warm personalities had been shattered.

As it turned out, what I saw on the drive back to LA on the same trip, I gave up on factory chicken too. Driving the same I-5 late at night several days later, a screeching sound started behind me. A truck going way faster than it should have been at 1 AM sped past me. My initial glare gave way to confusion as I saw open-air wire cages on the bed, stacked 10 deep. The thought that crossed my mind was akin to “What the f*K%?!”. On the back of a single truck were easily a thousand chickens, each crammed in cages no taller than a few inches, stacked with no space in-between, and chained down, squawking for all they were worth (pun intended). I’m not sure if any of you have been on the back of a truck, but it’s definitely not spacious enough for a hundred chickens, never mind close to a thousand. I found out later that they also clip all the beaks and claws so that they don’t scratch and potentially infect each other, thereby leading to a loss of product for the company.

Both of these experiences are only momentary glimpses into what is the final end of all of these animal’s lives before they end up on our table. There is more disgusting reality to your meat.

The average life of a factory cow begins in a pool of shit. Not a natural, small pile of shit, where the mother would then clean the calf and guard him as he wandered around the field, but literally, a massive pool of shit and urine. Often several feet deep, these are from the uncleaned grounds that his mother is crammed into sideways, with hundreds of other cows. If they’re unlucky enough to be destined to be your soft, tender veal, the calf heads off to a cage no bigger than him.

Exactly no bigger than him – for in order for veal to be tender, the calf is prevented from almost all movement from birth to death, so that his soft baby muscles don’t develop and become hard. They used to keep  the calves destined to become veal encased behind steel bars, but they began licking them for iron as their food was purposefully lacking in this, and so most corporations switched to wooden prisons (iron encourages muscle and bone development – veal must be soft for humans!)

The other cows grow up with no room to move either, crammed in stables or fields of feces, pumped full of hormones to encourage rapid growth, antibiotics to prevent the rampant diseases, fed cheap, chemically treated grain mixed with the ground leftover organs of other animals, and die miserable deaths in factory slaughterhouses.

As for chicken, almost all chicken farmers in USA have now been bought out by Tyson, and are forced to grow their animals pumped full of hormones and chemicals to encourage rapid growth of their breasts (that meat we love most). Many of these chickens literally cannot walk more than a step before collapsing to the ground because of the weight of these breasts, and often die diseased and trampled by the thousands of other chickens that live in their tiny hundred foot, non-ventilated enclosures. Additionally, studies done across the world have proven that little girls who live in countries with heavy chicken diets are now going through puberty as early as 8 on average, due to their body absorbing all the hormones in the chicken. Think a step further – when we go to the bathroom all these hormones that haven’t been absorbed by our bodies are flushed into the environment, poisoning our waters and soils even further. Why are we so content to remain ignorant?

Just the other day, my family sent out a video from an undercover investigator working at a foie gras factory (found here: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/738619/the_foie_gras_assembly_line). In order to get that luscious French delicacy, male and female ducks are separated at birth. The female chicks are tossed by the hundreds into garbage bags that are sealed shut to deprive them of air, and then tossed into the garbage. The males have their feet literally snipped off to prevent growth of toenails, and are then shoved into cages where they can’t move. Foot long tubes are forced down their throat, and they are force-fed daily, in attempts to instigate liver disease (for this is the hallmark of tasty foie gras). They often have collapsed lungs, weak muscles and gasp for air with every breath. They are then slaughtered while still alive and painfully aware of the blood draining out of their body.

I’ve said quite a bit here, but the sheer amount of examples of disgusting meat productions is enough to testify to the fact that these super-corporations are content to sell us these unhealthy animals that have been tortured and abused their entire lives. Would you still eat that hamburger if you had to watch the accelerated-growth, weakly-diseased cow dragged from a stinking pile of shit into the slaughterhouse, where its first shocked with an electrical jolt to the brain, then watch its throat slit while still conscious, left alive hanging for its blood to drain, then ground to thousands of bits by illegal, underpaid workers that don’t have to report when the dull knives slice their arms open and their blood mixes freely with the cows meat?

For me personally, what matters is not the consumption of meat, but the atrocious manner in which the animals that end up in the supermarket live (and die), and the absolute incredible amount of food that is consumed in the West, at the expense of the planets agriculture and starving billions. For every pound of beef, it is estimated that anywhere from 5 to 16 pounds of grains is gobbled up by these animals that could be used for human consumption (as billions starve daily). .

I am not promoting strict vegetarianism (though I think this is a very healthy practice when done right) as I am not against eating meat. What I am against is the inhumane treatment of animals and the over-consumption of meat. At what cost are we eating these meats that go through processes too hideous to conceive of? While I find PETA rather extremist at times, I do recommend taking a look at the videos they have managed to capture while visiting various slaughterhouses– if your stomach can bear it (www.peta.org ).  And if your stomach can’t bear it, I would think twice about why it is you can’t watch what the animals go through to get to your plate, but you have no problem when it’s on your plate. Out of sight, out of mind, is an outdated concept that is ruining the health of our planet on too many levels. Where is the love?

“Overconsumption of meat by the rich means hunger for the poor” – Rene Dumont, France’s National Agricultural Institute, Rome 1974.

“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.” – Paul McCartney

For anyone interested in if I’m practicing what I preach, I avoid red meats and almost always buy my chicken, fish and eggs as hormone-free, antibiotic-free, grain-fed, free range products from organic, sustainable farming/harvesting practices.

Suffering, stumbling, staggering cow at AgriProcessors/Rubashkin facility in Postville, Iowa.

Next Week: Fruit and Veggies?

Part 1: So Far Gone

Part 2: Meet your Meat

Part 3: Fruits & Veggies

Part 4: Dairy and Dispersal.

Part 5: The Return Home.

Part 1 – So Far Gone

In order to offset some of the heavy fees levied on travelers these days, I was working in Europe primarily through an international movement called WWOOF (www.wwoof.org). The acronym stands for Willing Workers on Organic Farms – largely self-explanatory. Those interested work on a chosen farm in exchange for room, board, and the opportunity to learn organic farming practices. The farms themselves vary from single-product farms, to family dwellings or agritourism. As with anything, it has its obvious flaws and difficulties, but is overall an amazing way to both travel and learn about new cultures, farming practices, and natural eating.

I confess my primary expectation was for the hosts to be truly dedicated to the North American concept of ‘organic’, i.e. heavily involved in vague certifications with cute symbols. To my astonishment and admiration, organic in Europe simply meant common sense. Grow your own food in the garden without spraying or pesticides. Watch after your own animals. Share what you grow with your neighbor that doesn’t grow the same produce, and vice versa.  No tactics employed by massive corporations attempting to keep our dollars while pretending to be environmentally friendly.

Now, I will grant that I spent a large portion of time working in Spain and Italy, both with climates favourable to food production, but the European’s unassuming premise of primarily self-sustainment in regards to food struck a chord within me, and food has become extremely important to me over the past year.

Making the right choice for your health and the planet.

Really, why should organic eating be anything but common sense?  Why do we accept that all our food products are mass produced, processed, bleached, genetically modified, sprayed with dangerous chemicals and arrive in neat, dyed packages? It’s bizarre that we even have a term to describe what should be the ONLY way we eat food.

When I was 15, I took my first voyage abroad to Trinidad. My family lived fairly rurally, and the first thing that hit me was that I had to walk to the water for well. It seems funny almost to write it as a Westerner, but it still is a reality for most people – taps and immediate hot water aren’t everywhere – and surprisingly water doesn’t magically spurt from beneath your house. There is a massive system and business involved in bringing the water to your house (another topic altogether).

Anyways, one particularly sweltering tropical evening, my aunt sent me to fetch chicken. I followed the directions she gave me, and ended up at a small barn with a large yard, staring in confusion. Where were the spotless pink chicken breasts, softly lain on a white wax backing, encased in a beaming yellow styrofoam tray, and vacuum sealed with glassy plastic in the large sterile refrigerated aisle? All I saw were a hundred chickens, several large machetes, a bloody table, and some sort of boiling kettle.  After getting over my initial shock, I pointed mutely in the yard when the heavily-accented man asked what I wanted. I then watched the chicken that had been in the general vicinity of my fingers aim have its neck snapped, boiled, plucked, cut and wrapped up, I was headed back to my aunts with a still-warm package of what had 10 minutes ago been a squawking chicken.

That was my first wake-up call as to what food actually was. I felt a bit guilty about it being killed, but realistically I had been eating chicken my entire life and had no idea what a real chicken even looked like. I had no clue what the food in the supermarket went through before it got there. I remember growing a bean in a paper towel in first grade, but apart from that, food had never been touched on in our school education. My mother was one of the healthiest parents (I was the kid with the whole wheat sandwich and carrot sticks, not the Wonderbread PB&J with a bag of Dorito’s), but even then, it’s difficult to teach your children in a city about maintaining cows and how to create a market garden to feed your family. The entire system of food production in the West is a maniacal business that generates billions of dollars yearly, both in disgustingly chemically-saturated junk, and in health care issues when people end up in the hospital as a result of eating poor.

In addition to generally having no idea what our food is, we also don’t really care where it comes from. I started playing the “How many countries” game when I eat – how many countries in the world contributed to the food on your plate?, and it daily amazes me. Bananas from Mexico, rice from Thailand, pasta from Italy, kiwis from New Zealand. The pollution involved in long-range transport is almost as bad as the factory pollution involved in mass production. What happened to the days when only the kings and queens could afford food that had sailed across the planet to reach their plate? It may be elitist, but it’s sure of a hell lot better for the environment than the constant international shipping that goes to serve the western middle classes on now.

Just for fun – why don’t you think about the food on your plate at least once today. Where did it come from? How did it live? How many chemicals are in? How many hormones has it been dosed with? Am I eating bleach? Was this animal covered in shit for most of its life? Could it even walk or breath without gasping? What sort of cancers do people commonly get from eating the preservatives found in this food? How many illegal workers were underpaid and abused for it to get here? How many farmers were exploited? Is the money I paid for this going to the person that sweat 12 hours a day to grow it, or to pay for that 16 year old son of the corporate owner of Tyson to get a new BMW to replace the one he crashed last month because his dad was far more focused on how to exploit and poison more people than on spending time with his son?

As a side note, I am not really going to be getting too heavily into fast food. I believe Eric Schlosser does an amazing job covering the history and problems of this industry in his book Fast Food Nation, for those who are interested.

Next week: Meet your Meat

Primarily plastics (95%), the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ is contained within the North Pacific Gyre. This is actually composed of two major gyres, one between Japan and Hawaii, and another between Hawaii and California, connected through the Subtropical Convergence Zone (An oceanic gyre is a rotating system of currents that swirl the water in a large, roughly circular shape).  The rotational movement of the gyres draws garbage in, and the lack of strong winds keeps it trapped almost stationary in the centre. The movement of the waters breaks down the plastics, so that most of the garbage is composed of tiny little bits, rather than large objects. This actually renders the GPGP invisible to satellite imagery, as the pieces are too small, and additionally held just below the surface.  Most of the garbage comes from land: 80% of marine debris is discharged from land, primarily via urban run-off (the other 20% comes from ships).  This makes it our garbage. The stuff you and I throw out on a regular basis.

The GPGP was accidentally discovered by Cpt. Charles Moore on an expedition in 1997, though its existence had been predicted as far back as the 1980’s by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association in America. While its true size cannot be truly measured due to the miniscule size of the debris and sludge, estimates range as high as 100 million tonnes of debris, and up to twice the length of the continental USA.  It has been a gradual accumulation of over a hundred years of poor environmental practices by all countries.

Most of the problem is the plastic. Plastic is composed of petroleum, and unfortunately not biodegradable. While theoretically a very useful product, the massive environmental disadvantages to plastics are starting to overtake the decades of successful aggressive marketing by plastic companies.  Plastics take thousands of years to degrade, and depending on the type, contain very high amounts of toxic chemicals, including DEHP’s, adipates, phthalates, bisphenol A, vinyl chloride, etc. etc. In addition to containing these dangerous chemicals, when burned plastics also release other toxic chemicals and fumes.

Well, if the debris is just floating in a relatively unoccupied part of the ocean far from any humans, why does it matter?

Because it breaks down into a toxic sludge of plastic that pollute and contaminate the ocean, carried on currents slowly across the planet.

Because animals eat, and die from eating, the garbage (Fish absorb the pollutants, and bird carcasses are found with all sorts of garbage they have eaten in the ocean – it has been estimated up to over a million sea-birds, and one hundred thousand marine mammals and turtles die yearly from plastic ingestion).

Because plastics are not biodegradable – meaning that we can’t just close our eyes and ears. The garbage is there to stay until we do something about it.

And it’s not the only one. Similar patches exist in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, up to 5 across the world. All of which are growing. This isn’t a problem to be solved only by the United States, or by China. This swirling pile of crap is hundreds of miles from any nation’s boundary. It belongs to us all – the plastic bag you callously tossed in the garbage bin ended up there. The plastic toys you played with as a child and threw out ended up there. The wrapper you dropped on the street last week is there. Every decision we make as consumers and citizens of the planet contributes to this. Imagine if you purchased a lovely oceanfront property, but had to look at millions of tons of debris instead. I bet we’d care more if we had to see it – out of sight, out of mind can NO LONGER apply to our planet. Let’s wake up and stop with the plastics! If we cut down, or even cut out our plastic usage, it won’t be discharged into the oceans.

Things you can do:

Minimalize your plastic usage – don’t use water bottles, stop using sandwich bags. Switch to re-usable containers and re-use them. And don’t just buy them : you can re-use yogurt containers, butter containers, etc. Buy re-usable grocery bags (of the cloth kind).  Most of our plastic usage comes from food and home products – think about it!

My number one pet peeve – plastic bags for your vegetables at the grocery store! Do you really think the dirtiest part of your vegetable’s trip is from the shelf to your house? Get real. You should be washing your fruits and vegetables for pesticides anyway (a whole other story).

Toys – stop buying so many cheap, plastic throw-away toys for kids! They don’t need them. Buy them hand-crafted wooden toys or metal instruments that can be passed down.

Cleaners – stop buying bottles of dangerous chemicals and cleaners. A bucket of hot water with baking soda and vinegar, a rag, and some elbow grease can clean almost anything.

At the end of the day, it comes down to common sense over convenience. If it wasn’t made by or found in the earth, chances are, it’s not good! Natural products. Woods, metals, local. Its up to us to fix this world gone wrong!

Let’s educate ourselves, and take action.

http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org/

http://plasticdebris.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

http://greatpacificgarbagepatch.info/

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex

Salt in over-abundance is in fact toxic to our environment. When used on roads and sidewalks, it enters our surface water, groundwater, and soil through snowmelt, and enters the air as a windborne particles when cars, trucks, etc. splash the snow.Over 4.9 million tonnes of salt are deposited in Canada alone every year, accounting for over 3 million tonnes of chloride deposition.

In water, natural background concentrations of chloride are usually no more than a few milligrams per litre. With the obsessive use of salt, concentrations as high as 18,000 mg/L have been found in highway runoff! The Ministry of the Environment has determined the safe level of drinking water to be only 250 mg/L, yet we often found amounts close to or surpassing this in our municipal waters.

Biologically speaking, this is ridiculously damaging to the organisms that live in run-off ponds, etc. It only takes 1,400 mg/L of chloride concentration for some aquatic organisms to die within four days. Do you really want to kill all these creatures on the off chance you ‘may’ slip? It even kills fish. The embryos of many fish are extremely sensitive to this and are almost guaranteed not to live – 10% of fish species are affected at levels as low as 240 mg/L. Compare that to 18,000 mg/L. Bit of a difference.

In terms of plants, changing salt concentrations in soil also allows certain species like cattails and reed-grass to invade these habitats, displacing many native species. More sensitive species have a reduction in their flowering and fruiting, retardation in their growth, shoot and root injury. etc. These reductions and shifts in communities can lead to a higher increase in road kill and predation of species that live in or near road-side habitats.

It also has major geographical effects that also damage living organisms while changing our environment. This includes (but is not limited to):

- The salinization of our groundwaters
- The salinization of our soil. In fact with increasing sodium content our soil destabilizes, swells, loses osmotic potential, erodes and gets deposited in our groundwaters as turbidity. Electrical conductivity increases greatly. Soil particles are attached to environmental contaminants such as heavy minerals, microbiota,nutrients etc., and when these are dispersed in higher numbers (due to salt usage), they end up in our water and around our environments in unsafe amounts.
- Elevated chloride concentrations
- Stratification of our ponds (meaning the layers of water become stabilized), this retards the seasonal mixing of the water layers, reducing oxygen and nutrient concentrations. If organisms cannot get the air and nutrients they need to live… they die!

Last but not least, road salt contains ferrocyanides. Under certain circumstances, the ferrocyanide can dissociate in solution, resulting in cyanide ions, which are known to be extremely toxic and lethal to many organisms.

Environment Canada (my employer of late) released a 5 year study on the use of road salts, demonstrating all these facts and many more. The report is publicly accessible at http://www.ec.gc.ca/substances/ese/eng/psap/final/roadsalts.cfm . The US government has also considered road salt a potential pollutant, under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System.

So what’s my point? The abuse of road salts kills microorganisms, aquatic organisms, fish, plants, and land animals. It drastically changes the wildlife communities. It destroys our soils, salinizes our groundwater (our drinking source!), upsets our surface water and ponds, and provides the opportunity for toxic chemicals to flourish. If we stopped using salt in Toronto immediately, it would take over 300 years for the system to return to natural chloride concentrations!
Is it really worth it?

Solution? Shovel – early and often! Kitty litter can be messy, so try sand instead. If you must use salt, please use it sparingly and mix it in with another natural product. Pick salt products that contain calcium chloride over sodium chloride, as it is more effective (works at a lower temperature and less is needed).

Our lives are not worth more than the planet we live on!

By the way, I am not against salt. I like it. We need it. I’m against the abuse of salt as a de-icer.

Welcome to all things science, translated into a language the rest of us can understand and enjoy. From physics to biology, climate change to viruses, all the latest research is written in a strict format of generally undecipherable enigmatic lexicons that are pretty much unreadable to anyone outside the specific science – meaning they tend to use too many big words no one else can understand.

This unfortunately makes a lot of fascinating knowledge inaccessible to the everyday person, as we are effectively blocked from this knowledge because of rigid formatting and language that you sometimes can’t even look up in a dictionary. In today’s rapidly changing planet and rapidly conglomerating societies, an understanding of the way things work is paramount to maintaining a finer balance and harmonious living between us and on this beautiful sphere.

Every week I will bring you some of the latest research presented by our world’s top scientists – fascinating new revelations that you might never hear about otherwise, because I’m guessing that you, like me, take one look at most science journals and immediately feel your eyes crossing.

Scientists aren’t to be blamed, as they have degrees and backgrounds in numbers, statistics, hypotheses, laws and theories – not words and language. This gap between scientists and the public is one that should be solved, one brilliant discovery at a time – the cloak of confusion must be removed.

If you want to contribute anything, have any ideas, or have heard about cool research (even your own!), send over a message, and it will be put in.

Cheers,

Naomi.