Sustainable Living

Garret Hardin's projection of his own flawed values onto communities managing commons should have been discarded instead of embraced. As Dr. Elinor Ostrom's recent Nobel Prize in Economics has shown,  local community management is often the best option.

by Tim Kelly

by Mark Anielski

Economics is failing to improve well-being for Earth's seven billion people. The high priests of economics have forgotten that economics' primary concern - the meaning of the word - is the well-being of the household. Economy (Greek oikonomia) means "household management." Most economists have also forgotten the meaning of "wealth," from 13th century Middle English, meaning "conditions of well-being." Instead of practicing genuine economics, the high priests have become experts at chrematistics (which Aristotle defined as the art of getting rich).

by Dawn Paley

The afternoon scene at the Jaime Sabinas sports complex in Jaltenango, a town in southern Mexico, is about the farthest thing imaginable from a bustling Seattle coffee shop. I've come to this mountainous region, hours by gravel road off the tourist track, to get a first hand look at what life is like for the people who grow the coffee we're told is fair trade. After a drive through Jaltenango, a medium-sized, coffee growing town with prominent coffee warehouses decorated with Starbucks logos, I arrived at the stadium to meet a group of people displaced from their homes and plantations in September.

Watershed Sentinel Comox Valley report

by Joyce Nelson

With an entire agricultural edifice constructed upon cheap energy, Canada is especially vulnerable, and not just because of rising oil prices - which economist Jeff Rubin (Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller)  recently claimed will reach "record highs" by 2011. Canada's dominant form of agriculture follows a high input, energy-intensive, export-oriented model of industrial food production that gives little thought to feeding ourselves. According to the Toronto Star (Oct. 12, 2009), "Canada now imports 80 percent of its fruits and vegetables," even though we grow more than 100 varieties of these foods, mostly for export.

Sarah Elton's book Locavore (Harper Collins, 2010) describes the absurdity: "Carrots from Ontario's richest soils, in the Holland Marsh, are loaded onto trucks and driven south to the US and shipped to places as far away as Puerto Rico and Venezuela, passing other trucks heading north loaded with American carrots destined for Ontario stores."

An interview with Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer, Planning and Environment, about the Greenest City Initiative.

by Stephanie Orford

"Environment cannot be a box that we open when we have the time and the money and the will," Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer told Watershed Sentinel. On the cusp of the 2010 Olympics, the international pressure on Canada to put an end to our greenhouse-gas-emitting ways is greater than ever. The municipal government of Vancouver wants to be in the vanguard, and has developed a plan to build Vancouver into the greenest city in the world by 2020. The plan includes creating environmentally sustainable jobs and economy, greening public spaces, and safeguarding human health.

by Tarah Millen

The town of Taiji, Japan is responsible for the slaughter and trade of over 2,000 dolphins each year. A jewel along the South East coastline of Japan, Taiji could transform into a beautiful oasis were it not for the horrors that occur there. Taiji is home to 26 men who are known to some as molesters, men who act with force, harming the beautiful creatures of our oceans. Each year from September through March, the cries of pain and desperation from thousands of dolphins ring out in the quiet town. The slaughter of dolphins in Japan is no less than a tragedy, a dark spot upon the country's reputation.

Migrating through the waters surrounding the coastal nation, dolphins are forcefully driven with "banger boats" from their home in the open ocean to a natural formation, a cove, where they will spend the last moments of their lives.

Excerpt from Joyce Nelson's WS article, "Eating Our Way Back to the Future: Low Greenhouse Gas Agriculture"

Peak oil may soon give us peak food. As we run out of fossil fuels, food will get increasingly expensive not only to produce, but to import and export. Changes to this system can also be good news, however, since globally, agriculture and our industrial food system account for almost one-third of all greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions that contribute to climate change. Changing how we farm our food can literally change the fate of the world.

"Low GHG agriculture" places top priority on soil restoration and on soil as a carbon sink. It looks to farming methods that are common practice in organic agriculture and, in some cases, practices that were widely used by Canadian farmers sixty or more years ago.Switching to organic, low GHG agricultural practices could not only reduce the 30 percent of GHG emissions that current industrial agriculture creates, but could also sequester through soil restoration another 40 percent of emissions globally. These practices include:

-      Banning synthetic fertilizers, which would lead to a 30 percent reduction of[agricultural] green-house gases.

-      Planting cover crops such as alfalfa, which is deep rooted and soak up heavy rains.

-      Reduced or no tillage on crop-land, as recommended by the UN's Food and AgricultureOrganization (FAO)  in order to increase the soil organic carbon.

by Susan MacVittie

Sipping on a morning cup of Jo goes beyond the quick fix of liquid wake-up - it's now a reflection of the drinker's ethical values. In the 1980s a rise in ethical consumerism, driven by issues like child labour and environmental degradation launched the branding of organic, fair trade and union-made products. For coffee-drinkers this means that there is now a befuddling assortment of coffee to choose from. Knowing which one is the real ethical deal is a lesson in the coffee commodity chain.

Bean 101

Coffee has always been a boom and bust crop in Latin America and Africa with little of the wealth going towards the growers, pruners and pickers. Although it is the second most traded commodity next to oil on the global market, in many countries a days' wages for picking coffee beans wouldn't buy a fancy cup of java at your favourite coffee shop.

by Norberto Rodriguez dela Vega

BC has a new growing movement– and that movement is Smart Growth.