You’ve Been Trumped

As a society, we worship money. By extension, we worship people who are rich. And we don’t care how they got to be rich, what their values are, or how they contribute to the welfare of the planet. Donald Trump is a wonderful example. His money gives him credibility. Otherwise, he would surely be a laughing-stock, arrogant, self-absorbed, bigoted. Instead, he has an international following, has been awarded honorary doctorates, even proposes a run for the presidency!

At the recent Canadian International Documentary Festival, a new movie showcasing a Trump project in Scotland was featured. In a gargantuan development project, Trump targeted a quiet Scottish seaside village and its neighbouring sand dunes, ecologically vital to the welfare of shorebirds, as the sight for a mega luxury golf course. The movie summary reads:

When the tycoon developer sets out to build the world’s most luxurious golf resort, he naturally picks the bonniest seaside village in Scotland—the birthplace of the sport—as his proposed site. Nestled between ancient sand dunes and rolling greens, the picturesque town of Balmedie seems perfect, aside from a handful of residents who immediately worry over the impact the mammoth project will have on their beloved natural habitat. When farmer Michael Forbes refuses to sell his land to make way for the shovels, Trump’s goodwill publicity appearances turn into all-out declarations of war. As work literally threatens to bulldoze forward, locals dig in and document what they see as strong-arm tactics and a distinctly American bullying campaign.

Of course, Trump is not singularly responsible for this failure of responsible stewardship. There is plenty of blame to go around. The Scottish government that overruled anti-development protesters must surely be held accountable. Ultimately, it is the wealthy patrons who will reward the project developers with their dollars that make it all economically worthwhile.

The saddest part of this story is that Trump’s golf course in Scotland is only remarkable for its scale. Destructive projects move forward every single day, all over the planet. Rarely can any amount of protest overcome the imperative of greed. Just down the road from here, a wetland and forest that supports several known endangered species is being turned into a housing tract. Northwest of Toronto, 2300 acres of prime farmland and the headwaters of three of Ontario’s major river systems are threatened by a huge quarry development. Stone from the quarry will be used in Toronto area construction and urban sprawl.

It’s everywhere, and we can’t blame only the developers. The people who buy Trump’s new super houses and play golf on the new course are ultimately the ones handing over the cold hard cash. The people who move into the houses that replace the wetland are to blame for its destruction. If no one bought those houses, the development wouldn’t happen. It’s not like there aren’t equally good houses elsewhere in the area. It’s all fueled by greed. Greed and colossal ignorance, and in this age of information, the ignorance is willful.

Grown Close to Home

This entry was first posted at Willow House Chronicles on August 24, 2010.

I just walked out to check on the tomatoes. Still green, just a touch of pink here and there. This is my fault. I started the seeds late, and was late in getting the baby plants into the ground. I’m not much of a vegetable gardener, probably because I’m not very interested in cooking, but I sure do enjoy that first tomato of the year, fresh off the vine. Nothing like it! I enjoyed Barbara’s take on fresh tomato sandwiches over at Folkways Notebook. While I wait for that first homegrown tomato, I have been doing the next-best thing, visiting our local pick-your-own and garden market farm and buying tomatoes there.

On a recent visit, I picked up a handout on the counter, a folder advertising local food farms. There is an amazing array of fresh food available right here, close to home, everything from vegetables and orchard fruits to honey and maple syrup. The flyer says it all: “No matter how you slice it, local food is more than a passing fad. In fact, supporting local food is one of the simplest things you can do to support the local economy, conserve valuable farm land, protect the environment, improve your health and learn more about where you live. Today, the average Canadian meal travels over 2,000 kilometers from the farm to your plate. … vegetables may be picked days or weeks before ripening. …local food is harvested fresh – as it was meant to be!”

The “Eat Local” movement has caught on and spread like wildfire. Books such as Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Smith and Mackinnon’s The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, have helped to raise awareness of food issues. Recently, I’ve noticed new books such as native plant gardening guru Lorraine Johnson’s City Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing, Sarah Elton’s Locavore: From Farmers’ Fields To Rooftop Gardens – How Canadians Are Changing the Way We Eat and Novella Carpenter’s Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer have focused on urban food issues. Celebrity chefs such as Toronto’s Jamie Kennedy are promoting local food culture and restaurants have begun to offer dishes featuring all-local food. There are even festivals celebrating local food. The local food movement has been so keenly embraced that even supermarkets are jumping on the bandwagon and advertising local produce.

Yes, eating local is big news these days. I was therefore aghast when I read of the Canadian government’s plan to close down prison farms! These farms are a 100-year-old tradition in Canada and to close them just at this point in history when local food production is more relevant than ever flies in the face of reason.

Beyond the obvious advantage of providing inmates with farm-fresh produce, farms offer an opportunity to work out-of-doors and experience the natural world in a way that it is unlikely many inmates have ever been able to enjoy. The Public Safety Committee, a group composed of representatives from all political parties, heard from witnesses who said that prison farms teach inmates valuable work and life skills that serve them well upon release. Mark Holland, the committee’s vice-chairman, said “The bottom line is it’s one of the most effective programs we have at rehabilitating inmates.”

Yet the Conservative government, making the announcement through spokesman Chris McCluskey, says that traditional farming is outdated and less than one percent of inmates find agricultural employment after leaving prison. The Conservatives have even refused an appeal to hire independent experts to study the impact of the closures, and is acting without full insight into the benefits of farms and the effects the closures will have.

If you agree that prison farms should be saved, you can sign the petition at Saveourprisonfarms.ca.

What’s in a Can of Tuna?

This entry was first posted at Willow House Chronicles on March 25, 2010.

Surely one of the most common forms of seafood enjoyed in North America must be canned tuna. Many a kitchen pantry is stocked with a can or two, handy for quick, nutritious sandwiches or a simple casserole. The tuna in many cans is Skipjack, a fish that grows up to 3 feet long. Skipjacks live a short life, have a high reproduction rate and a high natural mortality rate, and is a pretty good choice for responsible consumers. The problem comes, conservation-wise, with the way it is caught.

Tuna for canning is usually caught by purse seiners. The fishing boats set large nets around floating objects, often Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs), artificial floating structures that attract tuna. When the nets are gathered in, it’s not just tuna that are landed. By-catch can be up to 50% of the catch, and can include billfish, wahoo, triggerfish, barracuda, rainbow runners, sharks, rays and sea turtles. The tuna catch itself includes both mature fish and juveniles, and may include yellowfin and juvenile bigeye tuna, both less plentiful than skipjack. Nets may also be set around whales and catch whales as well as tuna The whales escape by breaking through the nets. Theoretically.

The cans of tuna I looked at were labelled “Dolphin Friendly”. The Environmental Justice Foundation offers this information about tuna and dolphins:

The capture of dolphins that were deliberately targeted in tuna purse-seine nets in the Eastern Pacific Ocean caused an outcry when first brought to pubic attention. Tuna’s association with dolphins makes detection at the surface easier, but dolphins deliberately encircled by the purse-seiners were frequently captured and killed in the process. Dolphin mortalities reached hundreds of thousands every year, and populations declined rapidly until the mid-1990s when technological and operational changes to reduce dolphin by-catch were successfully introduced. The efficacy of these measures, in conjunction with management actions to limit dolphin deaths per vessel, has lowered mortality levels for all dolphin populations to less than 0.1%.

In other words, dolphin as by-catch has not been a major issue for about 15 years and the dolphin-friendly labelling is something of a “red herring”. In The End of the Line, Charles Clover reports that he had difficulty securing figures about tuna fishing by-catch. However, he was able to secure a report about a tuna fishing fleet making its way across the Indian Ocean. About 20% of its catch was endangered bigeye tuna. There were also oceangoing turtles including loggerheads, leatherbacks and others, most of whom are endangered. Whales that were caught included minke and humpback. Other fish included great white sharks, now listed as vulnerable, slow-growing manta rays, stingray and spotted eagle ray, hammerhead sharks and other seagoing sharks. No dolphins.

All in all, it would appear that a can of tuna results in the death of a lot more than just the skipjack tuna that ends up in the can. The most amazing thing is that all this lost sealife comes with such a small price tag. Check out the bin in the opening photo. If the cans were any cheaper, they’d be giving them away at the store entrance. What a waste.

The Dinosaurs Are Not All Dead

This entry was first posted at Willow House Chronicles on January 23, 2010.

Steam Shovel

The dinosaurs are not all dead.
I saw one raise its iron head
To watch me walking down the road
Beyond our house today.
Its jaws were dripping with a load
Of earth and grass that it had cropped.
It must have heard me where I stopped,
Snorted white steam my way,
And stretched its long neck out to see,
And chewed, and grinned quite amiably.

by Charles Malam

Cute little poem, eh? I thought of it when this piece of heavy equipment appeared in the field next-door. It was used to tidy up the erosion that had eaten away at the drainage ditches along the edges of the corn field. Cute, but not true, of course. Outside of heavy equipment, you’re not going to see any dinosaurs wandering about these days.

Six great spasms of extinction have struck the planet over the last 500 million years. The dinosaurs disappeared about 65 million years ago, when some apocalyptic shock rocked the planet. Maybe a massive meteorite crashed into the earth at 72,000 kilometers an hour. Or maybe huge volcanic eruptions filled the sky with ash. Or maybe the meteorite strike set off volcanoes. Whatever it was, this event is known as the K-T boundary, the end of the Cretaceous period (the youngest period of the Mesozoic era) and the Tertiary period, the oldest of the Cenozoic era. It’s easy to imagine this giant rock falling from space and boom, the dinosaurs all keel over dead. Not quite. The extinctions of various groups were spread out over millions of years on either side of the K-T boundary. Dinosaurs died out over about 10 million years.

Dinosaurs used to be, probably still are, a popular subject with primary students. As a parent, I got very tired of dinosaurs as each child progressed through dinosaur units at school. I’m pretty sure teachers loved dinosaurs not because they hoped to turn out a generation of paleontologists, but because they found dinosaurs helpful in leading their restless XYers into basic literacy. In any case, most kindergarteners could identify stegosaurus or triceratops and even discuss the merits of the volcano or meteorite theory. Unfortunately, fewer youngsters could tell you that the K-T boundary represented the 5th Great Extinction. Nor could they tell you much about the 6th Great Extinction, its timeline, or its cause. The 6th Great Extinction is ongoing. We are the cause.

The 6th Great Extinction began centuries ago, as humans spread around the globe. In Madagascar, humans arrived about 500 AD. Following hard on their arrival was the extinction of the elephant birds, birds like the Aepyornis maximus, a giant almost 10 feet tall, with massive legs. Seven of the seventeen genera of lemurs disappeared. A pygmy hippopotamus, two huge species of land tortoises, an aardvark, all gone. In New Zealand, the Moa, another giant bird disappeared. The Thylacine, the largest marsupial predator to have survived into historic times, was exterminated from Tasmania. The Dodo was infamously slaughtered on Mauritius. In recent times, unfathomable numbers of passenger pigeons were destroyed. Of course, that’s just a tiny list of notables, some of the megafauna, from a long, long list of extinctions. E.O. Wilson estimates 27,000 species are currently lost per year. Scientist Paul Ehrlich estimates extinction rates at 7,000 to 13,000 times the background rate, 70,000 to 130,000 species per year. By 2022, 22% of all species will be extinct if no action is taken. As the human population spirals beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, habitat loss is the most significant cause of extinctions. If we fail to arrest climate change, the rate of extinctions we are already causing will increase.

Organic Food is for the Birds!

This entry was first posted at Willow House Chronicles on October 17, 2009.

Looking at the bananas in the grocery store, I have wondered if organic bananas are worth the extra few cents they cost. After all, you peel the skin off the banana, right? What difference does it make? The answer is it makes a lot of difference. It matters to the birds that use the banana grove and to the workers who have to spend time applying and living with the pesticides. In Costa Rica, banana plantations typically apply forty-five kilograms of active ingredients of pesticides per hectare.

It is now approaching half a century since Rachel Carson’s landmark book, Silent Spring, was published in September of 1962. At one time, DDT was a household chemical. It was advertised in national magazines as just the thing for the happy wife. Carson’s book spearheaded a movement that eventually led to the banning of DDT in North America, yet DDT, a fat-soluable pesticide lives on in the food chain. Testing has found that its breakdown product, DDE, is found in the blood-stream of nearly everyone across North America, years after DDT was banned.

The types of pesticides used have changed since DDT, but we are using more pesticides than ever. Birds are in as much danger today as in the 1950s because modern pesticides are more lethal. Many pesticides that are acutely toxic to birds, such as chlorpyrifos and diazinon, are used widely on vegetable and fruit crops in the United States and Canada.

Pesticide use is even heavier in Central and South American countries. Pesticides that are regulated or banned in the U.S. may still be used and farmers often don’t have sufficient training to apply pesticides safely. Pesticide use is heavy because farmers spray pesticides according to a regular schedule, rather than as needed to treat a specific problem.

The top five crops in the United States that pose the greatest risk for pesticide poisoning of songbirds at the local level are Brussel sprouts, celery, cranberries, cabbage and potatoes. You can help to reduce the use of pesticides that threaten birds by purchasing organic produce at your grocery store. It’s better for you and your family, and its much better for birds and other wildlife.

If you feel that shade-grown coffee, which does come with a premium price tag, it too much for your budget, consider buying organic, fair trade coffee as the next best choice. Nabob brand coffee is working with the Rainforest Alliance to produce sustainable coffee and is a good choice for consumers looking to make a difference with their coffee dollars. Look for Nabob Rainforest Alliance certified cans.