Crop production has improved over the past 20 years (from 1.8 tonnes per hectare in the 1980s to 2.5 tonnes today), but it has not kept up with population. “World cereal production per person peaked in the 1980s, and has since slowly decreased.” There will be roughly 9 billion people by 2050: feeding them and meeting the millennium development goal on hunger (halving the proportion of hungry people) would require a doubling of world food production. Unless we cut waste, overeating, biofuels and the consumption of meat, total demand for cereal crops could rise to three times the current level.

There are two limiting factors. One, mentioned only in passing in the report, is phosphate: it is not clear where future reserves might lie. The more immediate problem is water. “Meeting the Millennium Development Goal on hunger will require doubling of water use by crops by 2050.” Where will it come from? ‘Water scarcity is already acute in many regions, and farming already takes the lion’s share of water withdrawn from streams and groundwater.” One-tenth of the world’s major rivers no longer reach the sea all round the year.

Buried on page 148, I found this statement. “If present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress.” Wastage and deforestation are partly to blame, but the biggest cause of the coming droughts is climate change. Rainfall will decline most in the places in greatest need of water. So how, unless we engineer a sudden decline in carbon emissions, is the world to be fed? How, in many countries, will we prevent the social collapse that failure will cause?

The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth again. You will turn the page and carry on with your life. Last week we learnt that climate change could eliminate half the world’s species; that 25 primate species are already slipping into extinction; that biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release it, decades ahead of schedule. But everyone is watching and waiting for everyone else to move. The unspoken universal thought is this: “if it were really so serious, surely someone would do something?”

When a crowd of people watches something bad happen, the likelihood that someone will intervene to prevent it decreases as the size of the crowd increases. And here we are, the whole human race, watching our planet’s ability to sustain our lives slip away, waiting for someone to act.

Politicians, bloggers, voters: no more games please. This is issue number one. As the most unlikely of newspapers (The Toronto Sun) declared last week, we’re at red alert. The time to hesitate is long past through, and half-measures are not going to cut it.

One of the more interesting and lesser known facts about Cuba is their position as an environmental leader. They’ve made investments in renewable energy, legislated forest protection, significantly increased their country’s tree canopy, spoken out about the dangers of biofuels from food crops and, perhaps most remarkably, made the transition to 100% organic agriculture while simultaneously improving yields (proving for the rest of us that it can be done).

When it came my turn to speak, most of these examples had already been lifted up by the other panel members. So, instead, I wondered aloud why it was that Cuba had so many positive environmental examples. Here’s a theory: Cuba is not only an island, but one that has in many ways been cut off from the world. Without detracting from their accomplishment, many of their systemic changes have not been made out of a desire to “do the right thing,” but out of necessity. The shift to organic agriculture, for example, happened rapidly when the Soviet Union collapsed and took with it Cuba’s supply of petroleum-based fertilizers (the artificial energy inputs required for non-organic agriculture). In other words, on an isolated island you have to live within your means.

We, of course, do not live within our means. As much as we’ve grown to loath financial deficits, we continue to operate with huge environmental and social deficits that will come due someday soon.

And there it is. This Earth, too, is an island. As Carl Sagan wrote, “on it [the Earth] everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Every breath of air you ever breathed, every drop of water you ever drank. Every barrel of oil you ever burned.

He goes on: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.”

We’ll have to learn to live within our means soon. Islands who haven’t have paid a high price.

Ethanol boom helps fuel global run-up in food prices

Food prices are heating up globally as soaring energy costs, wonky weather and an ethanol boom all combine to push grocery bills higher.

Canadian food prices are 3.1 per cent higher than a year ago, Statistics Canada said yesterday, well ahead of last year’s rate of 2.4 per cent. Higher prices for meat and dairy are the main culprits, but the pickup in prices spills into everything from bread and applies to ice cream, eggs, jam and juice.

The reasons vary with each product, but one factor behind higher prices may be an ethanol boom south of the border, with Canadian chicken and dairy farmers saying they’re seeing higher feed prices.

“Corn and wheat prices are putting upward pressure on food in general,” said Ron Morency, acting chief of Statscan’s consumer price division. “We see that right now in our meat prices.”

…”It’s not going to let up any time soon,” said Adrienne Warren, senior economist at Bank of Nova Scotia. “Short term, it might be weather-related. But longer term, it’s growing demand for food in emerging economies, with growing middle classes and purchasing power, and the global demand for ethanol and biodiesel.”

This month, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said higher demand for biofuels is causing “fundamental changes” to agricultural markets that could drive up prices.

They see “structural changes” under way that could well keep prices for many agricultural products higher over the coming decade.

“We haven’t seen anything on this scale before,” Martin von Lampe, an agricultural economist in Paris at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, told Bloomberg News.

Net food importing countries, as well as the urban poor, will likely be hardest hit, the OECD predicts.

Just a few years ago, the biggest threat to our society’s survival was our willing blindness towards the crisis facing us. Now that we’re aware of that crisis, the biggest threat to our survival is our willingness to believe that there are easy answers; that we’re “on the right track;” that our political leaders are starting to “get it.” This is the threat of greenwash, intentional or otherwise, and it can’t be underestimated.

Last week, Canada’s New-ish-like Government^TM announced a $1.5 billion subsidy for biofuel production. You’d be forgiven for thinking that sounds like a positive, “step in the right direction.” In reality, it’s extremely dangerous and wrongheaded. In short, while some biofuel policies make sense, biofuels from crops like the ones targeted by Stephen Harper’s plan (corn, wheat, soy) lead to increasingly higher market prices for those crops, setting up a competition between cars and people for who gets to be fed by the Earth. Further, they’re likely to exacerbate, not mitigate, the climate crisis. And it’s happening already.

The fundamental idea behind biofuel is simple, as is its fundamental flaw. Fossil fuels comprise concentrated energy stored up by organic material (plants and animals) exposed to intense heat and pressure over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Since our dependence on fossil fuel energy is now becoming problematic and unrealistic for at least two major reasons (climate change and peak oil), the thinking behind biofuel is that we should just cut out the middle man and convert organic matter into hydrocarbons ourselves. It should be obvious, however, that we can never hope to produce biofuel rapidly enough to match our consumption of fossil fuels, since they took hundreds of millions of years to accumulate and we’ve already used up about half of that supply in just the past century.

What’s less obvious, perhaps, is that more than simply inadequate, this strategy is actually destructive. The $1.5 billion proposed by the Conservatives is an attempt to meet their own requirement for 5% ethanol content in gasoline by 2010. Europe has a similar target of 5.75% of transport power by 2010 and 10% by 2020. The United States is looking to use 35 billion gallons of biofuel a year. Problem is, according to the International Herald Tribute these targets “far exceed the agricultural capacities of the industrial North. Europe would need to plant 70 percent of its farmland with fuel crops. The entire corn and soy harvest of the United States would need to be processed as ethanol and biodiesel.” Of course, no American president or European leader is going to allow that to happen. Therefore, if these targets were actually met, they would likely have to be met by destroying the food systems of the South. The poor would go hungry while the wealthy pumped diverted human food into their SUVs.

Think this sounds implausible? It’s happening now:

CBC News, May 22 2007 – The rising demand for corn as a source of ethanol-blended fuel is largely to blame for increasing food costs around the world, and Canada is not immune, say industry experts.

Food prices rose 10 per cent in 2006, “driven mainly by surging prices of corn, wheat and soybean oil in the second part of the year,” the International Monetary Fund said in a report.

“Looking ahead, rising demand for biofuels will likely cause the prices of corn and soybean oil to rise further,” the authors wrote in the report released last month.

What’s more, the degree to which biofuels can contribute to solving the climate crisis has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the wrong kind of biofuel policy could even make the climate crisis worse. According to the BBC, a recent United Nations report found that “demand for biofuels has accelerated the clearing of primary forest for palm plantations, particularly in southeast Asia. This destruction of ecosystems which remove carbon from the atmosphere can lead to a net increase in emissions.”

Even once the initial conversion of wilderness to farmland is complete, biofuels grown by current agribusiness methods require large inputs of fossil fuel energy, which defeats the purpose. As a result, the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is very weak. According to a U.S. government report, the EROEI for ethanol grown from corn is 1.34. In other words, it takes approximately three barrels of ethanol to produce four. And that’s the optimistic outlook. A study out of Cornell University found that the production of biofuels actually results in a net energy loss.

In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production, the study found that:

• corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
• switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and
• wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel production, the study found that:

• soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, and
• sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

Normally, you would expect the market to sort at least some of that out, since biofuels that actually lose energy would not be economically viable, right? Unless of course, the government subsidizes them to keep the price artificially low. (Oh wait…crap.)

Despite all this, I tend to think that most people pushing for biofuels are well-intentioned. George Monbiot, on the other hand, begins a column published recently in the Guardian titled A Lethal Solution by saying:

It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless.

He goes on to point out that “a report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that…biodiesel from palm oil causes up to TEN TIMES [caps his] as much climate change as ordinary diesel.”

Now here’s where this gets really hard to follow: not all biofuels are bad. The same UN report cited above also concluded that “using biomass for combined heat and power (CHP), rather than for transport fuels or other uses, is the best option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade – and also one of the cheapest.” The Green Party of Canada also supports investments in cellulosic ethanol, since it doesn’t set up the same competition between people and cars for food (a competition which, as Monbiot points out, “people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are, by definition, richer than those who are in danger of starvation”). A good shorthand then, perhaps, is that we shouldn’t be making car-food out of people-food, and that we should focus our biomass efforts on CHP instead of as replacements for transport fuels like gasoline and diesel.

It may seem like asking a lot for us laypeople to be able to tell the difference. Even so, in a democracy it’s our responsibility to figure it out. We can’t get the right solutions out of government unless we know which governments (in waiting) are offering them up.

1. Close Bay Street to private vehicles.
2. Increase the number of recycling options.
3. More affordable housing.

Based on these calls, I will now conclude that if an election were held tomorrow, I’d get 66.6% of the vote and Michael Shapcott would get the other 33.3%. (Note: not a scientific poll.)

The question got me thinking though, and I decided to create my own top ten environmental new year’s resolutions for anyone wondering what they can do. The catch is that these kinds of lists are already everywhere, and I didn’t want to be boring. So, things like “drive less, replace your light bulbs, and recycle” didn’t make the cut. I’m assuming you already know that. These resolutions also ask a little bit more of you. Sorry about that.

Here, off the top of my head, are ten other things you may or may not have thought of or already be doing.

1. Eat less meat. We already eat too much for our health anyway, and meat is a very inefficient (albeit admittedly delicious) way of producing food energy. It takes more resources (food, land, water, etc) to produce meat than it does to eat lower on the food chain.
2. Eat more locally. The average meal travels further than it needs to, which contributes to climate change, damages local economies, and generally makes your food less yummy.
3. Eat more organically. (Yes, I did skip breakfast.) Did you know that agribusiness uses petroleum and natural gas-based fertilizers and pesticides? And that it’s only because of this infusion of oil that we’re able to grow as much food as we do? And that oil production will likely peak sometime between last year and ten or twenty years from now? Because I didn’t know that until a few years ago, and it’s a pretty big deal that we should all be aware of. We are, in effect, “eating oil,” in that much of the food we grow wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Buy foods that avoid the use of artificial fertilizers.
4. Take transit less. I actually got this tip from the now defunct One Tonne Challenge (this link is pretty funny and demonstrative), which advised me that since I don’t drive very much, and since even public transit uses energy, biking and walking would further reduce my carbon emissions. Also, biking is awesome.
5. Start a garden. This relates to #2. If you’ve got a back yard, this should be fairly simple. If you live in an apartment building or condo, you’ve got a little more work to do, but it’s still possible.
6. Buy less. My brother is returning from a trip to Kenya today, and he’s assured me that the impoverished Kenyans he met are, on average, happier and more life-loving than us wealthy Canadians. Almost everything we buy ends up in the garbage eventually anyway. The first and most forgotten R (of the three R’s) is the most important.
7. Produce some of your own power. If wind or solar (either passive or active) work where you live, consider getting them installed. If not, maybe you have a geothermal option. If you live in a condo this isn’t impossible, but obviously you’ll have to either talk your board into it or get elected to the board yourself.
8. Buy power from Bullfrog. Easier than #7, as they’ve already done the legwork.
9. Reduce your overall footprint. Using this ecological footprint calculator may give you some insight into what sorts of actions have the greatest effect.
10. Add your own tip by commenting on this page. (Note: Blogger comments have been buggy recently, but they’re still being saved. Even if it says “0 Comments” below, clicking on that link may reveal that there actually are comments.)

Hope that’s been helpful and/or interesting, and, of course, not too preachy. If not, that’s what tip number ten is for.

I’m glad to hear, in Kim’s introduction this afternoon, that we have something in common. You’re crazy. Me too. I run for a political party that, we were told, was never going to be taken seriously. And I advocate solutions to our problems that, we are told, are unrealistic. People say we’re crazy, and they tell us to “get real.”

At the same time, I’m a little humbled to be here, and I’ll tell you why. Earlier today I was speaking with a woman who was at the founding convention of the Green Party. (For the record, I wasn’t there, and would have been in diapers if I was.) She’s still involved, but her energy has become diverted to other organizations and action as well. In her words, “I got less political and more hands on.” Of course, that’s like you folks.

You got real. You’re accomplishing real things and demonstrating that the solutions that people like us advocate to the many threats facing our species and our planet are realistic solutions. And though the process we discover that what’s actually unrealistic is the path that we’re on now.

Today I want to talk about how we make political rhetoric real. And specifically, I’m going to talk about what language we use to bring others to our side. Because that’s part of my role as a politician: to speak to people in a way that they understand and that will ultimately cause them come to adopt my point of view. And I hope that’s what I can contribute to the discussion today.

First want to start by giving you a brief primer on the Green Party of Canada, so that you know where I’m coming from and can see how much common ground we share.

By way of introducing you to the Green Party, I want to start with a bit of a disclaimer. And that is simply that I don’t want to speak to you in a partisan way. That’s possible, because in many ways, the Green Party is a non-partisan political party. Both our membership, and our policies, come from the other three major Canadian political parties. We say that we are neither left nor right, but out front.

But what, exactly, does that mean? In part, it means that instead of subscribing to a political ideology of left or right, we have adopted the six key values of the Global Green movement. Those values are:

• Ecological Wisdom
• Social Justice
• Participatory Democracy
• Non-Violence
• Sustainability
• Respect for Diversity

And I know that last one is very important for Durika as well, thinking of your work towards biodiversity.

Sometimes it’s strange to speak to a group like this because, in some ways of course, I’m preaching to the choir. So I thought an interesting thing for us to talk about today would be: “how do we make the choir bigger?” Politics is about using language to persuade other people of your position, towards the goal of getting your ideas implemented. So let’s look at the language we use.

Green is the new black. Green is sexy. A few years ago, books like Collapse and A Short History of Progress were national best sellers. Following our natural cultural progression, popularity in literature became popularity in film this year with the release of An Inconvenient Truth. Wired magazine, the bible of “the next big thing,” put Al Gore on the cover and devoted a good chunk of the issue to neo-environmentalism. Last month The Toronto Star ran a feature story about several people who are discovering that environmental awareness is economically very valuable.

The Green Party is another gauge of public interest in this area. In just two elections The Green Party of Canada has gone from 0.8% of the vote to 4.5% of the vote, and in a recent poll we were at 10% nationally.

One of the ways we’ve done that is by adopting economic language to describe ecological problems and solutions. I wasn’t surprised to see the same thing on the Friends of Durika website, where biodiversity is described as “natural capital.” More about this later.

The downside, of course, is that much of the language used by corporations and politicians around issues of ecological wisdom has been greenwash: words on a page that don’t materialize into real action. When a company like Shell can claim to be operating in a sustainable way, we have to question whether or not that word has now lost all meaning.

As an exercise, let’s unpack this paragraph from the Friends of Durika website:

“Over the past fourteen years, they have created a sustainable community that is a true eco-village. Their energy source is alternative, their food organic and the organizational structure of the community is both democratic and consensus based. There is no religious affiliation nor do they subscribe to any particular political party.”

Let’s start with the word “sustainability.” One of the major critics of the word is author Michael Crichton, who argues that because natural systems are always changing and evolving, that sustainability cannot be defined or shown to exist. Now, I don’t agree with him. For example, when you build a suburb of Calgary or Toronto and start drawing down the water table faster than it fills up again, that’s clearly not a very sustainable action. However, I think it demonstrates that the word has not been well defined. I suspect that most people don’t have a very good understanding of what it means.

So let’s attempt to define it. The best definition I’ve seen is from Mike Nickerson, one of the elders of The Green Party and the author of several books, including his most recent, “Life, Money and Illusion.” Mike defines sustainability in the following way:

Well-being can be sustained when activities:

1. Use materials in continuous cycles.
2. Use continuously reliable sources of energy.
3. Come mainly from the qualities of being human (i.e. creativity, communication, coordination, appreciation, and spiritual and intellectual development.)

Long term well-being is diminished when activities:
1. Require continual inputs of non-renewable resources.
2. Use renewable resources faster than their rate of renewal.
3. Cause cumulative degradation of the environment.
4. Require resources in quantities that undermine other people’s well-being.
5. Lead to the extinction of other life forms.

I think that’s a pretty good definition, but it doesn’t fit into a soundbite. Therefore, when I speak to people I take the first point, “use materials in continuous cycles,” and focus on that language. We are the only species that creates waste. In nature, all waste is food. In the language of Ray Anderson, our economy is a linear “take-make-waste” economy. We need to transition to a cyclical economy, where materials move from cradle to cradle. We need to challenge economic indicators, like the GDP, which actually goes up in response to natural and other disasters.

The next phrase in that paragraph from the Friends of Durika website that jumped out at me was “their energy source is alternative.” Of course, the question I’d ask is, “alternative to what?” Up until the lat sixties, 100% of Ontario’s electricity mix was renewable. It was hydro generation, which is why we have this strange language relic in Ontario where we call all electricity “hydro.” In the late sixties, however, we introduced “alternative” energy sources. You know, things like coal, and nuclear. Just forty years later, and now “hydro” is the alternative.

Next, “their food [is] organic.” Here’s a fun pop-quiz: what’s the opposite of organic food? Ask most people in a supermarket, and they’re going to say “normal.” There’s organic food, and then there’s normal food. Well, we know that there’s nothing normal about putting poisons (pesticides) on your food. Or about building an entire agricultural system around oil-based fertilizers.

And finally, Durika is referred to as an “eco-village.” Over the past week I’ve been struggling a bit to explain to people what Durika is. It’s a place where people understand that materials need to be used in continuous cycles. It’s a place with natural energy, instead of the unnatural alternatives. It’s a place where they grow normal food, not food with artificial chemicals in the form of pesticides and fertilizers. Durika is a village first, and eco-village second. I know, of course, that it is a very special and extraordinary place, but it shouldn’t be. It’s just a place where, more or less, things are done right.

Thanks to your work, to the people of Durika, and to other communities like it, we are proving that there are realistic, wise solutions to the problems our communities and our planet are facing. And when you do that, when you take political ideas and turn them into real action, that’s when you can look your biggest critics in the eye and say, “who’s crazy now?”

How much time? About twenty years. How much time has it taken us to find this dump? About twenty years. And the next one will take even longer.

We’re the only species on this planet that makes true waste — as in, something that doesn’t go on to become food for something else. Looking at it that way, waste is economic inefficiency. Waste is lost profit. The only true solution to our waste problem is to eliminate waste altogether.

I know, sounds crazy, right? It’s not. In the past three years alone, Toronto has reduced the number of trucks we send to Michigan from 143 a day to 80. (And no, we didn’t just get bigger trucks.) We’ve done that by diverting recyclables and organics, and that’s just the tip of the (melting) iceberg. The real magic happens when you start using materials in continuous cycles.

Take the beer store, for example. They get back and reuse 96% of the bottles they sell! Ontario’s announcement that they’ll start doing this with LCBO products as well is a huge step in the right direction. Just think, if hungover people have the wherewithal to return bottles, how much more could we do with the packaging of non-intoxicating products?!

The bottom line is that we need to stop subsidizing waste, and start making manufacturers responsible for their own products. Author Paul Hawken often writes about having three categories of waste:

1. Consumables. Anything that can biodegrade completely and harmlessly. That includes clothes (assuming we stop putting other weird stuff in them) and food (assuming we stop spraying them with toxic pesticides).
2. Products of service, like cars, TVs and refrigerators would be “leased” to the customer, ultimately to be returned to the manufacturer who would be responsible for the product’s recycling or reuse.
3. Unmarkatables. This is the nasty stuff, like radioactive isotopes, toxins, and chemicals that bioaccumulate (build-up) in your body. Manufacturers really shouldn’t be producing these things at all, but if they do, they’ll pay to have them stored in “parking lots” until they can figure out how to neutralize them.

So, you can either make products that are 100% biodegradable, figure out how to reuse the parts, or pay the government to store your waste for you.

Anyone who thinks waste reduction, and ultimately elimination, isn’t realistic, should ask themselves one question. How realistic is the idea that we can just keep finding new dumps forever? (To say nothing of all the virgin materials we keep extracting unnecessarily.)

We need to start now, so that by the time this dump is full we won’t have to go looking for another one. Let’s not waste the next twenty years. (Ah ha! There’s the pun I was looking for.)

ps. By the way, this new dump is located in some of Ontario’s (and therefore, Toronto’s) prime agricultural land. As our garbage starts to break down it will leach into the earth that grows our food. The phrase “don’t shit where you eat” comes to mind.

I had a fun time trying to imagine what the Ben & Jerry’s boardroom brainstorm would have sounded like.

Ben: Ok, we need to do some sort of good-will PR thing.
Jerry: Let’s see…ice cream….
Ben: …cools you down…
Jerry: …when it’s hot…
Ben: Global Warming!
Jerry: That’s it! That’s so hot!
Ben: You mean cool.
Jerry: Is that what the kids are saying these days?

Or maybe Jerry really cares. The point isn’t to pick on my friends at the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, nor do I want to criticize anyone who makes delicious ice cream, but there’s one thing I find particularly bizarre about this campaign.

Can you spot it? No, it’s not the illustration of Earth in an ice cream cone (though I’m not quite sure what that’s about). And no, it’s not the fact that on the Ben & Jerry’s homepage there’s a flash animation (if you wait a few seconds) of a cow licking an ice cream cone (weird).

What really doesn’t make sense to me — and what I can’t believe wasn’t spotted or addressed by anyone at either organization — is the use of cows as an anti-global warming mascot. Why? Because cow farts cause global warming.

There. I said it.

Cows, though their farts and otherwise, produce large amounts of methane gas, which is the second greatest contributor to global warming after CO₂. Some studies have even suggested that in some regions cows contribute more to global warming than cars, while others have concluded that eating meat is just as bad for the climate as driving an SUV.

According to this blog’s first-ever anonymous source, the OCAA has already received several complaints about their partnership with B&J, including the observation that B&J’s products aren’t locally produced, meaning the involvement of long refrigerated-truck trips.

I’m glad to see the climate crisis getting people’s attention, I do think global warming campaigns can and should be fun, and I know I shouldn’t really be criticizing any company that wants to do their part. At the same time, global warming is a complex issue that cannot be easily solved. I don’t think we do ourselves any favours by reducing the whole issue to one paragraph, and then pretending to solve it with one sentence.

People are smarter than that, and deserve to be given more credit.

Ok, I’m done my party-pooping for the day. (And yes, after watching the protesting cows I did grab a delicious ice cream cone. It cheered me up a bit.)

Tags: lick, global, warming, ontario, clean, air, alliance, cow, cows, farts, methane

At one point in the doc, Dr. Mark Winston claimed that, “without bees, human society as we know it would not exist.” Now I’m a pretty eco-conscious guy, but even I wanted to laugh at such a silly statement. That is, until he explained that without bee pollination, the overwhelming majority of our agriculture couldn’t exist.

That would be a problem. Because, like, we humans totally love to eat.

That’s why I was a little concerned today to learn that diversity in bees and wild flowers is declining, bees are being killed by pesticides, and that bumblebees could even face extinction.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Sure Chris, I understand that we need bees to make food, and I like to eat, but protecting bees will hurt the economy, and that’s the most important thing. I want jobs, not bees!”

Good point. However, according to Simon Potts from the University of Reading, the economic value of pollination worldwide is over $100 billion Canadian each year. (And according to Doug Woodward–a Green Party member from St. Catharines who may or may not know what he’s talking about–Potts is “low by a factor of maybe 1000.”)

In conclusion, whether you’re into survival, money, or both, bees are your friend.

Tags: bees, the nature of things, pollination, agriculture, extinction, economy, economic, value