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“More needs to be done” said President Bush about the current world food crisis. And one would think he has the right to make that statement after requesting $620 million from congress for food aid (another $150 million for some sort of development project).

The problem is that America hasn’t actually been that generous. To start, their aid continues to be “tied”, meaning that all of the supplies purchased with that money must be purchased from American suppliers. Buying goods from specified suppliers, at specified prices, means the money doesn’t go as far as it could if the World Food Programme were able to look for the most cost-effective source. In fact, it loses 30 per cent of its value. So Mr. Bush only really pledged $434 million.

Well, that’s still a lot, right? Not quite. Because the goods are purchased in America, from American farmers and manufacturers, the money stays put. It doesn’t go to farmers in the affected areas who would benefit from increased revenue to expand their capabilities, breaking the cycle of subsistence and reducing the need for hand outs in the future. It doesn’t enter the poor economies in the form of extra jobs or higher wages, which would give those workers the means to purchase their food rather than wait for the handout. Instead, the money, up to 80% of it, just gets redistributed through the US to citizens with enormous wealth, compared to those needing the aid. The result is that George will only have to give away $124 million, the rest is farm aid for his own people.

Again, $124 million isn’t chump change, but I would like to take this opportunity to point out what my own (Canadian) government has done, because miraculously, they’ve done something worth bragging about. We’ve pledged $50 million of one hundred percent un-tied aid!

That’s right; the World Food Programme can spend the money in the most efficient way they find. They can spend it in the economies that need the boost most. And spending it that way will turn a hand out into a hand up.

Here in Canada, we have just over 33 million people. Down in dem der states, they’ve got just over 300 million. Now, I’ll make allowances for their current “economic downturn” (we still don’t want to use the term recession, of course). Nevertheless they’re sending just two and a half times more money out of the country than we are, yet they have 10 times the population. Something doesn’t add up here. Especially when you consider Bush’s statement that America “believe[s] in the timeless truth, to whom much is given, much is expected.”

I say it’s time for the “Leader of the Free World” to step up and lead, to provide some real aid, to do the ‘more’ that by his own admission is needed, and to live up to the expectation that comes with being the country to whom the most is given.

~~In the mean time, we can all give too, by visiting the WFP websiteand contributing a few days worth of latte money. Or by going to www.freerice.com and testing your vocabulary!

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I try to be an EcoOptimist, and normally I succeed, but the last few days, things have been looking kind of gloomy.

I’ve been reading No Impact Man, and have been quite inspired to make some serious changes. I mean, if he can do it in New York, surely I can do it in the middle of the Prairies.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been cultivating a list of actions that I can take to make my footprint even lighter, and also documenting the changes that I’ve already made. When I wrote it down, I was actually quite impressed the length of the “been there, done that” list. I’ve got a low-flow toilet (which I rigged up myself). I compost everything. I recycle, even though I live in the only major North-American city that still doesn’t offer curb-side pick-up. I use cloth bags as often as I can and reuse the plastic bags I do have a dozen times over. My fiancé and I rarely eat beef, opting instead for an occasional cut of venison hunted by family members to satisfy our red meat urges. I’m even phasing out the cleaning chemicals in my house and replacing them with borax and vinegar.

On the “to-do” list, I put everything from canning my own vegetables to switching to reusable feminine products. I was pretty proud of myself. And feeling quite up-beat about the future of our species.

Then I started looking around me. I see people at work put one-sided paper (or worse, naked paper with a bent corner) into the recycling bin, rather than the reuse bin 3.5 inches away. I watched my sister fill a garbage bag with pop bottles, walk right past the recycling bin and put it in the dumpster. I even discovered that she leaves her computer running every minute of every day of the year, and when I calculated that it costs her $7 per month to do so, she didn’t think that was very much.

I took the opportunity of having sushi for dinner the other night, since I’m in Vancouver, and halfway through I looked at my plate and wondered how these different species are harvested. So I visited the Vancouver aquarium website and discovered that most of my dinner was trolled, and that we’re down to the last 10% of our tuna stocks. I’m at a conference this week where everything edible is presented in handy, single-serving disposable packages – right down to the honey in individual glass jars.

On the policy front, we’ve got George W. telling us that the global rise in food prices has nothing to do with putting food in our gas tanks, it is in fact due to those pesky Chinese wanting to eat more than a subsistence diet including - if you can believe the audacity - meat every week! So he’s continuing with his plan to run 15% of American cars on ethanol in the next 10 years. I haven’t heard of Harper addressing the issue specifically, but no matter, as his answers typically consist of “Whatever Bush said”.

The icing on the cake was when I found out yesterday, that evidence is starting to suggest that wind turbines are killing huge numbers of migrating bats. Bats scarf down their body-weight in insects daily; insects that make people and crops sick. Without them we’ll need more pesticides and more pharmaceuticals, and my wind offsets are contributing to that.

My EcoConsciousness is being over run with panic and EcoGuilt.

I know that when I get home and I see the last of my bleach supply, the last of my plastic bags, the first of my (hopefully) delicious, homemade pickles I’ll feel better again. I’ll feel like the human race isn’t so spoiled and lazy that it won’t save itself. But the question will still be there: does it matter what I do if I’m (almost) the only one doing it?

If anyone can offer a pep-talk, I would very much appreciate it.

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In a word: no.

“But I thought this girl was an environmentalist” you say?! Well, I am, but I’m also a scientist, and as such I know that the one thing the nay-sayers have right is that humans are indeed too puny and insignificant to destroy the big rock we live on.

Nope, the world will go on, no matter how much CO2 we emit, no matter how many plastic bags we throw away, no matter how many rainforests we destroy, no matter how many nuclear bombs we “test”. The planet won’t alter course, won’t implode or fall out of the sky, won’t, in short, bat an eyelash.

The fact is that the planet has already survived hot times, cold times, meteors and mass extinctions. There have been rainforests at the poles and seas on top of the prairies, and the Pangaea of old has been cracked and splintered into the continents we know today.

Yet amazingly, the Earth has persisted.

So, you ask, do I think climate change is bogus? No. Do I think the people who tell me to save the trees and the whales are a bunch of lunatics that should be ignored? Absolutely not. Our changing environment is the single greatest threat to humanity that has ever existed. And therein lies the key.

Before I explain further, please raise your hand if you’ve ever peed in a pool… I’m willing to bet everyone’s hand went up. Personally I had to put up both hands… and both feet! And really, what’s wrong with peeing in the pool? The pool itself doesn’t get damaged by urine. The liner doesn’t disintegrate, the pumps don’t jam up. And pee is essentially sterile, so it doesn’t actually make the water dirty.

But if nothing bad happens from peeing in the pool, then why are we all told not to do it? It’s about perception and value assignation.

Most people love to swim. It’s a great way to exercise and a great way to cool off on a hot day. Because the water in a pool provides us with those opportunities, we each assign value to the water based on how much we like it. Nobody, by the way, cares two snits about the actual pool, we just care that it holds the water that we swim in. Society as a whole, also assigns value: to the purity of the water – or at least to the perceived purity of the water. (I’ll save the chlorine debate for another time.)

So let’s say we crowd a pool full of kids, and tell them to let their bladders loose, and to keep doing so, for hours or days or however long it takes. Eventually, the pool will start to smell like pee and look like pee. Society’s perception of what is clean tells us that pee doesn’t make the cut (although I’d be willing to bet that uric acid does just as good a job of controlling bacterial and algal growth as bromine). No one’s mother wants their kid sitting in something dirty, so the swimmers/peers will get out of the pool. If they can no longer swim in the pool, they will grieve the loss of the thing that personally valued.

But what of the pool? It’s still there. The urine-laden water will eventually be replaced by rainwater, which will probably sprout lots of algae, turning the water green. It will still exist, essentially unchanged and certainly undamaged, but it won’t possess the characteristics that we valued - namely clear, see-through water.

If we extend this scenario to the whole planet, we see that there’s only one difference: we can keep peeing in the planetary pool without fear of breaking it, but we also realize that we can’t climb out of the pool once the water turns yellow.

Our descendants will have to live in a world where the things our generation valued have either been fundamentally altered, or have disappeared altogether. It’s not a question of planetary survival; it’s a question of humanity’s way of life. If we dig up and cut down all of the world’s resources, and send them to the dump, we will eventually have to start looking to the dump for our resources. If we fill the air with toxic dust we’ll have to consider asthma a fact of life. If we let bees and ants and butterflies disappear, we’ll have to learn to accept pine needles as replacements for the vegetables we can no longer grow.

But it will still be Earth, and Earth will still go around the sun, and every atom that’s here tomorrow will be the same atom that was here yesterday. And no one cares about the planet any more than they do the pool: we care about the things the planet holds, and we especially care about how those things are arranged. And the problem lies in the fact that we’re rearranging those things, and we’re at risk of not liking the result. More to the point, we’re at risk of not being able to cope with the result.

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Maybe it was the martinis I had already drunk, or the beers he had already drunk, or maybe it’s just plain impossible to have a discussion about Biofuels without getting heated. But boy, did I have a doozy on Friday.

It all started with an energetic, but cool-headed conversation with a friend’s husband (who is an engineer, but grew up on a farm) about Biofuels, the government’s policy on using our farmland to put ethanol into gas tanks, and what a generally lousy plan that is in terms of the Climate Change.

I can’t remember what his point was, but I remember nodding vigorously when he made, so clearly I approved. Then for my part I pointed out that we have zero chance of getting the government to back off of this plan because it’s too sweet a deal in terms of PR. They get to appear to care about the environment because the overwhelming majority of our citizens aren’t well enough informed to realize that it takes more fossil fuel to raise the crop and process the ethanol, (not to mention cut down the rainforest to grow the same crop for food because we didn’t leave ourselves enough farm space in our own country to do that), than it would to just burn the gas in our cars in the first place. At the same time, by paying more for an ethanol crop than they would for the same product sold as food, the government is providing a farm subsidy, making farmers happy.

Happy farmers and happy lay people mean a happy government and, in this case, a really bad policy.

At this point though, a young man sitting a few seats away leaned over an asked if I could please explain how on earth this could possibly be considered a subsidy. So I re-capped for him: in the government’s report “A Climate Change Plan for the Purposes of the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act”, they outlined a $1.5 Billion renewable fuels strategy to help farmers grow crops for fuels. When the government gives money to a group of people to bolster the production of their product, it’s generally called a subsidy. But this guy still wasn’t getting it.

Somehow the discussion then veered away from Biofuels specifically and towards agriculture and GHG emissions in general. At which point, he presented his most sensational argument yet: agriculture in North America is actually a carbon sink because, before we all came here there were 2 million buffalo roaming the prairies. We mere humans, he contended, with all of our cows (…and pigs and chickens), our tractors and our fertilizers can’t possibly create more GHG equivalents than those free-ranging buffalo and their methaney farts!

I should have walked away at this point. Ok, I should have walked away well before this point. But, whether due to the Martini-effect, or my general abhorrence of stupidity, I stayed.

I argued that any rational person, who took 3rd grade math can add up the GHGs emitted from our 15.6 million farmed cattle, 13.6 million hogs, the acreage tilled with petroleum-powered machinery to feed those animals, the production for and release onto those crops of hydrocarbon-based synthetic fertilizers, and the transportation of all of those fertilizers, crops and animals around and see that we get a bigger number than we do from the calculating rumblings of a buffalo’s gut.

But he STILL didn’t get it.

Sometimes, I really worry that it’s hopeless.

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Al Gore will be speaking to the UN Climate Change Conference this week in Bali calling for a treaty that goes far beyond Kyoto.

This treaty will include every country in the world, developed or otherwise. It will call for a moratorium on new coal-fired power generators that do not include CO2 capture and storage. And most revolutionary of all, it will propose, not an addition of tax, but a change from a tax system based on income, to one based on pollution.

Finally, the treaty he proposes should be ratified in two years, and will call on world leaders to meet several times per year until the situation is under control.

And to help make his proposal, Al Gore is asking for your help. He will take with him on stage a petition showing support for his treaty, which you can sign at ClimateProtect.org

Sign today to stand with Al in Bali!

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