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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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This was my first post as a Rethos Journalist! As part of the Rethos journalism team, I’ll post a new article every couple of weeks, the next coming out November 1. Make sure to check them out, and join Rethos if you haven’t already.

photo via Treehugger

About four months ago, I started my blog. Determined to subject the public to my rantings, rather than keeping it a personal journal type of blog, I’ve been promoting it rather vigorously, partly by participating in conversations on other blogs and forums. And in doing so, I’ve noticed a very disturbing trend: militant and elitist environmentalism.

I have yet to come across a forum that doesn’t have a thread to the effect of “What did you do for the environment today,” and invariably these threads go something like this:

“I put a water saver in my toilet.”

“I decided only to flush (my already low-flow toilet) when I do a number two.”

“I do my number two right in the compost pile.”

“I haven’t bought a new shirt in 10 years.”

“I haven’t washed my shirt in 10 years.”

“I haven’t washed myself in 10 years.”

Seriously? Come on people. Does anyone think this one-upmanship really gets us anywhere? It is possible to be an EcoCrusader without subjecting one’s neighbours to body-odour.

Or probably the best example I have is from a blog called “How do I Recycle This?” One woman wrote in that she was out for dinner with some friends and someone at the table ordered mussels. When they were finished, there was a bowl full of shells, and she was wondering if there was a way to reuse them, if she was ever in that situation again. One oh so helpful “eco-elitist” replied that, if she actually cared about the environment, she wouldn’t have eaten them in the first place.

Now, what did he think he was going to accomplish with this attitude? Here was a person who had not only considered recycling something that most people wouldn’t look at twice, she had actually followed up the thought by actively researching a solution to the problem. She was being proactive. She deserved a big fat high-five. Not a snarky ‘you-should-be-doing-more’ reply.

Because really, we could all be doing more. We could all forsake electricity entirely. We could move to caves and eat the organic lichen off the walls. We could hold in our farts to save the methane. We could do many things. But the one thing we absolutely MUST do, is support each other.

Being the eco-minded woman that I am, I love to imagine waking up in the morning to a world with six billion people who choose smaller cars, eat only in-season food, buy wind power, and keep a composter. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen until the physical evidence of what is happening to our planet blatantly stares all six billion of its inhabitants in the face. And that might not happen until it’s too late.

In the mean time, the future of the world essentially rests on our shoulders. It rests with those of us who educate ourselves, share our knowledge with others, and make better choices every day. But some (in fact, I fear many) of us, are determined to be EcoZealots, and in so being are systematically destroying the work the others do.

This behaviour accomplishes nothing but to guarantee that environmentalism never truly gains mainstream status. It guarantees the continuation of the “crazy hippie” stereotype. It guarantees the alienation of anyone not yet committed to mitigating the dangerous changes that our planet is undergoing.

Until my dreams come true and all six billion of us are on board, we can’t afford to lose anyone who signs up; no matter how small a registration fee they pay. We have to applaud every CFL, every roll of recycled toilet paper, every mussel shell recycled, because we have an infinitely better chance of getting this planet back in shape with millions making these meager changes, than if a select few of us move back to the lichen caves, live methane-neutral and lament the others not following.

Let’s not forget, it’s about the planet, not bragging rights. Down with EcoElitism!

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Free Burma

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