20 Years Ago Today

It was my last year of university, and I'd made friends with a great bunch of people who unfortunately are no longer in my life. My friend Matthew, his girlfriend of the time whose name I do not even recall, and her sister Anne who was a friend and classmate of mine who shared some Philosophy classes with me. There was some kind of "environment club" at the university, and we were all members. There was a lot of talk around the world of reviving Earth Day, which was something that had taken place 20 years prior to then, back in 1970, but somehow did not become an annual event. The planet was in trouble and needed our help - and we rose to the call. The four of us spearheaded the efforts in the local community, and after weeks of planning we proudly pulled off a pretty spectacular day to celebrate the Planet we call home - Mother Earth.

We started the day with a sunrise ceremony at the lookoff (pictured). Incidentially, the house that my wife-to-be grew up in is in that picture - though it would be a number of years yet before I would meet her. The little church we got married in is hidden amongst some trees in the foreground. Unfortunately I don't recall exactly what was involved in our sunrise ceremony - I've got a pretty terrible memory like that. I do recall that afterwards we all went back to my place for a pancake breakfast. And after this we had a full day ahead of us in the Student Union Building at the University - we'd booked the main level and had tables and booths set up over the whole area, for people and organisations to put on displays and talk about the environment, and concrete ways we could do something positive to help. My terrible memory fails me again as to just what this all entailed - I do recall that we had a dozen or more people set up in booths and tables, I just do not recall what they all were. I do recall there was one lady with a cloth diapering business who was giving out information on how much better cloth diapering was for the environment, than disposables. Incidentally, that link is to the blog of the woman who owns the store where my wife works - a cloth diapering store here in Ottawa. When our fist child was born 8 years ago now, my wife was dead-set against my idea of using cloth diapers. But I managed to convert her, and now she calls herself a cloth-diapering evangelist :-)

I recall in the time leading up to this Earth Day revival there was a call in about it on the weekly CBC radio show Cross Country Checkup. I called in and got on the air and was talking about one little thing that I'd recently started doing to help the planet - using a brush and mug for shaving, instead of disposable cans of shaving cream. Not only does this method produce significantly less garbage than cans of shaving cream, but you also get a much better shave, to boot! And yes, I still do this. As a datapoint the bar of shaving soap currently in my mug has to be over a year old, and has at least as long left on it. You cannot beat that for a couple of bucks!

For the most part I've kept up my commitment to the planet over the years, and have tried to strengthen it. Though somewhere along the line I'd lost my passion for this day - Earth Day. I'm not sure where it went along the way, really, but this year I resolve to revive it. I think part of the reason for me is that I've been a bit too much of a cynic, and of the mind that taking care of the Earth is something we need to do every day, not just on one day a year. I wrote a bit about this recently regarding Earth Hour. But nonetheless I think having a day set aside for this is useful - it can be thought of as a milestone day, where we can look back over the last 12 months since the last one, and reflect upon what we personally have done to improve our environmental footprint. Sure, it is not enough to set aside one day out of 365 to care about the planet. But there is nothing wrong with setting aside that day to reflect upon the progress (or lack thereof) that we've made over the past 364, and to make resolutions to guide us through the next year.

So by this measure, the fact that I took the bus to work today is fairly meaningless - unless I follow it up by taking the bus to work a lot more over the next year. Which in fact I intend to do. As I've written before, in the months prior to my getting cut at Nortel I'd actually managed to start taking the bus 3 or 4 times a week, and was pretty pleased with myself as a result. Then things got chaotic with losing my job and so forth - but now I'm in the new job for just shy of a year now and this is no longer an excuse, so it is time to get off my lazy arse and get used to a new bus schedule. I don't think I will ever bus every day due to various factors, but I do think I can get myself bussing 3 or 4 days a week again. So next year at this time we can look back and see how well I've progressed in that area.

Something we've made great progress in over the last year is local food, and I hope to further these efforts even more over the next year. For close to a decade now we've been getting most of our beef from a local farmer. Grass fed, please. I'm sure most of us have already heard the statistics on how eating a vegetarian diet has such an incredibly lower environmental impact - according to Diet for a Small Planet it takes roughly 25 times the resources to get our protein from feedlot animals, rather than plants. But another fact that often gets overlooked almost comes from Diet for a Small Planet - pastured beef actually requires only about 1/8th the resources as the feedlot variety that is sold in grocery stores. So while it is still more wasteful than vegetarianism, it is only a factor of about 3x rather than about 25x. So if you want to continue to eat meat, but help the planet as well, find a good source of local grass fed beef to replace what you currently buy at the supermarket. Here in Ottawa you can use the Ottawa Foodies Localvore Thread that I started, to help you in that endeavor.

I guess I'll wrap it up here - there is lots more I could ramble on about, I'm sure. But I'll leave it at that. I think it has been a pretty good year for me and my commitment to the planet, and I think the year to come will be an even better one. Here's hoping that my writeup on next year's Earth Day will confirm that. And here's hoping you all will make similar efforts in your own lives.