Environmental Impact: Farming vs. Oil Sands Mining

Listening to the radio at work today, I heard about 12 protesters angry about the Saskatchewan government's "sale" of the oil sands to oil companies. A clip of one of the protesters came on who complained a little too passionately that Saskatchewan is meant for farming, not mining, or something along those lines. I couldn't help but laugh out loud.

I know the mining of the oil sands that's going on in Alberta has an enormous impact, but I can't help but think that no matter what people say or how much they protest, that oil is going to be mined. One can only wish it was done better, namely by using the fewest resources possible and with strict monitoring and control of the pollution going on. Trying to stop the oil from being extracted at all borders on crazy. The only way to stop it is to make alternatives to oil cheaper, or find other sources of oil that aren't as destructive to mine. As it is, the government is saying that horizontal drilling technology will be used rather than the famously devastating strip mining that's being done in Alberta.

What really blew me away was the typical sort of ignorant comment made by someone other people probably will think of as an "environmentalist" or out-of-touch hippy, that farming would be a better use of the province. A lot of people from the prairies (and elsewhere, but especially in the prairies) don't realize the environmental impact of putting hundreds of thousands of square kilometers into agricultural production. (Never mind the fact that farming isn't exactly a cash cow since cheap food is the base of our complex, well-developed, diversified economy. Farming's so bad a business to be in that there's a joke that passing on the family farm to one's children is child abuse.)

Recently my work site was mowed. The site is marshy, home to cattails and many birds. What isn't under water or directly being trod upon by human activity is allowed to freely grow wild, and whatever grows there, I've noticed, people commonly refer to as "weeds." So whatever's wild is considered a weed, because if it doesn't come with a label from a store, it must be a weed. Anyway, before the site was mowed various species of birds had abundant choices of tall "weeds" to hide in. Afterward, most of the birds that had been there disappeared, or presumably were limited to the unmowed sections of the site and city birds, such as crows and magpies, moved in.

This is one small area, a few acres in size. Imagine the impact of plowing fields and growing monocultures there. Mining the oil sands might be polluting in nature, but farming, by its very scope undoubtedly has a greater impact. The impact of cutting down on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides and growing much more mixed crops or leaving more land to grow wild or at least have hedges for birds and bees and other pollinators (all of which we need for pollination anyway, and seem to be running out of) is not something people talk much about, except in greenie circles. But the oil sands, everybody knows they're bad. I don't think it even goes as far as people just accepting they need to eat and the current agricultural system is the one we've got. It's simply not even considered, not even known that agricultural is one of the biggest ways humanity makes an impact on the natural environment. People with oil heating in their homes and workplaces also need to stay warm and probably appreciate oil being mined, especially with prices going up all the time, but there really isn't a whole lot of oil heating around here, so I guess they're just assuming people can just suck it up and drive less, which, yes, they can, much as they whine, that is one thing that most people could do much, much less of.

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Gardening, Insect Welfare

My gardening thus far hasn't been overly successful. My overzealous drip irrigation coordinator over-watered my garden (really just a modest flowerbed) at the beginning, which meant my whole first crop of carrots didn't sprout. I only got two heads of lettuce of a whole row I planted, presumably because there wasn't enough sunlight reaching that corner of the bed each day early on and then because it was too hot, or something along those lines. I tried to grow cucumber plants without a trellis, but today I gave up and started training them up a hastily/lazily constructed trellis-contraption. (I had to go to Home Depot and Co-op to find everything I needed. I hate Home Depot because it has too much stuff and everything's all over the place. I feel almost panicky in there. Ah, consumerism, big box stores, economies of scale, love it, love it, love it. Both stores are frequently sold out of what I need and short on staff that will actually approach you if you're looking lost (or terrified, as in my case).) The cucumbers were pretty well out of control at this point, with vines going everywhere and not a lot of actual cucumbers being produced. I'd read something about pruning, but many people apparently don't. I did some pruning where it seemed the least painful option for me, if not for the plant. I'd also looked into why the plant might not be producing any cucumbers and found a bit about pollination. But I watched several pollinators help themselves to the flowers and even felt compelled to help out a bee by holding still a vine I'd been working with when the bee landed on it.

And on the subject of insects, I have to (half seriously) ask why PETA or someone like that hasn't tried to outlaw fly strips. We have a couple at my work place and I try to hit flies with the swatter before they land on the strip because it bothers me to watch them struggling to try to free themselves and then just hanging there with their front legs outstretched or in a position that would be spine-breaking if they, uh, had spines? (I confess I don't know a whole lot about the anatomy of flies.) Moths also get caught up in the strips sometimes, leaving a trail of dust. I know most people think moths are pretty disgusting, but they're kind of beautiful with their delicate antennae. It'd probably be easier to get rid of fly strips than to get most people to give up meat. And frankly, insects are a lot more important in the ecological scheme of things than fuzzy, cute mammals. They're important for breaking down dead plants and animals and pollination. And we kill them all using broad insecticides and pesticides (and fly strips), and then worry later when we seem to be having a problem with the pollinators we need for a huge portion of our food supply. Anyway... Just another day in the life of me.

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Simple Solutions

There are some people in my life I'd describe as ubergeeks. By comparison, I'm almost a Luddite. To me, using more technology to do something that was previously relatively straightforward is just more trouble than it's worth (not to mention some other, less kind adjectives), and it usually requires more materials to be wasted and more energy to be consumed. They rave about the "convenience" and "safety" of radio frequency chips and how nice it is to have automatic deadbolts on their homes' doors. All I can think is that I'm not really convinced I want to implant these chips in my skin (their first choice for "convenience") or put them in my clothing, my wallet, my purse just so I can "easily" open the door, "No more fumbling with a key," - though if you don't go the implant route you still have to passing your chip in whatever it's on or in over that reader like an idiot until it's picked up, depending on the range and the setup. (When the power goes out there's a backup battery, when you lock yourself out there's a backup key hidden somewhere, when the door needs pulling to actually get the bolt to slide into place, well, rejigger the door. And it's all safe, remember, never mind the increasing skittishness by scientists and health agencies on cell phones and wireless networks and other things that require waves to be passing through the air, through our bodies, to make our lives convenient - and maybe cancerous, the jury's still out, and probably will be for decades.)

Anyhow, Luddite and anti-consumer that I am, I look for the simple solution as often as possible and won't buy something if it's not up to my specs. If I can't find a product that does what I want, I learn to live without rather than waste my hard-earned money. I complain, to the great annoyance of my ubernerd, shop for fun and distraction friends and family, about how poorly designed things are. My latest annoyance is that the apartment we moved into has one of these stupid built in drain covers, the type that turns and falls into place. This is probably not such a big deal if you have short hair, but if you have long hair, like I do, it posed a problem when the drain got clogged after a couple of months. The drain cover also leads to slower drainage in the first place, because it physically blocks the flow, so a clog becomes annoying that much faster. I asked for advice from people with similar drains. What I got was, "Mine just twists off," which was no help to me. But worse, "I just use Drano," and "You know there's not really a bunch of chemicals in there, it's mostly just pieces of aluminum that cut through the clog." And I thought, but didn't say, "Great, sharp pieces of aluminum (which may or may not lead to dementia if you're using it as a deodorant or drinking out of it) in the water supply, along with everything else." I also had experience with Drano and knew it was a poor substitute for just getting out the rubber gloves and reaching into the drain and pulling out the hair. You have to use it more frequently, and it's not much of a leap to think that the aluminum cutting the clog, hair especially, might mean the hair is getting trapped somewhere further down the line, creating, at some point in the future, a much harder to reach clog. I Googled, trying to figure out how to remove the particular type of drain cover I've got. I dismissed someone's humorously phrased suggestion that you just use the plunger, thinking, for some reason, that a plunger wouldn't work on a drain with this type of drain cover, though I knew plungers to be useful on bath tub drains in general. Well, eventually, I got annoyed. My eyesight's not the best, and I don't have tools to get to a screw underneath something in a tight space. I used the plunger. And it worked. Now I don't have to buy Drano or put more foreign crap than I already do into our lakes and streams. Unfortunately, my reliance on land lines and plungers really isn't making me popular with my tech-embracing friends, but that's another problem altogether.

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Canada's Green Plans, Most Effective Actions to Fight Climate Change

I was listening to the radio at work when a program attempted to break down the two leading Canadian political parties' green plans. The difference between talking with an economist or policy analyst (what they actually had on the show) and a scientist was apparent. Also, too much political correctness or "neutrality" was apparent. What is often heard on the streets of Western Canada is that the Liberals are trying to rob the West again, and this is just not accurate. It reflects a wider ignorance (I mean this in a blunt way, God knows I wish people had all the information needed to really understand the situation) on this issue. The average person is having a really hard time understanding the difference between the two plans.

The Conservative plan, as it stands, might be much worse for the West than the Liberal plan. The Liberal plan makes allowances for rural people who need to use more fuel. It also is a straight tax, which will affect all consumers, right across the country, because most everyone buys gas or oil, and everyone does buy products which require oil to produce or bring to market (everything does, especially food). The real nasty part for the West is not a burden that's equally shared, since it doesn't affect British Columbia at all compared to Alberta and Saskatchewan. That extra tax burden comes from the fact that these two provinces rely heavily on coal for energy. But the reality is, to offset that, more of the tax money pulled in can be spent in those provinces to get these provinces off of coal, because that's the whole point: to stop emitting so much greenhouse gases. This could mean spending in several ways. One of the best ways to reduce emissions would be to update building codes to increase insulation to greatly reduce the amount of energy needed to heat and cool buildings (residential and commercial). This is not so cheap, so the tax money collected under the Liberal Green Shift could be used to help with this burden. Fortunately, these provinces also tend to have some of the greatest weather extremes of hot and cold, which means much more bang for the buck. The price of natural gas (and coal) will continue to rise, since these are non-renewable resources, so it's best to start using less and less of them. Additionally, tax money could be spent on installing renewable sources of energy, such as wind, solar and geothermal (hydro is problematic, and not necessarily climate friendly for many reasons). Money can also be invested in research and development of better renewable energy technologies and also carbon sequestration technologies. There's no reason why the excess tax burden on these two provinces can't be spent back in those provinces to help draw down that burden.

The Conservative plan, on the other hand, really could be worse for the west in that it deals with corporations and sets hard targets to bring down "energy intensity." Most people don't seem to understand the bottom line with energy intensity. Although this means you use less energy to produce any given output or product (including oil from the oil sands), it does not mean you have to bring down your total greenhouse gases. This means that companies could be burdened with trying to meet these targets for energy intensity and paying a fine or tax when they don't, but still be putting out ever more emissions on the whole. The oil sands industry is one of the most "energy intense" industries in the country, so it will doubtless be affected, and it is, as everyone knows, in the West. The West has plenty of resource industries that could be hit hard by this, and it may be that some of these industries are forced out of business by these targets, because at some point, the product becomes so expense to produce that consumers of it may go elsewhere, or it cannot be competitive in the marketplace, assuming companies are passing on to their customers the costs of bringing in new technologies and practices to decrease energy intensity or alternatively paying taxes for not reaching their targets. This plan might not be all that great for fighting climate change and still cause financial meltdown in some sectors.

As a final note, people need to come from a base understanding of the issue of climate change, and also energy scarcity to fully grasp the importance of these plans and the differences between them. This is not about "saving the planet" as one caller to the radio show moaned. This is about saving our civilization and preventing suffering. This has nothing to do with cute arctic creatures and everything to do with keep the cogs of our own machine turning enough so that we all get fed and clothed and sheltered. The phrase "save the planet" should be put out to pasture, because the planet isn't the one that needs to be saved. It's also clear that people still don't really understand where greenhouse gases come from by source. There's still a lot of talk about changing how we power our cars when agriculture and buildings are really greater sources of emissions. One of the most obvious things we can do is to change building codes back to a style that would have helped us survive in our homes in the times before we had energy coming down from a far off power plant or a fossil fuel. This is not cheap, but non-renewable energy costs are going to continue to go up and the fuels will eventually become scarce, so it's a practical action anyway. From the agricultural perspective, ultimately our economic and political systems are going to have to stop pushing industrial agriculture which cannot work without abundant, cheap oil and is inefficient and destructive in ecological terms. People need to realize we're eating several times more meat than we ever did in the past and that livestock is far more energy intensive than plant production and produces methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. Don't just drive your car less, stop eating so much beef (and dairy, eggs and other meat). We can't keep running away from this problem and looking at the issue as an economic one versus an environmental one, when this issue is both. Once you realize we're going to increasingly have problems with keeping energy prices down and supplies up, it becomes clear that this is a win-win situation in terms of fighting climate change, and converting to the inevitable new and different forms of energy we'll come to rely on.

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Some NEW, Simple Ways to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Oil Prices Update, Fiction vs. Reality

I'm just about to go to work, so this will be a bit of a combined quick hit post.

Not so long ago I posted my annoyance with somewhat backwards, in my view, behaviour regarding environment and health. As I was doing my news rounds today, I came across this piece on ways beyond the old changing light bulbs in order to reduce GHG emissions:

Using a spring-driven clock instead of an electric prevents 48 grams (1.7 ounces) of carbon-dioxide emissions daily, while air-drying clothes saves 2.3 kilograms (5.1 pounds) daily, the Nairobi-based UN Environment Program said today in an e-mailed statement. Jogging in the park rather than on a treadmill at a gym can cut 1 kilogram of carbon dioxide, or CO2, the main pollutant blamed for global warming.

If full-scale greenhouse gas pricing went into effect, gyms might find themselves not quite so popular or profitable anymore. That 1 kg is presumably for one person's daily workout, so imagine the cost of a steady stream of customers on rows of exercise machines, not to mention the cooling and lighting costs of exercising indoors vs. outdoors. I understand that the gym can seem more convenient and that some climates aren't exactly hospitable to outdoor exercise year round (mine's a good example, but I make do), but humanity needs to learn to be in line with the natural environment instead of being completely inconsiderate of it (increasingly to our own detriment).

And on the constrained energy and surging prices front, The Christian Science Monitor describes how prices for all sorts of goods are set to go up by leaps and bounds because companies can no longer afford to absorb the increasing price of oil (for energy and as an ingredient in products and/or packaging).

And on a personal note, I've been reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven and although it helps pass the time, it also presents a very depressing and somewhat terrifyingly accurate portrait of the problems we're currently looking at, especially for a book done in 1971. When I read the above linked CSM article, especially the sections on road repair and asphalt, I couldn't help but wonder how long it will be before governments look at ways to avoid repairing the roads at all if no substitute is found, or if it will even matter so much the shape of the roads with fewer people all the time able to afford driving on them. It's always important to keep in mind how ever-present petroleum is in everything and in every stage in production for the world's economy. With it becoming more and more expensive as demand exceeds supply, society will quickly gain an education in everything that requires oil in its production and transportation and to what extent as prices shoot up.

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Vermicomposting Update: What not to do

It's been several weeks since I've blogged. I've been busy. Some starts and stops, disappointments and settlings, but it's all neither here nor there. I'm paying my bills and filling my days, so I'm content enough.

I planted my vegetable garden two weeks ago. I've already concluded a few things. First, I probably should have turned the soil deeper down than a few inches, since I imagine my root vegetables aren't going to be too happy if they ever get around to growing. Second, don't let overzealous computer nerds bent on automating everything decide how often to "irrigate" your garden. Even drip irrigation can be too much of a good thing (especially if the soil's probably all compacted below four inches and thus doesn't really drain properly). Third, if you don't know what you're doing, it's probably a good idea to start your veggies indoors since that way you lower your risk of not knowing whether you're pulling weeds or veggie sprouts when your waterlogged garden begins to sprout in all sorts of places (between rows and over every square inch) it's not supposed to. Fourth, treated wood is toxic and you probably shouldn't grow food next to it. Anyhow... a good learning experience. My cucumbers seem to be sprouting, and the others are going to have to tough it out amongst the weeds, until they're big enough to distinguish themselves. (What a disaster!)

But, onto the subject of this post as it's titled. Vermicomposting. I've been doing this for almost two years now. I've turned out a couple of bins' worth of compost. At first I had trouble with mites, and I figure now it's because the bin was too wet. The mites went away, although I don't remember consciously doing too much different. Last summer I had problems with indoor temperature. The bin was hotter than even the apartment, because decomposition in a closed in space produces heat (stick your hand into a pile of long sitting, rotting vegetation for proof of this). My worms started trying (and succeeding) to squeeze out every crack and hole in the bin. Some skittered across the carpet, but I quickly realized the problem because I knew that their temperature tolerances didn't run into the 30 Celsius range, and it was 27 or so in the apartment (pretty much the upper limit of what red wiggler worms can stand), so it had to be hotter in the bin. I actually took the lid off just as some were getting out. I initially made quite a bit of an error in my haste to cool off the bin and prevent the creepy crawlies from running amok in my apartment. I put ice directly on the pile, reasoning energy would be taken up evaporating it and its melt-water, preventing the bin from overheating. Too bad there wasn't enough heat to evaporate the melt water proportionately to how much I was putting in in the form of ice. My bin ended up with a ton of water I had to drain out of it, and a foul, foul smell. I was quite disgusted with myself and pretty sure I'd end up with an uncompostable, unlivable environment for the worms. I was surprised the worms had merely risen to the top of the pile and kept eating away. But things turned out okay. I stopped feeding the bin when it got too full and started a new one. I kept adding dry paper to the old one to sop up water over time and hopefully counter the foul smell and make the environment more manageable for the worms. Nearly a year later the top few inches had composted to black, wet compost, and was dug into a friends' flowerbed (She wasn't concerned about stray pepper or apple seeds or the worms, although I was a little concerned about these non-native worms being tossed outside. But hey, everybody else is doing it, so the cat's pretty much out of the bag on that one. I know, it's not like me to just give up like that, but basically I guess, deep down, non-native worms don't seem much to worry about in the face of bigger problems). Unfortunately, as I scooped out the top few inches of compost, the smell got worse and worse, and at the bottom I found quite a bit of uncomposted, no doubt compacted, stinky and apparently anaerobic wannabe vermicompost.

The lesson here is obviously do not add so much water that you've messed up your bin. It is also that it's probably a good idea to keep your bin from getting so full that it leads to compacting so that the bottom material cannot be easily moved through by the worms and microfriends that break it up. (I ended up keeping the bin cool by freezing 1.5 liter water bottles over night and putting them next to the bin during the day, and it seemed to work out.) However, I just turned the remaining bottom stink (for lack of a better word) and found a few seemingly evolved worms mucking around in it, even though it was difficult for me to pry the lot of it out of the corners of the bin. I added and mixed in a bit of dry newspaper for good measure, and I'll check on it over time again to see how it's going. There's probably as much compost there again as I already scooped out, even though it was compressed into a much smaller, smellier space for months.

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Weighing in on Myanmar

I've been watching the news about Myanmar peripherally since the storm hit. The country is controlled by a military junta (apparently, I'm not going to pretend I knew anything about Myanmar before this happened) which doesn't want to let in aid workers who might secretly be plotting to overthrow them one way or another. So planes have landed in Myanmar, filled with supplies but the aid organizations and countries don't want to just leave the aid there, in the hands of a corrupt government that doesn't seem to care a whole lot about the welfare of the country's people relative to the possibility that they might lose power by letting foreign aid workers onto their soil.

What I don't understand about this is why they don't try alternative means, why they haven't already, to get aid to these people. Aid workers have specialized training, but it looks like many of Myanmar's people are without food or even fuel to cremate the bodies of the dead, and in unsanitary, unsettled conditions like this disease is likely to spread. Why aren't airdrops done, all over the populated areas? With a little work they could even probably provide instructions on how to use specialized equipment or how to provide medical aid through either audio recordings or writing or some other primitive means of communication (pictures?). Instead they wait, while the death toll continues to go up. I know that governments control their airspace, but this is pretty much a win-win for the junta because it will help the people and keep unrest down, while keeping out any possible "spies" or soldiers. This is at least a lesser step than forcibly entering the country to provide aid under a new U.N. policy:

If Myanmar's leaders won't risk losing face by accepting help, people will begin dying in droves from exposure, hunger and disease. The United Nations should step in. France's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has called upon the U.N. to use its newly approved "responsibility to protect civilians" policy to enter Myanmar and deliver aid over the objections of the generals. This would be a dangerous, perhaps precedent-setting course, but the world's nations should consider it.

Edit and update: A correction was made to reflect that cadavers are not responsible for the spread of disease. The U.N. is now also suggesting that farm implements and seeds should be distributed in the country because due to displacement people may not be able to even harvest the food available because they are without the tools to do it. Poor farmers are also at a disadvantage because they may have lost stored food and livestock they were raising. It has also been stated that aid will not be delivered into the hands of the junta for distribution as there are concerns they will only give it to their supporters. And finally, to add to the frustration and tragic nature of this disaster is the fact that the storm and its path were accurately forecast four days before it hit and yet the people on the ground were not warned.

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