A real live spirit bear...who's protecting it's habitat? Not Canada

I know, I know. There’s already been a tonne of blog posts and tweets about the environmentalism of the Olympics. However, I believe that when an issue is important, every voice counts. The more voices, the more the people in charge are forced to take notice. So take notice Ottawa!

The Olympic organizers have made a pretty solid effort to make the games “greener”. They built energy efficient buildings, they’re re-using heat waste to heat other buildings, they’re promoting carbon offsets. Super.

But I want to focus on the big picture. There’s the frequently played “Beautiful British Columbia” commercial showing Ryan Reynolds enjoying a campfire in the forest, there’s the high impact images of salmon and old growth forests at the opening ceremonies, there’s the overload of images of mountains, oceans, trees and wildlife around every corner. We’re showing the world just how much we love our nature, how much we cherish what we’ve been gifted by geography.

Liars! We present this image to the world but we don’t live up to it at all. This article in the Vancouver Sun sums things up pretty well.

What a majestic representation of the salmon running at the opening ceremonies. According to the Vancouver Sun, 38 salmon runs in BC are endangered. Yet fishing of salmon runs still gets approved due to their commercial value, even those on the brink of becoming endangered or extinct. These runs are also in danger of genetic contamination by escaped farmed salmon (which are Atlantic salmon) or infection by lice picked up when swimming near salmon farms. Drastic changes are needed in the salmon fishery to ensure this symbolic animal does not go extinct.

Great display of the glory of the old growth forests. Logging of old growth stands is happening right now. The pockets that exist are getting fewer and far between. These stands represent a structure that can’t be re-grown in a decade or two. We’re talking hundreds of years.

And then there’s Canada’s environmental track record in general. Not so good. Just because we have a lot of nature and not so many people doesn’t give us a free ride. We consume pretty much the same as America per capita, produce the same amount of GHGs per capita.

Canadians love being associated with nature. So let’s make sure we keep nature around. Let’s live up to what we project to the world. Let’s tell parliament we want to be a green country!

Well I’ve finally finished reading The Wal-Mart Effect. This book first came out in 2005, so I’m a bit behind and the information is a bit out of date. However, I do recommend reading this book, especially if you’re a Wal-Mart shopper.

Now I don’t want to say never shop at Wal-Mart. I’ve shopped at Wal-Mart and there was a time in my life where if I needed a cheese grater, or towels, I could only really afford to shop at Wal-Mart (ok, maybe I’m still in this stage but I’ve made due without Wal-Mart for a couple years now).  But I will say THINK about it when you shop at Wal-Mart.

Just to say something good about Wal-Mart…do you remember when deodorant came in boxes? It doesn’t any more. Wal-Mart made that happen, saving countless trees from being harvested to make deodorant boxes. Why did Wal-Mart do this? Each box cost 5 cents. They asked their suppliers to take out the box so Wal-Mart pays 5 cents less for each one bought, plus less weight to ship saving shipping costs. That’s a lot of saving when you think about how many people have deodorant that they buy 3 or 4 times a year. So they didn’t do it for the environment, but it worked out well anyway.

But what else happens when you want to squeeze 2 or 3 cents less per item from your suppliers? Well maybe the supplier has to use a cheaper material. Maybe they skip employee raises this year.  Maybe, if you ask them over and over to find a way to take 2 or 3 cents off per item (which Wal-Mart does, often, and with a non-negotiable attitude), the supplier has to move it’s factory to China or Mexico.

The Wal-Mart Effect has a story of a company or two that went through each one of those steps. It has stories of real people, like the women from Bangladesh talking about factory conditions where if you made a mistake sewing a pair of pants the supervisors beat you with the pants. How does that make you feel about buying those pants for $20 at Wal-Mart? Not so great a deal anymore, is it?

Wal-Mart does do factory inspections overseas. They do a lot of them. But they also have a lot of factories that supply them and when you push and push to get cheaper products, things happen at those factories that Wal-Mart just can’t catch.

I don’t want to make this a super long post, so I can’t even really scratch the surface of the information in the book. There is also a very interesting afterward that talks of the initiatives Wal-Mart is taking to improve their image, such as cutting greenhouse emissions from all stores by 20% by 2012. Pretty impressive. But will they actually do it? I hope so. As much as we love to hate Wal-Mart, it is a global force that won’t be going away anytime soon and it affects many aspects of our everyday lives whether you shop there or not.

Monkeys!

A great benefit of living in Australia is you can get cheap flights to South East Asia. Hooray! So that is why Brad and I took fours days and flew to Kuala Lumpur (KL).

It was an amazing few days. The first day was spent checking out the city. The largest chunk of time was in Chinatown…eating, drinking and bartering. Petaling Street is a bustling street bazaar where I felt I needed a shirt that read “No I don’t want any DVDs”. We found that, in general, the people were much more relaxed than in China. They still try to call you into their stalls to look at their goods but they are no where near as pushy as the guys in China.

And we saw monkeys hanging out outside the Planetarium. Sweet.

The next day we took a bus to Melaka, a historic-type town about 2 hours south of KL. It was air conditioned. Awesome. While there we learned all about the Portuguese/Dutch/British colonizations. Melaka was a bustling trade hub run by local Sultans till the Europeans showed up around 1500 and basically messed it up. Melaka never recovered the glory of pre-European arrival. Way to go guys. Yeesh. We saw a church built in 1521, bits of an old fortress, and lots of dioramas. Malaysia really likes dioramas. The bus back to KL was not air conditioned. Boo.

Diorama number 85 of a sultans court

Next day, more monkey spotting in downtown KL’s rainforest park. Sweet.

Took another air conditioned bus to Kuala Selangor, about 2 hours west of KL. Saw more monkeys crossing the road. Sweet. We went to see a humongous firefly colony inhabiting the banks of a near by river. It was beautiful, but no photos turned out. Boo. After spending the night in the mosquito forest…whoops I mean the mangrove forest…park, we checked out some more Dutch ruins (and saw more monkeys…these guys could take over the country!) including an execution rock and poison well. Those guys knew how to get things done. Walked around the very nice mangrove forest (more details in a later post…stay tuned!) and fed the mosquitoes. Then one non-air conditioned bus back to the city.

Brad punching diorama number 105

Food was fantastic. We made an effort to find places that looked a bit like they could be a hidden treasure (ie down alleys, stalls at the markets and places filled with locals and not Westerners). It proved to be a good strategy and my belly was very happy at the end.

In conclusion, Malaysia is very humid and a delight. When you visit cross your fingers for air conditioned buses and if a restaurant/stall only sells one thing they’re probably really good at making that one thing, trust them.

Mmmm...random menu pick

Out of all the G8 countries, Canada has been ranked the lowest for it’s actions on climate change. *sigh*

I think many Canadians feel Canada is a green country because it has so much green space…but that’s not what counts. Are we taking care of that green space? The survey thinks not enough.

Our emissions per person are among the highest in the world. The conservative government just hasn’t stepped up to the plate.

As Canadians we need to put climate change higher up on the priorities list. And I think it is for a lot of Canadians. So make the effort to let the government know. It would only take a few minutes for you to look up the email of your MP and send them a note that you’re worried about the climate and are upset at our low ranking among the G8. Or email the PM himself at pm@pm.gc.ca. Tell them you want the environment to become a key issue of the government.

If you want you can use this template I modified from a website for a campaign for the Australian government. Just sign your name at the end!

Dear Prime Minister,

I’m writing you about Canada’s climate change policies, because I am deeply concerned about the future of our planet, not just for myself, but even more importantly, for Canada’s children and future generations, because they will be more seriously affected than us by climate change impacts.

The repeated news of changes in Canada’s north does not allow us to ignore climate change any longer. The melting of glaciers and the altered hunting grounds of polar bears show us that this is a real issue with real consequences for our people.

Climate change is no longer something that happens in the future, or something that happens “elsewhere”, but it is with us, here and now, and our population is deeply affected. That’s why I count on you all taking my message to you as urgent and extremely important.