Green Options

Building managers and environmental passers-by always scream when they see office lights on in the middle of the night, illuminating someone’s cubicle for hours when they’re not there. Ledalite’s Ergolight Controls System has been designed to take care of that problem, as well as increase office energy efficiency. It’s such a good solution, that it was recognized by the David Suzuki Foundation as one of their climate change solution case studies. Designed to help building designers and architects achieve LEED certification, depending on the set-up, customers can decrease their energy consumption by up to 80%.

Northern Alberta’s vast stores of bitumen–a.k.a. “tar sands” or “oil sands” or “dirty oil”–may well be one of the worst environmental tragedies you never heard of. At least that is what Andrew Nikiforuk, a prize-winning Canadian journalist, wants you to believe.

In his recent book Tar Sands: Diry Oil and the Future of a Continent, Nikiforuk lands a knockout blow on the kissers of the oil industry, oil-friendly bureaucrats, and petrol-guzzling North Americans. It is obvious that this Canadian is sick and tired of watching his own beloved habitat mutate from a pristine Northern ecosystem to a veritable toxic wasteland.

That said, Nikiforuk is clearly perturbed (another “p” word springs to mind…but this is a family-friendly blog). His book combines intensive research with a lively, caustic writing style…sort of enlightened invective. This makes for an astonishingly entertaining read that raises your hackles while raising your awareness about a seriously dangerous issue.

For someone to appreciate a book (or any expressive work for that matter), to “enter into” it fully the way William Blake described the process, there has to be some connection made between the work and the person. Even if the writer is as gifted a storyteller as Dickens, Dostoyevsky, or Stephen King, the work will never speak to you if it does not hook your interest somehow. If you are not open to what it has to say, you will never hear its message.

The same holds true for nature. If you are preoccupied or in a bad mood, a spectacular sunrise will not set you on fire, a wood thrush’s haunting song will go in one ear and out the other, and a vortex of wind-whipped winter snow will not set your spine a-tingling. If some place or thing does not “do it” for you, or if your “doors of perception” are not “cleansed” and open (Blake again), then you will remain blind to nature’s wonders.1

Now, this essential requirement of “mutual affinity” can either save or damn a book. And the best thing about a collection of nature essays like When the Wild Comes Leaping Up: Personal Encounters with Nature is that you have many different doorways to enter into the work and then connect with it. Or you will end up walking down a lot of dead-end hallways.

Editor David Suzuki brings together very personal pieces from some heavy hitters in the eco-literary world, including Diane Ackerman, Bill McKibben, Wade Davis, and Margaret Atwood. Each author explores some important way that he or she has connected with nature, leading to the reflective musing that is the stock in trade of nature writing. Sometimes these stories will draw you in and hold you breathless; other times they will leave you wondering why some people bother to share their ramblings with the world…and get paid for it!

When the Wild Comes Leaping Up, then, is as variegated and dappled as nature itself. Some pieces will strike you as arid deserts devoid of life while others will be like tropical rainforests teeming with more species than you can count.

When it was first published in 1997, David Suzuki’s The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature provided an insightful, heartfelt commentary on the dangers that humanity was facing and creating as a result of its disconnection from the natural world. And it seems that his pleas did not go unheard, for the book did quite well, selling over 100,000 copies in the age before “green” was trendy.

A decade later, Suzuki, with Amanda McConnell and Adrienne Mason, has updated and expanded his work in order to strengthen his case with the most recent scientific data and to tailor his argument to even more alarming conditions on Earth. Indeed, despite a growing focus on the environment, we are probably more out of balance now than when The Sacred Balance was first published. “More than ever,” Suzuki writes in the introduction, “we need agreement about what humankind’s real bottom line is, and achieving that agreement remains the primary goal of this book.”1

I am currently stuck at the car shop, having been towed here this morning. Over my shoulder, the TV is blaring day time game show, Price is Right in between ads for term life policies, diabetes mail order drugs, hemorrhoid medication, and Ex Lax. Clearly, I am the wrong demographic. But I remember why I quit watching TV. My brain cells are starving. I need some Food for Thought like right now. Oh my, the soaps are starting …

But, I Thought You Said “Eat Local?”
While President Bush may have told the nation that eating local was the way to go for the food crisis (despite that whole ethanol, lack of vegetable farm thing), he doesn’t seem to be helping us follow his innovative strategy. According to the American Farmland Trust, Bush is proposing cuts to the 2009 farm bill programs that would have supported local food, conservation and other agriculture programs. These programs were among the few bright spots that kept the new farm bill from being a total loss of reform. Hmm. Kinda hard to eat local if there isn’t any local food. By the way, what happened to that green tie?

Sticker Shock
Rainforest Action Network has organized a protest against products containing palm oil. On August 13, more than 2,000 concerned citizens across the nation will visit local supermarkets. The activists will be seeking out products containing palm oil and applying a sticker, “Warning! Product May Contain Rainforest Destruction,” on these products.