Captivated by the forest at Helliwell on Hornby Island

Last year was full of journeys, both in terms of travel and emotions, and of firsts. Recovering from a rocky end to 2010, I found emotional balance as my body took its time to heal. I also began a new romantic relationship in the spring that has helped me better understand myself and discover what a loving partnership really ought to feel like (answer: fantastic). That discovery induced some much-needed catharsis and put my past into perspective. I travelled overseas for the first time in almost a decade — and boarded the plane unaccompanied for the first time ever — and made two trips within BC with my sweetheart.

Swishing through a bed of leaves in Kitsilano reminds me there's nature in the city, but it's still difficult letting go of the dense, unique nature around the home in which I grew up.

It's dark when I get home from work now. I get to my street, and it's like I'm at the edge of the wilderness. There's only one street below mine on the hill as it slopes down into the water. From street level you can't see the lights across the inlet. Those lights are what make the darkness borderline between oppressive and refreshing. There's just enough of them, and at Christmas everyone lights up their docks and boats.

Moving was easy the first time. I don't know why — I should have been more emotional about it since I didn't intend to move home again. I did two years later; I've been here again for over three. I'm glad of it though: being in my mid-twenties — a mature adult, one might say — I'm aware of my surroundings in a more intimate, celebratory, pensive way, where I revere and require the nature around me. I would have missed out on this if I hadn't moved back.

I know it will be harder the second time. I remind myself that I will be excited about the prospect of having my own place. It's more complicated now, and yet easier: I plan to buy an apartment not solo but with my sweetheart, once his current place is ready for the market and we've had more time to know each other. The only disadvantage of this co-purchase is timing, since we're in agreement about having a bright place near a farmer's market and a bike route, close to nature. (Too bad Trout Lake is a lofty dream.)

But as we've been talking about it more, I've been thinking more seriously about the prospects. Oh, not regretfully. I want to. But I'm nostalgic and I've spent all but two years of my life living in this house, surrounded by trees and looking out onto a scene so beautiful that people always remark about that aspect when I tell them where I live.

Uniform, flawless produce requires a heartbreaking amount of food waste. (Photo by rick via Flickr)

This post is part of Blog Action Day's discussion on food.

If we're to feed the world delicious, nutritious food and halt climate change, we have to kill the supermarket.

There are many reasons why I suggest this enormous beast be culled. It thrives on the unsustainable industrial agriculture model of large-scale, monocrop food production, where food is not grown for taste or nutrition. It's then shipped long distances, so you can eat lettuce in Vancouver in January. Even if garlic is grown in your region, you're served up the garlic from China instead.

The produce section is a sterile place devoid of scent (the first sense to get us salivating), where the fruits and vegetables are uniform, barely ripe (if at all) and virtually flawless. It's no wonder children don't know their food grows in the ground or on a vine: the produce is so unnatural, it hardly seems a product of nature. Its sprawling, dizzying vastness is a maze that encourages overconsumption and takes up excess land to, among other things, allow for extra-wide shopping carts. It makes buying junk food more appealing than buying produce through a combination of store positioning, packaging and price, and this leads to disease.

I could go on; the reason I'm going to focus on here, however, is its massive — and one could suggest criminal — contribution to food waste.

The environmental film series at the annual Vancouver International Film Festival appears to have blossomed this year with over a dozen films dealing with issues ranging from food waste and sustainable seafood to climate change and the tar sands.

Some of them are surprising for their genre: Burning Ice brings artists, musicians and poets to the Arctic, and People of a Feather takes us intimately into the lives of Inuit whose very existence depends on the down of eider ducks.

Premiering on Tuesday is a film about Canada's energy use by local filmmaker Charles Wilkinson and produced by his partner, artist Tina Schliessler. I'm particularly excited to see this one as I've known the family since my childhood. Peace Out features interviews with both opponents and proponents of our current destructive energy systems, and aerial footage of the tar sands in Alberta, a project so massive it can be seen from space. Seen from a plane, it's utterly heartbreaking. Ultimately, we all need to use less energy.

Queen of Green emails

While I'm mainly devoted to the web in my design practice as well as at my job, I do wear many hats in my work at the David Suzuki Foundation. I recently took on a rebrand of David Suzuki's Queen of Green, the Foundation's expert on green living and one of our most public faces. The Queen of Green, Lindsay Coulter, writes a weekly blog, offers tips and recipes, and has regular media appearances. Her recipes and other public materials lacked cohesive, formally executed branding, so when it was time to have a fresh go at the content of her resources, we gave her work a proper identity.

You might expect a film about a Vancouver couple who spend a year almost zero-waste and without buying any stuff to be a tale of unimaginable hardship and sacrifice. Indeed, the prospects of using the same toothbrush for 365 days, not replacing worn-out clothing, or making crackers from scratch are daunting but The Clean Bin Project's Jen and Grant take a delighted, energetic approach akin to Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon's The 100-Mile Diet, but on the screen. The project was for them a competition for who could produce the least amount of garbage by year's end (I won't tell you who won), and involved learning about plastics, asking for their cheese unwrapped in their reusable container, and making the most of an old razor. Their enthusiasm was infectious. The 76-minute film is merely a glimpse at an entire year, but if it suggests anything about the 525,600 minutes they spent saving the planet, I think they enjoyed most of them.

Their artistically delicious film intersperses their own narrative of discovery — and occasional humourous disappointment — with the broader view of our consumption-based lifestyle and its consequences: successful community recycling initiatives; the Pacific Garbage Patch (which is twice the size of Texas); albatross death by plastic; landfills; and incomprehensibly large volumes of disposable stuff as depicted by Seattle artist Chris Jordan.

"More than 60 percent of Canadians do not support Harper and his government's contempt for democracy. Yet, he could win a majority with as little as 35 percent of the popular vote." — Project Democracy

I think it's telling of our citizens that we have three left-wing or centre-left national parties and only one right-wing since the merger of the PC and Reform parties back in 1990-something. (Quebecers of course have an extra choice.) It appears to make sense, then, that 62.4% of voters voted for these parties in the last election. Unfortunately, as we're all aware, this doesn't translate to 62% of the House of Commons, and a candidate can be elected with under 30% support in their riding. Our abysmal voter turnout (58.8% in 2008) should be a clear signal that our system needs to change.