Mushrooms sprout on a nurse stump
I’ll never forget the first time I visited this park in my new neighbourhood, three years before I moved here. It was March and it started snowing! Between the wild, jagged terrain and the owl appearing in the tall conifers, it left an impression almost more idyllic than my experience of it now.
In the warmer months, one particular path that begins at the street is muddy, almost creek-like. Riddled with stones and pebbles, it’s hard to traverse when it’s so wet and is slightly uphill. Yesterday it was hovering around zero degrees and the pseudo-creek bed was blanketed in ice! It looked like a tiny, frozen river.
Continue reading A wild park »
I cringe a little as I hear my desk chair’s sorry-excuse-for-casters grate against the hardwood floor, etching my every motion. I remind myself of wabi sabi now as I try to accept the subtle damage to my 1967 white oak parquet, refinished last summer to sand away the wear from a decade’s worth of someone else’s daily story. Looks pretty good for fourty-five years old.
But this story actually starts a year ago. I suppose it was in January 2012 that I started looking seriously at apartments. It was the beginning of a year that I would best describe as a rollercoaster.
Let me explain, in brief:
Conducted a nerve-wracking apartment search. Bought an apartment. Boyfriend and I celebrated our first year together as I got the keys. Renovated apartment. Moved (read: encouragingly shoved) out of parents’ house and into apartment. Lost best-job-ever of almost four years. Got new job. Boyfriend moved in. [Small unrelated personal event with its own silver lining.] Lost new job as we celebrated a year and a half, and six months as a homeowner. Decided to start freelancing in 2013. World didn’t end (yay!), not that I was worried.
Did I forget anything?
Continue reading Of rollercoasters, resolutions and resolve »
May 12 is Environmental Sensitivities Day.
First my nose stings, then it runs, then my eyes get itchy. The skin of my nose feels tight, swollen, even pink. My breath becomes shallow — at worst I have difficulty breathing at all. I probably start coughing. I feel stressed and anxious.
This is what happens when I’m exposed to synthetic fragrance. I’m not alone, and I’m lucky: for some people it can trigger asthma, headaches, and allergic reactions that are worse than mine. But it’s still not fun, and I feel like I’m the only one in the vicinity suffering. Sometimes, I’m the only one that can smell it.
I never had this problem until I did a detoxifying cleanse three years ago, which is why I don’t believe it when I read claims that people with my affliction are simply overburdened with toxins. I think it’s the other way around — that most people, generally unbeknownst to them, are full of toxins that are preventing reactions to toxic chemicals.
Continue reading Scents and sensitivity: go fragrance-free »
I’m not! I switched to vinegar and baking soda for most tasks years ago. I’m even considering making my own laundry detergent after I move out.
I have a confession to make, though: I used to like the smell of Mr. Clean. I’m sure a whiff of it now would send me into an allergic frenzy, but I broke up with Mr. Clean a long time ago. You can too, by going to SpringBreakup.ca, a campaign site my team at the David Suzuki Foundation recently launched with our Queen of Green.
Continue reading Are you in a toxic relationship with your household cleaners? »
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.
Continue reading 2011 year in review: A journey »
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.
Continue reading Nature and night: Moving from the woods to the city »
Uniform, flawless produce requires a heartbreaking amount of food waste. (Photo by
rick via Flickr)
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.
Continue reading Death to the supermarket »
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.
Continue reading Compelling environmental films bloom at VIFF »
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.
Continue reading David Suzuki’s Queen of Green gets a facelift — the brand, that is »
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.
Continue reading Talking trash: Projecting Change Film Fest opens May 26, and plastic is a Texas-sized problem »
