When in Doubt, Use Caution

When in doubt, proceed with caution! When an input is scarce, use it sparingly! To my way of thinking, these are two core conservative values. I believe in these values, and find it puzzling that these values seem absent from many of the policies and actions of our current conservative government.

Take the promise, in the recent federal budget, to streamline environmental approvals. In general we all agree that streamlining is good thing. It removes unnecessary bureaucratic blockages. But if statements made by Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources, are any indication of government intent, the intent of this streamlining is to not to assess the process. Instead, it seems, the government simply wants to get the environmental review process out of the way as quickly as possible so it can get on with its real agenda. Where is the caution here?

Why the rush? A successful business needs to know when to bring its product onto the market. It is not uncommon for a business enterprise to have to make a choice. It can choose to bring an inadequately developed product onto the market early and capitalize on an “early delivery” premium. Or it can spend more time on product development, sacrifice the “early delivery” premium, but deliver a good product.

I can understand why the oil companies are in a hurry to get things done. Each company wants to get in ahead of the other company because there is a premium in that. I can understand why the oil importing countries are lining up to fund the building of Canada’s pipelines. If they get in early, they have a better chance to get Canada’s oil.

But I can see no reason why Canada needs to be in a hurry. Why the hurry in exporting Canada’s oil resources? Why the desire to shorten the environmental approval process? Why the desire to attract non-Canadians to invest in the extraction of Canada’s oil? Why create jobs in the oil industry, when the jobs need to be filled by attracting immigrants? I could understand the hurry if it would be likely that we would lose if there were a delay in getting our oil onto the market.

But Canada won’t lose if we take our time in getting our oil onto the market, if we “take the time to develop a good product.” As the world oil supplies become harder to get; as the oil the world depends on comes increasingly from sources hard to get at (such a deep sea wells and Alberta’s tar sands), the price of oil will only go in one direction – up. The longer we delay in bringing this resource to the market, the higher will be the price. What’s to lose?

If Canada slows the delivery of tar sand derived oil onto the market, this delay will accelerate the rise in world oil prices. And this will affect what we pay at the pumps. That will hurt. It always does. Be that as it may, a substantial increase in the price of oil is inevitable. If not sooner, then it will be more later. Higher prices mean more pressure to find alternatives. We need that pressure. We need it soon.


By Eric Rempel

Local, Efficient Protein Production

Meat! I like meat. I also like eggs, cheese and other milk products. Meat, eggs, milk and plants contain amino acids that form proteins. Our bodies need eight different amino acids to survive. However, it takes ten vegetable proteins to produce one animal protein, so the production of animal protein takes about ten times as much space and resources as it takes to produce the equivalent amount of plant protein. In a finite, polluted, populated world, a world running out of resources, surely it makes sense to eat less animal product. Should we live without animal products? Probably not, but I say we need to do with less animal products? I do. I have been doing it for a several years.

Cereals (wheat, oats, barley) have six of the amino acids our bodies need. The two missing ones are present in legumes (peas, beans, lentils). If you eat your cereals together with legumes (a common, ancient practice in many traditions), you will get all the essential amino acids your body needs. It is equivalent eating meat – well, almost. Vitamin B12 is also essential, and this we cannot get from plants. Most of us get the small amount we need in meat and milk. However, vegetable B12 is available at your natural food store (food yeast, naturally brewed soya sauce, supplements). Alternatively, you can continue eating small amounts of local animal products.

Responsible eating also means we examine how far our food travels. Locally grown whole cereals, legumes, meats, eggs, milk products are available. We do not have to depend on food produced far away (In North America food travels an average of 2000 kms. between field and plate). There is no need to burn tons of fossil fuels transporting the food we need. If I have to burn fossil fuels, I prefer burning it to travel myself. My food cannot enjoy traveling anyway!

I am an organic gardener and I have found a relatively easy way to reduce my dependency on animal products. I now produce my own dry beans. For the last two years, I have been producing my own organic red kidney and pinto beans! Legumes grow well in poor soils and are good companions for potatoes because they confuse potato beetles and their roots fix nitrogen: they produce a natural fertilizer. Most of the beans dry on the plant, so you do not have to can, freeze or dry them. You simply throw the pods in a burlap bag, tread on them and beat them up a bit (excellent frustration spender and good exercise! Save on gym costs!). Then wait for a windy day and let the wind separate the beans from the chaff. Bonanza!

I can already envision the yummy chillies, soups, stews! Life is great! Yes, there are challenges, but solutions are available everywhere for those who want to find them!

The South Eastman Transition Initiative (SETI) gathers people who are concerned about the use of fossil fuel. We meet to encourage one another in the search for solutions to problems of this nature. SETI is sponsoring a workshop on organic backyard food production on Thursday, April 26. The workshop will be at the allotment gardens behind the Steinbach Mennonite Church, 134 Loewen Blvd. Anyone is welcome. Check southeasttransition.com for details.

Gabriel Gagne

We Are Running out of Miracles

You may not have noticed. Today we do not treat medical infections the way we treated those twenty years ago. I recently accompanied a friend to the emergency room at the hospital. It turned out he had a serious infection. Twenty years ago, he would have been given an injection of antibiotic, a prescription of oral antibiotic and sent home. Not today!  He immediately got a dose of antibiotic intravenously, and then needed to come back to the hospital two times a day for the next several days for further intravenous antibiotic.

This, my medical friends tell me, is because of antibiotic resistant bacteria. I am not old enough to remember infections before antibiotics, but I am old enough to remember the first generation of antibiotic: Penicillin. Penicillin was followed by second, third and fourth generation antibiotics. Now, it seems, the only way antibiotic is sufficiently effective is if it is administered intravenously. And once that no longer works, what is the next step?

This should surprise no one. Natural selection decrees that this will occur. The bacteria resistant to an antibiotic survive and reproduce.

Had we known then, when penicillin was first discovered and available to doctors, what we know now, would we have used these wonder drugs in the way we have? For example, would we have allowed their use in animal feed? We have a problem.

Within our food production system, we face a similar situation. Conventional food production conveniently disregards nature’s cycles.

Within nature, there are many natural cycles. The ones we understand best are the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle and the phosphate cycle. In each case the plant, as it is growing, take up elements from the soil and air, converting them into plant tissue. The plant dies and the elements return to the soil and air. Some plant tissue is eaten by animals, but as the animals defecate and die, the cycle is still completed.

But our conventional food production system does not recognize these cycles. Instead, the science behind our conventional food system recognizes that plants need phosphate and nitrogen to thrive. Science has found a way of converting natural gas into nitrogen fertilizer. The plant response to this fertilizer is phenomenal. The natural nitrogen cycle, it seems, is no longer pertinent.

In the same way, conventional science has found that phosphate, mined at Kapaskasing, can be converted to fertilizer. Again, the plant response to this fertilizer is exceptional.

But there are problems with this food system. First, the supply of both, natural gas and phosphate rock is in limited. Already we have used up the most accessible supplies of both resources. Secondly, when the plant tissue we consume is “used up”, the “waste” consists of the nitrogen and phosphate. Nature says that needs to go back to the soil to feed future generations of plants. But it does not. Instead, it becomes a pollutant. Much of it ends up in Lake Winnipeg.

Fortunately, for food production, there is an alternative, at least a partial one. While scientists and farmers within the conventional food production stream have been looking for ways of increasing the plant response to chemical nitrogen and phosphate, a much smaller group of scientists and farmers have been looking at an alternative, a way of enhancing food production within the natural cycles. They call themselves organic producers. As we remove our conventional blinders and become more aware of what these scientists and farmers have discovered, what we find is truly impressive.

By Eric Rempel

Can Organic Farming Become Mainstream?

Had someone asked me five years ago to describe the organic food industry, I would have placed organic food production somewhere on the fringe. I knew of consumers who believed organic food was healthier than conventional food. These consumers are willing to pay a premium for organically grown food and are complemented by farmers who grow food organically. These organic growers need the organic price premium in order to compensate for lower yields. Everyone is happy.

But not everyone, really. Anyone prepared to take a critical look at conventional agriculture, has always been concerned about the vulnerability of that production system because of its dependence on scarce and exotic chemicals; scarce in that phosphate and nitrogen as inputs are non-renewable resources, and exotic because chemicals are carefully developed in order to address a defined problem under defined conditions. The understanding of how these exotic chemicals work and of their side effects is limited.

The above thoughts should really not be new to anyone. What follows may surprise you.

In February, I attended the first ever Canadian Organic Science Conference in Winnipeg. The conference was fascinating in many respects, but what struck me most was the growing awareness by the conference attendees that organic food production is able to compete with conventional food production on its own terms: that is, organic food producers are poised to compete in the same market place with conventional food producers.

The Rhodale Institute in Pennsylvania has been a leader in the research, development and promotion of organic food production methods since 1947. They have been running a farming systems trial for 30 years comparing conventional and organic farming systems. The Institute has recently published a report thirty years into the study. They have found that:

• Organic yields match conventional yields
• Organic outperforms conventional in years of drought
• Organic systems build rather than deplete soil organic matter, making it a more sustainable system
• Organic farming uses 45% less energy
• Organic systems produce 60% of the greenhouse gases a conventional system does
• Organic farming systems are more profitable than conventional

Organic food production is not simply the elimination of chemicals in the growing of food. An organic producer told me recently, that a conventional farmer monitors his field, and when he detects a problem, he goes to his agricultural input supplier, buys the appropriate chemical and applies it. An organic producer, on the other hand, needs to be aware of the problems he is likely to encounter two or three years earlier, and begin to deal with them then. Organic production requires an understanding of the biological systems at work in the field or garden, and a familiarity with the wide array of tools now available to the organic grower.

Nobody said organic food production is easy, but as fuel prices go up and weeds and insects develop chemical resistance, more and more of us will need to embrace organic food production.

Eric Rempel

Everything we thought we knew is wrong!

Okay, maybe not everything. But what if some of our core beliefs about how the world works turn out to be seriously flawed? Last Thursday some of us watched a documentary that flipped our world upside down to see what makes it tick, as it explored the most critical question of our time:

How do we become a sustainable civilization?

Water shortages, hunger, peak oil, species extinction, and even increasing depression are all symptoms of a deeper problem – addiction to unending growth in a world that has limits. GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth goes way beyond prescribing Band-Aids to slow the bleeding. This film examines the cultural barriers that prevent us from reacting rationally to the evidence that current levels of population and consumption are unsustainable.

It asks why the population conversations are so difficult to have. Why it’s more important to our society to have economic growth than clean air. Why communities seek and subsidize growth even when it destroys quality of life and increases taxes.

Our growth-centric system is broken. It’s not providing the happiness or the prosperity we seek. But that’s good news; it means a shift to a sustainable model will be good for us. We’ll be happier and more prosperous!

Individual and public policy decisions today are informed by a powerful, pro-growth cultural bias. We worship at the Church of Growth Everlasting. Undeterred by the facts, we’re on a collision course powered by denial and the illusion that growth brings prosperity. Before we can shift our civilization meaningfully, effectively, and substantially toward true sustainability, the world must be “prepped.” We must become self-aware and recognize the programming that keeps us hooked. GrowthBusters attempts do just that. We heard from leading thinkers of our time – scientists, sociologists, economists – to help us separate fact from superstition.

We’re approaching the end of growth. Will we embrace it and find a winning solution? Or will we deny it and go down fighting?

From Las Vegas to Atlanta, Mexico City to Mumbai, the White House to the Vatican, GrowthBusters took us on a whirlwind tour of growth mania. Kind of like Wild Kingdom with a twist: the cameras are turned on humanity as our own survival skills were examined. GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth looks into the psychology of denial and crowd behavior. It explores our obsession with urban and economic growth, and our reluctance to address overpopulation issues head-on. This documentary holds up a mirror, encouraging us to examine the beliefs and behaviors we must leave behind – and the values we need to embrace – so our children can survive and thrive.

The movie, of course, does not focus on southeastern Manitoba. It looks at the world as a whole, and examines how embracing growth has affected some specific communities. The people of New York, Toronto, Hong Kong and Mexico City need to ask how they should be living if they want to leave a habitable planet for their children. But it’s a question we, living in southeastern Manitoba, need to ask as well. When will we do that?

Eric Rempel

Wanted: Extraordinary Canadians

Penguin Canada recently released a biography of Tommy Douglas, one volume of their Extraordinary Canadians series.  I received it for Christmas, and finished reading it on December 27^th.  At only 221 pages it was a light and fun read, a brief outline of the career of the Greatest Canadian (as Douglas was voted in 2004) that gave a strong sense of his character and personality.  By the end of the book I had a great sense of loss: we need Tommy Douglas in Canada today, just as much as we needed him in his own time.

I was not yet two years old when Tommy Douglas died, so I have never known a Canada without his incredible contributions.  He’s known as the father of Medicare in Canada, which (in spite of its problems) is an institution that is treasured by most Canadians, but he and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, the fore-runner of the NDP) were the first to promote many ideas and institutions that I’ve always known to be a part of life in Canada.  The original CCF mission statement, The Regina Manifesto (1932), called for the protection of rights for ethnic and religious minorities; a Canadian constitution, charter of rights, and central bank; national workplace standards, EI, CPP, and public healthcare.  At the time, they were called Communists for suggesting such things; now, at least thirty years after we’ve adopted all of those ideas, we take them for granted.  Fairly impressive work, considering that Douglas, the CCF, and the NDP that followed it have never formed a federal government!  Their small voice in government and the Canadian public square, over time, have had great effect.

Throughout this biography I was struck by the ways in which our situation today reflects the situations that Douglas faced.  The rhetoric used against Douglas and the CCF in political campaigns, both in Saskatchewan and federally, compared them to Nazis and Communists in the same sentence, charged that they would confiscate farms and require all citizens to work for the government, and many other baseless claims; these make our attack ads today seem petty and tame by comparison.  And the reaction against their proposed universal health care included the charge that “bureaucrats would commit women with menopausal symptoms to insane asylums”, which sounds just as bizarre as the reaction to the so-called Obamacare that continues to rage in the US.

Today, all of the angry rhetoric and baseless claims are against the suggestion that we need a system that is environmentally and economically sustainable.  Sustainability, like universal health care, is a sensible solution to problems caused by our society.  It's not partisan ideology.  Like healthcare, a government policy on sustainability is simply Canadians doing together what we already do individually: take care of each other.  In the midst of all of the debates about climate and oil, it's easy to lose sight of that.  We need new Tommy Douglases to rise above the rhetoric and insist on what is right.

Jeff Wheeldon 

What About Wood Heating

A series of columns on home design and home heating with a view to energy efficiency would not be complete without a discussion of the potential wood has for heating our homes.

Mary and I heat our home with wood. We like it. It helps us maintain our connection with the earth that supports us. This connection with the earth is so much more vivid when I am splitting wood in the morning or watching the flame in the glass window than if I were simply to set the thermostat higher and feel the heat come out of the forced air register of a natural gas furnace. For me that is one up side to heating with wood. The satisfaction I get from heating with wood is similar to that of growing the vegetables I eat.

But heating with wood is also energy efficient. We need to learn to pay attention to a new insight called EROEI (energy return on energy invested). When oil was first discovered in the 1930s, the EROEI for that oil was 100:1. Now all the readily accessible oil is gone. We are now developing the tar sands where the EROEI is only 5:1. If I apply that insight to wood heat, I consider the fuel used by my chain saw and my pickup truck. If I get my wood fuel about 45 km from my home, the EROEI is about 24:1. So for residents of southeastern Manitoba, where there is plenty of bush and forest, wood fuel is one of the most efficient sources of home heating.

Furthermore, as we become increasingly dependant on hard-to-get-at oil supplies, notably tar sands and offshore oil, the price of oil-based fuels is going to become increasingly volatile. There is comfort in being dependent on a local fuel resource, wood, the price of which is likely to be considerably more stable in the years ahead.

Now before we all run out and install wood burning heaters, there are some cautions to consider. Wood heaters produce smoke. Outdoor wood boilers are the biggest culprits in this regard. New, certified, indoor wood heaters produce much less smoke. In the last twenty years much research and development has gone into the development of improved heaters. The results are impressive. Nevertheless, where there is a wood fire, there is at least some smoke. If everyone in Steinbach heated with individual wood heaters, we would likely have an air pollution problem. A comprehensive solution to that problem exists and that is district wood heat. In Scandinavia, district wood heating is common.

Maintaining a wood fuel supply is labour intensive. That human energy is not included in the EROEI. This is because human energy is not fossil energy; it can be replaced. Furthermore, much, if not most of the labour going into the maintaining of a wood supply is wholesome energy, energy that ought to be expended in order to maintain the health of our body. Maintaining a wood fuel supply is good, healthy, outdoor exercise.

Eric Rempel