The little guy can do a lot
Last week I wrote about John Bullard, a former member of the Clinton administration in the United States and now president of a sea education school, who is so taken with the South Shore that he is building a house in the Lunenburg area.
One of the things Bullard said struck a real chord with people. When talking to a gathering at the fire hall in Lunenburg recently, he said he believed that when people knew something, they had an obligation to act on that information. That was one of the reasons why he spent so much time giving talks related to the Al Gore film on the dangers facing the environment.
It sometimes seems difficult for the ordinary person to have any effect on the looming issues facing our life on this planet. And yet, we have a good record on the South Shore in terms of recycling. That shows we want to do our part.
At the meeting in Lunenburg, a representative of the government was passing out free compact fluorescent light bulbs. We have some of those in the house and whenever an incandescent bulb burns out, plan on replacing it with a CFL. That's just one little thing that an ordinary person can do, and as Bullard says, there are others.
Every little bit counts.
After last week's column came out, I received an email from a person in the Valley, who also thought that small solutions add up. He said he and his wife have replaced their light bulbs, replaced their stove, drive energy efficient cars, car pool where they can, and now use a push mower (he says it is actually faster than the power mower). He is a teacher, and he says he talks to his students about the challenges they face, trying to get them to think about what needs to be done.
There is much that we can do. We've all heard that we should use energy efficient appliances, unplug things like DVD players that have those little lights burning away, have showers instead of baths, turn off hot water heaters when away for a day, turn down the heat when possible, hang clothes out to dry instead of using a dryer, drive more slowly, refrain from idling the car, use a bicycle or public transit if possible, carpool, buy things that are packaged reasonably, and buy foods produced locally, rather that ones that travel an average of 2,400 kilometres before they get to your plate.
I've talked about this before, in the context of keeping local businesses and agriculture healthy. Local food is tastier, not having been grown for travel; it is fresher, and best of all we have a sense of what has been done to it before we get it. I was at a meeting of the Southwest Nova Biosphere over the weekend where some of the county councillors were talking about their efforts to promote the use of food grown within a radius of 160 kilometres.
It's a win-win idea that helps us all, the main obstacle being the desire of the big supermarkets to centralize acquisition, processing and delivery of food. So the challenge for all of us is to talk to and write to supermarket representatives, insisting that they carry local produce, fruit, meats, and fish. And always check the labels carefully, because the frozen Highliner fish you have in your hands – caught off Nova Scotia – is apt to have been processed in China.
At the fire hall meeting with John Bullard, a woman named Nancy Carpenter asked how people could reduce their dependence on fossil fuels if one of the alternatives was nuclear energy, to which she was opposed. Bullard said he was personally in favour of nuclear power, and that this was one of the debates that needed to happen. He noted that France was completely powered by nuclear energy, and that there were no greenhouse gases involved.
An email I got recently from Doug Millar, Liverpool, said that he felt we were heading in the direction of nuclear generated electricity, and that he didn't know what other alternatives were reasonable. Graham Cowan, a Canadian who has written and presented papers on hydrogen fuel, wrote to say that using natural gas to generate the amount of electricity provided now by Point Lepreau would cost a billion dollars every four years. Bernie Swain, Mill Village, wrote to say that in his view, nuclear energy was acceptably safe.
All three had other excellent points about producing and storing energy, some of which I will get to at some point in the future. For now, we need to do our best as individuals, challenge the powers that be on issues that matter, and engage in the debate on the environment.
- Tom Sheppard can be reached at twsheppard@gmail.com
