Just look at this picture! You can talk about sustainability all you want, but until you see an image like this you don’t realize just how beautiful it can be. This photo was taken in Kingston Ontario where almost 100 wind turbines have recently been erected, and I mean recently. From the time they received the final environmental approvals they were up in about 6 months. It’s just amazing. The turbines will produce enough electricity to power the City of 100,000.

Ontario relies on nuclear power for half of its electrical generation but nuclear plants take forever to build. Our last, Darlington, took 12 years to build (years overdue) and cost close to $12 billion or 4 times the original estimate. The government has recently decided to build new reactors and has just received the quotes back from three reactor companies. These are the initial, preliminary quotes, before the inevitable overruns which come later, and already the government is floored by the cost. According to the Globe and Mail, Energy Minister George Smitherman is suffering from “sticker shock”.

Do you have any idea how much renewable generation capacity could be brought on line with the $26 billion or more that taxpayers are about to spend on nukes? Using energy efficiency, solar power, wind power, natural gas-fired combined heat and power, hydro, and biogas we would not be having to go to the Federal Government to ask for help. What happens with nuclear power is that taxpayers subsidize it so the consumers of the electricity never really have to pay the true cost. Most people in the province also don’t get to see where the electricity is generated. Wind turbines change that. They let you see where the power that makes your life better comes from. I’ve always said the fastest way to get people to use less electricity is to give them a way to generate it with a solar panel. Once you see how much goes into making this amazing stuff called electricity, you start getting responsible with your use of it.

Kingston sits at the eastern end of Lake Ontario and Wolfe Island, where the wind turbines are located, is perfectly situated to take advantage of the strong, consistent winds that blow down the lake. The 1976 Olympic sailing events were actually held in Kingston because of this amazing wind. Apart from the odd dissenting voice, most people in the area seem very supportive of the wind farm. The dissenting voices, I suppose, prefer to not think about the end products of the province’s electricity generation be it CO2 and pollution from the coal or oil plants, or the radioactive tritium that CANDU reactors leak into the Great Lakes. Our reactors release tritium at levels 100 times higher than allowed in Europe and pregnant women and young children are advised to not live near the reactors.
http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/press/press-releases/greenpeace-calls-for-tougher
The beauty of radioactive tritium is that you can’t see it. Out of sight, out of mind.

Yes, I’ll take the devil I can see anytime, and I find these wind turbines simply beautiful. Functional and beautiful. A towering testimony to the concept of living sustainably. The sailors don’t seem to mind them. I think they understand the inherent power in the wind and the magic of capturing it. I grew up being dragged behind a smoke- and oil-belching outboard motor while I water-skied, until I discovered wind surfing. There is no feeling like the strain in your muscles as you transfer that wind energy from the sail to the board and you feel that speed that your dexterity and body weight were able to capture and channel into motion through the water.

Windsurfers, sailboats and wind turbines! Clean, green wind machines. Bring’em on!
 

We’re putting the finishing touches on “Thriving During Challenging Times, The Energy, Food and Financial Independence Handbook” and it seems the topic is getting a lot of publicity these days.

Jeff Rubin, former chief economist for the CIBC has just released his book “Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization”. Rubin has been predicting rapidly rising oil prices as the world comes to grip with peak oil and he is one of the higher profile believers in the imminent end of easy and cheap energy. While his book seems to take a big picture macro look at the problem, our book takes a more micro look to offer you personal strategies for dealing with the inevitable changes that are coming.

Stories about people dealing with economic hardship are very common right now. The Kansas City Star ran an article called “Some stockpiling to prepare should times turn perilous” and a more recent “Crisis spurs spike in 'suburban survivalists’” http://www.kansascity.com/437/story/1215120.html

USA today just ran a story called “Economic survivalists take root” about families scaling back their lifestyles and making their households more independent.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2009-04-14-survivalistsinside14_N.htm

I sort of expect these types of articles in papers given the challenges of the economy these days, but “Elle” Magazine of all places in their May 2009 edition has an article called “Do Worry. Be Happy. Get in fighting shape for the coming storms--psychologically, economically, and environmentally.”
http://www.elle.com/Beauty/Health-Fitness/Do-Worry.-Be-Happy

Wow! That’s the theme of my book. Well sort of. I guess my theme is more that if you take some basic steps to make your family more resilient to future challenges, one of the main benefits is an increased sense of well being. Suddenly you start taking joy in more basic activities like growing your own food or using renewable energy to power your home.

It appears great change is upon us. You can put your head in the sand and hope it goes away. The problem with this strategy is that if things do become more challenging, when you pull your head out of the sand you may be more like a deer caught in the head lights and not know which way to turn. Embarking on a simple plan to make yourself and your family more independent is the way to weather gathering storms and so many of the things I outline in the book end up helping you reduce your impact on the plant.

Greater independence, more happiness by accomplishing meaningful tasks that so much of our technology has removed us from, and a smaller footprint on the planet. There really is no downside to it!

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines! Or start your hoes. The great “garden-off” is getting under way. You’re looking at our “square foot” garden.  We’ve just started work on our gardening book and with the interest in our gardening DVD we’re very excited about it.

One of the things I want to do some research on is the concept of “square foot gardening.” There are a number of books about growing a lot of vegetables in a very small space. This is very counter-intuitive to me. I’ve read the books and their rationalization, but I’m afraid I’m skeptical. Plants, like all living things, need nourishment and room to thrive. When you crowd too many living organisms into too small a place you usually encounter unexpected consequences. You certainly see this with predators and prey. When you have too many predators and not enough prey, eventually there will be a reduction in the number of predators and the ecosystem will return to equilibrium.

I feel the same way about plants. When you have too many plants in a limited space competing for a limited amount of nutrition and water, something’s going to suffer.

In a series of workshops I did on rainwater management and irrigation I learned how water moves through soil using capillary action. If you take a big bulky towel and dip the corner in water, then withdraw it, then wait a few minutes and dip in again, and keep doing this, eventually the whole towel will be soaked. That’s because the capillary action of the cloth pulls the water throughout the towel. In a sandy soil water will tend to move vertically or down as the soil is well drained. In a clay soil the water will move more laterally or horizontally because it has trouble working its way down through the clay.

Roots do the same thing. They seek the path of least resistance. They also grow and seek out water and nutrients in the soil. Soil can only hold so much water and so many nutrients, so if you have a larger number of plants and therefore roots trying to access a finite amount of either water or nutrients, something is going to suffer if there is not enough to go around. When you look at the size of a mature lettuce root system you can well imagine what the soil in a garden packed full of a variety of vegetables producing root systems like this would look like. It would be very matted and there would be extreme competition for resources.

Now that’s not to say you can’t garden well in a confined area, I’m just biased towards a larger garden. After growing in restricted spaces for much of my life I believe you can get a pretty significant output from a limited space. The key is that you really have to be aggressive in building the soil’s health and I’m not sure everyone is that committed. On a small garden plot, grabbing your neighbor’s grass clippings and leaves and adding them with your own compost, you should be able to produce a reasonable harvest. If you want to offset a large percentage of your family’s food expenses, I don’t think it’s possible.

Because I’m skeptical we’ve decided to grow a “square foot” garden as a control to compare to our regular ½ acre one. Michelle will be in charge of it just to make sure my bias doesn’t influence the outcome, i.e.… it would be pretty easy for me to just throw stuff in and not water it and claim it doesn’t work.

So we’ll be scientific and make a competition of it. Let the games begin. We’ll keep you posted over the summer.