By Cam Mather

My daughter Katie gave me a great T-shirt which reads “This is what a Feminist looks like.” I love it and am very proud of it. I’ve always been a feminist but my beliefs grew stronger when I became the parent of two daughters. When the girls were still very young, Michelle gave me a great book called “How to Father a Successful Daughter” by Nicky Marone. The book shares the story of a father, who is an emergency room doctor, who is driving with his son when they are involved in a car accident. The father is killed. As the son is wheeled into the emergency room the attending doctor says “Oh no, this is my son!” When I first read the story, I didn’t get it. How could that be? The father had been killed. The emergency room doctor, of course, was his mother, but my mindset at that time was that “Doctor” meant “male.” The book recommends that it is important for your daughters to see women in unconventional roles. So Michelle and I always made a point of finding female professionals. Our doctor, dentist, lawyer and accountant were female in order to avoid our daughters growing up with the biases that we had.

Recently in one of Katie’s university classes on gender the professor discussed how in our culture when you hear “Doctor, Dentist, Lawyer…” you tend to picture a male. Katie realized that she doesn’t picture males in those roles.  That was a red-letter day for her parents.

So I always love to meet strong women, and contrary to what you might think of with a traditional view of rural living, Mountain Road where I live has amazing women on it. Every house from Tamworth to our place is inhabited by an exceptional woman.

In the first house there is Rosie who is a civil engineer who recently moved here from B.C. This summer she booked a cross-Canada journey for her family on the train. This is the definition of environmentally responsible travel. It turns out that Rosie often travels by train for business as well!

Further along the road you’ll find Agnes who is a beef farmer. Agnes is awesome! She loves being a farmer and you can tell it every time you talk to her! Agnes loves sharing her knowledge, which is a real bonus for a citiot (city idiot) like me. She has been unbelievably gracious in giving me straw and hay, and most importantly explaining the difference to me. She also tells what she’s planting and explains the reasoning behind it. This is how I learned that when farmers plant things like wheat, they “underseed” with clover. As I discuss in “The All You Can Eat Gardening Handbook”, clover fixes nitrogen from the air. It also grows fairly low the first year. So while the wheat is growing tall to be cut off by a combine, the clover stays low replenishing the soil. Then you can turn that under and have your soil as healthy as when you started. This is a screen photo capture of Agnes from our DVD called “Biodiesel Basics.” She graciously consented to drive around on her tractor for a part of the DVD. Not only does she control a roundbale with the precision of a fighter pilot, Michelle noted that she was wearing earrings as she did so.

Agnes’ neighbor Mavis is a hardworking, energetic font of general country knowledge. Apart from her daytime job she keeps busy cutting the firewood to heat her house, tends to her horses and chickens and I often meet her at the scrap pile at the local saw mill. She picks up kindling for some of her older friends who are unable to get their own wood. Once when we were picking up a load of manure from her she showed us her Aracauna chickens that lay green eggs! No really - green eggs! I thought it was just a Dr. Zuess thing. Turns out, I do like green eggs. I would eat them in a box, with a fox…

A little further along Mountain Road we meet “Faith” who moved to the middle of no-where with her husband Mike in the late 60’s. When Mike wasn’t creating a well-known cross-country ski park in the 70’s and selling insurance to trailer parks, he was building helicopters. As I understand it Faith started raising her family before electricity poles made it to their house. She must have felt like Catherine Parr-Trail in the early years only nowadays her husband is out buzzing my wind turbine in his helicopter rather than tending to his crops.

Five miles along is our house and my exceptional wife Michelle. Not only was she a great public school teacher, who eventually spent many years home-schooling our daughters, she is a full partner in Aztext Press and basically does all the things that keeps the money flowing. When she’s not running the company she’s hauling big chunks of dead oak across a frozen pond to heat our house. For the last 12 years she has lived in the woods, 4 miles from the nearest neighbor, living with a man whose mood swings are as erratic as the weather in Canada, all the while maintaining her mellow demeanor. When wind turbines break, plumbing leaks, batteries need replacing, generators don’t work, raccoons trash the corn… there is one person (me) running around like a chicken with his head cut off, and one person sipping tea and being the definition of zen. Michelle’s the sort of person who when I finally lop off a limb with the chainsaw will just shrug when I get back to the house, and say “Oh and I guess you want me to take you emerg?” Michelle is the definitive calm, casual person who keeps hysterical people like me from going into shock. I’m not sure I’d still be living in the middle of nowhere without Michelle’s mellowing effect.

Four miles past our house lives Alyce who was born and raised here. She has gone from a luxury 3-seater outhouse (so three kids could go out after dark together) before electricity reached her house as a child, to an air-conditioned house with hot tub and wireless WiFi, managing a large governmental agency, and taking it all in stride. Alyce loves where she lives and she loves her life. When she got her first horse she didn’t have a barn yet and boarded it here. Anytime she visited she was simply busting with joy to be here to see her horse. Once she built her own horse barn and started adding to the stable, every addition was announced with abundant enthusiasm. As she’s taken dozens of her horse riding friends on trails rides past our house, her excitement for horses is palpable.

She has now bought a farm closer to town and has beef cattle. I’ve blogged about how several of her Dexter cows were boarded here for a few months this spring. I’ve always been intimidated by horses and cows, and with horses in particular. If you’re at all nervous around them, they sense it and will gladly boss you around. Since Alyce is absolutely fearless around them they always know who’s boss and behave accordingly. I’ve watched Alyce corralling horses, as I stood on the safe side of the fence, and thought she was either fearless or deranged. That was before she got cows, which convinced me of this as I watched her wrangle them into the trailer. She wasn’t on a horse like in the movies or even on an ATV, she was just walking around the paddock making it very clear to them their ultimate destination and the necessity of them going there peacefully. These cows have horns and about 2000 pounds on Alyce. It’s unbelievable to watch. Terrifying and thrilling, like living next to a theme park with a death-defying roller coaster.

My daughters have been raised at time when they know no limits.  And I live in a place where strong woman are the norm, these exceptional women of Mountain Road!

By Cam Mather

Sometimes after doing a talk or writing a blog I receive a comment along the lines of  “I really want to live off-grid … you are such a good environmentalist!” While I love to hear this, the reality is that anyone who is living off the grid isn’t necessarily having a net positive effect on the planet.

One of the biggest reasons is transportation. Most off-gridders live in the country and therefore drive - a lot - way more than many urban dwellers. It just seems to be the way it is. While Michelle and I try and minimize our trips to the city, and we make sure to combine all of our errands for one big trip, we’re still 45 minutes from the nearest big city. Luckily we are only 10 minutes from Tamworth where there is a grocery store, hardware store, post office, bakery, 4 restaurants, bank, hockey arena, medical office, and liquor store… all the essentials in other words. So our trips to Kingston are few and far between, and often triggered by a craving for curry at our favourite Indian restaurant.

We are increasing the number of trips to Tamworth that we take on the bike, either the electric-solar-powered bike or the human-powered one, but if we have a couple of big boxes of books to ship, we tend to default to driving our Honda Civic.

My daughters, on the other hand, live in Toronto and do not own cars. Toronto has an exceptional transit system and that’s how they get around. When they come home to visit us here they take the train or bus. I am really proud of my daughters for using public transit to get around.

Recent research actually shows that urban dwellers are healthier than rural dwellers because of how much walking they do. Often transit stops are 5 or more blocks apart and sometimes even if a city person needs to go 10 or 20 blocks they will choose to walk it. In the country, no matter how short the distance, people tend to drive. Country people substitute fossil fuel energy more and more for human power. You rarely see a gas powered push mower anymore, regardless of the size of the lawn, because people love to ride on their lawn mowers. I understand this since driving around on a ride-on lawn mower can satisfy your inner farmer fantasy, but it uses a whack of gas. Here in the bush I’m surrounded by hunt camps. The men who come to hunt in the camps used to drive to the camp, and then walk all through the woods to do their hunting. Now they all seem to own big honkin’ pickup trucks that they use to haul their ATVs to the camp, and then they drive the ATVs out to where they hunt. Then they sit around and play poker and drink beer all night. I think people were healthier when they walked.

The other reality of living off grid is that most people shift their largest energy needs, their “thermal” or “heat” loads, to propane. So they move off-grid and onto propane. They use it for cooking, for heating, and for heating hot water. Some people even use propane fridges to avoid electric loads. If you moved off-grid for environmental reasons, this is the wrong thing to do. Propane is delivered to you in a truck. It comes from the refining of a barrel of crude oil (that’s right, the stuff that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico) or from the production of natural gas. It is sequestered carbon that was stored safely in the ground, and when you burn it you release that carbon to the atmosphere.

So if you chose to be “off-grid” to be green, shifting all your thermal loads to propane is cheating. In the latest edition of “The Renewable Energy Handbook”, William “Bill” Kemp has taken his off-grid home “off propane”.

I would suggest that if you live in a city there’s a good chance you are doing very well in terms of your carbon footprint versus many off-gridders. In fact, if you live near a nuclear plant and cook with electric, you are putting far less carbon into the atmosphere than a propane cooking off-gridder. I won’t get into the reality of nuclear power and its waste today - this is just for a simple comparison.

If you live in a city and live in an apartment you are probably the model of environmental living. From a heating perspective, 3 of your 4 walls are inside walls, so you don’t have all the heat loss you get in a detached home. Even a town house with houses on both sides is better than a detached home. My daughters live in an apartment, walk many places and take transit for the rest. They are exceptional environmentalists, even though they don’t go around bragging about it. I’m happy to do that for them. I am very proud of them.

I have provided this perspective because many of the comments that I get about the blog these days comes from urban dwellers, many of whom seem determined to get to the country. I understand that sentiment and it’s how I ended up living 3 miles from my nearest neighbor. I am also realistic about the challenges it poses in terms of carbon output and how much harder I have to work to keep it low. I have to spend lots of money on solar panels to offset my propane use. I have to eat a whack of granola for energy to cycle the 16 miles (26 kilometers) to get to town and back when I’m craving a donut from the bakery. I’ll bet it’s way easier for you if you live in the city, not that any of us should be eating donuts.

It doesn’t matter where you live though, everything you can do helps and there’s no reason to just keep dreaming about your move to the country. Install a geothermal heating system. Put up solar panels for hot water first, and electricity later. And if the new owners don’t see the value in them, take them with you to your dream home in the country.

"Vintage" photos of city life are from Art Explosion by Nova Corp.

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By Cam Mather

Whenever we head to the nearest big city of Kingston to run errands we like to enjoy a meal at our favorite restaurant Curry Original. We love Indian food and their food is fantastic. We’ve come to know the owner Ali well, and we often talk to him and his staff about their trips back home to Bangladesh. I’m absolutely fascinated to hear about a country with such a dense population.

Bangladesh has a population of 162 million people and is 55,600 square miles in size. This means that for every square mile there are 2,917, or almost 3,000 people. Iowa is 56,271 square miles, which is close to Bangladesh with a population of 3 million people so the population density is 54 people for every square mile. New Jersey is the most densely populated U.S. State at 1,171 people per square mile. Wyoming and Montana have populations of about 6 people per square mile.

The Canadian province of Saskatchewan is 228,450 square miles, or 5 times as big as Bangladesh and has a population of 1,041,729, or let’s say 1 million people. So this means that everyone in Saskatchewan gets 4.3 square miles to themselves. Compared to 3,000 people per square mile, it’s crazy.

We own 150 acres and are surrounded by an undeveloped provincial park and many hunt camps. Our nearest neighbors are 3 miles to the east and 6 miles to the west. So other than the first two weeks of November during deer hunting season, I think we even beat Saskatchewan for population density. It’s just the two of us so on our property we each get 75 acres to ourselves, but if you count the bush around us its probably 750 acres, or 7,500 acres. It’s pretty amazing, and as someone who arrived here burned out on city life, it’s a dream come true.

I love foreign films because they let me experience other cultures without having the carbon footprint of actually flying there. I also don’t have to experience the airport nightmares, luggage horrors, unpredictable sickness, etc. that goes along with foreign travel. I enjoy watching south Asian movies so that I can see places like India. One thing I’m always struck by is the number of people. The sheer mass of humanity. Canada is almost 4 million square miles with 34 million people or 8 people per square mile.

India is 1.3 million square miles with an estimated population of 1.2 billion. That’s 933 people per square mile. I love Indian food and I appreciate the Indian culture but I have no desire to go to India. I just don’t think I could handle the crowds. I routinely don’t leave this place for weeks, so I really only ever see one other person on an on-going basis, my wife Michelle. I can just imagine that if I ever traveled to a country like India and find myself in a train station with 1,000s of people I’d probably have a huge panic attack. It would be quite embarrassing, so I’m just staying home.

In “Thriving During Challenging Times” I talk about how in the early 70s when the population of the planet was about 3.5 billion, the Club of Rome and a number of other groups suggested that maybe we should talk about slowing down or even stopping population growth. Maybe 3 billion is the carrying capacity of the planet. With the population of the planet now at 6.7 billion, obviously we didn’t listen. When I was born in 1960 the population was 3 billion, and in the year 2000 it was 6 billion, so in 4 decades, the population has doubled.

If everyone on the planet consumed at the rate of North Americans we’d need 5 planet Earths. Luckily most don’t. I know I’m doing my best to reduce my demands on the planet as much as I can. All I need to do is give up my car, rototiller, chainsaw and most of my income and I’d be close to someone living in Bangladesh.

In the meantime, I’m glad that Saskatchewan has so many farmers with so many huge fields of wheat. With affordable oil they are able to put diesel in their tractors and natural gas based fertilizers on their fields they are able to grow enough food to feed all the people who live in places with population densities too high to feed themselves. This year Saskatchewan had horrible spring rains and many farmers couldn’t get into their fields to seed properly. Their harvest will be down significantly. Russia has just announced that they will not be exporting any grain this year because of their brutal heat wave. Moscow has been under a cloud of smoke from the hundreds of wildfires that are burning, which has also dramatically affected crop yields.

In the book “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz”, the main character is obsessed with owning property because his grandfather has instilled in him a belief, “A man without land is nothing.” This was my philosophy when we bought our 150 acres. As the population of the planet continues to grow and climate change continues to impact crop yields, I don’t think there is any better insurance that you can have than some acres with your name on the property deed.