Writing to the Mayor on Smart Meters

I just sent the following letter to my local government leaders. Please feel free to copy and adapt it for your own muncipality.

Dear Mayor and Council,

Within the coming months, B.C. Hydro will be installing smart meters on homes and businesses across Bowen Island. I understand that, as in other communities in British Columbia, a number of residents are concerned with what they believe to be potential health risks associated with the meters.

I am writing to urge you to not to fall prey to the fear and alarmism that can spread quickly in the absence of strong leadership backed by factual and objective information. To be clear: There is no scientific evidence that the very low levels of radio frequency (RF) electromagnetic fields emitted at infrequent intervals by smart meters pose any risk to human health.

Smart meters are a very promising tool in the drive to modernize our electrical infrastructure. They could well help reduce the province’s overall energy demand and help British Columbians use our existing energy resources more efficiently. Ultimately, smart meters will help the province meet a greater portion of its energy needs through conservation—lessening the need to build new generating facilities.

Instead of being drawn into misinformation and hearsay, I urge you to instead show leadership. Please consider making a clear statement or resolution that Bowen Island Municipality supports the installation of smart meters as a promising new technology that will help members of the community better understand their energy consumption and ultimately reduce their overall energy use, saving money and conserving our shared resources.

That is a grassroots movement I would be proud to see my local government become a part of.

“Powerful: Energy for Everyone” Premiere

I’m looking forward to catching the Vancouver premier of Powerful: Energy for Everyone, a new documentary about our dysfunctional global energy system, and how we might fix it. Filmmaker David Chernushenko promises to “tackle the spin of the big energy lobby and dispel the myths of a ‘green utopia’ envisioned by many.” The film is billed as a candid examination of what a sustainable future may actually look like. It’s Friday afternoon at SFU Woodwards, part of the Projecting Change Film Festival. A clip from the film appears below.

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Are You an Atmosphan?

I’ve been mulling over in my head potential replacements for the word “environmentalist,” a term that in the minds of many needs to be retired, then sent home with a pension and a gold watch.

Why? Maybe it’s that it’s just not a very inspiring word. Maybe it’s that the term suggests that there is this “thing” out there called “the environment” that we need to buckle down and fix. To me, “the environment” feels more like an obligation than something to get excited about fixing. It’s a catch-all  collection of planetary ills: Deforestation? Overfishing? Whales? Particulates? Mercury? E-waste?

Can we please turn down the earnestat a few degrees?

Look, you’re all smart people out there. Maybe we can put our heads together and come up with some more upbeat words to describe those of us who know everything is ridiculously out of whack, and are working on the solutions, at home, at work, around the neighborhood, or across the country. Something a little more, er, marketable….

Let me throw one out to start. For me, it’s still all about climate. Attentive readers of this blog will note that I’m a big supporter of the atmosphere. It’s in rough shape, and pretty much everything down here depends upon us getting it back into balance, asap.

So call me an atmosphan. There.

Okay, now you. Go.

A Laptop and a Hammer

Blue Planet Green Living, a greener-living site based over in Iowa,  is presently running the transcript of a long-ish two-part interview conducted with me a couple weeks ago. The discussion covers the recession, President Obama, green building, Canada’s tar sands, transformational change, the challenges of living both rural and responsibly, and yes, everyone’s favorite topic, the mixed blessing of artificial turf soccer fields. Check it out.

Bowen Queen ferry photo by Chris Corrigan.

975 Green-Collar Layoffs Hit B.C.

British Columbia is about to lose 975 green collar jobs for the next eight weeks— and potentially longer. That’s because the only two industrial-scale Forest Stewardship Council sawmills in British Columbia—the same mills that sliced up the framing lumber for my Eco-Shed (see below)—are about to fall silent.

Tembec, the company in question, is shutting down its Elko and Canal Flats sawmills for two months as of early next week. When you factor in a third plant that will also spool down for the duration, 975 employees will be out of work.

The fact is, you don’t have to be a solar-panel installer to have a green-collar job. These mill workers were  processing lumber from just about the only industrial forestlands in all of British Columbia that are truly managed sustainably. The vast majority of the rest are clear-cuts—the standard-issue take-no-prisoners logging strategy that has, over decades, devastated thousands of square miles of ecosystem in this province.

Here’s a snippet from Almost Green that explains why FSC lumber is so important:

In a nutshell, the FSC tree logo does for lumber what the Energy Star label does for appliances and windows—it lets you know you’ve made the greener choice. An FSC stamp guarantees that the wood adheres to a set of ten principles of forest stewardship, including a set of kinder, gentler harvesting practices. FSC-certified foresters work selectively—leaving tracts of trees intact—and pay close attention to issues such as erosion, wildlife habitat, streams, and lakes. The program was set up to protect biodiversity long before greenhouse gas emissions really hit the radar screen, but it certainly advances carbon-conservative practices along the way.

The shutdowns shouldn’t surprise anyone, really: As I note in my book, I only managed to get my hands on the ultra-rare Tembec eco-studs by pure fluke. (It pretty much fell off the back of a truck.) Tembec has shipped almost every stick of the dimensional lumber produced at Elko and Canal flats exclusively into the States—in railcar quantities, and likely to big-box home-improvement chains—and people just aren’t building much of anything down that way these days.

The company has failed spectacularly to market its responsibly harvested lumber here in B.C.—the place where Tembec’s sustainably managed forests grow, the place where the logs are cut up, and the place where the green-collar workers have been punching the clock and making it all work. As I document in the book, none of the local Home Depots and lumber yards I called had even heard of the stuff. Consumers can’t ask for FSC lumber if they don’t even know it’s an option.

Now, it isn’t just the company’s product that is heading south this week, it’s their business, too. A damn shame. Does anyone else see a lesson here?

The Latest Tweets

Coming soon – the latest Tweets from James on Twitter – watch this space.

2009 To-Do List

A few things I want to do, and do more of, in 2009:

• Get more involved in helping my community prepare for the coming ground shifts. I’m hoping to work with the municipality to develop an active-transportation plan for the island, which is a prerequisite for implementation — going after public funds to build the stuff. Going to try and use social-media tools to get as much input as possible.

• Working with my wife, Elle, to launch several Bowfeast farmer’s markets over the summer. We are eyeing the North Dock as a location for this year’s market — a little- used space over the water next to the Island’s ferry dock that has huge potential — see below to get your bearings. Hope to bring back all the farmers, apiarists, and food gardeners from last year, and add a few more.

View Larger Map

• I’m going to work to more closely align my work with my values; I’m hoping to keep writing, but also develop an impresario role, using Web 2.0 tools such as mapping, tagging, and wikis to help people of common purpose connect with each other.

• Buy more second-hand, everything. Value Village, yeah.

• Ramp up the food garden. Last year was a great disappointment but we have been working on improving the soil over the fall and winter, and we have great hopes for a bumper crop this year. We’ve been hoarding mason jars for at least a year, and hope to do some canning and preserving.

• Camping, kayaking, and canoeing. The kids are big enough to appreciate all of it now.

And how about you? What do you want to accomplish?

Cute, But Does It Work?

My wife came into the Eco-Shed yesterday while I was working in there and straight away told me to “turn down the damn heat.” It was so warm in the place that I was stripped down to my T-shirt, and such luxuries are expensive when it’s five degrees below freezing outside — which it is these days.  “Just turn it down and put on a sweater!,” she implored.

But the heat was free. This is The Eco-Shed’s first full winter and so long as we have sunny skies — like we do right now — I’ll be damned if it the place doesn’t warm up all by itself just as we hoped it would.

For those of you just joining us, it’s a passive solar building with generous amounts of Low-E “Hard Coat” glass, which admits more thermal radiation, combined with a concrete floor that soaks up that heat, and excellent insulation to keep it inside. If anything, it works a little too well, it was a bit of a solar oven in there yesterday afternoon. I pulled the shades, bumped up the ventilation system and cracked a window.

I bleemed off the shed weather report to Dan Parke , my architect. “Beautiful,” he replied. Indeed.

What “Green” Really Means

Here’s my latest, a piece about my own community’s wrenching struggles to deal with growth and change — change in both the cultural fabric and the climate itself. It’s a broad-ranging investigation of the in-between moment we all find ourselves in, where there are no easy answers, where fear, entitlement, and good-old-fashioned denial can dominate the conversation, and where we don’t always agree on what “green” really means on the ground. Here’s the key passage:

“The one thing that may kick-start the island’s flagging economy, help reverse affordability, downshift greenhouse-gas emissions, soften the coming blow of peak oil, and preserve miles of forest and meadow from the march of estate-home sprawl is the very thing that many Bowenites came here specifically to escape…”

Before you dive in, I need to correct an error, introduced in editing, that suggests the gases methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide can potentially cause cancer. The passage should have instead referenced “butadiene, cadmium, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.” The editors regret the error. Really, they do.

With that out of the way, here’s the link:
Turf War, Vancouver magazine, November 2008. [PDF File, 1MB]

Your List of Demands, Please

I’m working on a presentation for Interesting Vancouver that I’m loosely calling the New Bill of Rights. In case you haven’t heard, we’re in a bit of a pickle, and while we each bring our own personal-life baggage to this perilous moment in history —ie, challenging legacy decisions regarding housing, vehicles, and so on — the time has come for bold thinking and big moves. The time has come to sweep away fear — of social backlash, of deep bright-green change — and turn up the volume. The time has come to hit the fast-forward button and demand our leaders use whatever means necessary to put the pieces of a better world in place.

We’re half-way there. I sense a rising chorus of individual voices out there who are literally crying out and scraping and scratching and clawing towards a bright-green society. They’re doing it one household at a time with more deliberate behaviors and more conscious purchasing decisions, or perhaps they are reaching over the back fence and dabbling in neighborhood-scale organizing — a process I call culdesactivism.

What this collective longing needs is a unified set of goals and principals, a list of things that are entirely within the realm of possible but kept at bay by the larger challenges of market subsidies and public policies engineered to preserve the brown status quo. We need to not think of this as a “wish list” but rather as a set of entitlements for the greater public good. We need to demand that greener choices exist, and that they come without premiums of price and life force. We need bold leadership to pour resources into these, to help avert catastrophe. Here are a couple to get you started:

1. I Have the Right to Efficient, Comfortable Public Transit. Here’s one of 206 new next-generation trams just rolling out in Berlin. It’s made by Bombardier, a Canadian company. There’s nothing like this in our cities. (Photo: IsarSteve.)

2. I Have the Right to Know What it Really Costs.This is the Pharos Lens, a project of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council. The lens is a concept hang-tag that would live at retail and convey to consumers, at a glace, a product’s various impacts. It’s a pilot program, and so far limited to the building-materials market, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t see this sort of thing on a package of pasta, or a pair of jeans. Food products come with a “nutrition label” for reasons of public health. It’s time we start thinking bigger to have the tools we need to make more informed snap decisions in the marketplace.

Now, what are YOUR demands? What would be in your New Bill of Rights? What is it time to stop pining for and simply demand with one loud voice? Perhaps if enough of us dive in, this might evolve into a kind of a petition to our leaders. Jump in the pool via the comments box, below.