By Terri Smith – Let’s talk refrigeration and climate change. At the start of April, the federal government awarded multi-billion-dollar company Loblaws $12 million to upgrade the company’s coolers in an effort to meet Canada’s emission targets. Just let that sink in for a minute. This amount is a drop in the bucket for Loblaws, but money that could help countless small, green businesses across Canada. I didn’t know anything about Galen Weston, chairman of Loblaws, and I mostly don’t shop at any of the stores owned by Loblaws anyway (Real Canadian Superstore, Extra Foods, and Shoppers Drug Mart are…
Author: thegreengazette
By Chris R. Shepherd – Having birds around is something most Canadians take for granted. Spring, especially, is full of bird songs as the migrants return and mating season’s singing rituals commence. However, in some parts of the world, these songs are being silenced by the illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade. Globally, the illegal wildlife trade is estimated to be worth between US$7 billion and US$23 billion annually. While its clandestine nature makes accurate valuation impossible, it is considered the fourth most lucrative global crime after drugs, humans, and arms. It is recognized as a major threat to biodiversity, often…
By David Suzuki – We should appreciate nature for its own sake. After all, we’re part of it. We must also recognize that nature gives us what we need to stay healthy and survive. What we do to nature, we do to ourselves. Healthy oceans and the plankton they support give us most of the oxygen we breathe and provide food for much of humanity. Trees sequester carbon, produce oxygen, filter contaminants in air and water, and prevent erosion and flooding. Polar ice caps regulate global temperatures and ocean currents. From the smallest microbes to the largest mammals, biodiverse animal…
Part of the Cariboo Regional District’s Solid Waste Info Series: Becoming Waste Wise By Tera Grady – Bans on plastic bags are a hot topic in BC, lately. Several municipalities across the province are working on bylaws to ban single-use plastic bags and the City of Victoria has been leading the way. Its ban came into effect mid-2018. It was not an easy task, though. The City was taken to court by the Canadian Plastic Bag Association with the argument that BC municipalities do not have authority to regulate the environment. In the end, the BC Supreme Court ruled in…
By Oliver Berger – Over half of the waste in our society is organic leftovers we can re-purpose to make valuable additions back into our everyday lives. I get asked a lot why we cannot have organics diversion bins in our city or the Cariboo region. The answer for this is the cost. When handling organic waste, you haul around much more product than you are finished with, because most of it is water. In reality, for every 100kg of organic waste you move, you will have 20kg of finished soil amendment to potentially sell. That is a tough profit…
By Brianna van de Wijngaard – The Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society (CCCS) hosted its first ever Repair Café on Saturday, May 11 at the Potato House in Williams Lake. The weather was perfect, and it was heartwarming to see how many people love to use and share skills that are almost becoming a lost art. The Repair Café concept itself is not new. The first Repair Café happened in Amsterdam on October 18, 2009 and they continue today in countries all around the world. The idea is pretty simple, but with multiple benefits: you bring the thing you think is…
By Angela Gutzer – The islands of Haida Gwaii had been calling me back after seven years. A local told me that it’s a sign you will live here if, when you are leaving the island you see a whale on your way out. It happened to her and she never looked back. On the ferry seven years ago, after a visit to Haida Gwaii I asked for a whale sighting on my way home, uninformed of the consequences. Far in the distance I saw a whale tail, but I questioned the vision wondering if my eyes had seen correctly.…
By Helen Englund – The Horsefly River watershed is located 75 km southeast of Williams Lake in the Cariboo Region of BC and encompasses approximately 286,000 hectares. The river is approximately 98 km in length and drains into Quesnel Lake. The lake feeds the Quesnel River, which meets the Fraser River in the community of Quesnel. The land features numerous landscape types and ranges in elevation from approximately 800 m in the Village of Horsefly to 2,500 m in the headwater area. For more than 150 years the watershed has been developed by forestry, agriculture, lodges, mining, trapping, recreational users,…
By Barbara Schellenberg – With the school year winding down and the summer holidays sparkling on the horizon it’s a good time to start laying the foundation for the summer months. Kids do a big part of their growing in the summer months, they are also often more active and that means it is crucial to keep up proper nutrition during this time. Summer means you are out of the day-to-day school-year routine, which makes it a perfect time to mix things up, introduce them to new foods, and focus on better eating for your family for the long term.…
By the time this issue comes out, the summer season will be rolling in. The smoke of recent years has taken its toll of some of the prime observing time for most casual observers. That is August and September, when nights are dark enough and warm enough. The sun is the dominant astronomical object of summer, of course. It is a little over 100 times farther away than it is big, so something like one-foot ball a hundred feet away and Earth is about a hundred times smaller in diameter, a small pea size. The light from the sun takes…
By Nola Daintith and Rodger Hamilton – For the last three years, two very generous market gardeners near Soda Creek, north of Williams Lake, have opened their potato patches and other vegetable fields in the fall to the Cariboo-Chilcotin Conservation Society (CCCS). Members of the CCCS along with friends, students, and assorted dogs have spent an enjoyable day or two gleaning potatoes, carrots, squash, and other veggies, but mostly potatoes—and a lot of potatoes! The idea behind the gleaning project was to collect the last of the crops (that were likely too expensive to harvest and market) and store them…
By Venta Rutkauskas – Summer beckons us to explore a landscape at the peak of its fertility while around the province, arts and culture events sprout and blossom into fruitful exchanges of energy. Music festivals, art walks, markets, and more, set themselves against the backdrop of British Columbia’s inspired terrain. It’s a time to revel in and celebrate the landscape, while the arts provide a passage into human ingenuity. The art experience is imbued with the sights, sounds, and smells of the environment, joining with the subject matter to create a synthesis perhaps unimagined by its creator. It’s that moment…
By Lisa Hilton – As our eight-year-old zips around the yard on his little electric dirt bike, courtesy of Canadian Tire, I can’t help but ponder the future of electric travel. It seems that the electric travel industry took a hundred-year hiatus, but since the turn of the millennia, it’s come sizzling back with a vengeance. Consider a company like Tesla Motors, incorporated in 2003 and thus fulfilling the dream of a fully electric sports car. Now, a mere 16 years later, they produce affordable family vehicles that can beat many gas-tanked vehicles for range, and as for fuel efficiency,…
By Erin Hitchcock – I can’t remember when I first learned about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but I remember the sheer shock and disbelief at how so much plastic could end up in the ocean. Why had no one done anything about it? While attempts are being made to do that, successful results remain to be seen. And the plastics keep flowing in. A dump truck full of plastic is released into the oceans each minute, according to a study from the World Economic Forum. Mistaking plastics for food, deceased whales and turtles continue to wash up on the…
By Shawn Lewis – Williams Lake, aka the Puddle, is not unique in being home to great mountain biking. Sure, we have been dubbed the Shangri-La of mountain biking by Bike Magazine, and most recently called “BC’s Best Adventure Town,” by Explore magazine, but we live in a beautiful province filled with amazing sites and really good trails, just about everywhere. There are a couple of things that separate us from the crowd though; first, the sheer size of our entire trail system—180 plus trails, four networks, and over 350 kms of single track. Second, the ease that one can…
By Stephanie Bird, on behalf of Rail Ties Be Wise, Williams Lake – Who stands to gain if rail ties are burned at the biomass power generator in Williams Lake? Certainly, Canadian National Railway (CN) will benefit. The company would have a simple solution to its problem—the trackside accumulation of waste rail ties between here and Québec. And Boston-based Atlantic Power will benefit also, as there can’t be too much (if any) cost in accessing this waste. Perhaps the company’s profit margin would grow? In a 2015 survey from the Railway Tie Association, three contractors reported paying tipping fees to…
By Jessica Kirby – with files from the Nature Trust of BC and Samantha Penner The Nature Trust of British Columbia (NTBC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to conserving ecologically significant land across the province for vulnerable wildlife, fish, and plants. Since 1971, it has acquired more than 71,000 hectares (175,000 acres) of critical habitat, and its conservation lands are located on the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island, the South Okanagan, the Kootenays, the Cariboo, and the Peace River region. Sammy Penner works for NTBC as the group’s Lower Mainland conservation field technician. In the spring and summer, she supervises the…
By LeRae Haynes – Williams Lake volunteers with Canadian Food for Children have taken recycling to a humanitarian level, turning pillow cases and T-shirts into dresses; discarded yarn into pneumonia vests for infants and into leprosy bandages; and tuna cans into candles for light and warmth. Canadian Food for Children works to relieve the suffering of the poor in over two dozen developing countries around the world, including Angola, Columbia, Dominica, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Madagascar, Malawi, Nicaragua, Peru, Philippines, Sierra Leone, St. Lucia, Tanzania, Trinidad, and Zambia. This goes beyond food. They provide things like midwife…
By Ryan Elizabeth Cope – June 8 is World Oceans Day. Much like Earth Day, it is a day to truly be celebrated every day one chooses to visit the ocean. But, similarly to Christmas, it’s wonderful to dedicate one entire day to one specific cause. The oceans are certainly worthy of our celebrations. Why? Well, simply put: without our oceans, you wouldn’t be reading this article, this magazine wouldn’t exist, and none of us would be around to be aware of any of this in the first place. The oceans provide us with a space to recreate and the…