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Published by the Kingston Greens
GREEN LIGHT KINGSTON #224 |
Issue #224
Monday, January 18, 2010 |
Printed in cyberspace on recycled electrons
Compiled and edited using 100% clean, renewable power (wind and low-impact hydro) from Bullfrog Power.
To publicise future events, corrections and/or if you have comments, please email Green Light Kingston:
We welcome new submissions!
Quote of the Week:
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
- Marshall McLuhan, educator and philosopher (1911-1980)
In This Issue:
| 1. Website of the Week | |
| 2. Cartoon | |
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| 3. Current Events | |
| 4. Coming Events | |
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| 5. Elsewhere Events | |
| 6. Community Action | |
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| 7. Worth Reading | |
| 8. Community Notices | |
| 9. Wanted! | |
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| 10. Local Organic Produce | |
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1. Website of the Week
| New! Canada Haiti Action Network |
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Haiti needs our help...
http://canadahaitiaction.ca/ |
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2. Cartoon
3. Current Events
| New! Kingstonians Against Prorogation |
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Saturday, January 23, 2010 1:00 PM
There will be a Democracy Demonstration at 1pm on Jan 23 on the Market Square (behind City Hall), against the prorogation of the parliament. |
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| New! An Old-time Appalachian Square Dance |
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Bring your family and friends out to an old-fashioned square dance featuring Sheesham and Lotus and Martha Cooper in the Mulberry School gym on Sunday, January 24th from 2:00 to 4:00 pm. A Family Friendly event. Come and kick up your heels old-time style! No experience necessary and no partner needed. All ages welcome!!
Tickets are available at the door. Mulberry School is an independent, non-denominational Developing Waldorf School within the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America and a charitable and not-for-profit organization. We offer Parent and Child programs, Morning Garden, Kindergarten and Grades 1-8. Mulberry School welcomes children and their families from all religious, ethnic, cultural and economic backgrounds. |
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| New! Protest Prorogation at Peter Milliken's Office |
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Saturday, January 23, 2010 11:00 AM
There's going to be a gathering at Milliken's office on Sat., Jan 23 at 11:00 a.m., part of a nationwide response set up by a facebook group objecting to the shutdown of Parliament. |
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| Ban Righ Centre Fundraiser |
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Ban Righ Centre Fundraiser
Presents The Play Marion Bridge by Daniel MacIvor | directed by Michael Catlin The Baby Grand Theatre January 27, 2010 Tickets $20.00 8:00 p.m. Contact Karen Knight 613-533-2976 or kk9@queensu.ca for details |
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4. Coming Events
5. Elsewhere Events
| New! Introduction to Permaculture: Roots of the Transition Town Movement |
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with Bonita Ford
Saturday, January 30, 2010 -- 10am to 5pm Richelieu-Vanier Community Centre 300 des Peres Blancs Avenue,Vanier Presented by: Transition Ottawa and The Canadian Biodiversity Institute At its simplest, permaculture is an eco-logical approach to design. It can be described as a way of thinking, making decisions and designing things based on observing nature. Permaculture has a set of ethics and design principles which can be applied to physical things - like landscapes or cities - as well as to invisible things - like business models, and our personal lives. Transition Towns utilise permaculture principles and design as an important base for action. Cost: $25 Send cheques made out to the Canadian Biodiversity Institute to CBI, 3351 Blanchfield Rd., Osgoode, Ont., K0A 2W0 Please bring your own lunch. Hot and cold beverages, fruit and dessert will be provided. There is free on-site parking, and OC Transpo Bus, Route #5 stops right outside the entrance. If you plan to attend, please RSVP to Heather Hamilton at 613-826-2190 or hhamilton@magma.ca by January 23. Maximum 40 participants Funding support from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, Community Foundation of Ottawa, City of Ottawa (CEPGP) Bonita Ford has led workshops worldwide for over five years. She received her Permaculture Design Certificate through Urban Permaculture Guild and Oakland Permaculture Institute, and has co-facilitated and guest taught in several permaculture design courses. To learn more about Bonita, please visit: http://www.eco-logicalsolutions.com |
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6. Community Action
7. Worth Reading
| New! Know the ingredients in your personal care products |
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From the environmental working group
http://www.ewg.org/healthyhometips/ingredientsinpersonalcareproducts Better products meet their claims and are free of ingredients that could harm our health or the environment. Labels might claim that a product is “gentle” or “natural,” but with no required safety testing, companies that make personal care products can use almost any chemical they want, regardless of risks. So, always read product labels – especially the ingredient list - before you buy. How to read a label Every personal care product on the market must list the ingredients on the label. Label reading can be confusing - here are some tips to help you wade through the chemical names. You can approach ingredient lists in 3 parts: 1.Start at the end where preservatives are listed. Try to avoid: •Words ending in “paraben” •DMDM hydantoin •Imidsazolidinyl urea •Methylchloroisothiazolinone •Methylisothiazolinone •Triclosan •Triclocarban •Triethanolamine (or “TEA”) 2.Next, check the beginning of the ingredients list. Here you’ll find the soap, surfactant, or lubricant that has been added to make the product work. Try to avoid ingredients that start with “PEG” or have an “-eth” in the middle (e.g., sodium laureth sulfate). 3.Finally, read the middle ingredients. Here you’ll look for some common – but not essential - additives that may bring excess hazard: fragrance and dyes. On the label look for “FRAGRANCE,” “FD&C,” or “D&C.” For the grown-ups in the house While many parents pay more attention to their kids’ environmental health than their own, your body can be affected by toxic chemicals, too, especially if you’re breastfeeding, pregnant, or planning to be pregnant. EWG’s Safer Shopping List has 9 common-sense tips to reduce your own exposures, like buying fragrance-free, skipping the nail polish and using fewer products. You can also download our handy wallet guide, which lists some products and ingredients to avoid. Use EWG’s Cosmetics Database to choose safer products. In addition to generating a hazard score for your product (on a 1 to 10 scale), it allows you to search by brand and for products without certain ingredients or health effects. You can enter products that aren’t included, and create personal shopping lists – among other tricks. Just for kids Extra caution is in order for kids because they receive greater exposures by weight than adults to contaminants in air, water, food, and everyday products. In addition, their immature metabolism and organ systems are typically less capable of fending off chemical assaults. Subtle damage to developing bodies that does not trigger immediate health effects may lead to disease later in life. Follow EWG’s top 6 tips for kids: 1.Use fewer products and use them less often. 2.Don’t trust the claims. Check ingredients. 3.Buy fragrance-free products. 4.Avoid the use of baby powder on newborns and infants. 5.Do your homework at EWG's Cosmetics Database 6.Always avoid EWG’s top 7 chemicals of concern for kids: •2-Bromo-2-Nitropropane-1,3 Diol •BHA •Boric acid and sodium borate •Dibutyl phthalate & toluene •DMDM Hydantoin •Oxybenzone •Triclosan |
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| New! The secret to preventing fishery decline: stop fishing so much |
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By Tim Varga
From TerraPass.com We have a range of tools to restore fisheries, but all require good government The concept of restoring ecosystems damaged by human exploitation has always interested me, so the recent edition of Science featuring Restoration Ecology sent my heart into a pitter-patter. There are a number of good news stories and perspectives in it, but the primary research article on “Rebuilding Global Fisheries” in particular deserves a few words. Global fish stocks have been declining precipitously since the industrialization of the fishing fleet, especially since the 1950s when technology, globalization, and improved shipbuilding proved too much for many popular (and some previously unpopular) fish stocks. Overfishing has resulted in a sharp decline in overall fish biomass, but has been especially hard on larger, longer-lived fish. Not only are there fewer fish in the seas, the ones that remain are on average 22% smaller today than 50 years ago. We are basically eating our way down the food chain, destroying the largest species and then moving on to smaller ones that the larger ones originally ate. Where we once caught large schools of giant fish on the open ocean (tuna), many people now munch on shockingly unattractive, bottom-feeding fish that have been given pretty but inaccurate names (Chilean sea bass). A sordid affair. The article is about restoring ecosystems, and thankfully there is some positive news to report. There are a range of policy and technology options that could help bring fish stocks back to what is known as Multispecies Maximum Sustainable Yield: reducing the total allowable catch, imposing gear restrictions to avoid by-catch, creating marine preserves that are off-limits to fishing entirely, and buying out excess fishing capacity to reduce overall pressure on ecosystems, among others. The authors are clear that none of these work all the time, and rarely do any of these options succeed by themselves. In fact, these implementations require “that good local governance, enforcement, and compliance form the very basis for conservation and rebuilding efforts.” That seems like a self-evident statement, but across the world a lack of adequate government means a failure to curb and control overfishing. Lack of government is not just a problem for Somalia, either. As the authors point out, “in the United States, where 67 overfished stocks have rebuilding plans, 45% of those were still being overfished in 2006, whereas only 3 stocks had been rebuilt at that time.” The sad truth is that there will be economic costs to reduced fishing in the short term; we can expect job losses in the fishing industry and fewer sales until stocks recover. The good news is that the ocean is a miraculously productive place. Its sheer enormity underlies its ability to provide food and well-being for hundreds of millions of people across the globe. With strong protections, the ocean’s bounty can be a vital and sustainable source of nutrition and pleasure for future generations. |
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| New! Defusing the population bomb |
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By Adam Stein
From TerraPass.com http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/defusing-the-population-bomb Study suggests family planning is one of the lowest-cost ways to reduce CO2 People may be the problem, but what’s the solution? Although energy use is driven by demographic trends, we don’t seem to have many tools readily at hand for addressing population as a root cause of climate change. But a new study suggests that a simple investment in family planning services might save an enormous amount of carbon emissions at very low cost. Specifically, the report claims that the world can spare 34 gigatons of CO2 emissions — the amount the entire U.S. produces in six years — over the next four decades at a cost of $7 per ton. According to the report, these reductions can be achieved simply by fulfilling the current “unmet need” for family planning, an ungainly phrase that refers to the population of couples who are married or “in union” and want contraception but lack access. Because unmarried people experience unwanted pregnancy as well, presumably demand for contraception is even greater than the study suggests. If all this unmet need is filled, the projected population in 2050 drops from 9.1 billion to 8.7 billion. 8.7 billion, of course, still represents substantial growth from today’s level. That’s always been the problem with focusing overly much on population as the key driver of climate change: the number of people on the planet seems likely to hit roughly 9 billion no matter what we do, so ultimately clean energy and efficiency are going to be the primary way we solve the resource puzzle. Nevertheless, 34 gigatons is a lot of gas, and $7 is a nice price, and providing family planning services to people who want them has meaningful humanitarian benefits, so this seems like a fruitful (ha!) area to explore. Of course, family planning is also an insanely fraught topic, so don’t expect much progress on this front anytime soon, at least in the U.S. Update: I’ve realized that I worded this post in a pretty misleading way. The primary benefit to providing better access to contraception occurs in the developing world, not in the U.S. My crack about the U.S. at the end was meant to apply more to foreign aid and foreign policy than to domestic policy. Of course, birth rate in the U.S. matters a lot, and reducing unwanted pregnancies here would have the single biggest effect of reducing them in any individual country — about 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide, according to the study. But in aggregate, reducing unwanted pregnancy in China, India, Russia, South Africa, and Mexico would reduce about 16 gigatons. Contrary to what some commenters have suggested, the developing world matters a lot. One giant question mark is how immigration affects the balance of emissions. The study doesn’t address this issue at all. Finally, this post has nothing to do with people’s personal decisions about children. It’s an examination of the impact of providing contraception to couples who want it but aren’t currently using it, primarily in developing countries. This is one of the few non-coercive ways I know of to reduce population pressures, and the study is interesting because it’s the only attempt I’ve seen to actually quantify the benefit. |
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| New! Prorogue apathy now! |
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Friday, January 08, 2010 00:00
From Fair Vote Canada The Prime Minister’s decision to prorogue (cancel) Parliament, yet again, has unleashed a storm of well-deserved political outrage. Fair Vote supporters know this is only the latest in a series of actions by governments of different political stripes to diminish the relevance of Parliament and concentrate power in the office of the Prime Minister. We also know the root problem is our inability to hold politicians and political parties accountable because of our antiquated and dysfunctional winner-take-all voting system. The Facebook group Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament has exploded to over 100,000 members in just a few days and protest rallies are being organized all over Canada for Saturday, January 23. But now it’s time to talk solutions! Opportunities for political change come along only once in a while. This is one of those moments! Act now! Here’s what to do: · Sign the Declaration of Voters’ Rights, demanding a new electoral system based on core democratic principles – voter equality, fair results and genuine majority rule. Forward this message to all your contacts and ask them to do the same. · Download and print off several copies of the Declaration of Voters’ Rights, collect signatures and mail them to Fair Vote Canada. · Attend one of the anti-proroguing rallies on January 23 with copies of the Declaration and get more signatures – anddistribute Fair Vote Canada flyers. Here are more ways to build a better democracy in Canada: · Join Fair Vote Canada and support us with your donation. · Become a fan on our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. Share with your online friends. · Get involved with Fair Vote Canada as a volunteer. |
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| New! Grassroots fury greets shuttered Parliament |
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By Susan Delacourt
and Richard J. Brennan Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to shut down Parliament for the next two months is facing a growing public uprising, which is building on social networks across Canada and is set to spill over in dozens of protest rallies this month. "Get back to work" is the rallying cry on a Facebook page that has been gaining thousands of supporters each day since it was launched last week – approaching 20,000 by the end of the day on Monday. It now has chapters in about 20 major centres, including Toronto, and demonstrations are planned for Saturday, Jan. 23 in those cities. The grassroots movement is led by a University of Alberta anthropology graduate student and echoes the views of some of Canada's most senior constitutional experts, including University of Toronto professor emeritus Peter Russell. "Canadians don't realize that parliamentary democracy is in danger," said Russell, who edited the book Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis following last year's prorogation by Harper. The prime minister made the move at the time to avoid his Conservative government being toppled and replaced with a coalition of the Liberals and NDP. The protest follows Harper's announcement last week that he was proroguing Parliament until March 3, when the Winter Olympics in Vancouver are over. Parliament was to resume on Jan. 25. The suspension of the House of Commons means dozens of pieces of legislation die on the order paper and the move also dissolves the parliamentary committee probing the issues surrounding allegations that Afghan detainees transferred by Canadian troops to Afghan authorities were subsequently tortured. "There's a lot of anger amongst people who aren't normally political," says Justin Arjoon, a 27-year-old botany student at the University of Toronto, who's heading up planning for the Toronto rally. "Everyone I've broached the subject to has burst into an unexpected rant at how cynical and corrupt this move is. Even my parents have commented." Shilo Davis, a student at McMaster University in Hamilton and a former contestant on CBC TV's Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, said she's seeing unexpected interest for the rally in her city, too. "I've gotten at least 50 emails a day from people asking how they can help and, even though the event page was only created a few days ago, we've had over 1,500 people confirm attendance," said Davis, who, like Arjoon, holds a position on her local NDP riding association. While most Canadians couldn't have defined the word "prorogue" a year ago, the term for suspending Parliament seems to be seeping into the public psyche. Some of the response to the parliamentary shutdown appears to fly in the face of predictions that Canadians are too bored or apathetic to care whether federal politicians have disappeared from the capital. When Christopher White, an anthropology graduate student at the University of Alberta, started his grassroots movement on Facebook last week – Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament – he didn't know what to expect. White, who says he is not a political activist, said Harper won two minority mandates largely on the promise his government would be more accountable than previous Liberal ones, "so I think that's what has especially hit a nerve." "This might be the straw that broke the camel's back," said White, who is helping organize the protests across the country. " (Harper's) counting on our apathy to carry him through this and the glow of the Olympics to bolster his appeal." Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff is calling this a defining moment in Harper's tenure – "one of those moments of supreme clarity," Ignatieff wrote in an opinion piece. "The audacity. The epic scale of the cynicism. The arrogance of a regime that thinks it can get away with just about anything." Ignatieff, who is embarking on a major tour of Canadian university and college campuses next week, is making clear that this need not provoke an election, as some pundits have suggested Harper is seeking. "Shutting down Parliament has raised speculation about a spring election. Certainly, there is no need for an early election. Three in less than six years is enough for the next while. In case anyone missed it, I got that message loud and clear from Canadians last fall. And that message was not only addressed to me," the Liberal leader wrote. Russell said Canadians have every right to be concerned that their democratic rights are under attack. "What this is is a continuation of a very authoritarian approach to government by the current prime minister ... this particular prime minister does not want to govern in an accountable democratic manner. It is extremely dangerous," Russell told the Star. Errol P. Mendes, a professor of constitutional and international law at the University of Ottawa, writes in a piece published in the Star Tuesday that the Prime Minister's highest duty is to uphold the Constitution, including the rights and privileges of the House of Commons and his duties to the Queen's representative in Canada. "Stephen Harper keeps on failing in his duties on both counts as evidenced by the second prorogation of Parliament on Dec. 30," he writes. |
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8. Community Notices
| Kingston's Community Garden Policy - Need Your Feedback! |
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Friday, January 01, 2010 9:00 AM
The city is consulting on a draft community garden policy. Deadline for comments is January 7th. http://www.cityofkingston.ca/cityhall/press/release.asp?mode=show&id=2768 Important points to consider:
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| Kingston's Sustainability Plan - Get informed |
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Kingston City Council's admirable goal is to become Canada's most sustainable city. We are situated in such a way to make this entirely possible. Explore the plan and make comments online at the following link:
http://www.cityofkingston.ca/cityhall/sustainability/ |
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| Join the Kingston Greens |
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Free newsletter, articles, talks etc.
Get involved in community actions (for example: Lobbying Council for a Ban
on the Cosmetic use of Pesticides, Fighting Urban Development on
Conservation Land, Survey on Green Issues that affect Kingstonians, Election
Canvassing etc.). Green momentum is building in Kingston. Come out and help us bring a sustainable future to Kingston! Membership to Kingston Greens is free but we encourage membership to the Green Party of Ontario ($10) and the Green Party of Canada ($10). Remember: You can get up to 75% of your donation to the Kingston Greens back at tax time! The current government will help you subsidize the greening of their own non-Green policies! Give generously and you'll receive a generous dividend in return: a 75% tax credit and more progressive government. Please send your cheque made to: KINGSTON GREENS (please specify Provincial or Federal membership on your cheque. Unfortunately, separate cheques are required for each.) - P.O. Box 1691, Kingston ON, K7L 5J6 More info: 384-8504 or ( |
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9. Wanted!
10. Local Organic Produce