Shopping local and GREEN can be easy

Spring has finally sprung and if you are like most of your neighbors in Toronto-Danforth you have arisen from hibernation and are back out riding bikes, walking and gardening in force.

Local is good for you!

Much of that walking and biking will be to shop at local merchants. There are many reasons why shopping locally makes sense now more than ever.     Read more »

Farmers’ markets 2008

This list is for 2008.  Click here for the 2009 list.     Read more »

Young Chris Tindal had a farm

Chris Tindal is a clever boy.  He’s planned a whole urban community with its own farm.  It recycles its water and generates part of its energy needs.  It is a living machine, as communities should be.  The entire community would replace the armoury buildings in Moss Park.  I would vote for the boy, if I still lived in Toronto-Centre.  And if you do live in Toronto-Centre, you have an opportunity to do so on Monday.

Food crisis looms

As we attempt to preserve as much as we can of an economy that relies on enormous and cheap energy inputs, there is a temptation to turn to all kinds of desperate measures.  It has long been a concern of mine that energy crops will compete directly with food crops, to preserve a high-energy lifestyle for the world’s rich at the cost of food for the world’s poor.

Here‘s a UK report that suggests that food shortages will hit the world before climate change affects us.

The end of fish?

A new U.N. report predicts the imminent collapse of the world’s fishing stocks due to climate change, according to this Associated Press report.

PARIS (AP) — Major world commercial fish stocks could collapse within decades as global warming compounds damage from pollution and overfishing, U.N. officials said Friday.

A U.N. Environment Program report details new research on how rising ocean surface temperature and other climate changes are affecting the fishing industry. It says that more than 2.6 billion people get most of their protein from fish.

“You overlay all of this and you are potentially putting a death nail in the coffin of the world fisheries,” Achim Steiner, head of the program, said in a telephone news conference from Monaco.