2.       List the food miles on your ‘locally-produced’ food products, however source the food from highly mechanized agricultural operations that have a large carbon footprint but a very low (for the time being) cost.  FACT:  In America, up to 12% of our total fossil fuel use is linked to the food system and more than 35% of our total greenhouse gas emissions are linked to our food system.  And yet, on average 85% of the carbon footprint of our food comes from production, and about 15% from transport.  So “food miles” does not tell the whole story.  Ode Mag article here.

3.       Launch a domestic store chain and stock it with cheap, imported goods.  Consumers tend to support domestically-owned retailers as they believe the profits are staying within the country, eg. Tim Horton’s Canadian Tire, Loblaws Companies, and Giant Tiger.  Who knows if this is true.

4.       Build a new brand with a local marketing proposition or, reposition an existing brand as local, in order to capitalize on the ‘buy local’ trend.  Locavores will love it!  PS. It’s called local-washing. Follow Starbuck’s example if you need help on how to do this.

5.       Spin everyday business practices to present your business as having green practices, eg. cite your cost reductions as resource conservation and put lovely nature imagery on your packaging regardless of whether your products are safe for the environment.  This way you can join the thousands of other businesses successfully green-washing their products.

It’ll never happen you say?  Well maybe not but I’d rather be prepared and moving toward more sustainable living at the same time, because it just makes sense to do so.  Here are some ways that you might want to prepare too.

1.       Create a  5 year Get-Out-of-Debt Plan and make it so

Financially, debt is our riskiest practice, and yet our entire financial system, including business, banks and governments are promoting debt like candy.  The reason is that economic growth – the very fabric of our financial system – depends on ongoing and increasing amounts of debt in the system.  Recognize this external pressure for what it is, and resist the temptation to buy beyond your means.  Create a plan to be out of debt in 5-years (or less!) and consider what it would take to simplify your life and living arrangements so that you are living within your means.  While you’re planning, be conservative and imagine your investments flat-lining rather than growing over time. There are simply too many unpredictable possibilities in our very near future that could make carrying your current debt unsustainable!

2.       Build up at least 2-weeks of shelf-stable food and water stores

My current project is to organize a food storage space in my home and begin building food stores to ensure that family would continue to be well fed in the event that store shelves were suddenly emptied or we couldn’t get to the store for an extended period of time.  I’m in awe at the wealth of how-to wisdom in Sharon Astyk’s Independence Days, outlining everything you could ever want to know about food preservation and food storage.  In a nutshell, the goal is to plan 2-weeks’ worth of meals that can be made from shelf-stable ingredients and begin stocking up.  Astyk also advises on how to make the most of the abundance in our local growing season and preserving the food so that our household stores are locally sourced and we’re supporting our local farmers and our own backyard gardening in the process.  And don’t forget some water stores.  Using old jars and bottles, and adding a few drops of bleach to the water in each will keep the water safe over time.

3.       Invest your assets into land, building(s), precious metals and community

Suppose the volatility of the financial markets and currencies is the way of the future… do you want to keep your life savings here?  Some argue that we’ve seen the end of the economic growth we’ve enjoyed in the past and that modest growth, steady state or even economic contraction will be the new normal.  Where would you want your assets so that you mitigate the chances of them disappearing into thin air like those fictitious financial instruments that the market is based on?  I can summarize what I believe is the safest investing strategy for your future in the following ways:  Convert your assets into a combination of the following: a) w³ land (with woodlands, water and wildlife); b) a sustainable home that is autonomous from fossil fuel energy; c) precious metals or other non-currency commodities; and d) your community.  This way, you’re building a localized, self-sufficient, resource-rich environment for you and your family to thrive.

4.       Develop contingency plans for income, transportation, home heating, and cooking that is not dependent on conventional fossil fuel energy.

That is, local and renewable.  When fossil fuels (finite resources approaching the end of their cheap and abundant status) become cost prohibitive, our lives are going be become much more local.  Start planning now for your livelihood options that will provide tangible value to your local community.  Experiment with carbon-free transport such as walking and biking.  And consider the alternatives to heat your home and cook your food if natural gas supply was interrupted or its price sky-rocketed.

5.       Start nurturing more relationships with your neighbours and others in your community

Start waving to the cars that pass as you’re shovelling your walkway, and stop to chat to that neighbour that you barely know.  Go for walks in your community even if you don’t have a dog. Shop at the local grocery mart, or better yet, your farmers’ market instead of the supercentre 15 km away.  Organize a street garage sale or a neighbourhood tool swap.  Join a local group or volunteer for the board your child’s soccer league.  We can’t navigate this uncertain future alone.  We are going to need to learn how to ‘do’ community in ways we’ve never experienced before to build a strong, supportive and collaborative network around us.

Bonus Tip:  Thanks to the wise teachings of Chris at Sticks and Stones Wilderness School, organize an emergency bin and leave it in your car.  We’ll have no more unprepared motorists such as we witnessed in the 402 blizzard in December! The bin can contain, but is not limited to: a shovel, a wool blanket and wool sweater for each member of the family (wool pants too if you have them!), snow boots for the driver, tea light candles, matches/lighter, utility knife, crank flashlight, crank radio, and energy bars.  You can survive quite comfortably overnight in your stranded car in frigid temperatures with these items on board.

What I’m suggesting here is quite frankly good common sense to manage your household risk.  We know how to mitigate risks at work, why don’t we put the time and effort into doing it for our families?

How have you been preparing for an uncertain future?

Check it out at www.coopersfarm.ca !

For all our shopping, visiting, meetings and errands within a 5K radius of our home, we’re using our bikes instead of the car, from May to October

We invite you to join us in the challenge!  And if you can use your bike for commuting to work, then add that to the Challenge!  I work from home so am committing to bike to all my local meetings.

DID YOU KNOW?

• Car trips under 5K are the most polluting because the engine and the pollution control system never reach peak operating temperature. Combining several trips into one can cut fuel use and emissions by 20 to 50%!
• On a bicycle you can travel 3 times faster than you can walk, using the same amount of energy
• For distances up to 5K, cycling is recognized as the fastest of all modes from door to door
• The annual operating cost of a bike is just 2.5% that of a car

We’ve been using April as a trial month.  We’ve got our bikes out and tuned them up.  I’m picking up a rack and paniers for the back of my bike this week, and we’re getting our body (our butts, really) warmed up  for the adventure.  Next is to make a rain plan… we’re not sure how difficult it will be to ride in the rain.

So far we’ve biked a 10K loop to pick up a ticket for the local dance for my son.  Yesterday I did a 15K loop with 4 stops including a meeting, an event, and a class.  And surprisingly the hardest habit to break has been those little car rides to drop a child off at a friend’s house, or take the dvd back to the video store!

Here are some strategies we’re using:

• group your errands together when they’re in the same area, and postpone and shift up a stop to consolidate your trips
• when large or multiple item shopping is needed, consolidate that stop with a longer car trip (over 5K)
• if you have flexibility, avoid biking the roads during ‘rush hour’ times.  Unfortunately most of our roads in EG don’t have bike lanes, so we need to ‘be one with the traffic’ and find a way to share the road with other vehicles
• think about the hills on your route and plan an alternate, even if it a bit longer, to avoid the extra effort of going up hill
• familiarize yourself with your bike (eg. practice your gear shifting if you’re rusty) and the rules of the road.  A bicycle is a vehicle and is therefore subject to Ontario’s Highway Traffic Act.  Learn the safe and legal aspects of cycling on the road.
• start to clock the mileage between various destinations when in your car, so that you can appropriately estimate your travel time when you attempt it on a bike

We’re having so much fun with the Challenge, and it hasn’t even started yet!  The kids are eager to bike to destinations.  It’s very empowering to arrive somewhere and realize we got there with human power.

Please post your own experiences in the Comments.

Happy Earth Day!

Here’s what I’m doing to reduce my household’s carbon footprint and our dependency on fossil fuels:

1. BIKE my local transportation needs – From May to October, I will use my bicycle for all my needs for shopping, errands, attending meetings and visiting, within a 6 km radius  (I better get my old bike tuned up!)
2. Re-localizing my household’s needs – finding local alternatives for as many things as possible, that we source from far away
3. Upgrade the insulation in my current home
4. Switch to green electricity in my current home (Bullfrog Power, 3 cents more per kWh)
5. Invest in powerbars to kill the phantom load electricity usage on all electronics
6. Install low flow, dual flush toilets
7. Turn the temperature setting down on the hot water heater
8. Build a well-stocked food pantry
9. Eco-Sustainable HOME – Within 18 months I will be living in a smaller home, preferably made of renewable building materials, that is self-sufficient for all its heating, electricity, water, sewage and waste, with a garden too!

We will continue to follow these eco-responsible practices:

1. Use no plastic water bottles
2. Use CFL light bulbs and a programmable thermostat to reduce energy consumption
3. Buy used whenever possible (manufacturing and distribution contributes to greenhouse gas emissions)

Let’s reclaim our status as “citizens”, who are borrowing the planet as our home for a lifetime, rather than the materialistic and destructive “consumers” that big business, retailers and the government would have us believe we are.

Stay tuned for my Personal Resilience Primer course coming in May!

What will I do…

-          When the shelves are bare at the grocery store?

-          When I can’t afford to fill up my car with gas?

-          When I want to visit my family 2 hours away?

What will I do…

-          Without conditioner for my frizzy hair?!

-          Without sandwich ziplocks for my kids’ lunches?

-          Tupperware?

-          Sarah wrap?

-          Without bananas from the tropics?

-          Without electricity and natural gas and water?

My sense is that the transition phase is going to be sudden and chaotic and quite possibly scary, but when the dust settles, on the other side of the Great Transition, we will find more peace, friendships, a sense of community and a shift in focus from economic growth to collaborating to provide for our loved ones and create meaning in our lives.

How are you preparing, emotionally and physically, for weathering this transition?

Are you sufficiently resilient to make it through unscathed?

Read the Tipping Point report here.

What is becoming clear to me as I digest this information is that it would be all too easy to become consumed with fear about the future of the world and then shut down or go into denial or begin causing mad panic in myself and those around me.  As I continue my journey toward personal resilience and work on raising awareness of the community action that’s possible with the Transition Movement framework, I’m reminding myself that we need to take intelligent and intentional steps toward the future we want to create.  It won’t serve us to make rash changes, nor will it serve us to wait for the inevitable to occur and then react.

These turbulent times and impending shock to our societies call for a proactive approach toward building personal and community resilience.  Stay tuned for an announcement about our Personal Resilience Program in May.

Read it here.

There is still rampant denial of both the problems and the possible solutions, however it looks like some seeds were planted and some shifts were made.  Kudos to the Rob and the Transition team!

You can download it here for now charge:

http://www.solutionsweneednow.org

Enjoy!

Here’s how the Movement appears to be evolving…

It all starts off when a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?

They begin by forming an initiating group and then adopt the Transition Model  with the intention of engaging a significant proportion of the people in their community to kick off a Transition Initiative.

A Transition Initiative is a community working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:

“For all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?”

We are undertaking a community-lead process to rebuild resilience and reduce carbon emissions.

For more information visit: www.transitiontowns.org

AND

join our Facebook Group, Transition Holland Landing: HERE