13 Actions for Friday 13th

1. Smile at a stranger.

2. Take your recyclables to the depot.

3. Clean a closet or shed and donate unused items to a thrift store.

4. Shut off your computer/monitor when leaving the room for more than 20 minutes.

5. Contact an organization/agency that works in an area that you are passionate about and ask about volunteer opportunities.

6. Logon to an activist website and gain some new awareness and maybe sign a petition.Global Action Amnesty Canada

7. Put a jar on your bedside table. At the end of each day, dump your change into the jar. At the end of each month, give the change to a homeless person.

8. Buy some locally produced food from a Farmer's Market.

9. Call or write a friend or mentor and let them know how much they mean to you.

10. Take reusable bags to grocery store.

11. Clean up a portion of a neighbourhood park.

12. Write a poem.

13. Do not be afraid.


8.

One Meal a Week

Thursday, June 7th, 2007
If every Canadian citizen ate just one meal a week that consisted of locally and organically raised meats and produce we would reduce our oil consumption by 5.7 million barrels of oil a year! Each food item in a typical meal has traveled an average of 1500 miles.

This may be an oversimplification (and I recognize that a diverse diet isn’t valued by all), but it seems that we’re being lulled into a false sense of quality of life by the oil-based infrastructure that our current development and agricultural models are dependent on. If you lived in the desert and could only eat desert vegetation (prickly pears may be haute cuisine but they’re a pain to prep!), I don’t think we’d have seen the rapid growth of Arizona cities these last twenty years. We’d see people living more densely in the areas where the quality of life was more true to nature and not artificially imposed.