Blog Action Day

On October 15th - Blog Action Day, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone's mind.

In its inaugural year, Blog Action Day will be co-ordinating bloggers to tackle the issue of the environment.

What Each Blogger Will Do

Bloggers can participate on Blog Action Day in one of two ways:

Publish a post on their blog which relates to an issue of their own choice pertaining to the environment.

For example: A blog about money might write about how to save around the home by using environmentally friendly ideas. Similarly a blog about politics might examine what weight environmental policy holds in the political arena.

Posts do not need to have any specific agenda, they simply need to relate to the larger issue in whatever way suits the blogger and readership. Our aim is not to promote one particular viewpoint, only to push the issue to the table for discussion.

Commit to donating their day’s advertising earnings to an environmental charity of their choice. There is a list of "official" Blog Action Day charities on the site, however bloggers are also free to choose an alternate environmental charity to donate to if they wish.


So what can you do - well we have talked about replacing incandescants with cfl's, recycling, saving water, driving less, walking more, carrying reusable grocery bags, and putting on a sweater. On Blog Action Day, I encourage you to take a more meaningful action (something that might be a bit diffucult). Today or tommorrow or one day this week - only eat food that was grown within 100 kms from your home. Give it a try

Short Vacation

I am on my way to Montreal for a few days and wanted to leave you with these;

"A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." -- Lao Tzu

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." -- Helen Keller

"Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversations." -- Elizabeth Drew

"Two of the greatest gifts we can give our children are roots and wings." –- Hodding Carter

"We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open." -- Jawaharal Nehru

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.