the eco advocate

It’s been a loooooong time since I’ve posted on my blog, The Eco Advocate, and have since posted so many ideas, frustrations and inspirations on Facebook that I’ve pretty much turned it into a blog… But Facebook really doesn’t do it justice, so with all these things going around in my brain, I’m about to explode.

‘I need a blog!!!’ I was thinking. But, wait. I have one! Silly me.

Time to remember my login and start typing again. Even if it’s just for me. : ) If anyone out there is reading this, hope you like it!

Some things I’ve been sharing on Facebook lately:

Windowfarms let you grow fresh vegetables at home by taking advantage of natural light and climate control indoors. (Via windowfarms.org / Kickstart)

Brand New Windowfarms- Vertical Food Gardens
Grow fresh food in your windows even during the winter without dirt!
via Kickstarter

This file photo released by Greenpeace shows the boat Arctic Sunrise reaching 'the ice bridge' in the Robeson channel, near the border between Greenland and Canada on September 14, 2009. Research published in a top scientific journal says Arctic sea ice has declined more in the last half-century than it has any time over the last 1,450 years. (AFP PHOTO/HANDOUT/GREENPEACE/NICK COBBING (Via Huffington Post)

Arctic Sea Ice Decline Greatest, Longest In 1,450 Years: Study
“No matter how good we are, no matter how much we respect women, the biases the women in our lives struggle against are the same biases fueling our success.”
via The Huffington Post

15 Food Companies that Serve You ‘Wood’
Not sure if this applies in Canada, but at least in the US, there’s a lot more in your food than you’d like to know. Like tree fibers. Yum…
via Food Freedom

The EU has provisionally imposed penalties severe enough to make it difficult for Canada to sell tar sands oil in Europe, but Britain is working to undermine that stance. Photograph: Jeff Mcintosh/AP (Via The Guardian)

Britain’s promotion of Canada’s tar sands oil is idiotic
Now that the US has temporarily declined the Keystone pipeline, Canada pressures the UK to import our oil – and for some idiotic reason they seem to be bowing to that pressure. I think Harper’s a bully. Not cool.
via The Guardian

James Schwartz/CC BY 2.0 (Via Tree Hugger)

Re:Cycling- Bike Activists Use Trash To Prove That Bike Lanes Work
Sadly, it sometimes takes a tragedy for real change to happen…
via TreeHugger

Ok, that didn’t really count as a real post but I’ll soon get back into the swing of things, I promise!!! Stay tuned.

A recent article I saw online called ‘Growing Greener Greens‘ talks about scientists enhancing the nutritional value of otherwise nutrient-lacking greens in order to make people healthier, through ‘conventional breeding techniques’ and new types of fertilizer.

At a first glance, it sounds alright. However, I’ve just come to realize just how incredibly horrible chemical fertilizer is.

Nitrogen fertilizers are used to increase crop yields, but end up in waterways and oceans, depleting oxygen and inhibiting the growth of life! This type of fertilizer is also made from fossil fuels, a non-renewable resource.

During the ‘Green Revolution’, post WWII, there was a significant increase in the American use of chemical fertilizers, as they were using the leftover chemicals from the war. Is our food is grown using chemicals originally developed to kill people? I’ll have to check that out another time… gross.

Anyhow, all these chemical fertilizers are being used to replace natural ones, ones that have been removed from the farm scene in the shift towards mono-cultures and specialized farming. Farm animals, be it cows, pigs, goats, or whatever, make the best fertilizer. Now we put our cows in big manure-filled pens where they are forced to eat corn (which is not at all good for them), and we then dump their manure into little ponds because it’s too toxic to use as fertilizer. Then it ends up contaminating our waterways. Strange, this idea of progress.

It seems to me like our quest for efficiency through specialization has blinded us to the efficiency that nature has figured out through the complex interrelatedness of life over billions of years. We’re so obsessed with our new technologies, convinced that we could do it better than nature, but nature’s got it figured out, my friends.

So, in our quest to feed the starving world, why are we spending so much time and energy making ‘better’ food? We should be fixing this messed up system that encourages over-production and plummeting prices, lower-quality food due to depleted soil quality, and excess consumption by already over-fed people.

There is enough food to go around, it’s just all controlled by those who already have too much. Food system FAIL.