There was once a time when the nuts of the American Chestnut tree fed the eastern half of this continent.
Each winter, millions of humans and other animals relied on them for survival. As time went on and settlers arrived here, even as they destroyed the forests, they planted the Chestnut in their fields. One such place was the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital, now known as St. Joesph’s Centre for Mountain Health Services (CMHS). The gardens, food trees, and forested patches on the hospital grounds provided patients there with activity and refuge and, for a time, almost all of their food.

BY GWENDOLYN GRAOVAC

The Organic movement has been steadily gaining momentum in the past decade, with every media outlet covering this trend in some form. Although there remain naysayers, refuting evidence of nutritional supremacy or down-playing the harmful effects of pesticides, it has become mostly accepted as fact: organic food is better for you, your kids, and the planet.

I disagree.

A Look Beneath Comfortable Myths

BY KNOWING THE LAND IS RESISTANCE COLLECTIVE

Kitchener-Waterloo is a rapidly growing double city on the banks of the Grand River. After biking from downtown Kitchener, we stop to catch our breath at the intersection of Erb St. W. and Ira Needles Blvd. in the city's West end. With wide eyes, we take in the landscape of a newly developing shopping centre and its sprawling parking lots — all in the place of abandoned farmers fields and healing meadows here just last spring.

Copenhagen was the perfect host city, exemplifying green transportation –providing an excellent infrastructure for cyclists and around the clock metro and light rail systems. Double-decker bike racks and car-width bike lanes provide the infrastructure necessary to support the eco-friendly transport mode that smiling, fit Danes pedal each day – even when it snows. Magnificent six-storey buildings line most streets, providing countless condominiums within minutes of the public transport, and diverse local businesses line the ground floors of the main streets.

Residents control the heat in each apartment, and that thermal energy is provided by a community district heating systems. In the apartment where I stayed, local radiators were opened only when we were in the room. With so many apartments attached to each other, the net amount of thermal mass ensures that heat travels through many apartments before it escapes to the ambient atmosphere. With a climate similar to Hamilton’s, the comparison is natural. Soon, the concept of separate heating spaces within a home will surely replace our wasteful concept of heating an enormous space 24/7.

The majority of buildings don’t have elevators either, relying on human leg power, and thereby keeping homo-sapiens hearty and healthy.

Climate Change – A Global Concern

The response to this Climate Summit overwhelmed the UN organizers. Instead of the usual 10,000 participants, over 45,000 attendees applied. Since the capacity of the conference centre was only 15,000, registration to media was limited to 3,500 persons, and the 20,000 registered NGO (non-governmental organization) media passes were reduced by 95%. Fortunately, the Danish government arranged an alternative venue site to host some of the displaced NGO personnel. Other huge side events included:

• The Klima Forum –an alternative gathering of organizations and technologies that are doing real work in developing countries
• The Bright Green technology showcase featuring components of the Green Economy
• An exhibit of climate change impacts on indigenous peoples
• A Fresh Air Centre of alternative and decentralized media following the proceedings, including the Huffington Post, and an influential network of bloggers that forecast the inevitable succession of today’s centralized media manipulation
• A parade of 100,000 demonstrators through the streets of Copenhagen
• An exhibit showing the impacts of deforestation and glacial ice melts throughout the world

Social Networking and Media Frenzy

If you’ve ever been to the Olympics, you soon realize it’s quite a social event. The same holds true for a United Nations Climate Change Conference. Every night, countries and interest groups from all over the world take turns hosting meetings and parties to share their message and make contacts. Normally, I’d attend these mixers, however this experience was different. Since my media pass allowed me privileged access along with the global press, I spent most of my free time writing a daily blog, and uploading videos and photos for others to follow my path. (More details at www.eco5.ca)

Canada – Fossil of the Year - An Embarrassment on the World Stage

Canada’s performance at this global conference demonstrated how out of touch Harper’s views are compared to other leaders as they negotiated a path forward. In fact, Harper was one of the few leaders that never addressed other leaders formally, and was excluded from Obama’s inner circle throughout. This is unprecedented. In fact, when Obama called a meeting of the world’s G20 leaders, only two leaders were excluded: Harper in Copenhagen, and Italy’s Berlusconi –who was recovering in an Italian hospital!

Canada’s Minister of the Environment, Jim Prentice, handled the briefings, and continued to evade questions. While most countries pledged a decrease in emissions of 20% below 1990 levels by 2020, Canada maintained the position of 20% below 2006 levels by 2020. Canada is the only signatory to the Kyoto Protocol that has conveniently changed the reference year for Kyoto and openly slandered the Protocol and Canada’s legal obligation to meet commitments.

This means our government will continue with the status quo, ignoring a global realignment toward a Green Economy, and isolating Canada from the action and leadership the majority of Canadians desire.

Appropriate then, that Harper invited only a select few of the Canadian media to an off-site press briefing prior to his return to Canada. The excluded media majority were livid. “He’s the only leader in the world that won’t address other nations and his own media at this conference! How embarrassing for Canadians!” one journalist huffed.

In the end, Canada received its third consecutive Fossil of the Year Award for disrupting talks, playing with language, and publicly decrying this global movement as “hype”. This award is chosen by the Climate Action Network, a global network of hundreds of NGO’s that follow the climate talks and issue Fossil of the Day awards that expose laggards to global media, and thereby provide incentive to countries to pull up their socks. Due to Canada’s isolated position, Harper and thus Canada have been lambasted again by the global press, which only contributes to Canada’s reputation as a tar sands advocate and climate change denier.

What Does This All Mean?

At the beginning of the conference, the goal was a Fair, Aggressive and Legally Binding (or “FAB”) agreement. Of course it’s much more complicated than this. Many attendees promoted the need for “System Change, not Climate Change”. In reality, the scope of this revolution is staggering, and revolves around the alignment of two polar opposites: China and the USA. These challenges can’t be solved overnight, or at a two-week conference. Instead they must evolve in a process of continuous improvement, and this conference is just another step in that process.

From the climate angle, developed countries owe a historic “climate debt” to developing countries that they have exploited for centuries, while generating tremendous wealth through the burning of fossil fuels and related anthropogenic emissions. Now, as the impacts of climate change are felt, developing countries are the most vulnerable with little financial resources to adapt to sea level rise, drought, weather variation and crop failure.

The challenge is that emissions of greenhouse gases are invisible, making a mutual openness a necessity in order to measure, verify, and report (MRV) progress within each country. The US insists on this sort of transparency, while China is cautious about this request.

The intent is there, but political intricacies of each country make this a bureaucratic marathon. There are positives. In order to assist the poor island states, vulnerable nations and address deforestation immediately, ten to thirty billion dollars have been pledged annually until 2013. The two-hundred billion dollars annually by 2020 as the global scope unfolds has also been secured. However, firm commitments were not signed off on and specifics will need to be clarified in the next few months.

Today, the Copenhagen Accord is part of the UN climate change portfolio. Seeds have been planted. We will see how they grow.

Food, it’s an essential part for sustaining life. Simply put: “We are what we eat”. If the soil that grows that food is contaminated with toxins and carcinogens then, who, or what are we?

The soil food web is a complex ecology of nematodes, protozoa, beneficial bacteria and fungi. In one handful of soil there are approximately 6 billion micro-organisms at work. These organisms are constantly recycling nutrients and making them readily available for plants to uptake and provide the plant -and us- with nutrition. We now know that nutrients are recycled by these micro-organisms, especially mychorrhizal fungi.

Sewer sludge or the Orwellian sounding name, bio-solids, as the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMFRA) likes to refer to it as, has found a home on farm fields across this province. Sewer sludge is as gross and disgusting as you can imagine, the end waste product of everything ever flushed down a toilet or dumped down a drain.

Water treatment plants process water for consumption and filter out the sludge. The treated reclaimed water is then drunk by millions, and put back into rivers and lakes. The sludge is often put in a landfill, incinerated, or spread on farmers fields as a cheap source of nutrients. When farmers choose to spread sludge on their fields they often get the sludge for free or in some cases are even paid to do so.

Fertilizer can cost a farmer thousands of dollars a year depending on their soil fertility, thus to get fertilizer for free is a tempting offer. The down side is that the sludge likely contains hundreds, if not thousands of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and heavy metals such as lead, mercury, cadmium, and copper. When sludge is applied it creates an environment that is lethal to soil ecology. Pharmaceuticals and heavy metals are detrimental to the soil ecology as a whole. Healthy soil with high levels of biodiversity holds over 50% more moisture than soil without, and allows natural nitrogen and available phosphorous to be released naturally and for free.

Hank Vanveen who works for Wessuc Inc., a Brantford based company that spreads sludge on Ontario farmland says that currently the sludge is tested twice a month for 11 heavy metals and bacteria like E-coli, but not for any pharmaceuticals or chemicals.

According to Vanveen “The levels [of pharmaceuticals] are so low they are not a concern at this point”. However, with no ongoing testing for pharmaceuticals or chemicals in the sludge or in the farmer’s soil there is currently no systemic mechanism in place to measure chemical or pharmaceutical contamination of soil that is being used to grow food where sludge has been spread.

OMAFRA’s website acknowledges that “biosolids may still contain some chemicals that are not beneficial to crops, but pose minimal risk to the environment”. However with no ongoing testing of the volume or types of chemical contamination, there is no way to conclude that there is only a minimal risk to the environment.

Furthermore, Environment Canada’s website acknowledges “land spreading of sewage or sewage sludge” is a source for ground water contamination. Once ground water is contaminated it can take a very long time for it to become safe to drink. Considering many people in rural communities rely on wells as their main source of water, the chance of their neighbors contaminating their well water is simply unacceptable.

Most of the chemicals dumped into the sewage system and the pharmaceuticals that are excreted from our bodies do not dissolve in water. They dilute and can easily end up in our waterways and in the sludge being spread on farmland. There is evidence that plants can absorb and bio-accumulate various chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Thus it is probable that food crops grown on land that has had sludge spread could be a medium for transferring these toxins into our bodies and back into the food chain.

According to the 2003 film Crap Shoot produced by the National Film Board of Canada, Ashbridges Bay, Toronto has relatively high concentrations of brominated flame retardants (BFR), and Canada’ effluent water has among the highest levels of pharmaceuticals in the developed world.

Dr. Lennart Hardel from Orebro Hospital in Sweden found that BFR act similar in our bodies as Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and both have been found in cancer patients. His research team found BFR in vegetables, like broccoli, as well as mother’s breast milk. BFR have been associated with cancer, particularly non hodgkin's lymphoma, and can disrupt the balance of thyroid hormones. When this research made it public that sludge in Sweden contained BFR, the public demanded the practice of spreading it on farmland be halted. Due to consumer backlash, the practice has been halted and sludge has been land filled in non-critical areas such as roads.

Considering that here in Canada there is no required testing of sludge for chemicals like BFR, many communities are concerned about the health implications of spreading it on farmland. Once heavy metals are put on soil they can never be removed. High concentrations of heavy metals in soil result in the land being unusable for agricultural purposes ever again.

There is no opportunity for the public to comment on the granting of a license to spread sludge on a piece of farmland, nor is their an opportunity for the public to appeal the license once it has been issued. Companies that spread sludge are not required to even notify neighbors that they are going to spread sludge, even when it can be spread as close as 25m from there residence, this according to the OMAFRA website.

On November 19th, 2009 the first civil suit in Canada was filed where an individual has claimed damages due to their proximity to the spread of sludge. Wendy Deavitt filed a civil suit against the Town of Cobourg, and two farmers, Terry and Sandra Greenly of Warkworth, for up to $650,000 in damages allegedly caused by the Greenly’s spread of bio-solids. Deavitt claims that living close to where they spread sludge, a Warkworth farm, has caused her family’s health problems and those of her animals.

Considering we know many chemicals can cause serious health problems, by not testing for them in sludge the Ontario Government is taking a position of willful ignorance about what contaminants are being spread on farmland.

According to “the precautionary principle”, science does not always give us immediate information about the health risks of using a particular product or process. Thus, when we do not know the long-term consequences of an action or product, we should exercise caution. From this perspective an industry should have to prove its product is safe, rather than assume it is safe until it is proven harmful.

“I think it’s [the precautionary principle] is a joke.” Says Vanveen. “If you would apply that principle to every aspect of your life you would live in a bubble. It doesn’t make any sense…I do not think the precautionary approach is appropriate in risk management.”

The Canadian Government would appear to agree. They rarely take a precautionary perspective in the drafting of its legislation. By taking a risk management approach the government to justifies exposing populations to perceived low risks, while maintaining business as usual. This approach can be found throughout Canadian regulations governing conventional agriculture practices, such as spraying chemical pesticides, genetically modifying crops, or in this case, using sludge as a fertilizer.

This said, many policy decisions in Europe are based on the precautionary principle. It would seem governments there are more interested in protecting its citizens from the unnecessary risks of industry.