Green as a Thistle

You know when you say goodbye to someone and then you both realize you’ll be walking to the same subway station so you have to do another goodbye five minutes later and it’s kind of awkward? Well, I feel like I’m in that kind of situation, having pretty much said my farewell already.

Still, there are four final blog posts from Copenhagen to share, so here they are, in chronological order:

Thursday’s entry, about bad Tiger Woods jokes at the Women’s Perspective on Nuclear Energy lecture and “Early Grey” tea is here;

Friday’s entry, about Bolivians and the necktie-to-keffiyeh ratio is here;

and lastly, here’s the diary entry from Saturday (which is probably the best, seeing as it features some X-rated content).

Here are some photos:

This is Baby, a waste-picker from India.

Bolivian protesters at the Bella Center.

A balloon representing a tonne of CO2 outside parliament.

The Greenpeace ship docked at the harbour.

And finally, some quick video footage of protesters dancing (with solar-powered speakers):

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In response to criticism about my irreverent tone in these articles, I’m just going to say two things: One, I’ve been doing other, lengthier interviews while here and hope to use the material for more earnest features at a later date, so it’s not as if I’ve come all the way to Copenhagen for the sole purpose of being snarky; and Two, in fairness to the Post, there is a lot of stuff here worth mocking — like the French activist who lingers outside the Bella Center in his skinny jeans with his collage poster that says, “Which climate fraud will you vote for?”, smoking his cigarette and generally adhering to every single French/activist stereotype there is — as well as a lot of people who don’t really need to be here, a lot of paper, plastic and food waste (and chile con carne on the menu? Seriously?), not to mention a series of press conferences and side events that either state the obvious or say nothing new at all about climate change and what we need to do about it.

Anyway, I truly hope something does result from COP15, and I really do love that over 30,000 protesters descended on the local parliament this Saturday to demonstrate (not including those who threw bricks, mind you), which just goes to highlight the sheer volume of people who care about the planet and want to make a difference, even if they aren’t a high-ranking politician with a PhD in environmental science.

So with that, here’s to keeping the enthusiasm alive; please keep reading Crunchy Chicken and Fake Plastic Fish and Arduous and Treehugger and Grist and listening to all the amazing green voices out there who are strengthening this movement each day. If you want to get in touch with me, my contact info is all here. Peace out,

Thistle.

All right peeps, I’ve gotta be honest with you — I kind of need to bail on this blog. There are so many green bloggers out there who are so much more willing to sit at a computer after a full day’s work and actually write something meaningful; I’m just not one of them. Out of pure selfishness (which I like to disguise as eco-friendliness), I’ve decided to put a concerted effort into unplugging myself from technology as much as possible. I already stare at a screen for eight hours a day and, to be frank, I don’t think my ramblings are worth the bandwidth.

However, I promised I’d report on my time in Copenhagen, so I’m going to follow through with that. The catch is that I’m writing about these climate talks for the National Post, which means that if I don’t eschew earnestness and embrace irreverence (our paper’s mandate), I could get fired. Well, probably not fired, but it would be useless because my editors wouldn’t print anything I filed. In short: my COP15 diary does not include heartfelt and lengthy interviews with people making a difference; it features quips about the Little Mermaid statue.

If you still want to read them, here’s a link to Monday’s story.

And here’s another link to today’s story.

Finally, here’s the introductory piece I wrote when I arrived on Sunday.

I’ll post the others later this week. Please don’t hate me for ending things on a sarcastic note!

Way back during my green year, I made a few changes that had to do with juice: One was to not consume anything that had HFCS or any other modified corn derivative in it (which a lot of juices do); another was to not buy any drink that came in disposable packaging, which all juices do. So basically, I had to make my own from scratch, using whole fruits that came from within Canada and the U.S. But to be honest, I’m not much of a juice person anyway. Smoothies with yogurt, ground flax seeds and ingredients that make it more of a meal I can understand, and the occasional peach, plum or pear will satiate the rest of my sugar cravings. Every time I drink juice, though, it just tastes too sweet and I think to myself, “If I’m going to be ingesting this much sugar, I might as well be drinking wine.” (Is this the first sign of alcoholism? Oh well).

However, my lovely boyfriend — who I will call J from now on because he doesn’t want all of his Google hits bringing up posts about lemon trees and Diva Cups — is a juice fiend. He is obsessed with Allen’s apple juice, primarily, but also likes a good youngberry juice from Ceres, and will occasionally throw some Tropicana cranberry or orange juice in there for good measure. I’ve been trying to wean him off the Allen’s because it’s less than $2 for a full 1.5 liters of the stuff and that just can’t be good (not to mention the possibility of BPA lining the cans), and the Ceres comes all the way from South Africa, which leaves quite the carbon footprint. I have generally felt that Tropicana is all right, despite being owned by Pepsi, as it’s not from concentrate, it’s an American company and it tastes pretty close to the fresh-squeezed stuff.

But man, oh man, have my opinions changed.

Have you heard about this new book, Squeezed? (Note the author’s stainless steel water bottle in the pic! And she’s Canadian!) Here’s the gist of what it’s about, according to the publishers:

Alissa Hamilton explores the hidden history of orange juice. She looks at the early forces that propelled orange juice to prominence, including a surplus of oranges that plagued Florida during most of the twentieth century and the army’s need to provide vitamin C to troops overseas during World War II. She tells the stories of the FDA’s decision in the early 1960s to standardize orange juice, and the juice equivalent of the cola wars that followed between Coca-Cola (which owns Minute Maid) and Pepsi (which owns Tropicana). Of particular interest to OJ drinkers will be the revelation that most orange juice comes from Brazil, not Florida, and that even “not from concentrate” orange juice is heated, stripped of flavor, stored for up to a year, and then reflavored before it is packaged and sold. The book concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of why consumers have the right to know how their food is produced.

And you can watch an interview with Hamilton on the CBC here:

So what do you make of all this? Is OJ especially evil when it comes to chemicals and preservatives, or is the same as any other juice on the market? Are certain companies or brands better than others? And can we check for certain labels or ingredients to make sure we get the best juice, or has the industry found a way to circumnavigate all the rules and guidelines about labelling? What juice do YOU drink??

Image from this website. Also, read Lloyd Alter’s review on Treehugger here.

So have you read the latest edition of The New Yorker? If so, you might have noticed Elizabeth Kolbert’s rant about green memoirs. In it, she rips apart authors Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, authors of The 100-Mile Diet, as well as Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, and myself (you can read the full story here; the bits about Sleeping Naked is Green and me in particular are here). Basically, Kolbert takes a stab at my decision to move from a small apartment into a house with three storeys (she actually misspells it as having three “stories” — last time I checked, my house wasn’t a storyteller, but I definitely would’ve paid more if it was), as well as my trips to Banff, Oregon, Tel Aviv (it was actually the West Bank) and New York (she forgot to mention Spain), where she reveals how I met up with No Impact Man and “sniffed” at his choice of café, WHICH IS TOTALLY UNTRUE —  if anything, I felt embarrassed because I ordered a bagel with cream cheese before checking that the cream cheese was organic. Later, she mentions how Colin’s project was “almost as incoherent as [mine].” Does anyone here think my green challenge was incoherent? If so, I can explain it to you in one sentence: I made 366 eco-friendly changes to my life. That’s pretty much it.

Anyway, I’m not so much hurt by the article as confused by it — it seems Kolbert has taken the time to read through my book, or at least scan it pretty thoroughly, which makes me wonder how she missed the point of it all. In fact, the point of all these green memoirs is more or less the same: We wanted to find out what happens when the average person tries to be as eco-friendly as possible, and what our struggles and triumphs ultimately say about the green movement in general. What should we be doing? What should we not be doing? All four of us have taken plenty of time to acknowledge the hypocrisy and sense of futility that comes with such challenges, and we’ve all admitted that we’re far from being perfect environmentalists. True, perhaps we should have spent more time lobbying governments and less time debating whether or not to use toilet paper, but again, the point was to look at everyday habits — last time I checked, not everyone has time to be a professional activist.

But what do you think? Does Kolbert have a point about these “eco stunts”? Or does she have an unnecessary hate-on for green bloggers and memoirists? Leave your thoughts below!

P.S. Check out the post that Crunchy Chicken wrote about all this; she was much more on top of the game than me and there are almost 30 comments on her blog now (mostly supportive, occasionally critical).

P.P.S. I’m adding this very funny retouching of my book cover, done by one of the National Post’s graphics guys who I refer to as Stevetastic. Note the revised title (thanks, Steve!):