Toilet unhumour

Incomprehensible: people who flush the urinal BEFORE they begin to pee. Do you really need a clean urinal? Is your piss going to be contaminated somehow? Why, oh why?

It’s not the same as flushing a used toilet before you sit down. Sometimes the toilet water can sploosh upwards. It’s gross, but it happens. Not so with a urinal. Plus full and unflushed toilets smell, and you spend more time at it. Not so with urinals. You’re in and you’re out and generally they don’t stink too bad.

I just don’t get it.

B.C. says, no parking

Anybody who has set foot in Waterton Lakes National Park knows how special that little patch of land in Alberta’s southwestern corner is. Turns out,  environmentalists say there’s an equally impressive patch in nearby British Columbia. But that patch – the Flathead River valley – is unprotected and possibly the site of a to-be-constructed coal mine. So environmental groups are petitioning the UN to declare Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park – a UNESCO heritage site that includes both Waterton Lakes and Glacier National Park, in Montana – a heritage site in danger.

You can read the full story here. Oh, and I wrote it. I would have liked to speak to someone from the British Columbia government. Indeed, I would still like to. But my phone records will show plenty of outgoing calls to various government offices and no incoming calls.

Icetime (photos)

The three Rs

Every time I throw a bottle or crumpled up box in the garbage I get the heebie-jeebies. In Canada, it costs you money to throw away bottles and is at least frowned upon not to recycle one’s cardboard boxes and the like. Here, there don’t seem to be many options for city dwellers who want to recycle. Like in England, the common course of action is to simply dump them all in the same bag as one’s food clippings and plastic waste and throw it on top of the dumpster.

Not everywhere though; at one home where we stayed for a week or so, the garbage can had seperate compartments for composting, paper and waste. Of course that home, like another we stayed at, had a garden and thus space for a compost pile. Most houses in the city don’t have such options and there is no blue bag program here. (Of course I’m not sure if even Kamloops has implemented such a program yet. Whenever I talk about the program to non-Vernonites, I’m constantly surprised to realized that Vernon is actually ahead of the curve on something.)

In Germany cans and bottles include a deposit in the price, like in Canada. That idea hasn’t yet hit Poland so until we find some place to take our bottles, were adding to the giant trash heap.

All of which raises some questions. I’m an environmentally-concerned person as it is, but I don’t always think about the environment as I go about my day-to-day activities. Sometimes I pollute more than necessary, sometimes I waste energy because of sheer laziness. I did the same back in Canada. Partially because of this, I’d been of the opinion that there needs to be pocket-book incentives to get people to act environmentally responsibly.

But, if I so compulsively want to put cardboard into a seperate bag that does not benefit me financially, what does that mean? Sure I think it’s important to recycle, but given my willingness to waste in other facets of life, it surprises me how buil- in my urge to recycle a milk jug is. The reason, I think, is pure habit.

Squishing a milk jug and putting it in a bag is now a habit nurtured by years of repetition but also by recycling cans and bottles. Slowly the habit expands and you begin adding more to the bag just because it’s there and easy to use.

How this applies to the larger world and specifically the battle against climate change I don’t know. But using sheer force of habit to encourage change is something that needs to, and I know is, being considered.

This also reminds me of a theory out there that people can be “nudged” to do the right thing through minor public policy urgings.

From Slate:

The real trick to understanding how to approach Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the new book by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler, lies in recognizing the limitations of your inner Homer Simpson. In the authors’ view, your whole brain is a civil-war zone between your “automatic system” (the rapid, intuitive, reptilian part) and your “reflective system” (the slow, deliberate, self-conscious part). Behavioral economists take the position that snap judgments formed by your Homer Simpson brain are often quite terrible ones, which go on to have enormous consequences in your financial, physical, and emotional life. Like Homer, we use all sorts of mental “heuristics” or cognitive “rules of thumb” that are flawed, which is why we pay for magazine subscriptions for years after the three-month “free” trial ended (“status quo bias”) and why we buy lottery tickets (“unrealistic optimism”).

A green government?

It seems that a North American country may yet speak up and do something about climate change. No, not Canada, silly. Stephen Harper is cold on climate change and only uses the word turtle in front of neck (I realise the poke isn’t entirely appropriate given that turtles are not intrinsically associated with the environmental movement. But they’re a cute little animal that could be impacted and the joke is the best I can come up with on a breakfast of Honey Nut Cheerios). Rather the Americans seem to be coming around to dealing with climate change. Yes those Americans that live south of Canada! The same America where George W. Bush kindly said to the world, “Burn baby burn” for eight years.

As I write, the top story on the Globe and Mail website is about how going green may help the faltering economy.

Saving the economy and saving the planet at the same time were once considered two mutually incompatible goals. But not any longer.

A chorus of proposals from liberal-leaning think tanks and conservation organizations is suggesting that the best way to revive the faltering economy would be to finance solutions to pressing environmental problems.

Supporters are calling the idea “green stimulus.” They argue that directing new government expenditures to wind farms, solar panels, gas-sipping cars and mass-transit infrastructure, among other items, would give a far bigger boost to the economy than tax cuts or government rebates.

The environmental funding would have the side benefit of helping solve such problems as global warming by spurring the development of less-polluting energy sources and increased energy efficiency.

Meanwhile, a story leading the New York Times has the following tidbit tucked within:

In his only public appearance on Tuesday, Mr. Obama indicated that he intended to move rapidly on one of the most ambitious items on his agenda, tackling climate change. Speaking to a bipartisan group of governors by video, the president-elect said that despite the weakening economy, he had no intention of softening or delaying his ambitious goals for reducing emissions that cause the warming of the planet.

“Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all,” Mr. Obama said. “Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”

Of course whether Obama’s able to actually do something while being pressured to prop up automakers and the entire global economy is another thing. But one idea I’ve read about is the potential to tie an auto-bailout to provisions that will force the major manufacturers to start building electric cars and the like. So in that sense, it’s very possible that the bad economy may help green standards, rather than green standards helping the struggling economy.

Passing winds

After being tipped off by a kind comment, I’ve been reading up on ventilation corridors, the theory behind which is apparently why there are large stretches of park land in urban Warsaw. The idea behind such corridors is to allow air to move freely around an urban centre by marking off stretches of city from development.

I may have that wrong, as I may have everything else wrong in this blog posting. My key source of information, after all, is google. But it seems ventilation corridors are coming back in style with sustainable development leading the charge for such greenways. I’ll tack on below a few paragraphs I’ve found around the net and I’ll probably return to this subject in the future, once I know more.

From the climate booklet for urban development of a German province (or state?): Italics are mine.

The climatic and air-hygienic perspective recommends encircling development with as much green space as possible as well as crisscrossing it with green corridors oriented to topographic features (e.g. ventilation passages; air induction corridors) and thus support air exchange.

Urban sprawl from numerous developments strewn across the landscape as well as the emergence of disruptive belts of built-up areas, e.g. through the convergence of neighboring communities, are to be avoided. Urban development must be accompanied by close, large fresh- and cold-air production areas and ventilation corridors.

The development of commercial and industrial enterprises should ensure that the residential areas in the immediate vicinity do not suffer from heightened emissions resulting from the local wind patterns.

Vernon residents may be interested in the following (from the same site):

Hillsides in extended built-up areas, should remain undeveloped, especially when development exists in valleys, since intensive cold- and fresh-air transport occurs here (however, development on southern hillsides is desirable from an energy conservation perspective – see also Chapter 3). The same is valid for gullies and ridges along these hillsides.

Saddle-like topographies on the backside of mountains serve as air induction corridors and should not be developed.

Turtle Mountain would seem like the epitome of a “saddle-like topography” while The Rise is built on a south-facing hillside and could be environmentally palatable if the houses were built with energy conversation in mind (I doubt they were. Otherwise we would have heard about it.

Creating ventilation corridors in Vernon, which lies in a valley, would seem both very helpful from a livability perspective and nearly impossible, given the lack of land.