The Green Pieces is a pot-pourri of Silver Donald Cameron's environmental writing – reprints of earlier articles, speeches and essays, and copies of current columns and other writings on environmental topics. Many of these are fairly lengthy pieces that are no longer accessible anywhere else.

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The Most Glorious Beach in the World (1998)

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Sat, 02/18/2012 - 20:58

"My favourite beach?" asks Dr. Miles O. Hayes of Columbia, South Carolina. "There's no doubt that the most beautiful beaches in the world are the beaches in South Carolina. You should go to Kiawah Island. Beautiful clean white sandy beaches." 

 
Amused by his own boosterism, Hayes laughs heartily. He is an internationally recognized coastal geologist who advises governments and corporations about beach clean-ups all over the world. But he is a patriot too. His office is in the capital of South Carolina, he has taught at the University of South Carolina, and in a sense he *designed* the beaches of Kiawah Island, near Charleston. When the Kuwait Development Corporation was planning to subdivide the island, they commissioned Miles Hayes to create regulations which would preserve those sweeping beaches in all their natural glory.
 
So Hayes can hardly be expected to praise beaches elsewhere — but then, to my surprise, he does.
 
“Actually my favourite beaches are in Alaska,” he says. “ The beaches in Cook Inlet and the beaches down off the Copper River delta are absolutely the best. Also I really like the beautiful white beaches in Oman -- the exposed beaches on the Indian Ocean, where the beaches are composed of little shells called forminifera tests. Those are my favourites." 
 
When I met Miles Hayes, I was researching a book called *The Living Beach* (Macmillan, 1998). I spoke to scientists, surfers, engineers, cottagers, conservationists, politicians. In passing, I asked them about their favourite beaches. To my surprise, I found that many people have three favourite beaches. 
 

Christmas Lobsters, Price and Value

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Sat, 12/24/2011 - 20:20

Santa's Lobsters (or, Ho, Ho, Homard...)

In Paris, it's a hallowed tradition to eat lobster at Christmas – and so great freight-carrying airliners rumble down the runways at the Halifax airport every year, carrying crustaceans to the City of Light. It's become the biggest bonanza of the year for the Maritime lobster industry.

If homard canadien is good enough for the Restaurant Guy Savoy on rue Troyon in Paris, it's good enough for us. So Marjorie hustled out to the local supermarket and collared a couple of lobsters. She paid $8 each. We could have done better buying straight off the back of a lobsterman's pickup truck, but we didn't see one nearby. Add some fresh bread, steamed artichokes, Marjorie's Peerless Potato Salad, some melted butter, a couple of glasses of Annapolis Valley white wine – Gaspereaux L'Acadie Blanc, let's say, a good buy at $16 – and there's our Christmas eve dinner.

Just like Restaurant Guy Savoy. Well, not quite. Guy Savoy also gives you a soupcon of caviar, a smidgeon of pigeon, a morsel of mullet, some scraps of apple, and two chocolates. The meal  costs €315 – about $420 Canadian. And I don't think that includes the wine.

My point is not to denigrate French cuisine, or even French prices. I'm sure that a meal at Guy Savoy would be an exquisite experience – and, from a certain point of view, worth every penny of the cost. But the fact is that you can often get a lobster in Halifax for $5, and that the same lobster might cost $100 in Paris – and the lobster itself is no better because it costs 20 times as much.

All of which got me thinking about price and value, and the way we confuse the two. I remembered writing something about it in my Sunday Herald column. The column is dated – it was written in 1998, more than 13 years ago, when the east coast was reeling from the collapse of the cod fishery, and the federal government was trying to induce people to migrate elsewhere in search of employment. Michael MacDonald headed the Greater Halifax Partnership. The web was in its infancy,  9/11 hadn't happened, and in many ways it was a distant world.

But the core point about the confusion of price with value remains, and maybe it's worth sharing the piece for that. And here's a more radical thought: maybe the fact that something has a price is an indication that it does not have great value. You can't put a price on love, on community cohesion and security, on clean air and good health. But those things are worth far more than anything that comes with a price tag.

Fear and Loathing in the Wheat Fields (2006)

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Mon, 12/05/2011 - 18:03

As the Harper government moves to (illegally) dismantle the Canadian Wheat Board, I want to share again a column I wrote in 2006, when they were first trying these shenanigans. 

Sunday Herald - October 1, 2006 

FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE WHEAT FIELDS

Among the worries which keep Maritimers awake at night, the Harper government’s drive to dismantle the Canadian Wheat Board probably doesn’t rank very high. But perhaps it should. The issue reveals a great deal about this government. 

The CWB was created to solve a problem very familiar to Maritimers: the dictatorial power of monopolistic businesses over primary producers. In the Maritimes, it was the power of local merchant barons and international fishing companies over the fishermen. On the Prairies it was the power of banks and big grain companies over the farmers.

Elephant Tracks: Nova Scotia's Ecological Footprint (2001)

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Fri, 11/25/2011 - 12:54
 

Here is a simple way to save the earth. Exterminate the populations of North America, Japan and Western Europe.

Probably not a plan. Hard to make it fly politically. But it’s a thought that flickered through my mind as I reviewed the numbers in GPI Atlantic’s recent publication. Released a few weeks ago, [in 2001] The Nova Scotia Ecological Footprint is the first such report for any province in Canada.

GPI Atlantic, you may recall, is the valiant little non-profit organization which is working to produce a Genuine Progress Index for Nova Scotia — an instrument designed to measure our real well-being, not merely our capacity to succeed at pointless or damaging economic activity. To learn more — or order this new report — visit www.gpiatlantic.org.

The Nova Scotia Ecological Footprint is a startling document. Unlike most environmental assessments, it looks not at the impact of industry, but at consumption -- the effect of eating fish or using lumber rather than the impact of the fishing or forest industries. It starts from the fact that each of us withdraws a certain amount every year from the great Bank of Nature. Each of us requires a certain amount of land to produce our food, a certain amount of energy to run our households, a certain amount of forest to absorb the greenhouse gasses we produce. The total demand I make on nature is my “ecological footprint” — the resources which I personally take from the planet. How much productive land and sea does my present lifestyle require?

Ronald Wright, Progress Traps and the Future of Food

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Wed, 09/21/2011 - 14:52

We've just published our interview with Ronald Wright, an extraordinary writer and thinker, author of such challenging books as Stolen Continents and A Short History of Progress. Trained in archaeology, Wright dissects the past, seeking clues to the future. What kind of an animal is the human being? How have humans behaved in the past? What does that tell us about their behaviour in the future?

The news is not good – but it's not hopeless. Time and again, human beings have carelessly ravaged their environments, and thus destroyed their societies. Our original Eden, green and lush and fertile, was probably in Iraq – which is hard to believe when you look at the dusty misery which is Iraq today. The deserts of North Africa were once the granary that fed the Roman Empire. For a really chilling saga of just how deluded and destructive we can be, read Wright's account of the denuding of Easter Island.

Ray Anderson: Creating the Green Corporation (February 18, 2007)

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Thu, 08/11/2011 - 12:44

“I’d like to see the business case for fishing the stocks to the point of collapse,” Ray Anderson declares. “I’d like to see the business case for destroying the ozone layer. What kind of a system do we have, where we think it’s cheaper to destroy the Earth than to take care of it?”

Where Does the Power Go?

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Sat, 07/09/2011 - 16:26

Homeowners have plenty of ways to reduce their energy use – but how do you know which changes are worthwhile? You can insulate, seal, change thermostats and replace old appliances. You can install solar panels, insulate your water heaters and water pipes, clean your furnace filters and replace shower-heads. But how do you measure the effect of your upgrades?

 
Energy monitoring systems – electricity monitoring systems, to be more precise – show you exactly where your electrical energy is going, and what it's costing you, says analyst Houston Neal in a recent article on the blog of SoftwareAdvice.com.
 
“An energy monitoring system can be set up in just 15 minutes, and for as little as $100,” says Neal. Once it's installed, you can turn on an appliance and see at once how much electricity it draws. You can find out what it costs to run that old fridge, to wash and dry a load of laundry, or to use an electric space heater.
 
The results can be surprising.

Robert Bateman!

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Tue, 07/05/2011 - 23:00

Our Green Interview with Robert Bateman has just been posted – more than an hour of reflection on art, education, wildlife, the shaping of consciousness in young people, and appreciation for the natural world. Bateman is among the world's foremost interpreters of nature through the medium of visual art – and, because of his many books and his controversial decision to allow his work to be inexpensively reproduced, one of the world's best-known and most-loved nature artists. His work is elegant, compelling and dramatic, and it brims with frozen narrative.

 Bateman was 80 at the time of the interview, in August 2010, but he looked and acted and thought like a man several decades younger. We talked in his studio in Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. To listen in on the conversation – and learn more about Bateman's life and art – click here.

The Nobel Prize of Sailing [Sunday Herald, January 2010]

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Sat, 07/02/2011 - 17:01

“Annie,” said Marjorie, “do you think hollyhocks would do well over there by the fence?”

Annie Hill laughed aloud.

“Marjorie,”she said, “I wouldn't know. I haven't had a home ashore since I was 19 years old.”

It's true. At 20, Annie and her first husband, Pete Hill, sailed from England to the Caribbean and back on a 28-foot engineless catamaran. Back in England, they built Badger, a 34-foot junk-rigged schooner. In Badger they roamed the world -- Brazil, Scandinavia, Greenland, Scotland, Africa, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Falklands, the Antarctic.

Living at sea, Annie Hill developed a philosophy.What do you really want from life? Decide that, and go for it -- and don't be deflected by the economic and social noise around you. Annie is the consummate anti-consumer, a subversive philosopher, a living example of the rich and free lifestyle that's available to anyone who understands the value of focus and discipline.

Bhutan! Our First Special Presentation (with notes on newspaper managers' decisions, the joys of home care, and other matters)

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Fri, 06/17/2011 - 00:32

But first: Bhutan!

Nearly 40 years ago, the Fourth Dragon King of Bhutan famously declared to a visiting journalist that Gross National Product was not as important as Gross National Happiness. At the time, Bhutan was a feudal monarchy without highways, hospitals, a postal system or a national currency. Over the intervening years, the country has acquired all those features and more, and – at the insistence of the Fourth King – it became a democracy, a constitutional monarchy,  in 2008. But it continues to pursue Gross National Happiness as opposed to Gross National Product.

What does Gross National Happiness mean? Can it be measured? How could its values be entrenched in a country's daily life, its agriculture, its economic life, its educational system? Bhutan's leaders have thought deeply about these questions, and have enlisted Ron Colman, one of our earliest Green Interviewees, to help with the task.