Last Call at the Oasis

I watched Last Call at the Oasis (also http://www.takepart.com/lastcall/) recently at the cinema, the so called last part of the "Participant's Media Crisis Quartet" after Food Inc., An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman. It was a great documentary for sure and disappointing as always how few people came to see the show considering only one was scheduled. 

I am not running over all the details but I tell you about the opening scene  and a few bits and pieces. The film starts showing people in poor countries fighting over water. These people either regularly experience severe drought or floods but they all lack clean water for consumption, and their situation is not going to change. They have to live along polluted rivers, watch their livestock die and crops dry out while working hard to survive. The music then changes to Pink's "Raise your glass" in which she sings "Why so serious?" Next you see people in the First World waste water on public fountains, water their lawns, power wash driveways, splash around in pools, grow crops in the middle of the desert with irrigation water that has travelled 100s of miles through pipelines, and you see Las Vegas. Las Vegas depends on water imports especially now that the reservoir behind Hoover Dam is drying up and the years are counted until the water level is so low that the connected power plant will stop operation. While Las Vegas wants to steal its water from even further afield I think it deserves to go down and plainly dry out. The sprawl and wastefulness of this city is simply disgusting. And in a country like the USA people pay next to nothing for their water which is even more disgusting! The film also pointed out that California is the next Australia and we all know how dried up, burnt down and deserted Down Under is. The days of eating produce grown in California might as well be counted too.   
 
Unfortunately I can't find my favourite quotes from that film right now but I recommend watching the trailer at least. The quotes went somewhere along the lines of 'humanity is capable of committing infinite destruction of the Earth and still be ignorant about it'. In one part of the film a bunch of business people tried to figure out how to market "recycled water" that for example would come from recycling urine. Naturally most people's reaction was "yikes, no way would I drink this, that's disgusting". The technology exists and is being used on spaceships already. So these guys come up with some clever marketing and get people to drink the recycled water and most realise it's fine and tastes like any other drinking water. One woman proves herself to be bloody stupid and ignorant saying something like, why do you bother doing this, we surely don't have a water shortage considering the size of the oceans'. Dah! Time to wake up!             

The film was presented by Community Renewable Energy Waterloo, an organisation that I had not heard about but that certainly tries to make a difference here in the region. And while I see more garden signs here advertising that a house is "Bullfrog Powered" than in Edmonton, living in an apartment sucks in so far that we have no influence whatsoever about the effiency of our appliances, the quality of the building, the energy provider etc. The other day I spoke to someone from Reduce the Juice and she said they are trying to get the green bin (organics) into apartment buildings as well. Wouldn't it be nice. It's a lot harder to have a compost bin in an apartment than in a garden!  

The energy for your air conditioning

Are you dreaming of solar-powered air conditioning right now,  just like I am? If you live in Ontario you might be dreading the heat by now, at least I do. I long have had enough of summer. Ontario as it turns out has made efforts to produce more solar and wind power and reduce their coal power plants contribution. That's nice, but unfortunately, the government seems to be hesitant to switch the coal plants off completely. Besides, they are way too much into nuclear power plants which have already had a massive impact on the provincial debt and power rates for consumers. I'm not a fan of nuke power either. Japan has shown more than impressively what can happen when nature's forces strike and don't stop at man-made obstacles such as power plants. 

A brochure of the Clean Air Alliance states that "According to the Ontario Energy Board, rising nuclear costs are responsible for 45% of the increase in Ontario's electricity generation prices over the past five years. Renewable energy, by comparison, has contributed just 6% to the increase." On their website the Clean Air Alliance runs some interesting articles on both coal and nuclear power, for example:           


"Ontario now has a significant surplus of coal-free electricity. We do not need to wait until December 2014 to finish the coal phase out. ...  Meanwhile, Ontario Power Generation has been paid close to a billion dollars to keep unneeded coal plants open. Send a letter to Premier Dalton McGuinty asking him to shutdown unnecessary coal units today!"

We recently spent a few days around Point Pelee and noticed there the co-existence of oil wells and large solar panels and wind turbines. It was surprising to be honest. Definitely good to see the solar panels and wind turbines. I get angry when I see road signs urging people to fight wind turbines. It's total BS to me. They cause a lot less noise than the average Canadian city during its day-to-day operations of people driving everywhere, construction sites and so on. Those most be Conservatives that for any price and environmental destruction want to stick to traditional ways of energy production. Why else would the federal government investigates the effects of wind turbines but isn't very rigorous about the shortfalls of the oil and gas industry which is still operating and expanding despite more oil spills and gas leaks.     

Dirty Dash

There's quite a few things I have been wanting to write about recently but I don't get to spend much time at the computer. With the drought and heat we have spent tons of time outside, yes outside, because our apartment is like a sauna. So, in the shade of a park tree or at the spray park it is for me and my daughter most of the time. In the "cool" morning we have done a few bike tours too. Today we finally got some rain in the afternoon with lots of thunder and we were out for a walk and stop at the spray park, enjoying the wet. In the morning though I did the Dirty Dash run and for once it was humid as the rain was looming in the sky but simply did not come until hours later. 

The Dirty Dash is a 4 km loop in a park that for the longer option is run twice. It's got a man-made mud pit at the end with flags put up low across the mud so that one has to crawl, belly slide or whatever underneath. We ran mostly on grass and forest trails (the forest is awesome, cool and dark), through a creek twice and up and down a few hills. As a surprise by the organisers we also got to jump over a log, car tires, and three rows of straw bales right before the mud pit. Yeah! Besides, they watered an uphill section with a sprinkler to make it slippery. This race went over faster than any other one because the obstacles and change of scenery made it so much more interesting than a road race. Besides, spectators like my hubby are much more entertained since they can see the runners along different parts of the course including most obstacles.

The latest result list put me 50. overall from 177 runners, 12. women, and first again in my age category with a time of 45 min 13 sec. Not bad under the circumstances. Will do it again!        



By the way the fastest man finished the 8 km in 31 min, the fastest woman in under 36 min. The first guys to come in apparently still had the energy to make somersaults in the mud and one of them ran afterwards the 4 km. Crazy, suppose they train for that. I keep fit with a toddler, a bike and my two feet, so there's not much need to go running laps in the wood every other day (which still would not make me win the race).