The Minto Suite Hotel is hosting a free showing of The 11th Hour this Saturday (June 21st) at dusk (which they’re estimating at 8:50 pm) in the parking lot at Slater and Lyon. The movie will be projected against the wall of a building. Refreshments will be available for a donation. All proceeds will go to The David Suzuki Foundation. Bring a lawnchair. (This event is weather permitting.)
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Archived Posts from this Category
June 17, 2008
Event: Free Outdoor Environmental Movie in Centretown
Posted by greenlivingottawa under Ottawa, arts and culture, climate change, energy, health, media, reduce1 Comment
January 31, 2008
The City of Ottawa Signs up for Earth Hour
Posted by greenlivingottawa under Ottawa, climate change, energy, reduce[4] Comments
Mayor Larry O’Brien announced this morning that the City of Ottawa in partnership with Hydro Ottawa has signed on to Earth Hour, a movement that started last year in Australia and which is going global this year through the sponsorship of the World Wildlife Fund.
The Earth Hour campaign asks individuals, households and businesses to shut off all their lights from 8pm to 9pm on Saturday March 29th in a gesture of solidarity on the issue of climate change. 2.2 million people participated in the 2007 Earth Hour based in Sydney Australia, resulting in a 10% electricity usage drop for that hour and a reduction of 25,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
In December of 2007 Toronto was named one of the seven flagship cities for Earth Hour 2008, marking a level of involvement all Canadians should be proud of. You can find information about Toronto’s participation at WWF Canada’s website. Unfortunately, WWF Canada has yet to post anything about other efforts across the country.
As an Ottawa resident and greenliving-keener, I’d like to see the Canadian chapter of the sponsor of this global movement take a more national approach to the Earth Hour campaign. Let’s all make the world take notice of Ottawa by pledging in droves to the turn off our lights on March 29th.
On-line news coverage of Ottawa’s announcement: Canada.com, The Toronto Star
January 23, 2008
A Greener Way to Watch DVDs: Zip.ca
Posted by greenlivingottawa under 100-mile, Ottawa, arts and culture, household, media, reduce[4] Comments
I have a friend who owns over 1,000 DVDs. He bought most of them second-hand, or through one of those buying clubs, but even if he paid an average of $10 a pop that’s a lot of money to have invested in things that clutter up your house. He hasn’t even watched them all.
We do own a few DVDs, but we only buy them if we’ve seen them already and think they’re worth watching more than once. Mostly we borrow them through Zip.ca.
Renting or borrowing is a great way to reduce the number of things you own and to decrease your ecological footprint. Alex Steffen of World Changing holds up product-service systems, “the substitution of access for ownership,” as one important pathway towards a more sustainable future. In his post, he uses the American company Netflix as an example of a thriving product-service system. Not only does Netflix allow people to watch videos without owning them, it also uses the postal system to circulate them. So instead of people driving their cars to the video store, they are delivered by mail carriers who are coming around your neighbourhood anyway. (See also articles by Treehugger and Ask Pablo.)
The Canadian version of Netflix, Zip.ca, is a homegrown Ottawa company. While they now have several warehouses across the country, they started out in a warehouse in the suburb of Nepean. I still get all my DVDs from the Ottawa warehouse (you can tell by the address on the return envelope), which means that they aren’t traveling that far to get to and from my house. Recently Zip.ca have become even more environmentally-friendly by making all their envelopes out of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper.
We have been Zip.ca members for about three years now. We’ve never had cable or satellite or even good regular tv reception so we watch DVDs way more often that we watch regular tv. I knew I was going to write this post, so I did a bit of looking around in Zip’s vast collection and a found a number of “green” videos: An Inconvenient Truth, Who Killed the Electric Car, A Crude Awakening, to name a few. I even got The Sacred Balance out so I could blog about watching it. However, I have to confess that I ended up leaving David Suzuki lying on the bookshelf while I binged on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What can I say, every once in a while I get the urge to watch vampires get a good ass-kicking and I indulge that urge in the greenest way I can.
January 5, 2008
New Year’s Resolution: Less Stuff
Posted by greenlivingottawa under Ottawa, books, energy, fair trade, household, reduce, waste reduction[9] Comments
As you might have been able to tell from all the thingless-Christmas posts I recently made, these days I’m working on reducing my material stuff. So I decided to centre my New Years resolutions around becoming conscious of my addiction to stuff and ultimately reducing the amount of stuff I have in my life.
What’s wrong with stuff? Well first of all, stuff takes natural resources and energy to produce. A lot of stuff requires storage facilities (such as book cases) or requires maintenance, both of which cost money. Some stuff-addicted friends of mine have had to move into bigger apartments or houses just so they had more room for their stuff! Bigger houses take more resources to build, maintain, heat, cool, and clean and they cost more to buy or rent. A lot of stuff also takes up space after it’s been “disposed of” in landfills. Plus making, using and disposing of stuff can produce pollution that poisons air, land and waterways. If you want to know more about stuff and how our addiction to it is destroying our planet check-out the short on-line video “The Story of Stuff” with Annie Leonard.
So how am I addressing my own addiction to stuff? First, I’m keeping track of every penny I spend. This stops me from being in denial about how much of my money and energy is going towards stuff and its maintenance. For more on the cost of stuff in your own life and the importance of keeping track of your spending see the simple living classic Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin.
Second, in order to help me reduce the amount of stuff I’m acquiring, I’m bringing a list of questions with me when I go shopping. I have adapted my questions from a great little book called 30 Days to a Simpler Life, by Connie Cox and Chris Evatt (which they used to have at the Ottawa Public Library, but which has mysteriously disappeared from their catalogue).
My own personal list of 10 shopping questions is as follows:
- Does this purchase meet my values of environmental sustainability and social justice?
- Will purchasing this object help me to meet my goals?
- Will it create more work?
- Will it create more costs?
- Will it make my life easier?
- Am I willing to scrap what it is replacing?
- Do I need it?
- Would I buy it at full price?
- Would I buy it if it did not reduce shipping costs for other items?
- Do I want it because I believe it will make me feel better?
Again, following the sound advice of Connie and Chris, when I have the desire to make a big purchase I am going to wait a month to see if I actually need it or if it was merely a passing impulse.
My final strategy for this year’s resolution is to get rid of stuff that I no longer use which is taking up space in my house. Again, I have turned to Connie and Chris for tips on how to tackle such a life-simplifying task. However, my motivation comes from Annie Leonard who cites a U.S. study that found only 1% of the stuff people purchase is still being used 6 months later. One Percent!
To help me reduce the stuff in my house without increasing the stuff languishing in landfills I’m going to make use of the Ottawa Full Circles community. Full Circles is an on-line group that helps people get the things they no longer use to people who need them, thereby reducing purchases of new items and reducing the stuff going to landfill sites. All for free.
So there you have my new year’s resolution and my plans for carrying through with it. I’d love to hear other people’s resolutions…
December 16, 2007
Day Five: Giving the Gift of Not Having to Cook
Posted by greenlivingottawa under 100-mile, Ottawa, food, organic, recycled, reduce, waste reductionNo Comments
This year my mother has put “a catering gift certificate” on her Christmas wish-list. Good food speaks to the body and soul and having meals cooked for you can be a great treat. If you’ve got more time than money, a gift certificate for a simple wholesome meal cooked by you can be a great eco-friendly thingless gift to give. However, if you’ve got more money than time and you want to give the gift of a meal cooked by a professional chef, there are a couple of caterers in Ottawa that are particularly eco-friendly and worth mentioning here.
First, if the person is lucky enough to live or work in the Kitchissippi Ward of Ottawa (basically the near west-end) you could buy him or her a week or two (or more) of eco-friendly catered lunches from Credible Edibles. Judy Varga-Toth of Credible Edibles cooks healthy nutritious weekday lunches using as many organic and locally-grown ingredients as possible and then delivers them to her customers in reusable lunch boxes. As she writes on her web-site: “No one should have to choose convenience at the expense of a healthy body and mind or a healthy planet.”
Jennifer and Jo-Ann of The Red Apron run a “dinner club.” They cook and deliver healthy suppers to their customers on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Jennifer and Jo-Ann try to source their ingredients locally and buy organic when they can. Their meals are delivered in special cardboard containers that are 100% recyclable. They currently run their business out of Old Ottawa South, though they will soon be moving to a new location in Centre-town. Recently, my husband and I decided to buy ourselves three weeks of the Red Apron Dinner Club as our wedding anniversary present to ourselves. We were not disappointed.
Judy, Jennifer and Jo-Ann are all members of Slow Food Ottawa-Gatineau, a non-profit group that seeks to promote good, clean and fair food in the Ottawa area.
