HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1996-03-06, Page 5Nature's Miracles
Monte Hummel
President of World Wildlife Fund Canada
The persistence of trash
I n nature, matter may change forms
or be converted to energy, but it
cannot cease to exist. Imagine, then,
how garbage would quickly pile up
around your home if you couldn't put it
curbside or take it to a disposal site.
Based on the Canadian national
average of about one kilogram of
garbage per person per day, a family of
four discards nearly 1,500 kilograms
each year. That's the weight of a full-
size car in rotting food, rusting metals,
soiled diapers and chemicals of varying
degrees of toxicity.
As a group, Canadians produce more
than 30 million kilograms of waste
every year. We have ways of making it
"disappear" from the curb, but it doesn't
disappear from the world. The garbage
that isn't piling up in our homes is
actually adding to much bigger heaps
called "landfills" or it is being burned in
incinerators. Increasing concern over
the safety of these disposal methods is
resulting in increased expenditures of
public money (your money) as we
struggle to prevent toxic substances
from escaping into our air, water and
food.
In general, "sanitary" landfills are not
the big compost piles they are often
considered to be. Composting, which
makes rich soil from decomposed
organic waste, relies on plenty of tiny
organisms and oxygen to do the work.
These are rarely present in landfills. In
fact, landfills can be so sterile — or
"sanitized" — that paper, plastics and
even food remain unchanged for
decades.
Other changes do take place,
however. Among them is a process
called leaching, in which fluids
gradually settle out of the garbage and
enter the soil and water surrounding a
fill site. From there, these sometimes
extremely toxic "leachates" can
continue to spread.
Incineration is not the entire answer,
either. Some poisonous residue is
inevitably a product of incineration.
This may be released into the
atmosphere and often has harmful
effects far away from the smokestack.
The residue kept from going up the
chimney is left behind and must still be
disposed of. Ironically, this often ends
up in landfills where it persists almost
literally forever.
We can all help by changing our
lifestyles to allow us to use fewer of
Earth's resources in the fist place. Once
we make this important commitment,
we can reduce the amount of trash we
each throw on the pile be reusing
everything we can and recycling as
much of what's left as possible. For
instance, recycling a tonne of paper
conserves 18 trees, keeps 25 kilograms
of pollutants out of the air and requires
only half as much water for processing
as wood pulp.
The result will be a better
quality of environment for
wildlife and people, too. WWF
Nature's Miracles is brought to you
by this publication and World Wildlife
Fund Canada (WWF). To find out how
you can help save wildlife and wild
places, call WWF at I-800-26-PANDA.
THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 1996 PAGE 5.
No doubt Canada
gets its fair share
of winter
Mon pays, ce n'est pas un pays. C'est
l'hiver
Man, sometimes it's tough to be a
Canadian. Take the quotation above. It
comes from a song written by a Quebecois
name of Gilles Vigneault. It translates as
"My country is not a country. It is winter".
Sometimes it feels like that. What you get
out of bed on a February morning, look out
the window and see snowbanks, naked trees,
ice patches, all under a steel-grey sky that
promises more snow.
It feels like that too, when you pick up
your newspaper and read of plant layoffs,
economic downturns, flu epidemics — and
incoming Arctic fronts.
This ain't a country; this is winter.
It's a state of mind a lot of Canucks get
into about this time of year, with too many
months of hard slogging behind us and
weeks to go before you can actually feel the
heat of the sun.
Perhaps we've been squinting at the
horizon too long. Maybe a couple of good
news stories could serve to warm us up.
The story, for instance, of Brian Charania.
Mister Charania is a Canadian of recent
vintage. He came to our shores from war-
torn Uganda 24 years ago.
He arrived in the dead of winter with his
wife and baby son. The Charanias were
driving through blizzard-whipped Ottawa
surveying a landscape the like of which has
never been seen in Uganda.
And they ran out of gas.
Right there on the east-west expressway
that bisects Ottawa. He got out of his car and
stood shivering in his new found frigid land,
wondering what would become of him.
Then a motorist pulled over, gave him a
lift to the nearest gas station, and drove him
back with a can full of gas.
A small event which most of us have
experienced some variation of, some time or
other. But Brian Charania never forgot.
He's a citizen of the capital now and the
owner of an Ottawa firm that employs 10
people. He has all the trappings of a
successful middle-aged Canadian: nice
house, decent car. His kids are in university,
he belongs to a few clubs.
But he can't forget the day he ran out of
gas and a stranger stopped to help him.
So every day in the winter, during
morning and evening rush hour, Brian
Charania or one of his employees climbs
into a company truck and drives the
expressway looking for stranded motorists.
The truck carries spare gasoline, windshield
washer fluid, battery cables and a cell phone.
Brian Charania is responsible for bailing out
five to 10 people a day.
You can never tell what will happen when
you hold out your mittened hand to a fellow
traveller in distress. One time a young
American doctor by the name of Herbert
Jasper was driving to McGill University in
Montreal during a blizzard. He hit a patch of
black ice, spun out and bushed his car.
Before he even got out, a crowd of
passers-by had materialized around his
vehicle, put their shoulders to it and pushed
him back on the road.
"They were so kind and quick that I didn't
even have time to thank anyone" the doctor
recalls. "I knew right then that this was the
kind of place I wanted to live."
So he moved. Doctor Herbert Jasper
became a Canadian citizen.
He also, over the next few decades, came
to be one of the world's foremost scientists,
specializing in brain research. Last year he
was given the Albert Einstein World Award
for Science, a prize given out by 25 Nobel
laureates.
There's no question about it: Canada gets
more than its fair share of winter.
It's what we do with it that counts.
Letters
L
MP endorses
National Farm
Safety Week
THE EDITOR,
This year the annual National Farm Safety
Week is March 7 - 13, 1996 with emphasis
on child safety, pointing out dangers and
increasing children's and parents' awareness
of risks on the farm."
Farm safety is an important issue that
doesn't get nearly enough attention. There is
no other occupation in Canada where
children live on an industrial work site.
The overall objective of the campaign is to
increase both children's and parents'
awareness of the hazards which are present
on the farm.
During National Farm Safety Week,
children and parents are invited to become
farm safety super sleuths. Farm families are
encouraged to make a serious effort to
identify and correct areas on the farm where
safety can be improved.
Farming is considered to be one of the
most hazardous occupations. The primary
cause of child injuries are farm machinery
and equipment (26 per cent) and farm
animals, including horses (26 per cent). The
most dangerous days of the week are
Saturday and Sunday with about 45 per cent
of child injuries occurring on the weekend.
I would like to take this opportunity to
commend all of the people in Huron-Bruce
who are continuing to demand excellence in
safety standards, not only at Harvest time,
but every single day of the year.
Paul Steckle
Huron-Bruce MP.
The
short
of it
By Bonnie Gropp
Cutting life short
Stay alert, don't get hurt.
This is sound advice being touted by the
Farm Safety Association this week as they
draw attention through their annual farm
safety campaign. The focus is children.
As I filtered through some of the
information contained in their media kit, one
paragraph, sandwiched between the bread
and butter of any awareness drive, the
alarming statistics, essentially provided the
meat of the problem. A farm is an industrial
workplace unlike any other. Like others it is
filled with areas of potential danger, yet it is
also a "home, a special place to visit."
My trips to a farm consisted of a week or
so during summer holidays and any other
opportunity I could manage, when I was a
youngster. Growing up in town, though my
roaming was not totally restricted I do recall
many rules governing my freedom. The farm
therefore, seemed to me, a limitless
playground.
To my cousin, farmlife was perhaps not
the golden experience it was to me, but in
retrospect I would say that every day I spent
there was filled with sunshine, both literally
and verbally; I honestly do not recall a day
when we were forced indoors because of
inclement weather, though I'm sure Auntie
Beat would.
With acres to explore, the days seemed to
stretch on forever, yet ended too quickly.
From morning until bedtime each minute
seemed filled with new adventure and
exploration. Using sticks and string we
fished (obviously unsuccessfully) in the
ditch. We hid in the mow, picked apples in
the orchard, and using burlap and twine
turned the stalls into horses. My wise and
tricky aunt and uncle even made work seem
like fun. Eating fresh beans and peas as we
picked them from the garden and cleaning
the chicken coop to use it as a playhouse
were pleasing tasks.
But I soon learned nothing comes without
a price and while the farm gave my young
soul a feeling of emancipation, the liberty
here, too had regulations imposed for our
safety. As urban children are streetproofed to
protect them, my aunt and uncle prepared us
for threatening situations and pointed out the
dangers without making us fearful of
adventure. There were boundaries to limit
our wanderings, machinery was off-limits
and a run in with a ticked-off boar taught us
a healthy respect for farm animals.
When I think of what a special place a
farm is for a child to grow up, it is so very
sad to think how many have had those days
of wonder cut short. According to the Farm
Safety Association, in just 10 years, 80
children under the age of 15 were killed in
Ontario farm accidents. Among these
fatalities were 61 youngsters aged 10 or less.
Thirty-nine were under the age of five. The
major cause of these deaths is farm
machinery, but there are others — hazardous
materials, unsafe buildings or other
structures and livestock.
There is not a farm family in existence
who does not know the dangers; it's just
good to be reminded once in awhile that it's
basically common sense that will protect
these children. Keep an eye on them, make
buildings safe, set a good example and
"farmproof" them on the potential hazards.
Their lives may depend on it.
Arthur Black