We are very, very good at eating. My aunt, Tita Sylvia makes sure that we have enough food to spend the entire day at the beach, preparing the feast days before. I wake up to the cries of the pig in my grandparents’ backyard being slaughtered for our family’s epic lunch. Mang Kardo, my grandmother’s trusted roaster goes to the beach house straight after breakfast to roast the pig on a spit for four hours and turn it into glorious lechon.

I gave up pork for three years while living in Manila, only to fall madly in love with lechon all over again as my cousin swooped her fork from the lechon’s ribs to my plate. I shrugged, ate it with vinegar and garlic, and it was divine.

I realize that this entry might be a bit too graphic for the Western palate. Being passionate about environmental sustainability, I’ve been struggling with the environmental cost of my consumption of meat and how essential meat consumption is to my home culture. Does eating meat make me less passionate about sustainability? Is it strange that I am comfortable looking at the pig I’m having for lunch before it gets slaughtered?

Moving to Vancouver made me realize how disconnected I have become from my food system. Back home, I knew how the trees where my fruits come from looked like, I knew the names of at least twenty kinds of fish, and went to the public market to haggle and buy my meat and seafood early in the morning. Western supermarkets just make it so easy and convenient to get neatly packed meat and produce, and hectic everyday living makes these romantic notions of knowing where your food comes from become such a hassle. Herein lies the problem – we are so disconnected from the earth and the damage that we place on it, that our actions are no longer guided by the non-monetary consequences of our consumption.

A friend of mine once told me about the time he slaughtered a goat for dinner. I’ve never killed a mammal for food before, so I wondered how this affected his consumption of meat. “I still eat meat. In order to have life, there must be death,” he said. I thought about that, and realized that this philosophy applies to all living beings. Even plants have to stop growing to nourish us.

As frequent my local farmer’s market and every week, I am reminded of the tension that exists between health and affordability. I don’t question that the higher price point reflects higher quality, better feed and labour-intensive organic farming. However, our society and economy have much to do before it can become a just and equal food system, accessible to everyone, regardless of their economic situation.

While there are no simple solutions the problems surrounding food security and climate change, reflecting on the process of growing, distributing, slaughtering, preparing and eating food, might make all of us better consumers who waste less, and eat better food.

Eat good food, try new food, share food with other people, grow your own food, kill your food and think about how comfortable you are with that, practice Meatless Mondays, prepare your food and be thankful to everyone who was involved in the process of getting that food on your plate.

Mao’s Great Leap Forward involved killing off sparrows, reclaiming land, wiping out forests and flattening out mountains in the name of progress. It was a success to conquer nature and extract its bounty. Archival footage of workers happily scaring off sparrows and passing on sacks of soil were shown, reflecting a sense of solidarity in the hope of pushing the nation into development. VIFF audiences are always more engaged and responsive compared to regular moviegoers, and everyone chuckled and smirked in retrospect. Then I noticed deep, troubled breaths as footage of recycling scavengers picked through the garbage beside a mountain that was once their farmland, before the government built dams over it.

The film focused mostly on social justice and land tenure issues for the farmers along the rivers, who were in danger of losing their land to the construction of hydroelectric dams. The footage was very emotionally charged with farmers fighting for their land, triggering a wave of interest for the cause of the local environmental movements. I had hoped that the film would spend a little more time digging into the contentious issues it touched on, namely:

1. How was the Great Leap Forward any different from what had happened in the Industrial Revolution?
2. One of the officials interviewed said, “Did Mao have bad intentions? No.” I most definitely agree. The struggle between development and environmental degradation is so much more tense when you’re living in dire circumstances.
3. Mistakes were made by Mao and felt by the people who were tasked to finish the job. What could be the mistakes that we are making now, as we try to rectify the wrongs we committed in the past?

I’ve been toying around with the idea of emotional attachment and ownership to the motherland and its people, and how, as immigrants in a foreign land, we lack a certain degree of solidarity with the new land we inhabit and its people. How can we live in Vancouver, a city unlike most of the ones we come from, bursting with tree-lined streets, random patches of forests throughout the city and among the freshest water and air available in the world, and still be cognizant of the environmental degradation that seems so far removed from the reality of our daily lives?

Waking the Green Tiger is showing at Empire Granville on Friday, October 7^th at 9:30pm, and on Tuesday, October 11^th at 12:20pm. For more information, visit: VIFF: Waking the Green Tiger

For further reading on General Mao’s development agenda and its effects on the environment, check out Mao’s War Against Nature by Judith Shapiro.

For images of recycling depots and rural development in China, watch Manufactured Landscapes by Edward Burtynsky, or view the photo series on Recycling and the Three Gorges Dam on his website.

by Nicole Ignacio

See links here:

http://www.cityfarmer.info/2011/09/23/cbc-news-looks-at-synergy-between-inner-city-farms-and-electric-composter/#more-14582

Can you help us spread the word about a problem as serious as the tar sands, located in our “front yard,” and happening right now?

Roberts Bank Coal Port, just outside of Vancouver, is North America’s single largest exporter of global warming pollution. It has rapidly carved out a role in the export of US thermal coal to Asia. If there was a carbon-offshoring Olympics today, it would win the gold medal. Oddly enough, the general public hardly knows it’s there. We think it deserves more attention.

We’re close to finalizing a deal to post two billboards at the ferry terminal between Vancouver and Victoria in BC. See the images below. For one month, people waiting for the ferry would see these two billboards in rotation. Roberts Bank is just to the north. We hope this will get some people turning their heads and thinking about the future.

Interested in helping make it happen? Visit http://vtacc.org/coalbillboards

Thanks for giving this your consideration — we think this will shine a spotlight on BC’s behind-the-scenes role in fueling the climate crisis.

Kevin Washbrook
Voters Taking Action on Climate Change

PS — Like us, you’ve probably heard that Canada Starts Here: BC’s Job Plan, rolled out by Premier Clark this week, basically boils down to more of the same: digging up our resources and selling them overseas. It would be more accurate to call it Climate Change Starts Here: BC’s Resource Export Plan.

More than ever, it’s crucial we challenge the status quo and draw public attention to the role we play in the climate crisis. Our premier needs to offer us a vision that ensures a sustainable, healthy future for BC.

I was attracted to RCR because of my background in organizations that work with ethnic communities; I hope you’ll enjoy my coverage of the events I attend. Every week, Vancouver buzzes with networking events, lectures, dialogues, outdoor festivals and others of the fun schmoozing variety. I like to frequent those with themes that focus on community engagement, social change, gardening and greening of public spaces.

On June 3, I attended my first event on behalf of RangiChangi: De-Growth, an annual conference held in Vancouver. De-Growth is a term for dealing with the problems associated with growth-based economies – the existence of this term and the conference reflects the number of people increasingly concerned with how our growth and output impacts our planet. De-Growth brings together leading experts and local contributors and allows them to have a dialogue with audience members to translate degrowth concepts into action. I would say the conference has a fairly heavy academic feel to it – one must be familiar with certain language and theory to understand what was being discussed, though not at all times. I’d venture to say initiatives such as De-Growth preach to the choir, but with each year the conference does gain new ground and exposure with the new people who attend. And even if it speaks to the converted, it’s still a great medium for experts to relay new insight, studies and theories and bring people with similar interests and angst together.

From authors to professors to founders of environmental organizations, the keynote speakers examined degrowth issues through many lenses. If you’ve been keeping up with our tweets, you’ll have heard us talk about some of the speakers’ ideas, from the existence of greed in the wild to the importance of women’s rights in reducing population growth.

I’d like to share with you one particular insight I learned from the conference. It was discussed by veteran journalist and author of Green Inc. Christine McDonald. McDonald’s book examines how green causes have made questionable deals and compromises as they are courted by corporations and companies. She shared the ways in which corporations offer financial support to environmental organizations and how that may influence their work.

One issue McDonald discussed was how seemingly positive relationships formed between environmental groups and corporations can, in reality, have negative impacts on the environment. Corporations set up plants that follow environmental laws or maintain a “green” image – however, the environmental laws are often lax and their plants cause harm in a way North Americans may not be aware of. In Brazilian nature preserves, for instance, farmers are required to set aside 10% of their land for nature preserves, but many ignore this law, especially factory farmers. Although corporations owning these farms may allege that they are ‘green’, lax policies like this allow corporations to still get away with environmentally harmful practices. Veiling the process in green language and policies can be misleading. As long as corporations follow the rules, they are still able to erode borders protecting pristine land – this is happening in the Amazon with soybean plantations. According to McDonald , these realities are why, for instance, the search for organically certified soy will probably never end – we are looking for a solution that cannot exist. Sustainable soy bean production can never truly be achieved with integrity as land resources do not allow it. I’m hoping to pick up the book when time allows and read more.

I would say the conference was, on the whole, quite academic and at times difficult to follow for a layperson such as myself. I’m not an environmental lawyer or scientist, nor do I work in urban development – but I did enjoy hearing such a wide variety of discussions on the topic from the experts, people who actually affect change and work directly in the field. The conference has been growing in size – Rex Weyler, one of the founders of Greenpeace and a prolific journalist, said the concept behind the conference would have been lost on Vancouver five years ago. It’s encouraging to know people are growing more concerned with finding ways to ease our impact on the earth.

“Sustainable” in Chinese is translated into 可持續發展 which literally means ‘development that can be continued’ but it is more exciting and active because it implies moving forward as well as embracing continuity.

“Solar panel” is 太陽能電池板 — literally, ‘solar power energy pool panel’.

“Wind power” is 風力發電 — or ‘wind power generate energy’.

“Carbon footprint” in Chinese is 碳足跡 which means exactly the same as in English. But it is also graphic in the Chinese language because you can literally see the footprint in “carbon” — black color, the color of coal.

“Renewable energy” is translated as: 再生能源 or ‘energy that is reborn’. How creative it is to describe a non-conventional, non-fossil-fuel energy source as a newborn?

LatinCouver will highlight the day by presenting a traditional street soccer tournament. Their Latin American plaza will include an open‐air food court that will offer authentic Latin American cuisine. Festival patrons will also enjoy the interactive cultural pavilion that includes a Latin American Art & Crafts Marketplace and children’s activities.