TIME IS LIMITED
TIME IS RUNNING OUT
TIME IS UP
TIME IS CLOSING IN
TIME IS IMPERATIVE
TIME IS CRUCIAL
TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE
TIME IS CRITICAL
TIME IS PRESSING
THE TIME IS NOW

In October, over 1000 young people will converge on Ottawa to ask for bold, comprehensive and immediate action on climate change.

Canada Needs You! Register Today.

Power Shift Canada is the largest-ever gathering of young people on the environment in the history of this country.

From October 23 to 26 2009, over 1,000 young people from across the country will converge in Ottawa to take a message of bold, comprehensive and immediate federal climate action to Parliament Hill.

Join us for three days of inspirational speakers, rewarding training, empowering workshops, entertaining concerts, strategic planning, and united lobbying to understand, push, prepare, develop, strengthen and connect through the climate crisis.

Sincerely,
The Power Shift Canada Team

Yesterday our wonderful friend Rin held the first of a series of three workshops on how to build a 10 x 10 ft permaculture garden at our house. We already grow some food, so the workshop transformed an area on the side of the garden that wasn’t being used (part of it was still grass) into a lovely new self-contained vegetable garden.

I learned about sheet mulching, no-dig gardening, crop rotations, and much much more. If you want to start growing food, or if you’ve been growing for years and want some new ideas, I can’t recommend Erin’s courses enough if you get a chance – she’s an amazing farmer, growing food for 5 families in a typical front and back-yard house in East Van.

From start to finish (raw materials to planted garden): The 10 x 10 permaculture garden in photos.

(Actually the space we had was 8 x 12, so we adapted the design a little!)

Happy growing…

As the UN climate talks continue in Bali, and many countries continue trying to make progress on international agreements on dealing with climate change, Canada’s conservative government seems to have a different plan – do the bidding of big oil and sabotage all progress at the climate talks, contrary to the wishes of most Canadians. So far has Canada slipped, under the current government, from its former position as bastion of international diplomacy at the Montreal negotiations two years ago, that at the weekend Canada won the “fossil of the day” award, for doing the most to block progress at the negotiations.

It’s time to make some noise, Canada: head on over to avaaz.org and tell Harper to stop blocking the UN climate talks. It only takes a minute.

Once you’ve done that, read on for more contact details. A phone call is worth a thousand emails…

read on

Google recently added Vancouver to Google Transit. This is extremely useful, as Translink’s own trip planner is so bad as to be almost unusable. However, one of my friends noticed something which I thought was rather amusing…

The system appears to think it is possible to walk on water.

Amazing.