Chandra Clarke

Offering Light and Laughter Wherever I Can

Dolphin dollars and moose money

By Leave a Comment

Promoters and developers spend thousands of dollars every year trying to bring tourists to their cities. In bigger places, mega-events like Lollapalooza, or the CNE are the attractions. In smaller towns, the local service clubs volunteer hundreds of hours to set up festivals, fairs and shows. 

Then there is Dingle, Ireland.

Dingle is a tiny fishing village on the west coast of the emerald isle. I’ve been there, and it’s one of those places that just has to be labelled “quaint.” A burgeoning metropolis of about 2000 people, it has been dubbed by some of the locals as the “last parish before the New World.” The main street is home to a grocery store, a couple of pubs, and some gift shops. It rains an awful lot in Dingle. 

It was also home to Fungi.

Fungi was a dolphin. Stories vary on just how and when the friendly little critter arrived, but presumably, he was originally spotted by fisherman out working the coastline. Some of the more entrepreneurial lads began taking folks out on their boats to visit him. Fungi, as it turned out, was a bit of a ham, and he especially liked flirting with women. And thus, a tourist attraction was born. 

The dolphin attracted visitors from all over the world. Psychiatrists took depressed patients out to swim with him, and photographers went nuts taking snapshots. Tourists from such diverse places as Wagga Wagga and Tuktoyuktuk gladly handed over their lunch money to go “Fungi-hunting.” Fungi was even featured on the Global television network here at home.

There were of course, the requisite Fungi T-shirts, coffee mugs and post cards for sale at the gift shops. The bed and breakfast homes filled up throughout the summer. The upshot of all this, is that one bored little dolphin pulled about £1 million per year into Dingle at the time. Think about that for a moment. That was more than $2 million in Canuck bucks. In Dingle.

This could mean one of two things. First: humans are easy to amuse. Well, that’s true enough. Take a long, hard look at some of the most famous tourist attractions in the world, and you’ll see what I mean. After all, what is the leaning tower of Pisa, if not a big time architectural boo-boo? The pyramids were the world’s first government sponsored employment/make-work project. Niagara Falls is essentially Mother Nature’s leakiest faucet.

Second: it means that eco-tourism is hot, hot, hot. There’s an explanation for this, which has to do with heritage. We pay money to go to Greek ruins — even thought there really isn’t anything there except rubble — because Ancient Greece is part of our history. People were beginning to realize that the environment is just as much a part of our Earthly heritage as Zeus and Apollo are.

Why have we only just begun to see this? I think that’s because we haven’t been able to separate ourselves from nature until the last century or so. It’s hard to appreciate the finer points of a lion when its teeth are buried in your left leg. Likewise, a rattlesnake is only cute(ish) at a distance.

Now though, as we continue to build a technological civilization, our natural heritage is going to become more and more important. There is a lesson to be learned here, developers. The pesky creature on the edge of town may just be a moose, but it’s our moose. Local residents might not be thrilled with it, but tourists from Indonesia will love it. 

Clown festivals and peach fairs are great, but it may be better and easier to promote tourism alternatives. What is commonplace in your backyard, is unique to someone living in the Far East. If you’d be willing to pay money to see panda bears, you can bet other people would pay money to see our polar bears. And that, by the way, provides an incentive to preserve the environment.

One Irish dolphin = $2 million.

Who knew?

But let’s hope Fungi had kids.

Image credit: Midjourney

Better Laundry

By Leave a Comment

As much as I’ve tried to escape it, laundry remains an inescapable part of life. In this section, we’re going to look at ways to make laundry lower impact.

Eco-Friendly Detergents

The detergent you use in your laundry can have a huge impact on the environment. Choose detergents with biodegradable ingredients that won’t pollute local water sources or cause harm to wildlife. Avoid phthalates and chlorine bleach, which can be toxic to aquatic ecosystems. Look for products labeled “green” or maybe “natural,” and always check labels carefully before deciding what to buy, to avoid greenwashed claims. (Also remember that “natural” isn’t automatically better. Lava is natural. So are very large tigers. You wouldn’t want either of these in your laundry room.)

Consider avoiding synthetic fragrances. Not only are there are increasing number of people allergic to these things (I’m one of them!), there is some evidence to suggest that they may not be good for us.

Wash Clothes Less Frequently

We all want our clothes to be clean and fresh, but you might be washing your clothes too often. Unless you work in a manual labour job where you’re sweating a lot or exposed to a lot of odours that cling to you, chances are you don’t need to throw them in the wash after one trip out of the closet. This is also true of your bath towels. You’re theoretically clean when you come out of the shower, so you can simply make sure your towel can air dry easily and only throw it in the wash after several uses. You’ll save energy, water, and money on soap. Not to mention time doing laundry…

Use Free Drying Solutions

If you have the time and space, you can hang your clothes up on a line to air dry them, or use one of those indoor drying racks. If you’re like me and are super pressed for time, consider investing in a solar panel and battery setup to provide power for this energy intensive appliance. Speaking of which…

Energy Ratings For the Win

If you’re in the market for a washer or dryer (or both) make sure you’re selecting for high efficiency ratings. Avoid natural gas powered appliances, because methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and the fewer opportunities for methane leaks there are, the better.

Consider Cold Water Washing

Most machines now come with settings for both hot and cold water temperatures when washing clothes but cold water can do just as good of a job. Make sure your detergent works in cold water. If you’re not convinced by cold water, try warm instead of hot. Compromise!

Ditch the Fabric Softener

This is one of things a lot of us buy reflexively because it’s how our parents did it, but unless you’re drying your clothes on the line… you don’t need it! Clothes come out of the dryer softened already as the tumble action ensures they don’t get stiff. Liquid fabric softener is rarely biodegradable and often laden with fragrances; dryer sheets are the same plus the sheets have to go in the garbage when you’re done.

But the static! I hear you cry. Dryer balls eliminate most of this problem. Get one or two wool dryer balls and chuck them into every load. They’re reusable and they may also reduce drying time, saving you money.

Washing Machine Lint

We’re used to thinking about the dryer lint trap, but washing machines generate lint too… and all of those clothing fibres go into the water system. Even if they’re natural fibres (more on that in a second), that’s a lot of lint going back out through your sewer. Check to see if your washing machine has a lint catcher, and if it doesn’t, consider purchasing one to add to laundry loads to reduce what gets washed out of your machine.

Ironing

I don’t know how many people actually iron their clothes anymore, but if you’re one of them, you can cut down on the amount of ironing you need to do by setting a timer on your phone (or elsewhere) and taking clothes out of the dryer when they’re still slightly damp. Hang them up immediately and you’ll avoid one major source of wrinkles: clothes sitting around in dryers.

Synthetic Fabrics?

Finally, let’s consider the clothes themselves. Synthetic fabrics — think polyester, nylon etc. — have many positives, but they’re not particularly earth friendly. They’re hard to recycle, so often end up in the dump, where they take decades to break down, if at all. Washing plastic-infused clothes releases micro plastics into our waterways, where they accumulate in ocean wildlife. As you replace your clothes, make sure your old clothes are properly disposed of and consider using natural fibres.

But What About Cotton? Isn’t it Bad?

It’s true that cotton processing, especially when it comes to making jeans, is a particularly water-intensive affair. Dying cotton makes use of a lot of chemicals that aren’t always handled properly or treated before going back into our rivers, streams and lakes.

On the plus side of the equation, cotton clothes do last pretty much forever with care (think of how many ancient t-shirts there are in your closet right now), so the water costs are at least amortized over a number of years. And it is possible, with a little work, to source from clothiers that are making an effort to clean up their chemical processes and reduce water use.

You can also look into clothing made from hemp fibres and bamboo as alternatives. These can be more expensive to purchase up front, but we’ll talk about wearing them long term and discuss fashion choices in a minute. Just as with your detergents, watch out for green washing. Just because something is made from one of these fibre sources doesn’t mean it’s made in a sustainable way. Take a bit of time to look into the company and their practices. Which brings me to…

Clothes Should Be an Investment

For too long now, we’ve considered clothes to be ‘disposable.’ We’re encouraged by clothing retailers and fashion magazines to change our look almost weekly, and the pace of trends (short hem, long hem, skinny jeans, low riders?) seems to have increased.

Worse, some retailers engage in horrifically wasteful practices. This season’s summer tops? If they don’t sell, they often are deliberately destroyed by floor staff (who are following corporate policy) and head to the dumpster rather than a charity shop. It wouldn’t do to have ‘the look’ of the moment just given to the poors, you see.

So… I would encourage you to ditch fast fashion too. Consider clothing a long term investment. Buy pieces that you can mix and match in a large number of combinations, but resist the urge to follow the latest trend.

Five Interesting Things – January 2023

By Leave a Comment

Welcome to the January 2023 version of FIT. It’s a short round up of things I’ve found that are: potentially actionable, inspiring, thought-provoking. Hey – if you enjoy my blog posts, please share them with people in your network and suggest they subscribe.

3D printing … wood? – Using cells from the common zinnia, researchers have been able to “bio-print” wooden pieces of any shape and size. This means that, just like with 3d printing in plastic or metal, we may soon see whole tables printed out as one solid piece. Star Trek replicators, anyone?

Eggsellent news – Princeton researchers have transformed egg whites, of all things, into a water-filtration aerogel that can remove almost all of the micro plastics from a sample of seawater. As you may have heard, micro plastics are so ubiquitous in our environment, we’re eating a credit card’s worth on the regular. Blech. Finding a sustainable way to clean up this mess is a big deal.

Biiiiig truck – One of the ‘arguments’ I see against renewable energy online is that it’s supposedly a sham because you need fossil fuels to mine raw materials and manufacture the components for wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal etc. People putting this argument forward seem unaware that you need to use the existing system to create a new system, and that it’s called a ‘transition’ for a reason. This link is one more piece of the puzzle: Caterpillar has developed an electric version of its massive 793 mining truck. While it’s likely to be a while before these supplant the diesel version, it’s a step in the right direction.

Mi casa su… battery? – Cement is also everywhere in our lives, and the production of it is a major source of carbon dioxide emissions. However, future cement installations may be much more beneficial as they could store energy. That’s right, cement batteries.

Liver regeneration – A biotech company has worked out how to grow ‘mini-livers’ to supplement the work of a damaged or diseased liver. When they injected hepatocytes from a donated liver into a lymph node, the cells received distress signals from the ailing liver and began growing, and taking over the lymph node. Over time, the lymph node is replaced by a miniature liver. This tech is still a long way from clinical usefulness, so please don’t take it as license to drink like a fish, ‘kay?

What did you think? Let me know in the comments.

A small town solution

By Leave a Comment

It’s well known that big cities have lots of problems. They tend to be overcrowded, dirty, noisy, and just basically nasty to live in.

The problems seem intractable. People are generally stubborn about urban living; they absolutely insist on living somewhere there is employment, entertainment, opportunities and other people to chum with. Go figure. 

These are not just minor inconveniences, either. There are a number of studies on the effects of urban living on humans, and most of them are not good. Stress, pollution, loneliness all have serious consequences for our mental health. We need to work out how to mitigate these issues. That is, before the rest of the planet moves into suburbia.

Part of the problem is that cities — especially North American cities — are concrete monstrosities. We’ve built out instead of up, and in most cases, given over far too much space to parking lots instead of parks. We don’t spend much time outside because outside is unpleasant and it takes too long to walk or bike anywhere.

As we rebuild older structures, we need to contract inward, replacing strip malls with smaller footprint buildings, making 3-6 floor apartment buildings instead of either looming towers or dismal fourplexes. And we need much, much, more green space. Electrifying our transit systems and working toward better public transit should help address that. In my book Echoes of Another, I posit a fleet of public, shared electric cars for the ‘last mile’ of public transit, but we also need electric buses and either electric or hydrogen trains.

We’ve also built anonymous, unfriendly places. The fix here might lie in changing our perceptions. For example, instead of looking at cities a single, sprawling complex, maybe should start thinking of it in terms of a bunch of small towns stuck together.

I say this because of an incident that happened in my town over one summer many years ago. It was hot of course, the nights were long, and the local teenagers were bored. The local park was quite vacant between midnight and 6 a.m., and so it was a perfect target for vandalism. Between burnt picnic tables, graffiti, and broken bottles in the swimming pool, the costs were adding up. Officials had tried staking out the park and calling the police, but the kids knew exactly when to scatter. For a while, it looked like the only solution was to shut down the park for good.

Then someone had the novel idea of approaching the teens to talk to them. The connection between the stuff they buy, taxes, and municipal budgets was explained. They were encouraged to think of how much more boredom they’d suffer from without the recreation facilities. Indeed, they were asked to think.

It worked. The older kids didn’t like the idea of a shutdown, so they agreed to try to prevent vandalism. The eldest one even began asking questions about municipal government, and the election process. 

From gang leader to town father? It could happen.

Obviously, it’s not as simple as all that. The “rational discussions” were helped a great deal by the fact that every one knew who the trouble makers were, and more importantly, where their parents lived. Not every kid is approachable either, and there are still incidents of vandalism — but not nearly as many as before.

The point is though, while you may not know who the problem people are fifteen blocks away — you likely have a good idea who they are in your own neighbourhood. Or to put it another way, your small town.

You see, small towns work because everyone knows everyone else. While 75% of the population might not give a darn about the welfare of the community, the top 25% do, and the size of the town is just enough for them to handle.

Cities meanwhile, suffer from anonymity. It’s not unusual for people to spend years in one place and not know a single neighbour. Nobody cares.

Certainly, we don’t want to develop some sort of Big Brother society, but there has got to be a compromise. Maybe there’s a good reason why you don’t want to associate with some of your neighbours; but even if just a few of you on each street get together to form those committees, the urban renewal groups, and the Optimist Clubs — that’s better than watching your community dissolve around you. 

Small town people sometimes complain that everyone knows their business, and that the rumours travel faster than they can in the car. However, small town people almost always say that their communities are the best places to live. Now you know why.