climate change important don't you think our friends at c jail why couldn't it cooperate in nelson have produced a four part series pulling in all sorts of good information on where we are at and where we are going brave from a sense of justice is taking a couple of well deserved weeks off so we thought this would be a good fit as a fill in for that time slot so listen from seven to eight pm wednesdays july twenty ninth august nineteenth for climate change smell the coffee only on c cho i want to one point of the show good morning welcome to changes the program on sustainability i'm susan gregory the coordinating producer of the show with you which is what brought you and your wife to devote your life to a sustainable lifestyle that's at that that could be a really long story but i'll try to give it in a nutshell  i guess what motivated us is that both in and we both went through some that we call the gas shift which is our what we used to gash it to give a shit shift and we both went through things in our lives which changed the way that we began to view the world around us and so fran that look like well and both ann and i were were were dumped dirty on and and ended up going and living in  one of the gulf islands in a little cabin that her husband had started and she ended up living there for the next five years and finished and finished it and in that process for her she turned off a lot of the mainstream and she was able just to  become comfortable in her own shoes or in her case her own gumboots and so that was that was her initial gosh if that allowed her to re evaluate what she was dealing with and for me i became a single dad and i was running a business in town in victoria and when i became a single dad my my work hours went from five am to six pm down to eight am to four pm and my business partner didn't like that after three months and i said watts ok i'll go and do my own thing and so i left i left the business sold my business and very instantly went from a good income that allowed me to do anything to an income where  didn't have money to buy christmas gifts or i didn't know if i could pay for rent or things like that and and i had to think to myself as to what really was important and how could i live a life that i could function and be happy without requiring that income and so for me my gosh it was almost an identity change or assessing what identity was so that is how i would say we both came to live different to the mainstream's we both began to question the of your life changes what resources that you find to help you acquire property and build your enterprises and that's a good question because that we we come across a lot of people but they do ask that question and for us i wasn't able to bring much high as i as i left the business and i had a divorce i i didn't i didn't end up with come out with very much  that she had her golf island property that that had increased in value so she was able to sell that and put towards it but what we also did is is ann's parents who were living in port moody at the time they decided that they wanted to come and participate with us and so we tried to pool funds and resources and we also had the benefit of meeting the landowner that we had this piece of land up for sale and we walked with her and we told her what our what are our goals were and she she appreciated that and she dropped the price one hundred thousand dollars that we had a special look of good luck and so that being  this well a lot of people that come to us very very big and unplugged and and start to question sort of the dominant culture so that's that's the first step and that's always the first thing is to unplugged from the program and and in terms of doing now a lot of people are also in the state of sort of reevaluating their self identity and but once you get past the sort of the philosophical and the ideal on the value side of it which is really important is we begin to tell people you know trying first of all think about building smaller you know if we were to do it again what would we do we would we would build smaller and then the thing that we really try and focus people on is try it you know we got land prices on vancouver island which works dream lehi very hard for young people to get into any sort of land ownership by themselves and that stay fling and specially when people want to grow food and so by being able to find like minded communities like minded people and working together that's that's important so building connections and then as you set out one of the things that really saves you time and money and and a lot of anxiety or anger is to go into any decision really professional and well informed and it's important to have passion but when you go and see a building inspector and you're trying to argue why you want to do something with passion and your ideals and they're sitting on the other side of the table and they're sort of confined by science and policy it sometimes it can lend to differences of opinion despite both sharing the same common goals of trying to do something that is safe and secure for everybody involved so trying to trying to  says sustainability can't be like some kind of moral sacrifice or political done or philanthropic locos it's a design challenge it is very much a what that is that is and that's and so it's a design system that looks at things and tries to use everything so that all the systems are resilient and redundant not necessarily efficient but there's people that are practicing permaculture and building food systems on a quarter of an acre of land for a small family of four that's pretty tiny and we happen to live in seven a half acres and we're probably know our food on on three of those acres but i think that if somebody is really wise and is integrating things they can do it on a on a small plot of land a half an acre and using a recycled house in essence is sort of the wisest move because you can move into that house you're already immediately reusing materials that it's recycled and you have the ability then to live in it adjust that house to your needs as funds and your own time allow and you you have that benefit whereas starting out and building a new house even if it's even if it's a that you couldn't sort of build down when you're older but i don't see much of it and i think what you have to talk about downsizing i'm very fortunate we live in a small place without a basement i'm kind of thinking about the size of this place that might be viable with a quarter of an acre and i'm thinking these must be people who earn their money another way  it it is well hey first of all going back to sort of a downsizing is something that we're seeing and in spades here where we live in our community in the district highlands near victoria we've got a lot of very good friends that are in their eighty's that have that have had hopes that they've raised their families them but it isn't a house that's necessarily conducive to aging in place them and so they have been in the process of looking for and buying a smaller house that is one level that's smaller that's got no upkeep to it and they have moved out some of them have looked at trying to have family or other people live in with them and i know just recently  after this interview i'm i'm heading out to go and get materials for my my father's own place to put in a wheelchair access ramp who's he's seventy eight so designing for aging in place is really important at the beginning and if you're doing a restoration of a used house it's important to consider not being able to be mobile and getting around and it's also really important to consider if you're growing food there's going to come a point in time where you maybe it's going to be harder to to bend over what sort of things can you do in your yard at least give you the enjoyment of contributing to your food systems to for artificial hips out of for artificial hips and so there comes a time when one of the things that we're seeing for example in souk is were seen a community that is being developed that is for its basically not in the called a retirement community and the call it the the aged and why it's community but what they're doing is they're building stuff that allows people to age in place and it also allows the younger families to come and be able to participate and they have gardens they have people that live on site or will be living on site to help with it all but it all again folks is around community and being able to incorporate and invite the younger ages in the other families younger aspects of the family into to participate amongst the the the community it's there so just a different model and again it's kind of like one of those things it's it's a design challenge where you interesting to hear that about our own have you seen a little mo community and they have very different from the kind of japanese community mainstream japanese community that most of us with vision and a diet course is brilliant to do so they're extraordinarily about go back go back two hundred years ago and what did our communities look like we had a whole integrated range of ages living in more smaller communities not these large cities there is less of this dependence on or those of us who have built a house have had to deal with building inspectors yes we built a house at a time when the building inspector had never seen a post and we had a very hard time getting approval yes so tell us about your experience applying the green standards when you were building and you built a large composting yeah so just to provide a little bit of aspect house in north america though there are other causes around we have composting toilets grey water systems solar p v solar thermal hot water systems and a whole host of other things so it's very different than  any other thing that you're probably going to see happening and so when it came to the when it came to the building code or the building official what we expected it to be a lot more challenging and we found took them years to trust of the original district and the force i think i think what it i mean that definitely definitely helps those there's no doubt about it but i think the biggest thing even doing a house as that is different but not necessarily green one of the things that we did at the very beginning was we sat down with the building official and we had we had tried to learn a little bit of the building officials languages like going travelling you may not be able to learn a foreign language but if you can least learn some of the words and and the plate words then that really helped because then you don't get him exactly and and you're showing that you're trying and and so as we started we needed to find out right away what sort of things that he required and we needed to share the concept that we understood that he had things that were part of what he had to make sure the house was it had to be safe it had to be safe for us  future homeowners and occupants and we let him know that we wanted the house to be safe and that we wanted it to be safer fewer future occupants but we also had a bigger lens we want to be safe for the ecology that surrounds the house and we didn't want to pull from other people's backyards and so we might we had a bit of a bigger lens without diminishing what his lens was so we ensured that we made sure that the risk common ground and that's important and then as we started to process there are certain times where we came to do things that he had a difference of opinion on and though i'm sure that we if we pushed and fought certain battles we could have won those one of the things we did is we took the opportunity to take ideas and suggestions from the building official and incorporate them into the house and what that did is that demonstrated well on our part but it also created by and for the building official and so now the building official has got some skin in the game and so it it it was about building that common ground building the connection knowing we're going in the same place having the same goals and being able to share ideas back and forth and ensuring that  it's the building official once they've got a little bit of their own ideas invested in it they also want to see it succeed and they become part of the design process absolutely they become in a great resource and you know not  cheaper or anything like that but if you have got to build an official that you can communicate with they become this tremendous resource of information that is is free really i think now just getting to that to building homes in england in the u k they have eight hundred nine hundred years old that are still standing are still being used what cobb is is is you mix up clay stan and straw and while it's still  able to be shaped into a ball what you do is you hand stack the materials on the wall your walls are about two feet thick and so the when the clay balls dry you have this monolithic structure and and that in essence is caught and what my lot of people are aware of in arizona new mexico is adobe which is basically clay bricks cob is basically the same thing except you your heat you dried in place and all that sort of explains we have we worked on five homes and our home some of them are some of the people i think we had one for person from the c b c once refer to our places as a very large hobbit house which high i don't think i've still quite look it looks very conventional so you can build in any variety of different styles i guess we could thin and i mean the way that we did ours ours is load bearing which means we have no posts and beams holding anything up what we did is we built our walls up out of cobb placed quite a santa straw and when we got to the height we wanted we then made a bond beam a plate that all the roof you members in the rafters could sit upon and then we just built a conventional roof system on top of that we happen to have a living roof and so once you get to the roof you're basically going right back to conventional building systems and so that makes roofing roofing options very very easy ok so then the other system to go in i'm thinking about those that close they would really lend themselves to pa or what they do we were lucky enough actually to receive a research grant and so we did a bunch of engineering on thermodynamics and the moisture modeling properties of the walls one of the things that we found is that on our south wall the side that gets the sudden heating it is we that wall acts like an r forty wall so as it acts very insulated but that's because it absorbs the solar radiation very quickly and is very slow to give that radiation that there are already a sion back out our north wall which is in the shade same thickness as a front wall acts like it's in our a wall and so it's a detriment so what we've done  we've we framed up and made an insulated cape on the back of the house and what we've learned a lot from doing the research and we have a report free online anybody wants to look at any of the science i'm going to jump i  very divergent i was going to jump to one of my pet peeves which is how to attach a root cellar how do you attach a root cellar well in our case our root cellars not attached to our house our root cellar is another little called building and it is attached directly to the bedrock with a variety thick living roof on top of it and two foot thick called walls and it's on the driveway between the class the answer came back well use those useless concrete parking  very conventional to a regular house i mean we have to follow the plumbing codes b one of the things that we try and do is we try and build water conservation into the homes so we use ninety percent less water than the average d c residents we do that by conservation first and the plumbing fixtures that we have in the house are all low flow low flow fittings that we picked up at either recycled actually most of our stuff is recycled but we also have a composting toilet and a composting toilet is a huge savings in water and our particular composting toilet doesn't have any water flowing into it and it doesn't have any water flowing out of it so it doesn't fall into the plumbing co and i must say that i even i find a flush toilet now gross and if it smells you're doing it wrong you are the e u when people first started to come by for tours and look at the composting toilet they we had a lot of  folks but now we have as with a lot of people to have a lot of interest in a as a matter of fact one of the things that's just finished up is just finished working with a group of four other individuals for the b c ministry of health to write the new guidelines for composting toilets you can and there's you know there's many different composting toilet systems and some will have a higher nitrogen content others will really require that nitrogen to break down some of the carbon that's used in the composting process so depends on the composting and it you know we we really do pride ourselves on having a system which impresses a lot of people when we do tours of the house will take seven or eight people into the bathroom i'll open up the toilet system and look at it and they can see that there's one full bucket and one empty bucket and nobody can smell a thing and that's important and we go to the composting pile and proper composting it shouldn't smell either and material should be broken down in a in a safe manner that  and all that sort of stuff is built into these new regulations well what do you do if you have babies into cars babies and diapers well it depends on obviously the type of diapers that you're going going to use if you're having disposable diapers then you're in that disposable diaper waste stream and if you're having caught they first then it's like anything else with the composting toilet in the house you can remove most of the materials into your composting toilet and in our composting toilet our process the human or system we compost everything we compost human feces human excreta so anything you'd otherwise call human waste is actually a resource we use a different term we don't call the waste but we also compost all our veggie scraps bones meat scraps shells everything you're not supposed to compost compost beautifully in a human nursed him because it's terrific and it gets up to temperature so when we have a chicken that dies that we allow to get old we put in the compost pile and in four days later that chicken is gone the feathers and bones are there but everything else is gone i didn't rot it it was able to be composted and turned into bacteria and life forms in the compost pile and it would be because we have to contend with their children but they're afraid to so the one thing with composting toilets and composting systems is that some composting procedures actually allow the biological activity in the soil to break down the talks and whether it's fat soluble pharmaceuticals or water salt water soluble pharmaceuticals whether a certain dioxins p c b s even here because so sam has some announcements to make so stay with us ok great thank you and we'll just remind our listeners that you're listening to c h o y one o one point seven f m your campus and community stations based in back yet but there is a menu across the top of the screen you can click on to listen which will bring up a menu at under that you can find a podcast link so that's the way to get to our podcast now and we will attempt to have the pod cast of today's show up as soon as possible because i think this is this is really fascinating i didn't know that some of those things would break down in soil for example lot of stuff in it yes yes yes yes but a lot of those things too or you know when they break down to their basic elements i guess then they become a lot less toxic so that's really interesting so thank you gord just the record of that if you advance this friday july thirty first there will be a critical mass bike ride celebrating cyclists  critical mass ride started in sweden in the one nine hundred seventy to raise awareness about cycling and are now held on the last friday of each month in over three hundred cities around the world so  doing this so once again friday seven pm showers landing port alberni now something important that's coming up next week the federal election hasn't actually been officially called yet i don't believe but it is theoretically going to happen on october nineteenth maclean's national leaders debate will be on august this is the one with elizabeth mae the leader of the green party as well as thomas mulcair justin trudeau and stephen harper so this is this is the important one i think so once again thursday august seventieth anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on hiroshima japan and the city of has proclaimed the day as hiroshima day people around the world gather on august sixth in their communities to remember the victims of this nuclear attack and to express the hope that nuclear weapons will never be used again in the lanterns for peace ceremony will be starting at nine pm so you can still watch the leaders it will be introduced by this was the lantern for peace or money will be introduced by the hour when the pussycat who will begin to sing at eight forty five the ceremony includes the everybody sings choir margaret sutton playing the japanese shakuhachi flute singer joan wallace and the nor belle ukulele group as well as a traditional japanese dance called the at dusk handmade lanterns will be launched into the lagoon usually they're strong together and towed around the lagoon by a kayaker which is a really lovely sight and it's a chance for because it is so beautiful to see those different colored lights on the water yes yes absolutely and you know good music at the same time and there will be a little bit of speechmaking but the main thing really is to see those lanterns on the water and just to think about the whole thing so that's our state the program that you're listening to point seven f m it changes and today margery is talking with gord baird who's i guess we could say your whole gourd is called ecosystems you know you've done some amazing things with building water conservation and so on so that to you there's lots more to talk about i think i'm going to come back to some of that stuff i'm going to come back to trista to permaculture and stuff like that but right now i want project we wanted to live what we call a three third's lifestyle where we could spend one third of our time working for an income and one third of our time volunteering and one third of our time following our own passions which is growing food and in good permaculture style we want to try and mimic what the ecosystem does and that is is is to be resilient and redundant so the services that we offer every time that we learn something we basically become a wealth of sort of information and that's important teach that so we have been doing consulting for regional system designs whether that's energy or water or food growing systems processing food we have been doing in the earlier years we were doing a lot of building for other people most importantly building and working with homeowners to help them and teach them skills to build their own homes so that they could do the most important thing for us was to be able to teach those skills to other people way the plant nursery came about was whereas we started to generate her own food force here which is basically had an integrated force that produces food all the plants that we started to research out and use we had people phoning us to contact with them i know you might have some interesting cross fertilization opportunities there is the ny mall has a huge amount of great resources one of the one of the people  or plants or projects or anything like that there's just a whole bunch of cross pollination of ideas that's wonderful to see we also do a lot of we've done work for the as i say the ministry of health for consulting but probably of the most interesting things is most recently we've we've become elected officials both then and i are elected municipal councillors in our district so the pain all the pain and you know the other thing that we you know that we do that we earn an income is we get paid seventy five dollars a week to clean the local public bathroom and the reason why that sorell important is that it's a little called building that we volunteered you know four hundred hours to build and it's got composting toilets in it so it's the first legal one in the c r d of the local park so you know it everything from building to consulting to research to food systems to teaching to cleaning toilets and being counsellors i don't know which one's got more stigma attached to it food we grow eighty percent of our food on our our piece of land here and one of the things that we do is we make and makes the the goat milk cheese and we had a neighbor the broker lake she's sixty two she fell off a ladder she phoned down from says come down to emergency and went down and took a notepad and started to write how to milk go and with that had meant that we needed a we needed a cheese press and so just using the scraps of wood we ended up designing and building a cheese press and then those cheese presses are beautiful and functional so they have become things that people enjoy to have for their own purposes so we do things like that or we've even made we do a  human behavior and sustainable behavior so that it becomes corporations out of control governments that don't do enough and don't do it fast enough it would get problems there systemic and you can't take  live near a to them because here's the here's the key the worst thing that you can apply to it we could problem isn't with that solution and with that solution is something like bear with me here oh we'll fix the to to grow so if for people who want to have milk that's made out of something that comes from far away these these are wicked plums and you have to have systemic reactions to them so clear what you are trying to do is make a systemic lifestyle so that you have a not we could solution to something that we all try to solve piecemeal with absolutely which doesn't really work too much for instance it blows my mind that people don't go to the bank before they go to the farmers market and they don't  gets and you can't solve a complicated problem by making things more complicated and so i think that's we're lucky where we live here on the southern bank rylan because we have a huge group and again it goes back it's it's  i multi generation we see a whole bunch of people out there that are the individual eyes out there that are modeling behavior that we can look at and what we're certain to see is that  the culture in our area is really starting to shift a systemic some of the systemic issues are starting to shift in a very small way and you know in with regards to looking  the composting toilet regulations that came through and i'm not fond of regulations but one of the things which is an eye opener is a b c ministry of health that approached to have composting toilet regulations because they saw it as important and they wanted also to make sure that the regulations didn't tie somebody to something that was c s a approved or had some sort of stamp something that could be billed by person something that could be state specific they wanted it flexible enough to be used so in other words they come to the purpose instead of trying to look for the objections exactly and becoming you know civil counsellors we see both sides of that and i think that we're probably luckier here than in most places but we believe that's a good reputation highlands has had has a good reputation and but we struggle with the same things that a lot of other people we have a huge gentrification happening because of land prices and then you get a suburbanite mode of thinking we do we had one area here that we put size limitations on the house size of homes that could be built in an area and the first home that went in they wanted to build seven thousand square feet and the reason why is that they had forty four kids that therefore they had a much larger family than normal and required seven thousand square feet and that to me was didn't didn't go over well you know talk to me about her family of five so was i yes it is it is a great just when you when you have to deal with mindsets that people aren't prepared to take them on and create them in terms of of new realities here you're doing water conservation so i'm sure you're aware of the most recent  statistics that have come out from the failure of major apps with their yes and the highlands in particular were we all rely on ground water and our ground water recharge is something that we take very seriously we have a drought in b c and that drought was predicted twenty years ago and we have friends and in environment canada know that this is the pattern that we're going to see for water usage we have got i mean we do rain water and also we've been fielding a lot of phone calls and consults for rainwater installations water conservation issues water conservation is huge but it's also one of those things which will change this which is which is forcing the systemic change because of the drought because of the water shortages we have an issue of health out there thinking we need to look at other options we also have people out there thinking how can i use water less how can i retain more water in my soil so the thinking about how they change doing agriculture whether it's to or own personal residential or we're seeing farms out there starting to change direction cultural practices so the pressures that are applied to prod us whether we like it or not are bringing about some of those changes that we need and it's also important to remember that we have a long way to go absolutely the reality is when you think of the countries around the world that make do is quite severely limited and is correct and some of it seems to me don't quite have it figured out that you can't continue doing development  and the area then i'm on the regional district and imo i really look up to them and think that they have been trying to make more progress progress than in other powys on the island or in canada in particular with their manual they brought out a few years ago and to try and embrace having people come in and and install rainwater systems other places in the country it is you know it's going legal or there's there's there's there's not that desire but i think there are places around where they're trying to make it illegal for people to harvest rainwater on the basis that it doesn't belong to sure permaculture is basically trying to integrate a bunch of different systems together so that you're not wasting anything and everything works quite well and supports everything else so when you take a look at food forestry or agroforestry what you're doing is you're basically taking a bunch of different plants systems and integrating them for our own benefit and for the you know the benefit of insects so that you can grow your own food so you m have several different layers of plants that make up a whole little forest and each of those plants is in essence to mimic in the natural forest but it's producing food for you and you will soon need trees so people have to stop taking  resilient lifestyle that they're modeling for us that's a good question i mean my most immediate goals are probably three things that i'm focusing on like any other family i'm dealing with family stuff i'm working on family dynamics so that's important because you have to have your local family unit working to continue doing whatever you're doing so thirty nonviolent communication skills and developing a holistic management strategy is key for the family i am focusing on my immediate goals is focusing on making sure our young fruit trees are past are vulnerable stage and the and the probably the third goal is really focusing on creating more resilience within our immediate community be in the friends and neighbors that we have so that we've got more you know there's more food more us for him say don't waste your life pursuing a train you could be almost dead by the time you valuable important short term go and get something done heart so that instead of being accused of always being too late and too slow or being accused of having to have an immediate answer to a future they could be thinking about achieving short term  to congress short that before he signed the emancipation law into force which brought in the scope of the civil war the civil war had already begun and this what he said said the don't most of the quiet people the challenge that i have taken up what it means for you well i guess for us what it means is the challenge is always scary naivety has always been our best friend because if we knew some of the challenges we were going to get and ourselves into we would have been maybe too nervous to jump him and so i guess any words of wisdom is it's important to be able to jump into something but not necessarily know when all the answers and and have a spirit to do that and to be considerate of to be considerate of the fact that you don't know everything that you need to know and therefore it's important to learn as much as you can to follow through with what you start for time so we have one minute who's going to grab that one minute well i can grab it by saying that i think that what you are doing with your radio show is is  part of the solution and it's teaching people and showing people that there are alternatives out there and it provides them with information and that's critical been able to give information to people is critical and i thank you guys for doing that ok kurt so we will thank you marjorie stewart very much for bringing guard to us today and that is our show changes heard every tuesday morning at eleven here on why check us out on facebook and on behalf of our production team thanks so much for joining