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July/August 2008 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: The big thirst Feature: Edge of the Empire Feature: Following Farley The Inside Story Editor's Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

Your article on solar power (“Sunpower,” April 2008) made me think about installing panels on my roof. Another great green story would be on electric cars or plug-in hybrids that could be charged by panels on the roof.

John Thuss
Strathroy, Ont.

It is great to see the exposure you gave to a story on renewable energy. People need to know that these options exist.

Nevertheless, I was disappointed in the article on two scores. First, there was no mention of the pilot project called PowerHouse Loan Program that the Ontario government is operating in parts of Greater Toronto’s Peel and York regions. Under this program, residents who install more than $2,000 worth of renewable-energy technologies (including solar) are eligible for a zero-interest loan. If this pilot program were expanded to the whole province, then it would really be considered “a daring new plan that pays you to harvest the sun.” As the sidebar to the story acknowledges, the current standard offer program (42 cents per kWh) really doesn’t pay the consumer enough to cover the costs of installing a solar-photovoltaic system. Without the zero-interest loans, I feel your headline is misleading. Second, the story notes that the total installed capacity of solar power in Germany is almost 2,500 MW and that this output is equivalent to one reactor at the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station. Admittedly, there is always some confusion when talking about the variable power output from solar and wind installations. The conventional method is to talk about the peak or maximum power (during full sun or wind). That appears to be what was being done in your article, since the measure is in megawatts (MW), which is a unit of power. If this is the case, then each reactor at Darlington is rated at a maximum power output of 881 MW, making the German solar capacity (on a bright sunny day) equivalent to nearly three reactors of this size, not one as the article states.

A better comparison could be made with the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, where each reactor has a capacity of 500 MW. Thus the total solar-power output in Germany is equivalent to five of these reactors. Indeed, since only six of the original eight reactors are still operating at Pickering, one could say that Germany’s solar power capacity is nearly equivalent to the whole Pickering station — and with no expenses for annual maintenance, security, refurbishment, and eventual decommissioning. And no worries about storage and disposal of spent nuclear fuel.

Peter J. Nelson
Ottawa

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Your story ignored altogether some of the most efficient and effective ways of using solar energy. If a building has south-facing windows, that alone may reduce the winter heating fuel requirements by 20 or 30 percent. And if there is appropriate roof overhang or other shading over those windows to keep out the high-angle summer sun but lets in the low-angle winter sun, then passive solar heating can be taken advantage of in winter, while excessive heating through those windows in summer is avoided. And it need not cost anything extra to build for passive solar heating.

Maybe that’s the problem. All the solar energy referenced in the article, including solar-thermal water heating, involved somebody making money. Passive-solar space heating can be incorporated in new housing without anybody making an extra buck from it. The consequences of not tackling global warming are very serious, but if measures to combat it don’t make a buck for somebody, the authorities (mostly) won’t do anything about it, commercial interests aren’t likely to do anything either, and maybe nobody will write about it.

The City of Lethbridge’s municipal development plan seems to be the rare exception, an official document that promotes passive solar heating. It recommends running streets east and west “to maximize solar access through either back or front windows.” It even suggest developers could use solar access and energy efficiency as selling points for their subdivisions.

Dan Williams
Coldwater, Ont.

Germany is no shining example of green power, solar or otherwise. More than 60 percent of Germany’s electricity comes from polluting fossil-fuel power plants, mostly coal-fired. Around 30 percent comes from nuclear power, with most of the balance from wind. However, the German government plans to shut down the nuclear plants by 2022, which means even more pollution as coal replaces nuclear. Berlin has already asked the European Union (EU) to allow for the phase-out of nuclear energy when the EU is allocating carbon dioxide permits to member states as part of its plan to reduce the region’s emissions. Obviously, the German government does not have much faith in its renewables.

Donald Jones
Mississauga, Ont.

Solar cells are made of crystal silicon, which is obtained from amorphous silicon — basically white sand. This process requires a tremendous amount of energy: the manufacture of computer memory chips, for example, requires the energy equivalent of burning seven litres of gasoline. Given the size of a memory chip — one square millimetre — compared with that of a solar cell, imagine how much more energy is required to manufacture one photovoltaic panel. People who bought into solar electrical power might do a better job by not buying solar panels and saving all the energy that goes into their production.

The second problem always conveniently missed in the media is that the manufacturing process is highly toxic, and much of the by-products will remain toxic forever. The manufacturing of solar cells is commercially viable only because energy and waste collection are subsidized by governments around the world.

I’m afraid there is no easy solution, no escape, and solar electric power is definitely not a solution.

Vlad Krivoroutchko
Concord, Ont.

Like many environmentally friendly articles, John Lorinc’s story failed to put this renewable technology into perspective. Switching to solar is just another feel-good quick fix, not a solution by any means. First is the problem of disposal. You must have a plan from start to finish for a resource. The batteries of solar panels contain heavy metals that have to be disposed of later. How often do you need to replace the batteries to maintain maximum efficiency? Where do we put all that battery acid? Compared with mining waste, battery acid has significantly higher concentrations of heavy metals.

Second, the article says that a new 10-megawatt solar farm will require “hundreds of thousands of photovoltaic panels.” From the photos, I estimate that each panel takes up about a half a square metre. The Bruce Power nuclear reactors produce 6,200 megawatts and occupy less than three square kilometers, so I estimate that for a solar farm to produce as much energy, it would need 34 square kilometres. Then add all the infrastructure into this. Although it doesn’t seem considerable, that’s how much habitat you are removing from the environment. As an environmentally friendly citizen, would I rather destroy 3 or 34 square kilometres of what little we have left?

Finally, housetop panels seem like a good idea, but you still have the disposal problem. It seems odd to me that all of these renewable-power options don’t receive the full top-to-bottom investigation. They should be compared with the mining industry.

Ben Moulton
Halifax

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My wife and I made a major buying decision last August when we put a deposit on a condominium to be built in Burlington, Ont. The exterior walls will have 13 centimetres of high-tech polystyrene foam combined with 20 centimetres of concrete. The sliding glass doors and windows are Low E-Argon. The roof will have 25 centimetres of rigid Styrofoam insulation with an R-50 value. The lighting in the garage and hallways will be motion-activated. On the roof, we will have four 20-metre-long solar arrays and wind turbines. Combined, we will produce 30 kilowatts of power. Another major feature is the geothermal heating and cooling system. I estimate our operating expenses, including taxes and condominium fees, will be about half of what we are paying in our current home. Your article on solar power just reconfirmed our buying decision.

C. Peter Campbell
Oakville, Ont.

I have thought about wind power for years, but land was always an issue. Solar panels seem a better way for me to help out in a small but effective manner.

I live in Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia, and when I contacted Nova Scotia Power, I was informed that I could do it but that there was no incentive program similiar to the one in Ontario. Not deterred, I am still interested, but now the hard work begins. I need to find out whom to contact and what permits to apply for.

Chris Green

I installed photovoltaic panels on my house in 2006, so I wanted to see how John Lorinc’s perception of Ontario programs compared with my own. Your cover and the captions in the article give the impression that Ontario wants individuals to produce electricity. The press overall has been very complimentary to the Ontario government for encouraging homeowners with inducements similar to those found in Germany and California. However, the article itself accurately reflected my experience: the standard offer program does not make it easy for individual homeowners to install photovoltaics and earn 42 cents per kilowatt hour.

When I pursued this, my local electrical distribution company, the Ontario Power Authority and the Ontario Ministry of Energy all said the same thing: the standard offer program was not created to encourage rooftop photovoltaics by individual homeowners. It will encompass “early adopters,” but its main purpose is to reward bigger commercial installations.

I think rooftop photovoltaics are part of the climate-change solution. Right now, even in Ontario, it is difficult to justify their installation purely on a payback basis. If Canadian governments and utilities are serious about getting distributed electrical generation at the household level, they will have to make their processes easier and their support stronger.

Don Fugler
Ottawa

“Sunpower” is a most brilliant piece of work. It gets information out to us all in Canada — and even British Columbia — about the fascinating developments and potential of renewable-energy technologies in Ontario. Your mention of B.C. Energy Minister Richard Neufeld’s reluctance to move forward more progressively with the standing offer feed-in program, as practised in Ontario, is really bad news, and we have to work on this.

Not in your article was what else is going on in British Columbia. What you missed is the fact that we have a very active BC Sustainable Energy Association, working with affiliate SolarBC that has a program called 100,000 Solar Roofs.

Gunther Honold
Victoria

Thank you for the article about the Tsawwassen Treaty (“No reservations,” April 2008). Tsawwassen First Nation is a member of Naut’sa mawt Tribal Council, of which I am the CEO, so I know the more complicated story behind your story. You presented the situation fairly, intelligently and in a style that was easy to read and understand.

Keith Wilson
Nanaimo, B.C.

When I read the first line of your recent article on hippie homesteaders, I literally had chills run up my spine. The April edition was waiting for me when my older brother and I returned from a nostalgia-filled trip to New York and New Jersey, where our parents were born and raised before they immigrated to Canada in the late 1960s. 

While there, we discovered some photos and postcards in our grandmother’s home that we had never seen before, which documented the earliest days of our parents’ arrival in Cape Breton, N.S., in the spring of 1972. The depth of emotion triggered by these images as we sat around our ailing grandmother’s dining room table surprised us both. 

We enthusiastically agreed that now was the time to chronicle our family’s story, before memories faded and more lives passed away, and that we would be the ones best suited to spearhead the task. You see, in 1972, our parents also, to quote the first line from your article, “bought a 100-acre abandoned farm for $2,000.” And the photo from the story looks remarkably similar to our own homestead in the Boisdale Hills of Cape Breton Island.

Judah (and Adam) Bunin
Douglas, N.B.

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My wife and young family lived for two years in a communal home in Old Chelsea, Que., and spent a year in an Ottawa apartment before migrating to southwestern Nova Scotia in 1973. I remember packing dozens of shipping boxes with all our worldly possessions and sending them by CN Rail from Ottawa to Tusket, the train station nearest to where we would be living in an old farmhouse in Central Argyle.

In our mid-twenties, we departed Ottawa in a yellow VW bug with two toddlers with a yellow canoe right side up on the roof filled to the gunwales with the rest of our belongings, including a child’s rocking chair. 

When we arrived, a wonderful farmer next door lent me his pickup truck to retrieve the boxes from the train station in return for a day’s labour haying a rocky field. He said we’d last a year. Chickens, goats, woodcutting and walking a kilometre with supplies lasted a year, but we’ve stayed 35 years, although on the grid.

Over those years, Vietnam-era refugees have come and gone, but those who stayed became schoolteachers and dance instructors, boatbuilders, businessmen, farmers, fishing-industry spokespersons, blacksmiths, welders and ironworkers, writers, artists, coaches of national athletes and participants in grassroots municipal and provincial affairs. Many of our children have departed for university and the city, but the country is still in their blood.

Andy Smith
Central Argyle, N.S.

Our own homestead

Reading about the back-to-the-landers (“Hippie homesteaders of the Fundy Hills,” April 2008) brought back a ton of memories. In 1973, my then husband and I bought an old farm for $11,500 which included 75 acres of land, a derelict Loyalist house (built around 1847), a barn and a shed, in Carsonville, N.B., a settlement not far from Sussex. I was born and raised in Montréal but had been living in Vermont, where we met. We decided to move back to Canada after spending the previous summer hitchhiking from coast to coast. During a visit to Saint John, where my husband was interviewed for a position at the shipyards, we contacted a realtor to see what was available in the area. The farm, which had been abandoned for many years, had basic electricity but no plumbing of any kind, and part of the foundation had collapsed, so the house was leaning badly toward the middle. But we were enthralled. It was just what we were looking for. All the windows in the house were broken, and the floorboards and the banister leading to the upstairs were gone. Grain had been stored in part of the house, and rats had chewed the windowsills. We could see how the house had been built in stages. The oldest part had laths split by hand and huge beams put together with pegs.

We moved to the farm in October and spent the first night in our tent in the field beside the house, with all our belongings stored in the barn. The following day, we set up our bed in the barn and slept there for the next week, while awaiting delivery of furniture and a wood cookstove. To say our neighbours were extraordinary would be a huge understatement. We were given use of a hunting camp, which had a wood stove, few kilometres up the road from the farm. My husband quickly found a job in Sussex, and after he left for work, I would go to the farm with the two pups we had adopted and work on pulling the old plaster off the walls in the two rooms where we intended to live initially.

Once we had replaced the glass in the window frames in that part of the house, the owners of the hunting camp provided us with a small wood stove so that we could move in. My husband borrowed house jacks from neighbours and jacked up the house and rebuilt the foundation. We found out that the house had been built by a man known in the community as Squire John McLeod and that it had, at one time, been the settlement post office.

The first winter, I stayed home and kept the fire going and went into Sussex once a week to do our laundry and buy food. Our source of water was a pump in the yard. We had one of those metal boilers (used to provide drinking water for animals), which we kept in one of the two rooms we occupied. It rested on bricks to keep it off the floor. It didn’t have a cover so we ended up sharing the water with the two dogs! Our toilet was the original outhouse in the oldest part of the house. Baths were taken standing in front of the woodstove. We purchased firewood from a neighbour and split it ourselves with a splitter borrowed from yet another neighbour. When we were removing all the old plaster from the house, our neighbours from the farm down the road brought us plates of food. Neighbours from another farm lent us a wagon to haul the plaster to a spot below the house. Our “refrigerator” was an old doll’s trunk, which was kept outside the door of the two rooms we occupied. We bought loud orange shag carpeting to lay in the room we were using as our bedroom and orange-flowered wallpaper, which was next to impossible to put up. since nothing in the house was plumb.

The following spring, we purchased a Jersey cow, pullets, chickens for meat, a beef calf and a real refrigerator (second-hand) and began planning our vegetable garden. We also bought a used tractor. My husband had been raised on a farm, but I was a city person with an intense love of animals and the outdoors. Our vegetable garden was a huge success. We had a big crop of tomatoes, melons, corn, peppers, yellow and green beans, sunflowers and cultivated strawberries.

The land around our house had mostly been cleared, and alders had begun to grow all along the banks of the small streams crossing the land. The fields were filled with wild strawberries and roses, which gave us rosehips in the fall. There was an ancient apple orchard behind the house, but the apples were no longer good to eat, so we cut some of the dead branches but left the trees intact, as the spring brought clouds of white and pink blossoms. There were also old lilac bushes. Our neighbours brought their young cattle to spend the summer in our fields, which helped keep down an impressive thistle crop.

I joined a quilting group and learned enough to make an appliquéd baby quilt for my nephew (from a design I found in the Sussex library) on an old quilting frame we bought at an auction. I set it up in the oldest part of the house and did all the stitching standing up, since the frame was too high.

One of the best things about being there was the feeling of self-sufficiency. The lack of plumbing really didn’t bother us a great deal. We had a crop of vegetables from our garden, which I canned using the hot-water-bath method. I had to fire up the wood stove in late summer to do this and keep the door closed due to the flies, which meant it was stifling in our two rooms. I gained a huge appreciation of what women had experienced before the coming of electricity. There were acres of wild blueberries on the land of a neighbour, who allowed us to pick them, for jam and freezing. My husband was now working in Saint John and traveled to work with the neighbour across the road, while I took care of the animals, the food and the house.

We stayed on the farm full-time for about three years, but then my husband was hired as a town engineer in a bedroom community close to Saint John, which obliged us to move there, although we went to the farm on weekends. The rest is history.

Our experience in Carsonville is, without a doubt, one of the most important and precious in my life. I want to hold on to memories of the farm the way it was in 1973, the strength and self-reliance we found in ourselves and the amazing generosity and kindness of our neighbours. At the time, we didn’t particularly feel we were part of a movement or a trend, but I guess we were.

Thank you again for your lovely article.

Alwynne K. Wise
Harrington, Que.

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Being from Quebec’s Lower North Shore has been a wonderful experience (“It’s the freedom, b’y,” Jan/Feb 2008). Unfortunately, I no longer live there. I left home at an early age to pursue my education and have returned only a few times to visit my parents, who will never leave the coast. I do have mixed feelings about the road. Yes, it would be nice to have one. The cost of a plane ticket is outrageous. But I think it will be detrimental to the way of life and the environment. Over the years, I have attempted to explain where I come from, and it has been an eye-opener. A majority of Canadians have no idea where the Labrador-Quebec border is and I am tired of saying, “No, it is not near James Bay or Gaspé.” Happily, I can now share your article with my colleagues and friends.

Cheryl Lessard
Whitby, Ont.

I found the map of worldwide NO₂ emissions (“À la carte,” April 2008) a fascinating illustration of a complex matter, but I was surprised that the text made no mention of these emissions being linked to greenhouse gases and global warming. Also, although the article’s specific focus is NO₂, your readers might wish to know that this gas is one of a group of gases referred to as nitrous oxides, or NOx.

Among the primary sources of N2O is another nitrous oxide, adipic acid, one of the most widely manufactured and used chemicals in the world, particularly in the production of nylon 6.6, foams, paints and tires and also as a food ingredient in gelatin, desserts and many other products.

This radioactive and chemically active gas is contributing to the recent increase in the Earth’s surface temperature because N2O absorbs reflected infrared radiation. At 150 years, the estimated atmospheric lifetime of N2O is long, and it contributes to ozone depletion.

Airplane emissions are another significant source of not just CO2 but also NO₂. Nitrous oxides along with water vapour represent about 66 percent of the industry’s impact on global warming. These will continue to increase with more airplane travel and will not be offset by an improvement in aircraft or engine technology but only by a reduction in flying (at least human!).

P. E. Cameron
Halifax

Regarding your map of nitrogen dioxide hot spots, I found the text to be biased against Alberta. There did not appear to be any glowing areas on the map in Alberta comparable to those in say Vancouver or Toronto, yet Fort McMurray and Edmonton merit mention as significant offenders. Although our emissions here need to be reduced, readers should realize that the consumption of fossil fuels has more impact on the environment than their production.

Bruce Lord
Kitscoty, Alta.

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The “Discovery” story on horseshoe crabs (“Crabby ancestors,” April 2008) says they are part of the phylum Arthropoda. However, in order to understand their relatedness to ticks and spiders, it must be stated that they are part of the subphylum Chelicerata. Ticks and spiders, along with horseshoe crabs and sea spiders, are all included in the subphylum Chelicerata. Without this statement and a brief explanation, it is difficult for the reader to understand how horseshoe crabs are more related to spiders than to other crabs, which are also part of the very large Arthropod phylum.

Kevin McEwan
Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre
Bamfield, B.C.

Once again, the United States, in general, and North Dakota, in particular have done it to Canada’s prairies. First they want to drain the polluted Devils Lake into the Red River system and pollute our rivers and lakes. Now they are selling their CO 2 to EnCana for injection in the Weyburn, Sask., field. Has the author of “Carbon cemetery” (Jan/Feb 2008) read William Marsden’s book Stupid to the Last Drop? Marsden reports that the farm life and health of one family have been seriously affected from leakage into their well and home property, forcing them off the land to seek accommodation in Weyburn. EnCana calls the project the world’s largest natural laboratory. Recent water tests show a presence of chemicals that would normally be kept in the lab, not freely spread to the atmosphere.

Ken Woodman
Calgary

As someone who feels that Canada’s native people have suffered terribly and so often continue to do so, I was nonetheless distressed to read that West Coast First Nations want to be able to harvest the rebounding population of sea otters for “cultural and ceremonial uses” (“Welcome back, otter,” Jan/Feb 2008). I thought that aboriginal people respected life and the land and killed for food only when necessary. To take lives for ceremonial purposes seems to me to be very, very wrong and out of tune with the Earth.

Furthermore, the paragraph on the Pacific Urchin Harvesters Association seems full of contradiction. Otters are being blamed for a decline in shellfish, yet they eat sea urchins, which themselves eat mussels. Perhaps the harvesters are overharvesting both urchins, and shellfish, as they are in it for commercial reasons, just like the East Coast fishermen who ludicrously blame seals for declining fish stocks. Nobody mentioned above seems to be living in balance with nature.

Ruben Kaufman
Calgary

Inspired by your story about the Royal Canadian Legion (“Meet me at the Legion,” Nov/Dec 2007), I thought I’d tell you about what is happening at the Legion in Grimsby, Ont., where I live. It is twinned with a post of The American Legion in Allegheny, N.Y., and at the nearby cenotaph, the Stars and Stripes flies very permanently and very proudly, albeit lower than the Maple Leaf.

The former Commander of the Legion found no difficulty with this practice. The MP for Niagara West-Glanbrook defends a property owner’s right to fly whichever flag he or she chooses. Admittedly, the Grimsby cenotaph sits on land owned by the Legion, right next to the town museum.

But however private the land it occupies, isn’t a cenotaph essentially a public space of national significance to honour Canadian servicemen and servicewomen? So it seems to me and, I suspect, most Canadians.

To fly the American flag on a permanent basis at such a memorial seems rather an inappropriate way to honour those who have served in the Canadian Forces, some of whom have, in recent years, paid dearly for errors made by the U.S. military. And some of whom, in the early 19th century, struggled against invading U.S. forces in order that Canada might ultimately have its own flag.

In Grimsby, a mere three kilometres or so from the cenotaph, Canadian militia won an important victory on July 8, 1813, at the mouth of Forty Mile Creek. Some veterans of the War of 1812, perhaps even some who fought at the Forty, now lie in St. Andrew’s Churchyard less than a kilometer from the cenotaph. Do they wonder if their service and sacrifice are valued or if they have passed their expiry date?

Peter Bennett
Grimsby, Ont.

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* Letters may be edited for length, accuracy and liability.