Let’s stay focused in fighting this I think it’s time we start banging our pots again. It feels like we’re losing our grip and not quite getting the message. People are dying. Right now, our behaviours everything we touch and every move we make are key to prevention and curbing the pandemic. Why anyone would think of air travel or flying anywhere right now unless for work, emergency, business or government matters is perplexing. We have the means with new routines to be functional and stable while we work collectively to get past tomorrow. Yet, it seems there’s still an undercurrent of resistance to the measures we all need to follow, consistently.
It means pursuing one’s own rational self-interest, not at the expense of others, but with others in society based on mutual benefit. It means an individual is free to pursue life, liberty and happiness for his or her own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor asking others to sacrifice themselves to him or her. It means being able to do so without coercion. As Rand stated: “Every one … has the right to make his own decision, but none has the right to force his decision on the others.” Hancock implies this is heartless and greedy, and without concern for emotions.
The winter solstice marks the turning point of the year, when the nights stop getting shorter and the days start getting longer. It holds out the promise of the warmer, sweeter days of spring and summer, of fertile animals and crops, of the coming of the light and the birth of a new year, writes Trevor Hancock. [Adrian Lam, Times Colonist] I recently did a presentation for inVIVO, a fascinating international conference series about human and planetary well-being. The organizers asked me to talk about the importance of connections, based on a column I wrote this year. So I talked about how connected we all are through our DNA to each other and all forms of life, through the very atoms we breathe, eat and drink to all the other plants and animals, going back millions of years, who incorporated those same atoms in their own bodies, and how those atoms also connect us to the stars in which they were created we truly are star stuff.
Larisa Hutchinson, the Capital Regional District’s general manager of environmental services, laid out some of the very real challenges and limitations the Capital Regional District is up against in managing the region’s waste. While we’re debating waste reduction in our daily paper, our landfill continues to fill up. Despite a 2015 regional ban on food scraps going to landfill, we’re still not adequately sorting compostable food waste from garbage. More than 25,000 tonnes of food waste from around the region still ends up there each year. And in Victoria alone, pre-pandemic, city workers collected 25,000 single-use items like coffee cups and take out containers from public trash cans, every day. And, each year, city workers dump 5.4 million single-use items from our home garbage bins. I shudder to think about how this number has increased during COVID-19.
The international definition of zero waste is 90 per cent of waste diverted from landfills, primarily through the top three Rs of the waste hierarchy: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The Regional District of Nanaimo, under its approved Solid Waste Management Plan, is on target to reduce waste generation from more than 1,000 kilograms per person (before Blue Box programs) to 109 kilograms per person by 2027. By contrast, the CRD has set a target of 250 kilograms per person by 2030, but does not formally embrace a target of 125 kilograms per person thereafter, despite the CRD’s commitment to endorse zero waste and encourage a circular economy.