To the Expositor:
Kudos for your excellent editorial, ‘How prepared is your household for an emergency,’ January 30, Page 4. Regardless of one’s opinion on the cause of the extreme weather currently challenging the planet, it’s a practical consideration to prepare one’s household for even a short-term breakdown in our fragile infrastructure. Beyond questioning our government selling Canadian farmers down the proverbial river, giving preference to the cheap import of foreign goods at the expense of Canadian food providers, buying local is a good policy. Eating less readymade food and more home cooked meals, putting in a garden and a stock of water and non-perishable food items, and considering the purchase of a backup generator and a wood stove, are all reasonable considerations.
I am especially inspired by the challenge that the North Bay couple have embraced, as described in the ‘Big Wild Year Notebook – Part I of a series’ by Warren Schlote. All the best to Delphanie Colyer and her partner Jeremy St. Onge for embarking on a year of eating only food they either hunt or forage. I am looking forward to following their adventure. As a retired construction contractor, this parallels my own ambition to build an “earth house” and an “earth greenhouse,” also called a Walipini. (The low tech Walipini was originally developed by the South American Aymara people of Bolivia and Chile, which they claim helped them survive the last ice age by being able to grow vegetables all year round.)
Endless debate in the media has not slowed corporate lobbyists from stepping up their program to confuse the populace with misleading authoritative studies and flooding the media with self-important pundits attempting to justify a denial of the reality of climate change. Rather than recognizing the global concensus among environmental scientists, from more than a century of existing study, the result from our fearless political leaders, (in Canada and south of the border), has been the dismantling of programs that recognize the impending consequences of the planets infatuation with fossil fuel and high tech farming strategies, at least partially, responsible for global warming. To prepare for the very real consequences of extreme weather our government should be investing our tax dollars in a rural self-sufficiency program that might actually help our citizenry prepare for the unthinkable.
Derek Stephens McPhail
Providence Bay
