In early July, Toronto Free Press ran a cover story under the headline 'Selling the Farm'. In the story TFP asked 'How many people in Ontario know that their farm crops are nurtured by human sewage?' 'Where are environmental activists like Greenpeace?'
'The practice of dumping human waste on Ontario's farmlands is largely unknown, controversial but legal. In Ontario, foods from strawberries to steak may be fertilized by human excrement.
'Municipal planners don't call it human waste. They use the terms 'biosolids' 'waste water residual' and 'sludge', said TFP.
During the past two months, this newspaper has been deluged with letters both pro and con over the contentious use of human waste as farm fertilizer.
'Unfortunately, your article on sewage used as fertilizer lumped together human excrement, stored sewage and Metro/Toronto's stabilized sludge. Without clarifying the huge differences among these substances, your article will no doubt have frightened many readers,' wrote Toronto councillor Ila Bossons. 'Contrary to your statement, human excrement is never allowed in Ontario; it's been known since the Middle Ages that it can spread disease.'
On September 20, the Toronto Star ran a story, 'Toronto sludge raises a stink' on its upfront Ontario page.
'Most days all summer long, Toronto's sewage sludge--mostly human waste--has been spread on farmers' fields near the Collingwood area.
'The spreading of sludge is an arrangement that’s been going on for nearly five years and is estimated to save area farmers thousands of dollars in fertilizer costs,' The Star story stated.
Beverley Bridges, a 36-year-old mother of a two-week-old daughter said she moved to the area 'because we thought it would be a nice place to raise a family.'
'We do’t want Toronto's sewage here. Very few people knew this was happening. It's been a dark, dirty secret,' said Wendy Berry, president of the Southgate Residents and Ratepayers Association, which is demanding that its council ban the practice.
This year, Southgate, the amalgamated community of Dundalk, Proton and Egremont Townships, took 2,500 tonnes of Toronto's sludge.
Toronto paid the Oakville-based Terra Tech Environmental company $2.7-million to spread 25,000 tonnes of city sludge on farms throughout southwestern Ontario.
By the end of year 2000, Toronto expects to send all of the sludge from its main treatment plant to rural Ontario to nourish crops.
On Sept. 3, 1997 Terratec entered into discussions with Metro Works about the feasibility of removing and applying to agricultural land, quantities of biolsolids up to twice the original estimated requirements.
Approval for the contract came from environmental activists Karey Shinn and Karen Buck, of the private Safe Sewage Committee, who became members of the city's Biosolids Multi-Stakeholder Committee, and were the only two private citizens on the city's influential eight-member Independent Review Committee, which ultimately hand-picked two biosolid companies who made it to the city's shortlist.
Consultants hired by the city identified that in the long term, the city preferred non-food chain uses of biosolids to food chain uses (Call for expression of Interest Draft, Aug. 11, 1998, page 2, section 2.1d). City documents show that Shinn, Buck and Ms. Elizabeth Borek suggested that the consultants remove this line from final EOI documents.
The Walkerton tragedy this spring, when 2,000 people were sick and six died from drinking contaminated water, has caused concern about sewage sludge, said Kiyoshi Oka, a senior engineer with Toronto's water pollution control department told Southgate residents.
But scientists worldwide are on the public record with anxieties about land applications of sludge composed of human waste.
Greenpeace and other activists have been strangely silent about the two issues of the Walkerton contaminated water supply and the use of human waste on farmlands.
It is October, 2000.
Toronto Free Press asks again: Where are Greenpeace and the environmental activists?
A study on global warming, recently released by European researchers, may send environmental activists back to the drawing board.
According to the study, Western Europeans should be able to survive a widely expected rise in temperature caused by global warming over the next 50 years.
European researchers pinpointed results after sifting through mortality figures among people aged 65 to 74 in seven regions: northern and southern Finland, southwest Germany, the Netherlands, London, northern Italy and Athens.
Regions with warm summers did not suffer significantly more heat-related deaths when their weather was exceptionally hot, was the study conclusion.
On the other hand, cold-related deaths in all regions were far more numerous than heat-related deaths, especially in London.
Bottom line: In spite of what environmental activists are telling us, cold does more harm than heat.
Study research, which is published in the weekly British Medical Journal, was coordinated by scientists at London's Queen Mary College.
'Populations in Europe have adjusted successfully to mean summer temperatures ranging from 13.5 degrees Celsius to 24.1 degrees Celsius, and can be expected to adjust to global warming predicted in the next half century with little sustained increase in heat-related mortality,' they concluded.
Extremism, no matter how passionate the cause, doesn't pay off.
That lesson seems to be lost on a 72-year-old great-grandmother, who will have one full year to think from the loneliness of a prison cell.
Long-time environmental activist Betty Krawczyk, who has begun serving a one-year-term--with no time off for good behaviour--registered surprise at the harshness of the sentence. Even so, she was unrepentant for her part in the blockading a lumber company’s access to the British Columbian Elaho forests.
Most people in their 72nd year of life wonder how many years they have left.
'That takes a precious year out of my life,' Krawczyk said in a telephone interview from prison. 'However, I feel so strongly about this issue. It's very important for succeeding generations and for my own grandchildren.
'Someone has to do it...It’s the health of our planet and our own species that's at stake here.'
Justice Glen Parrett of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, who meted out the one-year sentence, obviously felt differently.
Judge Parrett noted the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the constitutional right to free assembly and peaceful protest, but not the right to blockade government-authorized logging. Along with Krawczyk, protesters sentenced belonged to People's Action for Threatened Habitat, a group that has been organizing a logging road blockades and tree-sitting stunts in the Elaho forests since 1997. Barney Kern, 36, will also spend one full year in prison. Other protesters were given a three-month sentence, a two-month sentence and a suspended sentence.
A letter writing campaign launched by Krawczyk to politicians and environmental agencies has thus far been ignored.
'If you can get no satisfaction from politicians, if you can get no satisfaction from the law courts, then you really have no other choice if you believe this is an issue of such magnitude that it affects the planet, Krawczyk concludes.
The activist, who dabbles in writing romance stories, says she will spend her jail time writing a book about adventures in environmentalism.
Environmental groups and the forest company logging in the Elaho Valley north of Squamish agree that it is doubtful whether a one-year jail term for the great-grandmother will stop logging road blockades and other illegal protests there.
'I'm sure a few extremists will carry on,' said Gordon Prescott, project forester for International Forest Products.
'These little terrorism activities have been going on for a long time.'
The offchance sighting of baby loons riding on a parent's back, is surely one of nature's most enchanting portraits.
But mercury is causing a drop in the reproduction rate of loons.
'Burning coal is the single largest source of mercury emissions in North America and Canada's electricity sector burns more than 52 million tonnes annually,' says environmental writer Stephen Leahy. 'Surprisingly, this sector is exempt from any restrictions on mercury emissions. And since it's an element, this highly toxic pollutant cannot be destroyed.
'Ontario’s loons have become less common in southern Ontario. Last fall, hundreds of dead loons and thousands of red-breasted mergansers, another fish-eater, washed up on the shores of Lake Huron.
'After a sharp decline in the early 1990s, Ontario's mercury emissions are trending upward again because the province has doubled its use of coal to generate electricity in the past few years. Ontario burned more than 12 million tonnes of coal in 1998, for example, Mercury emissions from coal power have jumped 21 per cent from 1995 to 1999.'
Wildlife can't read. Every spring, Ontario residents are warned by the Ministry of Natural Resources that children and women of childbearing age shouldn't eat fish caught virtually anywhere in the province. High mercury levels in fish are responsible for 99 per cent of all fish advisories in Ontario.
Loons, and many other species, have no choice.
Without intervention, the cry of the loon may take on a tragic new meaning.
The bare butts of backpackers market the new image of activists at work in Saltspring Island, B.C.
Posing nude for calendars is paying off for Saltspring Island environmentalists trying to protect parcels of land. Environmentalists hope to buy about 2,000 hectares of their island slated for development. Their cheeky calendar, selling for $19.95 apiece, is already in its second run.
Posing in fallen timber and holding little lambs, they are immortalized in cyberspace.
Calendar girls from the Saltspring Island Women Preserve & Protect do not originate from life's obscure category.
Big-name calendar girls include Birgit Bateman, wife of painter Robert Bateman; Denise McCann, wife of musician Randy Bachman, and Andrea Collins, ex-wife of rocker Phil Collins.
Members of Saltspring Island Women Preserve & Protect are not alone in wanting to live in paradise. Upwards of half a million people flock to the region for annual visits. Those with residences include actors Robin Williams and Al Pacino as well as Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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