JULY 1ST IS CELEBRATED as a national holiday, known colloquially as Canada Day, but officially designated Dominion Day. Whether you’ll be puttering about the house, sweating outside in the garden, or taking time off work to kick back and relax, I would urge you to take a few minutes out of the day to reflect upon the meaning of this word ‘dominion’. The oldest ancestor of this word is the Greek ‘domos’, which simply means ‘house’ or ‘home’. The first derivation of the word was the addition of the suffix ‘nus’, which denotes the relationship of ownership, the possession of property, resulting in the Latin ‘dominus’, meaning ‘lord’ or ‘master’. So ‘dominion’ means domination: command, control, power, privilege.
BEING EMBEDDED in this industrial paradigm makes it difficult to acknowledge the underlying assumptions of our cradle-to-grave culture, much less challenge them. Surrounded by processes in which living things are packaged as products and rendered lifeless, it’s easy to forget that every other species on the planet — and every other previous human culture — will increase its own standard of living and improve the quality of its ecosystem at the same time. If you live in the City of Toronto or its outlying areas, then you probably can’t see the futuristic forest for the technological trees. But if we don’t step up and manifest some collective culture-change quickly, then pretty soon we won’t be able to see the forest or any trees — both figuratively and literally.
AT THE VERY START of the millennium, the City Councillors Waste Diversion Task Force committed themselves to reducing Toronto’s solid waste production to absolute zero by the year 2010. But two years ago, having failed to ramp up the recycling program to appropriate levels, City Council disappointingly revised its own goals downward and resolved themselves to reducing Toronto’s solid waste production to only thirty per cent by 2010. Bay Street bureaucrats sift through the statistics and juggle the numbers in order to put the best possible face on a dirty dilemma. Meanwhile, garbage collectors go on strike this week, and the termination of Toronto’s contract with the Michigan landfill looms on the horizon mere months away.
FOR THE 2009 SEASON we have acquired a new tool that bestows a number of ecological benefits: a manual paving block cutter. Up until now we have been using a grinding machine with rotating diamond blades to accomplish the same functions, when we need blocks of small, oddly-shaped sizes. And although the new ‘guillotine’ has a couple of distinct disadvantages — it’s very heavy, it cannot cut blocks in curved lines, and it cannot cut only partway across a block to create a V-cut — it outperforms the competition in every other way. So we continue to use the concrete saw for certain specific assignments, and the guillotine has taken over nearly all other cutting tasks.
AS PART of our commitment to greatly reduce the amount of waste that we produce, Green Apple has begun to research the various options available to us. This may have started out as a simple search on the web for recycling companies in the Greater Toronto Area, but it has morphed and mushroomed into something else entirely: a mission to pinpoint the final resting places of materials that we don’t want in our own backyards; to investigate the social and political implications of the modern waste-management industries; and ultimately, to understand the so-called Story of Stuff, and how we might radically reposition ourselves in that storyline.
