JOHN’S YOUNGER BROTHER Peter James has concluded his tour of duty with Green Apple for the 2009 season. He’s still in high school, so last week he headed back home to Guelph to get ready for senior year. P.J. is popular with the guys on site, always in cheerful spirits and up for whatever. I snapped a shot of him a couple of weeks ago at the Manning Avenue job, and he was characteristically upbeat, as you can make out in the photo below. P.J., you will be missed! Good luck back at school, you will be remembered fondly…
TODAY MARKS THE OFFICIAL end of the summer recess and the beginning of back to class and the start of the school year. You may have celebrated the Labour Day weekend with a cookout at the cottage, to squeeze those last little bits of vacation out of the summer. Or maybe you spent it running around and getting the young ones all stocked up on binders and notebooks, pens and pencils. The Gregorian New Year, celebrated on January 1, so soon after the winter solstice, is an important marker, when the sun reaches its lowest point on the horizon in the northern hemisphere, and is reborn. But the Hindu and Jewish New Years are celebrated around the Fall Equinox, at the evening twilight between summer and winter, as the mood shifts from ecstatic celebration to getting serious and buckling down to business.
I CAN SCARCELY BELIEVE IT, but only a day after we put the call out for public support of those protesting the ecologically devastating business park development at Hanlon Creek in Guelph… we triumphed! Yesterday, because a dedicated group of young eco-activists insisted that the planet comes before profits, an old-growth forest and endangered animal habitat were saved from the bulldozers — for a year. The construction start date was postponed due to the occupation of the site, and now it’s too late in the season to get the job done before winter.
AT GREEN APPLE PIE, we see our primary objective as keeping our clients and community as informed as possible about everything they can do to have a healthier home for themselves, and more moral dealings with all of the other ecosystems that are impacted by our landscaping decisions. Certainly, if we were all more conscious of how each of our actions affects the next seven generations and then some, our ecological ledger would be looking a whole lot better. And at the end of a long day, after making payments on food, clothes, shelter, and taking care of all our parental responsibilities, this is no small challenge in and of itself. But if you’ve already carefully scrutinized your own family’s ecological footprint, and you’d like to take on more responsibility for our collective fate, then the next step is environmental activism.
