Compost
GREEN APPLE JUST HIRED a brand new batch of workers in the field. About a hundred new employees are labouring away outside our offices, processing materials and preparing manure. I’m talking about a half-pound of Red Wiggler worms that were just delivered from Cathy’s Crawly Composters to help break down our compost quicker! They munch on our leftovers and turn them into castings (a fancy sounding name for worm poo), which is hyper-rich in water-soluble nutrients, making for excellent organic fertilizer for food plants. It’s a mutually beneficial working relationship, a win-win situation for all involved. Here’s wishing a wormy welcome to the Green Apple team for our vermicular colleagues!
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.
