I BELIEVE THAT THE CHOICE to segregate plants by species in order to produce a pixelated grass canvas is an unfortunate one. It perpetuates an aesthetic choice with negative real-world consequences: monocultures are vulnerable to decimating diseases and they skew the mineral content of the earth by sapping it of one kind of nutrient and choking it with another.  I’m not saying that you can never plant huge swaths of a single species; I’m just lamenting the fact that if this project is meant to promote a more ecologically-conscious way of organizing our landscape, then the plants should be mainly mixed up in permaculture patterns, lumped into guilds (a guild is a group of plants that are stronger than the sum of their parts).  This should be especially important in living walls, where there is very little soil depth to tap into for sustenance, if any at all. So if this project is supposed to preach the green gospel, then sadly, it’s been completely dumbed-down.

BUT THERE IS ANOTHER TYPE of disinformation that is taking place here, perhaps even more insidious. For the purposes of the remainder of this article, just so that I do not have to keep on calling them “The Bank In Question”, let’s call them… uh, “B.I.Q.”. BIQ’s new corporate headquarters is now the tallest building in the entire city. BIQ is the fifth-largest bank in the United States, and it owns the third largest amount of stand-alone ATM’s (automated teller machines) in the US. At the end of the 2008 calendar year, BIQ’s assets were totaled at an almost unfathomable 291 billion dollars. In the same year, BIQ’s CEO “earned” over 8.5 million dollars. On every single day that he worked for BIQ, he took home the same amount of money that the average American worker takes home in an entire year. So why did BIQ need a 48 million dollar subsidy from the American taxpayers in order to build these corporate headquarters? Do these fancy new-fangled eco-features cost 48 million dollars?

B.I.Q. REPORTS THAT THE SIZE of the green wall is 2400 square feet, and the company that built the wall for them claims that it cost between $100 to $125 per square foot. Taking the more expensive figure, that would mean that the price of the wall is only $300,000! So if the public paid for this green wall 160 times over, then why does BIQ take the credit for it with their corporate logo? And as for the astronomical price tag: Does the green wall benefit the public to the tune of 48 million dollars? Any polluted inner-city air filtration function that it could have performed if it existed at street level is rendered nil, by erecting the wall so high in the sky, several stories above human foot traffic — but just the right height for any pedestrian passing by to notice the ubiquitous BIQ logo. The Largest Green Wall in America is nothing more than a crude advertisement for one of the biggest corporations in America — paid for by the taxpayers of America.

GOVERNMENT HAND-OUTS FOR HUGE banking institutions whose CEO’s receive multi-million dollar bonuses, regardless of the quality of their performance — that didn’t begin with BIQ, and as we have seen with glaring clarity in the last few months, to the tune of $12 trillion, it certainly didn’t end with BIQ. But BIQ isn’t just another ordinary everyday bank (a run-of-the-mill institution that doesn’t run any mills, or any other productive activity for that matter). It turns out that it specializes in creative accounting practices that hide financial transactions from public scrutiny, the better to commit crimes. The Securities & Exchange Commission caught BIQ itself hiding over $750 million. Their subsidiary, (let’s call them S.I.Q., for “Subsidiary in Question”), was caught aiding and abetting foreign dictators like Augusto Pinochet of Chile (who ordered the murder of thousands and the torture of tens of thousands of his own countrymen and -women), to secretly syphon tens of millions of dollars out of their own countries’ economies and hide them in secret personal accounts. This is all a matter of public record.

BIQ finished the wall just in time for a G20 meeting. Anti-bailout protestors didn't buy the greenwash, and smashed their windows anyways, despite heavy police protection

SO, SUFFICE IT TO SAY that at least as much as any other bank that puts profits before people, BIQ has a PR problem. But citizens are finally starting to speak out against the proliferation of gargantuan billboards and other advertisements that dominate urban areas. Now green is the new black; so how better to whitewash a tarnished corporate image, than by re-branding it as “green”? For a most grotesque appropriation of ecological imagery, witness the billboard below: MacDonald’s, more responsible than any other restaurant in the world for environmental devastation, inhumane animal treatment, and poisonous food products, attempts to invert its anti-ecological image with a green wall billboard. Ptew! It’s aggravating to see the fruits of our labours go towards the very antithesis of what we believe in. I would much prefer it if the living walls that we build end up benefitting groups of people who put human rights over property rights and actually embrace a real ecological agenda.

IN THIS MATTER, I HOPE that we can look to groups like ADPSR — Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility — as an ethical example.  As an industry organization, ADPSR takes principled positions, even when they conflict with profit margins.  For example, because they believe that the prison-industrial complex in the USA is corporatized and corrupt, they refuse to participate in the planning, designing, and building of new prisons.  To be sure, there are plenty of professionals in the US who are only too happy to provide their services to the highest bidder, regardless of who will be affected, and how. But by taking a stand, the members of ADPSR are making a powerful political statement. Of course, political statements alone are not enough to make a change in the world; but they are an important first step towards change.  So I sincerely hope that more landscapers will do some soul-searching before they get to the dirt-digging.  We need to see a lot more green walls and a lot more green infrastructure in general, all over the city, all over the world.  But when we get paid to cover the walls in green, we need to be careful of what we’re covering up.

ADPSR Anti-Prison Campaign Posters

OF COURSE MORE OFTEN than not it’s going to be the youth that lead the battle in defense of the earth. They haven’t yet taken on any commitments to raise kids of their own. They haven’t opted to lock themselves into mortgages, and the serious steady jobs that they force us to hold. These teens and tweens are still trying to figure out what this world is really all about, and who they were meant to ultimately become, so they’ve got a little bit more free time on their hands to donate to worthy causes. Or maybe some of them actually have got this crazy world figured out to a tee, and understand that it’s gone to pot, precisely because almost all of us are so engrossed with our own narrow concerns that we’ve abandoned the planet to the most selfish and negligent. Either way, it’s natural for our young sons and daughters to be front-line eco-warriors, and we should thank them for it.

BUT THE SAD TRUTH IS that if they go it alone, then they’re not going to go far, and they’re definitely not going to go far enough. In this system, the amount of political power that you wield is directly correlated to the amount of financial resources that you control. These kids are just returning to universal truth, the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have done unto you. But the cards are stacked against them, because rules of this particular economic game are written by the players with the most gold. Although the words of these young eco-activists echo with the wisdom of ancient sustainable cultures, the unduly appointed decision-makers almost always ignore their warnings and capitulate instead to the short-term profit interests of property holders. And in this case, that’s us.

IF YOU’RE READING THIS, then you probably own your own home and can afford to spend a significant amount of money on making it look prettier on the outside. The Earth needs your support. The very best of our youth need your support. If some of them have crazy, colourful hair, that is not a reason for the salmon to suffer. If some of them have weird piercings, that does not justify chopping down forests. If they choose to dress differently than you and I, and reject cultural conventions about outward appearance, it may be for a damn good reason. Our culture is responsible — WE are responsible — for the destruction of the life-support systems of the planet; so like all of the other hollow propaganda that we spout, maybe the fashion decisions that we make aren’t anything to be celebrated or emulated, either.

TWO MONTHS AGO, a beautiful group of sensitive and empathetic human beings — young and funky and punky, and unapologetic for it, as they should never, ever have to be — valiantly occupied a construction site in Guelph in order to protect an old-growth forest and a natural habitat for endangered species of salamander. They maintained a peaceful presence on the land and forced the issue into the mainstream media. But although they’ve bought some time, the city developers are pressing ahead with their plans. Those who stand to make money off the project are insidiously ignoring the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources report that exhorts that it be scrapped because of the ecological damage that will result. I don’t know how much longer the hard-core activists can last for.

AND THIS IS WHERE you come in. Because it’s easy to dismiss the concerns of a few eco-freaks. But it’s a lot harder for them to force their plans onto the land if middle-class folks in dockers with two-point-one kids line up alongside the rag-tag band of activists. These passionate people have gone to great lengths to make their base camp kid-friendly, and have organized all kinds of educational activities on site, without any corporate support. It’s not just about any one particular piece of land: it’s about an inclusive movement for wide-scale change. It’s important that we win this battle and turn back the tide in defense of Mother Earth; but it’s even more important that we share skills and stories, learn from each other and listen to one another deeply, practice solidarity across demographic lines.

IF YOU HAVE A LITTLE bit of free time, or a little bit of extra money, I encourage you to support the Hanlon Creek Business Park Occupation. And if you don’t know enough about the issues involved, you can educate yourself by reading up on their blog and at Land Is More Important Than Sprawl. If after reading up on the issues, you’re still unsure about where you stand, I would urge you to contact them directly and ask them any questions that you might have, until your moral compass is satisfied. I know that taking the time to write a letter to Guelph City Councillors could be seen as something of a luxury in this busy season of getting ready to go back to school. But it could also be seen as a lot less than what these brave young activists have put on the line thus far — their bodies and their arrest records. And for those kids that we’re sending off to school, it’s also a luxury — a luxury that we MUST be able to afford.

OKAY, END RANT. Next week it’s back to backyards.

DR. DICKSON DESPOMMIER, professor of environmental sciences at Columbia University, believes he has seen the future of agriculture, and it takes place in city skyscrapers. Excited by the concept of green roofs, his students calculated the amount of food that could be harvested if all 13 acres of the commercial roof space in Manhattan was used for farming. Unfortunately, it only amounted to a measly two per cent of the borough’s food bill. To come up with the remaining 98% of New York County’s food budget, Despommier advocates planting crops on more than just top floors; let entire high-rises be dedicated to urban agriculture. By his calculation, 33 of these 50-storey farm factories could make the island self-sufficient for food, and with funding money, he could have the first vertical farm up and running in under a decade.

Vertical Farm (exterior), Las Vegas - by Chris Jacobs

FOR FRUITS AND VEGETABLES to grow in the heart of the concrete jungle, an environment completely alien and utterly inhospitable to them, lots of NASA space age technology is required. Instead of embedding them in irrigated soil, they are placed in plastic carts and are ferried around on assembly lines, where robots spray them with mist and minerals, and dose them with their allotted amount of light and heat. A sophisticated sensor system is supposed to screen out any offending bacteria and isolate any infected fruit or vegetable. When their robot keepers scientifically determine that they have sufficiently matured, they are mechanically harvested, processed, and packaged. On the first floor of the building, they are even sold to general public. Talk about vertical consolidation!

DESPOMMIER AND OTHER ADVOCATES of the vertical farm tout its numerous advantages. Conventional farms occasionally suffer from disastrous acts of nature, like hailstorms and monsoons, or droughts and wildfires, and as global warming kicks in, these incidences will only increase. Vertical farms are immune to these, since they regulate their environment and are protected from the elements. For these same reasons, advocates of vertical agriculture claim that these skyfarms will grow only “organic” produce, because fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides will become superfluous without soil. And under these artificial conditions, they will be able to recycle massive amounts of water, one of the biggest expenses of open-air farms. Most fabulously, since they are removing themselves from natural cycles and simulating optimum growing conditions, they will be able to yield far more harvests, producing much more food.

Vertical Farm (interior), Las Vegas - by Chris Jacobs

AND WE’RE NOT JUST TALKING about veggies and legumes.  The plan is to produce cow meat for human consumption. They can’t possibly graze on grass at a thousand dollars per square foot of precious real estate — they still haven’t come up with a techno-fix for that problem — but they can clone bovine stem cells, feed them protein shakes, and electrically shock them to simulate muscle texture.  So just about all aspects of the average American diet are accounted for.  If we base our calculations on Despommier’s optimistic figures — that a 30-storey building that covering a single city block could feed 50,000 people — this means that 60 of these skyfarms could feed the entire city of Toronto… and 600 skyfarms — an array of 25 by 25, the size of a small town — could feed the whole country of Canada!

OKAY, I’VE GIVEN the supporters of skyfarming ample opportunity to present their case in favour. Can I please rip into it now?

Dragonfly (overhead), NYC - by Vincent Callebaut

WHERE TO START? Let’s begin with the supposed savings that result from food localization. Yes, growing food much closer to the point of purchase will significantly reduce the amount of costly energy and environmental damage incurred transporting produce to market. But food miles constitute only a very small fraction of the energetic, economic and ecological costs.  That’s not to say that it’s not important to reduce these wherever we can.  But it’s certainly not the area in which we can make the most difference.  University of Toronto professor Pierre Desrochers calculated that even in Britain — an island that has higher import costs than we do, because it can’t have produce trucked in from tropical climates in the way that we can import berries overland from California — the costs associated with driving back and forth from the supermarket to buy green beans from Kenya are more than 40 times the price of it being shipped onto their shores from faraway Africa.

Dragonfly (exterior), NYC - by Vincent Callebaut

IN DESPOMMIER’S FUTURIST FANTASY, it’s not just that these skyfarms will supply some of the food for city slickers — he means for them to supply most of the food for urban areas, if not almost all of it.  So what will become of the farmers of today, and what will become of the land that they farm?  Let’s dismiss the obviously false claim of allowing farmland to return to its native state:  permitting trees to populate meadows, reducing greenhouse gases and preserving animal habitats, saving them from extinction. Under the hyper-capitalist conditions that caused this food crisis to begin with, there’s no way that so valuable a commodity would be allowed to lie fallow. Will they start supplementing the monocultural crops grown in the inner-city food factories with exotic, expensive heirloom varieties of vegetables?  Under current market conditions, it’s far likelier that these fields will be turned into carbon farms, growing inefficient bio-fuels to replace rapidly-peaking oil and natural gas.

Dragonfly (interior), NYC - by Vincent Callebaut

AN ARRAY OF SOLAR PANELS on the southern face of the building and wind turbines on top of the tower are not going to even come remotely close to meeting the needs of an energy-addicted skyfarm. Fifty-storey concrete-and-steel skyscrapers contain megatonnes of embedded energy. Water recycling systems are incredibly energy-intensive, too. And because crops won’t be exposed to the southern sun, it’ll need lots of artificial light and heat — 100 times more than is used by the average office worker! Despommier thinks that by funneling the city’s sewage system through the base of the building, he can burn methane and create excess energy to power the whole damn contraption. But he hasn’t done his high school homework:  the amount of power produced is miniscule in comparison — if it even came close, it would violate the law of conservation of energy!

Skyfarm (skyline), Toronto - by Gordon Graff

BUT DESPOMMIER’S MOST OFFENSIVE claim is that this is a solution for Darfur and other conflict-ridden regions of the world that suffer from food shortages.  Ha!  Billion-dollar vertical farms wouldn’t even be profitable in a First World city, competing with investment bankers for premium square footage.  And when environmental costs can’t be externalized any more and food starts to its reflect real value, making rent on a Park Avenue penthouse will be the least of his worries, as the inevitable riots ensue. On average, North Americans spend less a tenth of every dollar they earn on foodstuffs — less than anyone else in the world, so our perspective on this issue is completely skewed. Sudan won’t ever be able to afford a castle-in-the-skyfarm — this is just another neo-colonial slavery scheme that has more to do with First World agro-tech profits than Third World sustainability strategies.

Skyfarm (rendering), Toronto - by Gordon Graff

DESPOMMIER HAS EVEN SUGGESTED that Monsanto, arguably the most evil corporation on the planet, is the perfect partner to develop seeds specifically for skyfarms. This fact alone pushes the plan over the edge from impossible pipe dream to heinous apocalyptic nightmare. Media critic Jerry Mander has explained how it is insane and suicidal to insist on trying to fix a problem that was caused by technology with another technology-based solution! The first two high-tech agricultural revolutions in our lifetimes produced much more food for market, but at great human and environmental cost. Yes, conventional agriculture is the biggest polluter on the planet, even bigger than ‘industry’, as Despommier points out — but this is a red herring false dichotomy: conventional agriculture is industrial. Yes, we have to change the way that we acquire our calories, and fast. But NOT LIKE THIS.

Skyfarm (overhead), Toronto - by Gordon Graff

IF THE OBJECTIVE IS really to grow healthy food much closer to the point of purchase, there’s no reason that supermarkets all across the country can’t turn their own roofs into greenhouse grow-ops. In fact, there’s already a company out in California that is doing exactly that. Sky Vegetables, out of San Francisco, partners with local grocers to produce food right on top of their retail outlets. Even Harrod’s, the largest department store in the United Kingdom at over a million square feet, has begun to grow green vegetables on the roof at their flagship location. You don’t have to engineer any complex structure or research any unproven technology; just go green on your existing roof, and save on your heating and cooling bills while you’re at it.

IN ANY CASE, there’s no need to reinvent the plow in every generation. We already have a perfectly good idea of what happens when a culture suddenly has to feed far more mouths than its industrial farming model can provide for.  When the Soviet Union collapsed twenty years ago, and its ideologically-motivated oil subsidies ended, Cuba was still under a crippling American trade embargo. But it managed to survive its food crisis, because of old-school small-scale organic urban agriculture that proliferated across the island. Watch the incredible 53-minute documentary below and be amazed, then learn more at the website The Power of Community. Thirty-six years ago, E.F. Schumacher taught us that Small Is Beautiful, and it’s truer than ever in our own time.

GRASSY LAWNS HAD come to be associated with upper-class status in the minds of the rest of us peasants. And so some of the first important public parks on this continent, Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, were designed with the English pastoralist style in mind. But until the Second Industrial Revolution about a hundred and fifty years ago, most of the North American Continent was covered with moss and shrub. The average person couldn’t possibly afford a retinue of caretakers to constantly monitor the length of the lawn and incessantly scythe it down to mere centimetres. It wasn’t until the rise of the machines that manicured lawns were within the reach of the commoners. With the arrival of the lawn mower by the mid-1800s and the first fossil-fuel-powered mower emerging at the turn of the twentieth century, average Joes and Janes could adopt the tropes of the ridiculously prosperous and simulate at least the appearance of affluence.

moss

scrub

TODAY, EXACTLY HALF of the world’s population lives in urban areas; here in Canada, that rate is as high as four-fifths, and in Ontario it’s even more than that. A mock meadow has no meaning in a metropolitan Toronto: you can’t take your flock of sheep out to graze on the grass; you can’t possibly take a long, romantic walk in the woods; and you certainly can’t get lost in the forest, enchanted by the wondrousness of it all. You are bound in by fences and borders, enclosed on all sides with stick pickets and chain links. At most, you can take the domesticated dog outside so he doesn’t defecate on your carpet. You can make a fake firepit and burn a meaty meal on open coals, brought in by rail from a coal mine on the east coast of the country. You can nuke the lawn till it’s more florescent than anything else that grows on the Goddess’ green earth, but I’m sorry to say it, your little slice of heaven remains short of satisfying.

ASSUMING THAT YOU CAN’T see yourself anthropomorphizing blades of grass and that it doesn’t trouble you at all to continually castrate the sex of these small green creatures (which is how the grass experiences lawn mowing), and that you’ve got lots of disposable income so you don’t mind paying labourers to mow the lawn often — there’s still the matter of chemical maintainance. When they’re in the wild, grasses don’t keep green from May to September, they’re only emerald for a few weeks at a time, after which they fade to a pale pastel. Exactly a century ago, the first artificial fertilizers were invented to mess with the chemistry of the grass and trick it into staying jade green all season long. Then military-industrial R & D gave us the means to more efficiently kill off all the other species on the lawn without the exhausting, almost impossible task of weeding: herbicides and insecticides. So now we wage carcinogenic chemical warfare on the earth itself. And for what? To keep up with the Windsors?

lawn

Painting by Leonard Koscianski

THERE ARE ALL KINDS of alternatives that would be preferable to the grassy status quo, things you can let your lawn do. But the first proposal I can come up with off the top of my head is clover. Until the 1950’s, clover was considered to be a desirable item. But when the chemical corporations realized that their marketable products killed off clover as well as the other weeds, they re-branded clover as evil. How fickle and foolish we were to have bought their propaganda! Clover remains incandescent green as long as it’s pleasant to be outside, and can’t be discoloured, even by canine urine. It flourishes in sub-standard soil, fixing nitrogen into it, actually improving soil quality. It wages a war on weeds for you, crowding them out by natural selection. It demands so very little from you, only a small amount of water, much less than grass. And it certainly doesn’t need to be mowed — it automatically grows to a height of about twenty centimetres, and stays there perpetually.

THE ONLY THING you could possibly say against clover is that bees love it. And some people — especially little people — don’t necessarily love bees back. That humans have almost eradicated the natural habitats of bees, threatening them with extinction, and jeopardizing our own survival on this planet at the same time, since bees pollenate one-third of all human food — is a topic for another blog entry. But for now, let’s just settle the clover question by arming ourselves with the knowledge that maintaining a whole host of different types of flora in your yard will ensure a diversity of species — including insects — naturally keeping the bees in check. And if you’re planning on using it in a high-traffic area, then you want to mix it up with other ground-cover anyway. The idiom “to be in clover” even means to live the good life, carefree and easy — that’s no linguistic accident!

Clover

Clover 2

To learn more about the history of how we surround our houses with lifeless lawns, I highly encourage you to read the excellent article entitled “Turf War“, written by Elizabeth Kolbert, published exactly a year ago in The New Yorker magazine.

ONCE THE LAW goes into effect on January 31, all new buildings — residential, educational, institutional, and commercial — with over 2000 square metres in gross floor area (which is equivalent to approximately six storeys or more) fall under the jurisdiction of the law. At 2000 square metres, 20% of the roof must be green; at 5000 square metres, 30% must be green, and for every additional 5000 square metres, another 10% of the roof must be green, up to a maximum mandatory minimum of 60%. Green roofs mean much more insulation, will translates into lower heating bills in the winter, and lower cooling bills in the summer. And of course, green roofs humanize the atmosphere by removing greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and replacing them with oxygen-rich habitats for living beings.

IN 2005, CITY COUNCIL authorized an analytical study of green roofs. Conducted at Ryerson University, it came to the conclusion that 21% of Toronto is roofed, and that it could capably support 50 million square metres of greenery! They deduced that with this kind of investment in ecological infrastructure, the city would save over $300 million to start with, and an additional $37 million annually. The municipal government funds key commonwealth capital like roads and bridges — why not roofs, too? According to the NGO EcoJustice, between 2006 and 2007 over 2.7 billion litres of what Toronto flushes down its toilets was dumped into Lake Ontario; green roofs would have prevented this from occurring by retaining rainwater that overloads the sewage system.

THE RYERSON STUDY recommended mandating green roofs on all buildings with a multi-floor footprint of 350 square metres or more, but by the time the legislation came to council, building industry interest groups had rewritten the requirements, making 2000 square metres the cut-off point. Another loophole lets industrial buildings off the hook if only 10% of their roof area has been greened. And developers can outsource their ecological commitments by forking over funds for the retrofitting of older buildings. Ecological lobbyists Green Roofs for Healthy Cities are “very concerned that there’s been a watering down of the requirements, and we’re concerned it will set a negative precedent for cities elsewhere in North America.”

AND LIKE SO MUCH environmental protection legislation, the green roof bylaw isn’t backed up with nearly enough bite. If developers fail to meet these percentage requirements, they can be fined up to $100,000. But if ‘going green’ on a large project can mean increasing the cost of the roof by “hundreds of thousands of dollars… if not more”, as industry lobbyists BILD (Building Industry and Land Development Association) claim, then levying a mere $100,000 fee against the offenders would mean that they would have a greater incentive to break the law than to abide by it. In his June 27th article “Is green roof bylaw valid or a cash grab?”, New In Homes title page columnist Bob Aaron even suggests that the green roof bylaw is nothing more than a ploy by City Hall to squeeze more money out of virtuous developers.

ON THE PHONE, Aaron told me, “Green roofs are idiotic… they’re not cost-effective… and they’re ecologically insignificant.” When I asked him to substantiate his claim that green roofs are ecologically insignificant — would he also claim that green lawns are ecologically insignificant? Would he recommend that the bylaws requiring residences to include a certain percentage of green ground cover surrounding the house be repealed? — he admitted that he did not have any factual information to justify this assertion. I just didn’t understand why a reporter who has written a weekly Saturday column for the Toronto Star for the last decade would be so resistant to green roofs. That is, until is learned that in addition to his job as a journalist, he is also on the board of directors of the Tarion Warranty Corporation.

THE TARION WARRANTY CORPORATION is a privately-owned company that has been chartered since 2004 to mediate the legal relationship between disgruntled homeowners and derelict developers. A year ago, André Marin, the Ombudsman of Ontario, chastised the provincial government for misleading the voting public into assuming that it would protect their interests by overseeing the activities that they delegate to the Tarion corporation. Tarion’s own internal literature states: “Tarion’s mandate is unique in Canada. No other province or territory so completely transfers responsibility and liability for management of the home building industry to an independent organization.”

ALL NEW HOME BUYERS are required by law to pay Tarion between $700-800 to ‘protect their purchase’. Tarion has a state-protected monopoly on guaranteeing warranty coverage, and yet it is a private corporation, not a government agency, and therefore it is not accountable to anyone but its own board of directors. This year, Tarion held one public meeting that lasted less than an hour in the middle of the morning, when nearly no hard-working homeowners could have had their voices heard. It holds $100 million in equity, but consumer advocacy groups like Canadians for Properly Built Homes complain that it is a far cry from “the consumer protection organization it is intended to be”.

SIX MONTHS AGO, the CBC’s investigative report program Marketplace exposed Tarion’s practice of hampering home-owners’s efforts to receive fair restitution, even when they had obviously been defrauded by dishonest developers. Time after time, naïve home-buyers are being ripped off by unscrupulous home-builders, and then left with no choice but to seek legal representation, a course of action which is financially prohibitive for most. In the CBC piece, even Bob Aaron admitted: “The assumption is that [Tarion was] there to protect builders, who actually controlled the [warranty] program… the board is stacked with builders.” A few weeks after he made this statement, he was appointed to the Tarion board of directors himself.

IF A BUILDING DEVELOPER cuts corners and installs a sub-par green roof, there is a chance that it will leak. If that happens, home-owners have a right to demand that the developer return to repair the damage. But builders don’t want to do more work than they absolutely have to, because it cuts into their profit margin. So the government has entrusted Tarion with the task of protecting consumers’ interests. But Tarion corporate offices are stacked with building industry officials. And so one of these elite industry insiders, who just happens to have a public platform for promulgating his views, uses his position to contribute to a campaign of disinformation about this new and exciting aspect of ecological architecture, green roofs.

SO THE INK IS not even dry on this new piece of ecological legislation, and already the forces of big business are making moves to crush it before it can be put into effect. And the Toronto Star probably owes its readership a higher standard of journalism. But we would be remiss if we did not come clean about our own biases, as well. Here at Green Apple, we have our own vested interests in the implementation of this new bylaw: we are seriously considering entering the Toronto market to build green roofs on the tops of houses, in addition to the landscaping work we do around them. So we’ll try to use this blogging platform as a way to tell our side of the story: why we still think going green is the healthiest and happiest way to go, roofs included.

Thanks to Roger Frost for research.

Next Blog: The Green Roofs of Freidensreich Hundertwasser