Enviro Blog

Looking for a ride? Want to share a drive with some passengers? Trying to find a commute partner? How does one do this in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia?

We have an answer. In the summer of 2007 two students working under the Youth Conservation Program for the Tusket River Environmental Protection Association were working on transportation issues in our community. They came up with the idea of starting an easy to use web site that would let people get together on their transportation needs. They called the site Carpool Yarmouth.

You can access the site at http://carpoolyarmouth.freeforums.org.

Once at the site there are easy to follow instructions for its use. Essentially, you register to become a forum member and from there get to participate in all of its services and information sections. You can search for rides, offer rides, and provide information about other forms of transportation you have discovered in our region.

To make this really work for all of us, we need to greatly expand the membership and tell other potential users about the opportunity it offers. That way, we will always have plenty of rides and lots of riders to share our trips.

The Yarmouth Municipal council has proposed, and is in the initial phases of developing, a controversial new Municipal Building. Citizens have raised concerns about the procedural process, the lack of due diligence, and the projected cost of between 4.9 and 5 million dollars.

The proposed design was revealed in the October 30, 2007, The Yarmouth Vanguard, our local newspaper. The proposed design brings even more questions to the table. On the aesthetic side, in my opinion, it is a very pedestrian and boring building. If there is one thing a public building could do it would be to present an outstanding and distinguished image as public buildings - town halls, libraries, museums, churches, etc. - have done in the past. They should be the pace setters of architecture, not the lowest common denominator, of which this building is a prime example. However, given the argument, “I don’t know anything about architecture but I know what I like …”, let me get on with other concerns of our day not linked to aesthetic judgment. It has been called a “show-stopper” by one councillor.

Let us consider money and health issues. We can certainly agree that both of those are important to our citizens and issues our council should be interested in since they profess in the Vanguard to the paternalistic view that “residents of the municipality must trust their councillors to make decisions for them”. The question I ask is, does this building meet current levels of “best practices” in environmentally progressive building?

There are measures for this. There is a group called the Canada Green Building Council that subscribes to LEEDS® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards which are tailored specifically for Canadian climates, construction practices, and regulations. The system looks at five categories: Sustainable Sites, Water Efficiency, Energy and Atmosphere, Materials and Resources, and Indoor Environmental Quality. An additional category, Innovation and Design Process, addresses sustainable building expertise and design measures not covered by the five basic categories.

Building projects are certified by the CaGBC following an independent review. There are four levels of certification - certified, silver, gold and platinum. LEED® standards are flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of green building strategies that best fit the constraints and goals of particular projects. To review more specific information do a Google search on “green buildings Canada”. 

I have made a request to councillors to be brought up to date to the extent to which life cost of building and employee health issues have been incorporated into the design and to seek a LEEDS® certification assessment. I will report back to you on the response. Do we, or do we not, have a proposed building that will be cost effective in the long term and environmentally sensitive to employee needs, beyond the exercise room?   

The sporting world and flashlight users have discovered the world of lighting using light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Compared to the old world of C and AA battery life with traditional bulbs this has been a fantastic advance. The LEDs provide superior light and the batteries last much longer. They are about eighty percent more efficient that incandescents and they contain no mercury. Compared to CFLs they are the superior choice.

However, don’t hold off on changing from incandescents to CFLs with the thinking that LEDs will soon be available. The fact is, it will be five to ten years before prices come down to mass market levels and technical kinks for home lighting are worked out. The only issues with CFLs at this time are mercury and disposal, both issues that are easily worked out with a little governmental leadership. Coal powered plants are a hugh contributor of mercury to the environment and much of this power goes to feed incandescents. That is, incandescents are not mercury neutral.

What sold me on CFLs was the display in Home Hardware that had a power use meter between an incandescent and a CFL bulb of the same brightness. A switch could be use to go from one to the other while the meter registered electricity use. The difference in watts used was significant. Every store should have one of those meters on display. Seeing is believing.

There are many ways for our government to support energy efficiency and promote the use of environmentally sound technologies. One of them would be to lead by example in all aspects of government procurement.

There are also ways not to do it.

As reported in the Chronicle-Herald on May 11, 2007, the Nova Scotia government is spending $204,000 dollars at Home Depot so the store can give away energy saving fluorescent bulbs. While this is intended to promote better energy use, which I support, it appears to me that our government is providing Home Depot with a very nice publicly funded loss-leader item with which to attract customers for other purchases. Our local, home based, building materials suppliers are left out. The program is also only available in Halifax, Dartmouth and Sydney which is not very convenient for the rest of us in the province.

To me, this is a poorly thought out action and I object to having my tax contributions going to support Home Depot’s marketing and the lucky bulb recipients who happen to live in the metro area. If the government has that much money to spend on energy efficiency perhaps they could have purchased bulbs through the bid process to be distributed to publicly owned buildings throughout the province.

While on the subject of fluorescents, the government could also lead by working out a system for return of expired bulbs for safe disposal and recycling of toxic materials in the bulbs. They could do the same for the used batteries from consumer electronic devices.

I am pleased to report that a number of schools in the Tri-County Regional School Boad area are getting involved in environmental field studies.

In Barrington we have Evelyn Richardson Memorial Elementary School, Forest Ridge Academy, Cape Sable Island Elementary and Barrington Memorial High School partnering with the Barrington River Committee, a community group on the adopt-a-stream project for the Barrington River.

In Yarmouth we have Centennial Elementary and Yarmouth Junior High School in partnership with the Tusket River Environmental Protection Association on the adopt-a-stream project on Broad Brook. Trout Unlimited is involved with both of these studies.

Islands Consolidated on Digby Neck is adopting the Northeast Cove watershed. They are working closely with the Nova Scotia Community College’s Center of Geographic Sciences.

The teams of students working on these projects get to take their learning experience out into the field for real hands-on experience. They are learning about mapping, different types of habitats, identifying flora and fauna, and taking measurements of water quality. They also engage in environmental clean-up projects. The YJHS team has started a blog (http://yjhsea.blogspot.com/) to share information with the public. Please visit and comment. They would love to hear from you.

A number of these teams will be participating in a Gulf of Maine Institute mini-conference at Acadia University at the end of May to learn more about Applied Community Mapping. Some will also be joining in the Institute’s summer workhop in New Hampshire in July. They will meet other student teams from around the Gulf to gain environmental science and leadership skills. See (gulfofmaineinstitute.org) for more information.

In all of these experiences the students are working with and getting support from community organizations, doing field work on real community issues, working in adult/student teams, finding out about career choices in the environmental sciences, and gaining understanding of their town and region in the greater Gulf of Maine bioregion.