My Family
I currently live in Nanaimo with my wife Brenda and our daughter. Our home within walking distance of the Vancouver Island University Campus. When we moved in, Brenda was telecommuting to her job in Vancouver, so we had almost no carbon emissions due to commuting.
A few years ago, Brenda changed careers and is now an accountant. I’m the one telecommuting these days, as I teach online classes from our home office.
Our daughter graduated from High School this year and will be attending University full time next year. She is also active in Girl Guides and is part of the local sport climbing community.
Ashley and Lucy, in a rare group shot.
Our two cats, Ashley and Lucy, offer dinnertime entertainment in exchange for liberal amounts of food, play, warmth and catnip.
I believe in a balance between work and the rest of life, and my wife and I are equal partners in our relationship.
Doing Our Part
I once drove a sports car hundreds of kilometres every week. In addition to commuting over an hour each way to and from work, driving was my stress release and my way of exploring the world. In addition to the expense of burning out cars too quickly, this was an unsustainable and unnecessary waste of resources.
This bothered me mildly for years, but when my daughter was born, I decided that things needed to change. I stopped commuting by car and started using my bicycle and public transit to get to work. I revamped my wanderlust and replaced four wheels with two wheels or two feet. For daily travel, I now use an electric scooter, which works quite well in wet and mild Nanaimo, and gets the groceries home for about a 15 cents a week. My wife and I share the use of a single vehicle to keep our resource use down.
The City of Nanaimo revamped their waste disposal program last year, and now takes garbage, recyclables and compost/yard waste. As a result, there is no food waste, paper, recyclable containers, glass, tetra bricks, or electronics going into our garbage. What remains is almost exclusively plastic food packaging, which has really highlighted how much plastic comes from the grocery store.
In the past year, my daughter has taken it upon herself to reduce or eliminate plastic food packaging where possible. This is really hard! Plastic is truly a miracle substance for safe and clean food storage, and until an equally effective, but less persistent substance is found, there’s going to continue to be plastic in our waste stream. However, we have reduced our consumption of plastic by about 50% by reusing produce bags and replacing most of our zip lock bags with reusable silicone storage bags.
For years, we have been reducing our meat consumption as well. Beef was once a staple in our diet, but we switched to chicken, which requires many fewer resources to produce. In making this change, we have opened ourselves to more foreign cuisine, and we often eat more Thai and Indian food than European food.
In the past year, our daughter has made the choice to become a vegetarian. My wife and I have agreed to this, on the condition that she eats a balanced diet and gets enough nutrients. Although my daughter now cooks a lot of her own food, the vegetarian influence is insidious. First we learned how to cook tofu properly, and now, I’m trying to introduce more salads.
We experiment, find what we like, and gradually make our lifestyle less harmful to the planet. This has been a decade long project. Some things work famously and others are duds. We have some great stories about meals that went disastrously wrong, and can tell you about some things we’ve found that are incredible.