Driven by consumption, household debt is the name given to any debt held by a household, including mortgages and consumer debt, which consists of tabs racked up on financial products like credit cards, lines of credit, and automobile loans. From shiny new cars to pool noodles and from bottled water to disposable diapers, Canadians are increasingly spending more relative to what they earn. Keynesian economic theory, dating back to post-WWII mentality and reality, tells us that spending is what pulls us out of recession and makes the economy grow. However, our politicians and society have perhaps gone a little too far in wholeheartedly embracing this magic idea of spending as stimulus. Our collective consumption of goods, derived as they are from finite natural resources, has turned into a frenzy of consumerism that is leaving us indebted both financially and environmentally.

It’s an equation that a kindergartener could grasp: as we consume more, we extract more from our limited natural resources to keep up with material production. There is consensus in the scientific literature that dangerous levels of pollution and over-extraction threaten our aquatic and terrestrial systems. This is amounting to a colossal debt owed to the natural world.

The concept of debt is based on the idea that what is borrowed will eventually be paid back to the lender. But what if we are not able to pay back what we have borrowed from our ecosystems to make all of these consumer products? According to the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity, human actions, including the resource over-exploitation and pollution required to make consumer products, are collectively causing a massive decline in species populations and biodiversity. Almost half of all amphibian and bird species are experiencing shrinking populations globally. Our indulgence, fed by ocean extraction and pollution, has seen the collapse of coastal fisheries and the rapid melting of sea-ice in Canadian waters. Maybe we can pay Mother Earth back with a gift certificate?

Canada needs to find some middle ground: increased production as a result of high spending corresponds to “spending” the Earth’s natural resources. First of all, we’re failing to account for the economic value of ecosystems and biodiversity both in Canada and globally. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the supposed indicator of our nation’s prosperity, counts all money spent and deducts nothing for resources extracted or the value lost from their extraction. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Study estimated in 2008 that if business continued as usual, just one more year of natural capital loss would lead to a loss of ecosystem services worth as much as US$ 4.5 trillion over a 50 year period, for those that need to quantify it in a monetary way.

Regardless, the loss of ecological value is staggering. Our spending problem sits on the other end of the scale and Canada’s monetary policy needs to play a role in curbing the addiction. We don’t need a dictatorial crackdown on spending, but an implementation of well-designed policies that avoid gimmicks like 35-year mortgages and “teaser” interest rates that encourage people to spend mindlessly on things they don’t need. Good policy should serve the purpose of not only lowering risky household debt levels, but also reducing stress on the extraction of natural resources. Societal norms around debt could use a kick in the pants as well. I recently overheard someone bragging about their accumulated debt like some kind of decorated debt veteran. Promoting more conservative policies doesn’t mean staying at home and duct-taping your shoes back together. But collectively speaking, we do need to manage the consumer-crazed culture that not only creates unsustainable household debt levels, but also continues to deplete our funds from the bank of ecological capital.

The post The hidden cost of debt appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Growing populations, industrial development, resource extraction, housing, and municipal boundary expansion have put extreme pressures on the water and terrestrial resources of the Okanagan-Similkameen. And for the Similkameen People, the health of the land and the health of the people are inextricably linked. The ability to move freely within the territory to gather medicines and food, and to hunt, pray, and live has been profoundly restricted by the tourism industry in the Okanagan-Similkameen Valleys.

To live in a healthy way, Indigenous people, and arguably all people, need access to the land. Yet much of the health policy debate in Canada is categorical, separating health, the environment, family, food, and recreation into isolated entities. The Indigenous perspective tends to be more holistic or community-based, incorporating all these entities into a broader concept of health. Currently, the Similkameen people are working to translate ancient teachings into contemporary community plans for improved health. In the past, the sustainable management of the environment was necessary and vital since it functioned as both the grocery store and the pharmacy. Today, indigenous communities don’t have sufficient access to today’s costly organic foods because of high poverty and unemployment rates.

Aboriginal people have three times the national average of diabetes, and are more likely to have heart disease than their non-Indigenous counterparts. What’s more, Aboriginal men can be expected to live 8.1 years less, and Aboriginal women 5.5 years less, than their non-Aboriginal counterparts. This is despite the fact that both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities may be physically located in the same proximity to conventional health care facilities, such as in the case of the Similkameen People. However, unemployment, poverty, and continued health care coverage cuts by Health Canada’s non-insured health benefits program is a large part of what creates this inequality. Differences in mental health are prominent as well: tragically, suicide by First Nations people is nearly three times the 2001 Canadian rate. While there are many causal factors that can be attributed to these differences, food and lifestyle are one part of that equation. Food was once solely hunted and gathered, and healthy diets were drawn from fish, plants, and animals from the land. This stands in contrast to contemporary society’s sedentary lifestyle with high-calorie and low-quality foods making up a large part of the diet–which is indeed true for many Canadians. Most Indigenous people still supplement their livelihoods with hunting and gathering despite contemporary contexts and confines.

Community policymakers, take note: First Nations peoples are creating their own community health plans that incorporate local knowledge and understanding. Using Indigenous ways of knowing and doing, and considering this in all health policy creation, is an important way forward in moving from the categorical to the holistic. Given the ever-heated debate on health policy reform, this Indigenous perspective serves to deconstruct the way “Westerners” view health and should inform all Canadian community health policies, specifically where they affect Indigenous people.

The post Under pressure appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Despite being surrounded by water, the Spanish region of Andalucia is thirsty. To investigate this problem and take a sip of the proposed solution, I had come to spend the day at the Planta de la Desaladora de Carboneras, in the city of Carboneras on the southern Mediterranean coast of Spain.

It struck me as slightly odd that I was in southern Spain tasting water, not wine like most foreign visitors. The irony of the day continued when upstairs in the executive offices, I noticed a dispenser of purified water in the air-conditioned hallway. When I pointed this out, Cozar chuckled and said, “We don’t actually drink the desalinated water ourselves—we buy bottled water.”

Oh.

On a quest to determine whether desalination is indeed a good answer to the global water shortage (it is estimated that one third of the world’s population lives in countries with significant water stress), I visited Carboneras to see Europe’s largest desalination plant. Funded by a grant from the European Union for economically disadvantaged regions, the plant cost 254 million euros to build and was intended to supply potable water to the arid south. The plant is publicly owned and privately operated.

Capable of providing 500,000 people with 120,000 cubic meters of desalinated water per day, the plant runs at only 15 per cent of its capacity. According to the general manager of another nearby desalination plant in the city of Almeria, the problem is that “citizens don’t want to pay more for drinking water when they know the city can just pump it from the ground…plus they simply don’t like the concept of drinking desalinated ocean water.” However, the local aquifer has only a few decades of water left, if consumed at current rates.

With greenhouses full of tomatoes sprawling for tens of kilometers in every direction of the Carboneras plant, I wondered why they don’t sell desalinated water for agricultural use. As it turns out, tomatoes don’t need potable water, and farmers wouldn’t pay for it anyways.

The plant desalinates ocean water through the process of ‘reverse osmosis’ where pressure is applied to the water, forcing it through a semi-permeable membrane allowing water, not salt, to pass through.

“To try to keep our costs down, we desalinate water at night when electricity costs less,” says Cozar. “From 8:00 am to midnight the plant is mostly quiet.” The process is energy intensive, using 4.7 kilowatt hours (kWh) per cubic metre of water produced thanks to the multiple pumps and‘turbopumps’ bringing water from the sea through a series of holding tanks, and finally back to the ocean as salt-concentrated wastewater. (In comparison, the average car uses an equivalent of 0.96 kWh to drive a kilometre, and a cubic metre is roughly the size of the box a new washing machine might come in.)

All of the electricity used in the desalination process is purchased from the Spanish grid. A large portion of this energy is provided by carbon-intensive sources, with gas and coal making up 55 per cent in 2007, as well as non-carbon intensive sources like nuclear (18 per cent) and hydro (up to 30 per cent). According to Professor Ricardo Barcelona from Spain’s IESE School of Business, “Despite the abundance of windmills you see in southern Spain, wind energy contributes, depending on the day, a maximum of only ten per cent of the installed capacity of the national electricity grid.” With desertification problems worsening every year in southern Spain, along with the increasing demand to grow crops in the hot, sunny climate, there is irony in the fact that the more water that is desalinated, the more greenhouse gases are emitted, and in turn, the faster the desertification.

Desalination was starting to look a lot less like a clean technology.

While desalination uses lots of energy, requires the dumping of concentrated saline wastewater into the ocean, and damages marine life by causing algal growth and pH changes, the process does have a few pros. Namely, it doesn’t take up a lot of space, the plant can be turned on and off as needed, and it can run at any level of production. Plus, there is an arguably unlimited supply of seawater to desalinate.

However, despite downing a glass of the stuff, I’m not convinced that desalination is a good long-term and viable technology to solve our global water shortages.

Solar Desalination

Some thirsty locales are overcoming debilitating energy prices by tapping into their solar resources. Using a clean power source addresses some of the environmental concerns surrounding desalination and creates opportunities for its use in remote locations. Since desalination plants don’t run continuously, the problem of storing solar power can be avoided.

These advantages all add up for Saltworks Technologies Inc. This BCbased firm is developing thermal powered desalination systems that reduce electrical energy requirements by up to 80 per cent, giving new meaning to “clean water”.

Desalination in the Middle East

Water has been a key point of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But with Israel investing heavily in desalination infrastructure, reverse osmosis could relieve tension between the two parties.

Public financing of the Hadera Desalination Plant expansion will result in the cheapest fixed price for desalinated water achieved to date, NIS 2.6 per cubic metre ($0.74 CDN). With limited groundwater resources and continued investment, some experts have suggested that half of Israel’s water supply is likely to come from desalination in the future.

The post Salty waters appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Here the food used to come almost solely from the land. Mary Rose’s favourite is fish; her second favourite, moose. These days she won’t eat any meat from the area: “It’s no good anymore. Tastes bad since the factories were built upriver.” Her granddaughter concurs, showing how her grandma would push the plate away after one bite.

The tiny settlement was put on the environmental map when higher-than-normal cancer rates were reported in the community. Physician and local hero Dr. John O’Connor’s medical license was threatened after he spoke out about a particular form of cancer he observed in the community of 1,200 people. Typically affecting only one in 100,000, he had noticed five patients with bile-duct cancer, a type of cancer strongly linked to arsenic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, both byproducts of the upstream oil sands development.

O’Connor’s push for a public inquiry was thwarted by Alberta Health’s conclusion that the cancer scares were exaggerated. They proceeded to file complaints against O’Connor for professional misconduct for raising “undue alarm.” He has since been cleared of charges.

Alarmed by the escalating cancer rates, the three local First Nations who live in Fort Chipewyan decided to call a five-day ‘Keepers of the Water Conference’ in August 2008 so that people could come and see for themselves what is happening. Attended by 18 prominent Canadian and American NGOs, and government representatives from Alberta and the Northwest Territories, the gathering swiftly caught international attention as participants snapped photos of a two-mouthed fish caught in the river nearby.

Chief Alan Adam, the community’s 41-year-old chief from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, spoke at the conference about his concerns over the water and environmental contamination, recognizing that an economic boom upstream “becomes an economic disaster to our way of life.” With the unprecedented expansion of Alberta’s oil sands, economies are booming but not without consequences. Every day the oil sands create 1.8 billion litres of waste deposits that are stored in tailings ponds covering approximately 130 square km of Alberta. Suncor Energy Inc., one of the lead oil sands developers, commissioned its own environmental assessment and found the level of arsenic in local moose meat to be 453 times the acceptable levels.

The people of Fort Chipewyan are not alone in their concern over the rapid growth of the oil sands. According to a poll conducted for Alberta-based Pembina Institute, 71 per cent of Albertans believe new oil sands approvals should be suspended until infrastructure and environmental issues have been addressed.

The people of Fort Chipewyan issued a declaration at the conference: “Our water is polluted and many of our animals are no longer abundant; they are sick and dying. Our youth are going to have a hard time in the future if we do not make dramatic changes today.”

The post Troublesome waters appeared first on Corporate Knights.