Calgary!

We are sticking around in Calgary for a few more days due to Kristi's illness :(. Luckily, Calgary's International Film Festival is going on and we get to stay with Garrett's interesting cousin Bev and her husband who spent 5 years in Indonesia, so we are not at a loss of things to do.

For a couple of days Justin and Viera were staying at Prarie Sky Co-Housing (http://www.prairiesky.ab.ca/). It was a very inspiring place. 18 households and 55 people on 3 acres, which would usually house 2 families. Literally reducing their ecological footprint. The landscape architecture is very well done. They built the houses to be as environmentally sound as possible, which now saves a lot on their costs. The houses are so well insulated that they don't even have heaters, they just use the water heater. The people there were very kind. It seems the place very actively encourages community. It was very cool to see because it was successful, whereas many eco-villages/ co-housing units are struggling to keep people, and it was urban, which is accessible to more of the 80% + urban population of Canada than some of the rural places we are visiting.

On the way home one night Viera and Justin were whistled at and then a man ran across a highway to invite them to a Hare Krishna vegetarian feast! It was a highlight of the day.

Viera and Justin also attended a Food is Life festival. The first night they attended an event with the owner and chef of Forage, a restaurant that uses 80% local food and has a partnership with 43 restaurants. Some interesting things they learned were:
-in the past year Calgary has gone from 12 community gardens to over a 100! Wow!
-as well as being more healthy and better for the environment, eating local food can also bridge the current rural-urban social divide
-Meals on Wheels is able to accomplish what it would take the government 10 times as much money to do! (if there was a partnership between Meals on Wheels and local food, that would really set things off!)
-Many farmers markets struggle with the fact that most of the people there are resellers and so the profits go to them rather than to the farmers. Local farmers often can't afford the high costs of having a stand (the tables at some farmers markets, such as the Strathcona one in Edmonton, are subsidized)
-a study showed that kids in Britain can no longer name their veggies (compared to in Italy they can)
-The average age of a farmer in Alberta is 59! (losing the younger generations since it's such a hard living to make)
-Keeping farmland farmland: if not, costs go up since land is so much more valuable being developed. BC tried to make a land that all farmland had to stay farmland. It kept costs down but they're coming to the end of that experiment.
-the idea of sharing things in the community, such as lawnmowers
-ennobling farming
-example of a high producing organic farmer having 18 inches of topsoil compared to 3 on all the non organic farms around him, and holding a lot more rainwater. Response to when a lot of people say organic is great but it doesnt work on a large scale.
-for every dollar spent locally, you keep $2.50 in the community
-Canadian statistic is that 38-50% of our food ends up in the garbage
-believe in something and make a stand for it but also know that your perception of it will change with time.
-the SPUD distribution system seems to be very efficient in Calgary in linking farmers to and distributing food to urbanites.

They also went to a Backyard Beekeeping session, which was especially intersting to learn how easy it is to keep a smale scale bee house in your backyard, and that Canada is the worlds 3rd largest producer of honey and Alberta produces 80% of Canada's honey.
The next day we also went to some sessions on Vegetable Gardening in Calgary and Gardening in Small Spaces.

Before Prarie Sky Viera and Justin stayed with Viera's friend Kathryn, who head the Sustainable Alberta Association. She hooked them up with all sorts of environmental stuff going on in the city, hosted them at her house, advocated civic involvement, and talked to them about her Commuters project which encourages businesses to encourage their workers to get out of single occupance vehicles!

In other knews Viera got bung-lip (a bungee chord in her lip, which is funny since Otesha that Viera and Kristi did used to talk a lot about Bung-eye). Justin also got a trailer for his bike donated by Good Life bicycle shop in town.

Hope to head to Golden and visit Justin's aunt soon, as soon as we get Kristi's results!