John Beales

So I finally finished reading Faustus yesterday. It’s odd how the shortest book on my list took the longest to read, or so it seems. Things just worked out that way – I’ve had a lot going on and haven’t had a chance to read much recently.

It was interesting to read a play for a change. I haven’t read any since I was in high school, and that’s been a while. While I really enjoyed the play, I also found the information about Marlowe’s life, (was a spy and playwright, and went to prison – twice I think – all before being killed in a barroom fight at the age of 29. It gets better though, the fight might have actually been an assassination…), to be incredibly interesting as well. Marlowe is the guy who paved the way for Shakespeare, and from reading Faustus he seems to have done a great job of it.

It’s been a while since I read a good detective novel, and The Private Patient, like many books I’ve been reading recently, was been sitting on my bookshelf from Christmas until I read it recently. The Private Patient is by P. D. James, an author that I’ve never read, but is apparently quite productive and my mother really enjoys, so I hear, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that The Private Patient was a gift from my mother.

Now that I’ve read a P. D. James book, I can see why my mother enjoys them so much. This one was good! With any luck I’ll run across some more of her books at some point. As a detective novel this would have been a great book to have on a trip, (I sometimes find it tough to read stuff where I actually have to learn while travelling). Also, for those of us who don’t live or spend much time in the UK, it provides an interesting glimpse into the world of an English manor house.

I’ve been following the Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man blog for quite some time now and for Christmas, I asked for and received his book. A few days ago I finished reading it, and so did Joanie.

If you’re not aware, Colin and his family tried to live for a year without making any net impact on the earth. This meant eliminating garbage, carbon-producing transportation, eating sustainably, and even, eventually, turning off the heat and power in his apartment, and eliminating toilet paper. He was all over the news for a while, and there was even a Law & Order episode with a character based on his experiment, (you know you’ve made it big when you become a Law & Order episode). In the process he discovered that eliminating most of these things lead to a fuller, happer, and healthier life, but he also discovered the things that actually reduced his quality of life when he gave them up.

One of the things that he discovered, and that I’ve been thinking about a lot, is that we live in a disposable society, and it’s extremely difficult to make no trash. On top of that, a lot, probably most, of the trash that we do make is not stuff that breaks down quickly in a landfill. It’s largely plastic and other chemical-based materials like styrofoam. If I take a quick look around me right now, sitting in my office, I see some Cold-FX pills, (I’m starting to come down with something), in a blister pack, and that blister pack came in a cardboard box. I see a catalog that a company I ordered the parts to repair my external hard drive from mailed to the other day. There are three tubes of lip balm, (I use maybe 1 tube a year so some of these three will just go into the garbage unused). There is a container of dental floss, (plastic, will be thrown out when its empty). There’s a box of kleenex, (recycled, but still, they’re here), and a bunch of bills, note-paper, and so on. Here’s a small tangent: I signed up for electronic billing for my Visa card thinking that they would stop sending me a paper bill, but instead of eliminating the paper bill and reducing my Visa card’s environmental footprint, they now send me both, thereby increasing the my environmental footprint. I think you get the picture. It’s hard to make no trash.

However, that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try. What Colin discovered, and I think that the same thing may apply to me, is that by letting go of things that aren’t really needed you discover better things, like reconnecting with your community and your friends. So, we’re going to see if we can reduce our impact, and I’ll even document it, over on Choices that Matter.

During the Beavan family’s no impact year, there was also a documentary made about them. We rented it yesterday, (which reminds me that I have to take it back today), and while it doesn’t go into as much detail as the book does, it does really add another dimension to the no impact story. In the book we see Colin’s wife, Michelle, and how she makes a lot of changes, but we don’t realize how hard they are for her, (I think that Colin must have glossed over how hard it was for her, probably subconsciously). The movie really shows us her struggles at the beginning, and her happiness with the changes once they’ve become habits. Ironically, when we rented the movie yesterday, they couldn’t get the security device out of the case and had to rip the case apart, thereby producing trash.

I received the book Food Matters by Mark Bittman for Christmas this year, and although at the time I was reading The World is Flat I took a break to read Food Matters. The book really struck a chord with both Joanie and I, so much so that we’ve changed the way we eat, and I started keeping a journal, of my experiences eating like food matters. As of this past weekend, that journal is online, as the new blog Choices That Matter.

Food Matters has a basic message: If we eat less meat and more plants we will live healthier lives and help the planet. We eat way more meat and animal products than we really should, and the production of those products uses a vast amount of our natural resources that could otherwise be used to feed people in hungrier parts of the world or simply not used, reducing our impact on the earth.

Mark takes us through how we, as a North American society, became incredible overeaters and how we’ve been led to believe that we need to eat a lot more than we really do, and he gives us an eye-opeing look at how the food pyramid was built.

Half of the book is recipes, so Food Matters is a short and easy read. In fact, when I was finished reading it, I was surprised that it had ended and left wanting more. Maybe he’ll write a follow-up. I satisfied my hunger for more by reading through all of the recipes in the book.

If you want to lower your environmental impact, loose weight, save money, or do all of the above, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Food Matters and applying its principles to your life.

Note: Most of this entry was written at the end of January, when I finished reading Food Matters. However, I wanted to wait until I had Choices That Matter online before posting.

I just finished reading a story that’s quite different from anything that I’ve read before. The story is Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It’s a poem telling the story of Evangeline, a young Acadian girl. Her wedding day is the day of Le Grand Dérangement, and she is separated from her husband-to-be and spend the rest of her life searching for him.

I had never heard about Evangeline until I went to the maritimes with my sister two summers ago. When we were there we found all sorts of things called Evangeline. On the tourist maps there the Evangeline Trail, (a driving route in Nova Scotia), and part of New Brunswick, at lest on the tourist maps, was referred to Evangeline’s Land. There are all kinds of places called Evangeline, the Evangeline Inn, even the Evangeline Credit Union.

At some point before my 2007 trip to the maritimes, my fiancée Joanie had told me the story of Evangeline and Gabriel, lovers separated on their wedding day, who spend the rest of their lives searching for each other. There is even a song that plays on the radio here in Québec, and has for years, with the story. However, at the time neither of us realized that Evangeline was an Acadian.

So, interested to know who Evangeline was, my sister and I kept our eyes open and I ended up getting a copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie for my fiancée as a gift. This is the poem that started the modern fascination with Evangeline, and is largely responsible for our awareness today of what happened on September 5, 1755, when an entire culture was forced from what had become their homeland and scattered around the globe.

Evangeline tells the story of a part of Canadian history that is not well taught in schools, at least not in the west where I grew up. I remember learning about the Acadians, and learning that they were sent away at one point, but I don’t remember it being presented as any type of tragedy, I remember it being taught as something that had to be done, after all, they spoke French, and Canada was British territory. Now, years later, I finally learned that deporting the Acadians was not simply business as usual. In fact, it ranks up there among the worst things done to a group of people in Canada. This past summer Joanie and I went to the maritimes and we had the chance not only to go to Grand Pré and learn more about life as an Acadian and the deportation, but we were lucky enough to be in Caraquet, New Brunswick, (the “Capital of Acadie”), during the Acadian World Congress, so we got to experience modern Acadie, and it’s a culture that we should try to hold on to here in Canada, (and always should have tried to hold on to).

Back to the poem, it’s a long poem, long enough that it’s printed as a book, but it’s not hard to read, (I don’t exactly read poetry all of the time), and I highly recommend it. For Canadians, it is a window into a time and events that form an important part of our history, for Americans it gives you a glimpse of the birth of the Cajun culture, and for all of us it inspires us with a story of faith that most of us rarely even imagine.