N.S. Beach house may help save planet

~ dglennmillar ~ Leave a comment

On the west coast of Nova Scotia in the tiny community of Meteghan River, sits a tidy little beach house that just might help save the planet from the coming ravages of climate change. The brainchild of Dave Saulnier and Joel German, the beach house is one of those elegant approaches where problems are re-defined as opportunities.

Beach houseLike many coastal communities, Meteghan River will face severe weather in the decades ahead as the climate worsens. Sturdier shelter that can withstand severe storms is urgently needed, especially on the east coast of North America where hurricane-force winds are becoming an annual occurrence. At the same time, unwanted plastic is piling up in our landfills and littering our beaches. The solution? Use the unwanted plastic to build more durable shelter.

With a $109,000 repayable loan from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), Saulnier and German, built the demonstration home using 612,000 recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles. Reduced to pellets and injected with a gas to turn them into foam, the bottles were re-constituted as building panels to assemble the beach house.

The result is a structure that can resist moisture, fatigue, corrosion and rot and is 2.3 times more energy-efficient than homes built using traditional methods. However, the real eye-popper is the ability of the panels to withstand windstorms. At Exova testing facilities in Mississauga, Ontario, they withstood 326-mp/h (524-km/h) sustained wind force, which is twice the strength of a Category 5 hurricane.

Through their company, JD Composites, Saulnier and German hope to export the technology to countries in the Caribbean and South America, as well as into the United States. Many of the processes and methods used actually come from the boat building industry in which the two partners have worked for many years.

The beach house is currently up for sale, but if it doesn’t sell, Saulnier and German say they’ll list it on airbnb to help spread the word.

 

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Ghosts in the graveyard

~ dglennmillar ~ 2 Comments

So it turns out my first cousin, once removed, Alexander Brebner Millar is buried in Seaview Cemetery near Gibsons. I had no idea he was here when I first moved to the Coast. My wife, Carole, found out. She’s kind of a genealogyIMG_0943 super-sleuth, so she knows about that stuff.

Anyway, we decided to go visit Alex and as we drove in through the gates, we realized the graveyard is a lot bigger than it looks from the highway. There’s an awful lot of graves in there.

“This is going to take forever,” says I. “Why don’t they bury them in alphabetical order?”

“… because then they’d have to die in alphabetical order,” says she. “Just park and we’ll start looking.”

“Where should I park?”

I didn’t ask the question out loud. I just thought it in my head, and that’s when the spookiness started. Someone, not Carole, answered:

“Up ahead, by the tree, in the shade.”

It didn’t come to me as a voice. It wasn’t even communicated in words, although the meaning seemed pretty clear. It was more like, I don’t know, a vibration maybe, a chill breeze from the beyond, a gentle nudge from the other side. I did as I was told, because that’s what you should always do when you get messages from the hereafter. I parked the car up ahead, by the tree, in the shade. Then I got out of the car and walked over to the first gravestone I saw. Sure enough, it was Alex, my first cousin, once removed.

“Here he is,” says I.

“What? You found him already?” says she, and she walks over to check the stone. “That’s amazing. How did you do that?”

“I had a little help.”

Thanks for the directions, Alex. Rest in peace.

 

Letter from David Suzuki

~ dglennmillar

This year we invited David Suzuki, a well-known environmentalist, author and activist to come to the Sunshine Coast to participate in the Arts Council Literary Reading Program. With funding by the Canada Council, the program brings authors and poets to the Sunshine Coast to present readings of their work throughout the year. For some time, we’ve had it in mind to have a theme evening devoted to the environment and climate change, and who would be better for that than David Suzuki?

fullsizeoutput_9a3We knew our chances of getting him were slim to none, and we were right. David reluctantly declined our offer, but he took the time to write a personal handwritten note explaining why. It was very cool for me to receive the letter because David Suzuki has been one of my personal heroes for decades. It is something I will keep and show to friends and family; however, I was also saddened by the last few lines of the letter, which read as follows:

“I am going to be working flat out on the election Oct 21st. After that, I think I will have expended all I have in me and I will withdraw from public life.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that David Suzuki, who will be 84 on his next birthday, has decided to step back from the role he has played as Canada’s leading spokesman for the environment and the danger of climate change. He has been such a strong voice for so many years that it is difficult to imagine the climate debate without him. It is, perhaps, a signal that it is time for the rest of us to step up.

Chernobyl

~ dglennmillar

It has been more than 33 years since Chernobyl, the worst man-made disaster in the history of humankind, took place near the city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine. But HBO’s recently-released mini series of the same name could not be more timely. That’s because the series, which dramatizes the events following the explosion of Reactor 4 in the dead of night on April 26th 1986, is not really about a nuclear disaster. It is about the end of truth, and in our current political context, what could be more timely than that?MV5BNTEyYmIzMDUtNWMwNC00Y2Q1LWIyZTgtMGY1YzUxOTAwYTAwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjIyMTc0ODQ@._V1_UX67_CR0,0,67,98_AL_

The main character Valery Legosov, a nuclear scientist reluctantly sucked into the vortex of the Chernobyl clean-up, tells us as much in the opening monologue. 

“What is the cost of lies?” he asks. “It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories.”

Time and time again in the Chernobyl saga, it is the stories that go forward, not the reality. Radiation readings are ridiculously under reported. Damage to the reactor, including the breach of the core, is denied despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Communist party brass flatly states that a nuclear disaster of Chernobyl’s magnitude could not possibly have occurred in the Soviet Union because it doesn’t jibe with its glorified view of itself.

If that kind of denial sounds familiar, it should. It is modern-day Trump World where reality has nothing to do with the facts. It’s all about the stories that prop up the fantasy. Anything to the contrary is dismissed as fake news and ignored at our peril.

The world that Chernobyl shows us is not a pretty one. Despite the unmistakable selflessness and sacrifice of those who work to contain the disaster, it is a gritty, dirty world where everything is in decline: the buildings seem to crumble before our eyes, the tools and equipment are poorly designed, almost useless, and worst of all, the people are like soulless automatons sleep-walking through the most impactful moments of their lives.

We are left with the chilling prospect that if we fail to right this leaky ship soon, it is a world to which we might well be headed.

Murphy’s Law on sale this week only

~ dglennmillar

For all my friends in the U.S.A., my novel, Murphy’s Law, goes on sale today in Amazon’s U.S Store. You will be able to purchase the ebook version for the low, low price of .99 U.S as part of an Amazon Countdown sale. The price will rise through the week returning to the regular price of $4.95 U.S. on May 30th. So don’t delay, buy today! 🙂

Murphy’s Law on Sale this week only

~ dglennmillar

For all my friends in the U.K., my novel, Murphy’s Law, goes on sale today in Amazon’s U.K. Store. You will be able to purchase the ebook version for the low, low price of .99 GBP as part of an Amazon Countdown sale. The price will rise through the week returning to the regular price of 3.49 GBP on May 16th. So don’t miss out. Buy today! 🙂