Tim Hypocrits?

Okay, just a quick post. I just came back from getting a small lunch at Tim Hortons and I had my trusty refillable mug with me. Can anyone tell me why Tim Hortons uses one of their throw-away cups to MEASURE out the amount of tea/ coffee before putting it into your refillable mug?

I'm terribly confused about this, as it's outraguous!

I can see if they had one cup they always used to measure out the amount... but seriously! Talk about a sham. Tim Hortons, and many other alike coffee shops, have to get with the freaking program. I found a great post addressing similar concerns in Vancouver.

I'm a little flustered anyway that I even step foot inside a Tim Hortons, as I am desperately trying to only support free-trade local shops. I am very dissapointed. Tim Hortons' website talks its way around using Fair Trade coffee by saying they are very involved in the production of the coffee they use. Many fair trade coffee retailers support, and are actively involved in, the lives of the farmers who produce their coffee (they classify this as "sustainable coffee"). Why isn't Tim Hortons (a publicly traded company and one of the largest chains in Canada) aiding farmers with the Fair Trade certification process they deem is so daunting? I'm sure there are ways this can be done while maintaining the integrity and anonymity of the farms they deal with.

I'd like to end off this little tyrade by posting a phenomenal public letter that was literally written to "Tim" by Carl Hiehm back in July 2008. I'll just post a quote I referenced in the letter, as it applies directly to every Nova Scotian who frequents the Big Brown Coffee Monster:

'There are other areas you can improve on as well, such as your notorious litter problem. I got in touch with city hall and it just so happens that beverage containers make up one fifth of Toronto’s total litter, a significant portion of which is your cups. This isn’t a GTA phenomenon either, as Nova Scotia found 22 per cent of all litter was exclusively Tim Hortons cups."

Go Just Us!

Interesting topic for a research article?

Keep Bizzy!

Halifax Retro Cause, and Supporting Evidence (isawearthlings.com)

Last night something crying out for help stormed through my back door, ripped me off of my couch by my shirt collar and shook me in a way that I will never forget their desperation, so long as I live. It forced me to look in its eyes in an effort to unveil what was happening to it. I started to cry. Not a frightened cry, but a devastating rumble in my chest. I was sad. I felt guilty, because I was.

Forgive me for the somber, poetic confession. The thing that left me so torn last night was not a person, but a brutal realization that was so powerful, it felt this physical. As I mentioned in my last post, and with the aid of Halifax Retro, our team of two is going through a major journey of discovery, in every single sense of the word. I wanted to explain more about this before I go any further with my late night experience of yesterday.

Halifax Retro has been a source of motivation and inspiration to us in that it literally and literarily forces us to find out what is really going on with our earth; our earth being the catalyst of this research, discovery, and literary activism. While discovering the political, social, and environmental factors that are plaguing, aiding, hibernating, idling, and influencing our environment, both near and far. Combined with being counterculture and indie-writers, we have inevitably become intertwined in this foray of knowledge and feel compelled to communicate and stimulate awareness around various causes for concern. "Living for the Earth, Not Just On It" has become a common phrase used throughout Halifax Retro’s publication, communication, and online development. It’s hard to ignore what is going on once it has truly hit you. Once you’re a pickle you can never be a cucumber again.

So, with that said, we have embarked on a life journey to not only learn how to help, how to become involved, and how to make changes within our own lifestyles, the one thing that all writers and contributors of Halifax Retro share is the need to spread the word, and to give those who feel insignificant in this fight to understand why they aren’t, and to give them tools to become an activist in their everyday life. It requires passion, and passion such as this requires knowledge. We don’t only encourage reading our own content (as many publications and media outlets would wish to have it), we want to stimulate interest for a lifetime of self-learning. Hence why our website will eventually have a "FreeSkool" where members can run online lessons on anything they wish to educate about. We feel that Atlantic Canada has that powerful youth mentality of making changes, speaking out, and influencing policy. Just as they did in the 60’s – the counterculture of those days was comprised mostly of University students. Halifax has the most condensed post-secondary environment in Canada. We can be the change we want to see. We are the role-models.

Along with the website, Halifax Retro will be rolling out other projects. Right now, we are only two people in a small apartment building, but our writers and readers are helping this happen.

One of the things we do to expand our minds in unfamiliar areas is watching documentaries of all kinds. Last night, I was hard hit and completely devastated in my perception of the world, and some forms of humankind. The thing that stormed in my living room last night was life-altering. I just had to keep reminding myself that Halifax Retro is a learning process, and we aren’t perfect. This is what it’s all about – is being shaken to the core and compelled to make changes. If anything is able to make you change the way you think of the natural world and the natural order of things, it is Earthlings.





Earthlings is a brutal documentary that goes into great depth about our power-trip as human beings, and our utter ignorance about relating and caring for all living creatures – - we are all earthlings, after all. This brilliant and well acclaimed (yet suspiciously invisible) film is a discourse on how we have come to treat the defenseless and completely innocent creatures of the world to fulfill our own toxic egos. This isn’t just a soft-core Discovery Channel portrayal, this is a typically banned and hard-core look at what our consumerist world has come to, and leaves you staring at the TV 10 minutes after the credits begin rolling, and asking, “for what?”.

I think the image that will haunt me forever will be the skinning of a young calf for its hide, while it was still alive. This isn’t just a “shed” of skin - we are talking about skinning their fat and skin off until there is only muscle to be seen, with a blinking eyeball looking fearfully into the camera.

I’m not going to lie. I used to wonder what the big deal was, even thinking to myself sometimes, “if someone threw red paint on my leather jacket, they’d be sorry”. This video speaks to precisely, "… we want to believe that they aren’t talking about our hotdogs, our jackets. That ours came from a place where it wasn’t that bad…”. It simply isn’t true. At all.

I am greatful for having watched this film. I am doing my best to live as vegetarian/ vegan as possible now. It will be a learning process, and a challenging one at that, but armed with a bite of reality, the conscious is at play now.

Please watch this film.


… and Stay Bizzy.

Free Skool - What's Old is New Again

This week I attended a lecture that provided some great insight on the corporate side of sustainability, and shed some light on whether or not they actually do care about their operations in that sense, or if it’s just a new P.R craze. Dr. Blair Feltmate who spoke for almost 2 hours on “The History of Sustainability: What’s Old Is New Again” touched on the three pioneers of the “environmental movement” that we strive to conform to today.

What’s interesting is that I have had never really learned much about the “Fathers of Environmentalism”. And even though Dr. Feltmate was quick to point out that the three men he was about to discuss were certainly not the be-all end-all of “eco pioneers” he felt that it was important for any environmentalist to know the history behind their motivation, their causes, and their future hopes and goals. It struck me funny – how many of us really know who first understood or fore-thought what was to come in our natural world? Isn’t that a crucial topic for any and all varied environmentalist to know; how are we to know what path we’re on otherwise, and if we’ve made any difference at all since then? Like Dr. Feltmate said, economists have studied Adam Smith, philosophers have studied Plato, and every physicist understand Eistein’s concepts. We need to understand our past to know where we’re going, or where we should be going, and I don’t know if many of us who care about the environment do. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t. But as our publication, Halifax Retro, stands for, we have to start somewhere right? There's no right time to start, or "best" way to figure these things out and to proceed as quickly as we'd like. We have to start now, and we have to start exposing ourselves as much as we can to these truths. It's all a learning process, and even though I hadn't thought that much about the origins of the movement beyond the 1960's counterculture efforts, this is just another component to putting the peices together in my own mind, so I can maybe convey it to others. Motivation for changing your views and lifestyles comes from knowledge, after all.

For those of you in the same boat as myself:

 George Perkins Marsh “The Father of Environmentalism”
 Aldo Leopold “The Father of Preservation”
 John Muir “The Father of Conservation”


Very interesting stuff! There’s a lot to learn on each of them, but you can read more by clicking on their names above. I know I’ll be looking more into the history of environmentalism as a whole. It’s so true – if this all started so long ago, how is our progress? What have we done since then? How much further do we have to go? So many questions! Note to self -- This would make a fantastic essay or article!

I have more lectures and classes to attend outside of work as well. I’m on the ledge of a great development process. More on that in the next post.

Keep Bizzy!

The Significance of Empathy

Tonight is the United States Presidential Election outcome, and like many, I'm actually really anxious about it.

A few weeks ago, I eagerly made it home from work to throw on my pj's, pop open a bottle of Garrison Raspberry, and sat glued to the television set all night, hoping that my Canadian political party would at least gain some ground in this years election. They did, and like the rest of my parties' supporters, that relatively small percentage gain was a victory within itself. Tonight, I sit here awaiting for history to be made, because whether we look short term or long term, history will be (again) significantly altered with whatever candidate wins over America.



I'm not really ashamed to admit that this is the first election year that I've really paid attention to. Reason being - a) During previous elections I was in my teens (and no doubt, high school and university drama took precident at the time), and b) writing and producing Halifax Retro in the past few months has forced me to take in ungodly amounts of political and environmental information - both locally and globally. This isn't a bad thing, in fact, it's one of the main reasons why I wanted to start Haliax Retro in the first place - I didn't know enough about what was going on in the world around me. And like so many others, there's this general sense of yearning to know more about the environement, about government, about the stock markets, about living more sustainably, and wanting to understand why we should care about these things.

It's funny too, because as I'm saying this, there's this underlying doubting tickle in the back of my mind that wants to undermine my empathy for modern politics... "Things have always been obtuse - me caring doesn't change anything." I'm only human, so I'm not going to sit here and pretend that this thought hasn't crossed my mind a time or two. "Maybe it is better to be naieve - what am I going to change?"... "It's all out of my hands." I guess these questions are a natural part of the process of finding out why we should care - finding reasons to validate my role/part/concern. And these are the very same questions that have people throwing their garbage on the ground, not recycling, not following policy, etc - that feeling of insignificance.

Convenience, style, and temptations will always challenge every one of us to turn a blind eye to what is really going on around us - whether it's our health, our egos, the environment, etc. I guess my two cents on this self-conflict would be that it is that very belief of insignificance that got us here in the first place - our selfishness of not looking outside of ourselves. And even though your personal efforts will not save the world, your influence over others, your children, your participation in groups, will contribute to a difference. I mean, what else are you going to do? Know that we humans need to be more conscienscious, but not do anything yourself? It really does start with you, even though it can be hard to believe. It's hard to ignore once that realizations settles in.

Just a thought. Keep Bizzy!